Conclusion | Infinite Thematics
To produce, in the world such as it is, new forms to shelter the pride of the inhuman – that is what justifies us.
— Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds
The objective of architecture is to synthesize the meanings sourced in spatial and material relationships. Architecture is not a projected synthesis of rhetorical metaphors. An architectural synthesis will expand possibilities of experience, events, within an intentionally designed space. These will be found, read, and expanded upon through the materials that compose the work. To read a space, either a built one, or one drawn, is to place oneself within that space, and to imagine the profound potentials of cognitive expansion within. Barthes defined the semantics of expansions as existing in Thematics:
To thematize is, on the one hand, to leave the dictionary behind, to follow certain synonymic chains, to yield to an expanding nomination, and, on the other, to return to these various substantive stations in order to create some constant form. Only an infinite thematics, open to endless nomination, can respect the enduring character of language, the production of reading, and no longer the list of its products.
Thematics engender concepts, they provoke action. Only a conceptual act can define the moves that compose the final form into thematics. To create, to conceptualize, is to discern, define, initiate action, and execute with critical gestures. It is important for us to employ a critique of every possible critique, to build up an insatiably critical anxiety that will always lose its patience with watered down limits, and tenuous projections. Criticism may easily be Janus faced. By establishing the vanishing point where intention diminishes, where limits are hit, a concept’s validity attenuates into thin air; such attention in to detail in criticism is usually accused of being harsh. But to make criticism operative, it can’t simply establish the point of a concept’s elimination, it must revitalize the concept through suggestive opportunities. For a critic not to suggest, a critic not only fails in establishing the plane of opportunity, but in doing so, they “speak only of themselves when they set empty generalizations against one another,” as Deleuze and Guattari illustrate, as such critics “are the plague of philosophy.” Throughout the text of What is Philosophy?, the authors illuminate and expand the task of philosophy, which we may also appropriately claim as our own for the task of architecture: “to extract an event from things and beings.” This will open up possibilities of creating new concepts that give space, matter, and thought the potentials to expand in new directions. If desire resides within the narrative, the possibility of transferring it into the object must be made, thereby placing desire directly into the product of work. A critical anxiety will show how the work is not the reproduction of some particular rhetorical metaphor or analogy that happens to be fashionable at any given time; it will show the contrary, the object’s essence.
The essence of architecture is active in the built work, not in the rhetorical narrative. Hence the slash (/), of Barthes’ S/Z. This is the mark that confronts and functions as the cutting plane of truth. The slash eliminates illusion by turning a mirror against the two characters that make up the initials S and Z. Their reflected symmetry cannot be ignored, by establishing their presence in the index of paradigms, their battle against each other is futile. If S narrates desires, and Z is the design of the built work, their intentions must be fused into a project’s conceptual initiation. We must first seek the activation of the work, and project our desires directly into the work. Admitting that we desire is the first step. The second step will encourage those whose suppressed desires are saturated within the rhetorical narrative, to transfer their intentions into what is really wanted, the built work. Enjoy your fetish, as some already do.
And so we arrive at the point of redemption, the point of departure away from critique and into the enjoyment of the product of work. To enjoy, to interpretively qualify, applies the inner touch of human experience, a personal sensation. Through sensation do we participate and perceive, make contact and focus, read and give meaning, not only to ourselves, but to an ethics of architecture. As the ethics of architecture are aesthetics, we should focus our attentions to creating works of architecture that are sensational, and against rhetorical constructs that speak only to the timid psychological workings of the author. Affirming Alain Badiou’s optimistic justification of our very human essence, to produce new forms, not only shelters the pride of the inhuman, our animal within, but celebrates our creative abilities. And in Logics of Worlds, Badiou’s quotation of Mao Tse-tung should be shown here verbatim, by initiating conceptual developments, soon, “we will come to know everything that we did not know before.” This encouragement of our inherent desire to create, will build a world capable of producing its own truths, within its own work.
[ Introduction ] [ The Transfer of Desire ]
