This article was first published on the web platform of Arhitext magazine, and speaks on the idea of contemporary enclaves, asserting that we are increasingly speaking of an enclave of humanity, and not only an enclave in terms of space, urban framing, etc.

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Full Title: Transportment (1), or The Enclave of Humanity
Language: English
Publication: Arhitext, April 2011
Type of Work: Theory
Year: 2011



How can we talk, today, of a comportment, of an urban “spirit”, when the subject becomes transport (2), urban transfer, an element that needs to be transported ceaselessly, moved from one place to another of the urban firmament? How does the atomization of the city, announced as a matter of fact along with the plans of administrative-political restructuring, prepossess to a granulation of the subject (3), or at least how can we read the gradual dissolution into the medium, as mediums, as life projects that can be redistribuited in the kinetics whereby the city itself constitutes as transport, as injunctive movement involving almost necessairly a certain “self-abandonement”? the transport is a transport of emotions, or the mechanics of a displacement, of a commutation? How does the dynamics imposed by the spaces of a city “oblige” the freedom and the possibilities of the individual, who’s increasingly under the stress of certain scenarios associated with a new type of individuality? If today’s individual seems exploded, pulverized in un-proper scenarios, afore which he’s called to produce and re-produce scenarios of the resistance, itself a mechanism of social governing, itself an appanage of a certain politics, of a certain political claim, this only betrays the conclusive excavation of the human, which is now brought to the surface, encoded into new languages, grammaticized so as to match the new life mediums(-media). The territorialization and re-territorialization of the extremes, of the marges, the excavation of the peripheries, all these are building up the rest of humanity in the guise of an enclave wherein we constitute ourselves as a fragment built, imposed, limited from the outside. In other words, de-constituted from the first, pulled apart, severed – de-constitution as premise of the possibility to exist, of the freedom of movement, of the configuration of gestures, of the capacity to travel, implicitly, to shift the assigned limits.

Camouflaged by architecture, by the medium of architecture, dis-architectured in our own humanity, seeking for the camouflage of some identitarian kits where we’re prescribed the dose of individuality, we are living today closer and closer to a certain depth and to a certain impossible texture of the life environment, under the empire of a future that does not promise anything but its sure coming. That there’s a series of projects, a direction even, trying precisely to offer a certain consistency to these depths and textures, this is a sure thing. But the perspective wherein architecture places its own approach is precisely that of a dissolution of depths and textures, of an almost intangible mediation whereby the exteriorities meet the interiorities. It is not even, to the last, about the immersive character of the new mediums, but about the simple disappearance, about the incident annulment of a set of physical limits meant precisely to homogenize the urban frame. The apparent diversification of the spaces translates, as a matter of fact, a homogenization of the relation, a levelling of the differences through the aesthetical. A feeling of closure meeting a feeling of exposure, of submission under the empire of certain actions, percepts, laws, norms, etc. The more open, the more exposed, the more seized outside the self, more closed outside yourself. Exposure, at the same time, as laying into the open, as disclosure of the self, of the individuality, of the interiority. We are camouflaging ourselves into the exterior, urbanly, losing precisely the camouflage of our interiority, of which we’re dispossessed in order to be re-constituted as (a-political) subjects. Every reform supposes the prodromal de(-)formation of the individual, the (juridic) alienation of the self for a life community, insufficient however to constitute itself in the guise of a community of authentically political subjects.

Architecture constitutes itself, at the limit, in the guise of a proprioception apparatus, of a device that mediates the relation between movements, proximities, and human actions, an ensemble where we reflect ourselves, wherein we’re architecturing a life medium at the risk of dis-architecturing the self. The fact that we have a political right denotes preciselt the fact that we are not, as of right, political, that each of the subject’s political enterprise constitutes in the guise of a territorialization in the field of the law (territorialization, re-territorialization... de-territorialization). Or the architecture of life spaces, like the architectures of the rights, belong to the confounding of the limit between to have a political right and to be, as of right, political, to constitute ourselves in the guise of some political subjects. The fact that we have a body, something that unleashes for that matter everyone’s acerbic pursuit of other bodies where / upon which each one can exteriorize his/her own subjectivity, indicates precisely the fact that we are not a body, that we’re not, for one thing, constituted ourselves in the guise of a definitive body, and then, that we’re unable to form a body, to give a (community) body. Or, in this case, every comportment, let it be urbanly assumed, politically engaged, remains nothing but the transport of individuality, the displacement of the self, the transportment, hand in hand with the regulation of our portability, from one language to another, from one medium into another, from one practice to another, from one politics to another. Comportment in the guise of transport – portment, transportment. Body in the guise of body transport, in the guise of im-property, constantly driven from the back, mobilized precisely so as to avoid falling the victim of a state of inertia, of panic (4).

Architecture builds the frame of general mobilizations, it integrates around itself without allowing the lateral gaze, it builds socialization in order to falsely edify societies. Or today’s society is based on an afflux of affect, of affective constructions/constructs which disaffect the individuals (5), on the excessive assertion, without rest, of the individuality, which translates precisely the dis-individualization of the subject, the atomization or granulation of subjectivity, “particularization” understood as the atomization of interiority, the particle-becoming, particular, in particle. It is based, equally, on the promised legitimacy brought by the future, projected in the guise of a possible world, of authentic life projects, the promise of an antecedent future whereat architecture participates, in and from the antecedent future, in order to “justify” once again the deficiencies of the present and our beingly deficit of presence. Architecture contributes, once more, to the processing of the differences between individuals, being a mark for the localization and movement of the viewer’s body, by receiving some functional differences, not without a certain autopoiesis (6). Architecture contributes, at the risk of its own practice, to the encoding and decoding of the frames which determine our existence in terms of some constant processes and actions of transition, hybridization, and nomadization, alienation, estrangement. Beyond the “ruin” of vision (Derrida), it must recapture however not the space, but its permanent spacing. Not the difference which makes the difference, and which thus further (re-)territorializes the régime of signs and of authority, but the difference which escapes the difference, which shirks from the difference. If we want the “resistance to the philosophical authority” (Derrida) to take place, we need a spacing which can permanently escape its own difference, and in this sense become something we are not.

The remaining enclave of humanity must bear up, however, to a “morphological freedom” (7) defining both the current stage and state of a certain humanism, and the permutational condition of the reference frames and systems, among which architecture is another module. A generalized morphological freedom, turned into condition of having to adapt to the new technical-technological frames, to the new stimuli. The exterior constantly remains exterior of a certain particular interior which must be excavated without rest, territorialized precisely so as to be marked on the map (I hereby remind Bateson’s famous formula, accroding to whom the map is not the territory), engraved, encrusted upon the anonymous surface of society, in order to mark and thus homogenize the difference. The space itself, as such, represents nothing else but a code, hence the need of an uninterrupted spacing – the spacing of an enclave, de-territorialization of the authoritarian territorialities. Without indicating the surrender of the enclave, nor re-territorialization, but de-territorialization, de-structuring, dis-organization eventually, the inverted use of the prosthetic relation between us and the exterior, unscrewing of the system’s falsework, de-realization of the mediums. As Cary Wolfe states, ”(…) whatever we are, we come to be that way by submitting to a fundamentally prosthetic relation between us and the external. Paradoxically, these radically inhuman and nonorganic programs, codes, and archives are the medium through which we can fully realize who we are – but only by becoming something we are not.” (8). The stake lies, however, precisely in becoming something we are not in order to save the remaining enclave of humanity, as a rest, over-charge of a society which no longer retrieves itself, a-propriation in the middle of im-property, de-territorialization of the mediums against the media-becoming. Dis-architecturalization precisely so as to save fragments of architecture.

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Notes:

(1) I use the term transportment in more acceptances. First, it represents a construction between “transport” and “comportment”, which in its turn does not reside only in what we’d call behavior in English, but also in a com-portment, implying the idea of a course, of a transport, of a portability, and, at limit, of a de(-)portation (objectual, of self, etc.).
(2) I use the term transport both as movable, transportable object or being, specially by the aid of a means of locomotion (an important note when it comes to speaking about the way today’s metropolises are being constituted), and as self-abandonment (caused by emotion, by enthusiasm, by pleasure, etc., emotions that I do not involve here in no wise, as I am speaking, till now, about the simple self-abandonment).
(3) On the idea of granulation, see Sabin Borș – „Individul ca frecvență. Granulare și codare” [The Individual as Frequency. Granulation and encoding], in Art Out, no. 1/2011, pp. 46-56.
(4) The continuous mobilization represents, for that matter, the frame of a set of prescriptions regulating the actions of individuals, in order to maintain control on the biological, natural fear, which could degenerate into a state of inertia, of panic opposed to this mobilization – “The culture of panic begins where the mobilization as continuous advancement ends”, Peter Sloterdijk – Eurotaoism. Contribuții la o critică a cineticii politice [the Romanian translation of Eurotaoismus. Zur Kritik der politischen Kinetik], translation by Alexandru Suter, coll. „Panopticon”, Idea Design & Print Publishing House, Cluj, 2004, p. 55.
(5) See, in another register, the analyses undertaken by Bernard Stiegler in Mécréance et Discrédit. 2. Les sociétés incontrôlables d’individus désaffectés, Galilée, Paris, 2006.
(6) Autopoietic systems are characterized, according to Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela, in the guise of systems capable of reproducing the elements that constitute the system itself, open systems in terms of structure, yet closed in terms of organization, based on a selective, self-referential logics, used precisely in order to filter and to process the complexities of the environment. See The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding, Boston, Shambhala Publications, 1987.
(7) A. Sandberg – Morphological Freedom: Why We Not Just Want It, but Need It, conferință susținută în cadrul Conferinței TransVision, Berlin, 22-24 iunie 2001, text disponibil, în varianta sa integrală, urmărind link-ul: http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/Texts/MorphologicalFreedom.htm (last time checked on the 21st of April, 2011).
(8) Cary Wolfe – „Queasy Posthumanism. Hylozoic Ground”, în Phillip Beesley – Hylozoic Ground. Liminal Responsive Architecture, Riverside Architectural Press, 2010, pp. 56-65, respectively for p. 65.