The Force of the Virtual: Deleuze, Science, and Philosophy

6. Virtual Architecture

· 169 ·· CHAPTER 6 · Virtual Architecture Manola Antonioli Translated by Julie-Françoise Kruidenier and Peter Gaffney What is ironic in a time of unprecedented advancement in scientific and technological inventions is the reactionary and superficial appropriation of historical forms. The problem here is not just one of form, but of the tendency for this architecture to be acquiescent to the day-to-day demands of utility and economics. . . . This romanticising of an earlier time as ‘simpler,’ fails to grasp that it is in the realisation of complexity and contradiction that we begin to find our way out of the psychological malaise we’re currently suffering. —Thomas Mayne, “Connected Isolation” Compared to the wealth and complexity of analyses that Deleuze and Guattari devote to painting, cinema, literature, theater, and music, the place accorded to architecture seems extremely meager,indeed“minor.”Butweknowthatthe“minor,”inallitsforms,plays an essential role in their philosophy, which is why we will not be overly surprised to read in What Is Philosophy? that “Art begins not with flesh but with the house. That is why architecture is the first of the arts.”1 Architecture makes its first appearance in the last chapter of What Is Philosophy? following long analyses devoted to literature and painting; however, this reference is anticipated at the beginning of the chapter by passages that define art as a “monument,” “house,” or “territory,” terms that bring us back to the notions of dwelling and home, and whose appearance here may cause some surprise, coming from two philosophers who have not ceased to think in terms of deterritorialization and nomadism. We must try then to make sense of this at least apparent process of “sedentarization” in their discourse on art. 170 MANOLA ANTONIOLI If the monument has long been the model-form of the work of art in Western culture, this chapter in What Is Philosophy? seems to inscribe itself in a traditional approach, at the same time radically modifying it: It is true that every work of art is a monument, but here the monument is not something commemorating a past, it is a bloc of present sensations that owe their preservation only to themselves and that provide the event with the compound that celebrates it.2 A monument does not commemorate or celebrate something that happened but confides to the ear of the future the persistent sensations that embody the event.3 The art-monument, therefore, is not simply that which takes place and enduresinitsperfectedbeing,notthatwhichtakesplaceastheunchanging repetition of an essence, as the last resort of transcendence and the stability of sense. Rather, its “taking place” constitutes a unique experience of duration as the duration of an event, or as the place of an encounter. A work that only effectuates itself once, one that is nonrepeatable, could nonetheless create a new duration and a new “spacing” of sense. The artistic compound is not given once and for all, but inscribes itself in duration because the new percepts and affects that it creates lead us in turn into new becomings. From this point of view, architecture (as an applied science and as “the first of the arts”) will also be concealed from the memorial dimension of “monumentality” in order to inscribe itself in a field of immanence that is not only spatial or spatialized, but also temporal. It will be an “architecture event” that configures space as well as all the dimensions of time. The Fold and the Virtual The work by Deleuze that has exerted the greatest influence on contemporary architecture is almost certainly The Fold, even if it seems at first to have less to do with space than with Leibniz’s philosophy and its relation to all manifestations of the Baroque. The concept of the fold, which Deleuze bases on Leibniz, establishes a certain unity among the artistic manifestations of the Baroque, “the age of the fold which goes to infinity .” Moreover, and more importantly, it permits Deleuze to redefine the natures of subject, concept, object and the reciprocal relations among VIRTUAL ARCHITECTURE 171 them. We are dealing then with yet one more variation on the idea of the multiple, where multiplicity is not that which has many parts but “that which is folded in many ways.” The Baroque does not cease to make folds, to bend and rebend them, to push them to infinity and to differentiate them according to two directions or “levels” of the infinite: the pleats (replis...