Deleuze and Space

Author: Ian Buchanan & Gregg Lambert (eds.)
Year: 2005
Source type: book (edited collection)
Raw file: raw/books/buchanan-lambert-2005-deleuze-and-space.md

Summary

Deleuze and Space is a collection of essays applying Gilles Deleuze's (and Deleuze & Guattari's) spatial concepts to architecture, geography, cinema, and culture. The editors' introduction frames the book against the post-war problem of habitability — the shift from "how space affects individuals" to "could individuals affect space" — and against the proliferation of Deleuzian spatial concepts (smooth/striated space, the fold, deterritorialisation, any-space-whatever, the baroque house). Contributors (Buchanan, Harris, Frichot, DeLanda, Dewsbury & Thrift, Genosko & Bryx, Arsic, Bensmaia, Lorraine, Flaxman, Colebrook, Conley, Lambert) each take up a Deleuzian concept to rethink space, place, and the non-place of postmodernity.

Key Claims

• The post-war problem of space is habitability: "At stake is the practical problem of what it takes to make space habitable, to make places from sites where the active place-making infrastructure (tradition, memory, habit, and so forth) had been either destroyed or displaced."
• Before the war, spatial thinking was concerned with "the seemingly damaging effect space was having on the modern individual" (Vidler's agoraphobia/claustrophobia); after the war, "space came to be regarded as uninhabitable by definition."
• Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus replaces the tripartite division of the spatial field (reality/representation/subjectivity) with a spatial assemblage of planes, lines, and points of variation: "there are always two kinds of space: 'smooth and striated space — nomad space and sedentary space...' — are not of the same nature," yet any composition is "always a mixture."
• Deterritorialisation names "the process whereby the very basis of one's identity, the proverbial ground beneath our feet, is eroded." It "must not be confused with a return to a primitive or older territoriality"; anything "can serve as a deterritorialisation, in other words, 'stand for' the lost territory," acquiring a "home value."
• The postmodern city is defined by "its intractability to habitation, or better yet dwelling (in Heidegger's sense)" — cities "made of Teflon" that "repel old-fashioned attempts to put down roots."
• Augé's non-place (airports, train stations, supermarkets) "crushes the creative and indeed anarchic spirit of de Certeau's notion of space"; the "schizo is a better model than the neurotic on the couch" because the latter "dwells in coded space."
• The fold (from Leibniz, via the baroque house) is central to architecture: "Folding refers not so much... to the bending shapes of the materials (Lynn's infamous blobs), but more especially to the convergence of thought and matter, history and substance."
• DeLanda's distinction between intensive and extensive properties: "That which you can grasp, cut, twist and turn, is extensive; that which affects you, but does not yield to your attempt to contain it, is like wind in your face, intensive." Intensive differences are indivisible; "becoming" is movement between intensities.
• Colebrook reads Deleuze's "superfold" (or "unlimited finity") against phenomenology: "each located observer is the opening of a fold, a world folded around its contemplations and rhythms."

Connections

Concepts: Smooth and Striated Space · Deterritorialisation · Warped Space · Uncanny · Dwelling · Junkspace · Heterotopia
Authors: Gilles Deleuze · Ian Buchanan · Gregg Lambert · Anthony Vidler · Claire Colebrook
Theme: Phenomenology
Related source notes: vidler-2000-warped-space · vidler-1992-architectural-uncanny · koolhaas-2002-logan-airport-junkspace · colebrook-2002-politics-and-potential-of-everyday-life · wallenstein-2016-architecture-critique-ideology

Direct Quotes

"At stake is the practical problem of what it takes to make space habitable, to make places from sites where the active place-making infrastructure (tradition, memory, habit, and so forth) had been either destroyed or displaced." (Introduction)

"There are always two kinds of space: 'smooth and striated space — nomad space and sedentary space — the space in which the war machine develops and the space instituted by the State apparatus' — are not of the same nature." (Introduction, citing Deleuze & Guattari)

"Deterritorialisation must not be confused with a return to a primitive or older territoriality; it necessarily implies a set of artifices by which one element, itself deterritorialised, serves as a new territoriality for another, which has lost its territoriality as well." (Buchanan, citing Deleuze & Guattari)

"Folding refers not so much, or rather not only, to the bending shapes of the materials (Lynn's infamous blobs), but more especially to the convergence of thought and matter, history and substance." (Introduction)

"That which you can grasp, cut, twist and turn, is extensive; that which affects you, but does not yield to your attempt to contain it, is like wind in your face, intensive." (Introduction, on DeLanda)

Open Questions

• Does Deleuze's spatial thought (smooth/striated, the fold, deterritorialisation) offer a critical resource against the spectacular/parametric architecture Geoffrey studies, or is it — as Douglas Spencer charges — the very "architectural Deleuzism" that parametricism and the affective turn have absorbed into neoliberal governance?
• How does the Deleuzian "any-space-whatever" and the non-place relate to the wiki's Junkspace and Spectacle concepts?