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“architecture and urbanity: theory, insight and inspiration”

14/08/2011 MACHINES, THE UNTIMELY and Deterritorialisation [C. Colebrook] | Preface to the Italian Edition of A Thousand Plateaus [Gilles Deleuze] | City and Environment [A. Ballantyne]

Life is like riding a bicycle

to keep your balance,

you must keep moving

~A. Einstein

In curious places around Adelaide you’ll find small murals ranging from cartoons tucked round back alley corners to Audrey Hepburns on electrical boxes. The most proliferate of these is Einstein riding a bicycle; it was in fact seeing these in so many different contexts around the city that prompted me to investigate the work and significance of this particular art further.

As it happens, the work is that of a young activist promoting cycling and alternative transport in the city, but this investigation also yielded a quote from Einstein himself about cycling and life that resonated given the themes presented in this and last week’s readings concerning the implications and contextual development of Deleuzian philosophy, or as it were, anti-philosophy. (I say anti-philosophy because I wonder if it can really be described as such since its dogma is anti-dogmatic). Anyway, I recall in the readings from last week that life can only be considered life if it reproduces. Life is therefore constantly on the move to reproduce itself. This is how it remains life; it “becomes worthy of becoming” (Colebrook, 57) by making a “connection with what is not itself in order to transform and maximize itself” (Colebrook, 57). Life is insatiable possibility, constantly seeking new combinations and recombinations; always wanting “what might become” (Colebrook, 59). Powerful works of art and philosophy (ie.Shakespeare) are alive. They, or perhaps themes as “mechanics”within them, live outside of an original context to become new beings when combined with other affects. Deleuze and Guattari write that philosophy is”nothing but screeches around which concepts develop their songs” (311); philosphy is this becoming, the notes of which are affects that join to create sound that join to create melody… that join to create songs… that connect with human cognition to create meaning… ad infinitum. Profundity and possibility, like time, are multiplicitous and multidirectional.

As far as the architectural implications of this understanding of life, philosophy, biological and “more-than-biological” purpose are concerned, I think the most crucial argument presented in Ballantyne’s paper is that as architects, we must forget about form as inention and operate instead“in the milieux” (Ballantyne, 97) as “unselfconscious” (Ballantyne) molecules. This holds the potential for a dynamic architecture that is not static once realized, but part of a continual “becoming,” moving.