Arakawa + Gins: Why Ethics?

or, what does it mean, to arrive at an absolute

cessation of habit using buildings?
Ed Keller

Published 1996 in the Japanese Philosophy journal Gendai Shisou- special issue on
Arakawa and Gins' work



In a recent conversation with Madeline and Arakawa, I tangented into the topic of will,
and mentioned to Arakawa the crux of the matter (for me): a critical will! Consciously
arriving at this critical will was of great importance, and a key intention in their work.
Arakawa expressed his agreement.
------------------------------------
What are the implications of a critical will, and how does it emerge from an architectural
work? How can it have an inseparable relationship to a radical ethics? Why does habit
intercede here?

As A+G have noted- somehow, we must ask the universe to accept some kind of
cessation of habit or the residue thereof, as an exchange for the alternative body and
soul Arakawa and Gins propose. But why, indeed, would innity incline itself towards us
and allow us to become even, as John Knesl has suggested, only stuttering gods... A
god such as Borges has described in his 'The Circular Ruins': one who invents
themselves through dreaming, a constitution moment by moment of the body, the
consciousness, intentionally. These are the themes to be addressed in the following
words.

SAVAGE Architecture
In the work of A+Gins, an absolute cessation of habit, a limit condition, is NOT a
cessation of language alone. True, absolute inchoateness (savagery) is the loss of, or
casting away from any sequence, any repetition. The term 'savage' encompasses an
entire spectrum of intensities, in relation to language and habituated experience-
proprioceptive, linguistic, perceptual- which generate the ability to move at will between
the enframings of repetition as a context and the 'freedom' of the totally inchoate. To be
a stuttering god means to move into and out of true inchaoteness- thus to invent
constantly.

A critical will engaged in invention produces a quite different behavioral structure- a
exible, accommodating one, if indeed a structure at all- than a will constrained by
absolutes.

How to invoke a critical will; a cookbook for new awareness
In process, identify the elements that foster a non critical sensibility, a complacent
subjectivity. Habit falls into the forefront. Repetition; memory: the elements that
contextualize all human perception in time, that allow us to represent, ctionalize,
Arakawa + Gins: Why Ethics?
or, what does it mean, to arrive at an absolute cessation of habit using buildings?
Ed Keller, 1996 Gendai Shisou- special issue on Arakawa and Gins
regulate behaviors. Ideas. This habit is produced by a set of forces, the forces that
Deleuze (through Spinoza) identies, which produce inadequate ideas in individuals
captured by the canalizations that these regimes of power set up versus Spinoza's
adequate ideas- a critical, self reective, uid, nonintegrative motivation which questions
even the possibility of repetition in a single, linear time. (Deleuze: ' But in the ethical
view the power of being affected is xed only within general limits. While exercised by
passive affections, it is reduced to a minimum; we then remain imperfect and impotent,
cut off, in a way, from our essence or degree of power, cut off from what we can do.....It
is indeed true that an existing mode is always as perfect as it can be: but this only
relative to the affections actually belonging to its essence. It is indeed true that the
passive affections we experience exercise our capacity to be affected; but this , having
reduced it to a minimum, having cut us off from what we can do (our power of action).
The expressive changes of nite modes consist, then, not only in mechanical changes
in the affections it experiences, but also in dynamic changes in the capactiy to be
affected....'
from Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, Zone Books, NY, 1992.

-- as regards differing kinds of power, Brian Massumi notes that 'Puissance refers to a range of
potential...It may be thought of as a scale of intensity or fullness of existence...puissance pertains to the
virtual, (the plane of consistency), pouvoir to the actual (the plane of organization). D&G use pouvoir in a
sense very close to Foucault's, as an instituted and reproducible relation of force, selective concretization
of potential.' -1000 Plateaus, p xvii )-

These forces materialize across the entire spectrum available to human perception and
construction: within the spatial and programmatic sequences organized by architecture;
within narrative sequences in all media; within allowable behaviors sanctioned by the
church and the state, and indeed, all forms of behavior, belief, and form that involve
themselves in legislating in any way whatever.

On a daily level, we constantly uctuate between a stable, normative perception of
ourselves and the world around us, and a much more dynamic and variable self- a
distributed self, in which the body PERFORMS: as a 'smear' in time, across spaces-
where the perceiving self dissolves into a multiplicity of sentiments, directions, actions...
The limit condition, which is a moment where most people typically encounter in the
inchoate- is produced by any out of the ordinary experience...or any experience which
may be thought to be out of the ordinary. It can be brought on by extremes of emotion,
fatigue, drugs, sexual pleasure... at this moment, the individual may well be thrown not
only out of language, but out of their routine, habitual ways of seeing, being, thinking.
The limit condition then takes on an active role in the dissolution of the self, in the
setting up of opportunities for that dissolution to take place.

This limit condition is isomorphic in many ways to the gap in perception/memory/self
which Bergson identies as the point of elan vital's descent into humanity. Creative
emotion irrupts across the gap that the cessation of habit ( absolute, atemporal
perception, or BEING) produces between its absoluteness and the immediately
following contextualization through memory. (cf Bergson here; also Deleuze' work Bergsonism)
Arakawa + Gins: Why Ethics?
or, what does it mean, to arrive at an absolute cessation of habit using buildings?
Ed Keller, 1996 Gendai Shisou- special issue on Arakawa and Gins

As Francisco Varela more recently notes, ' ... it is the breakdowns, the hinges that
articulate microworlds, that are the source of the autonomous and creative side of living
cognition. Such common sense, then must be examined on a microscale: in the
moment during a breakdown it actualizes the birth of the concrete. " Varela,
Reenchantment of the Concrete, Zone 6, Zone books NY

These breakdowns occur at moments when Benjaminian absentmindedness is
disrupted, and habit is thrown into a destabilized condition.

This breakdown is the moment which Arakawa and Gins precipitate, and attempt to
prolong. However, even extending this moment is useless unless a return is facilitated
which deposits the individual in a place which is inected and slightly different from
where she started. Hence the role of critical resemblance in A+G's work. The value of
this is found in a straightforward tactic: dislocation/relocation.

The relocation proposed is not one which attempts to reintegrate the subject into the
social structure from which she exited, but, in alignment with Victor Turner and Roberto
Unger 's elaboration of the improvisatory nature of any social organization, one which
sets up a possibility for absolute invention, and provides the opportunity for the subject
to realign herself- to create- to invent- a new spectrum of selves (landing sites). (unger
footnote "Until we make the underlying institutional and imaginative structures of a
society explicit we are almost certain to mistake the regularities and routines that
persist, so long as the structure is left undisturbed, for general laws of social
organization. At the very least, we are likely to treat them as the laws of a particular type
of society and to imagine that we can suspend them only by a revolutionary switch to a
new type. Superstition then encourages surrender." --- Unger, R., Social Theory: Its
Situation and Task, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987 p4)

As Victor Turner divides the role of the transformative, into two categories, the liminal
and the liminoid, we nd A+G falling quite clearly into the liminoid. (footnote here :
Turner identies typologies of social transitions- rituals. He describes a socially
reintegrative path of ritual transformation as a liminal path- and calls it ergic ludic, as it
reinserts the subject into a social order. However, the path termed the anergic ludic is a
game playing path that does NOT reintegrate, that does not work, per se, but plays:
"liminal genres put much stress on social frames, plural reexivity, and mass ow,
shared ow, while liminoid genres emphasize idiosyncratic framing, individual reexivity,
subjective ow, and see the social as problem, not datum..." Turner, V., 'Frame, Flow,
Reection: Ritual and Drama as Public Liminality' in Performance in Postmodern
Culture)

The value of this lies, perhaps most critically, in the fact that in invention may be found
the impetus for a radical ethics- a critical ethics. A+G suggest an architectural
framework which allows the individual cut loose from context to recontextualize herself
actively, as opposed to returning to a predened structure which provides context. We
can look to the example of Lemmy Caution, for instance, as the prototypical individual
Arakawa + Gins: Why Ethics?
or, what does it mean, to arrive at an absolute cessation of habit using buildings?
Ed Keller, 1996 Gendai Shisou- special issue on Arakawa and Gins
in relation to power and habit, who manages to uidly negotiate those labyrinths and
continue to maintain a ludic sensibility, a serious yet light practice. (footnote: Lemmy
Caution, protagonist in Godard's lm Alphaville.)


Ethics and Invention
...i'm stuck in this dream its changing me i am becoming
the me that you know had some second thoughts
he's covered with scabs he is broken and sore
the me that you know doesnt come around much
that part of me isnt here anymore...
trent reznor, NIN , The Downward Spiral, 1994

In this light, the absolute madness that conventional wisdom would impute to such a
process becomes something much more positive, and evades the negative trajectory
which Bataille's grounding of le bas wallows in. The Spinozan project tackles this
question (footnote Spinoza's Ethics here); in the model of ethology, we nd a path that
allows for a positive 'radical' ethics and a new teleology. Turner's model of the liminoid
suggests as well an alternative teleology, which allows one to enter into the
transgressive path in a manner which does not mandate a negative dialectic, nor the
oppositional tactic that Bataille embraces but which aligns itself more closely with the
impartial teleology that Norman Bryson extracts from his analysis of Nishitani, in
comparison to Lacan. ( footnote "...what counts is not what is above but what is beneath or
underneath, what Bataille later calls le bas. Instead of 'converting' oneself to the higher place, in this
orientation one tries to 'subvert' what appear to be the 'grounds' of things, uncovering beneath such
grounds the fathomless abysses that precede them...' Rajchman, J. ANYWHERE, Anyone Corp/
Rizzoli, New York, 1992)

'The concept of blankness, as it evolves in the thought of Nishida and then of Nishitani,
relocates the Gaze, le regard, in an expanded eld where number of conceptual
transformations become necessary and urgent: notably concerning the aspect of
menace which still colors Lacan's account of the subject's visual experience, concerning
the question of where the subject resides, under the Gaze and in the expanded eld of
sunyata or blankness...' Bryson, N, The Gaze in the Expanded Field, October #44

In rethinking 'other' (and, inescapably, death) from a non combative point Bryson posits
an ethics which would not see its own constitution through potentiality and effect as a
violent propagation of will, but as a much more afrmative, light practice. Bryson's
investigations of Nishitani here allow us to understand the self returning out of absolute
inchoateness (or even remaining there...) as a process which does not constitute a
crisis- much as he rethinks other and emptiness in the context of 'ma' and 'sunyata',
Bryson allows a different return from madness- from the madness that becoming
immortal might well bring with it. To be a stuttering god would then mean nding oneself
alternately in habit, in time, in language, and then sliding/ying/dancing out of habit back
into the realms of absolute invention.

Arakawa + Gins: Why Ethics?
or, what does it mean, to arrive at an absolute cessation of habit using buildings?
Ed Keller, 1996 Gendai Shisou- special issue on Arakawa and Gins
To battle stasis, habit, and atrocity, we need a critical will, an innite nostalgia, a savage
tragedy. For us, the implications may be extended quite clearly to the development of
radical ethics- in the face of arbitrary congurations of social , ethical, moral structure,
the impetus for these ethics emerge from a reconceptualization of the framework any
propositional intention is sited in.
It is clear that Arakawa and Gins are moving along this line. They recognize that the
fundamental measure, for most humans (both practically and as a problematic within
philosophy), has to do with living in relationship to dying. And the way in which we
practice these two things.

It is for most people absolutely impossible to reconcile events like Auschwitz-Hiroshima
(which A+G explicitly invoke as absolutes in our understanding of humanity's
capabilities) with any overarching moral structure. To condone them. ( though apathy on
the part of millions, is an implicit condoning, and as part of the continuing status quo of
the human condition, demands the cry for action that A+G heed) . This almost absolute
act against other humans forms one point on the diagram A+G have outlined as a frame
for their endeavor; the other is one's own death. These two factors- absolute horror (a
perpetration), and nal conclusion (a fate)- are posed as 'great motivators' in the search,
not for meaning, but for acceptable invention in the course of our existence as
perceiving and acting beings, in the world. The ethical question then becomes, after
Spinoza- how, rst, we can arrive at adequate ideas- in fact, at an adequate conduct of
life in general... and second, since it is ethics we are talking about here, how we
propose these practices for others.

As this is a question of practical, radical ethics-a processual ethics- for such a practice
this means the cessation not only of habit, but of any mandate. An ethological concern
not only addresses the capacities of radically dispersed, dynamic bodies in relation to
one another; it questions the entire method of proposition at its origin. (footnote: cf here,
for an analagous train of thought, Andrew Benjamin's examination of the an-original and its ethical
implications)

This is the motivation of Arakawa and Gins' 'tentative' plan. In the architectural work
Arakawa + Gins have developed devices and techniques which dislocate the subject
from habit in various ways, and then suggest a set of possible relocations.

ARCHITECTURE'S role in this;
and how we might then stutter, godlike
The work then must take on its role as guide, as gentle trickster, as standin for the self.
As suggested above, architecture as a device for inscribing and inecting subjectivity
thus is an ideal mechanism for providing large groups of people with the opportunity to
become suddenly self aware. Or spontaneously burn from within.

It is not the appropriate place here to list the full spectrum of techniques which
accomplish this, developed by A+G and others. Nor should these techniques be
considered absolute and effective over long periods of time. However, there are some
Arakawa + Gins: Why Ethics?
or, what does it mean, to arrive at an absolute cessation of habit using buildings?
Ed Keller, 1996 Gendai Shisou- special issue on Arakawa and Gins
basic techniques of the body, of perception, which disrupt accepted norms of the body,
and which a re important to note in support of the above arguments.

In the park at Gifu, for example, there are devices deployed to disrupt habit both in the
body itself, in the body's location of itself in relation to gravity and the horizon, in the
self's identication of itself in relation to program; and proposed in their (as yet unbuilt)
projects for housing one nds the extension of these concerns a step further into the
local reconguration of programmatic sequences on the level of the appliance all the
way up through the scale of movement sequence and programmatic organization in an
entire housing 'block'.

These effects are realized at Gifu, for instance, in the destabilization of the body in
relation to gravity, through a wildly variegated terrain, and the creation of multiple
horizons; the incorporation of alternate local programs (the couch, furniture, appliances
outside) into a public park; the opening of the walls of the house to invite in the middle
and far grounds visually, and the elements as well; the subtle repetition and distortion of
formal themes across the entire park, to create a self referential labyrinth which is both
transparent and opaque simultaneously.

It is important to note that these techniques are only a few in a vast library of endlessly
mutating techniques within architecture (and by implication, the arts, lm, music, social
organization, and the like); yet to be explored are more complicated programmatic
sequences ( soon, perhaps, in their proposed housing outside of Tokyo, at which point
an entire encyclopaedia of architectural devices will evolve) which will shift and mutate
over time, in relation to the uses their inhabitants put them to, and the manner in which
human perception, social structure, and the forms themselves change. Fundamental to
them all is simply, that given the social context they are deployed within, they function
as devices for attaining a limit condition.

Intentional (constructed) Situations
constructed situation
A moment of life, concretely and deliberately constructed by the
collective organization of unitary environment and the free play of
events.

From the journal Internationale Situationniste #1, June 1958

It is suggested that through this organization of transitory cessations of habit a
transformative subject will emerge. In contrast to the engines of discipline utilized by
pouvoir in general (cf above footnotes on Massumi's pouvoir/puissance) we nd here a
much more uid teleology in service of radical ethics. Not in service of a reintegrative
strategy either socially or on the level of the individual, but a quest to invent new selves
constantly. The logical extreme of this pursuit suggests a society where people who
never speak the same language or practice the same activities, on a daily basis
endlessly improvise on a theme of existence as exuberant game- ( Turner's metaphor
for the liminoid calls it the 'anergic ludic') .
Arakawa + Gins: Why Ethics?
or, what does it mean, to arrive at an absolute cessation of habit using buildings?
Ed Keller, 1996 Gendai Shisou- special issue on Arakawa and Gins
Key to the success of this project is the realization, both in theory and practice, of a truly
distributed body. A body which, as A+G propose, is a site for landing- assembling- a
human, from multiple forces crossing it. As they theorize the body and the subject, they
project a human who does not submit to a dialectical subdivision; the inchoate no
longer means outside of language, or the informe- but an inchoateness of the body
become a cessation of bodily habit- a processual and developmental state. In this
schema cessation of habit, critically deployed, leads to a human constantly engaged in
the production, the living, of Spinozist 'active affections'.

Ed Keller, 1996



Arakawa + Gins: Why Ethics?
or, what does it mean, to arrive at an absolute cessation of habit using buildings?
Ed Keller, 1996 Gendai Shisou- special issue on Arakawa and Gins