Politics and aesthetics in contemporary architectural design

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The people who have made a significant contribution to the production of this thesis are many,

Maria Voyatzaki (Full Professor, PhD) Stavros Vergopoulos (Assistant Professor, PhD) Dimitris Gourdoukis (PhD Candidate School of Architecture, A.U.Th.) Manos Zaroukas (History and Theory Tutor, Design Teaching Fellow, Advanced Urban Design, Post-professional Proramme, UCL the Bartlett, London, PhD) Anastasios Tellios (Assistant Professor, PhD) Spiros Papadimitriou (Lecturer, School of Architecture) and my lovely 8 months unborn baby girl & my precious husband

Thanks everyone.

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Politics and Aesthetics in contemporary architectural design the partitioning of sensible conditioned by an aesthetic system, relations that marks community as political and the affectivity of things that forms a kind of sense

by Vaia Gkerliotou

Submitted to the Master Programme: "Advanced Design: Innovation and Transdisciplinarity in Architectural Design" to the department of Architecture at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the master degree in Architecture.

ABSTRACT In this essay about Politics and Aesthetics in contemporary architectural design is examined the field of aesthetics as conditions of experience and how this experience means architectural expression and via versa.

Aesthetics are disrupted by politics. Rancière understands the kinds of aesthetics as synonymous with the political event. An event that marks a change in the state of the world. Through the imperceptibility of political

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potential event of Deleuze and the politics of Rancière, Kant's aesthetics are examined. It is examined how can political becomes a possibility with the institution of a community, where community is something we share in common. This commonality is analyzed through a shared partition around common modalities of sense. This partition of the sensible represents that aesthetics suffers from a duality of the theory of this sensibility, where the possible experience examines the beautiful through deals with the reality of the real. On the other hand the sublime is a mode of aesthetic comprehension occurring precisely when one experiences the harmonious relation between one's various faculties and senses being overturned. It is cognition which can change the formation of the object-form.

Possible experiences can form the transcendental subject by a personal consciousness and the subjective identity. This process of subjectification creates a metastable equilibrium with potential energies. These energies are understood as an image of the real, while the real is supposed to resemble the possible. It is examined the Logic of the Sense as a theory of ''double causality'' proposed by Deleuze. Foucault's analysis of the modern invention of the disciplines distinguishes aesthetic value from ethics, social, and political values from the evaluation of sense experience, and more, when he posits aesthetics both at what is at stake in politics and at what erupts anew when politics happens. There is also the affectivity of things in a community that forms a kind of sense analyzed in many different ways in five brilliant architects' s work, which forms a new radical way of thinking about creating architectural spaces nowadays.

ΠΕΡΙΛΗΨΗ Στο δοκίμιο αυτό για την Πολιτική και την Αισθητική στο σύγχρονο αρχιτεκτονικό σχεδιασμό εξετάζεται το πεδίο της αισθητικής καθώς και οι συνθήκες της εμπειρίας για το πώς αυτή η εμπειρία σημαίνει αρχιτεκτονικής έκφρασης και αντιστρόφως. Η Αισθητική διαταράσσεται από την πολιτική. Ο Rancière κατανοεί τα είδη της αισθητικής ως συνώνυμα με την πολιτική εκδήλωση. Ένα γεγονός που σηματοδοτεί μια αλλαγή στην κατάσταση του κόσμου. Μέσα από το δυσδιάκριτο πολιτικό

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δυναμικό του γεγονότος από τον Deleuze και την πολιτική του Rancière, εξετάζονται η αισθητική του Καντ. Εξετάζεται πώς η πολιτική είναι πιθανό γεγονός στο θεσμό της κοινότητας, όπου κοινότητα είναι κάτι που μοιραζόμαστε από κοινού. Αυτό το κοινό αναλύεται μέσα από ένα μοιρασμένο μερίδιο γύρω από κοινούς τρόπους αίσθησης. Αυτό το μοίρασμα του αισθητού αντιπροσωπεύει το ότι η αισθητική πάσχει από μια δυαδικότητα στη θεωρίας της αισθητικότητας, όπου η πιθανή εμπειρία εξετάζει το όμορφο μέσω της πραγματικότητας του πραγματικού. Από την άλλη πλευρά, το υπέρτατο είναι ένας τρόπος αισθητικής κατανόηση που συμβαίνει ακριβώς όταν κάποιος βιώνει την αρμονική σχέση μεταξύ των διαφόρων ικανοτήτων και οι αισθήσεις ανατρέπονται. Είναι η γνωστική λειτουργία που μπορεί να αλλάξει την διαμόρφωση του αντικειμένου ως μορφή. Πιθανές εμπειρίες μπορούν να σχηματίσουν το υπερβατικό υποκείμενο μέσω της προσωπικής συνείδησης και της υποκειμενικής ταυτότητας. Αυτή η διαδικασία της υποκειμενοποίησης δημιουργεί μια μετασταθή ισορροπία με δυνητικές ενέργειες. Αυτές οι ενέργειες γίνονται κατανοητές ως η εικόνα του πραγματικού, ενώ το πραγματικό υποτίθεται ότι μοιάζει με το πιθανό. Εξετάζεται η λογική του αισθητού, ως η θεωρία της '' διπλής αιτιότητας '' όπως προτείνεται από τον Deleuze. Η ανάλυση του Foucault της σύγχρονης επινόησης των ειδικοτήτων διακρίνει αισθητικές αξίες από τις ηθικές, κοινωνικές και πολιτικές αξίες μέσω της αξιολόγησης της εμπειρίας των αισθητού, και περισσότερο, όταν θέτει την αισθητική τόσο στο τι διακυβεύεται στην πολιτική και στο τι ξεσπά εκ νέου όταν συμβαίνει η πολιτική. Υπάρχει επίσης αυτή η σχέση επιρροής των πραγμάτων σε μια κοινότητα που σχηματίζει ένα είδος αίσθησης που αναλύεται με πολλούς διαφορετικούς τρόπους στο έργο πέντε λαμπρών αρχιτεκτόνων, η οποία αποτελεί ένα νέο ριζοσπαστικό τρόπο σκέψης για τη δημιουργία αρχιτεκτονικών χώρων στις μέρες μας.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION

..10

I. Carl Schmitt the concept of the political

..13

II. Jacques Rancière argument about politics and aesthetics

..18

III. Immanuel Kant

..25

IV. Benjamin H. Bratton ..31 Some Trace effects of the Post-Anthropocene: On Accelerationist Geopolitical Aesthetics and the Black Stack Cloud Polis ..36 The Stack ..37 V. Steven Shaviro ..40 Accelerationist Aesthetics:Necessary Inefficiency in Times of RealSubsumption..42 What is the role of aesthetics, then, today? ..43 What does globalized network society mean for aesthetics? ..44 VI. The "Wrenching Duality" of Aesthetics: Kant, Deleuze, and the "Theory of the Sensible" the duality of Deleuze the transcendentalof Kant and the process of individuation for Deleuze the syntheses: the possible, the real and the virtual double causality, real and quasi the beautiful and the sublime space and time wrenching duality: active cognition and being-affected

..47 ..48 ..49 ..49 ..50 ..51 ..52

VII. Architectural examples exploring politics in architectural aesthetics and aesthetics that shape politics Hernan Diaz Alonso Alisa Andrasek Francois Roche Alejandro Aravena Pier Vittorio Aureli

..54 ..60 ..64 ..72 ..76

CONCLUSION

..80

BIBLIOGRAPHY

..82

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..54

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INTRODUCTION The purpose of this thesis is to examine and critically assess the claim that the political domain is autonomous. First is analyzed through Carl Schmitt thoughts the fact that based on the definition of the state, state presupposes the concept of politics. The state is the political situation of an organized people in a closed territorial unit / in a closed environment.

Politics emerges from every confrontation (religious, cultural, economic, ethnic, moral) where intensified when such a confrontation leads to relationships dipole friend - enemy. The enemy is not necessarily bad morally, aesthetically ugly or good economic rival, but is something first "existentially different, outlandish." The Policy becomes active whenever a distinction is so intense that takes the characteristics of the friend-enemy relationship. Emotionally the enemy can easily be seen as bad and ugly, because every distinction, above all political, alleging other discriminations.

For example, the moral evil, aesthetically ugly or economically damaging need not necessarily be the enemy.

Furthermore, very interesting are Rancière' s thoughts about politics and aesthetics. Aesthetic experience acts as the formations that create new ways of sensorial perception and leads to new forms of political subjectivity.

In this case aesthetics are synonymous with the political event. Jacques Rancière argues that what is at stake in politics, just as in aesthetics, is the "distribution of the sensible", meaning shared modalities of sensing. This partitioning of the sensible upon which the community is founded ultimately determines which people are recognizable as part of a shared world and which are sanctioned in partaking of it. Aesthetics is "the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience". But there is historical construction of the sensible which means that we are already too historically embedded to be universal. Very characteristic is Rancière's phrase for "the promise of a people to come", the promise of a new kind of community, the need of a new kind of sense. There is a metaphysics partitioning the sensible through an external and static law of natural properties and proper relations. These are the imperceptible individuations who are only sensed and perceived in relation to others.

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Immanuel Kant marks out two distinct domains: the transcendental realm of a priori forms and the empirical realm of sensible matter (the phenomena). He explores the relation between two mental faculties or a priori formative powers of subjectivity distinguished in the Critique of Pure Reason: the faculty of cognition, with understanding as its primary modality, and the faculty of feeling pleasure and pain, with imagination as its operative expression. Imagination is the mode by which the subject reaches out to the sensible.

Additionally, Benjamin Bratton refers to the Post-Anthropocene era which forms Accelerationist Geopolitical Aesthetics giving the example of the Black Stack, a megastructure platform consisted by many layers that coexist and can form the new world. This implies an acceleration from the initial recognition of the local planetary scale towards a more universal recombination for which the political and aesthetic representation of human experience are titled off-center. This is a "geopolitical aesthetic", a comprehension of a World System. There cannot be a post-Anthropocenic "politics" in any normative sense—a "politics" based on the human subject as a coherent agent. . If "we" survive the Anthropocene, we will not be as "humans" and then a post-Anthropocenic geopolitical aesthetics will happen.

Another great philosopher is Steven Shaviro who claims that we have to think of what comes after the inevitable Anthropocenic crashes, so that we might envision and evaluate our adaptations in advance. Through design we can grasp the outline of possible future formations and an understanding of the human place in this process, as much as it can be perceived, creates a politics. But a geopolitics has something else at its center besides the human. The nonhuman center finds different articulations because of its lack of suitability for human life. For our geopolitics, this nonhuman center takes the form of the world-without us- to-come.

All these thoughts are well being generated by greater philosophers way of thinking about human' s role on this place called Earth, much earlier. So the "Wrenching Duality" of Aesthetics and the "Theory of the Sensible" is examined according to Kant and Deleuze.

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All these theories are taking place on architectural approaches of brilliant architects nowadays both in academic and in practice field. The human, the World we cannot imagine, the otherness, the becoming and this PostAnthropocene era cause significant changes in the way we perceive and generate our place to live by creating politics and vice versa.

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I. Carl Schmitt

The concept of the political

For Carl Schmitt, the concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political. According to modern linguistic usage, the state is the political status of an organized people in an enclosed territorial unit. "In its literal sense and in its historical appearance the state is a specific entity of a 1 people ", he says.

Schmitt makes a clear definition of the political by intensify that the word is most frequently used negatively, in contrast to various other ideas, for example in such, antitheses as politics and economy, politics and morality, politics and law; and within law there is again politics and civil laws and so 1

Schmitt has in mind the modern national sovereign state and not the political entities of the medieval or ancient periods. For Schmitt's identification with the epoch of the modern state see George Schwab, The Challenge of the Ercemion: An Introduction to the political Idea; of Carl Schmitt haulm 1921 and 1936 ad ed. (New York: Greenwood Press, s989), PP. 27, 54: also, George Schwab, "Enemy oder Foe: Der Konflikt der modernen Politik," tr. J. Zeumer, Epirrhosis: Fertgabe fur Cad Schmitt, ed. H. Barion, BOckenfOrde, E. Forsthoff, W. Weber (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1968), II, 665-666

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forth. For Schmitt, "political" is generally juxtaposed to "state" or at least is brought into relation with it. The state thus appears as something political and the political as something pertaining to the state —obviously it is an unsatisfactory circle.

The use of the noun "PoliticalÂť (das Politische) is not random. Schmitt believes that the political arena is not a separate, clearly defined area human Act, nor has his own particular referents. Emerging from each opposition (religious, cultural, economic, ethnic, ethical) when it intensified so as to result in agglomerates based on a clear separation of friends and enemies. The antithesis of friend and enemy corresponds to the relatively independent criteria of other antitheses: good and evil in the moral sphere, beautiful and ugly in the aesthetic sphere, and so on. The enemy is not necessarily bad morally, aesthetically ugly or good economic rival, but something "existential different, alien and foreign." The distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation.

The Political inherent potential everywhere and becomes active whenever any opposition becomes so intense that it received friend-Enemy contrast characteristics. The State must ensure the existence of an undisturbed political unity, to prevent by all means the development of any contrast in Enemy-friend. The end of the era of the States imply the end of the fundamental decision-making capacity for the organization and establishment of political life.

Schmitt is an incurable romantic, approaching reality through emotions and seek the presence of the Enemy guarantee existential zeal and devotion. It is a typical case of intellectual who despises bourgeois normality and regularity and loves the special and exceptional. He tells us that the state is something more than the elements that form it, everyone should be engaged in it, to ensure its existence in any case, and within that there will always be a perpetual conflict cycle between rulers and the dominated for what interests you "promote" in the state policy.

Assuming that the confrontation friend and enemy symbolizes confrontation state and private interests, then the latter are always those who impose their domination by totalitarian way. Integral means that the

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positive contribution of the state, the greater good, are fully identified with the aspirations and choices of these interests. The public interest, in this sense, can no longer be determined or at least as something universal, as exceeding the private, thus missing that consistently good, which is able to coordinate the society and to ensure the class. Therefore, any policy is stillborn and the respective communities or societies cannot have prescribed values and move on them. Based therefore the principle of friend and enemy, what perhaps can guarantee a kind of continuity as our community is our decision to defend ourselves, i.e. our opposition and our domination over others.

Everyone, therefore, whether a member of one or other private organization looks and always looks forward to the predominance of the political class. This is even more true when, for example democracy or liberalism cannot function as a political class values, because all the people orthofrones objectively not agree. In conclusion: The necessary political class can only be enforced through the available power or potency of a given community, the so-called consensus in society.

Emotionally the enemy is easily treated as being evil and ugly, because every distinction, most of all the political, draws upon other distinctions for support. For example, the morally evil, aesthetically ugly or economically damaging need not necessarily be the enemy. The morally good, aesthetically beautiful, and economically profitable need not necessarily become the friend. Thereby the inherently objective nature and autonomy of the political becomes evident by virtue of its being able to treat, distinguish, and comprehend the friend-enemy antithesis independently of other antitheses. This antithesis are to be understood not as metaphors or symbols, not mixed and weakened by economic, moral, and other conceptions, least of all in a private-individualistic sense as a psychological expression of private emotions and tendencies. But, rationally speaking, it cannot be denied that nations continue to group themselves according to the friend and enemy antithesis, that the distinction still remains actual today, and that this is an ever present possibility for every people existing in the political sphere.

The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it

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approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend enemy grouping. In its entirety the state as an organized political entity decides for itself the friend-enemy distinction. This means that all political concepts have a polemical meaning. The word political is today often used interchangeably with party politics. The demand for depoliticalization in Schmitt's texts means the rejection of party politics.

Giving an example, Schmitt reflects this intense political distinction like a War event. He says that war follows from enmity. It is the most extreme consequence of enmity and it must nevertheless remain a real possibility for as long as the concept of the enemy remains valid. War has its own strategic, tactical, and other rules and points of view, but they all presuppose that the political decision has already been made as to who the enemy is. War is neither the aim nor the purpose nor even the very content of politics. But as an ever present possibility it is the leading presupposition which determines in a characteristic way human action and thereby creates a specifically political behavior.

As with every political concept, the neutrality concept is subject to the ultimate presupposition of a real possibility of a friend-and-enemy grouping. Should only neutrality prevail in the world, then not only war but also neutrality would come to an end. The politics of avoiding war terminates, as does all politics, whenever the possibility of fighting disappears. Even if wars today have decreased in number and frequency, they have proportionately increased in ferocity. War is still today the most extreme possibility. For only in real combat is revealed the most extreme consequence of the political grouping of friend and enemy. From this most extreme possibility human life derives its specifically political tension. A world in which the possibility of war is utterly eliminated, a completely pacified globe, would be a world without the distinction of friend and enemy and hence a world without politics. So for Schmitt, war as the most extreme political means discloses the possibility which underlies every political idea, namely, the distinction of friend and enemy.

Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy. And furthermore, a religious community which wages wars against members of other religious communities or

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engages in other wars is already more than a religious community; it is a political entity.

In the end, Schmitt must be at least partly right that there is a difference between on the one hand employing our moral and religious reasons to persuade ourselves and others to act rightly, employing bargaining techniques and economic exchange to establish relations with our fellows, and using law as a means to compel individuals to act in ways we find acceptable; and on the other hand taking the aim of defending a way of life, a concrete system of norms, practices, laws, and exchanges, against its enemies. Whether we want to call the latter the political or not, Schmitt has to be right to point out this important distinction.

There is a way of life that emerges from the moral, ethical, religious, economic, legal and "cultural" activity we engage in and this cultural activity is the product of someone's having taken over the political role and identified "our" enemies. There must become a political apparatus to come along and unify us in a common mission to annihilate our enemies.

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II. Jacques Rancière

argument about politics and aesthetics

For Rancière aesthetic experience acts as the formations that create new ways of sensorial perception and lead to new forms of political subjectivity.

The trend of "situationistes» , which emerged from an artistic avant-garde war movement, developed in the 1960s a radical critique of political class, it is undoubtedly a symptom of this duplex today motion between the policy and the art and the transformation of innovative thinking in nostalgic thoughts. The texts of Jean Francois Lyotard are those that best characterize the way in which the "aesthetic" was able, in the last twenty years, to become the privileged area where critical tradition turned into mourning thought.

This means firstly, to process the very meaning of the term aesthetic, which is not mentioned in art theory in general or to a theory which reduces art to effects on the sensation, but in a special identification system and reflection on the arts.

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What Rancière is trying to do is to interpret social sovereignty as a matter both of knowledge and ignorance. More specifically, he wants to practice a review of the model through which is exercised domination and oppression to the people. His original thought is that people are obeyed because they are ignorant of the cause which puts them in the position they are. This means that the way this situation works deprives, of the majority of the people, the possibility of a comprehensive and total viewing of the world. In other words, Rancière is trying to rethink the relationship between sovereignty and viewing model. The way in which this model works establish the condition of inequality: there are people who see and people do not see. If people are unequal, the cause is the actual inequality, but it may not be aware of it.

But what does politics have to do with aesthetics for Rancière? For Rancière aesthetics is synonymous with the political event. Jacques Rancière argues that what is at stake in politics, just as it is in aesthetics, is "the distribution 2 of the sensible" . How is this phrase to be understood? Politics first becomes a possibility with the institution of a community, where a community itself begins with something in common. This commonality is no shared stock of goods or shared claim to a territory. Rather, it is a shared partition of the sensible: community pivots around common modalities of sense. In other words, the commonality upon which a community is founded is sense, and politics first becomes a possibility with the institution of common sense. Hand in hand with the disclosure of shared modalities of sensing, moreover, comes the delimitation of each modality. The partition of the sensible thus renders some sounds intelligible (logos) and others unintelligible (pathos), some capacities visible and other invisible, and more.

Moreover, social positions are portioned out according to these delimitations, and the partitioning of the sensible upon which the community is founded ultimately determines which people are recognizable as part of a shared world and which are sanctioned in partaking of it. For Rancière, politics is that rare event that occurs when the confluence between sanctioned dispositions to partake of the shared world and

2

Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), p.9

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positions within the partition of the sensible is ruptured. So, Politics not only interrupts common sense but also erupts into the shared sensible world.

The Politics of Aesthetics argues that the distribution of the sensible is an aesthetic enterprise, and what is at stake in politics is aesthetics. Aesthetics is not any set of artistic practices, not even a theory of sense experience at large. Rancière insists aesthetics must be understood in the terms of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Aesthetics is "the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience". Moreover, Rancière claims the relation aesthetics bears to politics is analogous to the relation Kant's a priori forms bear to sense experience. These a priori forms determine the organization of human experience and provide its conditions.

Here we have to mention that in Kant's first book the Critique of Pure Reason , the text concerned for the world as we know it, we can call it possible sense, but more important is the second book Critique of Judgment that explores sense beyond the limits of our understanding, and this must be called real sense. Rancière misses this moment in Kant, as he derives his conception of Kantian aesthetics primarily from the Critique of Pure Reason. Also Rancière is influenced by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze for 3 politics . Deleuze places 'imperceptibility' at the heart of a project to give birth to a new kind of community, a new kind of relationality between beings in the world. To identify Deleuze's notion of the imperceptible, we have to think of the Kantian object-form, the condition of perception in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. This form is disrupted, as Deleuze tell us, by the force of the real itself. The imperceptible is a part of this force and party to this disruption, functioning aesthetically as the 'percipiendum', that which must be perceived but cannot be perceived according to the delimitation of sense experience in the sensus communis of Kant.

Rancière employs Aristotle's political philosophy to illuminate the pivotal role partitions of the sensible play in the institution of community. He claims that any partitioning of the sensible is always conditioned by a certain aesthetic system. Aristotle's political community is instituted according to 3

Jacques Ranciere, "Deleuze, Bartleby, and the Literary Formula," in The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, California: Stanford U.P,2004), pp.146-164, p.164

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the rules and principles of the aesthetic experience of the beautiful. For Aristotle, the institution of the political community requires first the existence of a being whose nature is political: the human being with characteristics like logos - the capacity to reason and to express claims about justice and injustice through speech and pathos - the capacity to express pain and pleasure. It is here, at the foundation of the Aristotelian political community, that Rancière finds lodged a partition of the sensible, a distinction "between two modes of access to sense experience:" logos, rendering sensible a world of justice and injustice, and pathos, restricting 4 the sensible to the domain of pain and pleasure . Based on that definitions logos is requisite for entry into a political community, and thus, it is precisely the appearance of such relations that marks this community as political. In other words whereas justice pivots around relations of domination and dominance is ordered in accordance with each person's nature and from proper relations we can have justice and from improper relations we can see injustice.

Rancière also renders Aristotle's conception of justice as a partitioning of the sensible. Kant's critical philosophy marks out two distinct domains: the transcendental realm of a priori forms and the empirical realm of sensible matter (the phenomena). It is from this transcendental form, unique to human beings as creatures of consciousness and reason, that a shared sensory world is produced, with each of the senses as well as each of the faculties taking a proper place in this production. This sounds much like Aristotle's account of the coming to be of the community as rendered by Rancière, a coming to be of a common sensory world. We can say that what is the ethical configuration of human experience, for Rancière is the distribution of the sensible at stake for politics.

The structure of the sensible, empirical world of Kant and those structures of human subjectivity that Kant speaks of as a priori, has no chance to be part of the sensory shared world because these are historical construction of the sensible which for Rancière means already too historically embedded to be universal. In contrast, we can find a similarity in Rancière's account of politics and Kant's attention to the sublime in the Critique of Judgment . The 4

Jacques Ranciere, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis and London: U. of Minnesota P., 1999), p.2

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similarity is that a power of sensible expression exists over and above any sensus communis, which for Rancière is fundamental on a shared sensory world. Both illuminate a capacity for sense and its eruption that holds, regardless of historically contingent and pre determinable properties, such as a recognizable capacity for logos as lodged within the very push towards a shared, sensory world. In Rancière words, "It is through the existence of this part of those who have no part, of this nothing that is all, that the community exists as a political community . . . that is, as divided by a fundamental dispute. . . to do with the counting of the community's parts."

Furthermore, there is a great difference between Rancière and Deleuze regarding the moment of "sensibility without recognition". Let's give an example to understand this phrase. A measure equal to the world can always be conceived, although not always imagined. In Deleuze rendering of this moment, he says that it appears when the faculty of understanding, pushing imagination to always find a measure, pushes imagination to its very limit and, at this limit, the imagination pushes back, leading the understanding itself to acquire a distinct power. This movement from sensible to sentiendum, from perceptible to percipiendum is what Kant says about cogito movement to cogitandum. The percipiendum is that which forcibly erupts; it cannot but be perceived, whatever the community's will. This imperative power comes from a force of life unrecognizable according to the partitions of the sensible, and what is generated is a sense of that which is insensible and imperceptible in the community. It is useful to see those thoughts of these great philosophers of Deleuze and Kant to be able to analyze Rancière's thoughts from this imperceptible moment to politics.

Deleuze characterize the world as "a wall of loose, uncemented stones".

This for Rancière's The Politics of Aesthetics means, as for Aristotle also, that have taken the properties of various subjects, predetermined by nature, to be the formative force from which any narrative, that is, any ordering of the sensible, can unfold. This incites a political question: By what power might a narrative unfold in the absence of a subject with determinate capacities? For Rancière there is a causal power within matter itself. He introduces here a kind of individuation. In contrast with Kant and Aristotle, where for both of them, a faculty of the soul and an a priori power of the subject, give to matter its sensible form, here, individuations are immanent

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within matter itself. An individuation can now be "a drop of water, a shell, a 5 strand of hair." This matter is in its own genetic self-expression and holds the key to a kind of relationality, a new kind of community for Rancière.

Very characteristic is Rancière's phrase "the promise of a people to come", the promise of a new kind of community, a new kind of sense . There is a metaphysics partitioning the sensible through an external and static law of natural properties and proper relations. These are the imperceptible individuations who are only sensed and perceived in relation to others. So these individuations have sensed relations, which relationality registers materially in the activity of the body, before it registers consciously. An example on this is that " we do not run because we are afraid, but we are 6 afraid because we run." Each pushes against another, and it is through this discordant communication with one another that each forces itself sensibly upon us. This for Deleuze is the imperceptible, that of the perceptible that presents itself when our perception and the sensus communis, both among our faculties and senses and at the heart of political community, are pushed to their limit. This moment opens it to politics as Rancière understands it. This communication is built through a force of affectivity, according to Spinoza, by which intensities differing in nature can be condensed into a whole which itself differs in nature from each of these intensities. By this process new intensities are produced that reconfigurate the old.

Now we can conclude by revising the phrase "the world is a wall of loose, uncemented stones", that it is a whole world outside this domain insofar as to divide these stones from their relations is to alter their nature. This world is the world of the percipiendum, that which we must perceived. Just as yellow and blue vanish from sight upon reaching a critical point of proximity with one another, changing in nature to produce green, relations of critical proximity produce every discrete element available to perception.

'Imperceptible' individuations constitute the perceived, and the perceived here forces itself upon our body just like a color so bright one cannot turn one's eyes from it.

5

"Deleuze, Bartleby, and the Literary Formula," p.149 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham and London: Duke U. P., 2002), p.231 6

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Rancière's attention to an aesthetics of politics may have surprised us. Yet aesthetics has long been a field of inquiry that looks to sense experience to ask after value. Aesthetics asks how value is expressed sensibly and how we 7 know when value is present. Rancière is clearly responding to Foucault's analysis of the modern invention of the disciplines, distinguishing aesthetic value from ethics, social and political values from the evaluation of sense experience, and more, when he posits aesthetics both at what is at stake in politics and at what erupts anew when politics happens.

We were centered around Rancière's call for a Politics of Aesthetics. We aimed to demonstrate how Kant's critical philosophy, particularly as developed in the Critique of Pure Reason, corroborates Rancière's analysis of the distribution of the sensible. Simultaneously how Kant's Critique of Judgment, approached through a Deleuzian lens, opens to a distinctly political aesthetics as defined by Rancière. Furthermore we analyzed the role Kant's Critique of Judgment plays in Deleuze's formulation of the notion of the 'imperceptible,' key to Deleuze's own call for politics in A Thousand Plateaus, which can not only reconcile Deleuze's philosophy with Rancière's politics but can, in fact, render Rancière's call for a 'Politics of Aesthetics' both more convincing, urgent, and important.

7

Davide Panagia makes a similar claim in The Poetics of Politics (Durham and London: Duke U.P., 2006), cf. pp.4-5.

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III. Immanuel Kant

From Kant we have to significant texts. The Critiques of Pure Reason and The Critiques of Judgment. Above we saw Rancière insists aesthetics must be understood in the terms of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Aesthetics is "the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience."

In The Critiques of Pure Reason the text concerned with the conditions of possibility for the world as we know it (possible sense), where it is the later Critique of Judgment the text explores sense beyond the limits of our understanding (real sense). The Critique of Judgment distinguishes between two kinds of aesthetic experiences, experiences of the beautiful and of the sublime. Both offer insights into sense beyond the limits of our understanding. Here we have to mention that what is for Kant the articulations of the aesthetic experience of the sublime, is what is for 8 Rancière the notion of the partitioning of the sensible. In The Critiques of

8

Although the aesthetic experience of the beautiful, as Kant's text suggests, needs to be reinvestigated following an illumination of the aesthetic experience of the sublime, this is a task that I will not undertake here.

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Judgment Kant analyzes the a priori rules and principles of human understanding, of the aesthetic experience of the beautiful.

Furthermore, Kant marks out two distinct domains: the transcendental realm of a priori forms and the empirical realm of sensible matter (the phenomena). Kant critical philosophy works to articulate the process by which the a priori structures of human subjectivity are mapped onto the sensible, phenomenal domain.

In the Critique of Pure Reason, the form given to the phenomenal through 9 reflection of the transcendental is what Kant calls the "object = x." This is an empty form that only receives qualitative specifications when related to a multiplicity of phenomenal qualia held together through mental operations, meaning when are synthesized together mentally to form the object. It is a synthesis that allows the various qualitative impressions, like the sun for a flower, and more to be shared between the various faculties. This synthesis is also what allows each of our various senses to present the same object to us such that. Another example is that our eyesight is a sense that in a certain way is affected by light, but he does not dwell on the actual, material eye without which this affection would not be possible. This is the way how sun affects flowers.

However, the object-form is not itself a transcendental form but rather an analogue of such a form. What of the transcendental human subject has the capacity to produce an analogue of itself that conditions a shared sensory world? The cogito. The cogito for Kant is a unity prior conditionally to all empirical experience. It is the "I think" which gives to the human being a subjecthood by which it can then reach out to the world and make it one's own. Nonetheless, the cogito is neither individual nor personal. Rather, it is the universal form of reason in general. Thus, as an analogue of the cogito, the object-form renders a shared, sensory world not only for one's own senses and faculties but also for one person and another. The object form renders a shared, sensory world.

9

Daniel W. Smith, "Deleuze on Bacon: Three Conceptual Trajectories in The Logic of Sensation," in Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P., 2002) pp.vii - xxvii, esp. pp.xv-xvi

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Kant further explores the relation between two mental faculties or a priori formative powers of subjectivity distinguished in the Critique of Pure Reason: the faculty of cognition, with understanding as its primary modality, and the faculty of feeling pleasure and pain, with imagination as its operative expression. Imagination is the mode by which the subject reaches out to the sensible. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant insists that the sensible can only be received in a form conditioned by the structure of the human understanding. Nonetheless, in the Critique of Judgment he is struck by the sensible's capacity to manifest structural organization beyond that which the understanding can conceptualize in terms of the object form. All structural organization manifested in the sensible which is beyond the possibility of understanding is organization manifest in a particular, empirical phenomenon. Yet the sensible can manifest a regularity without recognizable specificities; a regularity that can't be referred back to any concepts the understanding already has.

The aesthetic experience of the beautiful is one example of the manifestation of such regularity in the particular. It is like a single rose that one finds beautiful, not roses in general, due to a certain harmony that 10 appears to us in it which it is sensible for us. This which is sensible for us express our subjective need and this condition attaches to the object.

Nonetheless, we can suppose every human being shares this need, and the aesthetic comprehension of the beautiful is thus posed to play a key role in the ethical configuration of the shared world of human experience. This need, which is a transcendental form, is unique to human beings as creatures of consciousness and reason, that a shared sensory world is produced, with each of the senses as well as each of the faculties taking a proper place in this production. Furthermore, our need for this harmony is what Aristotle renders in politics on proportionality. What one takes -a place in the community- is always proportional to that which one brings to it.

Proportionality is the element in Aristotle's rendition of the political community that gives it harmony.

10

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), p.59.

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To go back in Kant's thoughts about synthesis, synthesis occurs by way of a 11 certain notion of measure. The faculty of understanding operates through concepts and thus has the capacity to develop conceptual units of measurement such as a meter or a foot. The faculty of imagination, however, does not have concepts at its disposal. Thus, there must be a sensible measure by which to synthesis parts. For example, "evaluate a tree in relation to the human body" or "evaluate the moon rising in terms of a coin held at close range." Here is the moment of phenomenology in Kant that opens aesthetic comprehension to a kind of dialogue between the empirical and the transcendental. This phenomenological moment that leads Kant to an aesthetic of the sublime, an aesthetics which would erupt and not disrupt yet. This disruption can be mentioned on Aristotle's example of proletarians, where Aristotle orders the political community, this of aristocrats, is thus thoroughly disrupted by the proletarians claim to freedom. To push it further this freedom as a political event, contributes to the institution of a political community and so a shared sensible world for Rancière. By this political event is depicted the difference between social position and natural capacities.

Going back to the notion of the sublime, it is a mode of aesthetic comprehension occurring precisely when one experiences the harmonious relation between one's various faculties and senses being overturned. The sublime shows a faculty of the mind surpassing every standard of sense insofar as it reveals that because, for example, Kant believes, the measure equal to the world can always be conceived, although not always imagined.

Further still, insofar as it is a sensible unit of measure that is necessary for the synthesis of empirical parts in accordance with an object-form, an experience of the sublime is one in which there is no synthesis. The form cannot be produced. It is the moment when the faculty of imagination is confronted with its fragility in the face of the world. The faculties are forced to stretch beyond themselves. This capacity for Kant is called sense without recognition and this is the moment of experience outside the dominion of common sense but this moment is sensible nonetheless. Here we understand that the sensible capacity which manifests structural organization, to give a form to the object, happens beyond the human understanding, which conceptualized the object form. So while we was 11

"Deleuze on Bacon," pp.xviii - xix

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talking about cogito, the "I think", now we are talking about the cogitandum, the "ought be thought" because it is preceded. Based on this a measure equal to the world can always be conceived, although not always imagined.

Kant's philosophy remains in the end convinced that there will always be an a priori form which makes the sensible possible.

Lastly we do not have to miss to analyze the meaning of the phrase that Kant use regarding the theory of sensibility, about " ideal embodiment" .

Kant is interested in investigation into how the possibility and limits of human cognition, acting, and judging have to take into account the human body. A great example on this is this already referred above about how light has an affective relation with the eyesight creating the sense of vision. In other words this is an a priori dimension of our sensibility (cognitive, practical, and aesthetic) – a dimension that is irreducible to purely mental activity and is necessarily embodied. This a priori dimension illustrated the Transcendental Aesthetics of Kant. Kant focus on the problem of (a priori) knowledge and how the features of sensibility that emerge from the Transcendental Aesthetic – sensation and passivity – can teach us something about embodiment or the human body. We have to remember that the body for Kant is the 'site' of sensibility.

We can understand it further by thinking that we intuitively relate things to the orientation of our body in order to argue that space, for example, can neither be perceived by the senses nor grasped by the intellect. The left/right orientation is also relevant to the conception of embodiment. This means that there is an oriented human body as a "transedental ground of our cognition". So for Kant "the body is not the site of the empirical senses but the reference point of our formal sense for spatial orientation".

In conclusion, Kant focus to raise the various aspects of human sensibility into topics of transcendental philosophy and how this reveals something about human embodiment. According to Kant, there is no sphere of human life that does not depend on sensibility. Yet this entails that human beings can and must put sensibility in the service of cognition, moral actions, and aesthetic judgments, in other words, that sensibility can and must be transformed into something that enhances rather than threatens the activity of the higher faculties so as for humans to think in a new radical way, beyond the domain of human cognition, finding the invisible. All these

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meanings for aesthetics, senses, human understanding and cognition cause and identify political events and attitudes.

If it were possible to find that there is an a priori principle in capabilities and regulatory relationship and interaction between people bound together by the common possession of the world (the earth), then it could be proven that man is essentially political being. Aesthetics, as a fundamental cultural activity is being statesmanship. From the way man crises, reveals himself, liberated from his temperament. Politics, speech and act, reveal the unique diversity of the individual within a true democracy. For Kant the critical strength seems to accompany the political act as a component of an active life (vita activa).

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IV. Benjamin H. Bratton

Some Trace effects of the Post-Anthropocene: On Accelerationist Geopolitical Aesthetics and the Black Stack

The transition of digital tools in the scale of the urban seems to be a "revolution" with Andrew Gillespie to state: "[...] It remains to be seen how that designers (planners) have further develop the knowledge, let alone the expertise or appropriate policy intervention mechanisms that would give them the opportunity to influence the spatial development of a digital society. Someone can plan the future digital city. Telecommunications 12 companies maybe? - Certainly not, however, seems to be the designers."

Characteristic is the remark of Benjamin Bratton replacing the motto modernist house-habitation machine with dipole city -iPhone stressing the drastic effect of information technology on how we perceive and experience the urban space.

12

Andrew Gillespie, 'Digital Lifestyles and the Future City', in Neil Leach (ed), Designing for the Digital World, John Wiley & Sons Ltd (London), 2002, p.71

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It is crucial to explore the passage from the simple recognition of the impact of digital technologies on the experience and operation of the city in their active involvement in the design. To highlight the multiple dimensions of this "intersection" juxtaposes the "parametricism" as a new style in architecture and in urban planning (see Patrick Schumacher) with science fiction visions of Chlorophilia of Hernan Diaz Alonso and «I've heard about ... © » of Francois Roche to result that when the digital tools now faced with a much larger scale and complexity of systems for modeling and / or design should perhaps now incorporate issues that transcend morphogenesis and located in the process of decision-making it as Manuel De Landa analyzes.

For Bratton, the post-humanism era is a planetary and incomplete situation.

We have moved from Kantian Geography, for which the commonality of the earth’s surface guarantees Cosmopolitanism, to Deleuzian solutions of the painterly image-force, to numinous or occult conspiracies of geologic violence, to now to a comparative planetology. In this planetology the earth as a mediating polis can only be thought through aesthetics derived from the computation of possible geometries, subdivisions, doubles, inversions, localizations, and Hubble-scale adoptions from the outside. This implies an acceleration from the initial recognition of the local planetary scale towards a more universal recombination for which the political and aesthetic representation of human experience are titled off-center. This cause the entrance of xenopolitics, xenoaesthetics, xenoarchitectonics, meaning new inside-out geopolitical aesthetics, where the human polities seems most to 13 14 be conditional. ''An inventory of contingencies'' as Bratton says. How can we transform our own relations to these changes, what could do the work for a geopolitical aesthetics by and for an extinct Anthropocenic subject? Bratton uses the word ''accelerationist'' for the post-Anthropocenic exteriority.

13

The “xeno-” prefix was introduced into this discourse by Reza Negarastani. on Journal #46 - June 2013, Benjamin H. Bratton, Some Trace Effects of the Post-Anthropocene: On Accelerationist Geopolitical Aesthetics

14

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Figure 1 “Speculations on Anonymous Materials” at Fridericianum, Purity of Vapors, 2012 Silicon, pigments, SmartWater bottles, refrigerator, Pamela Rosenkranz. refer to accelerationist aesthetics of Bratton.

We are attentive to how planetary-scale computation’s instrumentalization of Design to model its political arrivals also provides "aesthetic" programs which are less reflective of political realities than generative of their material evolution. For this, the work of computation as a style of thought, is held open by the final incompleteness of algorithmic indeterminacy, and through this can directly cause unknown and unknowable political architectures.

For Bratton there are visible "trace-effects" from Computational Design to what Steven Shaviro calls an "accelerationist aesthetics", and in difference 15 from an "accelerationist politics". First we have to understand these two meanings by Shaviro.

To predict what will and will not survive the Anthropocene demands that artist/designer speculate upon irreducibly complex material interdependencies (of oil, water, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon, avian influenza,

15

See Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect (London: Zero Books, 2010), 137–39.

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rotting iron, insect biomass, plankton genomics, and so forth), the effects that the subtraction or amplification of any one of these will have on the others. This is a "geopolitical aesthetic", a comprehension of a World System. There cannot be a post-Anthropocenic "politics" in any normative sense—a "politics" based on the human subject as a coherent agent.

We are brought to this Anthropocenic dead-end not just by a cosmic predicament but by the violences of our current Algorithmic Capitalism.

Does this 'machine of capitalism', this human market, this alien entropy machine eat us? Instead of "post-Capitalism" as the futural specter on call, 16 Bratton prefers the more encompassing "post-Anthropocene." The latter names not only another economic order but articulates in advance the displacement of the human agent. The post-Anthropocene indicates that the organizing work of a "xenogeopolitical aesthetics" can be done only in relation to an alienation from human history and anthropocentric time and scale and that's how we passed from nanometric to comparative-planetary scales. By the extinction of Anthropocenic anthropology and corresponding models of governance, the Post-Anthropocene establishes not only that humanism disappears but we as the more elemental genetic machines reappear as unthinkable new animal machines and New Earths. This means that we have to see the planetary-world with another tranjectory from one of ancestrality toward one of alien descendence. So we are forced to encounter in advance the descendent for which we are the ancestor and for which we are the unthinkable fossil.

The passage from organic into inorganic composition is an economy of 17 accelerationism. It is a genetic to allogenetic iteration. If should Anthropocenic ecological collapse making familiar human systems untenable, then our chemical substances our phylum, biomass, and phenotype will have no reality. If "we" survive the Anthropocene, we will not be as "humans" and then a post-Anthropocenic geopolitical aesthetics will happen. If there is a "politics" interested in acceleration toward a postAnthropocenic condition, it is because the biopolitical context of our 16

This corresponds to a shift in focus from immediate resistance to capitalism to the ultimate completion of its historical mission (of self-extinguishment).

17 See Reza Negarastani, “Drafting the Inhuman: Conjectures on Capitalism and Organic Necrocracy,� in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Scrnicek, Graham Harman. (Melbourne: re:press, 2011).

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Algorithmic Capitalism is itself already a strong leverage point in the larger dramas of planetary-scale conversion, decay, restoration, and wholesale replacement.

Bratton calls this economy a Thanotonic economy where traces living organisms back into inorganic matter, in the early-to-mid Anthropocene.

One not only transforms into the other, but each is displaced by the other as a complementary form of embodiment: robotics, molecular engineering, synthetic biology, various implants, tissue and organ transplantation, sensory augmentation, avant-garde pharmaceuticals, and so forth. For some this designed promiscuity between the organic and inorganic at the scale of the organism may be a kind of living death. By mixing organic and inorganic material into new composites in the laboratory, it introduces death into life. On the other hand, these technological displacements of life and matter may signal something more than diverted necromancy they may signal a desire to innovate upon the mammalian diagram, perhaps in the accidental interests of a biopolitics.

Figure 2 Epidermal Biopolitics and Nanoskin. Regarding the accelerationist geopolitical brief by Benjamin Bratton, refer to organic and inorganic promiscuity.

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We have a good sense of the passage from the Foucauldian disciplinary biopolitics for which bodies are captured and enumerated into a governable interior, into the Deleuzian "society of control" where bodies wandering through urban landscapes without tether because there is no outside to which they might escape. (figure 2) Now another regime appears, one that organizes its biopolitical governance through a more immediate and affective means: the sensing and codification of risk at the level of skin, like a mammal’s largest sensory organ. This epidermal biopolitics is based less on "seeing like a state" than upon what a governing apparatus can sense. An example, are those developed applications for inks that could detect ambient particulate trace elements of chemicals which with microelectronics embedded in the paint, the skin becomes a sensor technology.

Cloud Polis We see how global Cloud computing platforms can divide political geography and introduce another, asymptotic sovereign layer on top of the State’s territories. This is seen perhaps most directly in the ongoing Sino18 Google conflicts, that began in 2008. As States become Cloud-based entities, conversely Cloud platforms take on some of the most essential technologies of governance, like legal identity, currency, cartography, and platform allegiance.

The Cloud Polis extracts revenue from the cognitive capital of its usercitizens, who use the global infrastructural services. These embryonic accomplishments of planetary-scale computation redraw political territory toward an increasing universal acceleration. Even today, each user in the Android population, for example, is a node in a vast, massively distributed supercomputing sensing, seeing, tracking, and sorting platform. These Android devices or artificial vision machines generate their own

18

Google has shaken the Hornet’s nest in China by threatening to pull out of China in wake of continuous hacking attempts which are apparently government controlled and censorship attempts of the Chinese government on Google search results.

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autonomous aesthetic, the so-called 'New Aesthetic'. This depicts how certain control systems, certain platform systems work toward particular governmental effects.

To conclude, no discussion of an accelerationist geopolitical aesthetic can develop without passage into the life and afterlife of Anthropocenic Capitalism, particularly with regard to planetary-scale computation as its financial system. But for the purposes of actually constructing geopolitical aesthetics, the partial inventory of trace-effects will help us pass from an accelerationism of the conceptual to an accelerationism of the material: expressed through Design. This is because Design does the work of both conceptualization and materialization at once, one oscillating into the other at their own rhythms.

The Stack We saw how planetary-scale computation’s instrumentalization of Design, models political arrivals, and also provides "aesthetic" programs which are less reflective of political realities than generative of their material evolution.

Bratton asks the question, "What has planetary-scale computation done to our geopolitical realities?" He develops a political perspective on computerdriven processes on a planetary scale. He suggests that we consider the vast array of new and emerging digital and digital-supported technologies as aspects of a single phenomenon that he calls "The Stack" an accidental megastructure, referring to the layered architecture of certain software and hardware systems. The Stack, he argues, has the characteristics of a platform. There are modular layers in the stack, which all play their specific role, and each is both independent and that because computer systems have become the form and content by which we organize our ideas, economies and cultures. It's not just the way governments operate, it has become the driving situation. In the Stack system everything operating at one layer can be replaced by a completely different mechanism, according to certain protocols as long as it communicates with the layer above it and below it, which implies a degree of verticality. Stack systems are designed to be re-designed. We need a conceptual model to find what is causing the

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verticality and so as the layering to be understood. This new machine can bring next economics.

The Stack not only acts as a piece of technology, but also as a piece of geography: as a way to map jurisdictions and sovereignties, starting to fulfill cloud platforms like Google, Facebook and other more services and functions previously provided by the state. We can see how each different platforms can not only have a different business model, but also a different political model, which may be the cloud policy. Facebook model the cloud policy on "exhibiting themselves'. Google shapes the policy on rationalizing information structures and algorithmic reason. Apple models the policy on the gentle dictatorship from smooth, sealed surfaces. Amazon model the cloud policy where it is the object of political knowledge, not people. These are not only all different business models, they are also different political models, and they all occupy the same time the cloud layer. But they all make use of this larger mechanism to obtain access to the city layer.

The Stack is a huge hungry machine and very flexible in terms of what we design, as a kind of platform. Not all platforms are stacks. A platform is a series of mechanisms that allows for the indiscriminate use of these mechanisms for the production of "emergent" effects, which in advance, at the initiation of these mechanisms, are not intended or planned. Furthermore a platform is a set of strategic opportunities. The way in which there is arranged an advance will determine in some way the possibilities. In the same way that Google will organize the logic of the Internet around the rationalization of information, without determining the content of the Internet: Google only creates the mechanism by which everyone else can make the content of the Internet. A 'column' that can activate all layers of the stack, a user can be. That can be a person, but also an algorithm, an animal, a vegetable, a self-driving car, whatever. This participation within the space of the stack, with other machine-like, animal or algorithmic "co-inhabitants", will be one of the most difficult philosophical challenges for us to handle. It is a machine with our mechanical participation.

The application layer in the stack is open to many different types of 'agency'. There is no clear difference between a human user and a machine.

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This is the 'Geo-engineering biotechnological level'. The Stack is this idea of a chain of information exchange between things and the users are all elements connected, crossed, in flux, inserted and ejected.

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V. STEVEN SHAVIRO

The post-Anthropocene era is defined by the fact that people are no longer the dominant geological factor. That might means that we are extinct, or that we will become something else that is no longer recognizable as human. Our DNA will continue to exist, but man as a species concept might not. It is a politically philosophical work.

Shaviro makes a strong distinction between transhumanism and posthumanism. Transhumanism is an independent and autonomous organism that can renew itself and expand, while post-humanism arises from the issues raised by technologies such as nanotech and biotech.

Transhumanism is extremely anthropocentric, and post-humanism. We would destroy the old logic of identity, and not just because that would expand.

The value of an accelerationist aesthetics as we mentioned above, is totally different from an accelerationist politics. For Shaviro accelerationist aesthetics is to draw out "what it feels like" to live in the contemporary moment, as partially determined by inhuman displacements like those noted above (figure 2). Accelerationist aesthetics accomplishes this

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conjuring prototypes of what comes after the inevitable Anthropocenic crashes, so that we might envision and evaluate our adaptations in advance. However, for Shaviro this becomes an exercise in cognitive mapping that may provide "the individual subject with some heightened 19 sense of place." An accelerationist politics comes with no clear path out, no quarantee of ultimate outcomes. It is therefore disqualified as a suitable program for well-understood "political" goals. This aesthetic project, however, could be useful by training a recognizable politics through the shock of its unrecognizable affect. But as we saw Bratton's interest is exactly the opposite: an unrecognizable politics through a recognizable aesthetics.

The Anthropocene is a contemporary term for the period when humans are the dominant source of planetary change and the post-Anthropocene—a moment of lift-off when computation leaves humanity behind. This is the moment when we realize 'an unrecognizable politics through a recognizable aesthetics' and this recognizability of the aesthetics comes through design conceived as a function of computation. The traces of calculation and computation in design permit the at least fragmentary grasping of the alien process and, even more dimly, the outline of its possible future formations.

The aims of computation are "adaptation, invention, diversion, and reiteration" and an understanding of the human place in this process, as much as it can be perceived, creates a politics. But a geopolitics has something else at its center besides the human. The nonhuman center finds different articulations because of its lack of suitability for human life.

For our geopolitics, this nonhuman center takes the form of the worldwithout us- to-come.

19

Fredric Jameson, quoted in Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect, 138.

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Accelerationist Aesthetics: Necessary Inefficiency in Times of Real Subsumption For Shaviro, Aesthetics exists in a special relationship to political economy, precisely because aesthetics is the one thing that cannot be reduced to political economy. Politics, ethics, epistemology, and even ontology are all subject to "determination in the last instance" by the forces and relations of production. This is because there is something spectral, and curiously insubstantial, about aesthetics. Kant says two important things about what he calls aesthetic judgment.

The first is that any such judgment is necessarily "disinterested." This means that it doesn’t relate to my own needs and desires. It is something that I enjoy entirely for its own sake, with no ulterior motives, and with no profit to myself. This is why aesthetic sensation is not reducible to political economy.

Beauty in itself is inefficacious. But this also means that beauty is in and of itself utopian. For beauty presupposes a liberation from need; it offers us a way out from the artificial scarcity imposed by the capitalist mode of production. However, since we do in fact live under this mode of production, beauty is only a "promise of happiness" (as Stendhal said) rather than happiness itself. Aesthetics, for us, is unavoidably fleeting and spectral. When time is money and labor is 24/7, we don’t have the luxury to be indifferent to the existence of anything. To use a distinction made by China Miéville, art under capitalism at best offers us escapism, rather than the actual prospect of escape.

The second important thing that Kant says about aesthetic judgment is that it is "non-cognitive". Beauty cannot be subsumed under any concept, seems spectral so it is epiphenomenal . The aesthetic experience has nothing to do with information and facts. It cannot be extracted, is "inner sensation," or the experience of "qualia," or "consciousness" , doesn’t really exist.

Aesthetic experience is not part of any cognitive mechanism.

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What is the role of aesthetics, then, today?

We mentioned that beauty cannot be subsumed; yet we live in a time when financial mechanisms subsume everything. Capitalism has moved from "formal subsumption" to "real subsumption." In formal subsumption, capital appropriates, and extracts a surplus from labor processes. In real subsumption, there is no longer any such autonomy; labor itself is directly organized in capitalist terms (think of the factory and the assembly line). In Hardt and Negri’s expanded redefinition of "subsumption," it isn’t just labor that is subsumed by capital, but all aspects of personal and social life. This means that everything in life must now be seen as a kind of labor: we are still working, even when we consume, and even when we are asleep. Affects and feelings, linguistic abilities, modes of cooperation, forms of know-how and of explicit knowledge, expressions of desire: all these are appropriated and turned into sources of surplus value.

This means that labor, subjectivity, and social life are no longer "outside" capital and antagonistic to it. Rather, they are immediately produced as parts of it, functions of capital. This is what leads us to speak of such things as "social capital," "cultural capital," and "human capital". Our knowledge, our abilities, our beliefs, and our desires need to be invested. Under a regime of real subsumption, every living person is transformed into a capital stock. The individual is assumed to be, as Foucault puts it, "an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself … being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of 20 [his] earnings."

This process of real subsumption is the key to our globalized network society. Everything without exception is subordinated to an economic logic, an economic rationality.

20

Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2010), 226.

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Figure 3 Zombie selfie on the set of The Walking Dead.

What does globalized network society mean for aesthetics?

The process of real subsumption requires the valuation, and evaluation, of everything: even of that which is spectral, epiphenomenal, and without value. Affect and inner experience are not exempt from this process of subsumption, appropriation, and extraction of a surplus. For capitalism now seeks to expropriate surplus value, not just from labor narrowly considered, but from leisure as well; not just from "private property," but also from what the Autonomists call "the common" and not just from palpable things, but also from feelings and moods and subjective states. Everything must be marketed and made subject to competition. Everything must be identified as a "brand."

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"Aesthetics, or styling, has become a unique selling point—on a global 21 basis." In today’s capitalism everything is aestheticized, and all values are ultimately aesthetic ones. Feelings are trivialized when they are packaged for sale. Aesthetic sensations and feelings are no longer disinterested, because they have been recast as markers of personal identity and transformed into data, that they can be exploited as forms of labor, and marketed as fresh experiences and exciting lifestyle choices. Ironically, then, it is precisely in a time when "affective labor" is privileged over material production (Hardt and Negri), and when marketing is increasingly concerned with impalpable commodities like moods, experiences, and "atmospheres" (Biehl-Missal and Saren), that we enter into the regime of a fully cognitive philosophy of mind, "cognitive capitalism" (Moulier Boutang).

22

In Neoliberalism leisure and enjoyment have become forms of labor.

Neoliberalism also operates directly on our bodies. Data are extracted from everything we feel, think, and do. Data are packaged and sold back to us.

Everything is organized in terms of thresholds, intensities, and 23 modulations. As Robin James puts it, "For the neoliberal subject, the point of life is to ‘push it to the limit," to pursue a line of intensification and recuperating the intensity as profit. As James says, "privileged people get to lead the most intense lives, lives of maximized investment, like personal 24 autonomy, sexual freedom, and individual "self-realization". This is the spectrality and epiphenomenality of the aesthetic.

Accelerationism was a political strategy before it became an aesthetic one.

Since there is no Outside to the capitalist system, accelerationism hopes to reach a point where capitalism explodes and falls apart. Starting in the 1980s, "accelerationist" policies were in fact put into effect by the likes of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Deng Xiaoping. The full savagery of capitalism was unleashed.

21

This statement is quoted and endorsed by Virginia Postrel in: Postrel, The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness(New York: Harper Perennial, 2004), 2 22 Elie Ayache, The Blank Swan: The End of Probability (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010).

23 See Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” in Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 177–82 24 Robin James, “Loving the Alien,” The New Inquiry, Oct. 22, 2012

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It has become increasingly clear that crises and contradictions do not lead to the demise of capitalism. Rather, they actually work to promote and advance capitalism, by providing it with its fuel. Capitalism repeatedly renews itself. We are all caught within this loop. The system under which we live refuses to die, no matter how oppressive and dysfunctional it is. We double this systemic incapacity with our own inability to imagine any sort of alternative. "Capitalist realism" is when "it’s easier to imagine the end of the 25 world than the end of capitalism."

To sum up, aesthetic accelerationism does not claim any efficacy for its own operations and does not deny that its own intensities serve the aim of extracting surplus value for its own operations. Thus, helps to move us towards the disinterest and epiphenomentality of aesthetics, an aesthetic inefficacy.

25

Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (London: Zero Books, 2009)

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VI. The "Wrenching Duality" of Aesthetics: Kant, Deleuze, and the "Theory of the Sensible"

the duality of Deleuze Gilles Deleuze writes that "aesthetics suffers from a wrenching duality." On one hand, it designates the theory of sensibility as the form of possible experience; on the other hand, it designates the theory of art as the reflection of real experience. The theory of the sensible captures only the real’s conformity with possible experience; and the theory of the beautiful deals with the reality of the real.

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the transcendental of Kant and the process of individuation for Deleuze On Kant's "Transcendental Aesthetic" in the First Critique, he works out his "theory of sensibility," by describing space and time as the forms, or conditions of possibility, for any experience of sensible intuition. On the other hand, there is the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment" in the Third Critique, Kant works out his "theory of art as the reflection of real experience," by considering the actual dynamics of sensible intuition in the experience of the beautiful and the sublime. It is also the virtual for Deleuze which is the transcendental condition of all experience, a transcendental realm.

Kant's transcendental realm has the structure of subjectivity. The active force that is supposed to condition all possible experience is itself passively modeled upon, and therefore in its own turn conditioned by, that experience. Subjectivity is preformed or prefigured, because it is generated by something that has the form of the subject already. The problem with the Kantian transcendental subject is that it "retains the form of subjective 26 identity" . If this circularity were actually the case, nothing new could ever emerge. Kant describes the transcendental as something like a set of templates, pre-existing conditions of possibility to which everything empirical must conform. Deleuze corrects Kant that the process of subjectification, or the force that impels this process, does not itself have 27 the form of a subject. Deleuze, following Gilbert Simondon, describes the transcendental as a field of potential energies in metastable equilibrium.

For Simondon and Deleuze, the subject cannot be given in advance, it must always emerge anew. For them, it is not the individual, but the alwaysongoing, and never complete or definitive, process of individuation.

26

Deleuze, Gilles (1990). The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 98 27 Simondon, Gilbert (2005). L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’ information.

Grenoble: Million

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the syntheses: the possible, the real and the virtual For Deleuze, the possible is an empty form. This means that possibility is a purely negative category; it lacks any proper being of its own. Mere possibility is not generative or productive; it is not enough to make anything happen. This is why Deleuze says that "the possible is opposed to the real". it is understood as an image of the real. And the real is nothing more than the working-out of what was already prefigured and envisioned as possible.

In this mirror play of resemblances, there can be nothing new or unexpected. When a possibility comes into existence, no actual creation has taken place. The virtual for Deleuze is "real without being actual, a principle of emergence that generates the actual. The virtual does not prefigure the actualities that emerge from it. Rather, it is the force that allows each actual entity to appear as something new. So the virtual is entirely distinct from the possible. These are called post-Kantian "syntheses" of difference: transcendental conditions of all experience – although they are conditions for dynamic becoming, rather than for static being.

double causality, real and quasi The virtual requires a new sort of transcendental logic. In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze proposes a theory of "double causality". On the one hand, there is real, or physical causality: causes relate to other causes in the depths of matter. This is a realm of "bodies with their tensions, physical qualities, actions and passions. Here we find 'bodies penetrating other bodies' and there is also a virtual relation, or a 'bond,' linking 'effects or incorporeal events' among themselves. The virtual is the realm of effects separated from their causes.

Quasi-causality is "an unreal and ghostly causality", which subdivides each present into past and future. The 'quasi-cause' is nothing outside of its effect but it is a principle of creativity. Looking forward, it induces the process of actualization; looking backward, it is an expression of that process. Quasi-causality is incorporeal rather than actual and effective, not

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to constrain things to a predetermined destiny, but to "assur[e] the full autonomy of the effect". And this autonomy preserves or grounds freedom, liberating events from the destiny. This is what it means to preserve 'the truth of the event,' in its inexhaustible potentiality, from the catastrophe of 'it's inevitable actualization'. Deleuze’s figure of the actualizes of the event is similar to the figure of the Kantian moral agent. My action as a free moral agent supplements the way that my actions are determined by my empirical inclinations, Kant’s 'causality as freedom' has the same virtual status as Deleuze’s 'quasi-cause.'

There is, of course, one crucial difference between the Kantian moral agent and the Deleuzian counter-effectuation. Where Kantian morality is categorical and universal, Deleuzian counter-effectuation is hypothetical and singular. Where Kant demands a rule that is infinitely generalizable, Deleuze looks for conditions, and which therefore cannot be generalized or extended. Kant remains within the bounds of traditional (Aristotelian) logic, which moves through a series of mediations from the particular to the general. Deleuze, to the contrary, posits a singularity, without a hierarchy of mediations. For Deleuze there is no one substance, only an always differentiating process, an origami cosmos, always folding, unfolding, refolding.

the beautiful and the sublime Furthermore, Kant’s "Analytic of the Beautiful," in the Third Critique, is really a theory of singularity. The beautiful involves an intuition for which there is no adequate concept; this is why an instance of beauty cannot be generalized or placed under a rule. The sublime, to the contrary, involves a concept for which there is no adequate sensible intuition.

Modernist and postmodernist thought, as well as artistic practice, has tended to privilege the sublime, and to actively reject the beautiful. This is largely because the sublime invokes a limit-experience, an encounter with something that is unrepresentable: whereas the beautiful would seem to

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remain firmly rooted within the bounds of sense. For Lyotard, the sublime would be that which in the modern invokes the unpresentable, that which refuses the consolation of correct forms, refuses the consensus of taste permitting a common experience of nostalgia for the impossible, and inquires into new presentations that produce the feeling that there is something 'unpresentable'. According to this account, the sublime forces us to confront the unknown; the beautiful, to the contrary, only involves the already-known, the already-familiar, the already-'tasteful.' The beautiful, involves an experience between intuitions and concepts. The sublime excess of concept over intuition leads us, through the unknown, to a recognition of the power of mind, and thereby to the universal.

space and time As we have mentioned above the Transcendental Aesthetic contains Kant’s position of space and time, as conditions of receptivity, or sensibility. Space and time are acategorical and non-conceptual. Space is "an a priori 28 intuition, not a concept" . Space and time are immanent conditions of sensible intuition: they indicate the ways in which we receive the data that objects provide to us. Because they are merely forms of reception, space and time are not adequate for cognition. This account of space and time is what Gilbert Simondon calls hylomorphism, or the dualism of form and 29 matter . It is true that Kant at one point calls space and time the 'pure forms' of perception, and that 'sensation is its matter'. But his discussion also bears the traces of a different logic. Because time and space are not categories or concepts, they do not relate to their objects in the way that the forms of intelligibility developed in the Transcendental Logic (causation, substance, quality, quantity) do. Time and space are not organizing principles actively imprinted upon an otherwise shapeless and disorganized

28

Deleuze, Gilles (1996). Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Werner Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett.

Kimball, Roger (2004). The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art. New York: Encounter Books, p.79 29 Simondon, Gilbert (2005). L’ individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information.

Grenoble: Million, p. 45-60

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matter. Rather, space and time are the media of what Simondon calls 'a flexible, always-varying modulation' –Or, as Deleuze posits 'a concept-object relation in which the concept is an active form, and the object a merely potential matter. It is a mold, a process of molding.'

Space and time have a certain flexibility, and cannot entirely be conceived as forms imposed upon an inchoate matter, because they are modes of receptivity rather than spontaneity. Our understanding, is our ability to think the object of sensible intuition. But this ability to think is something entirely separate from the intuition itself. Kant says that sensibility or receptivity has to do with 'the appearance of something, and the way we are affected by that something'. That is the crucial point. Even though the thing in itself is unknowable, or uncognizable, nevertheless it affects us, in a particular way. And by conveying and expressing 'the way we are affected,' space and time establish immanent, non-cognitive connections among objects and subjects. These affective connections are intrinsic to the very course of any experience in space and time. For Kant, Time and space are modes of feeling before they are conditions for understanding. "the capacity (a receptivity) to acquire presentations as a result of the way we are affected by objects"; Kant goes on to say that this is how 'objects are given to us'. Space and time are basic forms of affectivity. These objects affect us, prior to any knowledge of them on our part, or to any formal process of cause and effect.

wrenching duality: active cognition and being-affected The problematic of beauty pertains not just to the creation and reception of works of art, but to sensible experience more generally. Acts of sensible intuition and judgments of beauty alike involve feelings that are receptive and not spontaneous, and for which there can be no adequate concepts.

This feeling of being-affected, rather than active cognition, is the basis of experience. This problematic of aesthetic singularity, or of a sensible intuition to which no cognition is adequate, is what allows Deleuze to overcome the "wrenching duality" at the heart of aesthetics.

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Works of art are expressions of the virtual, of becoming, and of transformation. When we experience them, "we are not in the world, we become with the world; we become by contemplating it. Everything is vision, becoming. We become universes. Becoming animal, plant, molecular, 30 becoming zero" . Such aesthetic contemplation is explicitly opposed to action. For example, great films paralyze the viewer. This interruption is the affect which Kant called 'disinterest.'

In order to see a different world we have to escape from this affective relation. Peter Hallward says "those of us who still seek to change our world and to empower its inhabitants will need to look for our inspiration 31 elsewhere" . The 'otherwordliness' here can really be read as aestheticism.

If there’s anything that Left and Right today agree upon, it’s the absolute incompatibility between aesthetic values and political ones. As Marx said, "the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it." Being is always, in the first instance, political. In the aesthetic, we are forced to feel the intolerable intensity of the actual. For Deleuze, the aesthetic is not a sufficient condition for the political, but it is a necessary one. And if aesthetics is not subordinated to politics, this is because both are necessary, and both irreducible.

30

Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p.169 Hallward, Peter (2006). Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation. New York: Verso 31

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VI. Architectural examples

exploring politics in architectural aesthetics and aesthetics that shape politics

Hernan Diaz Alonso

Figure 4 Shenzhen Art Museum and Library Competition 2015, Xefirotarch - 54 -

'Rituals have had the capacity to combine the power of raw mutilation with highly sophisticated formal understandings of organization. The instruments of rituals have also featured a saturated and excessive ornament'.

Hernan Diaz Alonso

Hernan Diaz Alonso argues that Architecture has been developed as rituals over its history. He is intrigued by the capability of the grotesque and the horrific to produce beauty. He tends to pay attention to things that everybody considers to be the opposite of beauty and how to find mechanisms for working on that.

It is really difficult to accept that complexity, that new beauty, because some of the most important architecture seems and is useless, or rather the most important quality for architecture is uselessness. It is really difficult to understand the idea of practicality of use because it doesn't exist in Hernan Alonso architecture. It's not useless in the sense that it won't contribute to society, culture, the human condition, and so on. The argument is that some of the best historical or contemporary architecture is not necessarily associated with a practical application. He really believes that extraordinary 32 architecture is a genius solution to a non-existing problem. Not that he is against the idea of utility or against the idea that architecture shouldn't be able to be used, he just don't think it's the most important thing to define.

For Alonso the notion of aesthetics and the production of beauty is one of the most important things any creative field can aspire to produce. But something ugly is the beauty we don't know and haven't seen yet. We can recognize that Architecture is a material expression of the cultural forces at any given time.

Through his work he express his commitment to technology and new mechanisms. Technology has been a great partner and ally for his work. He has a commitment to and curiosity regarding contemporary tools and he 32

Hernan Diaz Alonso_Interviewed by Benjamin Smith, September 9, 2015, ht tp : / / s c i a r c - o ffr a mp . i nf o / u s e l e s s / he r na n- d i a z - a l o ns o

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considers them and their affiliated techniques to be crucial. The use of these tools is based on cultural behavior. It's a reading of culture by creating a relationship, in a sense, and a understanding of how we fit relative to that cultural reading. How you provoke and how you choose the context; where you want to define the other side of the relationship.

He claims that "the digital domain and the computer territory are not a series of tools, it is an intellectual and ideological apparatus. What software and technology you choose to work with has ethical implications. So it is not a question of what the tool can do for you, it is more about a partnership with a cultural machine. " He don't see digital tools as tools but as a completely different conceptual and cultural domain that's completely changing the way we produce and that shape future politics.

Based on the aesthetics and politics of aesthetics, as we analyzed above, we can understand the architecture practice of some architects. For example, the architecture of Hernan Diaz Alonso suggests how the eclipse of Anthropocenic systems, doesn’t suppose that they are necessarily actually erased, but that they become bound within other hosts (perhaps many layers deep, parasites within parasites within parasites) and that, instead of withdrawing into a purified phenomenal geometry, any building-form must presume contagion between its own goopy, hungry, post-animalian composition and other organic and inorganic agents (both symbiots and parasites). Through this, "polities" emerge.

His interest is not at all in the material aspect of architecture and it has to do with his ambition to keep everything in a kind of dynamic and cinematic logic. The characteristic is that he is much more obsessed with image than the physicality of form. He likes seeing the pictures more than seeing the object in reality. He don't care of what it is real.

For Hernan Alonso, architecture is a collective construction. You are equal part author and audience. We as architects don't come to a pre-agreement with the audience, but there are emerging agreements at any given time that define values. Architecture is a very subjective discipline. Our aim is to construct values. You try to be as objective as you can, but at the same time, you know that it's an absolutely subjective thing. As architecture is a humanist endeavor, and as such, we always operate on a very individualistic

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and emotional level. But parallel, you have to be able to articulate some sort of discourse to communicate. It's one of the fundamental differences between architecture and pure art. Art has different rules of engagement.

Architecture tends to be much more focused on the construction of discourse.

In his work, it is obvious that in order to communicate it, he uses architecture as an ecosystem of variables. Architecture is a way to understand relationships and put together mechanisms of order that sometimes produce disorder. Because of that, he examines Architecture as a permanent negotiation of boundaries and how to push the boundary is the key. It is a practice defined by constraints, not defined by its pure freedom. We design between limits and boundaries and that 's how and why parasites and new forms, with a new kind of beauty as this of complexity, emerges.

Figure 5 Xefirotarch/Hernan Diaz Alonso

We like to think that we are very diverse. His work has passed from experimentation into speculation, into creating the scenario for those who

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are not yet habitats. It is better to speculate in order to be engages with the future. To try to remain as pure as we can as a center for speculation and thinking. That's the best thing we can do. Additionally, in his work it is obvious how he handles the almost insanely exponential series of options of information, in terms of knowledge, opportunities, and what you can do to make clear that density of knowledge. He think architecture as a way to see and understand the world. Through his work we can have the challenge on how to navigate this world where in all the options, events, unpredictable conditions are opening in a way. As today we live in a much more permeable society, but that is a fascinating thing, all the 'lines' are a bit more blurred and require readjustment. Hernan Diaz Alonso express these Cosmo features in his speculative architectural endeavors.

Figure 6 Shenzhen Art Museum and Library Competition 2015

Furthermore, we can refer his new course regarding Design and Visualization ( Spring 2015) at the Yale School of Architecture which had the theme Butchering and Form, The Pursuit of "NEW COHERENCIES" to understand further his architectural approaches. The aspiration of the work in the studio is proposing to re-examine the possibilities of form generation as an autonomous entity trough the understanding of Rituals of butchery, carving, re assembling. Most butchery techniques had the capacity to

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combine the power of raw mutilations with highly sophisticated formal understanding of organization. By knives what knives do you need to fabricate meat? There are many available knives and some of them are for specific cutting techniques he will examine how it is to cut the world to divide existing traditional and conservative typologies, how to find the appropriate knife to cut these contingencies using specific cutting techniques to fabricate meat. This means how important is to absolve existing relations by forcing ourselves to rethink the philosophical as well as ethical motivation of our endeavors. This is a new commitment to the "useless" by producing "formless" or better edgeless masses. This is a real and complex demand that global network culture makes on producers of architectural content.

Figure 7 Figure 6 Shenzhen Art Museum and Library Competition 2015

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Alisa Andrasek

Figure 8 CLIMATH // DUBROVNIK Competition Entry 2011 – Europan – Honorary Mention

Alisa Andrasek use of autonomous computational agents to find and deform real and virtual matter. For both Diaz Alonso and Andrasek, architecture doesn’t represent a political organization through symbolization, but rather directly configures its mediating anatomy. Their model geometries are immanent prototypes for the real infrastructures of post-Anthropocenic geography. Alisa Andrasek's (Biothing) focus on mathematics and philosophy as generative conditions for spatial/environmental design. She uses architecture as a platform to engage shifting grounds in political, cultural and aesthetic agency, giving important roles to disciplinary convergence and experimentation.

Alisa's work is talking for a Biopolitical Architecture in which ecologies are envisioned as an open platform for rethinking, increasingly complex landscape of architecture and asymptotic cultures. For her the Field is Open, foregrounds the necessity for resilient bounding of global-local, generic-particular relations and transference, a navigational system for

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which increasingly accelerated scientific discoveries within the manifest image of the world are taken as opportunities for further synthesis.

It can be said that all politics –from ecologies to bodies to microbes– is biopolitics. With synthetic biology she expands her design imagination in unsettling ways. Well-beyond biomimicry, genetic algorithms are put to work assembling architecture. Biology becomes a speculative discourse regarding the conception and exploration of alternative forms of embodiment. For this, life is abstracted to genetic codes that can applied to inorganic and computational processes, like the conception of virtual forms, which in turn are substantialized at the scale of cities. If the domain of the political has been defined by what does and does not count as "human," then in the age of digital biology, this precondition is being revisioned in Alisa's work. Her Biodesign conceives the biopolitics we might wish to inhabit.

Her work, depicted above, is called Synthetic Ecology. The project is binding ingredients of local culture and physics in order to developed hybridized programming through a higher resolution fabric of architecture. Inspired by the Old City’s network of polished stone pavements, squares, palace courtyards and cloister gardens, the project attempts to replicate qualities and effects of such collective "living" space. Proposal introduces highresolution micro-articulation of urban furniture, synthetic "weather" and dispersed energy production.

Alisa examines science, where advances are increasingly based on correlations instead of causation. By this process new species can be continually discovered by correlating them with known ones. For her these is a new fabric of reality which continually grows and is called Contingency.

Architecture has always been bound to the notion of contingency and tends to operate within an extensive conceptual framework. The increasingly ambiguous and complex landscapes that architecture needs to engage call for its adaptation to the instability of shifting regions and to conditions far from local equilibrium. Thus, it becomes necessary to introduce a more resilient connective tissue that can bind local to global, generic to particular.

Alisa uses Generative design operating on nonlinear platforms but of neighborhood-based computing and this is because she is opening new

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regional topologies of tension and synthesis. These new topologies are conceived from her in terms of ruptures, cuts, fissures, and obstructions in the global continuum. These disruptions in continuity (of data, matter, etc.) are simply sites with shared boundaries and where discontinuities reestablish the continuous global flow. The role of those boundaries is no longer to enclose space, but rather to form tissue for osmotic exchange.

What could be called data materialization is opening up the potential for architecture to finally resonate with the complexity of ecology. This wider horizon reveals things that go beyond traditionally established concepts of the "natural" – matter as information, matter as an active agency, matter as strange and unnatural – and promotes the synthetic capacities of the world without distinguishing nature from artifice. Design becomes a catalytic agency in a process of amplifying found environments and synthesizing new ones.

The mathematics of this open continuum allow increased designability within complex ecologies – structures with increased resiliency and plasticity. It allows for speculative proposals of unprecedented complexity and scale. We can see in her work this convergence of matter and information by reading data from the dynamics of the physical phenomena and start developing much more sensitive structures. She encorporates those data of local physics, forces, like stiffness of the mountains, the sun, the landscape, hydrology etc. to use these as building materials. It is a simbiotic with local physics which consists the Synthetic Ecology.

From this shift in computational architecture in the construction of code heterogeneous architectural outputs could eventually emerge. This convergence of matter and information is resulting in more adaptability and resilience. Computational models are coming closer to the way information is processed in living organisms. Instead of centralized linear functions, there is a prevalence of distributed and discrete neighborhood-based computing- agents. In a biological context, the generative nature of such systems is very resilient because it economizes on the amount of genetic information needed to produce complex patterns.

Multi-agent systems are one such computational territory where generative design opens toward complexity. Agents can be understood as active elements whose behavior is determined by a collection of rules. These rules

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are often based on stimulus-response logic (simple if/then rules for instance), and when agents interact collectively they are capable of producing complex behaviors and emergent effects. The collective behavior of agents can act as a connective tissue for nonlinear negotiation between multiple data sets.

Alisa Andrasek' architecture go beyond geometry to directly design the structure of matter itself. This makes architecture more resilient against economic pressures and the rigidities of the construction industry.

Increasing access to the universal conditions of computing and matter is redefining the boundaries of architecture and expanding its agency. A resultant increase in the porosity of complex and ruptured boundaries nurtures osmotic processes, making architecture an open field. This universality is a rich ground for the transmission of data, and its rapid exchange and viral proliferation nurtures a culture of knowledge sharing through collective open-source libraries and distributed authorship between human and nonhuman actors.

In mining the resources of computational "otherness," architecture can open up novel spaces of synthesis and go beyond any deterministic design intent. In a context where all agencies are intricately interlaced with one another, the possibility of open synthesis reveals a resilient new fabric of architecture.

Figure 9 Turing Pavilion in collaboration with Jose Sanchez and D-shape

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Francois Roche

Figure 10 ‘The Offspring’ (Photograph courtesy of New_territories)

Architecture is a set of movements, active connections and relations that produce politics. On the one side there is the material space and material configurations and on the other side is their inhabitations which is the polity. Space is being modified by shifting infrastructural procedures,

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political decisions and social dynamics. By these we reshape spaces of cohabitation. Retracing different territories by different politics.

Reorganization of points of view can active paths towards the reappropriation of resources, action and so on. We have to multiple the horizon.

But that horizon, according with François Roche, has to have resistance and resilience (vitalism). Resistance not against laws or systems or politics, but against architecture itself. The democracy empire served the ideology of progress by inventions of technology in the pursuit of 'businessdom' due to capitalism. It system needs to be renovated. Democracy is our ideal insane asylum, through the delegation of power and notions of government. But architecture is not a political consequence. We have slipped into a system of control. Society is like a planned environment that induces in advance instructions for the proper use of it. Only with strategies of conflict, the capitalist structure can be renegotiated regarding the relations of transaction. In order to negotiate we must first cut the world, cause it to crack call it in combat. We have to find the mechanisms of power and authority, that articulate the visible. Those mechanisms are hidden via language, speech poetic, political, psychological, mathematical and influence what we can see and what is reality. What we see is fake operations and illusions from social prototypes of the social system. Resistance must used as a strategy of opposition.

The biotope is pre-existing and can create its own ornamentation before we modify it. As an architect, how do you become a part of the system? That is, to lose the visibility of what you are doing and to accept a degree of uncertainty. We have to negotiate with nature in terms of the species based on all relations between human and nature. We respect nature on how these relationships and conflicts produce geometry. That is, how these relations form an architecture. We have to negotiate with brutal forces without denying or erasing the danger. Nature is a domesticated garden and humans are only a part of a global equilibrium. In fact, even when we are destroying something, it is for the benefit of Gaïa—we are never outside of this circuit but respecting the boundaries and negotiate with them. A boundary is an osmotic membrane. When the membrane becomes entirely determined by advertising, it is no longer porous. We have stopped caring what happened outside the field.

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Figure 11 ‘Concrete[I]Land’ (Photograph courtesy of New_territories with Ann-Arbor)

His most recent project consisted of removing a slum built on poles the accumulated mud composed — among other things — of human shit that ran down the poles. There was no drainage system so he had to shift all this

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crap using robots, putting a small bookshop back in place of it. How can anyone talk decently about ecology without taking into account filth and trash?

He is interested in bringing things like that back into the contemporary world, whether they’re refined or not. You can learn more about people by looking into their garbage can than into their fridge. Technology isn’t all on the level of MIT. Technology is also about confronting what the world making visible but also putting it back into the cycle as a raw material- even if it has a repulsive dimension.

Bangkok is a getaway destination. His team used their first computers equipped with topology transformation software. He is wondering what does it mean to be assigned to a territory, dependent on it and held hostage by it? What does that kind of relationship to territory entail? It isn’t just the polis in the etymological sense — the city — it’s also the state where there are zones of apprehension, appropriation, of fear and hostility and sexuality too! That’s what aesthetics are. A sophisticated play of synesthesia at the service of saying and feeling. Topology is about Bézier curves, differential equations, asymptotic systems. It folds in and out as Artaud said, before Deleuze. It isn’t just geometrical, it has to do with the folds of the soul too.

Figure 12 Permanent installation workshop Chania, Crete

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Figure 13 ‘Robotic Processes’ (Photograph courtesy of New_territories)

We have no longer to wait for a permit to do things. There are study groups in architecture that have moved into this workshop mode, they’re busy doing, making things and spreading the word. They compute and fabricate

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in small units, foxholes for experimenting with operative and discursive strategies. He uses a fiction/narration/scenario that enables us to extract the ‘mere doing’ and shift it somewhere else.

He is doing things in XXS mode, just negotiating ‘in the street’ with the neighborhood. He sets up a robot in the street, plugged it into a public power source and built a small fabrication experimentation in exchangemode with locals, with the micro-economies. The people concerned without delegation from the territorial authorities. This is a way of territorializing technologies.

Figure 14 ‘Emet’ (Photograph courtesy of New_territories with RMIT)

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Figure 15 ‘Sanatorium Last Call’ (Photograph courtesy of New_Territories)

"Architecture is not a matter of projection, but a matter of ‘distortion of reality’." In these fabricated schizoid psycho-nature-machine-scapes of the globalized world, the human being is no longer a bio-ecological consumer but a psycho-computing animal that emerges co-dependently with its environment in a hyper-local haecceity ("this-ness").

Each Roche's architectural scenario fabulates geo-architectural conditions of human exile, solitude, and pathology drawn from narratives of the forbidden and taboo. Those are: - the true story of an old Indian book collector exiled from his community on the suspicion of atheism, who finds refuge in a tear-collecting shelter ("Would Have Been My Last Complaint")

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- a scientist captured by a water spirit who remains trapped like a fish in the mindscape of a fish butcher (Although (in) Hapnea) - a monster-boy endomorph constantly overfed and protected by a claustrophilic antidote-jacket produced by the excess of his incestuous mother’s love ((beau)strosity) - Ariadne, labyrinth overseer, floating between two macho spirals, testosteroned Theseus and alcoholic Dionysus (Naxos, Terra Insola) - the feral child (innocent, naïve, and obscene) in the deep jungle, auscultated by a scientistic voyeurism (The Offspring) Each of these scenarios (designed as "shelters" where mind, environment, and architecture co-map each other) unfolds a "mythomania" in which each character transforms, and is transformed, para-psychically, by the environment, in a sort of biotope (habitat) feedback experiment.

Ultimately, Lacadee and Roche want to create — via architecture and design, myth (literature), and psycho-geography — various conditions for schizoid passages between realism and fiction, expertise and knowledge, mind and built environment, narrative and topology, in order to bring about new strategic-tragic co-dependencies as forms of schizoid resistance to the usual identity regimes, and to also reboot architecture as a form of psychosocial praxis and non-necrotic speculation.

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Alejandro Aravena

Figure 16 ELEMENTAL Quinta Monroy, Iquique, Chile. Photographer Cristobal Palma

Today societies are organized in terms of functional differentiation. This is what Luhmann calls functionally differentiated society comprised of the great function systems of society as parallel systems that co-evolve with each other as autonomous discourses, i.e. as systems of communication like politics, law, economics, science, education, health, mass media, and art.

Analyzing these different function systems Alejandro Aravena realized that they share parallel structure so he thinks of creating a field rather than a space. For him, Politics and economics does not make architecture, but architecture does not make itself alone. This is co-dependency of system

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and environment. Architecture is one of the major subsystems of society and self-referentially closed function system. Contemporary society is too complex and too dynamic to establish fixed hierarchies of values/priorities.

So it is time to democratizing architecture out of any centrality so as to be elaborated in a formal universe. Changes in the socio-economic environment do not determine new architectural concepts.

Based on this socio-economic environment Aravena says that there is a demand of a new, more open approach. We have to engage with other fields. Architecture must speak other languages. The next step is to create "open systems": physical conditions in cities that allow all forces to play an input. Design can be a powerful tool to mobilizing people to act. People should see a different world through architecture, not stylistically, but ennoiologically. We want to understand what design tools are needed to subvert the forces that privilege individual gain over collective benefit. We must see design as added value, not extra cost. In the Biennale theme he says that it is showing what it is like to improve life quality while working in the margins, under tough circumstances, facing pressing challenges. The battle for a better built environment is nothing more than the disciplined construction of the spaces in which life takes place. That's why he won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2016.

Architecture is about giving form to the places where people live. Life ranges from very basic needs to very deep desires, from the self to the collective. Advancement of architecture is not a goal in itself but a way to improve people’s quality of life. We have to widen the range of issues to which architecture is expected to respond. On the other hand, architecture is called to respond to more than one dimension at the time, integrating a variety of fields. So new fields of action, facing issues are those like segregation, inequalities, natural disasters, migration, crime, traffic, waste, pollution and participation of communities. And simultaneously he gives a great importance on synthesizing different dimensions, integrating the pragmatic with the existential, creativity and common sense. The greed of capital or the single mindedness and conservatism of the bureaucracy tend to produce banal and dull built environments. These are the frontlines from which we would like different practitioners to report from, sharing success stories and exemplary cases where architecture did, is and will make a difference.

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Alejandro Aravena epitomizes the revival of a more socially engaged architect, especially in his long-term commitment to tackling the global housing crisis and fighting for a better urban environment for all. He has a deep understanding of both architecture and civil society. The role of the architect is now being challenged to serve greater social and humanitarian needs, and Alejandro Aravena has clearly, generously and fully responded to this challenge.

After awarding Shigeru Ban in 2014, Frei Otto in 2015 and now Alejandro Aravena in 2016, the Pritzker Prize has recently shown a tendency to recognize architects who have gone beyond the traditional boundaries of the architectural discipline; architects who are capable of wielding influence to generate solutions to the most urgent problems of society.

According to the latest report by UN Habitat, in Latin America and the Caribbean there are now 110.7 million people living in slums. That is why rewarding Alejandro Aravena at this time could be considered almost a wake-up call for architects and a positive invitation to focus again on the basics. With his central theme for the upcoming 2016 Venice Biennale, "Reporting from the Front," Aravena has already strongly expressed this ideal.

"The ELEMENTAL team (Aravena' s firm) participates in every phase of the complex process of providing dwellings for the underserved: engaging with politicians, lawyers, researchers, residents, local authorities, and builders, in order to obtain the best possible results for the benefit of the residents and society... This inventive approach enlarges the traditional scope of the architect and transforms the professional into a universal figure with the aim of finding a truly collective solution for the built environment," explained the Jury on the Pritzker Prize. His designs are transformed into an opportunity to bring the benefits of the city for all, celebrates design that solves human problems.

Climate change is reshaping the globe. For architects, today’s challenges and opportunities are historic. "In the name of artistic freedom, architects

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made themselves irrelevant," nature, don’t resist it.

33

33

Aravena says. The general idea is Live with

Alejandro Aravena: "the Architect Rebuilding a Country", The New York Style Magazine, 23/4/2016

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Pier Vittorio Aureli

Figure 17 DOGMA, A Simple Heart, 2011 (Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara with Alice Bulla), Architecture on Ruins of the Post- Fordist City, European North Western Metropolitan Area, 2002–09

In contrast but not literally, with Aravena regarding the open approach on the thing of architecture based on socio-economical forces and disciplines,

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Piere Vitorio Aureli understands urban space not as ubiquitous, but as something that can be framed, limited, and thus potentially situated as a thing among other things. For Aureli architecture is reinvented by absorbing the compulsion to repeat which is the essential trait of capitalist civilization.

Architecture is a frame, limit both to itself and to the forces and interests that it represents. This attitude toward limiting, is a political principle of design, not open-ended growth, but limiting and confrontation among parts. The concept of limits goes beyond architecture and involves the complex ecology of economical and political space. The task of architecture is to transform into public generic and common things which is the political organization of space. Architecture as a finite form is the example for a city no longer driven by the ethos of expansion and inclusion, but the positive idea of limits and confrontation. Space of urbanization is a space of management of anything that constitutes our civilization.

The city is like an archipelagos of moments where fragments of the city are cut from the general mechanism in which these are. The politics is a constant battle, agonism between discrimination and conflict. Aureli' s intervention is local, spot and express an oppositional attitude regarding the rest city which is the system of civilization that expands in a planetary scale. Meaning that the megacities have that kind of spatial and morphological characteristics everywhere and even in a colony in Africa. So Aureli express to take a distance from that system, to move outside of this which is given to us by others, where we can think of another cosmos. Here the difference and the particularity is celebrated in this battle and the opposition, this dialectic relationship of the elements where their connection resolve the elements of the city on a common experience.

Aureli' s project is the competition, the resistance in the system, in the machine of the globalised situation. He try to make this cut by the prospect of restructure of the relations in a topological level. The urban fabric is cut the established relations and from an opposed logic he creates new correlations and not only between existent elements (human, animals, environment) but by examining how these elements form relations, that are imperceptible on this we call Antropocene.

For Aureli Architecture must be conceived as an example that is a form potentially repeatable. His example functions as an archetype: a singular form-type able to define a milieu of possible forms, While the type indicates

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a model of design based on the concept of evolution. This exemplary form elaborates archetypical actions. These actions are capable of blossoming into new combinations of the artificial and the natural, the technical and the formal, the structural and the accidental. It is, in short, the exemplary unit.

For this reason, the example may be reproduced, but never proliferated 34 into an omnivorous 'general planning' for the entire city.

A Simple Heart is a project for the European city. It consists of 22 inhabitable units, each located close to the railway network that serves the European North Western Metropolitan Area (NWMA). Each unit is established by enclosing an area of 800 x 800m by means of an inhabitable wall. The interior space is intended as a vast open ‘living room’, a contemporary production space where living, social exchange and work take place within the same space. The units are conceived as ‘learning centres ’located along the railway circuit that links the cities. As such, the entire system is conceived as an ‘Edufactory’, a new contemporary production plant, an immaterial work and its manifestation as the possibility of encounter and exchange. The project ultimately celebrates the power of form in framing and defining the space of existence against the 35 fragmentation perpetrated by contemporary urbanization. DOGMA’s A Simple Heart assumes the postindustrial city is a potential space for the 34

These notes are a re-elaboration and adaptation of Paolo Virno’ s text ‘Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus’, in Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno(eds), Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1996,pp 189–212. The discussion on example and archetypeis a re-elaboration of the theories of Paolo Virno and Giorgio Agamben on the essence of political action. The discussion on example, and exemplarity as the core of political action, emerged in the early 1990s in the political journal Luogo Comune: see Luogo Comune, No1, November 1990. See also: Paolo Virno, Mondanità, L’idea di ‘mondo’ tra esperienza sensibile e sfera pubblica, Manifestolibri (Rome), 1994, p 106; GiorgioAgamben, The Signature of all Things: On Method, transLuca di Santo, Zone Books (Cambridge, MA), 2009.

35 Flaubert presents the main character of A Simple Heart as an archetype. Instead of criticizing society by means of a sociological critique, he chose the archetype of the most simple, humble form of life to reveal per vianegativa the limits of rational thinking that characterised the selfassurance of the bourgeoisie. The short novelis thus a sequence of ‘simple forms’, archetypes that by means of their monumental epiphany and stubborn simplicity reveal the social and cultural impasse of the writer’s social class. Yet the archetype of Felicitè, the main character of the novel, is not presented by Flaubert as satirical commentary, as a parody, but as a celebration of a radical different conception of life. See Gustave Flaubert, A Simple Heart in Three Tales , trans Robert Baldick, Penguin Books (London), 1961

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contemporary expanded university by making explicit the city as a ‘social factory’. A Simple Heart aims at revealing its fundamental political potential by radicalizing it. This consists in increasing the openness and flexibility of the spaces of learning in order to reveal the common and generic attributes of knowledge.

Within this condition, architecture is completely liberated from any functionalist or programmatic duty, and it serves production only by means of being there as a framework, as place. However, we do not need to understand this liberation of architecture from programme, where space has been subsumed by production, as a plea for a generic ‘free space’. For this reason the traditional partitions of the city such as those between public and private space, or those between different activities such as work and living, culture and market are no longer relevant. If these partitions still exist, they simply act as ideological projection, as a mask that covers the ‘generic field’. This generic field is the life of the social factory made by continuous mobility, and thus uprootedness, poverty of specialized instincts, common places, precariousness of life. A Simple Heart is the utmost embodiment of this condition, and at the same time the frame holding it. The aim of the project is not to eliminate the ethos of the social factory, but to make it explicit. A building is thus the best analogy in order to understand the biblical concept of the Katechon (from Greek: το κατέχον); like in the Katechon, a building has to hold the forces that might want to transgress its order and should accommodate them through the management of the spaces so that at the same time, the same forces are restrained. The concept of the Katechon does not imply the negation of the forces of mobility, genericity and precariousness; it implies a form that resists these forces by adhering to them. As a consequence, architectural form is reduced to its essential nature in order to stage and make visible not itself, but the life that happens within its limits.

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CONCLUSION "The truly traumatic thing is that miracles -not in the religious sense but in the sense of free acts - do happen , but it's very difficult to come to terms with them. [The] Real is not this kind of thing-in-itself that we cannot approach. the Real is, rather, freedom as a radical cut in the texture of the 36 reality."

In this extended thesis was examined the concept of architectural imaginary regarding its embededness and its conditionality. The radical dispersion of the partition and the frame into software-based techniques has changed the terms by which space is contested. Architectural practice posits building as an index of extrinsic sociological demands able to produce and mediate alternative forms of habitation and exchange. From the above analyses it is clear that the apparent autonomy of architecture's pursuit is reliant on the affective experience of a culturally conditioned aesthetics. It was investigated the relationship between architecture and aesthetics; consider the role architecture and architects in social and political processes; discover potential new ways architecture can be used to promote social equality; and evaluate the historic role of architecture in forming hierarchical political structures. It was thoroughly explored emerging positions that cast aesthetics as the primary discourse for social, ecological, and political engagement. In contrast to commonly held opinions that these issues are antithetical to the aesthetic, recent work in aesthetic theory across multiple disciplines suggests that such political and ontological problems may be best addressed as aspects of aesthetic experience. An interdisciplinary group of philosophers, scholars, media theorists, artists, curators, and architects speculate on how a reignited discourse on aesthetics is prompting new insights into our relationships with not only objects, spaces, environments, and ecologies, but also with each other and political structures in which we are all enmeshed.

We must be guided by Quentin Meillassoux words: "Speculative materialism

provides the conceptual resources to think a reality that is independent of thought."

36

J. Irwin Miller Symposium, “Aesthetic Activism�, Published on 18 Nov 2016

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