The chapter suggests that the dominant architectural history is too logocentric and not speculative enough. As such, its only merit is to translate a coexistence of becomings into a succession of neat logically necessary types. The case will be made for the role of topology as the antidote to the pernicious typological essentialism. Architecture needs to be free from the ideas of epoch and destiny. Following Brian Massumi’s lead, the speculative aspect relates to the contingently obligatory becoming, an event: “intrepidly future-facing, far-rangingly foretracing.” While it would appear logical that space should precede affordance, in fact the inverse holds true. The degree zero of spatial experience occurs at the level of the unconscious and is proto-subjective and sub-representational. As Hayles put it, consciousness is overrated. In terms of architectural thinking everything begins from the sensible. However, the task of speculative thinking is to go beyond the sensible to the potentials that make sensibility possible. After all, the basic medium of the discipline of architecture, as we see it, is the ‘space of experience’. This spatium, which is not to be confused with the ‘experience of space’, does not pre-exist but subsists as a virtuality. According to Deleuze, the plane of composition - as a work of sensation - is aesthetic: "it is the material that passes into the sensation." Once aesthetics is drawn into the context of production its realm expands to become a dimension of being itself. Both subjects and objects come to be seen as derivative. Consequently, the mereological relationship - which is perfectly suitable for the realm of the extensive - needs to be radically revamped in order to become capable of capturing topological transformations. But what we are advocating is not a formalisable model. Quite the contrary, any technological determinism needs to be kept at bay. What is needed instead is heuristics as a practice of material inference. However disadvantageous this may seem to the architect, it will prove not to be so once we fully grasp the Affective Turn and its implications for the discipline. It might become apparent that it is through habit, rather than attention, and collectivity, rather than individualism, that we find the (royal) road to the understanding of ‘space’, or better still, that we take a (minor) apprenticeship in spatialisation.
Introduction: Know Thyself
