Time of affect
Shifting a model of time: towards a thickening model of duration and the affect-time vector
The earlier accounts of architectural practice subscribe to an economy of exchange reflective of the capitalist framework within which those framing them reside. Here is a human-centred, anthropocentric model of time, where operations are driven by, and privilege, the human experience. Further, productiveness is deemed generally to be governed by functional equivalence and framed by a teleological perception of architecture operant under a linear- temporality. What is sought, however, is an extension of this framework; one inclusive of, to use Kwinter’s words,‘a new type of unstable, hypersaturated moment... a dramatic multiplication of random or chance effects.’58 One that may also include times of stillness, the phenomenon of change and transformative effects of time. Likewise, a capacity for thinking outside of a stabilising form of architectural autonomy with its logical, sequential, and univocal trajectory: that which limits through a defined beginning, middle, and end. In short, what is sought is the inclusion of practice as lived experience. It is precisely this extended framework that the present work intends to explore, characterise, and most importantly, depict, through the empirical studies investigated in the main chapters (Chapters 3 through 5).
Any discussion of an extended framework for the depiction of architectural time and practice must begin with a renewed interpretation of time itself. It requires a shift of temporal understanding beyond a single, linear, mathematical time axis, towards the thickened time-model of duration, Henri Bergson’s duree.59 This is not just any time but rather, as Bergson claims, an attention to time’s movement, which can only be grasped in its process - in its ‘lasting through.’60 It is a call towards intersecting our understanding of architectural practice and the design process with ‘process temporality’ or processual time, constituted by features of becoming, continuity, and heterogeneity.
For Bergson, duree is, the ‘indivisible continuity of change’; it cannot be divided into a sequence of separate, discrete elements.61 Rather, without a succession of spatial constructs, no past, present or future, duration is time uncontaminated by space. Conceived as the continuous flow of interpenetrating moments, it is the continuity of becoming. Duree is also heterogeneous. Keith Alan Robinson explains that this key feature of Bergson’s duration shows ‘how a multiplicity of elements in becoming form a temporal unity. In other words if the continuity of becoming implies creativity, novelty and the new there must be qualitative or heterogeneous differences in the continuity.’62 Hence Bergson insists on time as we actually experience it: a continuum lasting through, enduring, as a continuity of experiences without juxtaposition. It fuses experience of past (conserving it), present newness and that which follows. Duration resists an objectified, quantifiable, measurable spatial time-construct framed within presupposed rational terms. By way of explanation, Robinson provides one of Bergson’s favoured examples of this experience:
In listening to a melody we have an experience of a change that endures. Although the tone, the pitch and the timbre might be the same as a second ago what enables novelty to emerge is that the antecedent phase is still there providing a qualitative difference in our experience of past and present. Thus, continuity and heterogeneity of becoming are fused in the experience of the melody surviving in the past and emerging in the present.63
Attention to Bergson’s experiential-duration is important to this present work in allowing an understanding of enduring change that ‘enables novelty.’ Connected to duration, ‘duration means invention, the creation of forms, and the continual elaboration of the absolutely new.’64 In Bergson’s own words:
The more I consider this point, the more it seems to me that, if the future is bound to succeed the present instead of being given alongside of it, it is because the future is not altogether determined at the present moment, and that if the time taken up by this succession is something other than a number, if it has for the consciousness that is installed in its absolute value and reality, it is because there is unceasingly being created in it. . . something unforeseeably and new.65
Through Bergson, we understand duration, this thickening of time that endures, as a complex heterogeneity of interdependent elements. These elements have vectorial properties: such tendencies and orientations of towards or away being their directedness relative to other qualities; likewise they act to potentialise relations between elements. To pursue the stated aims of this book, it is requisite that the concept of an affect-time vector be explored more deeply.
Affect-time vector
It is argued that the structure of time in practice is thick, following the nonlinear or dual axis temporality of duration as modelled by Bergson. The present work promotes consideration of a third axis, a vector of movement or force, of affect. This affect-time vector, a variable of relative direction as well as magnitude of momentum, force, velocity and hence influence, is rooted in a dynamic tendency and agency based on multiplicity, chance, and change. Hence it is a variable inclusive of the unforeseeable and unexpected; of abruptness, interference, indeterminacy and most significantly, stillness. This is a time-vector which, as Kwinter states in following Nietzsche,‘has no history.’66 Expanding on this further, Kwinter explains:
once an object or sign is embedded within the streaming, chaotic world of force, its so-called meaning must give way to a pure affectivity: the capacity to bear, transmit, or block and turn inward, a unit of ‘Will to Power’. In this domain there exist only dynamic metastabilities or meaning-events (accidents, convergences, subjugations); matter, form, and subjects (‘doers) come only later, reintroduced at a second order level, not as ground but as produced effect.67
From Kwinter’s and Nietzsche’s perspective, this affect-time vector challenges and departs from a ‘human-centred model of time, toward a conception of a highly differentiated and thickening model of duration.’68 In proposing this thickened duration, it is to be understood that the past, present and future can no longer be thought of as successive points on a time line. It is also to be understood that for all subsequent chapters, and the book overall, the interest is the encounter between this duration, as thickened by the affect-time vector, and the linear-axis or ‘mathematical time’: i.e., where the linear structure of architectural practice comes into contact with the nonlinear, often disjunctive, structure of the process itself. The present work is thus concerned with the processes of occasions and events that occur in the everyday reality of practice as performed rather than that which is scripted or theorised.
While the concept of an affect-time vector is not yet embedded in architectural practice or architectural literature, it offers a way to consider practice as performed, with all its disruptions and the fragmentary nature of the heterogeneous occasions of experience. In applying the affect-vector to the time of architectural practice, we are invited to re-conceptualise these interruptions, fragmentations, and happenstance instances of the design process; seeing them as other than collectively negative, and rather, to follow Bergson as, ‘swelling unceasingly with a present that is absolutely new.’69 What if we propose architectural practice as a system of disequilibrium producing lines of flight that exert interruptive forces or intensities? Such interruptions may then be perceived as stutters, as voids that open up, persisting and lingering through bodies both human and non-human; they become affects in excess to the goal orientations of practice. Most discussion on affect is abstract. However, in applying this framework to three rather different processes of architectural practice, that of RUR Architecture DPC (RUR), Kerstin Thompson Architects (KTA), and Shigeru Ban Architects (SBA), these new understandings of time may be engaged in application, doing so by analysing practice through a widened lens of affect: a purpose pursued through Chapters 3, 4, and 5.
Such a purpose leaves us with a range of problematic questions, stemming in the main from the one: How do we maintain affect’s potentiality in architectural practice which is always already within an economy of exchange? Within this question lies the issue of how to explore affective operations demonstrative of affect’s excess; an excess that does not subscribe to this economy of exchange, especially one organised within a capitalist framework. Further, how can we identify affectual operations showing an affect that defies a definition of productiveness governed by functional equivalence: One that exceeds human efforts to put it to use and so is not directly framed by human concerns; one demonstrating an economy proper to the adventures of matter, and bodies as assemblages of matter? That is, how to investigate within conditions whereby affect potentialises the world beyond an anthropocentrism? This book puts forward the argument for a disruptive and disjunctive temporality, a ‘thickened’ theory of affect, as the requisite path towards showing how bodies are held together and apart, and hence, as a way towards fuller interpretations of affect’s place in architecture.
Time of architectural practices through affect-time vector
Putting a lens of affect over the temporality of practice is to bring notions of intensity into frame. Likewise, the question of how might affect intensify or, equally, diminish, practice’s temporality? To briefly review, affect, according to Deleuze, is the ‘product of actions between bodies (animate and inanimate)’ where an action ‘causes a response - a movement, transition, or transformations - and this response takes many forms: perhaps an inspiration, or an instance of action.’70 Thus, affect is in movement between bodies, in which bodies, according to Manning ‘not only seek out but create the [potentiality of] relations.’71 Intensifying temporality implies intensifying the movement of affect in-between two bodies, two relations.72 This applies also between different temporalities, in which the intensification of stimulating affairs take place to unravel ‘ambiguities of desires, provoking and maintaining individual differences ... which at the same time demand practices of indifference.’75 In the context of architectural practice, these intensified relations comprise the in-betweens of expectation and realisation, for example, intension and production, original needs and altered needs.74 Thus, affect navigates between and through practice’s temporality, in which affect ‘happens’ not as or in a separate dimension but as inherent to the process of practice.
When thinking through affect in this way, the time of practice is not wholly anticipatory. Hence the position espoused through the pages of this book holds affect as a productive means for exploring the time of practice. This, because it allows emphasis on the in-between times of practices in which future trajectories are but partial inferences. Linking affect and architectural practice through time requires examining practice’s moments of ‘indeterminacy, undecidability and ambivalence’;75 that is, times of stillness or stilled stutters. The question of affect and time in practice is therefore undertaken through consideration of stuttering, which in turn references the work of Deleuze. Before proceeding further, it is important to clarify the term ‘stuttering’ as it is used throughout the remainder of the chapter and the book at large.
On stuttering
The term ‘stutter’ carries two resonances that need explanation. First, stuttering suggests a series of breaks within a whole motion. Within this there is a sense of process in which the series of bits and pieces are held together under a present that extends through, as Anderson describes, ‘stilled-slowed time’76 such as sustained stuttering. Second, and concurrently, the idea of stutter also incorporates abrupt suspensions, suspensions of affect intensity, suggesting a temporal motion that hurries on towards the future. Thus, stuttering is a form of temporal mediation - taking place as a temporal relation of proximity between present and future. Its temporality is not about the immediate, but about the conditions in between. Importantly, as this work argues, the stutters (as temporal intervals) are not empty but are filled by affective content.
Here it is critical to acknowledge Deleuze’s essay titled ‘He Stuttered,’77 in which he refers to the stuttering of the writer as a performative activity, ‘making the language . . . stutter’ through ‘an affective intensity.’78 In Deleuze’s terminology, stuttering is the dislocated relation between words by the writer rather than the speaker, in which the language can ‘roll from right to left . . . toss from back to front.’79 Further, Deleuze suggests stuttering occurs when a language system ‘overstrains itself.’80 This strained language system ‘suffers a pressure that delivers it to silence.’81 Thus, through the inarticulate stutter, the language system becomes affective and intensive rather than functional and extensive.
Deleuze’s description of stuttering informs us that the concept of the stutter is significant to time of practice, highlighting how involuntary and disjunctive repetition of actions (e.g., in language, sounds, and silences in speech) can trigger affects in the form of embarrassment, discomfort, and forestalled progress. In addition, Deleuze refers to the space between - the time gap of the stutter - in which we may consider the disequilibrium of stuttering as an ‘affirmative disjunction.’82 This affirmative approach turns stuttering into ‘creative’ stuttering; stuttering in which ‘language growjs] from the middle, like grass, it is what makes language a rhizome instead of a tree,’ placing ‘language in perpetual disequilibrium.’83 Following this illustration of‘growing from the middle,’ this chapter, and those that follow, hold the position that a practice is bound to stutter as it grapples with the inherently unstable bodies that participate in design processes. The practice of architecture is an open-system that is overstrained and pressured: thus, it begins to stutter creatively and affirmatively through affective temporalities.
