Hypersurface
Theory:
Architecture><Culture*
PART(4)
Stephen Perrella and Rebecca Carpenter, Mobius House Study, 1998
Transversal nurb animations
Email from Gary Genosko, February, 1998
Dear Stephen, Your critique of dichotomaniac thought by way of the collapse of dominant dualities, which reveals their transversal connections on a plane of immanence, strongly suggests that the dominant generative force is consumer society. This ties hypersurface phenomena to capitalist codes, reinstating a dominant semiology on the plane of immanence and more or less defeating the purpose of your critique. The idea that hypersurfaces produce intensive effects must mean that singular traits of these effects are maintained against capitalist translations of them. This means that a certain amount of a-signifying semiosis must be at work in hypersurfaces: the relation between formal and material fluxes must in some manner elude capitalist representation of them (if they fail to do so they will cancel each other out). Of course, hypersurface phenomena need to borrow capitalist semiologies, but they also need to retain some autonomy from them. I suppose, all that needs to be admitted is that hypersurface semiotics eludes the dominant meaning-giving formalisms of a signifying regime based on dichotomies, that they cannot be captured as a language (architecture is not a language!). What is hypersurface architecture? Well, it is not a pure signifying semiology, for one thing; it engages semiotic substances that are non-linguistic, especially tactile, which are relatively untranslatable into language, which is one of their virtues; and this tactility cannot be reduced to visual coding.
Response
Dear Gary, I am suggesting that hypersurfaces are an incommensurate complexity conjoined by a number of simultaneous impulses stemming from schizo-culture. One is from an Heideggerian/Derridean trajectory, whereby capitalism bring about a deconstruction and deterritorialisation of subjectivity through its modes of production. This is almost a Walter Benjamin thesis, but one needs post-phenomenology to talk about "hyper" as flickering signifiers floating through material surfaces. This trajectory is the vulgar culture side and the material part is found in the architecture context, which has led to the topologising of form into surfaces. I think that when these two incommensurates conjoin: hyper-to-surface, they are not aligned, bringing about intensive effects that are not reducible to language. Indeed, they resist such consumptive subsumption, manifesting themselves instead as generative or autopoeitic.As with a Jackson Pollok painting, there is no possible reduction. It is a field that only opens to greater complexity; a nexus of interweavings. Hypersurfaces result from the messiness of everyone's lines of communication criss-crossing over one another leading to disfiguration, with the architects trying to supply a membrane with which to support such crossing. They never can because the excess of media is too great, thereby contributing to the fluctuation of it all. The entire scene is one of autopoeitic emergence. Like randomly generated noise that has moments of clarity; a productive schizophrenia. Such effects are not reducible to language because they are merely effects that are shifting back and forth between the material and the immaterial; generated by consumption yet not providing a common ground upon which to build a socius. Gary, this is a main point about hypersurfaces: a material/immaterial flux of actual discourse (partially constituted by commerce) that cannot result in a political collectivity. No governing consciousness, no material foundations - all middle. Out.
Productive schizophrenia: hypersurfaces from the middle-out
Hypersurface theory involves the simultaneous holding of a Heideggerian effect with a Deleuzean effect. Both conditions have become relevant because of the way culture has unfolded and embraced technology. The two trajectories are somewhat incommensurate: one is phenomenological and one is proprioceptive. This is why hypersurface theory is not a fusion of the two, but a theory that allows for both simultaneously. This is the basis for a productive schizophrenia. This is why an incommensurate effect is now resulting in architecture/culture. How will this schizo-doubling be productive? The strategy within a term like "hypersurface" is to suggest that architecture is an inhabitable envelopment of between deterritorialised subjects and objects. Deleuze argues that everything is connected prior to division, thus subject and matter are fundamentally linked. What is described in this document is the complex of forces that are evacuating the dualisms that have categorically kept subjectivity and materiality apart. They are forces that undermine the tenets of separation and come from the machinations of our everyday life, which is now interconnected by digital teletechnology.Hypersurface theory acknowledges that prior to experiences with the contemporary built environment, one is already affected by the media complex. This techno-existential condition situates us in an inescapable relation to media (here are meant to be broadly inclusive of all modes of representation in culture that are facilitated by technology). Activity in the contemporary milieu triggers associations that resonate within a partially constructed subject. The co-presence of embodied experience superposed upon mediated subjectivity is a hypersurface. The manifestation of this construct in the built environment is a reflection of this. If we are part-media constructs then it will be manifested in the built environment, an inflected place where we encounter ourselves, but as technology. Hypersurfaces appear in architecture where the co-presence of both material and image upon an architectural surface/membrane/substrate such that neither the materiality nor the image dominates the problematic. Such a construct resonates and destabilizes meaning and apprehension, swerving perception transversally into flows and trajectories.
The purpose of hypersurface theory is to describe an emerging phenomenon in architecture and culture as a means to go beyond schizophrenic or nihilistic interpretations that contribute to the dynamics occurring in our complex world today. Prior to the division between things, there is a more pervasive connectedness. There are many approaches to this impossibly complex configuration but a few themes may be explored to uncover the underlying dynamics of connection before division. Hypersurface theory suggests an architecture/culture from the middle-out. What is a middle-out architecture and how does it stand in opposition to other theories about architecture? What would it be to think architecture from the middle-out? To what end?
Firstly, it would not be an end. Middle-out works in an alternate way from our more dominant tendency to think oppositions and privileging one or other entity. This is what we learned from deconstruction: that binary oppositions operate to create frameworks for all that is meaningful. Does this mean that we are interested here in a meaningless architecture? What situation are we confronted with at the beginning of a new millennium?
Hypersurface architecture is the simultaneous and incommensurate action of human agency over a material topology. A hypersurface is the co-presence of the activities of human agency taking effect in a form-substance of force, or linguistic signifiers as it occurs in a plane of immanence relative to another plane of immanence whose form-substance is that of matter. Intensities occur where these two planes of immanence create new planes of immanence - none of which participates in any absolute or transcendental logics. Hypersurface is that condition made possible as a result of the forces effecting both human-becoming and form-matter such that these two polarities are no longer opposite and isolated. They each instead commingle and proliferate, establishing the rudiments of what may soon become an intersubjective plane of immanence. Mind and body meet in hypersurface in a conjunction with the realm of form-substance and are let-to-flow as planes of immanence in a hypersurface architecture. Our bodies are hypersurfaces, convex and concave surfaces over and through which sense flows. This is an irreducible condition having neither and absolute inside or outside.
Inside must reconnect to the outside through imagination, but one that is configured by a highly problematic intersubjectivity. Hypersurface is the activation of those latent potentials within substrates, membranes, surfaces that constitute the interstitial relations between bodies (distended as language) and substance-matter. This does not occur as an intervention into an existing context, but becomes manifest due to complex interactions between technological manifestations and our background and past that is latent with having been saturated with the media. The unconscious always exists in the background, underlying human motives, operating just beneath apprehension. Psychoanalytics brings an interpretation of these operations to the surface but not into any full framework of understanding. The effects of hypersurface are beyond that of either form or image. Generally, a hypersurface has a range of effects, including and most significantly a surreality or hyperreality; a realism that is simultaneously uncanny, incomprehensible and therefore a catalyst or provocation, but not necessarily in any overt way. Being neither in the context of the purely conscious or unconscious, hypersurfaces slip readily between these realms, in the seam between the two. A hypersurface is the informed topology of the interstitial terrain between the real and unreal (or any other binary opposition) which then flows transversally into a stream of associations. Our current condition of stasis in an audio-visual world is what Virilio means by the "last vehicle". But it is a condition that will be overcome as our mediatised sensibilities begin to flood into the new proliferation of architectural forms being transformed into topological hypersurfaces.
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