CLOSE

Emma Cocker.

After something of a break, I seem to have looped back to my old interest - the strange interrelations of text, space, and reading. Emma Cocker's Blog 'Not Yet There' always has something new and...well, closer, to offer. This image, entitled Close Reading (G.D. T.F. 1993) is part of an ongoing series that investigates the practice of close reading or of an ‘explication de texte’ as a critical tool for destabilizing language, for breaking up the linear unfolding of language into discontinuous fragments. Close Reading performs a close reading of Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, 1993, in an attempt to render the text itself as an unfolding of pleats and stutters.

Possible

Deleuze and Guattari's crucial distinction between the realization of the possible and the  actualisation of the virtual captures a sense of potential, as discussed at length by John Rajchman in 'The Virtual House'.

Introduction to The Thousand Plateaus

The two of us wrote anti-oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of everything that came within range, what as closest as well as farthest away. We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognisable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it's nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it's only a manner of speaking. To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.

relationscapes - on bodies, thoughts, and movement through space

What moves as a body, returns as the movement of thought
-Deleuze

Reading Erin Manning's Relationscapes.

Manning sets out to bridge the gap between thinking/speaking and doing/creating, and in doing so, to challenge the active/passive model of speaker/listener or artist/spectator. One of the major projects on which the book is based, Housing the Body - Dressing the Environment, unpacks the gap between thinking and doing through aligning with Henri Bergson's definition of Embodied Cognition. According to this critical theory, the relation between perception in all its modes is one of reciprocal read-and-return. Manning writes that 'the cross genesis of action and perception opens into thought.' In other words, every perception: a thinking action. Every act: the perception of thought. Furthermore, this relation can be modified via the environment. Architecture not only houses the body, buit also creates modes of embodied experience and thought.
The questions Manning poses range from how does thought work? where does creation begin? what constitutes novelty and what might a politics of movement do to the ultimate question of how can thinking through movement alter the force of thought?

natural purpose, digital design, and reflective engagements

‘Why not ...first to find out where the
stranger in natural science, the concept of
natural purposes, may lead us? ‘
‐ Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment 301.
Within the discipline of architecture, natural is a persistent term which, through its history of redefinition, has acquired the potential to relocate the designed.1 The term identifies challenges to architectural practice, describes production, and situates the architectural object. In a strange parallel, digital design is currently asserting the same potential to induce “the transformation of the meaning of the architectural object”.2 This paper examines the current relationship between nature and the architectural object as mediated by digital design processes towards a speculation on user inhabitation of so designed space.

It infers that the broad theological framework that has been the unifying ground for theoreticians with respect to computer‐aided design practices – Deleuzian material theory – is insufficient when it comes to understanding the new blurring of distinction between natural and designed, and that this dependency is robbing digital design of its experiential potentials.3 The need to reconcile the virtual architectural object with the real architectural object transcends theoretical discussion hinging on form‐based discussions and the nature of the computer design environment, without rejecting the importance of such interrogation. Formal emphasis produces architectural space that represses the user’s sense‐based experience. Current oppositions to formalist architecture through digital design, such as Greg Lynn’s Animate Form, highlight a tendency to resolve issues through time‐based discussions, excluding space.4

Neo‐Kantian interpretations will provide as an alternate framework to disrupt the determinism underpinned formalism. While Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason appears to endorse formalist architectural space as emphasised by digital methodologies, the later Critique of Judgement – with particular reference to the treatises on Natural Purpose and Reflective Judgment ‐ can provide an examination of embodied space.5 The Critique of Judgment is a fertile architectural text due to its capacity to force out relations between theory and action.6 Setting up a Kantian interrogation allows the paper to formatively straddle broader architectural  questions of nature, aesthetics, surface/structure, metaphysics, sublime, and immateriality.