Radman Andrej - Critical and clinical cartographies - architecture, robotics, medicine, phi

Critical and Clinical Cartographies

New Materialisms

Series editors: Iris van der Tuin and Rosi Braidotti

New Materialisms asks how materiality permits representation, actualises ethical subjectivities and innovates the political. The series will provide a discursive hub and an institutional home to this vibrant emerging field and open it up to a wider readership.

Editorial Advisory board

Marie-Luise Angerer, Karen Barad, Corinna Bath, Barbara Bolt, Felicity Colman, Manuel DeLanda, Richard Grusin, Vicki Kirby, Gregg Lambert, Nina Lykke, Brian Massumi, Henk Oosterling, Arun Saldanha.

Books available

What if Culture was Nature all Along?

Edited by Vicki Kirby

Critical and Clinical Cartographies Architecture, Robotics, Medicine, Philosophy

Edited by Andrej Radman and Heidi Sohn

Books forthcoming

Architectural Materialisms: Non-Human Creativity

Edited by Maria Voyatzaki

Critical and Clinical
Cartographies

Architecture, Robotics, Medicine, Philosophy

Edited by Andrej Radman and Heidi Sohn

EDINBURGH

University Press

We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com

editorial matter and organisation Andrej Radman and Heidi Sohn, 2017

the chapters their several authors, 2017

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

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The right of Andrej Radman and Heidi Sohn to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

Acknowledgements

This book is the result of the international conference Critical and Clinical Cartographies, which was organised by the Architecture Theory section, in collaboration with Hyperbody, of the Faculty of Architecture of the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), and held in the Armamentarium in Delft in November 2014. The editors wish to thank Arie Graafland for suggesting the core theme for the conference and for generously sharing his research with us. Without him, the conference and this book would never have been possible. We would also like to extend our gratitude to the organising and scientific committees for their insights and feedback in the preparation of the conference and this book, and in particular to the staff of the Architecture Theory section Patrick Healy, Stavros Kousoulas and Gregory Bracken for their tireless efforts and enduring support. To the Department of Architecture of the Faculty of Architecture of the TU Delft we owe the generous administrative support they have offered us throughout.

We are especially indebted to Carol Macdonald of Edinburgh University Press for her receptiveness and enthusiasm for our book project, and for her valuable editorial comments and assistance, and to Heleen Schrder, for the magnificent copyediting input and professionalism in preparing this volume for publication.

We extend our special thanks to all the authors in this book for their generous contributions and cooperation. And last, but not least, we wish to thank our students, to whom we dedicate this book.

The Four Domains of the Plane of Consistency

Andrej Radman and Heidi Sohn

This is Major Tom to Ground Control.

Im stepping through the door.

And Im floating in a most peculiar way.

And the stars look very different today.

(D. Bowie, Space Oddity, 1969)

3C Glossary

It is our privilege to introduce the book that was triggered by the conference on Critical and Clinical Cartographies (or 3C for short) that took place at Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, in November 2014.

First, let us briefly take you through a glossary to situate this neo-materialist project, starting with the three Cs. The first two critical and clinical are directly appropriated from Gilles Deleuzes Essays Critical and Clinical. In other words, health already implies practice, insofar as signs imply ways of living, forms of life.

As Deleuze observed, it was this very ability to shift between the two non-mutually exclusive perspectives illness and health that constituted the Nietzschean concept of great health. Paradoxically, the blurring of the boundary between the normal and the pathological, Smith surmises, allows for poor health to become the very condition of great health. Frailty turns out to be that which forces genuinely creative thought upon us:

The question that links [art] and life, in both its ontological [what-there-is] and its ethical [how-to-live] aspects, is the question of health. This does not mean that an author necessarily enjoys robust health; on the contrary, artists, like philosophers, often have frail health, a weak constitution, a fragile personal life (Spinozas frailty, D. H. Lawrences hemoptysis, Nietzsches migraines, Deleuzes own respiratory ailments). This frailty, however, does not simply stem from their illnesses or neuroses, says Deleuze, but from having seen or felt something in life that is too great for them, something unbearable that has put on them the quiet mark of death.

The great health requires us to think the critique as a process productive of the real rather than the Kantian a priori form of possible experience and to thus rethink the relation between bodies and signs. Symptomatology is thus best defined as the study of signs. As Goethe would have it, this is a genetic rather than a generic approach.

We must confess that, like our colleague Chris L. Smith in his Architectures, Critical and Clinical, we too succumb to the following temptation.

It is neither the materiality of the sensuous body nor the immateriality of the signs that render meaning, but a space of reciprocal determination, real yet incorporeal. Deleuze calls this intensive space or spatium the body without organs (corps sans organs). BwO is not the body (being) but the very process of de-re-territorialisation, that is, embodiment. Embodiment is thus defined as the reconversion of a stratified system of expression into a pre-individual field of emergence (becoming). Here comes the neo-materialist formula, a prescribed technology if you will: To make the body a power which is not reducible to the organism, to make thought a power which is not reducible to consciousness.

Finally, what of the third C that stands for cartography rather than classification, or cartographies, to be precise?

Figure 1 Axes of discursivity/reference and de-territorialisation/consistency, based on Flix Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, trans. Andrew Goffey (London: Bloomsbury, [1989] 2013).

Source: author.

Four Ontological Functors

The book is divided into four parts. Each quadrant consists of three chapters (that is, literary machines). Let us tentatively propose that those four parts are the four ontological functors, as in Guattarian metamodeling. Guattari calls them functors to indicate their transformative effects on the assemblage whose overall dynamics they initiate and sustain: