Visualizing Palestine is an open collective which attempts to demonstrate graphically the injustice to which the Palestinians are subjected to in the current apartheid -or colonization depending on whether you consider the territory Palestine/Israel as one sovereignty or two. After an historical document on the hunger strike to support Khader Adnan who was doing one to protest against his detention in an Israeli prison without having been charged with anything, they just released a map of Israel/Palestine (see above) illustrating the segregative characteristics of the road system on this territory. The West Bank and East Jerusalem are indeed full of highways that are forbidden to Palestinian cars as they link the Israeli territory to the numerous illegal civil settlements in the occupied territories (see my previous article about the Route 443). In addition to that, the map shows how the totality of roads accessible to Palestinians to link their main cities together are highly restricted as they are punctuated regularly by more or less heavy duty checkpoints which can ultimately cut any form of physical communication between the various towns of the West Bank.

A country like the United States is participating to the segregation as their aid to Palestine is mostly focused on the construction of specific roads for Palestinians. Not only such supposedly philanthropic operation mark the West Bank’s landscape with as many useless scars (since they basically double the exclusive Israeli roads), but it ratifies de facto the current situation and sustain it in time.

Maps are very important for that matter as they illustrate the fundamental organization of mechanisms of occupation which, ultimately is in complete violation of the international law. Nowadays, a viral video of a young Danish activist being punched by a IDF soldier with a rifle seems to have more impact for the awareness than these depersonnified maps. However, the indignation provoked by a local event is misplaced as it looks only at the end of the long sum of stategized circumstances that allows such event to occur. This indignation is therefore, not only quasi-useless, but almost dangerous as it often bases its reaction on an acceptance of these circumstances (here, the occupation and oppressive policies against Palestinians). On the contrary, cartographic documents and other elements addressing the issue in a broad legal field are the important pieces to recognize the unjust essence of these policies.

In a more specifically architectural approach the authors of the map, Polypod and our friend  Ahmad Barclay also include a small schematic inventory of road typologies which implements the segregative conditions through their design. Those are on the maps but you can see a close-up below:

The new videoclip of Jay Z and Kanye West, No Church in the Wild, directed by Romain Gavras is problematic to many extents. During 5 very aesthetic minutes of film, a slowmotion of a scene involving a violent fight between an angry mob (composed strictly of men) and a less angry -yet much more methodical in its violence- group of suppressive geared policemen. The scene is recognizably occurring in Prague and Paris, thus offering us a modern version of the various European revolutions and insurrections of the 19th century. The ‘aesthetization’ of violence is optimal in order to directly to address our testosterone which then helps us to identify to this hyper-male insurrectional standard which correspond in nothing to the various 2011 Arab revolutions or civic movements in various countries in the world. The society of spectacle is not interested in long pacific democratic construction and, through its various media (including the most serious and so called ‘liberal’ of them like the perfidious New York Times), prefers to capitalize on the violent side of the revolt imaginary in order to both discredit and co-opt a movement that was originally anti-capitalist. In this regard, it is not innocent that the rioters, in this video, do not seem to seek anything else than a simple fight with the police force (almost like a sport). It is Capitalism’s great strength to be able to include within itself its own antagonism, and furthermore to be able to capitalize on the latter. Jay Z and Kanye West are the perfect example of such phenomena as they represent the nec plus ultra of the anti-pro system components of a hip-hop music that was originally invented as a pure form of resistance against this very same system.

However, this short film is still interesting to look at, as it might touch a line of risk that capitalism is taking against itself. Capitalist’s cinema has been aesthetizing violence for quite a long time now; nevertheless when doing so, it is always careful to subject this violence against a tangible and specific form of otherness, whether the latter is embodied by aliens, enemy armies, gangsters, cops (but always corrupted and individualized in one way or another) or any other instance characterized by its binary mode of existence -it is either alive or dead, victorious or defeated. What a film like No Church in the Wild participates to, is the construction of an imaginary in which an intangible yet ubiquitous system is being fought against. Of course, the society of spectacle is still strongly present and the policemen are contributing to the anthropomorphism of an antagonism; nevertheless, it is clear that something outside of this visible fight is engaged and is therefore developed in our imaginary.

Let’s not forget that the opportunists tell us something interesting about our era as they carry more or less consciously the awareness of capitalism’s mutation at work. The fact that Jay-Z and Kanye West’s videoclips are no longer introducing phalocratic (chauvinist) orgies playboy style, but rather a more grave look (even if it is still chauvinist and still incredibly simplistic) on society is revealing the shift of what started in 2011 on people’s imaginary. Rather than rejecting absolutely the product of such opportunism, we should attempt to study how such good can be used against the very logic of its own production. Using the system against itself is probably the only mean to counter its faculties of mutation and adaptation. Inversely, all is done to convert this current political energy in favor of the very object that it was originally constructed against and it is up to us, on the contrary, to consolidate this same energy into a base for a new criticality within society.

Prison Map is a project developed by Josh Begley, a graduate student studying Interactive Telecommunications at New York University. Thanks a small script and geo-coordinates, he obtained a google earth snapshot of each of the 4,916 incarceration facilities in the United States. Let’s recall here that a bit less than 2.5 millions people are living in prison in this country. Such a project illustrates therefore a sort of hidden urbanism in which 0.8% of the American population live for a given time. Of course, these photographs are interesting to observe the architecture of incarceration, but more importantly in my opinion, is the relationship they develop with their direct environment as they illustrate a geography of exclusion.

Many of these facilities use the obvious strategy of remoteness to engage this will of exclusion. In this regard, from the cartographic point of view, they often ironically appear similar to European palaces with well-ordered classical plans. Others are situated on islands (like Rikers in New York) or piers in order to use water as a buffer zone between the included society and the excluded one. Finally, others are situated in the center of some cities like the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago (see previous post) or the Brooklyn Detention Complex using the verticality of their architecture to implement the exclusionary status.

The page Prison Map is only displaying 700 facilities for convenience reasons but the 4,216 others can be seen by following this link. Josh Begley also have another page entitled Prison Count which establishes a photographic inventory of California State Adult Prisons. In addition, you can also consult an old article about the book Forms of Constraint
The following pictures are extracted from the Prison Map project:

Last year, the Zagreb Society of Architects’ program Think Space organized interesting competitions curated successively by Shohei Shigematsu, Teddy Cruz, Francois Roche and Hrvoje Njirić. This year’s series will be just much interesting, if not potential more, as Adrian Lahoud, this year’s curator, has planned competitions which question architecture’s historicity through their principle. Entitled Past Forward, they consist in the revival of competitions that have been forging a certain form of paradigm for contemporary architecture but which can obviously not be thought through the same way few decades later.The oldest is the Peak Leisure Club in Hong Kong, won in 1983 by Zaha Hadid Architects but eventually never built. The second one, eleven years later, the Yokohama Port Terminal’s winning entry and final building has been designed by Foreign Office Architects. Finally, the most recent one (1999) is the Blur Building designed by Diller & Scofidio + Renfro for the Swiss Association Expo 2001 in Yverdon-les-Bains.

The common link to those three competitions is that these projects founded the three practices of the offices who won them and that they constituted more built manifestos than the materialization of a deep theoretical research. The importance of those three buildings in recent architecture history lies in the fact that those three programs, although technically in the city, were not necessarily involving a strong relationship with the latter which would have brought many political, social and societal challenges that were not constituting the main engagement of the winning architects. This observation could then be a starting point to re-think these competitions nowadays in order to incorporate within them, their potential engagement towards the polis. Let’s not forget that many important competitions have been won based on a re-interpretation of their program. The fact that the programs of these competitions are ancient -and therefore maybe obsolete- pushes towards this attitude even more.

Another common link to the three winning entries lies in the strength of their representation means. Zaha Hadid’s 1983 proposal is, in this regard, exemplary, and can be said to constitute the vanguard of a period. If the very principle of those competitions’ revival implies the change to a new paradigm in architecture, representation has probably a role to play as its recent explosive proliferation transformed it into a consumable good that empty its content.

One thing seems problematic in the organization of these new/old competitions however; it is the fact that the winning entries will be determined by the original winners themselves (Zaha Hadid/Patrik Schumacher, Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Richard Scofidio/Charles Renfro). Rare are the example in history for which a paradigmatic generation has been able to recognize the contents of the paradigm that follows them since, often, the latter is built as an antagonist against the former. Such decision could be, for the competitions’ ambition, what I would call a suicide in utero since it seems to be in complete contradiction with the premisses of this new series. What is comforting nevertheless, is that the true vanguardist projects are very often not the one winning competitions and we might therefore see interesting questions about architecture, if we pay attention to the various proposals in the future.

See also the article written by our friends from Socks Studio.

The Peak Leisure Club (1983) by Zaha Hadid Architects

Yokohama Port Terminal (1994) by FOA

Blur-Building (1999) by Diller Scofidio + Renfro

In 2010 the French NGO Aix Group released a 60 page document which introduces the challenges and propositions that could be made for the construction of a road link between Gaza and the West Bank. This hypothesis is of course based on the credible scenario of what is now called ‘the two states solution’ which would geographically separates the two territories under Palestinian sovereignty, Gaza on one side, the West Bank and East Jerusalem on the other side. In this scenario, this link would indeed be an extremely crucial element for the future of the Palestinian unity since the exercise of a unique sovereignty over two territories always constitute a very delicate practice. At a different scale the 24 year long example of Pakistan (1947-1971) separated between Western and Eastern territories – the latter became Bangladesh in 1971- illustrate such difficulties.

The studies attempts to propose an exhaustive list of options for the link’s materialization (road, train, monorail, surface, tunnel, bridge…see below) as well as a variety of its potential routes (five of them including three studied more specifically…see below as well). In order to function, the link would be under Palestinian authority surrounded by the Israeli territory (as defined by the UN based on the 1967 borders), thus constituting a peculiar geo-political precedent: a sovereignty applied to a line on the map. However, what is proper to a line or rather, a corridor, is the maximization of its surface in contact with the exterior. In this historical conflictual context and if considering the options given by this NGO, the potentialities for Israel to control or block the link – for whichever reason invoked – are plethora and this interesting legal case deserve probably a deeper level of imagination and ‘cleverness’ to actually make it effective and trustworthy for the Palestinians.

In conclusion, we might point out that such delicate situation of a precarious link illustrates why the two states solution is not the one that should be wished for. It is not surprising that the State of Israel is more and more tending towards this scenario as they know that the status quo cannot be eternal and that if the apartheid policies would be abolished between Jewish and Arabs, the demographic weight of the latter would make them weight heavily in the societal and political organization of the territory of Palestine – I use the term Palestine as a geographical region here. It seems that this scenario is less and less considered however, and the imaginative design of other narratives for the construction of a Palestinian state – which would be confronted to many other internal issues – appears therefore as the thing to do. Decolonizing Architecture, through the elaboration of a narrative that sees the 500,000 Israeli settlers of the West Bank leaving their colonies, back to the lawful Israeli territoy, is leading the way in how we, architects, can participate to this construction.

All the following documents are extracted from the document about the Link by Aix Group (2010)

In a move that he clearly enjoy, Rem Koolhaas along with Hans Ulrich Obrist re-introduce the Metabolists in an era that consecrates SANAA and their followers as the new Japanese paradigm for global architecture. It is indeed difficult to find two visions of architecture that different and the fact that they were produced in the same country makes this opposition even more visible. The 700-page book Project Japan can therefore be considered, not as a retroactive manifesto (that was the self-definition of Koolhaas’ Delirious New York), but rather as a rehabilitative archive. It is a document that illustrates the coherency of a historical movement created as both individual and collective work in a way that cannot be observed in any way nowadays. Through interviews with almost all the actors of this movement -Kurokawa and Kitutake died since then-, R.Koolhaas and H.U.Obrist explore as much the origins of this ambition (they find them in Kenzo Tange’s experience of the war in China and its large territories) as the globalization of the movement which saw the Metabolists proposed many projects in the Middle East. The photographs of Charlie Koolhaas of several buildings built in the 60′s in their current state also bring an interesting comparison with the original documents and the endurance (or not) of those building to time.

Beyond the subjective reading of the two Europeans, this book is mostly a very valuable archive of documents created by the Metabolists, many of them which are probably not findable in already published books. In this regard, the Repertoire of Metabolism is particularly rich through its succinctness. In thirty four pages, we access to a visual inventory of the various architectural inventions or appropriations that the Metabolists have been developing through their work. The key typological words are the following:
- Capsules
- Ground/Artificial Ground
- Proliferation/Colonization
- Group Form
- Floating Cities
- Unicore/Joint core
- Megaforest
The following (bad quality) photos constitutes an excerpt of this chapter. They are all extracted from the book Project Japan by Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist. (editors Kayoko Ota with James Westcott) Koln: Taschen, 2011.

The following text was curated by Mexican magazine Arquine and is therefore available in a Spanish version on its website.

The exhibition Archizines is currently visible at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City and touring in ten cities of Europe and North America. This display of eighty architectural journals (including the funambulist’s  friends from Studio Magazine and Beyond!) is a good opportunity for us to question this medium of communication of ideas. Fifty years from now, Archigram and its ten zines publications participated to a revolution of architecture from the modernist patronizing austerity to a bold and imaginative movement for a city liberated from its bourgeoisie. Nowadays, the democratic aspect of these journals lies more in their facilitated production than in their radical contents. This mean of publication has indeed evolved with the relatively recent creation of many self-publishing services and the potential communication about the printed issues via the internet. The price reflects such means of production and contrast with more established architectural magazines with a larger run. Nevertheless, the goal of a more democratic access to knowledge has still to be pursued.

 Two very recent examples of (non-architectural) publications aiming to this goal can be considered here to describe an ideal for the journals involved in the exhibition Archizines. The first one is the small pamphlet entitled ‘Indignez Vous’ (Time for Outrage in its English version) written by French former resistant 95 years old Stéphane Hessel in 2010. This 27 pages manual invites its readers to actively critique their political environment and undertake a pacific insurrection. This small book was sold for three euros (less than four US dollars) and many of us bought several of them to give them away to friends and acquaintances. In less than a year it has been translated in thirty four languages, acquired by four millions people, and gave its name to the Spanish social movement the Indignados. Adopting the format of a pocket pamphlet ‘Indignez Vous’ managed to be spread out and therefore politically active while a similar volume, ‘L’insurrection qui vient’ (The Coming Insurrection) did not reach out to the same amount of readers for having registered within more traditional means of publishing.

The second example, closer from the archizines because of its variations through several issues, is offered by the Occupy Theory journal, Tidal. The two first issues which proposed small essays from occupiers intellectuals such as Judith Butler were distributed for free all around New York City in an attempt to invite a plethora of readers to reach a level of criticality towards our economical and political environment. Tidal also proposes an articulated discourse on how the movement Occupy and its world equivalents unfold themselves as various resistive strategies against this same environment. The journal relies on donations –via kickstarter for example- in order to exist and to be distributed for free in the subway and on public squares.

Of course, this article does not try to be judgmental towards the many journals that remains at a price which make them less accessible for a whole part of population, but it seems important to introduces means of production which seems more in adequacy with what zines stand for: subjective and cheap publications  that can reach a broad audience. In this regard, this short text can find its conclusion in the evocation of a very recent initiative proposed by Ethel Baraona as a side event of the exhibition archizines, the Make Your Own Architecture Fanzine workshop. This event occurred on April 21^st and allowed four teams of two people to challenge the idea of the zine while creating a new one. May this exhibition and those various other examples inspire many people to undertake such reflections and productions.

Link towards the exhibition’s website which constitutes an important collective databank: http://www.archizines.com/

Regularly,  I evoke my will to make this blog, non only a (not-so) daily (anymore) platform of expression for my reflective peregrinations, but also an archive of documents which constitute as many tools for my readers in their work. In this spirit today, I would like to publish the totality of the the short essay To Have Done with the Massacre of the Body written by Félix Guattari yet published anonymously for the journal Recherches no. 12, 1973 for who he was the director of publications. Entitled “Three Billion Perverts: Great Encyclopedia of Homosexuals.” , this issue of the journal was destroyed by the French government presided by Georges Pompidou. It is accessible to us thanks to Sylvère Lotringer and his collection of Guattari’s writings published in Chaosophy (semiotext(e), 2007). The transcript version published here is coming from the great database 1,000 Little Hammers which undertake to formalize a useful library of politically subversive documents.

This text (that I was already quoting in my essay about Antonin Artaud) constitutes a powerful inspiration for the series of articles I wrote about the dangerous notion of ideal normative body. Through it, Félix Guattari expresses a violent diatribe about capitalism’s mechanisms of capture of the body. The profound disorder – let’s recall that Guattari was a psychotherapist – felt within this system is produced by the dichotomy between the extremely subjective nature of desire and the narrow and oppressive characteristics of the norms issued from ideology (and religion) but also from the essence of a system which actively profits from a uniformization of desire. F.Guattari therefore argues for a resistance through what he calls micropolitics, a continuous ethical and creative production of desire at a small scale in an attempt for an immanent subversion within the system.

To Have Done with the Massacre of the Body
by Félix Guattari

No matter how much it proclaims its pseudo-tolerance, the capitalist system in all its forms (family, school, factories, army, codes, discourse…) continues to subjugate all desires, sexuality, and affects to the dictatorship of its totalitarian organization, founded on exploitation, property, male power, profit, productivity…

Tirelessly it continues its dirty work of castrating, suppressing, torturing, and dividing up our bodies in order to inscribe its laws on our flesh, in order to rivet to our subconscious its mechanisms for reproducing this system of enslavement.

With its throttling, its stasis, its lesions, its neuroses, the capitalist state imposes its norms, establishes its models, imprints its features, assigns its roles, propagates its program… Using every available access route into our organisms, it insinuates into the depths of our insides its roots of death. It usurps our organs, disrupts our vital functions, mutilates our pleasure, subjugates all lived experience to the control of its condemning judgments. It makes of each individual a cripple, cut off from his or her body, a stranger to his or her own desires.

To reinforce its social terror which it forces individuals to experience as their own guilt, the capitalist army of occupation strives, through an ever more refined system of aggression, provocation, and blackmail, to repress, to exclude, and to neutralize all those practices of desire which do not reproduce the established form of domination.

In this way the system perpetuates a centuries-old regime of spoiled pleasures, sacrifice, resignation, institutionalized masochism, and death. It is a castrating regime, which produces a guilty, neurotic, scrabbling, submissive drudge of a human being.

This antiquated world, which stinks everywhere of dead flesh, horrifies us and convinces us of the necessity of carrying the revolutionary struggle against capitalist oppression into that territory where the oppression is most deeply rooted: the living body.

It is the body and all the desire it produces that we wish to liberate from “foreign” domination. It is “on that ground” that we wish to “work” for the liberation of society. There is no boundary between the two elements. ‘I’ oppress myself inasmuch as that ‘I’ is the produced of a system of oppression that extends to all aspects of living.

The “revolutionary consciousness” is a mystification if it is not situated within a “revolutionary body,” that is to say, within a body that produces its own liberation.

Women in revolt against a male power—a power that has been forced on their bodies for centuries—homosexuals in revolt against the terroristic “normality,” young people in revolt against the pathological authority of adults: these are the people who, collectively, have begun to make the body a means of subversion, and have begun to see subversion as a means for meeting the “immediate” needs of the body.

These are the people who have begun to question the mode of production of desires, the relationship between pleasure and power, the relationship between the body and the individual. These are the people who question the function of such relationships in all spheres of capitalist society, including within militant groups.

These are the people, in both sexes, who have finally broken that perennial barrier between “politics” and reality as it is actually lived—a barrier that has served the interests of both the leaders of bourgeois society and those who have claimed to represent and speak for the masses.

These are the people, of both sexes, who have opened the way for the great uprising of life against the forces of death—even as these latter continue to infiltrate our organisms in order to subjugate, with greater and greater subtlety, our energies, our desires, and our reality to the demands of the established order.

A new cutting edge, a new line of more radical and more definitive attack has been opened up, and because of it there will necessarily be new alignments among revolutionary forces.

We can no longer sit idly by as others steal our mouths, our anuses, our genitals, our nerves, our guts, our arteries, in order to fashion parts and work in an ignoble mechanism of production which links capital, exploitation, and the family.

We can no longer allow others to turn our mucous membranes, our skin, all our sensitive areas into occupied territory—territory controlled and regimented by others, to which we are forbidden access.

We can no longer permit our nervous system to serve as a communications network for the system of capitalist exploitation, for the patriarchal state; nor can we permit our brains to be used as instruments of torture programmed by the powers that surround us.

We can no longer allow others to repress our fucking, control our shit, our saliva, our energies, all in conformity with the prescription of the law and its carefully-defined little transgressions. We want to see frigid, imprisoned, mortified bodies explode to bits, even if capitalism continues to demand that they be kept in check at the expense of our living bodies.

This desire for a fundamental liberation, if it is to be a truly revolutionary action, requires that we move beyond the limits of our “person,” that we overturn the notion of the “individual,” that we transcend our sedentary selves, our “normal social identities,” in order to travel to the boundaryless territory of the body, in order to live in the flux of desires that lies beyond sexuality, beyond the territory of the repertories of normality.

So it is that some of us have felt the vital need to act as a group in liberating ourselves from those forces that have crushed and controlled desire in each one of us.

Everything that we have experienced on the level of the personal, intimate life we have tried to approach, explore, and live collectively. We want to break down the concrete wall, erected by the dominant social organization, that separates being from appearance, the spoken from the unspoken, the private from the social.

Together, we have begun to explore all the working of our attractions, repulsions, our resistances, our orgasms, the universe of our representations, our fetishes, our obsessions, our phobias. The “unconfessable secret” has become for us a matter for reflection, public discussion, and political action—where politics is taken as the social manifestation of the irrepressible aspirations of the “living being.”

We have decided to break the intolerable seal of secrecy which the power structure has placed on the reality of sensual, sexual, and affective practices; thus we will break the power structure’s ability to produce and reproduce forms of oppression.

As we have explored collectively our individual histories, we have seen to what extent all of our desiring life has been dominated by the fundamental laws of the bourgeois capitalist state and the Judeo-Christian tradition; all of our desires are subjected to capitalism’s rules concerning efficiency, surplus value, and reproduction. In comparing our various “experiences,” no matter how free they may have appeared, we recognized that we are always and forever obliged to conform to the officially sanctioned sexual stereotypes, which regulate all forms of lived experience and extend their control over marriage beds, houses of prostitution, public bathrooms, dance floors, factories, confessionals, sex shops, prisons, high schools, buses, etc.

Let us discuss this officially sanctioned sexuality, which has been defined as the one and only possible sexuality. We do not wish to manage it, as one manages the conditions of one’s imprisonment. Rather, we wish to destroy it, eliminate it, because it is nothing more that a mechanism for castrating and recastrating; it is a mechanism for reproducing everywhere, in every individual, over and over again, the bases for a system of enslavement. “Sexuality” is a monstrosity, whether in its restrictive forms, or in its so-called “permissive” forms. It is clear that “liberalizing” attitudes and “eroticizing” the social reality through advertising is something organized and controlled by the managers of “advanced” capitalism for the sake of a more efficacious reproduction of the officially sanctioned libido. Far from reducing sexual misery, these transactions only increase frustrations and feelings of “failure,” hence permitting the transformation of desire into a compulsive consumer need, while also guaranteeing “the production of demand,” which of course is the very motor of capitalist expression. There is no real difference between the “immaculate conception” and the seductive female of advertising, between dutifully-fulfilled marital obligations and the promiscuity of bourgeois women on the go.  The same censorship is at work in all cases. The same will to put to death the body-that desires perpetuates itself. Only a change of strategy has occurred.

What we want, what we desire, is to burst through the screen of sexuality and its representations in order to know the reality of our bodies, of our bodiesthat- desire.

We want to free this living body, make it whole again, unblock it, clear it, so that it may experience the liberation of all its energies, desires, intensities, which at present are crushed by a social system that prescribes and conditions.

We want to recover such elementary faculties as the pleasure of breathing, which has literally been strangled by the forces that oppress and pollute. We want to recover the pleasure of eating and digesting, which has been disrupted by the rhythms imposed by Productivity and by the bad food that is produced and Prepared according to criteria of marketability.

And let us not forget the pleasure of shitting and the pleasures of the anus, systematically destroyed by the coercive conditioning of the sphincter— a conditioning used by capitalist authority to inscribe even into the flesh its fundamental principles (relationships of exploitation, neurotic accumulation, the mystique of property of cleanliness, etc.). Or the pleasure of masturbating happily and without shame, which no anguished feelings about failure and compensation, but simply for the pleasure of masturbating. Or the pleasures of shaking oneself, of humming, of speaking, of walking, of moving, of expressing oneself, of feeling delirious, of singing, of playing with one’s body in every possible way. We want to recover the pleasures of producing pleasure and of creating—pleasures which have been ruthlessly quashed by educational systems charged with manufacturing obedient worker-consumers.

We want to open our bodies to the bodies of other people, to let energies circulate, allow desires to merge, so that we can all give free reign of our fantasies, to our ecstasies, so that at last we can live without guilt, so that we can practice without guilt all pleasures, whether individual or shared by two or more people. All of this pleasure we desperately need if we are not to experience our daily reality as a kind of slow agony which capitalist, bureaucratic civilization imposes as a model of existence on its subjects. And we want to excise from our being the malignant tumor of guilt, which is the age-old root of all oppression.

Obviously we are aware of the formidable obstacles that we will have to overcome if our aspirations are not to remain simply the dream of a tiny set of marginalized people. We are quite aware that the liberation of the body and the freeing of sensual, sexual, affective, and ecstatic feelings are indissolubly linked to the liberation of women and the abolition of every kind of sexual categorization.

Revolutionizing desire means destroying male power and rejecting all its modes of behavior and its ideas about couples; revolutionizing desire means destroying all forms of oppression and all models of normality.

We want to put an end once and for all to the roles of identities instituted by the Phallus.

We want to put an end once and for all to any rigid assigning of sexual identity. We do not want to think of ourselves anymore as men and women, homosexuals and heterosexuals, possessors and possessed, older and younger, masters and salve, but rather as human beings who transcend such sexual categorization, who are autonomous, in flux, and multifaceted. We want to see ourselves as being with varying identities, who can express their desires, their pleasures, their ecstasies, their tenderness without relying on or invoking any system of surplus value, or any system of power at all, but only in the spirit of play.

We have begun with the body, the revolutionary body, as a place where “subversive” energies are produced— and a place where in truth all kinds of cruelties and oppressions have been perpetuated. By connecting “political” practice to the reality of this body and its functioning, by working collectively to find means to liberate this body, we have already begun to create a new social reality which the maximum of ecstasy is combined the maximum of consciousness.

This is the only way that we will be able to directly combat the hold of the Capitalist State exercises over us. This is the only step that will truly make us STRONG against a system of domination that continues to strengthen its power, that aims to weaken and undermine each individual in order to force him or her to bow to the system, that seeks, in effect, to reduce us all to the level of dogs.

Guattari Félix. To Have Done with the Massacre of the Body in Chaosophy. Semio-text(e), 2007.

Invention is the transposition of one phase state to another, of one resonance on top of another, and it expresses therefore the deep recomposability, indeed deep recomputability, of worldly substance. Catherine Malabou speaks of the world’s plasticity as a condition of its futurity. When or where? Less than deep recomputability causes a genuinely new condition to emerge ‘later in time’ simultaneous to some postponed event, it does so ‘here’ in the recombinancy of an infinite synchronic field of the longest possible ‘now’. This is the absolute contingency of mathematics collapsing into the moratal contingency of stuff. That is, does everything that has ever existed now, in the molecular transformation of geo-programmatic recycling, and also, does everything that will ever exist already do so in another larval, disorganized distribution?

Bratton Benjamin. Root the Earth in  Leper Creativity. Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2012. P46

The book Leper Creativity gathers the ensemble of the lectures given in March 2011 at Parsons in the frame of the Cyclonopedia Symposium. This conference day was organized by Ed Keller, Nicola Masciandaro & Eugene Thacker around the book written by Reza Negarestani that I referred to many time in my articles these last two years. Many of the presentations were as complex as Cyclonopedia can be and this book  therefore constitutes a chance to try to fathom the various speakers’ discourse. In this regard, I continue to consider Eugene Thacker’s Black Infinity; or, Oil Discovers Humans as particularly expressive of Cyclonopedia’s cosmological vision: a world interpreted through an absolute counter-anthropocentrism in direct genealogy with Spinoza and Deleuze.

CONTENTS

- Robin Mackay, “A Brief History of Geotrauma”
– McKenzie Wark, “An Inhuman Fiction of Forces”
– Benjamin H. Bratton, “Root the Earth: On Peak Oil Apophenia”
– Alisa Andrasek, “Dustism”
– Zach Blas, “Queerness, Openness”
– Melanie Doherty, “Non-Oedipal Networks and the Inorganic Unconscious”
– Anthony Sciscione, “Symptomatic Horror: Lovecraft’s ‘The Colour Out of Space’”
– Kate Marshall, “Cyclonopedia as Novel (a meditation on complicity as inauthenticity)”
– Alexander R. Galloway, “What is a Hermeneutic Light?”
– Eugene Thacker, “Black Infinity; or, Oil Discovers Humans”
– Nicola Masciandaro, “Gourmandized in the Abattoir of Openness”
– Dan Mellamphy & Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, “Phileas Fog^g, or the Cyclonic Passepartout: On the Alchemical Elements of War”
– Ben Woodard, “The Untimely (and Unshapely) Decomposition of Onto-Epistemological Solidity: Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia as Metaphysics”
– Ed Keller, “. . .Or, Speaking with the Alien, a Refrain. . .”
– Lionel Maunz, “Receipt of Malice”
– Öykü Tekten, “Symposium Photographs”
– Reza Negarestani, “Notes on the Figure of the Cyclone”

Before starting this article, I would like to say that I am well aware that what might distinguish this blog from others is the fact that architecture is only rarely questioned directly but rather via indirect means and disciplines. Lately I have been writing much more articles which, on the contrary, deal with architecture more explicitly. My readings and research work by phases and the recurrence of certain topics is not revealing a deep change in my editorial line but should rather be interpreted as chapters of it.

From October 2011 to April 2012, the Canadian Centre for Architecture displayed the exhibition Imperfect Health: The Medicalization of Architecture. In parallel of it has been edited a book with the same name by Giovanna Borasi and Mirko Zardini (Lars Muller Publishers). This volume – and therefore the exhibition – explores the heritage of modernism which promoted the antic ‘mens sana in corpore sano’ (a sane mind within a sane body) and was undertaking to design architecture around it. Through the various essays of the book, two approaches seems to emerge:

The first one consists in the intelligent understanding of atmospheric conditions in order to integrate them as the essence of a given design. A paradigmatic example of such approach is brought by the ensemble of the work of Philippe Rahm and his office. Through processes of pressure, convection, evaporation, radiation, digestion and conduction, he investigate architecture’s immateriality as the catalyst for the body’s health and comfort. Such an approach is in direct affiliation with the modernist ideology characterized by a vision of the architect as an expert owning a knowledge potentially beneficial for architecture’s users.

The second approach does not have moral considerations for ‘agents of infections’ but rather use the latter as creative elements. This attitude is the one that has been developed for almost two decades by R&Sie(n) in their projects which are recurrently quoted in this book. In this case, the architect refuses his supposed expertise and prefers to propose expressive environments in which the human body is not the center but rather a part as many others which all interact with each others.

Although this book is a precious volume to have in one’s library, I personally regret that two additional paradigms have been absolutely eluded from this research. The first one was pretty obvious to me when I first saw the subtitle of the exhibition: the Medicalization of Architecture. I was then envisioning an approach of architecture, hygiene and sanity through a filter constructed by Michel Foucault. This chapter would have investigate the various processes of normatization undertook by such a historical movement as well as the construction of institutionalized spaces (hospitals, schools, factories, prisons) as mechanisms of control of the population.
The second lacking chapter/approach would have explored the life work of Arakawa and Madeline Gins in their ambitious manifesto which attempts to invent an architecture in which the human body does not die anymore. I already wrote many articles about their work and won’t reiterate here but their absence of this book/exhibition seems (sadly) symptomatic of the poor interest that architects have for them.

As an appendix, I would like to draw attention on the following drawing which was made by Gordon Matta Clark in 1978 as a representation of his own organism back then – he was suffering and eventually died from a cancer: Antibodies and cancer cells are fighting for the salvation/destruction of the body in a dramatic science fiction scenery.

Immune vs. Cancer Cells by Gordon Matta-Clark (1978) / Excerpt from Imperfect Health

Domestic Isolation Room by David Garcia Studio (2010) / Excerpt from Imperfect Health

Mokattam Ridge (Garbage City) by Bas Princen (2009) / Excerpt from Imperfect Health

Speleotherapy: Breathing in (Solotvyno salt mine Ukraine) by Kirill Kuletski (2009) / Excerpt from Imperfect Health

Dustyrelife F/B-mu by R&Sie(n): Francois Roche, Stephanie Lavaux, Jean Navarro (2002) / Excerpt from Imperfect Health

Handicapped and Elderly, Wheelchair users and body access by Henry Dreyfuss Associates and Niels Diffrient (1974) / Excerpt from Imperfect Health

Fit-City: Promoting Physical Activity through Design (2006) / Excerpt from Imperfect Health

Convective Apartments by Philippe Rahm Architects (2010)