Andrej Radman - Zigzagging: Bound by the Absence of Tie
(last edited: 2016)
author(s): Paulo de Assis, Andrej Radman
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Andrej Radman | Delft University of Technology, NL
Day 1, 9 November, Orpheus Auditorium, 15:30-16:00
The paper will unpack Deleuze/Guattari’s machinic conception of consistency, which is determined neither by the autonomy of the vitalist whole (organicism) nor by the geometric expression of the whole in its parts (mechanicism), but by the dark precursor’s zigzagging between the Scylla of submissive empathy and the Charybdis of dominating abstraction. In the words of Deleuze: “it is not a matter of bringing things together under one and the same [universal] concept, but rather of relating each [singular] concept to the variables that determine its mutations.” The argument starts from the hypothesis that the current digital turn in architecture effectively reproduces the Cartesian duality of mind and body, removing the former from contexts of engagement with the environment while treating the latter as no more than a kind of recording mechanism, converting the stimuli that impinge upon it into data to be processed. It is for this reason that we want to revamp the legacy of Deleuzian transcendental empiricism in general and Gibsonian ecological perception in particular.
The American psychologist Gibson vehemently rejected the reductionist information-processing view, with its implied separation of the activity of the mind in the body (abstraction) from the reactivity of the body in the world (empathy), arguing instead that perception is part and parcel of the total system of relations constituted by the ecology of the life form or its mode of existence (metastable plasticity). Let us make it, after Guattari, ecologies in the plural: environmental, social, and psychical (transversality). Life forms perceive the world directly, by moving about and discovering what the environment affords, rather than by representing it in the mind. Hence, meaning is not the form that the mind contributes to the flux of raw sensory data by way of its acquired schemata. Rather it is continually becoming within relational contexts of pragmatic engagement. Empathy and abstraction are mutually constitutive.
Everything starts from the sensible to be consequently extended to that which makes sensibility possible; that is, sensations mobilise the differential forces that make thinking possible. This is what Deleuze means by “pedagogy of the senses”—we are completely at the mercy of encounters (epigenetic turn). To quote the late media guru Kittler, “It’s funny, this thing turning back on itself. It’s called feedback (and not, as should be noted, reflection).” The cognition is extended and not interiorised or centralised, embedded and not generalised or decontextualised, enacted and not passive or merely receptive, embodied and not logocentric, affective and not unprovoked. If architects ever stopped to consider how much of life is guided by ego-logic (intentionality) and how much by eco-logic (gratuitous encounters), they would certainly pay far more attention to relational properties or the bind by the absence of an a priori tie.
