Debate on the papers of Session 1 85
people in space; and I think that that maybe opened up an interesting dimension to Dar-
ren’s paper; that is to say, if we take up Deleuze’s comment about becoming and take it
to the full, really becoming is a kind of reciprocal process of interaction between yourself
and your environment. Of course, Deleuze uses the example of the wasp orchid and how
the wasp becomes like the orchid and the orchid becomes like the wasp; but that opens
up the possibility of how the kind of spatial performativities that people perform in a
particular kind of space might somehow interact with the material space around them,
so that maybe architecture can be seen as a kind of exoskeleton of human behaviour, to
use a term employed by De Landa. In other words, one can see the possibility of interac-
tion between material performativities of people and materials themselves, and what
you see in Deleuze’s formulation is something that occurs over time: with time the one
becomes like the other and the other becomes like the one. And I want to put forward
the possibility of thinking about how architecture might then be designed in this kind
of sense, almost a Future Perfect; how architecture will become adapted in order to fit
in with the kind of spatial operations that are going on in a particular kind of space; and
the example that comes to mind is how architecture might respond to human activities
the way that sheets on a bed might describe the kind of nightmare we had the night
before. So think about how architecture is actually a kind of material thing responding
to or interacting with human behaviour, and you see this kind of dialogue. When you
see a handrail, you see it is actually being worn away by the use of the hand, and there
is thus an interaction between one and the other. And I think that with Carmella’s paper
one can possibly be taking that further.
I think that the way that you were looking at spatial performances was very inter-
esting, but how have spatial performances impacted upon the fabric of the buildings
themselves?
To me there was a really interesting kind of dialectic set-up about the notion of
reciprocal presupposition that comes in Deleuze’s work.
Darren Dean, Kingston, United Kingdom
Thanks, Neil. I just wanted to make a quick clarification. From my perspective, and
I understand that it is not everyone’s perspective, I think that there is a difference
between background and foreground and that there may be parts or elements (and
to my mind these are not the same – I shall return to that in a moment), there may
be aspects of a building that are quite deliberately unresponsive, that frame the
background, so to speak. I have just come out of a long PhD that was about the dif-
ference between the part and the element. It is interesting to note that it was at the
beginning of the 20th century that ‘element’ began to replace ‘part’ as the primary
descriptive term used to describe the components of buildings. Now, if you think
about these two terms, the f irst, ‘element’, comes from natural science, medicine,
Galen, from a kind of physical, a kind of temporal process. ‘Part’, on the other hand,
comes from mathematics; it may be an old-fashioned kind of mathematics, perhaps,
but it is a more stable type of environment. The way those two terms were used in
architectural history is very, very dif ferent. I think that what may have occurred,
certainly from the Enlightenment onwards, is a confusion between these two terms.
For me, parts measure the background. For example, if you look at the room we are
in, it is quite unresponsive: what is happening is what we are doing. I am interested