Monthly Archives: April 2011

# POLITICS /// Ai Weiwei incarcerated for the second time

Posted on April 4, 2011 | 2 Comments

The New York Times informs us today, Monday that Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is been incarcerated for the second time in less than six months (see previous article) three months after his studio has been destroyed by the Chinese authorities (see other article).

Lebbeus Woods has written on his blog that he will refuse any new projects in China until Weiwei is liberated (he could have canceled the current one but, it’s easy for me to judge).

It is important to remember that Ai Weiwei is in fact one of the Chinese that benefit of the biggest impunity. However, because of this very related freedom of speech he has been having in the past, he can become a symbol (and a leader ?) of the resistance.

The New Yorker also released an interesting article by Evan Osnos that quoted a Chinese Internet user reacting (evanescently as those comment are obviously being censored very quickly) to this news:
When a fat guy lost his freedom, you said, “It has nothing to do with me, because I’m skinny.” When someone with a beard lost his freedom, you said, “It has nothing to do with me, because I don’t have a beard.” When a man who sells sunflower seeds lost his freedom, you said, “It has nothing to do with me, because I don’t sell sunflower seeds.” When they are after everyone—even the skinny, beardless ones that don’t sell sunflower seeds—there will be no one left to speak for you anymore.
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Posted in Politics

# ARCHITECTURAL THEORIES /// Diagrams of Utopia by Anthony Vidler

Posted on April 3, 2011 | 4 Comments

picture: La Maison Baroque, from Gilles Deleuze, The Fold (1993)

Diagram: from Old French diagramme, from Greek, dia across/through, gramma something written, letter of the alphabet, that which is marked out by lines, a geometrical figure, written list, register, the gamut of scale in music. (Geom.) A figure composed of lines, serving to illustrate a definition or statement, or to aid in the proof of a proposition. An illustrative figure, which, without representing the exact appearance of an object, gives an outline or general scheme of it, so as to exhibit the shape and relations of its various parts. A set of lines, marks, or tracings which represent symbolically the course or results of any action or process, or the variations which characterize it. A delineation used to symbolize related abstract propositions or mental processes.
Oxford English Dictionary as quoted by Anthony Vidler, Diagrams of Utopia in The Activist Drawing, Cambridge. MIT Press, 1999.

Diagrams are part of a whole family of architectural schools and practices (especially in the United States) nowadays since Peter Eisenman has been introducing them as a primary generator of architecture. I will not even evoke, here, the incredible confusion that makes most of architects to call a drawing, a diagram when it is not one. On the contrary, I would like to evoke the very interesting article Diagrams of Utopia written by Anthony Vidler (current dean of Cooper Union) in the fantastic book The Activist Drawing edited at the MIT Press by Catherine de Zegher and Mark Wigley (current dean of Columbia GSAPP) about the New Babylon by Constant.

Quoting Charles Sanders Peirce, Vidler affirms that “a diagram is mainly an Icon, and an icon of intelligible relations in the constitution of its Object.” (The Collected Papers). It confuses “the real and the copy” and therefore makes it as an “instrument of suspended reality”. This “pure dream” can thus be associated with the notion of utopia that constitutes itself by schematic lines of organization.
Building architecture with diagrams becomes therefore as problematic as building societies with Utopias. Somehow, both require this same tool but it does not go without dangers as the diagram’s lines does not wear the thickness of human uncertainty. Moreover, a diagram tends to draw lines based on the experience of the real, but those lines when materialized, impose a transcendental influence on the real.
In the following excerpt, Vidler bases his thoughts on Gilles Deleuze’s study of the work of Michel Foucault who was probably the most accurate archeologist of diagrams. He also evoke briefly what he calls the anti-panopticon, the House of Lubricity as thought by the Marquis de Sade:
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Posted in Architectural Theories, Foucault, Maps, Philosophy

# PHILOSOPHY /// A Thousand Machines by Gerald Raunig

Posted on April 1, 2011 | 3 Comments

A Thousand Machines is a recent book written by Austrian Philosopher Gerald Raunig and published in the beautiful series of semiotext(e) (The Coming Insurrection, The Agony of Power, Introduction to Civil War etc.) distributed by the MIT Press.
The title is an obvious reference to A Thousand Plateaus and their War Machine elaborated by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and intend to question this notion of machine with a Marxist approach.

What appears to me as the main thesis of this concise and important book is the dialogue of Deleuze and Guattari’s definition that consider a machine as an assemblage and Marx’s reading of a system like Capitalism as non transcendental.
Nowadays, it is almost normal for Westerners to be critical of capitalism, however, this criticism is always directed towards one or several persons that would impose a transcendental goal to the system. This vision of capitalism has the advantage for them to virtually exclude them from the system and therefore to consider as sufficient their critical action. Of course, such exclusion is an illusion because capitalism is inherently an immanent system, an assemblage, a machine. As Michel Foucault demonstrated, capitalism does not reproduce the Middle Age’s scheme of sovereignty, based principally on a continuous state of war, that was considering human lives as a consumable good by the transcendental power. Instead of that, capitalism manages and control lives in order to maintain an extraction of work production on a continuous basis.

In order to explain the difference of this immanent assemblage and a transcendental machine, Gerald Raunig uses the two examples of the machine of the Penal Colony by Franz Kafka and the love machine of the Supermale by Alfred Jarry. In order to fully understand the following excerpt, I have to explain what those two machines are about.
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Posted in Books, Deleuze, Literature, Philosophy, Politics