Rethinking Architecture| A reader in cultural theory

(Axel Boer) #1

power is thus a function of a threshold or degree beyond which what is conjured away
ceases to be so and arrives. This threshold of consistency or of constraint is not
evolutionary, but coexists with what has not crossed it. What is more, a distinction must
be made between different thresholds of consistency: the town and the State, however
complementary, are not the same thing. The ‘urban revolution’ and the ‘state revolution’
may coincide, but are not one. In both cases there is a central power, but it does not
assume the same figure. Certain authors have made a distinction between the palatial or
imperial system (palace temple) and the urban town system. In both cases there is a town,
but in one case the town is an outgrowth of the palace or temple and in the other the
palace or the temple is a concretion of the town. In one case the town par excellence is
the capital, and in the other the metropolis. Sumer already attests to a town-solution, as
opposed to the imperial solution of Egypt. But to an even greater extent, it was the
Mediterranean world, with the Pelasgians, Phoenicians, Greeks and Carthaginians, that
created an urban tissue distinct from the imperial organisms of the Orient.^1 Once again,
the question is not one of evolution, but of two thresholds of consistency that are
themselves coexistent. They differ in several respects.
The town is the correlate of the road. The town exists only as a function of circulation
and of circuits; it is a singular point on the circuits which create it and which it creates. It
is defined by entries and exits: something must enter it and exit from it. It imposes a
frequency. It effects a polarization of matter, inert, living or human; it causes the phylum,
the flow, to pass through specific places, along horizontal lines. It is a phenomenon of
transconsistency, a network, because it is fundamentally in contact with other towns. It
represents a threshold of deterritorialization because whatever the material involved, it
must be deterritorialized enough to enter the network, to submit to the polarization, to
follow the circuit of urban and road recoding. The maximum deterritorialization appears
in the tendency of maritime and commercial towns to separate from the backcountry,
from the countryside (Athens, Carthage, Venice). The commercial character of the town
has often been emphasized, but the commerce in question is also spiritual, as in a network
of monasteries or temple-cities. Towns are points-circuits of every kind, which enter into
counterpoint along horizontal lines; they operate a complete but local town-by-town
integration. Each one constitutes a central power, but is a power of polarization or of the
middle (milieu), of forced co-ordination. That is why this kind of power has egalitarian
pretensions, regardless of the form it takes: tyrannical, democratic, oligarchic,
aristocratic.... Town power invents the idea of the magistrature, which is very different
from the State civil-service sector (fonctionnariat).^2 Who can say where the greatest civil
violence resides?
The State proceeds otherwise: it is a phenomenon of intraconsistency. It makes points
resonate together, points that are not necessarily already town-poles, but even diverse
points of order—geographic, ethnic, linguistic, moral, economic, technological
particularities. The State makes the town resonate with the countryside. It operates by
stratification: in other words, it forms a vertical, hierarchized aggregate that spans the
horizontal lines in a dimension of depth. In retaining given elements, it necessarily cuts
off their relations with other elements, which become exterior; it inhibits, slows down or
controls those relations. If the State has a circuit of its own, it is an internal circuit
dependent primarily upon resonance; it is a zone of recurrence that isolates itself from the
remainder of the network, even if in order to do so it must exert even stricter controls


Gilles Deleuze 297
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