Andrej Radman

This issue builds on the 16th International Deleuze and Guattari Studies Camp and Conference, held at Delft University of Technology in July 2024. Hosted by the Architecture Philosophy and Theory academic group and its Ecologies of Architecture research team, the event focused on processes of subjectification. The production of subjectivity has been a central concern for Deleuze and Guattari since Anti-Oedipus. Guattari further developed their schizoanalytic approach to social formations, expanding Anti-Oedipus’s three syntheses into a more general account of three broader ecologies: environmental, social and mental. Today, it is increasingly evident that these three ecologies can no longer be addressed in isolation by the sciences, humanities or arts. Half a century after the publication of the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, this line of transversal thinking is more pertinent than ever for addressing the ever-evolving bio-, techno- and noo-spheres, shaped by hyperautomation, algorithmic governance and increasingly systemic forms of disempowerment.

Drawing on a range of philosophical texts, Andrej Radman brings together a collection of 11 of his essays, published over the last decade, to show that when a society manipulates its matter it is not a reflection of culture; it is culture. To speak of ecologies of architecture is to break with judgement for experience. As Gilles Deleuze put it in his book on Nietzsche, it is not about justification, ‘but a different way of feeling: another sensibility’. If to think differently we have to feel differently, then the design of the built environment has no other purpose but to transform us. While engineering is solution-oriented, architecture stays with the problem so as to tease out a creative potential.

The work of Bernard Stiegler (1952–2020) provides invaluable material for rethinking the built environment as a sort of inorganic spatial memory that enables the evolution of life by means other than organic life. Following Stiegler’s theoretical turn toward epiphylogenetic processes, Footprint 30 is devoted to revisiting the built environment as middling between individuating technical ensembles and niche construction processes. It offers a platform to the transdisciplinary field of posthuman scholarship dealing with existential niches from a technological angle and the concomitant architectural thought that advances such speculative recasting.

Driven by the Foucauldian attitude of subsuming architectural history into a genealogy of techne, Architectures of Life and Death advances a transdisciplinary approach rethinking subjectivity and exploring the political ramifications of these processes for the discipline of architecture and beyond. In contrast to mainstream approaches, architecture will not be seen as representative of culture, but as the mechanism of culture, the ‘collective equipment’ that rests on the reciprocal determination of social habits and technological habitats. In this sense, the idea that we shape our environments, therefore they shape us, is not to be taken as a metaphor. The animate has always been utterly dependent on the inanimate. A livable habitat is one which the inhabitant actively co-evolves with and which does not constitute a ready-made condition to which the inhabitant would simply have to passively adapt.