3. WEAK AS METHOD. SYNTHESIS OF A PROCESS AS OPEN WORK This leads us to the following fundamental theoretical steps: Horizontal Thought: we abandon known paradigms about the city to replace them with the kind of horizontal thought generated by Gilles Deleuze. Trans-disciplinarity becomes the possibility for a continuous re-signification where the project becomes an open work with different levels of reality, self-defined as relational, hyper-textual and rhizomatic. Complex Thought: the project is a process, dialogic not linear, focused on deliberate ambiguity. Dodging Time: the subjunctive possibly avoids the present, the future perfect dodges the past, the conditional dodges the future. In this temporal assumption, the project is characterised as always different, temporary, dynamic, instantaneous, transitional. The Baroque: a relativisation of contents (anti-emphatic) de-forms it into a decorative and rhetorical moment. The Baroque works with multiplicity, between the folds, between conceptual and formal discontinuities, so that architecture is really decorative – not essential, not fixed. Baroque Diversion: an accent on minor thought emphasises the concept of intermixing, the right of opacity and the conceptual passage from territory to land as defined by Glissant. 5
4. WEAK AS INSTRUMENT
‘Language to be looked at, things to be read’. An apparatus of instruments activates the theoretical conditions of the research to open up to new methodological and operative conditions. Between method and operation, the tools are the game and the paradox, the éclat of the esoteric and a cognitive-projective map. The tools give ‘provisional legitimisation’ to the project and question the long-held validity of the authoritarian principle. In particular, the paradox and the game become instruments that open up a multiplicity of meanings, reorienting the project toward as yet untrodden streets, toward infinite epistemological and formal possibilities that the project foresees. It is a Tangled Tale 6 where sense works with non-sense 7 to define a new degree of freedom, a radical re-definition, where a shape is just one of the possible manifestations of meaning in continuous renewal. The esoteric words of the Deleuzian matrix, the éclats 8 , are not just exercises, but rather an operational method with continuous re-articulations, each unstable, that support a flexible, nomadic and complex methodology. Like quotation marks, they cordon off and specify the temporary subject of the project, which can thus enter into more specific settings while still remaining open. Words are ‘called’ not because they ‘are’ but because they ‘can be’, because they become operative in a broken relation with what precedes them. Each word, each shape is ‘re- territorialised’ 9 without losing the connotations of instability. These tools introduce a process that is rhizomatic, not structural, allowing a variability of contents and shapes in each direction. The tools are heterogeneous. They privilege ‘formal awakenings’ – constellations of similar elements even if disciplinarily different. They avoid a presumed ‘structure of continuity’ of the world. Nor are the tools axiological; they amplify interpretation. And they are, above all, imaginative. Reality becomes promiscuous with visions, able to amplify the transformative power of the project not only in a formal- disciplinary/extra-disciplinary environment, but also inside the contamination between the possible and the real. 5 Édouard Glissant. Poétique de la Relation . Paris: Gallimard, 1990. 6 Lewis Carroll. A Tangled Tale . London: Macmillan & Co, 1885 7 Gilles Deleuze. Logique du sens. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1969 8 As defined by Glissant, ‘the term éclat has in itself a polysemy that, far from correctly traduced, needs to be discussed with the reader. Properly, éclat is a splinter, but it also means the brightness and the roar of an explosion that sends something into pieces by launching fragments in every direction. However, around this word there are more semantic lines: material fracture (the breaking of something in splinters), metaphorical fracture (the scandal), generation of fragments (material and metaphorical), new vital light emanated by the genetic event (from explosion), the transmission and seminal clamour that forms the context to this light. Thus the reader, with this plexus of senses, needs to decipher an expression that seals the indomitable complexity of the matter. We have used the term ‘explosion’ because it covers the material (the illuminating infringe), the metaphoric (a scandalous but fertile discontinuity that propagates itself by an echo that multiplies the explosion), and a communication that manipulates the message by contiguous subdivision, from medium to media, from tool to system.’ 9 Gilles Deleuze. Logique du sens . Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1969
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