reassuring unity of its meaning. Tschumi’s folies no doubt play on this ‘alteration’ and
superimpose, against common sense, common meaning, this other meaning, the meaning
of the other, of the other language, the madness of this asemantics.
PART TWELVE
When I discovered Bernard Tschumi’s work, I had to dismiss one easy hypothesis:
recourse to the language of deconstruction, to what in it has become coded, to its most
insistent words and motifs, to some of its strategies would only be an analogical
transposition or even an architectural application. In any case, impossibility itself. For
according to the logic of this hypothesis (which quickly became untenable), we could
have inquired: what could a deconstructive architecture be? Isn’t what deconstructive
strategies begin or end by destabilizing exactly the structural principle of architecture
(system, architectonics, structure, foundation, construction, etc.)? Instead, the last
question led me towards another turn of interpretation: what The Manhattan Transcripts
and the Folies of La Villette urge us towards is the obligatory route of deconstruction in
one of its most intense, affirmative and necessary implementations. Not deconstruction
itself, since there never was such a thing; rather, what carries its jolt beyond semantic
analysis, critique of discourses and ideologies, concepts or texts, in the traditional sense
of the term. Deconstructions would be feeble if they were negative, if they did not
construct, and above all, if they did not first measure themselves against institutions in
their solidity, at the place of their greatest resistance: political structures, levers of
economic decision, the material and phantasmatic apparatuses which connect state, civil
society, capital, bureaucracy, cultural power and architectural education—a remarkably
sensitive relay; but in addition, those which join the arts, from the fine arts to martial arts,
science and technology, the old and the new. All these are so many forces which quickly
harden or cement into a largescale architectural operation, particularly when it
approaches the body of a metropolis and involves transactions with the state. This is the
case here.
PART THIRTEEN
One does not declare war. Another strategy weaves itself between hostilities and
negotiations. Taken in its strictest, if not most literal, sense, the grid of folies introduces a
specific device into the space of the transaction. The meaning of ‘grid’ does not achieve
assembled totality. It crosses through. To establish a grid is to cross through, to go
through a channel. It is the experience of a permeability. Furthermore, such crossing does
not move through an already-existing texture; it weaves this texture, it invents the
histological structure of a text, of what one would call in English a ‘fabric’. Fabric in
English recalls fabrique, a French noun with an entirely different meaning which some
decision-makers proposed substituting for the disquieting title of folies.
Architect-weaver. He plots grids, twining the threads of a chain, his writing holds out
a net. A weave always weaves in several directions, several meanings, and beyond
meaning. A network-stratagem, and thus a singular device. Which? A dissociated series
of ‘points’, red points, constitutes the grid, spacing a multiplicity of matrices or
generative cells whose transformations will never let themselves be calmed, stabilized,
Jacques Derrida 313