phd
beyond the need of the architect and architecture: problematizing territorial coloniality and neo-liberal subjectivation in so-called colombia and méxico
egs / european graduate school
2018-2024
phd in philosophy, art and social thought
supervised by fred moten
english version
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as frantz fanon might have said, before beginning our case, we have to say certain things. the analysis that we are undertaking is not philosophical, sociological, anthropological or architectural, or as félix guattari would say: “none of that in particular, all of that at the same time” (guattari & rolnik, 2006, p. 81). all forms, indeed. the most varied forms.
since it is considered appropriate to introduce a work with a statement of its methodology. we shall break with tradition. we leave methods to architects and urbanists. there is a point at which methods devour themselves. many architects will not find themselves in what follows (fanon, 2008, pp. 4–5).
as josé villagrán garcía never said, to problematize architecture and the architect is neither the audacity of a more or less ingenious thinker, nor the original discovery of an unthought-of state, but the tragic necessity of whom—held by privilege and persistence—, enveloped in the whirlwind that makes the world spin and collapse, tries to find supports or glimpses of other horizons (villagrán garcía, 2011, p. 613).
throughout the following, we elaborate a problematization of architecture and the architect, through the fields and forces of the experience of coloniality, situated in the territories now called colombia and méxico. and study particularly, the re/production of the neo-liberal architect—the current modality of the architect—through the false promise of the uni-versal individual subject, vocational education at uni-versities and abstract-alienating-subordinated labour, and how it is sustained by/for the amalgam of patriarchy-capitalism and colonial domination. what such amalgam produces is the constant (sub)valorization of life and the reduction of life to an economic existence and labour identity.
we hold that architecture as a technology, proper to the white bourgeois ideology of design, and fundamental to territorial coloniality dominates the multiple approaches to study, imagine, compose and construct space and form, and encubre the diverse inhabiting and constructive cultures, modalities of inhabiting. architecture pushes constantly towards the violent inseparability of the white-totality of being and the white-totality of inhabiting. “but no apparatus of capture is a totality; no apparatus of capture can indeed succeed in the entirety of its attempted capture” (bey, 2023, p. 8).
dis/appropriating eli meyerhoff (meyerhoff, 2019, p. 4), as he argues against the romance of education, we argue that architecture is just one possible mode of studying, imagining, composing and constructing places—or spatio-territorial trans-formation—among many, alternative modes of inhabitation are bound up with different practices of world un-making, as fred moten might say (moten & da silva, 2021)—ways of rehearsing becomings, spatiality and sociality. we understand modes of inhabitation as ways of composi(t)ng the means and relations of inhabitation. we argue that architecture-based modes of inhabitations sustain practices of world-making that are associated with modernist, colonial, capitalist, statist, white-supremacist, cis-hetero patriarchal norms. in the course of political struggles between conflicting modes of world-making, architecture has been presented as the best and only option for spatio-territorial trans-formation. because it is idealized in this way, today, the possibilities of alternative modes of spatio-territorial trans-formation, practices of world un-making have become almost unthinkable. not only architecture is idealized and imposed, but architectural alienation operates by estranging people off the collective potency of inhabiting autonomously the world. against the grain, we take aim at the romance of architecture, beyond-against and beyond architectural alienation.
contesting the white-north architectural left, as erik swyngedouw and peggy deamer, who both agree on the “identification that while architecture is what tafuri claimed it to be—ideology’s pawn—architects are not” (lahiji, 2016, p. 106). on the contrary, we argue that architects are essential pawns, lavaperros del poder, “watchdogs of colonialism” as césaire would say (césaire, 2001, p. 55), there is no architecture without architects—which does not mean that all architecture is directly done by architects, we know most architecture is produced without the direct participation of architects, but that rather architects advance either disciplinary or professionally the white bourgeois ideology of design which operates environmentally by modulating one hegemonic mode of inhabiting, the architectural world—, architecture is the production of the architect, as labour is the production of the labourer, the creation of architecture is the creation of the architect, and as fred moten and stefano harney note, “the worker first produces herself, but in so doing produces not just herself but the very relations of capital” (moten & harney, 2021, p. 132).
problematizing architecture, then, is always already a critique of the architect. and situating such critique in so-called méxico and colombia, calls to co-move beyond-against and beyond the modality of existence that over-represents the architect, the white-cis-hetero-petty-bourgeois mestizo, the neo-liberal patriarchitect. we ask what/who is an architect? if labour is the key form of capitalist domination (krisis-group, 1999), in other words, the amalgam of patriarchy-capitalism and colonial domination is fundamentally sustained through labour. through the ontological imbrication of class, race and gender. then, what we are mobilizing is fundamentally a problematization of the ontology of such thing as the architect. the ontological push towards being architects. with all the class, race and gender violence this implies. yet, as marquis bey, remarks in impossible life: a meditation on paraontology: we ask nothing of ontology. “ontology is not the thing” (bey, 2023, p. 19). because, “the fort is the ontological, the supposed community that comes with being a part of the same race or gender or class” (bey, 2023, p. 19). or the fort of the supposed architectural community.
we are elaborating an imbricate and trans-versal—anarchic, anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, anti-racist—problematization of architecture, an abolitionist critique. which is to say, to co-move beyond-against and beyond the white-bourgeois authority complex of the patriarchitect. we hold then, by way of iván illich, that there are no alternative architectures, nor alternative modalities of the architect, but what we urgently need are alternatives to architecture, alternatives to the white-authority professional complex of the architect. and, ultimately that a critique of the architect and architecture as white-colonial ideology, means co-moving towards composi(t)ng and rehearsing the means and relations of autonomous modes of inhabitation, beyond-against and beyond the need for architecture and the architect. in other words, by way of moten and harney, and through fanon (moten & harney, 2013, p. 15), we argue, we are co-moving not to end the architect or architecture, but the end of the standpoint from which it makes sense to need the architect and architecture.
make no mistake, we are all neo-liberal architects. we are not compelled to engage with a ruthless criticism of architecture and the architect in order to dissociate and distance ourselves from architecture, and its responsibility. but to recognize ourselves through the violence we sustain as architects and doing architecture, as workers. because as guattari underscores, “self-critique is always for theory and organization” (guattari, 2015, p. 367). and therefore, co-move collective potencies of organization beyond architectural education and labour, against the professionalization of our habitat. because even if the main axis of critique is architecture and the architect, we do not write only for architects, nor for the discipline or profession. we are not here to convince anyone. but rather to engage and co-move, to study, with anyone and everyone willing to re/claim the autonomous potency of inhabitation. to co-move beyond the false promise of the uni-versal individual subject. in other words, to mobilize together beyond-against and beyond architecture. fuck architecture! there is no autonomy of architecture. but only autonomy from architecture. the autonomy of architecture is whiteness dream. which is to say, there is no autonomous architecture, but autonomous struggles beyond-against and beyond architecture.
let go. we must let go the false promise that we need architects and architecture. “to inhabit the world as unfixed requires one to let go profoundly. but this profound letting go is with respect to a profound gaining of something else that might allow us to do things differently” (bey, 2021, p. 12). “we must let go […] letting go allows us to attempt to find ourselves unviolated existences” (bey, 2021, p. 137). “we become new and different subjects, subjects we could not have been if we had not abolished subjectivity. we become subjectless. for now at least” (bey, 2021, p. 140).
no matter how much architects want to insist on the possibility of designing and building other worlds, this will never happen, not through the white/colonial disciplinary and professional authority and its modern-capitalist-patriarchal project, which will only continue to re/produce the same architectural world. not behind the white-mask of amiable leadership (said, 2003, p. 226). in other words, the world the globalitarian modern-eurocentric civilizatory project has imposed over the planet, sustained by/for the amalgam of patriarchy-capitalism and colonial domination, which has designed and constructed the world through violent: enclosures, frontiers, extractivism, dispossession, deterritorialization, codification and discrimination. all to sustain mono-functional modern space—which is to say the spatiality by/for mono-humanism—for the (sub)valorization of life. sustaining such world has caused the civilizatory catastrophe, that as horacio machado aráoz argues, is “not only the material collapse of the world, which it is, the water, energy, and food crisis, but already as a civilizatory crisis, which has to do fundamentally with bodies that become incapable of feeling that life is threatened. the civilizatory crisis is a crisis of meaning: the inability to feel what is happening at the level of the flows of life; and inability to answer about the meaning of life” (machado aráoz, 2016, p. 254).
therefore, no matter how much architecture wears all the masks of inclusion: racial, sexual or class, a mask it will be. this is the challenge, the horizon, because it is not only about negating and refusing the authority and labour identity of the patriarchitect, but most importantly about co-moving towards the possibility and potency of imagining and constructing other worlds, transworlds (bey, 2022, p. 96), rehearsing, as saidiya hartman beautifully notes, other modes of inhabiting earth that might yield other forms for existence, that the world violently denies us. beyond-against and beyond the architectural world, we co-move, dream and rehearse towards anarchic worlds, ungovernable modalities of inhabitation, beautiful experiments in how-to-live, towards collective trans-formations, and become ungovernable (hartman, 2019, p. 203) (hartman, 2021, pp. xiii–vi).