To Have - Spoken

from Composition of the City, Book - IV, Enunciations: or To Have-Spoken. Analysis of Significances. Architectural Composition / Engineering [1]

AND BENARAS IS A REVELATION! It still possesses moments of the first urbanisation. By the way of proof, imagine a void of the riverbank: of pure landscape between the city and the river where the ghat is now. Imagine the river and the old wall whose delineation is still visible. Imagine the two as positives and not the ghat [as is the habit nowadays]. Imagine the possibilities of such a tension between the city and that which it is fortified against (or, which has yet conquered it). The relation of the void. A Strategy.

Urban | Man |; his domain (largely) mathematic is substance. Note his parallel layers: the river, the sub streets, the pol; note the perpendicular layer: the alley plotted as water would have carved the cliff. This city has recorded the river into its consciousness by the way of this flowing. This is similar to the landscape’s Organising the village. Urban space = countryside as a microcosm. Flowing parallel to the river = being shaped by the river’s flow. Just as they had been flowing in the forests at the beginning; here. And the city this artificial universe is yet that forest. That is its genius loci—an articulate forest. Note that streets meet in triads, the leaves of a peepal tree. Note that the space of a house is no more than a tree, filtering the light; lit as they are from above. Note that the general compression about the street is just as a path in the forest. And note the mathematics: dissolution of the axis, group symmetries. Insert the temple—rock—a millennia of erosion. Note the house-tree-temple-rock complimentarily. And note the inward plunge of the spiral, this spiral is no more then a descent into the cave, the polished sanctum at the heart of granite. And note the granite spreading in concentric circles. The layers are eternal ripples in the flow of this river=city.

In a significant detail, one learns to make a wall like layers of sedimentation in the soil. Mix engineering bricks and pati with stone or concrete in rhythmic alternating layers. In this way one will have the horizontal layers of soil. This act of construction in layers is ritualised by Indian architecture. This notation is but an extension of the aqueous. Insert into this the vertical rhythm of the column, in timber. Or steel. On the ghat one observes grand steel section portals. Offering large scales, lending the river rhythm in terms other than the stone tree trunks. Opposed to the organic. This percussion in harmony with the clam horizontal sheet metal of the waters. Potentially mixing the over- and the under- structured, the organic with the abstract. And further, in steel, the builder should have finest of technical capabilities. Today.

Into this smooth matching of wall-flow and rhythm, this synthesis of organic and abstract we insert wind. The Second Order when understood in terms of VEDH, the piercing, at once an inevitable violence to the sanctum and an articulation of that violence. It is an initiation. The cave is brought to light. It finds its place in the corporeal. The element of vedh is autochthonous, independent of the wall-column sequence. And hence, the winds are held in place with axii describing an analytic gridding of space. This is the second scale. Now you have two systems of scaling; the wall with its horizontal rhythm—of the gravitational kind; and the gridding of fenestration, ultimately united with the sky. Growing to the sky and prescribing the scale of the courtyard and the terrace. That is, the house.

Significant is the relation between a house and the experience in the skies made of invisible walls of pressures, manifest pillars of water over multiple horizons. Notice the equivalent of the domain of man. Where walls have risen out of and made of earth, the pillars a product of gravity and the fluid, where the horizon becomes an idea about itself—the floor. Autochthonous substances. Where in the working of nature the algebraic is introduced to bring control. In which one finds determinism and intellectual play. Imagine an efficiency, from the aqueous in the east to the heavenly. From the heavens to earth. A metaphoric process parallel to that of nature as perceived by the primitive man, the bushman and the aborigine. In this may the soul be satisfied. In the torrents of waters purified in the skies, the thirst may be satisfied and the ground may become a repository of this satisfaction.[2] Going onwards from the possibility of this (disjunctive) synthesis, and once having found them, one must ignite those waters: fire...~sub-æthereal~....Water-fires~....terror.of terrorism in our times~...marking of that terror into our times~.into our grounds~.into our works.....[3]

For ultimately, we all are waves in this æther. Æthere being the other side of [our] desire. And what of the project of | Man | if it is not in the continuous productions of desire? By the way of hope or despair. . . by any and all means. We are translucent, our presence obscuring this presence of the Other; our bodies forming in those basic flows; held up by the basic flows within which, one could recognise the only significant battle as the one that passes through us unheralded. Spoken not of but in it’s own terms and to recognise itself is the task[4]. Having recognised it, to name it; that—the naming itself—which haunts the labyrinths of our creation. And that, only that has the power to give materiality to the imperceptible.

It is time, then, to formulate possible technologies of perception: new technologies for an another architecture. To lend significance to a spent force. As new physics, an array of sciences already in the making would transform engineering; another architecture would be born automatically. Several instances come to mind: think of craft propelled by light, and light propelled by itself. Think of buildings resting not on the solid body of earth; but its magnetic field. It is no longer a matter of placing bricks, it is a matter of transforming energies existent already into that very energy: of transforming water into water. It is a matter of intention. Of Will, if you will.

It is a matter of re-territorializing engineering: of assuming architecture to be a consequence, or a coherent outcome of technological processes. It is a matter of understanding "I" as a bio-chemical process—a matter of chromosome and the mitochondria. A matter of abstract machines. It is a matter of the death of symbols, of the death of despotic representation. And therefore it is a matter of transforming our understanding—as I have already done before—of Benaras.

It is a matter of eliminating all symbolic structures: the super-structures; from the originary. It is a matter of technology reducing our understanding of the world to the level of the bushman or the nuclear physicist. It is the matter of structures already embedded into our brains: a realising or a quickening. It is the matter of the molecular.

Notes:

1. It would not set out to show that an architecture has a certain way of 'meaning' or 'saying' that is peculiar in that it dispenses with words. It would try to show that . . . architecture is itself a discursive practice that embodies techniques and effects of representation. In this sense, the architect's is not a pure vision that must be transcribed in space; nor is it a naked gesture whose silent and eternally empty signifiers must be freed from subsequent interpretation. It is shot through - independently of scientific knowledge (connaissance) and philosophical themes - with the positivism of a knowledge. The question here is how the problem of historical knowledge is embodied in the énoncés. Independence of the architectural from philosophical "themes" does not absolve plastic arts from the expression of "thought". On one hand, the problem cannot be understood as autonomous; separate either from discourse or knowledge-power relations. On the other, philosophy's claims for a monopoly on concepts, as embodies in linguistic proposition is being subtly but unquestionably eroded.
2. No metaphysical soul. Soul as considered, and operated on by the State. not any state, the colonising-occidental state. The state-of-consuming. Foucault argued that one of the definitive characteristics of European state formation since the early modern period was the transition from a sovereign state power which operated negatively by setting limits and constraints, to a de-centred disciplinary power which penetrates our soul, bodies and minds; actively transforming them and producing positive effects which turn us all into self-managing citizens. Foucault's concern was to analyse the techniques and strategies by which this disciplinary power operated, the techniques of the self which turn us, and with which we turn ourselves, into peculiarly modern subjects. Norbert Elias also insists that we should see European social history in terms of a gradual transformation of personality structure, an intensifying 'constraint towards self-constraint', in which the regulation of the human body, as well as our impulses, passions and desires undergo a 'civilising process' which he explains in terms of the increasing monopolisation of violence which accompanied the process of state formation, the effects of the intensified competition between and within social groups characteristic of a market economy, as well as an accompanying historical tendency towards increasing social interdependency.
3. VADVANAL, see Annals of the Bhandarakar Archives circa 1910-18. The first murmuring of the first molecular revolution in 20th Century India. The murmuring which would evolve in water-fires culminating--or being arrested by--other murmuring. These, the second, would result in the burning of a police station. Burning the police, of course, the first manifestation of organised war against the (then prevalent) state. These would continue, into Revenue Riots in Benaras, the Azad Hind Sena, and the battle of the tennis court. The lost and forgotten armies raised by which still refuse to go away. fortunately.
4. "Isn't all that a bit incoherent? Well, I don’t think so because, once again, the molecular revolution is not something that will constitute a program. It’s something that develops precisely in the direction of ersity, of a multiplicity of perspectives, of creating the conditions for the maximum impetus of processes of singularisation. It’s not a question of creating agreement; on the contrary, the less we agree, the more we create an area, a field of vitality in different branches of this phylum of molecular revolution, and the more we reinforce this area. It’s a completely different logic from the organisational, absorbscent logic that we know in political or union movements. OK, I persist in thinking that there is indeed a development in the molecular revolution. But then if we don’t want to make of it a vague global level, there are several questions that arise; there are two, I’m not going to develop them, I'll simply point them out. There is a theoretical question and a practical question: 1) The theoretical question is that, in order to account for these correspondences, the "elective affinities" (to use a title from Goethe) between erse, sometimes contradictory, even antagonistic movements, we must forge new analytical instruments, new concepts, because it’s not the shared trait that counts there, but rather the transversally, the crossing of abstract machines that constitute a subjectivity and .that are incarnated, that live in very different regions and domains and, I repeat, that can be contradictory and antagonistic. That is therefore an entire problematic, an entire analytic, of subjectivity which must be developed in order to understand, to account for, to plot the map of (cartographier) what these molecular revolutions are. 2) That brings us to the second aspect which is that we cannot be content with these analogies and affinities; we must also try to construct a social practice, to construct new modes of intervention, this time no longer in molecular, but molar relationships, in political and social power relations, in order to avoid watching the systematic, recurring defeat that we knew during the ‘70s, particularly in Italy with the enormous rise of repression linked to an event, in itself repressive, which was the rise of terrorism. Through its methods, its violence, and its dogmatism, terrorism gives aid to the State repression which it is fighting. There is a sort of complicity, there again transversal. So, in this case, we are no longer only on the theoretical plane, but on the plane of experimentation, of new forms of interactions, of movement construction that respects the ersity, the sensitivities, the particularities of interventions, and that is none the less capable of constituting antagonistic machines of struggle to intervene in power relations."

Thinking Heterotopia