Debate on the papers of Session 1 87
Sean Hanna, London, United Kingdom
Is there anyone in particular that you would like to direct that to on the panel? Or is
there anyone who would like to respond to that now?
Neil Leach, United Kingdom
Actually, Paul, I teach a course called “Deleuze and New Scientific Thinking”, which does
attempt to make that connection, basically picking up on the materialist thinking of
Deleuze and working through De Landa into new scientific thinking. De Landa, of course,
has recently written a book called Intensive Science, Virtual Philosophy, in which he
attempts to understand the scientific thinking in Deleuze’s own work. And you can make
a kind of bridge from that into the new scientific thinking that Kas was talking about,
Stephen Wolfram and his book A New Kind of Science, the work on emergence, and all
the way into these kinds of digital technologies. So there is a new kind of paradigm. I
teach this course at SCI-Arch and other places, and the student interest is astonishing.
I think that you are absolutely right, there is a bridge that needs to be made and it has
to be made soon, and it is there.
Darren Dean, Kingston, United Kingdom
I would like to add something to that. I read De Landa’s book quite recently, probably
within the last six months, and what it did for me was not to change the output, the
architecture – I did not read it and then sort of literalise it or use it as a kind of genera-
tive diagram –, but to help me think about the patterns of thinking behind the work.
And the point I tried to stress in the paper was that the diagrams came after the work,
not before. Maybe I am declaring my colours here, and I do not literalise them, but on
one level they were reflective things that kind of talked about processes that were in
the work but did not seem to be. And to address the first question, I would say that the
connection you are looking for between Deleuze and others of that sort might be more
indirect and less focused on earlier questions.
Vana Tentokali, Thessaloniki, Greece
I am not particularly familiar with the theme of differentiating perspectives on archi-
tecture, but I dare say that I am not sure that the connection between the philosophical
discourse of Deleuze and the applied part of it is something that can be considered as
an application. To my way of thinking, it is not an application at all. I do not want to
say that it is a paraphrase, but I am very sceptical about the question you are asking
regarding the connection or relation. It is easy for us to say that of course all of this
literature uses the philosophical discourse of Deleuze as a theoretical, philosophical
refuge. This is very direct and very much expected, but I am raising the question in
the respect of whether Deleuzian theory could be applied to these architectural idioms
we have.
Paul Coates, London, United Kingdom
I think that you have actually answered my question. The connection between the
philosophical and the as it were electro-mechanical, or the virtual or the digital, not
architecture as such, if you see what I mean.