The Affect Theory challenges the alleged primacy of the ‘physical’ world. We engage with a world replete with capacities, tendencies and values, not with an aggregate of objects. In the Nietzschean tenor, there is no antonym for the word ‘value’, and it can certainly not be found in the word ‘fact’. The emphasis is on the encounter, where experience is seen as an emergence that returns the body to a process field of exteriority. Sensibility introduces an aleatory moment into the development of thought and turns contingency into the very condition for thinking. Not only does this upset logical identity and opposition, but it also places the limit of thinking beyond any dialectical system. Thought cannot activate itself by thinking; it must be provoked. Art and architecture may provide such provocation. If to think differently one has to feel differently, and if the ultimate purpose of design is to change us, then architecture is a ‘psychotropic practice’ that modulates and compels routines of subjectification. This makes the concept of affect fundamentally transindividual.
The chapter seeks to invigorate radical empiricism as a means of tapping not into the solipsistic world of design, but into the relation of exteriority – the design of the world. Such anti-representational disposition resonates strongly with Félix Guattari’s Ethico-Aesthetics, or eco-logical ‘power-to’ experimentation, that seeks to challenge all-too-reductionist ego-logical conceptions of ‘power-over’ relations. The chapter juxtaposes three conceptual triads related to feeling, acting and learning: Charles Sanders Peirce’s Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness; James Jerome Gibson’s Ambient Optic Array, Occluding Edge and Affordance; and Gilles Deleuze’s three syntheses of time. The concept of affect, as a near synonym of affordance, becomes indispensable in overcoming the subject/object opposition by tying sensibility to sense, and matter to manner. The main thesis is inspired by Gilbert Simondon’s formula that knowledge of individuation is itself the individuation of knowledge.

Sensing-Intuiting-Imaging (SII) focuses on the production of speculative and intuitive problematisations. These speculations require both the formation of new sensibilities and the creation of new forms capable of expressing their potential. We call these forms images, but following a non-representational approach that does not reduce them to shapes, outlines, or the tracing thereof. On the contrary, we open images to an untapped affective potential that provides not only an account of “what has been” but can also invent “what is to come.”

This issue builds on the 16th International Deleuze and Guattari Studies Camp and Conference, held at Delft University of Technology in July 2024. Hosted by the Architecture Philosophy and Theory academic group and its Ecologies of Architecture research team, the event focused on processes of subjectification. The production of subjectivity has been a central concern for Deleuze and Guattari since Anti-Oedipus. Guattari further developed their schizoanalytic approach to social formations, expanding Anti-Oedipus’s three syntheses into a more general account of three broader ecologies: environmental, social and mental. Today, it is increasingly evident that these three ecologies can no longer be addressed in isolation by the sciences, humanities or arts. Half a century after the publication of the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, this line of transversal thinking is more pertinent than ever for addressing the ever-evolving bio-, techno- and noo-spheres, shaped by hyperautomation, algorithmic governance and increasingly systemic forms of disempowerment.

Footprint 36 features eight contributions that each in their own way examines how the discipline of architecture may contribute to resisting stupidity and relearning how to think by moving beyond disaffected apocalyptic forms of reasoning, imagining and creating. In the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Sixth Extinction, we propose to reframe the concept of stupidity as the inability to discern between the singular (remarkable) and the ordinary (trivial), and not to confuse it with a failure to offer the ‘right’ solution (optimisation). Following Henri Bergson’s understanding of problematisation, the concept of stupidity that we collectively examine is thus understood as the incapacity to properly determine a problem. Its near synonym ‘idiocy’ by definition prevents us from seeing beyond our narrow interests and ready-made solutions, thereby blocking environmental awareness and the possibility of trans-individuation, that is, of living and transforming collectively.

Review of Architecture after Deleuze and Guattari, by Chris L. Smith, London, Bloomsbury, 2023, 248 pp., ISBN: 978-1-3501-6849-7

Let us imagine that you have invited a group of friends to dinner, and they are not vegetarians. The example is borrowed from N. Katherine Hayles (who in turn borrowed it from Hans Moravec, whose written source could not be traced). So, you find yourself in a supermarket in front of a meat refrigerator, realising that your choice essentially boils down to poultry, pork, veal, and beef. Who decided to reduce the infinity of possibilities to these four choices? Nobody did, or perhaps everybody did to some extent. Better still, not everybody, but everything. However, even this is not quite right because it keeps us firmly locked in a reified world. So, what has decided? The answer is ecologies, always plural. It is at least three ecologies – mental, social, and environmental – that have conjointly modulated the attractor landscape to produce the four basins of attraction, while simultaneously ‘pushing alternatives up the hill’.

It is common enough question: What is the human? Sure enough, it is also a question that has troubled some of the greatest minds to walk this planet. Nevertheless, one might wonder, is it really a good question in its own right? To show our allegiances from the outset, we categorically declare it an extremely bad question – in the sense of being unproductive. Like most “what is” questions, to ask “what is the human” cannot avoid but fall victim to an implicitly essential and reductionist definition of the human that would, in addition, aspire to remain eternal and unchangeable, a supposed one-size-fits-all account. However, many of those same “what is” thinkers have appraised the human as the greatest among animals, the one who possesses logic, the one who can adapt to anything that this harsh and cold existence throws at it. The contradiction becomes obvious then: how can there be a universally applicable and everlasting definition of the human if the human is the animal that can (supposedly) adapt and transform better than any other? To avoid this conflict, we propose to follow Gilles Deleuze (who, on this topic, followed Marcel Proust) and adopt what we can call minor questions: when, where, how and for what purpose is the human?1 Such questions do not essentialize but rather impose an approach that demands to be returned to experience itself and therefore provide plastic – as in, transformable and open to revaluation – definitions.

Our present condition urges those critically and creatively engaged with it, to address the transformative potentials that are brought about by a highly intertwined triad of changes. As the posthuman philosopher Rosi Braidotti notes, these three changes can no longer be addressed in isolation or in the context of singular disciplines. At an environmental level, we are entangled within deteriorating ecological systems, global changes in climate that affect areas and populations in vastly divergent ways, and massive species extinction that disrupts a variety of symbiotic relationships. At a social level, we are entangled in increasing structural injustices brought about by economic and political systems going increasingly haywire. Finally, at a technological level, we are entangled in new techno-logical developments mostly related to developments in cybernetic-informational systems redefining the human and life in general, (design) intelligence, and related systems of bio- and necro-political governance and control, that accelerate in their longstanding dehumanizing and disindividuating logics and effects.1 Given its urgent multi-layered social, psychological, and environmental dimensions, this latter technological condition in particular cannot be answered through technology alone. It requires a compound view that ought to be not just multi-, cross-, or inter-disciplinary, but fundamentally trans-disciplinary, in order to address issues in a transversal manner.

It was Gregory Bateson who coined the term metalogue. Enacting an imaginary conversation between father and daughter, Bateson argued that the structure and form of a conversation are critical to the problem that is being addressed. This is precisely why a metalogue is meta: it expresses a shared problem as a point of convergence. As such, a metalogue is by default transdisciplinary or impure, in the sense that it requires the production of methodological, theoretical, and conceptual innovations, novel trajectories that emerge so as to address a problematic field that binds disciplines together. What is the problem that architecture, perception, action and an epiphylogenetic understanding of the world share? We will claim that it is the world itself that needs to respond to this, in all its complexity, all its filthy heterogeneous entanglements, all the aberrant nuptials that in their differential can produce information or, as Bateson would have it, a difference that makes a difference. The information that produces architecture as a world-making technicity, and the information that architecture produces as an actual world-making consequence, will be brought together in the form of a metalogue between the architect and the world, attempting to outline an autonormative understanding of the architectural asignifying mediality, no longer depending on anything transcendent to it, but rather being reconceptualised as the driving motor of a purposiveness without purpose, a consequence-organised dynamic that is its own consequence.1 The strong conviction – that the conditions of sensations are, at the same time, conditions for the production of the new – calls for an aesthetic rather than merely epistemological approach to design. But this is easier said than done considering the traditional tendency to regard the singular – or the purely present – as fulfilled only in the thought of some representable whole. Claire Colebrook thus identifies an ‘architectonic’ impulse in metaphysics, “regarding as properly present only that which can be re-thought, brought to consciousness and rendered universal and transparent to thought in general.”2 Conversely, a particular metaphysical impulse in architecture makes it highly dependent on representation and as such prone to misplacing concreteness. The metalogue sets the convivial stage for the world to push back. The architect is yet to conceive that the opposite of the concrete is the discrete, not the abstract. [...]

The paper addresses the topic of architectural intelligence whose sole purpose is to create affordances and make experience ‘stand on its own’, apart from architecture and distinct from the architect. The principles of sensation constitute the principles of composition of an existential niche whose structure reveals the genetic conditions of real experience. The argument is unpacked across three sections by reference to the Simondonian concept of allagmatics defined as the theory of operations. The first section ‘Ticks and Cats’ argues in favour of inserting an interval between the input and output, with the aim of debunking the mechanicist allegiance to linearity and promoting the concept of quasi-causality. In the second section ‘Ducks and Rabbits’ the affordance theory meets contemporary neurosciences to revamp the concept of metastability and plasticity. Its goal is to reframe the subject as the effect of (architectural) affect. The concluding radical empiricist section ‘Zebras and Flies’ revisits the lesson of the Leibnizian Monadology to tie sense to sensibility and matter to manner. The overall ambition of the paper is to contest the philosophy of representation through the concept of difference and multiplicity.

In the format of a round-table discussion, we bring together voices from different departments, sections and roles within TU Delft to explore questions arising from the current issue of the magazine. Unlike the more familiar 'topias' like utopia and dystopia, atopia eludes clear definition and challenges conventional understandings of space in our rapidly changing environments. As we delve into this multifaceted theme, each participant has provided their unique perspective, creating a mosaic of insights and examples that shed light on the ever-shifting landscapes of non-places.

The non-apodictic culture of architecture is often at cross-purposes with the techno-deterministic nature of engineering. From the scientific point of view, the modus operandi of architecture is often (mis)perceived as vague or indeterminate. It is a bias that has tangible consequences for disciplinary research and pedagogy alike. However, this perceived weakness in architecture could turn out to be its greatest strength, a result of the symbiosis between its Beaux-Arts and Polytechnic traditions (aberrant nuptials). It is possible to be both inexact and rigorous. What distinguishes architecture from other disciplines and makes it the material-discursive practice par excellence is the interplay between the abstract means and concrete ends. Architecture requires both conceptual and practical tools to work effectively in a paradoxical milieu: immersed in the incorporeal world of images and abstract notations while intimately connected to the corporeality of material and forces. Architecture neither houses nor represents culture. It is the mechanism of transindividuation whose primary ethico-aesthetic role is to modulate modes of existence. The established idea of a variably deformable object in a complex vector field, as the main principle of architectural design, needs rethinking. Only an action can be related to another action. Action-on-action, not action-on-object, is the secret of ethological metastability that this chapter will tease out.

The chapter is devoted to an ecological work of art; the proof that senses, inventions and worlds are not to be considered in isolation. It examines the process of folding an ‘uncanny valley’ into an ‘inhabitable mountain’ across seven points. First: Amor fati, the Nietzschean call to be worthy of what happens to us. Second: Decoding and Reterritorialisation, the emergence of sensibilia as expressive features. Third: Superjects and Objectiles, the primacy/exteriority of relations. Fourth: Isomorphism without Resemblance, the vital asymmetry between the virtual capacities and actual properties. Fifth: Schizoanalysis, the non-entailment of material inference, a.k.a. abduction. Sixth: Mutation of Boundary Conditions, the downward causation of enabling constraints. Seventh: Geology of Morals, recasting ethics as a problem of power, not duty. To quote Le Clèzio, “Perhaps one day we will know that
there wasn’t any art but only medicine.”

The work of Bernard Stiegler (1952–2020) provides invaluable material for rethinking the built environment as a sort of inorganic spatial memory that enables the evolution of life by means other than organic life. Following Stiegler’s theoretical turn toward epiphylogenetic processes, Footprint 30 is devoted to revisiting the built environment as middling between individuating technical ensembles and niche construction processes. It offers a platform to the transdisciplinary field of posthuman scholarship dealing with existential niches from a technological angle and the concomitant architectural thought that advances such speculative recasting.

Script for a Synthetic Play delves into human and land exhaustion, new world-making technologies, the need for refuge and infrastructures of care, and cultural and ecological challenges of today.

This tripartite article is devoted to the role of architectural heritage in the process of exo-somatisation or evolution by means other than life. The first part entitled 'Politics of Location' will provide a brief history of the Architecture Philosophy and Theory Group at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) to situate my position following the lesson of Donna Haraway's 'situated knowledges'. The second part entitled 'Affects Before Subjects' addresses transdisciplinary architectural research and education, where I will make a case for the kind of learning that starts with 'leading out' (educere), in response to Claire Colebrook's proposition: 'The word "education" comes from the root e from ex, out, and duco, I lead. It means a leading out. [E]ducation is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul'. After a call to debunk stereotypes, I will turn to concrete evidence of the affordance theory in practice through meta-modelling in the third and last part entitled 'Two Compasses, One World'. In the words of Reza Negarestani: 'Conception without praxis is unrealised abstraction and praxis without conception is a hollow impression of concreteness'.

The chapter draws on the anti-substantivist and anti-hylomorphic legacy of two significant Deleuze and Guattari’s interlocutors: Raymond Ruyer and Gilbert Simondon. Ruyer vehemently opposed the logic of mechanicism with- out regressing to (active) vitalism. His masterpiece Neofinalism, yet to be fully appreciated in architectural circles, is an ode to multiplicity or ‘absolute form’. The title is to be read as a challenge to the hegemony of the step-by-step causation and partes-extra-partes mereology. According to Ruyer, non-locality is the key, not only to the question of subjectivity, but to the problem of life itself. Simon- don too shies away from the metaphysics of presence. For him, the process of individuation cannot be grasped on the basis of the fully formed individual. In other words, the knowledge of individuation is the individuation of knowledge. Simondon’s highest ambition in On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects was to integrate culture and technics (tekhne). The conviction that culture need not be antagonistic to technology is particularly pertinent to the ecologies of architecture. In the second half of the chapter, the affordance theory meets contemporary neurosciences.

Drawing on a range of philosophical texts, Andrej Radman brings together a collection of 11 of his essays, published over the last decade, to show that when a society manipulates its matter it is not a reflection of culture; it is culture. To speak of ecologies of architecture is to break with judgement for experience. As Gilles Deleuze put it in his book on Nietzsche, it is not about justification, ‘but a different way of feeling: another sensibility’. If to think differently we have to feel differently, then the design of the built environment has no other purpose but to transform us. While engineering is solution-oriented, architecture stays with the problem so as to tease out a creative potential.