Aphorisms, or an archive of obvious revelations.

Aphorisms are ongoing lines of thought dispersed in time and space ranging from stating the obvious to introspection.

This archive is an ongoing stream of consciousness, it might and perhaps should contain contradictions.

 67. On autonomy, again

Autonomy in itself is an abstraction.

Taken bluntly, most basic definition of autonomy could be the capacity of an entity to exert total control over its internal matters, while being bound to a greater entity or a context in its external dealings. Applied to a human subject, this could mean freedom to choose what to consume (information or material consumption), how to manage one’s own body, and capacity to exercise intellectual creation within. If autonomy is the subject’s capacity to exert control over such inner dealings freely and at will, - which, for the sake of this postulation, take complete freedom and will as possible ideals- autonomy is still only a part that composes subject’s reality.

—

Horizon of the real for a subject appears at the moment of conflict between inner dealings and its greater context.

—

Subject is in a continuous conflict with a given context, or external forces. Agency is perhaps subject’s capacity to bend or influence external forces within a certain sphere. Technique is how agency is practiced. And knowledge is the abstract basis of technique. Absence or weakness of knowledge would lead to poor techniques, and in worst case no agency for subject to influence its context or the immediate world around it; in the extreme case subject would end up as a total product of its context, one of many iterations among a constellation.

Autonomy, in this frame, is understood as an ‘inner construction of means’; that lead to knowledge, technique, and potential of agency. Autonomy, understood this way, is an infrastructural process within the subject towards prospective mediation (move through, deal with, co-exist or exist in conflict against) of future contexts.

Does the subject come before the context, or vice versa? In stark truth, a subject is born into a context, and as a result of contextual conflicts that predate its arrival. This is a primordial truth all subjects are bound to. To be a subject means to have born into a context – propagated by a context.

—

Subject is in perpetual conflict with a Context.

Agency is Subject’s capacity to bend a Context.

Technique is how Subject exercises Agency.

Knowledge is the basis of Technique.

Knowledge (including acknowledgement of lack thereof) is thus the indirect core constitution of Subject, since its predilection is paramount to how Subject can relate to its Context (in effect to and in affect by).

—

Subject is driven by fear.

Existential dread is a well trodden narrative path.

—

Identity seeks repetition, and relations of sameness. Sameness is also a desired condition to perpetuate pathways of communication. Sameness enhances predictability, which is implied control over situations, and one’s life. The term ‘figuring out’, implies a stable figuration of one’s life to subscribe to and strive for; the safety of knowing one’s place, and acceptance of an identity to dwell in.

Our fear of the unknown, or the unknowable, unpredictable, unstable, is at the essence of processes of subjugation, or, what makes subjects. Being a subject is being subjected-to a greater order, attaining an identity – a repeatedly knowable and predictable collection of qualities. This comes at a cost of being in an inescapable context perpetually, and kills the possibility of any aspect of living existing outside -or unbound to- a context, in vacuum.

Hence we are addicted to content, which gives us pre-mediated contexts to dwell in. The twofold comfort lies in sparing one the trouble of engaging in meaningful creation of a context, and convenient attainment of a definable identity for a period of time in a defined space.

One mass solution practiced against this conundrum (for those who recognize it as such), is the search for transcendence – which is really subjection multiplied. Transcendence promises of escapology, but through putting forth an ever greater order to be subscribed to (simply cosmological, ‘beyond’ the self, or theological).

An alternate opposition to problem of transcendence is immanence, which could be summed as nowness.

Nowness implies pure existence, and complete dissolution of subject.

Nowness is total presence of self, whereas transcendence is erasure of self, or total subjectivation.

Transcendence erases the self in pursuit of total subjectification.

Immanence erases the subject in pursuit of total presence of self.

—

It is through nowness that the self can attain a capacity to re-contextualize the world-around.

 66. On aesthetics

“Whatever is real in our sensations is precisely what they have that isn’t ours. The sensations common to us all are what constitute reality. Our sensations’ individuality, therefore, lies in whatever they have that’s erroneous.”

– Pessoa, 369, Book of disquiet

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Sensations that are allowed to enter into a construct of collective experience, are only given permission to become part of reality. In other words, if reality is understood to be constituted by the sensations that attain a commonality, then sensations that are not common do not constitute the real. This, of course, hinges on the assumption that any reality is shared reality, in the context of a society. The real as discussed here, does not refer to the capacity of an individual to experience sensations (to either physical or immaterial ends), but rather refers to what the society, or a collective, accepts as truth. For a sensation to attain the status of truth in the context of a community, it needs to, as a prerequisite, first attain share-ability; ripe for a communicable packaging, filtered through the conduits of communication, be it semantic or technological, so that it could be received, consumed, digested, by a commune of receptors.

Does reality prerequire an audience? Meaning if the real is produced out of an interaction between an expressor, and a receiver, is it fair to say this interaction suggests a performance, a stage on which that performance could unfold, and an audience to redeem the performance itself? ‘The common’ as it could be understood in this context, is what’s left out of the transmittal by the performer, after the parts that don’t fall under the audience’s consensus is taken away. Individuals that constitute the audience might take away ‘uncommon’ impressions, or subjective interpretations; however these would remain out of ‘the common’, hence the shared meaning, or the real. The higher degree of commonality a performance, or message, could attain, the more ‘popular’ it will become in the quantitative sense, deliberate practice of which is ‘populism’. ‘Art’ on the other hand, is not concerned with ‘messaging’, but rather potentially subjective experiences it evokes; it is through the evocation of subjective emotive responses ‘art’ attains a commonality – and such is the difference between poetic communication versus populist communication.

Symbiotic relation between the real (or what a group accepts as truth), and a constituent performance, seems counter-intuitive at first. After all, there is the common conception that, ‘that which is staged’ is an act, a particular simulation of the so-called real life, charged as a delivery mechanism for a central idea or message. An act, a performance that is staged (or contextualized), is presumed to be a fiction; and an audience interacts with this act with the preamble that the purpose of the practice they’re engaging in is to look for a central, essential, more likely than not – moral, message to be found within this fictive realm. The designated place for this fictive realm is called the theater, where the audience goes precisely in search of moral takeaways. A curious revelation enters our sight at this cognitive juncture: the possibility that there are endless theaters, stages, contexts, imbued in the everyday life and the ordinary; since in it’s bare form a ‘fictive realm’ exists in between any bodies (media) participating in conveyance (and/or transaction) of messages (content).

65. On image and representation

Conceptualization of a thing as a foreclosed entity with unknowable edges, vertices, corners, from a subject’s point of view is overmining the object.

A picture of a world wherein subjects are all independent editors of adjacent realities, leads to a system where any common ground is a chance occurrence, any recurring knowledge that could be accessed in different times by different bodies, virtually unexplainable.

“Matter in our view is an aggregate of images,” to quote Bergson.

Matter, perhaps, isn’t a foreclosed entity that has to be fully defined or can never be fully determined. Perhaps there is no ‘fullness’. Matter is a currency, in circulation via images. Images are impressions, or marks, be it visual, or psycho-somatic. Objects leave impressions amongst themselves as well. And all of us, to some extent, is capable of rearranging this currency in various ways, enacting life as an unfolding of these circulatory dynamics.

When one enters a room, the body-mind entity combines with the ambiance to create a novel compound entity. The dust, the light rays, the solid objects decomposing space, and the haptic volumetric weight of the void registered, puts the subject on a stage. Subject is conditioned by the ambiance, memories (of distant pasts or inoculate epistemologies) are awakened in different degrees, for use of the creative agent, be it for mundane tasks or assuming existential positions. In that moment, the objects that contribute to this conditioning, architecture included, are as real and ‘full’ as they could be in that duration. Latencies of repeatable responses of objects are what make them what they are. One can catalogue all the differing degrees of responses that could be extracted from an object to come to an approximate definition of what the object is. But that is what it is – an approximation.

Living beings are privileged in the strength of their agency, but all entities have agency. World is not a composition of objects and subjects lumped together one ruling the other. World is a plane of co-existing agents, but with wildly varying degrees of influence when it comes to conditioning the real.

64. On history as a measure

Historical frameworks provide a measure upon which change (be it progress or regression) could be measured at all. A historical timeline, isn’t just a factual record of relations of cause and effect, but also a social infrastructure, on which narratives of events could be constructed. The narrative-making aspect is precisely how our creative practices decide among hierarchies of points of views, and contextualize actions. In vacuum, an act of creative production can still have a definable merit, or traits, albeit in an isolated, analytical sense. It is in context, an act of creative production ‘moves’ the intellect, a society, and/or its’ culture. In context, the creative act can be a lens that attempts to make sense of the world at a particular given time and place.

History thus in a greater sense, allows one to establish networks between different narratives, production, perspectives of worlds. It provides a scale on which yielding points, liminal conditions could be observed and conceptualized. Historical scale in a way, makes possible the subjective architecture of events – wherein an ostensibly insignificant act could hold tremendous value when contextualized within a course of mutually inclusive events in time. History teaches us about cycles, and cyclical nature of events and their consequences, not just linear accumulations and relations of causality. In this way history also teaches us reciprocity, which could only unfold in time and involves a decentralized intelligence – as opposed to mere correlation which risks bias and neglecting the seemingly unknown. Seeds of the art of embracing the un-mappable, un-knowable, un-quantifiable phenomena, lies in engagement with the historical framework. By placing the conscious body on a stream – history connects us to futures, especially crucial in a contemporary world so enamored by a tyranny of the present.

History makes visible the displacement; it makes movement as a concept possible. Without concepts of displacement, or movement (in an abstract sense), other concepts such as self-reflection, nostalgia (for a past that has been lived), or melancholy (yearning for different futures), remain locked. Consequently, death of historical frameworks, also threatens imagination – daring to dream for different futures to come; since a common sense of relativity is crushed in an ever-present state.

Historical framework allows for revisiting; layering of periods of time and their availability through the position of the present context.

After all – the stream of cultural, social, technical acts of creating, is the assembly of things from the past into novel futures, and the act of assemblage occupying the present. Growth, or evolution, the improvement through critique, (not necessarily to a better, fitter, happier future, but to a more sensible, and informed one first and foremost), happens in those gaps between the parts of the assemblage, as they are transformed in pursuit of a common language. Perhaps the central purpose of contextualization in regards to a creative practice is this: to set up the stage on which gaps could be defined; gaps that will have to be overcome with leaps of faith.

63. On time, space, and speed of architecture

Primordial purpose of architecture is freezing an intersection of time and space through form, in a life where everything otherwise is in constant flux. Form is beyond use, beyond ascribed functions, beyond any agendas that dictate programs.

There is a thread of reality about human life that is both existential and biological simultaneously; the fact that one wakes up to a slightly different version of one’s self every day. It’s a bio-chemical reality, but also a mental exercise in that one’s identity is not a fixed definition; it’s fluid and amorphous, in tune with the perpetual motion of the ground below our feet.

Architecture is thus a fundamental social practice of constructing datums; experiential reference points that will host time, in the same way, every day, every year, every millennium. One will not be the same self tomorrow, it was today – but shadows will cast the same geometry on a wall they did hundred years ago.

Architecture becomes an act of collective socio-psychological settlement. What I hope to mean by that is that, architecture holds the possibility of creating a world we could know, places that we could come back to with the safety of knowing that they host time and space in an immutable manner. This is how architecture hosts our memories, collective and individual. Memories in turn, are conduits of shared knowledge, or ways of being and knowing the world around us. Architecture holds the possibility of contributing to how we could make sense of the world – and consequently also interrogate it.

I say ‘holds the possibility’ because this is not a given. The prevalent disjunction of form and meaning, and related atomization towards sub-disciplines and hyper-specialization of everything under modern capitalism has been leading us to a period of ‘liquidification’ of architecture- for the lack of a better term. In direct terms, although a term that is ripe with a multitude of understandings and hence its allure, what we mean by ‘liquidification’ of architecture could be seen as an emerging ubiquitous formless-ness, non-descript-ness, and hence non-place-ness that become the overarching produce of architecture. There are many issues with this from a struggle against the earth itself, to creation of novel forms of dispossession and inequality, which should be subjects to other discussions.

At the root of this problem lies a cognitive loss – a loss of communal ways of knowing, strength for empathy, and also individual strength for interrogating existence in a forward way which is only possible in cultures that memorialize settlement as an act dispersed over time (as opposed to nomadic cultures which ultimately ‘liquidified’ architecture is a part of). This is not to say contemporaneous problems of the modern world are not to be faced or adapted to. It is to say that the way we’ve been going about it so far is eroding our collective ways of knowing into an oblivious fluidity wherein a system apt for opportunistic/neo-feudal exploitation is growing.

62. On the process of formalization / or / free will and fate

{For the record it should be futile to be fatalistic.}

Human psyche has this capacity to render the occurrence of an event as an affair that couldn’t have happened any other way, reinforced by summation of smaller events and details scattered in one’s personal history that seemingly led up to it. There are recurring themes in one’s life, that eventually make more sense as revelatory anchor points when a greater theme emerges at certain transitional points in life. The question is, aren’t the “recurring themes” are enacted by a will that is enacting them because that is the way it knows how to live, and the tendency to enact parallel recurring actions only gets stronger because it’s reinforced by the predating ones as they accumulate?

We enact life in such a way that the trace, the lineage of the path, the form that it takes, somewhat makes sense to us, as seeing a self in a mirror, albeit with imperfections, but nonetheless an impression of a whole. In the end (terminal points where transitional periods occur), when life is swayed towards one way versus another, there has to be a strong feeling of “it couldn’t have happened any other way”. This feeling gives us a home to dwell in, it’s welcoming, it’s accepting, validating. Some might confuse it to be ‘fate’, an overarching scheme we were bound to follow in all our metaphysical weakness. Yet I believe it’s the opposite extreme, it’s the will that enacts over and over again, recurring narratives until we believe where it has taken us in life is where we were bound to be. ‘Make-believe’ in other words.

This is not to deny that some people could always feel out of place, steeped in alienation, always feeling late to something, always arriving but not quite fully. For these people, in the similar vein, this is their recurring theme, the spirals of life they entrap themselves within, a state of homelessness they are bound to (or bind themselves to) perpetually engage in – and within which they actually find a constant state, nomadic but one they could hold on to, an identity.

If life on universe, and in its microcosmic scale on earth, is formless in essence, the primordial reflex of human psyche is to give it partial, temporal, yet legible, forms. Forms are the music we make, our written and spoken languages, abstract psycho-social space carved between two people in a relationship, amongst other obvious creative endeavors. It is in forms, we grab instances of life and amplify the pulse, the colors, the vein. In forms, we make sense of the world around us, and life. In forms, we make sense of who we are, or at least the image of ourselves we imagine to be. It is in forms, we communicate and touch one another, while any form predicates a possibility of misunderstanding, it nonetheless is a door opened towards a way of understanding as well.

Within the informal maelstrom of the universe, inside the chasm we come and go for a brief time, forms are our fragile marks of life, and question marks posed against the nature of existence.

61. On blindness of that which detours

One who’s stuck in a linear progression of time, and vita activa without pause, is blinded to those things whose nature involve detours, meanders, hesitation.

Consider perception of time as a landscape, versus as an arrow with sharp and clear distinctions between the past, present and future. Landscape can only be occupied a finite, known point at a time – perhaps this is the present; future is points one might occupy or even discover - either newfound or under a new light, and past is the trails and vistas and microclimates that have become experience and memory that mold. In this landscape of time, temporality is a spatial accumulation that is accessible for traversing – which also means an act on one edge of this temporality could reframe the whole in an unprecedented way.

Time as an arrow on the other hand, is always on the look for the next destination – the ultimate locale that will justify a grand narrative. Time as an arrow predicates an opposing relationship between the present/future mix and the past, compared to time as a landscape; for time as an arrow, an act that is to come in the perfect present is coveted to be an event that everything that came before must have been for; it shrinks the vast ocean of memory and experience into servitude of singular messianic moments to come, within its squinting sharp gaze.

In time as an arrow, the lived whole is for the singular event to come.

In time as a landscape, a single event can alter the space of the whole – the space where identity dwells.

For one who’s stuck in time as an arrow, detours are wasteful, paths that meander meaningless, hesitation or lingering before acting (which might very well result in sideways steps and a potentially different path forward) merely indecisive hence weak. For one who’s stuck in time as an arrow, there can be no merit to paths that spiral before flowing into an eventual direction (perhaps only to spiral further, later, in a different spatiotemporal zone). In time as an arrow, experience is not valued for what it is but for what it can serve.

Consequently one who lives within time as an arrow, remains blind to subtexts. Subtexts are the murky depths of meaning below the immediacy of the semiotics we use to communicate – it’s the depths of the communicative or expressive acts we engage in as part of our existence. Subtexts are the things we mean indirectly, and things that could only be expressed in this way. Subtexts are in the language we use, body language we employ, actions we undertake, manner with which we handle events dispersed in wider timelines, acts of loyalty and perseverance we can only let shine in time and space when given.

Subtexts can only be shown and not told – which the limited gaze of the linear time can’t see.

60. On the impossible nature of thing-in-itself

For a thing, a subject, a person in an anti-anthropocentric way.

There is no such thing as a core being, beyond interaction with any circumstances external to it. Or even if it is possible, as a concept, or as a physical datum, it is only the clean slate upon which idiosyncrasies are meant to be grafted. The peculiar permutation of idiosyncrasies, plus the datum lump that might be the core, is the being’s identity in its totality; and it’s ever changing.

An identity is fluid. It’s fluid because it’s structured with partial agreements on validity of attributes, in agreed periods of time, in agreed contexts. We can speak of a core, unchanging lump, describe it scientifically, but this simply doesn’t get us anywhere in understanding the character, thought world, and potentials of the subject. The truth of the core lump is merely a different matter of interest than one relating to identity or persona.

Thus we exist as receptor-beings. We don’t exist as foreclosed entities with core truths. We construct principles, and mold them, edit them, as we go on. We are agreeable beings, we find ways to agree, we are creators. We also like to share – we rely on commons; to conspire and bond with others, for tribal reasons, but also for attaining access to worlds greater than our singular entity can attain. Hence we are collective – we have to be in sync with things that are external to us, we collaborate; not just with other fellow humans but with the outer world at large.

Who we are is not a question of discovery of an unveiled object within. We are who we are because of how we react to things and situations external to us. We are who we are because of how we choose to act, when we face the immanence of action – and existence when observed closely, is a continuum of this immanence. A continuously emerging necessity to act (or cease to exist), against all things external.

You are who you are because of how you choose to act.

Actions turn to marks turn to weights turn to emotions turn to thoughts turn to pillars turn to stimulants turn to reactions. A reservoir of taxonomies, of emotions, experiences, memories, moments lies within – in which we swim. You swim and call and respond, until you cease to exist.  

59. On burden of freedom

Freedom is heavy; it is the realization that one has to act upon the world to catch a glimpse of an understanding of an existence. Freedom is a point, an abstract measurement between past and present, that has no history or future, no world in-front - but all-around. This is quite profound; world (and all that is of worldly existence) is “all around”, one finds itself submerged in it – there are no abstract frames from which to frontally view other things, what is to come, or what has passed.

To truly act, weaving habits and revelations slowly in time to achieve displacement, a movement, is heavy and often finds form in spirals as opposed to straight lines. We fall easily into autocracy of selections; what to be done next, what to aspire for, who to become, whom and what to love: the slipstream of comforting top-down structures with their ready-to-use moral codes. If one abstains from selection for a moment (in life), that’s when one find the self on an open field; the plateau of decisions and possible existences where time is not something to be measured against but a material force perpetually chipping away at the being every moment.

To “decide” is to “cut-off” (‘decidere’). To cut and shape a path. To “select”, on the other hand, comes with an underlying anesthesia of subconsciously telling one’s self that there wasn’t a possibility of empowerment to begin with, and finding a twisted comfort in it. Suffering is the undeniable and consistent truth. One either suffers through repression of will with the delegation mechanisms of selections – or, through actually living through the suffering of the burden to decide. How beautiful could it be to take the latter kind of suffering as a material of existence, and mold it into new worlds that couldn’t have existed otherwise. Perhaps the truth is that there are earthly forces - and earthly forces are all that there is; it is a question of either letting them pass through, or riding them towards roads of procreation.

58. On the fleeting

Truth is that world and the life on it have always been incomplete, caught in a perpetual process of becoming. The “thing in itself” could exist as a conceptualization, but in the material realm only as an artifact, a coding of a partial fragment of collective or individual consciousness at a given time, that will be appropriated, re-interpreted by external attempts of engagement, and ultimately drifting further from the will of the consequences that led to its creation.

The thing in itself can’t be charged with an intrinsic will. It is not auto-poetic; rather it is open to endless external auto-poetic processes. Thing in itself provides context – and this is why it is best described as an artifact. Thing in itself is a myth.

57. Heraclitean provocation

{Heraclitus – All is in constant flux.

Parmenides – All is in constant stasis.}

The concept of constant flux, state of being in constant change, is a curiously deceptive one. The caveat is that in order to maintain the veracity of this statement –in its absolute totality- one has to deny the possibility of a common ground on which this idea could be transmitted between a source and an audience in the first place. In other words, mechanisms of communication including language, accumulation of innate knowledge as part of an ongoing evolutionary motion spanning millennia, relies on certain things sticking to the surface amidst all the flux. Commons are shared realities constructed over time. The trick is ‘things’ that are deemed real are rendered as such by us humans not only on the basis of pure materialism, but also on the basis of thoughts.

Concept of constant flux is very attractive precisely because if taken at face value, there’s a brutal truth to it. Earth is on its constant spiral trajectory (not circular which is an important distinction), in constant fall, on whose surface all organic and material bodies are in a constant state of fall towards its core. Friction, an effect constantly present, is chipping away particles of ‘things’ across every imaginable scale from micro to macro, all the time. A Parmenidean axis enters our sight of thought precisely at this point (albeit as a subjective interpretation); the absolute constant eventually makes sense as a static framework. If all is indeed found in a state of change, all the time, then this very quality which we find all the time is non-changing in itself. This sensibility is perhaps what allows us to construct our static frameworks, which we could re-visit in time, and share as grounds of reciprocity with others.

One could go as far as to suggest that a true Heraclitean proposal would be one where the states of change themselves are subject to discontinuity. If the flux is broken by states of absolute nothingness – only to reappear again in a drastically different course, perhaps that would have been the true definition of flux as an overarching framework. Contemporary reflex of the neoliberal specter actually attempts to simulate flux in this definition, as evidenced through bureaucracies of decision making or materially through processes of urbanism. Flux is not continuity, it’s continuity and discontinuity hand in hand; the spill and the violent break both necessitated by each other within a game of extracting the most out of the other’s existence.

56. On Non-places (of Marc Augé)

Non-places are essentially spaces of being-in-transit.

In transit, transitory, temporary in the sense that tempo of an instance of life –and not the life itself- is put on display, staged.

Non-place is where the subject is nomadic.

A society of nomads necessitates agglomeration and dispersion of non-places.

Nomadic subjects exist in non-places scattered across the quotidian scales.

This is how, in return, non-places conquer cities, or the urban.

Settlement, or the act of settling, settling thoughts, settling conversations, settling relationships, are against non-places. Non-places unsettle, and feed on unsettling.

Similarly, memory is against non-places.

Repetition, recurrence, revisiting, are all critical acts that stand against non-places. Locales where they are nurtured and triggered and welcomed, will deconstruct the non-place in to a place.

Aesthetics of non-places are, in consequence, are cold and cheap.

Cheap in the sense that it is what it is. Cold in the sense that there was no purpose to begin with.

Sufficient and incidental best describes the material realities of the non-place.

Intentionality and particularity will deconstruct the non-place.

Nomadic subjects demand non-places, and non-places reproduce nomadic subjects.

But nomadic subjects are unsettled, unattached, with a false sense of freedom that actually subjugates – especially in the age of emotional capitalism.

Nomadic subject is an insecure subject – and an insecure subject is an enslaved subject.

Nomadic subject has too many opinions but none of them grounded.

A society composed of subjects with groundless opinions is not a productive or creative one because it will lack productive contradictions and confrontations.

Consequently, this society will lack common grounds; as well as true meeting points, true convergence.

Non-place society is a society perpetually on the move with a sense of insecurity, and within the constraints of biological earthly lives where all is cyclical and finite in the end, this attempted simulation of infinity will not pass as freedom – and will only lead to a game of chasing tails.

55. On tribes

Human beings, when put together on a piece of land, after some time and under certain conditions, start forming groupings. The emerging groupings, based on similarity (a primal solidarity based on similarity), could be about genetics, economic interest, power over certain resources, or ideas. And perhaps, as a whole, this given set of people form a single group, against the larger constellation of groupings of people occupying different lands.

In a primitive level, groupings lend themselves easily to totalitarian constructs. In this primitive society, the overarching values of the grouping would likely dictate acts and “expressed” thoughts (inner thoughts as well perhaps but that’s a different discussion) of the member. The social safety provided by the group in return demands devotion. This should be the most fundamental human to human relation based on what is essentially a transaction. Perhaps at the moment when group predicates a way of life, it becomes a tribe. Group surely will have a hierarchy within, meaning for most, subscription to it equals unquestioned embrace of a certain set of values and truth that predates them. The subscriber is not an active agent that could reconfigure anything, subscriber is a follower.

Let’s draw the facile conclusion that grouping-society, or, a society where individual identity is almost completely dependent on what is handed down from the larger group identity, leads to a totalitarian complex. How humanity attempted to solve this conundrum, post-WW II, with millennia of cumulative experience of histories of empires, organized religion, and feudalism in store, seems like a move towards engaging in a multiplicity of groupings that interweave rather than a complete erasure of the tribe mentality.  The eclectic-society is propelled by diversity as a catchphrase, wherein boundaries of hyper-specific groupings are allowed to permeate one another. At first look the individual even has the agency to construct new adjacencies, meaning the permutation of collected groupings one assigns to itself is not determined by their socio-geographic proximity, but only bound by the individual’s will and imagination. There are new geographies, fluid and cloud-like (solid and chtonic at the same time), that the individual could traverse at will, which could pass as freedom, and collect subscriptions within a trajectory that is the individual’s life, that only seems to get more specific in combinations it’s capable of, hence ostensibly unique.

The current terminal point, subscription-society, advocates an identity making based on additive acts. There are no decisions, but selections. Negative acts of cutting-off, leaving behind, subtracting through reciprocal thought, are not the characteristics of this society. Additive acts are smooth, fast-paced, conflict-free, and promote associations based on sameness. As economies of scale and mass production lie at the heart of this complex; subscriptions, or available selections, could very easily be described as slightly differing variations of the same things. This is a society of a myriad of slightly differing but essentially same identities, that subscribe and act at will, but not by decision. 

54. On style (and content)

Style is the attitude with which the thing comes into being. It’s the articulation of the thing, and not the thing itself.

Age of transparency, violence of the penetrating gaze in realms of social and private life, runs the risk of (or straightaway gives birth to), projects of pure style. A project of pure style is articulation without an object, style without content. Nothing being said, only looking as if something is being said. Markers, or simulated symptoms of the effect, leading to the presumption of the effect without a root cause.

More data we collect, more substance we lose. More we sprawl, less ground we occupy. No more city walls, no more mythologies spawned by ancient landscapes, yet a stronger feeling of being lost in the “environment”. Precisely because there is no more environment, when everything is inside. When everywhere is an interior, is everything carceral? No more exteriors, yet the territorial strangeness does not go away. “Chtonic cloud infrastructures” is perhaps the best example yet of this blinded contradiction humanity has set itself in. There is also “death by GPS,” the tragedy of ironic process of becoming cyborgs, staged by human bodies drifting carelessly into oblivious deaths on the face of earth, under the same sun that shone millennia ago, with access to more data but less insight about their immediate surroundings.

Yet style is necessary and inevitable. There is no content that exists without style. But there could be style without content. Perhaps this shows that it’s more primordial than content. Perhaps it’s fair to say that before humans had anything to say to each other, they had ways to seem to one another as if they had something to say. They looked curious to one another before actually discovering curiosity, they looked hungry before discovering the concept of hunger. 

So is style more urgent or primitive than content? Is it the existential thread that precedes the essence that it’s supposed to nurture, enclose?

53. On planetary scale

It is an obvious observation that cities of today are no longer rigid entities confined to geographical and self-imposed physical limits that we can point to. Cities, or specifically the metropolis, today could be described as a zone/platform/plateau composed of episodes of events and practices belonging to “wholes” that could only be defined in a planetary scale.

There are, what one could call, narratives of related events and practices, dispersed in planetary scale. While we can’t define what the totality of a single “narrative” exactly consists of (we can never catalogue all the physical or intellectual entities comprising a specific “narrative”), it nonetheless does not disqualify accepting/imagining the singularity of narratives as such. Metropolis, is the zone where dispersed episodes of multiple narratives (dispersed in planetary scale), agglomerate heavily. Spatially, they might be superimposed, adjacent, or completely unrelated. Regardless of whether they are spatially superimposed, adjacent, or completely unrelated, they might be functionally affective of one another or completely exclusive.

In this context, the primordial aspect of the architectural object, as a formal intervention within the current of collective human organization in regards to societal relations (anthropological) and to the environment relations (cosmological), still holds true. The attention in reading the formal qualities of an architectural object must shift from the immediate physical locality of it to how they work in relation to the currents that are episodic in nature and planetary in scale. Form – attempts to allow certain happenings, while seemingly disregarding others. (I don’t think it to be an informed approach to say “form allows certain things while disallowing others” because in truth spaces in the end will not produce knowable habitual outcomes in an algorithmic manner). Form is biased as an essential condition of existence. Form, could be valuing certain practices over others, in a more directly physical, functional, infrastructural aspect; or it could be participating in a means of cultural production by way of aesthetics it exercises.

Every great age created its own architectural paradigms. Today we look back on neo-classicism, Baroque, or antiquity and see ruins or aesthetic remnants of past techniques and tastes that could be retrofit. Logics through which the planetary scale urban paradigm has emerged is not necessarily going to hold true forever – but it nonetheless is transforming how we build, why we build, and what we build for today. So the question that has to be raised is twofold; what does it mean to practice architecture (effectively) within this paradigm, and how can Architecture position itself after the potential collapse of the current culture of production?

52. On the necessary struggle and shortcuts

An inherent knowledge possessed and transferred over generations in human beings is that things that are attained after a period of struggle have an exclusive kind of value attached to them. This ultimately relates to the idea that “to suffer” for something is an honorable act in itself. We have to make the distinction between two kinds of suffering here.

To “work” for something, to dedicate one’s self mentally and physically in pursuit of a goal is primarily an existential craving for partaking in an act of creation within the confines of the mortal life. To “suffer” in this respect, is not an honorable act in itself, or an act that would guarantee happiness. Happiness, if it does arise with the attainment of the goal, is a byproduct resulting from the fulfillment of the craving to create, through which the individual also accumulates “experience” – a pure phenomenon of feeling alive.

51. On faith and rationale

If there are two competing ways to compose a view of the world; 1)anthropocentric, placing human activity at the center within a greater explanation of the world, or, 2)anti-anthropocentric, placing human activity inter-weaved among other biological praxis neither more important nor autonomous, a cognitive organization biased on faith or rationale doesn’t necessarily lead to one worldview or the other exclusively. What this also proves is that faith and rationale are not diametrically opposed concepts, or mutually exclusive. To have faith, one has to pass through a subjective process of rationalization of the world around, and to act rationally one has to have faith in the possibility of certain ideals in the dark, in their embryonic stage. Precursor to the rationale process is dreaming. Precursor to faith is empirical/observational processes that lead to a desire for different futures. Faith and rationality are married in a complex manner, and in a world constructed out of binary oppositions, the blockage against embracing their relationship as such further prevents societies from unlocking more equitable, diverse, democratic, creative, productive ways of life. This is akin to learning to be comfortable with the fact that a better future for humanity on earth actually lies within the grasp of the mindset that can envision humankind as another non-autonomous biological categorization amongst others.

In regards to faith, the foremost thread that puts it closer to an anthropocentric view of the world is the idea of an ever-present god. Often subject to personifications as well, the god figure, and the greater religious/mythological complex predicates life on earth as a hierarchical organization of biological subjects with human at the top. Scientific process on the other hand is typically assigned the role of nurturing doubt in the face of dogma, in a way threatening the privileged position of the humankind within a universe centered around it.

Philosophy, as proto-science in antiquity, also has its roots in empiricism as an oppositional yet complementary mental activity to epistemology of faith, or theology. But this as well is a much more complex of a relationship than a mere opposition; the historical moment when Platonic thought asserts that world, after all, might exist as an ideation beyond all that could ever be sensed, philosophy plants the seeds of subjects’ potential dedication to a “world beyond the earthly one” – a knowledge not based on previous experience, but faith.

This traditional dynamic of faith somehow privileging the human existence in the name of a purposefulness that must exist, against (proto-) scientific thought willing to challenge any easy way out towards a given purpose, became complicated after the Copernican revolution. The modern model of the universe, shattered the notion of earth as the absolute center of all observed life and celestial phenomena, suddenly rendering the significance of earth and humankind uncertain in relation to other celestial bodies, nullifying the existential order adopted (by ancient philosophy and refined) by theology up until that point. Science as a critique of an anthropocentric worldview however arguably evolved to a different stage with the rise of the scientific method post-Renaissance, as it ultimately went through Enlightenment, industrial revolution(s), and late capitalism up until the contemporary age of big data.

50. On the circular search of the self

1-You seek freedom in the distance. Physical and figurative distance. The lightness of disengagement, non-attachment. A zone only known to self, in which it is not bound by any other reality external to it. A darkness that is somehow comforting, and finding comfort in darkness as a bold - hence proud or enlivening act in itself. But after a while, self becomes numb in this darkness, in absence of other surfaces to reflect against.

2-You seek freedom in the commons. In associations, relationships, subscriptions. In the core of this will to connect and to relate, there is a sincere hunger, a curiosity of the self to know its limits. Testing boundaries to get to know where they lie at all. You are who you are because of everything else you are not. In other words, the sincere will to engage with others has to do with defining the self through confrontations. Every contradiction with other selves is a small victory. Self can attain a unique status amongst others, and uniqueness shares echoes of liberation.

3-You lose track in the crowd. Sociality consists of assigning roles and perceived characteristics to other selves, and accepting assignments in return to exist within a shared reality. You realize selves interact partially only, and that being in a veiled manner, to build a bridge to interaction at all. Incapacity of the self to control its fate. If liberation is discovery of the self through others, it risks so obviously turning into an eternal state of captivation of the self in others, because it can’t exist in the first place without adjectives handed down to it within a greater game of trading associations. A weight you did not ask for, put on the self by other selves who see it in one way or another. But doesn’t proximity eventually lead to myopia over time? You seek freedom in the distance.

49. On heaviness

We have an inherent evolutionary doctrine, coded in our being, about a desire to escape contradictions, the unknown, or the darkness. Freedom is often associated with lightness, the state of not being bound (to anyone or any place), an escape from conditions that limit. The unbound space leads to vanity of sorts, and in the extreme end of the spectrum to a vacuum – which is the oxymoronic condition of total abolishment of space due to its abundance. Hence the horror vacui? Vacuum, in the end, is crushing – it asphyxiates, it disintegrates the body into pieces; a fetish of lightness leading perhaps to a nihilistic destruction of self, drowned in photons. Erasure.

Pain will exist wherever life is, but the pain of lightness is different than pain of heaviness. If the ultimate pain of total state of lightness is sudden, shattering, and nihilistic in the sense that it aspires to erase all proof of existence within a violent, crushing, atemporal plane, the pain that comes from heaviness veers quite differently, having to do with a slow death, an auto-biological decay, from which an autobiography could be born, leaving marks of struggle on the face of the weight that burdens, in time. Heaviness calls for roots, both literally and figuratively. Links, patterns, marks, proofs of existence, all produced as negatives through processes of absorbing weights.

48. On identity

Establishment of difference from others lies in the core of the construction of an identity. Self is an autonomous, unique entity not only because of what it is, but essentially because of what everything it is not. One way to define the use of concept of principle could be through this lens as well; principles are about things one would rather abstain from partaking, accumulation of practices and paths that are avoided which in summation lead to a specific character – a particular life.

Realization of differences is important in establishing the parameters for one’s identity, yet a looming deception within seeking difference in order to construct an identity is the fallacious perception of difference as a goal in itself to achieve an identity at all, rather than a device en route to discovery of an identity. Perhaps this also has to do with deception of identity as something to be obtained as opposed to something that has to be nurtured and sought after perpetually.

Today, in the generic western late capitalist society, people are raised, almost by default, with the notions of individuality and independence having to do with a self-centered view of the world. Coming to terms with one’s existence as an individual should be the supreme aspiration of a lifetime. On one hand, the concept of the realization of one’s state as an individual, a singular being on earth should have a daunting quality – since it has to do with realizing the ultimate solitude, fragility, and brevity of one’s existence in the face of everything else the individual is not. Idea of arriving at a notion of individuality through establishing difference with everything else the individual is not, constitutes the individual among an endless constellation of other individuals (be it human or else); if we are to define individuality this way, it is a notion that exists within a decentralized universality, it has to do with weakness and being off-centered yet somehow finding strength in those very qualities since being one among an unknown quantity is what makes the individual what it is.

In contrast with this thread, individual in the contemporaneous sense is a self-centered entity within a multi-verse. Yes, one’s consciousness is trapped within the extents of one’s body, but this is not an excuse to draw the conclusion that the individual thus should be the center of its own version of the universe. The problem with centrality, and the self-centered notion of individuality more specifically, is that it eventually comes to arrange the use of difference in identity-making as series of associations to be made, hence difference as something to be obtained or consumed – as opposed to something to be processed. The self-centered entity attains an identity through a collage of associations, an additive collection of qualities. An individual in this sense constructs relationships with others (be it other selves or institutions) based on a predilection of whatever associations are available for taking, in order to be added to one’s collection in progression of a consumption driven identity-making. In this way of life, creation is not at the core of one’s path moving through its own existence; and the one who does not employ creative forces but is dependent on the consumption of what is readily available can’t lead an independent existence. Yes, true liberation from all the conditionings that surround one’s biography and quotidian existence is impossible, but what is at stake here is that the self-centered individual does not actually practice the freedom it thinks it is on its identity-in-the-making.

A self-centered perspective of individuality thus results in some kind of an inverted totalitarianism. Where identity-making is dependent on subscriptions to be made, possession of a certain set of associations is equated to practicing difference. This actually ends up with the flattening of differences within a society, since in the name of difference, the self-centered individuals can easily end up subscribing to slightly different versions of what is essentially the same kind of association. This is the illusion of difference, perpetuating a myriad of slightly differing variations of similar individualities.

In true individuality, one does need the presence of, and the connection to, others, in constructing an identity. Associations indeed are to be made, but in contrary to being collected in mere additive fashion, they are for deducing marks of differences to help one locate its identity among others. Call it reciprocity, subtraction, or processing – the practice of deducing differences to look back on one’s self is a struggle in itself and a painful act at times. We establish associations based on sameness, and an identity constructed out of mere collection of associations is a smooth process of accumulating sameness, avoiding friction, and productive regression which is the only true way to progress. Decisions made in regards to erasing, taking out, leaving behind, are harder decisions – and such are the honest moments where one can truly face its identity in its singularity and invaluable fragility.

47. On time

Time detracts as well because past is also malleable.

Observations become memories.

If architect is a cognitive device in relation to the consciousness of architecture as a whole, memories – collective and individual – are the essential elements, agendas.

46. On the arc of life

Timeline of a life is best represented by the figure of an arc, a projectile motion. Life is a projection. It’s not a linear accumulation, it’s growth and decay side by side, a straight line of the rational mind cutting through the inevitable cyclical natures governing the biological body. Recognizing oneself in cuts.

45. On the plan and the section

Plan and section, the two abstract devices that compose the space that is the architecture are reciprocal in essence. Spatial reciprocity. Plan is anthropological – it is the framework within which humans relate to one another. Plan lays out protocols (or better, rules) of engagement between bodies. It molds rituals and consequently allows appropriation in response. Section is cosmological – it is a way of making sense from the human perspective, of what is not human. It is statement of a particular means of existing in relation to a terrain, and the divine sky.

44. For the downcast subject

Freedom – is being comfortable,

With the unwritten future –

The unknown, the void, the unpredictable.

Discomfort or fear of the unpredictable,

Brings subjugation, hence,

The downcast subject.

43. On the weakness of big-data

The liminal event will always escape data – because it could only be defined by its’ phenomena leading up to it – which will not conform to any recognizable rhythm of repetition.

Patterns and repetition are not the same thing.

If pattern making equates to making sense – or having a feel for something – observations of conceived repetitions are merely observations of conceived repetitions, not making sense. Making sense involves a cognitive leap, a peculiar narrative of reciprocity that is alien to the correlative nature of data processing.

42. On pre-reflexive acts

The contemporary case of neoliberal operations are based on an ethos of influencing subjects at a pre-reflexive level, as a part of a framework wherein the disciplinary machine delegates decision making to the individual as part of an illusion of exercised liberty. We bought the myth that ability to make decisions (which is really about making selections – a fundamentally different act than choice ) equates to exercising freedom, yet constraints are no longer physical but psychological. In other terms, psyche is another spatial layer – through which the horizon of what it means to be free at all could be defined. This is not news – but an extrapolative opportunity that lies within this line of thought is projecting this logic to think of how the urban comes to exist as a body as well. Just as the individual body is subject to a series of pre-configurative alignments outside of its agency, before it can have an illusion of exercising its agency, the urban body, consisting of architectural bodies, also relies on a network of pre-configurative acts of alignment to happen to come into existence at all. Architectural psyche of the neoliberal epoch is addicted to ‘constraints’ – and exercises its liberty, its coming-into-being, via making decisions as responses to given constraints. Architecture as the absolute medium of constructing limits is transfigured into a case wherein architecture begs of limits other than itself to exist at all. Today, under cover of well-worn catchphrases, it is even being rendered as the honorable path – a moral responsibility (also- how easy has it become to be responsible once you agree to follow a certain set of rules) to follow constraints – as if simply following constraints will lead to good architecture, as in at least its socially responsible because it could always be proven that constraints were followed. (This tautology is not the same thing as Kahn asking the stone what it wants to be or FLW “listening” to the site). Constraints are fetishized at the expanse of architecture’s capacity to carve open worlds that would otherwise not be possible.

Architecture shouldn’t be gamified into a parody of itself wherein what is being performed is a complex of tasks of spatial arrangement in relation to a given set of constraints under the name of problem-solving. Responsibility is a complex and multi-faceted issue. What is also at stake is the flattening of how we understand what it means to be responsible. At the very least, the architect’s responsibility is twofold – against all the socially accepted and expected norms, and against the discipline itself in the wake of possible futures that are implied or deemed possible through the project itself.

To do nothing at all in a given circumstance could be a choice.

To do nothing at all can’t be a selection.

-—

1. Happiness and misery go hand in hand. There is no life that is fundamentally happy or miserable. There is happiness in misery and misery in happiness. They exist through filling the voids created by the other.

2. There is always a part that will remain immature when viewed from the conscience of the present. Not embracing this fact is the true immaturity – or maturing should really be understood as a process of coming to terms with one’s inability to eliminate for good the possibility of making mistakes.

41. On moving on from being a subject to a project

If being a subject assumes the prerequisite of employing techniques of making sense of what is exterior, evolving into a project in the neoliberal sense, amounts to a loss of a capacity to be autonomous. By becoming a project, the individual by default is situated on a plane on which a project can exist at all – a plane whose extents and ultimately horizon are preconfigured. But this is not simply a case of stepping into a disciplinary society. A project is something that is constantly being worked on, and individual is the one doing the work. There is agency being exercised, but is agency still agency if it’s not being employed in the interest of the exercising agent?

40. On models

Models are there to be shaved off by reality, and set a horizon for the reality itself. Without models, what is real is pure darkness, an unadulterated chasm of possibilities, so dense in its construct that noise is all there is - no sight of refinement. We project models into the present moment – not to live exactly what the we think model shall dictate, but to live something at all. Thus the gap between the model and the reality is healthy; we find a creative existence in between that space. In other words, expectations are there to fail in order for an existence to be staged at all – a phobia of possessing expectations to avoid disappointment would only lead to a life in stasis.

39. On incarceration

Consider the default formal/operative definition of prison. That which is kept inside, by definition forcefully, is the imprisoned. What is left outside of the bounding line, left to roam willfully, is the free. (Here already emerges several concepts up for debate; who to define inside versus outside, what kind of force is employed, what is will in its true sense). If the contemporary condition is essentially defined by logics of exclusion, the act of excluding itself has come to define what is incarcerating. This is a stage where the roaming are the imprisoned, not because they are kept within a boundary, but rather they are kept away from certain interiors. The enclosing line bounds inaccessible areas (of information, of communication, of operation). Selective access to what is being kept away from the many defines the free. But this logic also propagates, or rather invites, novel ways of being free – almost charging the incarcerated with a capacity; since one who is able to draw out a genuine boundary can attain uncharted definitions of freedom. Art is such a device as well; a device that can put into question selective means of access and a spectrum of ways of knowing. This of course is different from analytical ways of knowing.

38. On the myth of progress

The myth of progress is structured upon a linear understanding of history according to which past is immutable. This is how the notion of progress becomes a totalitarian device; promises of better things to come to replace the remains of what had already happened directs the populace’s gaze to future, while past is reconfigured. In fact, perhaps this is what power really is; the capacity to reconfigure the past in the name of progress. Past is malleable because it is ever different depending on the nature of the vantage point in the present. In this sense, past is a part of the present, and vice versa. Future on the other hand, is bound to remain as fiction, upon which promises and expectations are projected. Future is projection. Past/present is the wall.

37. On mirrors

The problem of the mirror is how to ‘look at it’ rather than ‘looking in it’. A mirror reveals, not through images reflected, but rather through how it comes into material existence in the first place.

36. On aestheticization

Aestheticization in the sense of design work, operates through making something more useful, user-friendly, attractive.

Aestheticization from an artistic perspective is about de-functionalization, de-contextualization, taking something out of context to deem of no use in regards to how it was expected to perform; an act of framing.

34. Making sense

Pure thoughts and ‘making sense’ are not the same thing. Pure thoughts might be traveling at speeds not even reasonably graspable to the consciousness. Act of making sense on the other hand, has to do with de-acceleration of thoughts, rewinding, cutting, clipping, montaging. Construction of patterns, hence geometry as a device, has an innate connection with the act of making sense. Codification happens through patterns, not just in language – the most obvious example – but in all arts as well. Figures lead to codes, which lead to patterns, whose accumulation construct memories – or information that could be accessed when desired. So-called “abstraction” in artistic terms, in this sense, is an attempt to overcome patterns familiar to the mind in order to produce previously inaccessible ways of knowing, or sensations.

Domestic environments often consist of a careful choreography of objects. Music, in notational essence and in performance, relies on accumulated relations between individual moments whether signified by marks invented to diagram (through abstraction) the sonic event or performed by repeated movements of the flesh against air in specific duration(s). Examples could be multiplied and a sweeping generalization such as “all beings leave behind patterns,” could be made. The real issue in question is not the factual existence of the patterns themselves, but the purpose they serve as intermediary media in interpreting the external world for beings. These intermediary media act as what one might call “frames,” or “techniques”, whose very existence draw a line between the being and whatever-the-being-is-not, so as to make claims of “us/them” viable. It is through pattern making –mental or otherwise- that the being achieves the status of a subject in the world and delineates objects to make senses of (which involves further processes of pattern making –yes, mental or otherwise-).

Making sense, or pattern construction, is inevitably related to processes of ‘revisiting’. Obsession with progress as a default condition, a constant translation forward without looking back, in simplest terms obstructs the capacity to make sense. Revisiting however shouldn’t be understood as going backwards or the opposite direction, but rather as the movement in question welcoming vectoral shifts so that it will familiarize itself with certain previously well-trodden paths. Coming back to a –again, mental or otherwise- place, strolling again amongst the traces left by previous happenings is the very essence of a will that has an urge to make sense. It is in fact the means of ‘recollecting’ certain parts through this stroll that spawns the logic –dare I say, grammar- of the pattern in the making. In this vein, there is a ritualistic side to the act of making sense; the body itself has to participate in pattern construction in space-time, thus also emerges the concept of everyday life as a revolutionary context.  

Making sense is forensic because the subject is always late to a scene. Making sense is ceremonial because rituals of codes have to be performed to access the liminal. Making sense is archeological because ruins are excavated and catalogued along the way – ruins that already are and those that will be.

Being a subject is to be stuck in a continuous self-induced state of arrival. Subject is always to arrive at a destination, even when it’s on the leave. This is the linear nature of biography; as Hannah Arendt once pointed out, biography is a line cutting through everything circular that is earthly. Everything earthly is indeed circular, or in other terms, cyclical. Cyclical natures don’t necessarily imply simple replay – it could be thought more like shifting gears, passing narratives and elements (in the chemical as well as an analogous sense) to one another. Yet the very condition of becoming a subject is fleshing out an arc of life (bios), that has clearly defined nodes, edges, vertices. The revelatory aspect in this line of thought is that subject-making, or subject-being, is not necessarily an anthropocentric concept. Groupings of human-beings could be made subjects via other earthly groupings such as climate or geography. This is not about a nature/human divide; as ‘human’ is a categorization of particular earthly elements (chemical or otherwise) grouped in particular means just as ‘climate’ is a categorization that indicates another earthly grouping with a different domain. By affecting the ‘bios’ that is human, and inducing particular patterns in their ways of existing, climate attempts to make sense of humans, just as humans attempt to make sense of the climate through pattern making (meteorology, astronomy, etc.). In this example, humans assume subject status while objectifying climate, and climate does the same. Climate aspires to be a subject as well, as it is also always arriving, since tomorrow’s weather is already somewhere else’s weather.

A similar mutually inclusive experience with regards to subject-making is that of the cinema. As recorded space time travels by way of luminous data cast on the retina, which in turn sets in motion chains of chemical reactions, the duration of the cinematic experience involves a submission of the body. This inhuman entity that is the collective whole of what could be called ‘the film’, projects patterns on the submissive body, taking over it for a duration, as if extracting attention as a resource to be mined. In this way, the cinematic process is a process of ‘the film’ making sense of the submissive body. Cinema, for this duration, assumes the status of a subject, at the expense of creating objects out of its spectators. Here lies precisely the critical aspect of the cinematic experience – the experience whose sequential totality consists of the events of body arriving at a dark room, submitting itself to continuously arriving projections, gradually allowing its own objectification (or allowing itself to be made sense of), and leaving the dark room to gradually reattain a subject status again. The moment of coming back to being a subject again, means traversing the gap that has been levered open by the cinematic process between the self-as-object and self-as-subject; and consequently this act of retracing becomes how the cinematic process becomes a device for the body in making sense of the external world. In contemporary terms, cinema is the ceremonial process par excellence.

33. On flows

Consider the definition of flow, ‘Q’ – or volumetric flow rate, within fluid mechanics; Q = V/t. Flow, after all, is rate of change of volume per unit time. If architecture multiplies property into real estate, participating in the game of extruding raw sqare footage into volumetric values, it is already precisely the process of handling rates of changes of volumes. Suddenly the lexicon surrounding “flows of the capital,” or flows of money, doesn’t have to be so abstract.   

32. Within and against simultaneity

A work of architecture is always an assembly of a sequence of experiences. It always is – even when the case of architecture in question is a singular/ascetic/pure form; even in its most elementary state, architecture in minimum assembles a single sequence of passage from an exterior to an interior.

An elemental human condition is also the impossibility of overcoming partiality when it comes to processing the actual experience. We experience partially, and any comprehensive opinion –of interactions with other people, places, objects- is a construct composed of partial experiences. It is almost a bare essence of being human; being confined to a particular vantage point at any given time - and being aware of it. Yet we somehow possess opinions about entities whose sheer physical extent and scale far surpass those of our bodies; we extrapolate, we interpolate, we assume – in a way as basic requisites for survival.

So what is the totality of an architecture? Is it the summation of all possible experiences defined by its physical manifestation? Is it the abstract essence that is only really captured via drawings and discourses that precede its material existence? Let’s admit what we already know; architecture is never experienced in its totality – yet hundreds of thousands of licensed professionals across the globe pretend on a daily basis to narrate tales of finitude, images of totalities that claim to settle briefs once and for all.

31. The room question

When does a room become a cell? When does limitation cease being a fundamental component of creation from within and become incarceration? When does a body become carceral?

30. On hybrids

Switch society is addicted to binary oppositions; the condition of constantly being flooded with zeroes and ones, all or nothing. So called hybrids we are presented with are regulated degrees of difference out of finite possibilities. Real hybrids are scarce and fearsome, thought of indecisiveness almost deathly.

29. Words for a future

Subjective, but not personal.

Inclusive - from a distance.

Conclusive, to begin again.

Exceptional, because of the normal.

28. On alienation

Alienation is not simply the case of being estranged. It’s one’s inability to declare/establish difference from the rest. It’s the case of being consumed by an omnipresent sameness. Alienation is a case of involuntary participation in this state of mass sameness – while occupying an underlying consciousness of the weakness one possesses in the face of altering it.

27. Questions of things

Are things always objects that collectively form networks, or are things always parts of greater objects dispersed in time and space? Are objects always dispersed in time and space; is the idea of an intact object at a given time and location actually impossible? Let’s say intact objects don’t exist, only their parts in appearances of what we call “objects”, such that a so-called network is never a network of things autonomous in themselves, but a given set of provincially defined relationships between partial objects whose sums are never completely knowable. Here, a delamination between this particular conception of object and form is required. Forms are what embody the appearing finiteness, or completeness, of partial objects. The full object –who is always unknown and dispersed in time and space- might be said to have a form as well, but in any case, the partiality of its appearances with which we encounter as its liaisons does not invalidate these partial object’s forms as being knowable, delimited entities. Object and form are both conceptions of the mind, yet while object might be standing further from reach cognitively, form should be a tool for describing, conceiving, critiquing, and ultimately, knowing – even if partially.

Form, then, is the knowledge of delimitation.

26. On the elongation of the existing

There are two typical responses that are successions of each other in a circuitous manner. One is the practice of responding to a problem at hand by looking for solutions from within. Searching for leads in what has been existing long before is an inevitable condition, as what has been existing before thought’s arrival is all that there ever is – but, this weakness in itself shouldn’t justify constructing responses as a direct elongation of the present. According to a place and time and intention, a regressive, or circumventing response could be much more effective. It is, often, much harder in fact, to make the regressive decision, the step backwards – to recalibrate a situation which could only then be directed into a useful future.

The second common practice is the acceptance of mind as a constructor of truths. When put this simply, it sounds blatant and dull, an irony whose immanent proximity induces a case of myopia. There is absolutely no difference at all between the entity that takes notions of regularity and order at face value, organizational grids as appropriate frameworks of a reign of the mind, and the entity that resorts to notions of irregularity in defense of a so-called imperfect or “real” humanness while accusing the other for distorting “real” human values. Both cases are artificial in the sense that they deny their artificiality. Both claim to find the definitive answer, to have chosen the correct side to be on, once and for all. They both take the human mind as a datum from which to construct absolute truths to structure value systems – and this, is the fundamental problem. Both subscribe blindly to an idea of what they think world should be like, rather than searching for what it could be.

Every grouping values its own vantage point over others. Just as anthropocentricism is the plane which decisions regarding the global scale and context are always bound, modernism is the case of “moderns” faultily privileging their decision making processes in relation to the course of history just because of where they stand within that temporal framework - which they perceive as a linear one.

Is a practice possible, where (1) responses to existing situations are constructed honestly considering the unknown and the non-extant, (2) mind is accepted as the ultimate limit condition and thus simultaneously doubted while being utilized to make decisions in pursuit of an honest creation, and (3) the creation itself is seen as a product of the human mind yet embraced as a body in space-time continually hosting a limited yet unknown amount of unknown possibilities to mean/be/do something other than its subjectively intended essence?

Back when our cities had limits, we were actually conscious and accepting of the limits of the mind. Erasure of the peripheries in continual manner, is the loss of this consciousness. More ground covered equates erasure of a critical awareness. We are in a stage where a reconciliation of this consciousness is needed in order to find ways to co-operate/come to terms with a constant state of uncertainty.

25. On changes

Messianic appearances of the yielding point never come. Change is a continuum in itself, ever-present, ever-different. Desire is the urge to partake in the processes of change, that inevitably happen with or without us, all the time.

The fallacy of the grandiosity of a singular moment of change stems from the fact that change does happen through moments of breakage. In other words, what is commonly defined as the moment of change actually refers to the moment when change shows its face, when the readily ongoing process is made visible. Visibility is due to variables surrounding the subject of change suddenly experiencing a shift in how they relate to each other. Shift is sudden because we were already too late when we arrived at the scene - or when the scene decides to unfold in front of our subjective and crippled vision. Liminality and breakage supplement each other as processes of change traverse endlessly from one medium to another.

24. Geography after nature

Geography after cognitive conquering (a.k.a. death) of nature becomes a pure datum among other data. Simultaneously, the same moment presents a chance to reconfigure any datum as a geographical affair in essence.

A datum preconditions. Design of the precondition means geographical design in the post-nature era.

23. Against binary oppositions

Subscription culture generates an everyday continuum of either/or scenarios, locating choice as a consumed necessity, while assuming control of overarching structures by prefiguring both the nature of binary oppositions, and their eventual uses in elongating existing ways of life. In reality (- that is, beneath the surface reality), half-truths or quasi-wrongdoings are just as valid; as a whole is almost never a mere a summation of parts.

A whole is a whole because of our capacity to describe it as such. Different approaches could be extracted from this assertion; as in, (1) “thus, everything is a part in relation to other things”, or (2) “life on earth is a sequence of objects among others – conceptions that precede and succeed one another,” or even (3), “every part is a whole in its own right and should be treated accordingly,” and so on. An assertion is not a fact to agree or disagree with as dictated to us by default, but rather a platform with its own limits, upon which a permutation of confrontations could be had.

This is about the realization of multiplicity of paths through which a concept could be approached.

{A quasi-thought} A machine –in the wide sense- as a product of a certain societal context is a materialization of the given social grouping’s idea of completeness/perfection/totality within the genre of the specific composition.

22. Concrete biology

Physical constructs even when considered devoid of actual life are the most prominent examples of a concrete biology. Object of the act of creation, solitary or communal, remains as a chemical extension in essence, of an ever-illustrious circle of life. Perhaps it is time architecture is classified as just another biological process (but not in line with the manner that so unabashedly takes terminologies with the likes of “organic” out of context, to the extent of sucking out all their meaning; the overarching concern here is always foremost about enigma, and a will to pursue it and dwell in it, not its deciphering once and for all – sincere progression has always been about honest admittance of lack of knowledge, not total, stable, and classified dominance over knowledge).

So take concrete biology like musique concrète. Raw and ragged but real because it’s bare and unavoidably immanent. Akin to going the wrong way on purpose to; (a) learn from subject’s own mistake (as a bad precedent), (b) show an audience –one that might not even have been conscious of its own existence till that moment- that the other way is just as valid of an option simply because of its newfound availability as such (as a bold precedent), (c) or to prove that an audience need not rely on the performer as the subject, but rather on the subjects comprising the audience each as a unique subject – once the performance itself proves to be a futile exercise by riding itself to its own demise (reactionary precedent).  After all, so called lack of aesthetics, or a self-claimed “anti” stance, is a tool in itself for simply being – not for assuming appearances expected of it.

21. On the importance of subjectivity

The most interesting processes producing the most refreshing results or whimsical outcomes inviting the critical mind to play and co-produce are not those that are additive but rather those that dare to subtract and participate in strategies of distancing. Editing, cutting off, taking away, delineating, delimiting, distilling, abstaining, sublimating, hiding certain things on purpose to reveal better; the acts of restricting or shaving off/molding/chiseling require decision making at a more critical level – in the truest sense of the word, as in “critical” that pertains to the possibility of something coming to an end for good, possibility of stoppage, of the messianic appearance of the yielding point. Negotiation of such decisions is the true artistic process as well; not deciding on what to show but what to omit.

[Less doers, more contemplators.]

Objectivity indeed could be political correctness gone mad, a harmless exercise resulting in lukewarm commentary at best – seemingly cold and minimal in the name of style, an indifferent coolness (that manages to pass as “elegance” –or better (?), “sleekness”- at a surprisingly high rate) that stays just afar enough to appear like its’ silence is on purpose but really is just grey and bleak because of a lack of anything with sincere substance to say. The direct opposite – a saturated package of color and commentary and media – leads to the same place as well. In other words, not showing enough because of a lack of substance, and showing much more than enough because of a lack of substance in determining what exactly to assert, are essentially the same phenomenon. If cold indifference without substance claims to be elegant or sleek as an excuse, the over-saturated loudness tends to speak of polyvalent natures of things and complexity at face value. Both are the same and both lack the subjective mind, in the so called pursuit of a common, objective ground.

The subjective construct, on the other hand, is a weapon. It inherently speaks about something bigger than itself precisely through the subjective act of omittance carried out by limits that its’ essence is found upon. It is inclusive through being exclusive. It bears the possibility of opposite interpretations within itself, through only being itself and nothing else. The outsider, outlier, particular, peculiar, small in scope, urgent, immanent, is sharp and strong not because of its individuality and specific expertise but because of the individuality and specific expertise it influences in others by being a precedent of such. Through being itself and nothing else, an object among others, the subjective construct mirrors the possibilities of other worlds via what it chooses to leave out of the frame.

20. On the hierarchy of the urban process

Production of urban space, as a result of contested political, financial, or jurisdictional interests could be distilled down to four components: (1) the purely technical infrastructures that carve out or appropriate the necessary space for protocols of alignment to operate, (2) the protocols of alignment that are operative, legislative, executive, and/or relational that surround the relationships of bodies with conflictual, co-operative, or simply autonomous interests, (3) urban planning or "zoning" as a managerial device that comes after the technical infrastructures and protocols of alignment to spatially -albeit diagrammatically- optimize different interests on a clearly indicated slab of land, and (4) architecture and construction industry laminated as a single service sector producing the delimited components as dictated by the previous act of "master" planning.

The question is - can the discipline of architecture find cracks within the hierarchy to exist?

19.Limits and freedom, again

If the so-called “state of exception” indicates what lies beyond jurisdictional frameworks, and the state within which it is necessary to cross that threshold from the sovereign body’s point of view, it also teaches us about the inevitable limits, or finitude of our own laws and constitutions. The totalitarian body appropriates this limit, perhaps by fabricating necessity or simply re-writing the rules that constitute ways of life governed by it. Nonetheless, the spatial dialectic of limit and freedom holds true from a judicial perspective as well, we, as governed subjects, can preserve the possibility of freedom as long as we stay conscious of and defend the judicial limits that constitute our ways of life. Like a wall carving out possibilities of appropriation and coexistence in a room, law is a limit condition that seeks appropriation, however whether the appropriation seeks an existence within the limit or beyond it is another question, in other words the existence of the limit will never guarantee the existence of absolute freedom.

18. A Glossary (in progress)

All-inclusive. Alignments. Analogy. Crystallizations of systems. Circularity. Double negative. Exclusion. Falsity of truth. Finite element analysis. Finitude. Flat Ontology. Fluids. Form-Figure-Shape. Geography. Identity. Image. Limits. Metaphors. Narrative. Pre-Conditioning. Protected Medium. Protocols of alignment. Protocols of optimization. Productive contradiction. Recording surface. Regimes of distancing. Registry. Subject. State of Exception. Tendencies-Ideation-Principles-Projections. Things and the Gap. Things of earth. Totality. Object. Object Oriented Ontology. Urgency. Weird realism.

17. A project of geography

The Westphalian model of sovereignty has collapsed. Two-dimensional loops inscribed on the surface of the land as the progenitor of nation-state sovereignty is an obsolete concept. The global order, capitalism or else, which is supra-national, has first (1) created a transnational system of global subjects of managers, producers, and consumers, which eventually led to (2) localized multi-dimensional (land, sea, air, subterranean, cyber) loops, across borders and multi-national in nature. Expansion and contraction – but both through production of dispersed finite components, or autonomous subjects, and management of the distances in between them.

This continuity is not merely endless, it leads to finite components that ultimately present spatial problems, hence the new feudal age. The capacity to be sovereign is thus not about how or where to draw the enclosing line, or even who draws it, but to be able to decide what an existing line encloses – what is interior and what is exterior. Lines, enclosures, enclaves, are on auto-production, and sovereign is the body who actively decides interiors versus exteriors, parasitically – or tactically – sifting through layers of spatial and operational exclusivities to choose from and assemble. This is not the age of the nation-state, but the age of the trans-national, the hybrid.

Is it possible to speak about a continuation of the so-called project of autonomy here? Project of autonomy theorized the possibility of an architecture to exist without giving in to the default tendencies of pervasive urbanisms, in defense of the discipline itself. One thing has not changed; the discipline is still endangered today. But our approach has to change, or evolve, as we face an advanced stage of global orderings, a later chapter where crystallizations and revealing of finite components is the main event.

This is inevitably also concurrently a project of geography. As Paul Virilio prophesized aptly, “we are now experiencing the last of the globalizations: the finitude of geography in the face of temporal compression.” If geography has traditionally been the “other” of the city, against which the act of settlement defined itself, constructed its social relations by feeding off of geography as a spatial, logistical, or natural resource, today we are faced with the possibility of finitude of geography. Yet finitude of geography, following Virilio’s axiom, doesn’t mean the end of geography; it rather points to our realization of geography as another finite element, among others on earth, that has already been conquered by human practices, cognitively and practically, and turned into yet another scale of built environment, a fabricated reality. Fabrication of the geographical scale means that the “other” of the city, it’s negative, what limits it albeit not in a deterministic way but in a way that helps it find its form, and consequently what preconditions the city and relationships contained within it, is a fabricated framework. It is in this context that geography, as a distinct scale from landscape or urban design, becomes a potential framework for architectural thought to work in, and act of preconditioning a novel way to reconstruct a relationship with a theory of city-making.

16. Which has to be said

Being a rational extension of the existing worldly conditions is not a proper justification for architecture. A conceptual reading of the world and society at large can reveal interconnected, homogeneously equalized, all-assuming deeper structures, leading to notions of fluidity, relativity, and ultimately, a totality within which myriad of parts are simply suspended equally (from the human cell to the fossil beneath the soil to the satellites above the sky). Architecture, as a product of the human mind, foremost, doesn’t need to give in to these logics by default, it is primordially an act of stoppage, an ‘otherworldly’ act that carves out new worlds within existing ones. In fact, the very idea of all particles sustained within the limits of earth being subjects of an equalized order itself justifies the act of architecture as one that crafts new exclusive worlds through rearranging (momentarily or else) existing sets of relationships between equalized particles.

Everything today seems to strive for a theory of everything. Everything tends to claim to be of multi-use. In the age of sustainability as accepted populism, multiplicity is a style, a mask, a commodity, an empty sign. And in the age of the multi-use, true wisdom dies, because true wisdom comes from specific expertise, from acquired experience of provincial applications. Multiple, smaller, and dispersed, is the model we champion. Not all-inclusive and multi-use. Not the image of multiplicity in the service of all-assuming deeper structures beneath, which is basically indifference, not difference.

15. On Frameworks

So how to actually qualify “critical architecture” today? If we accept that production of architecture is an addition of a spatial framework (abstract and physical) among existing ones (that qualify our mental and bodily perceptions, capacity to perceive and consume difference, hence identity), then perhaps we could understand the generic as the production of a framework (managerial, communicative, or physical), a superimposition on top of existing ones in the world, as a perfect alignment – meaning generic simply elongates existing frameworks, and although it is indeed a new addition, because it aligns perfectly –as an extension of quantitative value judgments- with existing frameworks, it does not carry within itself a possibility to change or liberate the mind and the body. On the other hand, critical architecture, is the production of frameworks that are superimposed against the other existing frameworks, offset in such a way that it allows a moment of disorientation, disfiguration, or simply, it creates a possibility of mis-understanding of existing frameworks through this dis-alignment. The newly carved out space between the frameworks then become the possibility of the users (us, the public) to achieve new readings of the text that is the spatial relations that govern our ways of life. If articulated within the right context, meaning if the existence of this new dis-aligned framework is logically justified by satisfying some previously untapped necessity –that could very much hinge upon quantitative, reified value systems projected by existing frameworks- then the dis-alignment also carries within itself the potential to be a new normal. This is a paradox but a productive one; while normalcy or the popular imaginary is what the “Critical” initially stands against, it inherently has to aspire to assume a normalcy – to have the potential to be accepted as a new normal, and realization of this potential is the true critical, the core mentality being endless propagation of ideas of new normalcies as opposed to resorting to existing ones. This is kind of a paranoia, but a healthy one – because the other option left to us is amnesia or a life on anesthesia. Paranoia then becomes a way to remember, or keep memory alive. Memories tie together to extend the permanence of spatial concepts – stability and grounding, required to establish a datum, a reference point, which could then define our actions and freedom in response to, a measure. Act of dis-alignment of the non-generic is for the possibility of a misreading to help us retain our memories to establish a collective consciousness which could be our datum – upon which we can define how to be free. But an architecture that establishes new frameworks, draws attention and is fed by it, is not an architecture that induces paranoia or laments it. The “critical”, hopefully, is the honest statement of the absurd state we’re continually in, it’s an honest reflection and questioning of the possibility of difference, and its inner logics.

14. On the gap

There is a gap, between things themselves and values ascribed to them. This is more than simply pointing to a duality of reality vs. concept. In fact reality vs. concept is a different dualism altogether; concept is the genesis, or conceptualizations are beginnings; each conceptualization necessitates ideation to construct a projection in a more subjective form. Construction of the subjective form, however, leads to an object – in physical but also in conceptual terms, an object to be objectively shared among others; this is the thing that inherently comes with a feeling of alienation in regards to what it can be. A thing can be anything. But every “thing” necessitates evaluations, and descriptions. Consequently, values are ascribed to these “things”. Things have to have a definition to be shared in a more fluid social level, they have to be instantly recognizable to be commodified, reified, packaged, distributed, and consumed.

Concept and reality, is a dualism that leads to a thing-ificaton.

Thing itself necessitates values to be ascribed to be communicated. (Aesthetic scope of value ascription is a separate discussion.)

The promise of a different life, possibilities of other ways of life, reside in that gap between the thing itself and what is expected of it. Truth is, the thing itself has a finite amount of -but perceptually endless- latencies, and values ascribed discover only very few. Construction of any thing is thus, construction of possibilities. And as a side note, construction of new expectations from existing models is design as well.

13. On Form, Figure, and Shape

Form and figure are not the same thing, shape certainly is not either.

Form is an essence, it’s unspoken, abstract, almost ghostly, but there as a primary condition of existence. In this way architecture assumes somewhat of a religious quality when built; an intangible essence is the basis of a physical existence. Although the genesis of form is a different story altogether. Form relies on precedents, precedents of architectures as well as precedents of social and mental conditions of the author(s). Form is simultaneously a transmittance of previous knowledge as well as its deformation and possibilities of new knowledge. It is birth and destruction hanging on to each other loosely in an equilibrium.

Figure is still abstract but something more familiar. It’s like the semantic complement to the syntactic of form. Figure is where one searches for meaning, albeit in a futile way. Figure is memory, recognition, as well as misunderstanding. It could be a portal into misappropriation and consequently innovation, it’s what we respond to about form – mentally and physically. It’s form’s delegate, and it’s the one to blame if things go wrong, as form itself is sacred. Figure brushes shoulders with images; they’re distant relatives. Figure is also less about space and more about a ground. It invokes an absence or presence of a ground, a shared platform, a possibility of a collective inhabitation. Ground is the neutral zone where oppositions can be communicated, and figure, per via negativa, establishes the possibility for such.

Shape is the inevitable articulation of abstract ideas of form and figure. It’s a specific model out of a myriad of possible outcomes. It’s not pure, and it leaves out some implications by default. Shape embodies choice, an attitude, a particular way to exist that is unique, and in this sense it has the capacity to be political. It’s a translation of universal ideals into local realities, however gimmicky and kitsch. Shape tells a particular story, it’s not impartial, it’s sharp and to the point.

12. On the Difficult whole

Difficulty between analysis and project, thought and action, experience and liminality. Difficult agreement between parts. Design as the protocols/conditions of the agreement itself. Form as the action of conditioning. Form and act of conditioning as a difficult whole in itself; as form relies on previous experience while act of conditioning a novel agreement is thinking an attitude that hasn’t been thought of before.

11. On Registry

Everything that is exterior is interiorized through being registered by the human mind. In this sense what we claim to know and share as such is a series of interior registries. The act of registry, or inscribing the recording surface, is what makes truths possible. Reading knowledge, or transcribing information from sources other than us, thus, requires a reading of off the recording surface (whatever it may be), external to us. The act of “textualizing” or deciphering a text to seek information from it, is consequently dependent on its context – the recording surface. The recording surface, in this way, has as much influence on the information as the core facts themselves, it’s an inseparable, a necessary part of truth, reality.

If recording surface is a medium, architect is the one who deals with construction of existential agreements upon media.

A truth is true because it proves certain things to be false. A new truth – production of truth- is simultaneously production of falsity. Consequently, today’s falsity could be tomorrow’s truth and vice versa.

10. Invisible cities, again

Multiple readings of a city are inscribed in it. But this is not a case of city as ‘one’ thing that is open to multiple iterations/appropriations, but city as the literal accumulation of multiple worlds, that might be adjacent/superimposed/totally detached. These two are fundamentally different concepts and should not be mixed.

09. On Dealing with the Absurd

Driving absurd tendencies to their logical conclusions is a rational way of working. Response to absurdity is the elaboration of this logical extension, not a mere anti-thesis.

08. On Honesty

Totality and/or the promise of the singular is very attractive indeed, but it can't be achieved by easy means. Perhaps one can go as far as to say that honest architecture is the one that struggles to achieve this kind of a totality but is nonetheless frozen in that moment of trying. Without this struggle architecture falls back into the mirror games of the image and its connotations, either by claiming complexity at face value "because the world is complex" - or unity/minimalism because such is "the way to bring order and that is what's human, and the right thing to do."

07. Deep structures, surface structures

Dissolution of any cognitive difference between deep and surface structures. This is where syntax = semantic; concept = principle. Where architecture finds kinship with art, not as a pompous self-fulfilling prophecy- more like bumping into an old friend. Where an all-consuming attitude eventually leads to zero: nothing is the concept, the artifact is all that there is - there is no need to speak of a concept, both because it is here and simultaneously is cancelled out by the very notion of being alive.

06. Images

How to use them? How to love them?

05. Our Operations

Operations of operations. Operations about how to operate. Operations to record knowledge about operations. Inventories of operations. Dreams of operations to allow paradigm shift in existing operations, tilt them but not really change the outcome – only the path to allow operating in a slightly different way to exploit some unexploited condition. Daily bodily operations to get to a place of operation to operate certain operative systems to speculate on the impact of certain operations which will presumably happen at some point in the future.

04. Metaphors

Metaphors are most useful when kept to self.

03. Mind

Mind is of the earth and simultaneously not. It is because it is a chemical extension within a greater ontology. It is not because of its’ very capacity to even think so.

02. Designer vs. ideologue

Ideologues deal with origin, reclaimed legitimacy, and path of information.

Designers deal with craft of tools that serve a higher purpose.

An ideologue-designer deals with logics that compose information through crafting of tools in a critical manner.

01. Things of Earth

Speed means distancing and compression of time.

When the idea of progression surpasses progression in pure sense, hyperreality is at play.

Speed equals propaganda, propagation, progression, which lead to proto-concepts and simulations.

Within this culture of ideology of progression, distances, separating and being separated becomes a desired condition, in the name of freedom, which is a paradox because limits are required to speak of freedom.

Distanced bodies are controlled bodies.

However things of earth are finite, and within an ultimate framework of finitude, spatial expansion and temporal compression leads to finitude of geography in pure sense. In some ways, this is geography becoming a constructed reality, a simulation.

Because things of earth are finite, simulation of geography is a threshold into a double negative. Eventually crystallizations happen within all-inclusive, or all-expansive systems due to the fact that finitude is a must that reveals itself in architectural scale.

Within this cycle of negation, the moment of falsity itself becomes an opportunity for architecture to seek overlaps and comment on the systems that seemingly control it.

Through re-introducing itself into a discourse of construction of limits and logics of separations, architecture has the capacity to comment on ways of life again.

Texts: Aykut Imer.