Keywords

1 Introduction

This paper was imagined and partially written in the enduring aftermath of Melonism, Orbanism and the transnational rise of authoritarian populism, the emergence of BlackLivesMatter and Fridays for Future, the unrelenting global ecological devastation, the precarities exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, the ever present humanitarian crises in war zones like Palestine, Syria, Ukraine and too many more to list here, the visible increase in violence against women, minorities, and in its imperial colonial version the one affecting people on the move across Latin America, Central Africa as well as in the Mediterranean, the intertwined predicaments and pleasures wrought by new technological interfaces, artificial intelligence, and social media, a radical rethinking of the operations of “care” through trans/queer/crip/feminist lenses, a quite innovative, refreshing and politically engaged Venice Biennale though with a return to the vernacular, the local, the ecological. A landscape that gives architecture, its practice, and its pedagogy (and beyond) a special urgency in reinterrogating positions, conditions, and possibilities of critique and, possibly, a reformulation around its active and situated orientation.

The paper emerges from two interrelated pedagogical experiences. The first one is the “Architecture, Society and Territory B” studio of the Sustainable Architecture MSc Program at the Polytechnic di Torino, where students from all over the world produced architectural research within Anthropocene, beyond its sterile interpretations of ‘crisis’ focusing on a contested territory and a critical vocabulary fostering the development of a spatial reflection regarding the inhabitation of an uninhabitable world. The second is a Doctoral Course titled “From refusal to abolition. Critical theory and the architecture of livability” developed with Marco Trisciuoglio, a series seminars set out to reflect on the role of architecture and design in the tension between refusal and abolition (of canon, of agency, of author, of site, to the limitless of architecture) engaging directly with an expanded epistemic and geographic with more non-European epistemologies in “the rich fields of global studies…postcolonial, decolonial and settler colonial studies” [1], feminist, political ecologies, more-than-human geographies, new materialism, and black studies.

In the studio we have developed what we called a ‘pedagogy of uselessness’Footnote 1 an approach that questions how different cultural worlds and realities come into being, how diverse onto-epistemologies encounter one another. The pedagogy of uselessness has two orientations: a) it does not argue for solutions and b) it does not align to the arrogance of utility. Both positions align it to a decolonial practice, and uselessness, approached in the form of a laboratory of imagination, was conceived as political practice that think design through the radical yet taxing power to imagine elsewhere and otherwise, rather than through the evaluative criteria of sustainable development and environmental governance risk prediction calculative figures. Usefulness, was an experiment in critique, was a way to bring critique back in the version suggested by Amy Allen’s being something that “refers simultaneously to a tradition, a method, and an aim” [2]. I’m not directly discussing that though.

If it clear that in architecture and urban design education, critique it is hard to find anymore as it does seem lost in the call for a renewed disciplinary autonomy, localised territorial interests and the sole artistic and sovereign agency of the maestro but also hidden in the sustainability solutionism reduced to margins, the sole negative with its arrogant tone, stripped from the forms of seminars and discussions and forced to be ancillary to design studios extremisms. The same happen to any form of critical theory, being Marxist, relegated to its obsolescence, feminist labelled as activist and anti disciplinar or decolonial, still misjudged as infused in the rhetoric of social justice and exoticism. Starting from these assumptions and grounding the reflections in the pedagogical experiences mentioned ask how is possible to reclaim critique in the present within a planetary catastrophe in which design is always/already implicated and entangled? What visions of critique are required?

2 Critique in Crisis

As critique is in crisis in so many disciplines and so many places of public and cultural discourses, more critique is needed everywhere. Banned, rendered superfluous, condemned to irrelevance, to obscurancy and idealism at best. Critique-focused courses have been closed at all latitudes in favour of problem-solving, easy marketable challenges, reading list reduced to the bare twitter-like maximum; intellectual circuits have prefigured even the end of critique beyond its necessity. Critical thinking has limited contrast capacities to the powerful alliance of science, politics, and economy. However, what sort of critical thinking is needed in a time when its very existence seems threatened? When the very essence of liveable futures, existence is at stake? How can we address contemporary issues without repudiating the intellectual legacies of the past and reiterating the very same stultifying language? Very many questions.

Fassin and Harcourt’s A Time for Critique argue that “the challenges critique faces today call for a reappraisal of its practice, and simultaneously a deepening and a displacement of our own reflection” [3] and appreciate that we are always/already implicated and entangled and how then critique is not an action performed by a neutral subject, philosopher or architect, changing the world, but a more situated position of enquiry and intervene into tangle of ecological, economic, cultural, and sociopolitical conditions of today [4].

The spatiality of globalisation, the continuous redefinition of boundaries between security and insecurity, knowledge and unknowability, certainty, and experimentation, disciplinary and wild, have redrawn what, in science as in politics, has characterised modernity for centuries, making the threshold the most suitable topography to interrogate contemporary spatiality and design. Threshold means many things: the French seuil refers to the solea of the sandalwood, designating at the same time the movement of passage and grounding; the German schwelle refers to the door lintel and its structural capacity that the verb schwellen used by Benjiamin also means ‘to swell, swell, rise’ and that in the more common English with thresholds also implies the sense of ‘to hold back, hesitate, waver’ before a territory.

The threshold is not a boundary but an area, an infrastructure, a territory that while contemplating an inside and an outside does not rigidly distinguish them but encompasses them both. With Agamben, it makes them indiscernible. These are not empty, clear, safe spaces but spaces of difference, where we stumble, assemble and clash, are opaque and non-unique. The architectural threshold is therefore a figure to describe and present a reflection on a pedagogy that, borrowing from Deleuze, implies a different way of thinking, as it induces us to identify a potential otherwise production in those spaces that exceed representation, distort cartography while implying a scenography between the sayable and the visible that distorts image and language. An excess that remains unspeakable, suspended almost, interstitial, in-between, with contradictions and aporias. Therefore, the question of thresholds, of the architectural threshold becomes, wherever one poses it, from philosophy to geography, from history to design, a political question and therefore useful for seeking some form of criticism.

Foucault’s text What Is Critique? do remain to me - and for what I aim to reflect here - central. There, he famously posed the question “how not to be governed like that” [5]. Foucault approaches ‘critique’ as a technology of the self, a practice involving the subject. In his “very first definition of critique,” Foucault characterizes it as “a way of thinking…I would very simply call the art of not being governed or better, the art of not being governed like that and at that cost” [6]. The text then goes on to specify this ‘way of thinking’ as a ‘critical practice’ which lies in the ‘desubjugation’ of the subject itself and is directed against the “movement through which individuals are subjugated in the reality of a social practice through mechanisms of power” [7].

In another text What Is Enlightenment? Foucault identified what he called an ‘attitude of modernity’. “By ‘attitude’” - Foucault explained - “I mean a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task” [8]. According to him, this attitude of modernity would bring together philosophical inquiry and critical thought focused on contemporary historical actuality: “relentless criticism of all existing conditions, relentless in the sense that the criticism is not afraid of its findings and just as little afraid of the conflict with the powers that be” [9]. The idea was that critique must serve as the way to awaken a new sense of human dignity and bring about social change. Critical theory and critical praxis are not activism, and neither are contemplation. They are not abstraction, and certainly are not simple action [10]. Does seem that for my argument, take a definition or an attribute of critique as ‘curios activity’, as a practice that arrest, disorganize, denaturalize, dehegemonize, both propositions and institutions.

2.1 Critique in the Anthropocene

In the Anthropocene any critical though cannot insist exclusively on solution-based and technical approaches toward solving climate disruption. What happens when things are beyond repair? We can only stay with the brokenedness of things. As Thieme puts it, “staying with the trouble is a disposition that gives permission for things not to work (necessarily) and not to be fixed (right away), at least not in the way that adheres to familiar and mainstream metrics of expertise” [11]. Thinking on the planetary technologies of domination, colonial neocolonial, securitarian, extractive, is key to transcend the crisis as in imposition of exception, allow to think and practice a different gaze, perspective and optic from the ordinary people (as the southern city do not correspond to the modernist biased form) that live in such conditions where makeshift forms of life and creative infrastructures have to be coupled with the cumulative dynamic of exclusion, expulsions and deep inequality. How is then possible to reconfigure critique for the present within a planetary (non-innocent) condition where we know that we are always/already implicated and entangled; What visions of critique are required to intervene into the tangle of ecological, economic, cultural, and sociopolitical conditions of today? [12].

3 Sketching an Architectural soglia: Minor, Adjacency and Destituent

How can the monumental task of abolishing the present conditions be accomplished without creating a newly terrifying monster in its turn? A minor design. An inversion. It is not another planet, another future, distant or not, but an act of an inverse nature: a reconfiguration of the conditions of possibility. It is an effort of unmaking, of redefinition to resignify territories; ultimately, to undo or deactivate an established territorial order of modernity, security, and escape. A possible avenue, imperfect, and provisional is an appreciation of an architectural thresholds a soglia between spaces, figures, and territories, around three gestures of such critique: the minor, the adjacency and the destituent. I’ll address them very quickly and in a sketched manner.

3.1 A Pedagogy of Minor Practices, Spaces, and Discourses

A critical theory as soglia in teaching architecture should be minor and should be focused on minor practices, spaces, and discourses. Minor is an adjective that qualifies an action. It is a tonality. A differential tone, a reduction. It is a difference of status, of recognition, of measure, of position. Deleuze and Guttuari writing in Kafka, Toward a Minor Literature state that ‘minority’ becomes the category to which one turns in order to “subtract politics from all contradictions and regressions” and that, while remaining in language, it takes on the most disruptive meaning precisely because “major and minor, rather than opposing peculiarities or qualitative indices, are intensive processes that interact reciprocally, modifying the relations of force from time to time prevailing in a given language. The minor language does not tend to replace a major one, nor does it claim its own status, but it acts within it” [13].

Deleuze and Guattari argue that a minor literature means writing in a major language in ways that subvert it from within. Major and minor are not different languages so much as different ‘uses’ of the same language, not a translation but more of a subversion, escape, or transformation. Not a limited or imperceptible position, nor a language spoken by a minority, rather a metamorphic becoming, a vibrant wave around a transgressive movement. Deleuze and Guattari call this deterritorialization. A term with which they designate a movement of leaving the habitual in a continuous flight from itself, in the oscillation between possibility and impossibility which is never completely resolved.

Erin Manning’s The Minor Gesture marks the idea of minority as a “gestural force that opens experiences to its potential variations” [14]. The tense relation of the minor to the major is not only because the major is dominant, but because its rhythms are not controlled by a pre-existing structure. The minor is thus resisting to be set aside, neglected, or forgotten in the interaction of the major arrangements. The minor invents new forms of existence and with them, in them, we come to be [15]. These temporary forms of life travel through the everyday, creating untimely structures, activating new modes of perception, inventing languages that speak, as Cindi Katz suggests in Towards Minor Theory [16] to reconfiguring the production of knowledge in geography and reposition it as ‘situated’ and ‘interstitial’. Katz explicitly critiques the dominant position suggesting a minor approach that is framed outside the exact dichotomies “of the local versus the global, structure versus agency, class versus gender, culture versus economy” [17]. With Katz minor is not a theory of the margins, but a different way of working with the material. It is about making, finding, elaborating, inhabiting ruptures: a tension out of which something else could happen.

A minor theory can erode the major one with a series of different positions, remaining with its assertions, interstitial “[…] a minor theory is not about mastery but […] its intent is to mark and produce alternative subjectivities, spatialities and temporalities” [17]. What Katz denounces, is the way theory is made. There is an arrogance to the way major theory is established. “Minor theory” is not a distinct body of theory, proper to specific authors and specific disciplines, so much as a gesture, “a way of doing theory […] backwards, made up of fugitive moves and interstitial emergent practices […] Minor theory challenges major theory and celebrates its distinctions, but its movements alter the constitution of major theory as well” [18]. Precisely because “the intention is to recognize and release a multitude of ‘other histories vibrating within’ the affirmations and arguments of the major theory” [19].

3.2 A Pedagogy of Adjacency and Commitment to Difference

A critical theory as soglia in teaching architecture should develop a sort of adjacency due to its power of commitment to alterity.

Tina Campt in her A Black Gaze introduce a powerful concept of adjacency. She does so, discussing black artistic works and their visual language. Specifically looking at the ‘autoportrait’ of Diamond Reynolds, she said “it demands we partake of the labour of adjacency, which requires us to listen attentively to her quietly enthralling image and feel accountable to it. Reynolds’s act of defiance was her refusal to remain silent. Yet autoportrait renders her neither speechless nor silent” [20]. Adjacency is “the reparative work of transforming proximity into accountability; the labour of positioning oneself in relation to another in ways that revalue and redress complex histories of dispossession” [21]. And she continues “it is not a gaze restricted to or defined by race or phenotype. It is a viewing practice and a structure of witnessing that reckons with the precarious state of Black life in the twenty-first century. A Black gaze transforms this precarity into creative forms of affirmation. It repurposes vulnerability and makes it (re)generative”. Ultimately, the quiet, still-moving-image of Diamond Reynolds’s refusal to embrace silence is, to me, a powerful means of reckoning with the impact of the ongoing war currently being waged against Black bodies. It is a still-moving-image of refusal—a quiet refusal to explain, a refusal to capitulate, a refusal to be anything else than who we are, even at the cost of death” [22]. The engagement with art as form or refusal.

We can paraphrase Campt question what constitutes an architecture of refusal? A design of refusal. An attempt to reclaim architectural practice from the capitalist ideology of production. It proposes, instead, that the possibilities of architecture are not determined by the performance-and-deadline-driven excesses of post-industrial society. An architecture of refusal is not a refusal of architecture, but rather a refusal to see building as the only valid architectural response to the question of space, place, and occasion; a refusal to understand architecture as always ‘problem-solving’; a refusal to view money as the bottom line. It is an opportunity to slow down and re-evaluate the terms of the discipline, consider the possibilities of an expanded architectural practice, and to participate in the creation of an architectural commons.

An architecture of refusal is close to the ‘I prefer not to’ voiced by Bartleby as but framed as a mode of engagement that creates the possibility for what Camps describe as a process of ‘reassemblage in dispossession’: everyday micro-shifts in the social order of racialization that temporarily reconfigure the status of the dispossessed. A fugitivity is not an act of flight or escape or a strategy of resistance.

Adjacency allow us to think agency, and relations as redemption and control, as we are never fully in control of our own processes. Encounters, episodes, inclinations, patterns, become “another way of talking about mediation” as Laurent Berlant [23] poignantly writes. Adjacency allows for different rationalities, moving from linearity, determinism, and functionalism to something more ambivalent, embracing the situation in which we live and from which we must imagine a future of coexistence in and with “the inconvenience of other people” [23]. For Berlant, inconvenience is the affective sense of the familiar friction of being in relation and continuously adapting to these relations. The central element is to acknowledge one’s implication in the pressures of coexistence. This condition suggests the importance of “the evidence that no one has ever been sovereign, only that most operate according to an imaginable, often distorted image of their power over things, actions, people and causality” [24]. The inconvenience of other people becomes a pragmatic political topic for any disaster reflection: With whom can you imagine sharing the world’s sidewalk? What do you do with the figures of threat and dread that your own mind carries around? Berlant’s book is a reflection on ‘over-closeness’ in the world and how we live with it. Inconvenience is a key concept of this book: the affective sense of the familiar friction of being in relation with no reduction, sustainability, recovery possible. At a minimum, inconvenience is the force that makes one shift a little while processing the world. The important thing is that we are inescapably in relation with other beings and the world and are continuously being adjacent to them.

A possible ambivalence in the pedagogy of architecture maybe forces research and knowledge production to lose its innocence and change its rationalities moving from linearity, determinism, functionalism to something less hard more ambivalent embracing the situation in which we live and from which we must imagine a future of coexistence in an adjacency with ‘the inconvenience of other people’.

3.3 A Destituent Pedagogy One that Radically Breaks with the Modern Logic of Sovereignty and Realisation

A critical theory as soglia in teaching architecture radically break with the modern logic of sovereignty, realization and try to repair souls in the same act of repairing the world. Destituent was a term/concept used for the first time by the Colectivo Situactiones in Buenos Aires to describe the original features of the Argentine piqueteros movement of 2001 which was capable of bringing about real change in Argentina by delegitimizing the existing political forces [25]. More recently, the concept is found in Agamben, who expresses the full force of its political meaning. In his last instalment of the Homo Sacer project, The Use of Bodies, Agamben [18] suggests that a destituent power is one that “deactivates something and renders it inoperative – a power … without simply destroying it but by liberating the potentials that have remained inactive in it in order to allow a different use of them” and that “while remaining heterogeneous to the system, had the capacity to render decisions destitute and suspend them” [18].

Destituent power is configured as a way of practising and thinking about politics that radically breaks with the modern logic of sovereignty. Consequently, it can be seen as a radical alternative to constituent power in a time that is not about control and sovereignty, but of immanent permanence, albeit in a potential form, of multiple and plural instances of liberation that do not find a solution in institutions (state and non-state), and somehow remain in écarts with respect to dominant forms of societal control.

Destituent subjectivities are linked to the idea of politics without foundation (a politics without arché). A destituent politics has a limited but precise task: to create the conditions, that is, the vacuum, so that another politics, the one that today seems impossible, can happen. Destituent is a politics not founded by power. Destituent is a “power that deposes power without setting a new one in its place” [26]. It indicates a movement to be made: to unleash a politics of the event. Recently, Agamben suggested that, only if “it is subjected to a decisive critique and if we free ourselves from a concept that has dominated and continues surreptitiously to dominate Western thought and politics: the concept of realisation” [27]. Agamben asks “is it possible to free from its central tenets of realisation?” where realisation is intended as “the idea that political action consists in realising, in facts or deeds, a doctrine, a philosophy, an ideal, a plan, or whatever else one wants to call this sort of obscure presupposition to every political praxis?” [28]. Destituent thinking is something removed from the model of realisation. Realisation is not related to construction, to the building process, or to its materiality, but rather a “matter of rendering it inexecutable” [29]. Desituent here is understood more as a withdrawal, a more radical and certainly more visible response in the present global condition of dispossession. What Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call abolition: “not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society” [30]. As The Invisible Committee observes, “what is at issue is nothing less than the repairing of our souls through the very act of repairing our world” [31]. The nature of such a revolution “is no longer merely political or cosmopolitan but anthropological” [32]. For Aarons (and others) the logic is not abstract, rather is the actual intimate relationship between place-making and the politics of destituent power through “affirming another idea of living, which presupposes—literally coincides with—the affirmation of a fragmentary experience of collective dignity” [33]. Weather in the form of desertion, withdrawal, new form of alliances, new form of narrative, support of struggles, the logic of destituent potential is essentially inconsistent with plausible and well-established principles of the grammar of political change. It does not fit with the modern political and juridical canon that sees any new accomplishment in the broader sphere of human social life as the realisation and constitution of orders.

4 Towards Abolition: Hope for Critical Theory

As Tony Fry and Mladina Tlostanova have repeatedly argued, “we must acknowledge the damage done by human designs and how our current design infrastructures keep designing even though we have little knowledge of the ongoing agencies of our designs and the values and knowledges and how they keep designing after we have designed and made them” [34]. To be sure, refusal should not be mistaken as simply passive withdrawal or retreat; rather, they are the active forms of a radically different mode of being and doing. There is something prophetic about abolition; some element of the elsewhere that marks its practice, and its discourse. In the work of undoing, there is a crack. In the refusal, a moment of imagination. When conceived as abolitionist, critique becomes different, not the road to enlightenment, not a route to a new politics but the end as such. A much-needed direction in architecture that consists in the construction of a space, a soglia, of “struggle against the arbitrary diktats of autocracy” [35] against absolute truth.