Other programmatic agencies in the metropolis: a machinic approach to urban reterritorialization processes

Abstract

What if the strength of the architectural object were associated with program and spatial strategies engendered at the service of “habitability” and future sociabilities rather than with the building of monumental architectural gadgets and optical events in the landscape? Based on the Deleuzean (from the philosopher Gilles Deleuze) machinic phylum as well as concepts associated with it such as “bonding” and “agency,” using the Lacanian approach (from the psychiatrist Jacques Lacan) to the gadget concept and the Derridian concept (from the philosopher Jacques Derrida) of “supplement,” this article discusses a shift of the most current senses and representations of contemporary urban architectural design historically associated with the notable (meaning the wish to be noticed) formal and composite materialization of the artistic object at the service of programmed sociabilities towards nother conceptualization. The building of architectural supports from residual (according to Deleuze, the possibility of producing other wishes, far from the dominant capitalist logic, lies in residues in the residual flows produced by the capital itself) programmatic and spatial agencies emerges as a critical path to the categorical imperative of the generalizing global logic. It is a logic based on non-territorial landscapes and centered on investments in the composite view and intentional spatial and programmatic imprisonments in familiar formulae originating from domesticated and standardized prêt-à-utiliser thinking. To think about other architectural spatial and programmatic agencies originating from residues and flows that simultaneously rise from and escape the global logic is to bet on the chance of non-programmed sociabilities taking place. Ceasing to think about architecture as a formal object in its artistic and paradigmatic dimension would mean to conceive it as an urban syntagmatic machine of [de]constructive power based on de-territorializing and re-territorializing programmatic and spatial agencies.