Gilles Deleuze and the Missing

Architecture

Marko Jobst

Greenwich University

Abstract
This essay combines experiential writing, quotes from Virginia Woolfs
novel The Waves and Gilles Deleuzes philosophy in order to indicate
that architecture remains a largely overlooked instance of the world.
This is particularly problematic in the context of the question of
immanence, which can be understood to lie at the core of Deleuzes
philosophy. Architectures relation to thought is discussed here via
Deleuzes writing in Difference and Repetition and pursued in
conjunction with Simone Brotts notion of architectural effects. Rather
than seeing encounters with architecture as the site of recognition of
the habitual and routine, our experience of architecture-as-world should
be understood to ceaselessly contribute to the emergence of thought.
Brian Massumis writing offers one potential direction to pursue, via the
notion of the diagram tied to experience before it is fed into the loop of
architectural design and its accompanying representational techniques.
Keywords: architecture, experience, sensation, thought, immanence

Prologue 1: Belgrade 1990

The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and
then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped
lower down. The sun sharpened the walls of the house, and rested like the tip
of a fan upon a white blind and made a blue fingerprint of shadow under the
leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was
dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside.
Woolf 1994: 8
Deleuze Studies 8.2 (2014): 157172
DOI: 10.3366/dls.2014.0141
Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/dls

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This is the memory then, the false memory of the event. The year is 1990,
1991 and I am sitting inside a room that appears to be a simple white
cube. The walls are on a grid (as far as the eye can tell) except in one of
the corners behind the door, where the white surface juts out by exactly
97 mm. There is a single, tall window opposite and the view opens onto
Kalemegdan. But what is known of the outside, what matters, is the light
and the trees, the ceaseless pattern of movement cutting across individual
leaves. The window is as old as the building and doesnt close properly.
The paint that coats it is peeling. If you stand close enough, you can
see the small, sharp flakes that drop off if you shut the window too
vigorously.
The year and the location might speak of a different kind of events to
you and there will definitely be violence in this story, only not the kind
you might expect. Meanwhile, consider the room closely, every object
and every variation in it, every fragment that presents itself and the conjunctions the fragments form unexpectedly. Observe carefully. The point
is that even if you dont, you will keep perceiving. And so will the room.
There is a desk, long and white. There are two bookcases. A bed.
There is a large box on the floor, made of iron, its interior lined with
felt. You are aware of its feel even when the box is closed and you are
thinking something else. There are several lamps in the room; no light
issues from them currently. Blue patterns chase each other across the
carpet, two shades of blue alternating at the periphery of your vision.
They are always present, even when the eyes are trained on the desks
white surface, on the open book, on the marks that cover the page. The
edge of the table, the turning point: made of brushed steel, it cuts a thin,
crisp line and reflects the light that moves with the smallest shifts in the
position of your body. Your body that is never perfectly still.
It is at this desk that I spent afternoons reading (I am still there, in
that room, even if it looks nothing like this today.) It was 1991, 1990.
I was reading a novel and would occasionally lift my eyes to look at
the view outside (light-movement-leaves). The room was imperceptibly
contracting and not all of it had to do with my breathing.

Prologue 2: London 2012

The sun laid broader blades upon the house. The light touched something
green in the window corner and made it a lump of emerald, a cave of pure
green like stoneless fruit. It sharpened the edges of chairs and tables and
stitched white table-cloths with fine gold wires.
Woolf 1994: 24

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Last night, in this flat on Bermondsey Street, I dreamed of having

written all this before. I dreamed that Deleuze and Guattari claimed
that art begins with the house, not with flesh; that architecture should be
understood as the first of the arts (not the last, as some others might have
it); that architecture is, above all, about frames, the way in which frames
interlock, and that this would appear again in other arts, in painting
as well as film (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 1867). I dream of having
written that they claimed the frames to hold compounds of sensations;
sensations, compounds, that is exactly what they write.
And then, there was the Australian philosopher, one of the first to
write about architecture and invoke Deleuzes name. She claimed that
art was the extension of the architectural imperative to organise earth,
its space. Architecture binds forces, allows qualities to live their own
life (that is exactly what she writes), constituting territory, allowing sensations to emerge and resonate, for the sake of intensity alone (Grosz
2008: 12). It is the question of pure beings of sensation, I remembered
reading (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 167). The phrase remained.
I dream that the most important thing was the role sensations are
given in architecture and that it was the first of the arts, always the first.
In the dream, I seem to be trying to convince anyone who would listen
that philosophy keeps missing the point, that no one can see what can
be seen so clearly.

I.
The sun fell in sharp wedges inside the room. Whatever the light touched
became dowered with a fanatical existence. A plate was like a white lake.
A knife looked like a dagger of ice. Suddenly tumblers revealed themselves
upheld by streaks of light. Tables and chairs rose to the surface as if they
had been sunk under water and rose, filmed with red, orange, purple like
bloom on the skin of ripe fruit. The veins on the glaze of the china, the
grain of the wood, the fibres of the matting became more and more finely
engraved. Everything was without shadow. A jar was so green that the eye
seemed sucked up through a funnel by its intensity and stuck to it like a
limpet. Then shapes took on mass and edge. Here was the boss of a chair;
here the bulk of a cupboard. And as the light increased, flocks of shadow
were driven before it and conglomerated and hung in many-pleated folds in
the background.
Woolf 1994: 878

I have written elsewhere about the relationship between architectural

theory and the uptake of Deleuzes philosophy since the 1980s, and

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the current position of Deleuze and Guattaris thought in architecture
(Jobst 2013). In short, the uses of Deleuze in architectural discourse
have been confined to a handful of concepts, primarily derived from
The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, and closely related to the rise of the
digital. Apart from being a severe reduction of the scope of Deleuzes
philosophical project, this is also a case of marked oversight of the
consequences of architectures positioning as the first of the arts. The
stress on the question of sensation is in architectural theory still seen to
be associated with architectural phenomenology, rather than Deleuzes
philosophy with all the problems the phenomenological context
poses.
Meanwhile, the writing on contemporary and conceptual arts,
including performance and dance, is edging ever closer to acknowledging
architecture as that ever-present context of all creation and the inevitable
aspect of the insertion of art into everyday life, which Deleuze qualified
in Difference and Repetition as the key question (Deleuze 1994: 293).
It is in this context that the publication of Simone Brotts Architecture
for a Free Subjectivity: Deleuze and Guattari at the Horizon of the
Real in 2011 offered a much needed reorienting of Deleuzian thought
within the discourse of architecture. Brotts is a project of reinscribing
the question of the production of subjects into the uptake of Deleuzes
philosophy forged in architecture in the 1990s, when it was largely
emptied of its political connotations. Throughout the book, Brott shows
that more is to be had from Deleuze when redressing the period of what
is today understood as the discourse of post-World War II architectural
theory, with all its subsequent crises and transformations. Brotts aim,
to elucidate the relation between subject and object in a radically
novel way (a question that keeps resurfacing in architecture in various
guises despite or precisely because of the strong push in the direction
of textual analysis that coloured architectural theory in the wake of
Derridas philosophy), is a valiant and important one. But, as clearly
shown in her own conclusion, to pose the question of the subject might
also lead to the recurrence of the problems the question of subjectivity
encountered at every turn in the development of architectural theory
(Brott 2011: 1201).
There is another, affiliated question to be posed here, which covers
a similar territory in ways in which architecture hasnt yet engaged,
let alone architectural theories based on Deleuzes philosophy, and this
is the question of architectures relation to thought. Underlying this
is the question of immanence, which should be key when addressing
Deleuze with architecture in mind. What is the sequence leading from

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built environments to thought and back, and how does this reflect on
Deleuzes philosophy?

II.
The sun struck straight upon the house, making the white walls glare between
the dark windows. Their panes, woven thickly with green branches, held
circles of impenetrable darkness. Sharp-edged wedges of light lay upon the
window-sill and showed inside the room plates with blue rings, cups with
curved handles, the bulge of a great bowl, the crisscross pattern in the rug,
and the formidable corners and lines of cabinets and bookcases. Behind their
conglomeration hung a zone of shadow in which might be a further shape to
be disencumbered of shadow or still denser depths of darkness.
Woolf 1994: 118

In Immanence: Deleuze and Philosophy Miguel de Beistegui writes that

the question of immanence should be understood as the key notion
orienting Deleuzes work, culminating in his collaboration with Guattari
in What Is Philosophy? Importantly, it is here that we encounter the link
between thought and the sensible, in ways that need addressing both in
architecture and the arts let alone philosophy in the field of Deleuze
studies, which has so far been largely blind to the overwhelming presence
of architecture as an inescapable instance of the world.
De Beistegui writes that the creation of concepts
is not a creation ex nihilo, but an effort to extract from the sensible the
singular points at which the constitution of a phenomenon, whatever its
nature, is being decided. In that respect, whilst created, concepts are the
concepts of the sensible itself. (De Beistegui 2010: 6)

Furthermore, concepts are

produced in response to specific events that take place in the empirical
world. If this understanding of concepts as originating in the sensible itself
amounts to a form of empiricism, Deleuze immediately goes on to characterise
it as a superior form of empiricism, or as a transcendental empiricism,
thus doing away with the very opposition between empiricism and idealism.
(De Beistegui 2010: 6)

De Beistegui is keen to show that the consequence of this conception of

philosophy vis--vis the real is that the horizon that precedes concepts
(and orients their formation plane as plan) and from which concepts
emerge what Deleuze will repeatedly address as the image of thought
in his work on Nietzsche and Proust, in Difference and Repetition as well

162 Marko Jobst

as in What Is Philosophy? implies that non-philosophy figures (quite
literally) at the heart of philosophy (De Beistegui 2010: 10).
The notion of immanence, traced in Deleuzes work in such a way, De
Beistegui claims to be something other than a straightforward Deleuzian
concept. Immanence is not a concept, he writes, or if it is, it should
be understood as a concept of a radically different kind. It is an
image, precisely: the plane of immanence is the image of thought, the
image thought gives itself of what it means to think, to make use of
thought, to find ones bearings in thought [. . .] (De Beistegui 2010:
12). Importantly for a discussion on architecture, the focus here should
be on what the notion of immanence implies with regard to sensation
and that which is in architecture broadly discussed under the banner of
experience.
Thought happens, De Beistegui further writes,
as a result of an encounter with the outside. It is a response a creative
response to something that has taken hold of us. What does this mean? It
means [. . .] that the conditions of thought are not within thought itself, that
thought is not its own ground, and so certainly not that of the intelligibility of
the real. This is the extent to which Deleuze is an empiricist: our concepts are
generated from our encounter with the external world; the external, sensible
reality is where they originate. (De Beistegui 2010: 13)

Immanence, in other words, preserves the world, and the possibility of

its meaningfulness, from being assigned to an origin that is not inner
worldly. It turns thought itself into a worldly event (De Beistegui 2010:
16) one in which architecture is yet to be properly accounted for.
As a result, to think immanently is to render thought immanent to reality,
to its chaotic becoming, its variations, and its vibrations. It amounts
to constructing an image of thought that is not posited in advance,
independently of the real itself, and orienting it from the start, but that
grown from within the real, or Being. Throughout, immanence designated the
method as well as the content of thought, the manner in which thought must
unfold as well as the matter from which it unfolds. (De Beistegui 2010: 192)

This matter from which thought unfolds is where architecture should

be brought into focus in the writing on Deleuze in ways overlooked
so far, no doubt due in part to the cursory discussion of architecture
in Deleuzes writing itself, as well as his work with Guattari (whose
engagement with architecture, as Simone Brott shows, was more
extensive (Brott 2011: 7596)).
Unlike in the case of cinema, literature or painting, Deleuze and
Guattaris writing on architecture (in particular in its broadest sense, as

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the built environment, or what could tentatively be termed organised

matter) is woefully cursory. That this shouldnt deter us from drawing
out ways in which their work opens an incredibly rich territory for
it nevertheless is clear, for instance, in the way Laura Cull indicates
performance might need to be taken (Cull 2009: 121), or Simon
OSullivan and Stephen Zepke approach contemporary art (Zepke and
OSullivan 2010: 111). The simple starting point for this is the following: if thought unfolds from matter, what difference does it make that so
much of the matter already comes designed in a very particular way?
And where does this organised matter resist the purpose assigned it?

III.
The windows showed erratically spots of burning fire, the elbow of one
branch, and then some tranquil space of pure clarity. The blind hung red
at the windows edge and within the room daggers of light fell upon chairs
and tables making cracks across their lacquer and polish. The green pot
bulged enormously, with its white window elongated in its side. Light driving
darkness before it split itself profusely upon the corners and bosses; and yet
heaped up darkness in mounds of unmoulded shape.
Woolf 1994: 131

Simone Brott writes in Architecture for a Free Subjectivity: Deleuze

and Guattari at the Horizon of the Real of the subject/object problem
of architecture, and proposes that architecture should be approached
through the concept of impersonal effects:
What I call the impersonal effects, are the inchoate, not-yet-determined
fragments of architectural encounter, as opposed to the personal effects of
identity, individuality or the constituted collective. Effect is not, in Deleuzes
sense, ephemeral an effect of something more primary; but rather, like a
magnetic effect, it is a productive force, an effect that works and creates. By
extension, the project here is to find and express, by architectural means, the
image of effects. (Brott 2011: 1)

The architectural encounter on which the conception of impersonal

effects relies
does not signal an in-between, a space between persons and concrete forms,
as troubled for decades by architectural criticism [. . .] Rather, it is an event
that comes before the crystallization of all things, it is the abstract surface of
all singularities coming into being. (Brott 2011: 2)

This is a redefinition of what has, in architectural theory, been the

question of experience, as considered in architecture throughout the

164 Marko Jobst

twentieth century from the side of function, use, programme, or indeed
the architectural event.1
As such, there hovers a cloud of architectural effects which constitute what
might be called the architectural real, or that from which every particular
series is crystallized. Walls, objects, and other components clustering around
us are teeming with loose effects, and what emerges is an ongoing
accumulation of a particular selection, or arrangement. Architectural effects
are mobile, displaced as a nomadic distribution within an indeterminate
pool of possible experiences. Every encounter is born via a complex selection
procedure which renders it unique for each person, even if it replicates an
authorized reading, reiterating the same effects for anyone, anytime. If I
have a subjectivity, it is a general and anonymous power to attract perceptual
arrangements, to envelop a series of aesthetic, social and other effects, like
anyone else. But it is also the phenomenon of having been selected, of an
unconscious leaning for this set of effects. (Brott 2011: 43)

These architectural encounters should ultimately be understood in the

light of the role of perception in Deleuzes project. As Brott writes,
[i]t is precisely the early theory of perception that clarifies the sense
in which the personological subject is derivative for Deleuze. In his early
conceptual apparatus, perceptions are conceived of as unique material
powers that come before the subject (Brott 2011: 38). This is the result
of the fact that perceptions in Deleuzes thinking operate at the level
of presence (39). Differently put, perceptions and impressions do not
represent something more real or original outside themselves, but are
continuous with matter (39).
Such a strong stress on experience and perception will ultimately
reorient the understanding of architecture when it comes to locating creation in it and, as a consequence, this will reorient the role of design.

IV.
The red curtains and the white blinds blew in and out, flapping against
the edge of the window, and the light which entered by flaps and breadths
unequally had in it some brown tinge, and some abandonment as it blew
through the blowing curtains in gusts. Here it browned a cabinet, there
reddened a chair, here it made the window waver in the side of the green jar.
All for a moment wavered and bent in uncertainty and ambiguity, as if a great
moth sailing through the room had shadowed the immense solidity of chairs
and tables with floating wings.
Woolf 1994: 1445

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It is at this point that I would like to take a slightly different route, and
with a slightly different aim in mind, from Brotts. While the discussion
regarding subjectivity in architecture is one of great importance if
nothing else because of the long history of the subject/object dichotomy
plaguing architectural discourse what Deleuzes philosophy helps think
is the very relationship between architecture and the emergence of
thought. Rather than ask how the subject is constructed through the
architectural encounter, I would like to question the importance of the
emergence of thought within what Brott has outlined, since this will
be the key not only to understanding the use of Deleuzes philosophy
in architecture but also in helping architecture address a philosophy in
which immanence is assigned such a central role.
The potential problem with the way architecture is defined in What
Is Philosophy? as the formation of blocs of sensation through acts
of framing is that the definition implicitly still considers architecture
from the side of its obvious creation, namely design, even if the side
of experience is clearly implicated. If we consider the worldly event
of thought through the conceptual vocabulary of the kind that Brott
offers (that is, the architectural encounter as brought forward through
impersonal effects), it becomes clear that architecture remains a fairly
unaccounted instance of the world, which we keep encountering,
increasingly so if we consider that as of 2007 it is estimated that there
are more inhabitants living in urban environments than anywhere else
on the planet.
Architecture-as-world, understood to give rise to thought in its own
way, would in turn help rethink architectural creation, that is, its
obvious praxis, precisely from the side of thoughts emergence from that
which is present in and as the world, that is, immanently. So what does
it mean to think in Deleuzes philosophy?

V.
The evening sun, whose heat had gone out of it and whose burning spot of
intensity had been diffused, made chairs and tables mellower and inlaid them
with lozenges of brown and yellow. Lined with shadows their weight seemed
more ponderous, as if colour, tilted, had run to one side. Here lay knife,
fork and glass, but lengthened, swollen, and made portentous. Rimmed in
a gold circle the looking-glass held the scene immobile as if everlasting in
its eye.
Woolf 1994: 1645

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In Difference and Repetition Deleuze writes in relation to Platos The
Republic that the text
distinguishes two kinds of things: those which do not disturb thought and
(as Plato will later say) those which force us to think. The first are objects
of recognition: [. . .] this is a finger, this is a table, Good morning Theaetetus.
(Deleuze 1994: 138)

The inclusion of a piece of furniture is a telling proclamation regarding

architecture and its potential, or lack thereof, to provoke thought.
Deleuze writes that:
concepts only ever designate possibilities. They lack the claws of absolute
necessity in other words, of an original violence inflicted upon thought; the
claws of a strangeness or an enmity which alone would awaken thought from
its original stupor or eternal possibility: there is only involuntary thought,
aroused but constrained within thought, and all the more absolutely necessary
for being born, illegitimately, of fortuitousness of the world. (Deleuze 1994:
139)

It is hard not to see in this description of the violence necessary for

the emergence of thought, as opposed to recognition, an echo of Brotts
description of the architectural encounter:
There is, in the architectural encounter, an unmistakable agencement that
pre-exists all personal agents navigating space; the most apt translation
of this Deleuzian term might be arrangement. In this capacity, it is an
anonymous architecture as pure indifference that seizes us, and not the
reverse, a subjectivizing agency prior to the constitution of any building or
subject. The selection of effects is accomplished by a certain savagery that
transcends personal choice or personality. (Brott 2011: 43)

While the savagery spoken of here relates to the way the arrangement
of effects rearranges the seemingly immutable unities of architecture as
well as those of the subject, it is nevertheless indicative of what needs
to be regarded carefully if the approach to the relation of architecture
and thought is to be investigated from the other end the violence of the
encounter that gives rise to thought itself.
Deleuze writes:
Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not
of recognition but of a fundamental encounter. What is encountered may
be Socrates, or a temple [!] or a demon. It may be grasped in a range of
affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In whichever tone, its primary
characteristic is that it can only be sensed. In this sense, it is opposed to
recognition. In recognition, the sensible is not at all that which can only be

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167

sensed, but that which bears directly upon the senses in an object which can be
recalled, imagined and conceived. The sensible is referred to an object which
may not only be experienced other than by sense, but may itself be attained
by other faculties. It therefore presupposes the exercise of the senses and the
exercise of the other faculties in a common sense. The object of encounter,
on the other hand, really gives rise to sensibility with regard to a given sense.
(Deleuze 1994: 139)

This proposition is yet to be properly confronted with the question

of architecture and its position in the world, with all its immanent
relations to thought. Differently put: if architecture is to be understood
as an instance of the world and therefore via the sensible as constant
potential food for thought, what are the conditions under which simple
recognition is replaced by thought as creation? The built environment is
teeming with loose effects (Brott 2011: 43) and they have the power to
trigger thought and not just to lead to recognition as in this is a table.

VI.
All the colours in the room had overflown their banks. The precise brush
stroke was swollen and lop-sided; cupboards and chairs melted their brown
masses into one huge obscurity. The height from floor to ceiling was hung
with vast curtains of shaking darkness. The looking-glass was pale as the
mouth of a cave shadowed by hanging creepers.
Woolf 1994: 186

It is from the direction of Brian Massumis tangential engagements

with architecture and his expansion of the Deleuzian frame through the
utilisation of A. N. Whitehead and William James (as well as Massumis
collaborative work with Erin Manning) that this question is likely to
be addressed with more specificity. In Semblance and Event: Activist
Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts Massumi writes (in the context of
process philosophy and its activist incarnation) that his concern is
with the question of how the makeup of an occasion of experience
effectively and constructively includes its own beyond (Massumi 2011:
14). This he approaches through the concept of techniques of existence,
whereby a technique of existence is a technique that takes as its object
process itself, as the speculative-pragmatic production of oriented events
of change (14).
In order to question what these techniques of existence do
pragmatically-speculatively, Massumi uses the concept of the diagram,
as adopted from Deleuze and Peirce. According to this, techniques of
existence abstract; and to

168 Marko Jobst

abstract in this fuller sense is a technique of extracting the relationalqualitative arc of one occasion of experience its subjective form and
systematically depositing it in the world for the next occasion to find, and
to potentially take up into its own formation. (Massumi 2011: 1415)

As a technique of existence the diagram is therefore a way of informing

the next occasion of these potentials for self-formation (Massumi 2011:
15). It is important to note, however as this will be crucial for the
discussion on where to look for creation in architecture before the
rather obvious stage of design commences that all of this concerns
experience. In experience is to be found the genesis of things (15).
The concept of the diagram has, by now, an established place in
architectural theory: it was to be found in the special issue of ANY:
Diagram Work (No. 23, 1998) (where a version of one of the chapters in
Massumis book first appeared); it was key to Peter Eisenmans Diagram
Diaries in 1999, and in the more recent AD Reader The Diagrams of
Architecture (2010) edited by Mark Garcia, to name but the more visible
sources. Largely, though, the diagrams spoken of in architecture are
still thought in relation to the acts of design and the representational
paradigms they involve (drawing, modelling), and do not necessarily
focus on the question of experience first and foremost even when
experience is implied.
The diagram, as explained above, is a word that activist philosophy uses
to name a speculative-pragmatic procedure for navigating the complexity of
experiences passing, taking special aim on the critical moments. These are
the junctures where one moment of experiences passing passes into another,
informing it of (in-forming it with) the potential to become again: techniques
of existence. (Massumi 2011: 25)

How does architecture relate to these critical moments that mark the
passing of experience and allow for an understanding of techniques of
existence that are finely attuned to architectures (omni)presence? Part
of the answer lies in the stress on the experiential side of architecture,
where the genesis of things is to be found. As is the case with
Brotts approach, Massumis careful unfolding of the question of
experience indicates that only an understanding of thought as finely
attuned to the milieus in which it arises will offer a sufficiently nuanced
understanding of our material environment. Without shifting the
emphasis towards experience, and its role in the emergence of thought,
architecture will remain locked in the realm of recognition (this is a
table).

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169

VII.
As if there were waves of darkness in the air, darkness moved on, covering
houses, hills, trees, as waves of water washed down streets, eddying round
single figures, engulfing them; blotting out couples clasped under the showery
darkness of elm trees in full summer foliage. Darkness rolled its waves along
grassy rides and over the wrinkled skin of the turf, enveloping the solitary
thorn tree and the empty snail-shells at its foot. Mounting higher, darkness
blew along the bare upland slopes, and met the fretted and abraded pinnacles
of the mountain where the snow lodges for ever on the hard rock even when
the valleys are full of running streams and yellow vine leaves, and girls, sitting
on verandahs, look up at the snow, shading their faces with their fans. Them,
too, darkness covered.
Woolf 1994: 187

Further elaborating on experience via the concept of the diagram,

Massumi writes that the diagram brings about the final question, that
of experience in nonhuman forms of life, and in nonliving matter itself
(Massumi 2011: 25). The world is made of expression, he writes, which
means that it is made of experience; as a result, perception can be said
to be everywhere in the world. He writes:
the question of the nonhuman revolves around the question of nonhuman
perception. In what way can we say that what we have the tendency to separate out as dumb matter in fact perceives and is therefore, by the precepts
of activist philosophy, experientially self-creative? (Massumi 2011: 25)

And even more pointedly when it comes to the question of the missing
architecture:
even outside any encounter with human perception, the electron, the
mountains, the tree involve perceptions. They are perceptions in themselves:
they are how they take account, in their own self-formative activity, of the
world of activity always and already going on around. (Massumi 2011: 26)

How is this not to be said of architecture? And how do we account for

the fact that architecture is matter already organised, by the human, in
a very particular way?
Whenever we see, whenever we perceptually feel, whenever we live
abstraction, we are taking in nonhuman occasions of experience. We are
inheriting their activity, taking it into our own special activity as a human
form of life: as a society of occasions of experience contributing to a
continuing growth pattern it pleases us to call our human self. (Massumi
2011: 26)

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As Simone Brott writes, the constant process of subjectivisation is
inevitably influenced by architectural encounters and our experience
perpetually coloured by the impersonal effects of architecture. To deny
its presence to pretend that all architecture can ever be is recognised is
simply an oversight, an error.
For Massumi though, the important stress will fall on the side of
the (human) body. He writes that [l]ike all animal forms of life, the
human has a technique of existence whose role is to selectively channel
the nonhuman activity always going on all around into its own special
activity and this technique is the body itself (Massumi 2011: 267). He
also writes that:
The senses are procedures of the body as technique of existence. The body is
the seat of bare activity: the region of indistinction between the human and
matter where something doing is always already just stirring, before it starts
to take definitive experiential form. (Massumi 2011: 267)

This is then the key place from which to go back to art (and the
imperative to probe its insertion into life) and consider Deleuze and
Guattaris proposition that architecture is the first of the arts. It is not
with flesh that art begins, but with architecture, they write (1994: 186);
this should not be discounted, as it establishes a very clear imperative
to regard experience and all of perception, human or other as already
in the region of indistinction between architecture as matter and the
human.
That is why I would suggest that the link to ecology that Massumi is
keen to make towards the end of his introduction to the book should
be taken with a crucial caveat in mind: body and nature as always
already of, in and through architecture. The one-word summary of its
relational-qualitative goings on: ecology, he writes. Activist philosophy
concerns the ecology of powers of existence. Becoming in the midst.
Creative change taking place, self-enjoying, humanly or no, humanly
and more (Massumi 2011: 28). Note the more that goes by the name
of architecture.

Coda: Belgrade to London, Pivot 1999

The waves broke on the shore.
Woolf 1994: 234

During the day, this flat in London is filled with light, whatever the
weather outside; the walls are white and the rooms appear as cubes.
But they never are; they are never perfect, never ideal forms, however

Gilles Deleuze and the Missing Architecture

171

simply you dress them. If you look more closely, the walls are not
straight; the ceiling is covered with cracks and there are incredibly small
fissures spreading out from the top corners of the windows made of
aluminium and plastic, like something tectonic. You need to observe,
spend time. The more closely you (proprioceptively) look, the more
becomes revealed of this environment that accompanies every word you
read.
The table is made of oak, composed of two pieces. If you feel under
its surface you will find a latch that releases the mechanism: the table
can be transformed, extended. It indicates the possibility of more bodies
around it than might be initially conceived. But this is what you already
recognise; it is the question of use. Right now there is only one body
seated, and the line, the controlled crack in the surface, is undisturbed,
closed; just a narrow slit to the right of your hand as you hold the book
you are reading, as you type the words that emerge. Only the smallest
grains of grit find their way inside. You leave them where they are but
remain aware of their presence. You dont have to watch them to know
that they are there.
There is no bed in this room; the beds are upstairs. The ceiling creaks
even when no one is on the level above. The sounds from the street below
are different at night, or when it rains. And underneath this flat there is
another, and all the other rooms you have never been in, none of them
the same.
You are reading (I was reading in Belgrade) and something jolts your
thought (my thought within the images Virginia created) and you cannot
separate it from the violence of the seemingly controlled crack in the
surface of the table (the gleam on the edge of my table in Belgrade) that
has lodged itself at the periphery of your vision, almost present, never
perfectly graspable, somewhere behind your eyes.

Note
1. On the transformation of the concept of function in architecture see Forty 2000.

References
Brott, S. (2011) Architecture for a Free Subjectivity: Deleuze and Guattari at the
Horizon of the Real, Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Cull, L. (2009) Introduction, in L. Cull (ed.), Deleuze and Performance, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, pp. 121.
De Beistegui, M. (2010) Immanence: Deleuze and Philosophy, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.

172 Marko Jobst

Deleuze, G. (1994) Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton, London: Athlone
Press.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1994) What Is Philosophy?, trans. G. Burchell and
H. Tomlinson, London: Verso.
Eisenman, P. (1999) Diagram Diaries, New York: Universe.
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