Searching for a Shift of a Paradigm in Architectural Ethico-Aesthetics With Felix Guattari

‘It is up to the architect…at least not to mutilate the essentials of their virtualities in advance!’ (Guattari, 1989/2013, p. 238)

1. Introduction: In search of a paradigmatic shift in architecture

One might say that aesthetics offer a visible vector of a shift in paradigm. Forms, shapes, scales, colours, textures, (de)functions of spaces - all seem to signify a strong tendency away from the modernist minimalism and towards a more complex and plural aesthetic arrangement. For Guattari, though, an adoption of a new ‘style or school’ is not enough for ‘reinventing architecture,’ but ‘the recomposition of the architectural enunciation’ (1989/2013, p. 323).

Felix Guattari elevates aesthetics and equalises its function by arguing that all ethical values are synonymous with its specific aesthetics (Guattari, 1992/1995). In his late works he tried to overwrite the dominant scientific paradigm with an ethico-aesthetic one, because ‘ethics implies that something singular happens’ and share 'this same concern with singularity… in aesthetic creation (Guattari and Spire 2002: 13–14 in Guattari, 1989/2000, p. 12; Watson, 2009, pp. 125–126). If, following Guattari, ethical modes always-already expresses themselves into aesthetic forms, then aesthetic forms always-already mark ethical, thus political, arrangements of power. Let’s delve into the above elevation of aesthetics to ethics and politics.

For Felix Guattari, as for his counterpart fellow Gilles Deleuze, ethics are practices, modes of arrangements to be invented in order to relate, better and better, existing powers and not yet possible virtual forces. Let’s think the role of the virtual in architecture as a bunch of uses of a space that have not yet realised, as a surplus of uses and yet-to-be-invented functionalities. Later in the paper we will see how a process of virtualization involves and reshuffles our sense of time.

In terms of architectural aesthetics, power calculates and captures not only the already recognizable line of aesthetics, a trend such as bio-aesthetics, but also a form of a line that renders a building recognizable, exceptional, a sign. The power of each aesthetic sign in architecture is through affect, but there is something extra of such buildings, something surplus that this paper calls virtual force. An actualised aesthetic line is always traversed by unrealisable surplus.

Our reading of Guattari’s thought is that each block of ethics results in its specific formed aesthetics, not as a passive referrer but an energetic one: aesthetic practices in the role of a partial enunciator (Guattari, 1992/1995, p. 13).

The ethico-aesthetical practices of every building works like a compass of relationality and territoriality: they are able to narrate the lived experience of the users, the accesses and prohibitions imposed on user’s bodies, the stories of the flows of materials and workings used for its construction, the anticipation of its future deconstruction or reconstruction etc. An ethico-aesthetic analysis also speaks about these allowances and porous margins of a design that ‘can never simply be a projected realization of certain given possibilities and predetermined functions’ (Massumi in Porter, 2009, p. 80).

Guattari visited Brazil in search of an ethico-aesthetic paradigm in a process of its actualization, in times when everything there seems to be politically and architecturally in a nascent state (Rolnik, 1986/2007). The reinvention of architecture calls architects not to be in the pure service of Art or as critical observers, but to reveal ‘the virtual desires of spaces,’ to bring about the conditions for the ‘contemporary productions of subjectivities’ (Guattari, 1989/2013, p. 232).

Guattari’s diagrammatization on contemporary architecture and architectural methodology opts for a re-singularazation of desires and values and the activation of existential territories (processes of subjectivation) via cartographic assessments of actual powers and virtual forces of components (universes of reference and value) for both architects and inhabitants (Guattari, 1989/2013).

This goal puts architects and their aesthetic productions in the first line of our collective life; their position is on a polyvocal junction, themselves being catalytic actors and negotiators to elaborate consistencies of singularized, monadic and nomadic, architectural enunciations. This junction demands from them to bring forth, to test, a transferential economy between their present clients demands and that of unpredictable users.

If, as Guattari held, aesthetics bear surplus affective powers that ‘emits sense’ (Abrahams, 2020, p. 612; Guattari, 1989/2013, p. 237) and not only an end product, then the new materialised aesthetic trends are needed to be analysed by both architects and non-architects in terms of what array of subjectifications allow for: of, for example, the pharaonic scales of Renzo Piano’s or Patric Schumacher’s buildings, or the coloured, sometimes alien, curves and textures of the parametric trend.

2. Aesthetics of built forms as forces

Architecture creates a corner in the world, a minimum territory for life, encompassing existing materials and incorporealities, calculating forces, enforcing powers; in other words the whole work stems from a diagrammatization of forces. The least territory emits as an attractor, something like a point, a sign, initiating significations of each particular surrounding milieu and bodies (human and non-human). To put it simply, the goal is to hold the minimum – the side of the needs, and to allow the maximum – the side of desiring production. To form a territory one has to be engaged with multiple lines of problems accommodating the ‘how to’ create a natural artificiality, opening to processes of experimental negotiations between actual possibilities and virtual potentialities.

Buildings, like nests, are time machines, since they create ritornellos or rhythms of flows, the giving which becomes an unconscious given (Radman, 2017). To form a building somebody needs to empty a space, to exterminate previous flows, to cut trees and plants, hives, burrows and dens, to eliminate a surface of an earth, to neutralize soil, to create a new surface of homogenization. Each territorialization is a new use of light and shadow, wind and temperature, direction of movement to its milieu.

The question here is if aesthetic forms have on its own any power to affect and effect the users and those that surround the building forms, or if they can perfectly subsumed to the capitalist function.

Aesthetic forms are signatures, they mark time, they produce or reproduce metric time (chronos), but they carry something untimely, a co-existence of eternal forms or eternal objects as Whitehead would have it, of forms un-actualised, un-captured, un-realized (Deleuze, 1988/1993, pp. 76–84). An aesthetic signature carries a singularity, are being selected, are arranged by specific tendencies of an arrangement; it is always a specific tendency, an organizing value that moves toward practical and actualised ethics.

Let’s repeat it one more time: Guattari argues that ethical values are synonymous with its specific aesthetics (Guattari, 1992/1995). The question ‘what are the ethics of a build form?’ is equal with questions such as ‘how they manipulate flows? What flows are cutting off? What short of actions and passions they territorialize or promote?’ Ethics are not morality, even if they seem to signify some (Deleuze, 1962/1983). In short, the main difference between them is that ethics are always open to new formations while morals are static images of how things must be related.

Ethical forms are forms of real relations that can never be given, but are enabling ways of relation to be experimented and arranged in specific bodies at the side of need and desire. If aesthetics are ethics, as two sides of a coin, then their common core is that of enabling the osmosis of new possibilities from the potentials, from collective enunciations to be formed and act in the here and now.

Aesthetics are part of the building function and not just a dispensable feature called ornamentation. Façades, for example, do not only mask capitalist functionalities but also expose them (a building with an inspired façade outside - to shot a picture with your phone when visiting a city – but with a common block of offices on the inside); they pertain to the undying effect of capitalization of minds and bodies. Aesthetic forms such as façades and other surfaces decontextualize the material, the embodied and the embedded histories, but mostly they enforce a re-territorialised vision of a continuous present onto the future. They are capturing the future into only one form of it, a default futurity.

But significant façades and other surfaces (for example unique tiles on walls and floors), the cutting edge of architecture, are unique marks in time, and if they reflect, as this article argues, the ethical procedures of the current works of power, then they are also in a position to put into question and to emit new problems that pertain to the ethical or unethical relations enforced not only by this or that specific building/mansion/apartment, but the whole bunch of such functionalities, or else the categories of capitalist capture.

Here we start adding a critical force of an aesthetic form (such as that of a façade) apart from its creativity or its function as a Signifier of power (money, social status etc). There is a dependency of an aesthetic form not only in the direction of decontexualization or its ahistorical fetishistic powers, but also toward its vectors of forming wholes and activating critical and clinical inquiries (Smith in Deleuze, 1988/1993: xi-Iiii).

3. Built Forms: Time machines, Spatial machines, micro-political Machines

‘Eventfully: the boundary preserves an edge of timelikeness. The virtual line is the virtual whole as it edges, imperceptibly, into the actual.’ (Massumi, 1998)

A built form enforces the establishment of its rhythms through its affective powers, specific temporalizations of Aion (Deleuze, 1969/1990, pp. 162–168), specific rhythms of movement. This rhythmic function is established and captured through perceptions, pure perceptions such as atmospheres of texture, tactility, softness and hardness of built materials; the actualized is what triggers its surplus virtuality. A built form not only enforces the establishment of rythmic time, but opens up glimpses of the whole of Aion- Time to be unfolded.

A space folds materials and unfolds immaterials supplementary in a co-emerging fashion. There are times before this one, and different spatialisations of this very space. A built form is a temporal machine (its overall capacity of visitors, its date of construction etc) but also a time-machine (a sign in a city). What happens when space and time are unfolding is no other than a becoming-architectural, a becoming-contextual, a becoming-political, since an aesthetic of a building carries with it, and saturates, all the real possibles of spatializations, opening up the history of architecture into its difference from the habitual presence and its current modes of movements and rhythms (for example the rhythm of consumption).

Architectural modes are signatures in/of time and space, invoking stability, but also expose what is left outside; the ‘eternal return’ of the outside not through lack, but its virtual co-presence^[1]. Following this point of view, it can be said that there are numerous micro-politics of architecture, all those involving humans, non-humans, materials, sounds and silences, lighting and shadowing, social and historical, environmental, processes of raw materials and its production, its mining, its toxic residuum, its entombment in landfills, no matter if these have already happened or are to be happen in the future.

In this way, past, present and future, all, become empty, fulfilled, as a whole, and it is this always-open politicization of each built forms: a return with a difference of forms, rhythms, accessibilities and barriers, aesthetics and ethics, the unfolding of forces or the capturing of forces into new powers. There are pharaonic built forms in the archaic world as well as in modern and current architecture - the sandy pyramids, the colour painted marbles of the ancient Greek temples, the sky heighted cathedrals of the transcendence or the oval ceramic Byzantium of the earth, the white-and-gray concrete Cultural Centres of the enforced continuity of the present; there is a theistic function in the past and present time - multiple Gods, one God, science God. Every form of one God seems to demand a pharaonic construction. This is a methodological example of how a real (but) virtual whole can be formed, how one virtual whole causes new problems, new ethics of forces and calculations of powers, in a line of time that is discontinuous, still reciprocally presupposing. It is from an actual spatialised time of a building that new temporalized proto-diagrams of spaces can be opened up.

4. Capitalist de-singularization vs architectural re-signularization

[…] ‘Architecture has always occupied a major place in the fabrication of territories of power, in the setting of its emblems, in the proclamation of its durability.’ (Guattari, 2009, p. 294)

‘Other institutional objects, be they architectural, economic, or Cosmic, have an equal right to contribute to the functioning of existential production.’ (Guattari, 1989/2000, p. 56)

Guattari analysed advance capitalist machine as the great homogenizer of values and references, be it ecological, economic, desiring, genetic coding, aesthetic, or any other kind and type of values, reducing them into one exchangeable, generalised equivalence (Guattari, 1992/1995, p. 55; Vandana Shiva in Braidotti, 2013). It is a machine that flattens difference and plurality making everything one of the same: de-singularization. The premium target of advanced capitalist mechanisms is the production of subjectivity in such a way that it loses its polyvocality and processual creativity by installing empty referents, relations of representation, leaving them (us) with an unfathomable existential void (‘Bifo’ Beraldi, 2009, 2015; Guattari, 1992/1995, p. 29).

Paradoxically, Guattari and advanced capitalism put their effort on the same target, but with opposite vectors. Against this backdrop of impoverishment of the Universes of values, the utmost priority is to relay the possible and potential processual capacities of individualised, monadic, production of subjectivity: re-singularization. Processes of singularization means a pluralisation of the Universes of value and reference as well as a forming of existential territories, and speaking of territories, not many sciences know them better than architects and musicians.

More precisely, Guattari grouped ‘architecture, town planning, public facilities’ directly with the semiotic mechanisms of advanced capitalism that target subjectification (Guattari, 1989/2000, p. 48). Architectural aesthetics of buildings have nothing to do with ownerships and trademarks, its singular whole and its special traits emit sense and affective powers all over the space, like a radioactive material; offer signs of different natures in social, thus individual, unconscious; cast affects and then effect subjective and collective, emotional and existential, environments; capacitate or incapacitate affordances by invoking people to be even more subjected to normality (re-territorialization), or provoke new turns of their own processes of individualization and singularization to a becoming-something (deterritorialization).

The aesthetics of shared/common spaces were the first to be impoverished under the neoliberal rule in a synchronicity with the indirect imposition of sameness of the private buildings by the modernist minimalist schools of concrete and glass with the dominant neutrality of concrete gray, white surfaces, and transparent glass façades. It is this catastrophic capitalism that invents costly logistic solutions to its own demolitions: abandon public spaces and go to a copy-pasted aestheticized private ones and, finally, hire companies to recreate city-brands and logos that will make the city look and function like every other! Decades ago, modernism bear the promise of the new freedom against archaic-traditional rule of aesthetics and functionality of space, by providing empty (mass, inexpensively) spaces to the aesthetic world-wideness selectivity of the post-war subjectivities. Decades after, rooms, corridors, functions, colours, cityscapes seem differentness, with visitors and habitants frequently using googlemaps to orient themselves.

The Impoverished architectural aesthetic sense and sensations, this homogenising neutrality, freezes the perception of its users, the globalized citizens, in one linear time; it is the time of what already exists when processes stop. Contrarily, the times of processes take off from the common metric time into temporalities that signs and traits take over and initiate new processes of their parts; it is the virtual and intensive time:

‘Time is connected to an experience of the novel, a certain vitality or movement and change in the order of things.’ (Porter, 2009, pp. 77–78)

What might be a radical move for architectural aesthetics is the undoing of the one linear time towards other temporalities, this affective giving of existential and collective potentialities, unprocessed, into new real possibilities of becoming-other. It might sound very abstract, very vague, but it is what people do every day across the world, they re/de-function, re-work, re/de-activate, re-appropriate space.

Re-singularization of spaces and built works means that architects leave the aesthetic forms and contents open, negotiable for the users-workers-visitors and architects to come, while offering a dated signature of becoming in the world, not the reproduction of emptiness and neutrality - which is really an obvious whitening and patriarchal spatiality. It is from somewhere specific - a territory - that a line of flight begins, and this line orients and operates itself towards somewhere else, a renewed territory. A re-singularization of space is through ways that a space opens up to unknown times, a territory that de-territorializes and de-temporalises, and this radical shift is what Guattari means by the architectural enunciation through an architectural concept.

Aesthetic interface

What Guattari applies to architectural work is an ecological function that he calls transversality. Transversality in architecture is a matter of methodology, a matter of a pluralisation of parameters during and after the design process, of enunciating all those distinct processes of building; carrying and caring not only about the given and desired functions calculated and decided at the present, but also of potentialities that may arise by the people and animals to come, that come to inhabit a building or a city.

There is no model for radicalizing architecture, but a matter of endo- and exo-consistency of an enunciation. Guattari adopts some types of enunciations^[2], voices that help to establish a more polyphonic arrangement, a dynamic meta-model open to new complexifications, but here we will focus only to the aesthetic modality. As mentioned earlier, in Guattarian optics, aesthetic ordinates emit (affect) and trigger, something that transpose them more to the side of renewed functionality. Architectural aesthetics work as an interface, an intensive surface, which rearticulates to other lived and incorporeal components through affect, this is their ethical machinery. However, an ethico-aesthetic form does not mean that it is good for the people and animals to come. The criteria here is if it allows re/signularizations and ecologies to be invented.

In architectural theory there is an interesting discordance about ‘affect,’ and more specifically about the so-called autonomy of the affect proposed by Brian Massumi (1995). Recently, Douglas Spencer restates the problematization of such a conceptual take:

‘affect is highly amenable to capture within capitalism, of being put to work within its mechanisms of valorisation and its processes of subjectification.’ (Spencer, 2021)

Guattari holds that the aesthetic ordinate as an affective interface could relate ethically the multivalent enunciations. This powerful machine, the aesthetic one, do works in the opposite side as well, as seen clearly in many historical circumstances, for example the fascist aesthetics. The critical discussions about the autonomy of affect, If we understand it well enough, argue that the powers of affect can be used for reactional purposes. In short, the one side argues that affect can be fully captured, while the other that the products of the affective powers cannot be pre-figured.

Our understanding of affect is that it initiates processes of becoming, by breaking down the subjections and the measured timeline, that are unassimilatable and immediate, but something comes to be actualized, but that effect has directions that start from the actual and could work as organisational magnets of the unconscious processes. We argue that a specific emotional atmosphere, of fear/ terror/ reassurance etc, can be established through uses of affective powers. Specific triggers of affect could actually incorporate anchors that lead to specific fields of feeling and existential positionalities. The most common example is the non-topos of an airport or the emotional impositions in a movie by musical tricks (triggers). Affect (impersonal) always ends up producing effects (emotions).

The aesthetic machines of a building surface and its affective powers are not in the opposite side of functionality, nor it has to do only with the human phenomenological perception of it – thus with emotional effects and morals (pretty-vulgar etc). Massumi’s view of affect does not erase emotions and passions, after all if we are to adopt the Spinozean political thesis, it is the joyful passions that relate us more and more to the others, and offer us an adequate form of knowledge (Deleuze, 1981/1988).

It might be argued that we have not seen yet what the aesthetic forces of a building can do, or, better, we have mostly seen - and felt - its normalizing function: buildings that animate estrangement with the living for both humans and non-human animals (functional modernism, brutalism) through specific materials, scales, colours, and shapes. These aesthetic tropisms signify something that current trends (parametric architecture, 3D printing, machinic-learning architecture) seem to encompass too: an eternal function of the current era, a false-changing but static character of the capitalist era, an undying era in which functions of productivity and value of capitalization stay unchanged, but aesthetics multiply: instead of living among quadratic building forms, we will be living among round-shaped or alien-baroque buildings and towns.

Having in mind this Spinozean politics of joyful relationality, and returning to Guattari and architectural ethico-aesthetics, the designing process of the aesthetic ordinates through a transversalist methodology could work to heterogenize further the polyphony of enunciations, it could work as threshold, as ‘a catalytic operator triggering chain reactions at the heart of modes of semiotization that makes us escape from ourselves and open us to original fields of possibilities’ (Guattari in Genosko, 2002: 138). So, aesthetics and its affective capacities could reactivate the perceptual fields of sensibility, revive the embodied selves, re-link parts and traits into new wholes, they could singularize the view one has for/ in our shared collective life.

What Guattari, Deleuze, and their conjoined work practice at once is a critical and creative response in the real present. The critical side exhausts the dominant forms of power, as their precursors such as Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Marx did, while the centrality of their machinic unconscious and virtual intensities reserve as an infinite reservoir of the creation of a new ethics and politics of space. The virtual is real and it is based, activated, and negotiate foremost by the actual, and this negotiation is problematic.

One question that arises through the critical conversations about the architectural theory informed by Delezo/Guattarian philosophy with concepts like affect (Spencer, 2021), is if the creation of the new, alone, is adequately radical. Let us form the same question in a specific example: does the construction of luxurious mansions signatured by Zaha Hadid’s singular aesthetic line, for example, offer a radical vision of the new in the territorialized mundane present architecture?

What is this very radical in front of the obvious tantamount privatized capital that invests itself by its axiomatics of valorization assimilating forms of architecture, just like it does in the art market? What a cartographic methodology does is that it captures lines of power and lines of flight that probably will engender un-present possibilities. In short, every ‘new’ built form definitely extracts capital investment and symbolic power; these are the power relations at work in the here and now.

One point that could be extracted via Guattari & Deleuze’s political philosophy, as practical ethics, is that these assimilations and renewals of capitalism function in more than two sides: they exhaust the new line of aesthetics and all the conditions that actualise it (capital, materials etc) and all their possibilities (this specific style identified from now on). On the other side, the already constructed buildings of a particular aesthetic bears the potential to make a rupture with the whole foundations that enabled this line to come to exist from the very beginning (criticism of scale and utility, ecological critique of the usage of raw and processed materials and its production etc), lastly, it opens up a potential rhizomatic mutation in the direction of economic, ecological, collective and other tensions that may be raised.

These and other negotiations are to be made inside the science of architecture and with all the population, collectively, and are to be made and activated in and by our unconscious. The call to empty the present and its common sense in order to find new conditions of creation is an indispensable movement ‘to become worthy of what happens to us’ (Deleuze, 1969/1990, p. 149), and without critical thinking as symptomatological evaluation, the new is unrealizable.

An Aesthetic form, for example of a building, are always-already ethical modes of relating bodies-forces and by the same time excluding potentialities, thus forming power relations in the actual world (the end product). The Aesthetic architectural forms are always-already political by carrying infinite particles of the historically embodied and embedded collective lives of human, animal, inorganic, energetic and spatiotemporal coordinates.

5. In lieu of conclusion

The way Guattari proceeds in relation to architecture and its aesthetics is neither of criticism, nor of fabulation of the previous, current and futuristic trends in architecture, but indispensable symptomatological, critical and creative, processes that will capture other ethico-aesthetic paradigms of building and designing by activating singular existential and collective enunciations.

Guattari calls architects to occupy the position of the analyser of their trade, ‘to become an artist and an artisan of sensible and relational lived experience’ (1989/2013, p. 232). From the part of a single habitat to a whole of urbanism and its interrelated globalised flows, and from individual to collective, architectural aesthetics become today the political issue par excellence, especially since the tendency moves towards globalised city-states.