avanessian – xenoarchitecture (draft) Introduction Armen Avanessian “Man’s desire is the desire of the Other,” Lacan, Seminar XI, p. 235 Following Lacan’s infamous dictum, according to which desire is defined as the desire of the Other, we could ask ourselves what a correlate methodology would look like for the humanities (or should we say “the inhumanities”?). Obviously, the structure of the phrase is ambiguous, or even tautological if taken as a predicative proposition. Instead, I propose to read it as a speculative proposition: we do not simply desire what the other has or hasn’t got, but we desire the state of being an Other, an othering, becoming a stranger to oneself and others—literally alienating them as well as “ourselves.” A desire for the xeno? This transformation has at least three central aspects: alienation (the negative mirroring of a given reality), negation (the construction of an asymmetry that initiates an annihilation of the positively given), and a recursion of alienation and negation through speculation.1 It is a poietic qua productive and creative transformation in the sense that it increases the scope of navigation and liberation by means of manipulation. Together with others, I have thought, experimented, and written a lot about questions of othering and “matching” experimental settings2 for the production of knowledge, tactical spaces in the sense of Michel de Certeau, xeno-spaces that are defined by “a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus. No delimitation of an exteriority, then, provides it with the condition necessary for autonomy. The space of a tactic is the space of the Other. Thus, it must play on and with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power.”3 Maybe we are confronted here with a fantasy as old as philosophy itself, a kind of dialogue (or trialogue? or …) of radical alienation that is passed on or handed to us from the Platonic or Socratic dialogues, the idea of a radical recursive transformation of knowing into not-knowing into knowing, an othering that also affects (and alienates) the idea of communication at the very heart of the philosophical community. We are dealing here with a communication not on the basis of an accumulation of different sorts of (positive) knowledge 1 I have developed these ideas in detail in my book Overwrite: Ethics of Knowledge – Poetics of Existence (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017) 2 By “setting,” I mean the structure that prescribes what kind of knowledge emerges. In psychoanalysis and elsewhere, it is the setting that prescribes the way in which knowledge can be produced as well as the position from which the subject sets out to find its truth. 3 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 37. 1 avanessian – xenoarchitecture (draft) but one in the radical sense carved out etymologically by Roberto Esposito: a communitas whose connections are established on the basis of subtraction and not addition (munus, as a debt and pledge). What would be a coextensive xeno-communication—or xeno-method—that opens itself to its Other, to its unknown outside? What would be a xeno-methodology that disables any guarantee of knowing how to trace its origins? And what would a xeno- architecture be like that is (and has as its basis) not an Architektur der reinen Vernunft— architecture of pure reason—as in Kant, but, on the contrary, an impure reason that simultaneously affects its future and its recent past as well as its own origins (the arché). Questions like these were already bothering me, so when Markus Miessen invited me to write the foreword to a book on his critical practice, and later to develop a project together with him, the speculative task was clear: I would draw on previous experiences with poetic collaborations (with other writers, illustrators, filmmakers, performers, and artists) images nd experimentation with the concept of “xeno-architecture” with regard to the work of some contemporary architects. It was obvious in any case that what had to be avoided was mere contemplation and reflection about architecture. Instead we tried to build an alternative setting—another xeno-architecture of reasoning. In our experimental arrangement, speculation takes the place of contemplation and the transformative dimension of recursion takes over from reflection. And instead of installing a merely dialogic communication (between the philosopher and the architect, between the theoretician and the practitioner, between the abstract and the concrete), this book is dedicated to the attempt to develop an architecture of knowledge to match xenoism. It has already changed our understanding of how to speak or write or think architecture. First of all, it changed how we spoke to each other, not in a dialogue, but in an ongoing drift of communicational settings, all leading toward an event on April 18, 2017, at the Kaaitheater in Brussels. Maybe the series of encounters (between musicians, architects, philosophers, performance-artists, etc.) can be understood using a term borrowed from the philosophy of science: cognitive traps. These always-changing and developing traps of knowledge production are manipulations of the respective intellectual or practical context. Here Lorenzo Magnani’s concept of “manipulative abduction” is especially relevant: Manipulative abduction occurs when many external things, usually inert from the semiotic point of view, can be transformed into […] “epistemic mediators” that give rise to new signs, new chances for interpretants, and new 2 avanessian – xenoarchitecture (draft) interpretations. […] It happens when we are thinking through doing and not only, in a pragmatic sense, about doing.4 In organizing an event in Brussels—as the fifth and, for now, final conversation—we immediately decided to disappoint the expectation of a collaboration like ours (philosophers talking about or in an architectural setting), representing this or that external idea in a pedagogical manner. Instead, we were aiming at a transformative environment, a manipulative setting that would be capable not just of alienating the individual protagonists and their audience (the problem of estrangement qua aesthetic experience without any further ramifications) but of creating an alienation, an othering, and a xeno-architectural laboratory condition aimed at the actual production of knowledge. At the same time the idea was not to put on display what is supposed to be unique in each practice and overexpose its Other (or its many Others). Our goal, therefore, was focused not so much on a reflective unease but on a recursive disquiet, triggered by constantly integrating parts and practices into wholly new ones, perforating what was previously a whole and recursively changing both the integrated parts and the integrating whole. We wanted to create settings that are in themselves xeno- architectural and could provide us with some insight into a hyperstitional or speculative concept like xeno-architecture, a conceptual fiction capable of realizing itself from the future. Because it might not only be high time for a xeno-architecture (of knowing) to match. For then, and from a non-chronological point of view, it might be both slightly different and the other way around. Perhaps xeno-architecture has long since started in the future and we just don’t know it yet. 4 Lorenzo Magnani, Abductive Cognition: The Epistemological and Eco-Cognitive Dimensions of Hypothetical Reasoning (Berlin: Springer, 2009), 174. 3 avanessian – xenoarchitecture (draft) 4 xenoarchitecture (draft) Conversation 1 01-26-2017, 11:00 CET+1 Armen Avanessian, Anke Hennig, Markus Miessen, Patricia Reed Armen Avanessian: The reason why Markus and I decided to start the series of conversations with you, Patricia and Anke, is based on your respective implementation of the “xeno” into your practices, namely xeno-poetics and xeno-feminism. I would like to propose starting in a counter-intuitive way in which both of you explain each other’s practice, instead of Patricia explaining xeno-feminism and Anke, xeno-poetics. Patricia Reed: Alright, let me start by explaining how I relate to xeno-poetics. My main interest in the prefix “xeno” is partly related to the work of Wilfrid Sellars and his concept of the “manifest image,” which basically comes down to how humans understand themselves in the world (and the agency ingrained in this conceptual process). I think that the work in your book Metanoia Spekulative Ontologie der Sprache (Merve, 2014), Armen and Anke, is important within this frame, since “metanoia” is the moment, or perhaps act, of self-transformation. In your literary outline, it’s a sense-event resulting in a self-transformation whereby your view of reality is dramatically “othered,” to the point where you can no longer return to your former perspective. The question that I’ve always had with metanoia, since I think we’ve all experienced this phenomenon on an individual level, is how that process could be collectivized so that it actually becomes a transformation of the human’s self-image. How can or does metanoia go beyond an individual epiphany? Perhaps the ambition of xeno-poetics would be to examine how to collectivize this idea of a new perspective that results from the sense-event of metanoia. What I mean with “sense-event” (and why I think hyphenation is important) is firstly to express a continuum between perception and thinking, which is what metanoia, as I understand it, makes explicit. Secondly, to use the term “event” (lowercase, and not stand-alone) to mark a moment of transformation, so hopefully not as heroic as a capital-E event that carries with it too much theo- political baggage for my taste. So this metanoia, via a sense-event, is deeply tied to the creating of new perspectives on the world. This brings us to another interesting inquiry, which is related to the methodological question: How do we introduce these processes of new human self-understandings, in line with Reza Negarestani’s notion of inhumanism? What I’m getting at here is the idea of the interface as the technique of mediation; a general question as to how to unleash these processes.