© Patricia Smith 2013

PLOT PLANS FOR AN

IDEAL CITY

PATRICIA SMITH

These lines mean nothing. It is an affair of cartography. They compose us, as they compose our map. 1

The superficial reign of absolute space occurs within a system of language without response. If only external space-time could offer meanders that could generate a permutable operative symbolic field, as an analogy or echo of its own assigned and meaningful form—the Egg as Original Desire Structure. To lead out of what is mere decipherment of messages by the eyes, out of already dense representations of space, into what is further off, into nature, into symbols, into an intense, aggressive and repressive visualization.

Our internal space-time is maze-like. This space is ‘lived’ as magical and cosmic rather than conceived, by means of which it overwhelms the whole body.

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What is your body without organs? What are your lines? What map are you in the process of making or rearranging? What abstract line will you draw, and at what price, for yourself and for others? What is your line of flight? What is your BwO, merged with that line? Are you cracking up? Are you going to crack up? Are you deterritorializing? 2

What is your Desire for Containment, first of nature’s space, then all of social space, which is itself a reduction with neither imaginary figures nor symbolic functions. Instead, the signifier arises in the town and its surroundings that it possesses, and indeed in a sense instigates this facet of spacial practice. It appears to describe an entity which draws off the surplus product, like a City as Reflected Constellation. The global city is not a place, but a symbiotic entity, simultaneously creating places and non-places within the respective importance of the lines. You can begin with the vastness of pre-existing space, it’s the easiest, it’s pre-given.

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But it is also possible to begin with the qualities embedded in space: perhaps this is primary, with its absolute deterritorialization. It is clear that the line of flight does not come afterward; it is there from the beginning, even if it waits for the others to explode. Supple segmentarity, then, is only a kind of compromise operating through Processes Without Structures. Relative spaces, for their part, carry the justification of the system.

While attempting to discover the links between the various aspects—broken lines and verticals—a natural and cosmic fertility leapt forth from the earth and traced extraordinary and dizzying Decorative Flood Patterns. Such forms offer some notion of ambiguity to demands for meaning. Could a tiny rivulet of new intensity suddenly start to flow?

Absolute space dissolves into a struggle of vaporous qualities, ritually affixable to any place and hence also detachable there-from. Whether empty or full, we can recognize a mystical abandon as its identifying mark. The two major mechanisms of identification and imitation always arrived too late. The problem is to actually possess a strict form.

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One only ever travels through and in one’s body. The city is thus conceived as a corporeal unity, in which all the elements act by some notion of ambiguity. The body without organs leaves a shadow of Spinal Density Patterns, a ‘plan’ existing in a void, a fragmented tool which can be used within its own boundaries..

All cities are geological, and produce Self-Generated Weather Patterns within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. You can’t take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing a dirty little secret in the optical formant. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision of spectacularization has something of smoke and mirrors about it.

The coordinates added up to 000106—the intensive space within the extensive one. The deep complexity of a site is always imperceptible in space, virtual in time, the echo of which generates an ‘infinitization’ of meaning. One might say the index points to something that cannot be ‘mapped’ but only ‘diagrammed’, or the smooth space within the striated. What are your couples, your doubles, your clandestines, and what are

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their mixes? A moment of life has grown old.Lineaments running through groups as well as

individuals thus make possible not just dual ideological illusions (opacity/transparency) but also much more complex tempering. It is for this reason that a general sense of false consciousness may be described and explained, at least partially, in terms of an intentional signifying process of ‘pure’ nothingness, in terms of sequential or self correcting codes and in terms of truth’s sudden eruptions through which one can perceive Layered Vibrational Fields. And yet this transparency is deceptive.

We are bored in the city, we really have to strain to still discover revolutionary urbanism in entranced states of mind. Subconscious Détournement, on the other hand, may on the contrary block it, plug it, throw it even deeper into rigid segmentarity. It can happen in Bi-Polar Growth Patterns that one person’s creative line is the other’s imprisonment. The composition of the lines, of one line with another, is a problem, even of two lines of the same type. There is no assurance that two lines will prove attempts to integrate artistic debris on the individual territorial level. In

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the temporal cultural logic of the contemporary city, the boundaries of mental space, and even our own symbolic existence have dispensed with the single best world, turning rather to the complicities and complexities of the disparation through which things diverge into others, exciting Carnal Action Points. Absolute space assumes meanings addressed not to the intellect but to the body. Still, that familiarity tends to break apart. Inasmuch as the act of seeing and what is seen are confused, both become impotent.

Absolute and relative are themselves prone to the decay of representational space. The organized spectacle of error is misdirected and/or fetishized, at once power’s proxy and a form of spectacular separation, a fictitious locus of mystery. Nor does it have any great immunity to all these contradictions.

A map to escape would be a Proposed Network for Aimlessness. The use value of this space, namely, a signifier which, rather than signifying a void, indicates merely a Waning Interest in the Center. The strategy is rather to reproduce distance internally—or more precisely, to find something new and uncharted in—the gridded space, which it cannot

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contain, which leaks or spills out from it, linking it to the formalisms of rite and ritual. In this way the grid becomes only a dimension of the folding of the space in which it figures… an intensive cityspace that would be free and complex.

The next number given was 000113, at the time anticipating a good year. Real division is only suspended in the conflicts which ordinarily exist between the rational and the symbolic. These dated images retain a small catalyzing power, but it is almost impossible to use them in a symbolic urbanism without rejuvenating them by giving them deterritorializations, or reterritorializations. Our imaginations, describing only a sort of negative surplus, have remained far behind the sophistication of the machines, which endlessly churn out Subliminal Decorative Formations, a sort of potential for free self-complication.

We thus inhabit the metroplex. There is no completely rational space, no completely adequate place, but instead a kind of Coagulated Density. This deep or groundless complexity is always virtual-disparation, is always a virtuality in a space.

I see myself in the measured divisions of 000128,

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in an unreal Virtual Heterotopia, a sort of shadow that opens up behind the surface that gives my own visibility to myself. I am over there, there where I am not. I discover my absence in its repercussions or echo. Thus are the foldings that expose an intensive multiple complexity of the fabric of things. They unearth ‘within’ a space the complications that take the space ‘outside’ itself, or its frame, and fold it again. This need for total creation, a continual putting-to-the-test of the emotions, has always been intimately associated with the need to play with architecture, time and space.

For the street he was in, the very concept of abstract space, did not lead up to the Castle hill, it only made towards it and then, as if self-correcting, turned aside, and though it did not lead away from the Castle it got no nearer to it either. At every turn K. expected the road to double back to the Castle, and only because of this expectation did he go on; he was flatly unwilling, tired as he was, to leave the street, and he was also amazed at the intensive space that seemed to break out from the intervals of the articulating elements of the bounded space, which seemed to have no end; again and again the same little houses, and frostbound window panes

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and snow and the entire absence of human beings. But at last he tore himself away from the obsession of the City as Building Containing Other Buildings whose walls become less organizational equilibrium of a system whose component parts are massive now that they no longer bear all the weight. He broke into a sweat, suddenly came to a stop, and could not go on.

For complexity no longer occurs within a house governed by the principles of such an ‘elevating’ illumination but rather becomes a matter of a freedom of houses at play at once within and without the house—of this pli, this folding, which is a matter of an inexplicable chance, prior to principles, prior to design, yet always virtual in them.

Around this nucleus of an organic coherence, labeled as 000115, which is the centre of time because it is the centre of a pervasive and thus banal spirit of the times, is the spatial order that it dominates in an already dense population. Actually, however, harmony between the nucleus and its surroundings only occurs if the circumstances are right. A Body upon which these lines are inscribed as so many segments, thresholds, or territorialities. The lines are inscribed on a heavy cargo

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of myth, upon which everything is drawn and flees, which is itself an abstract line with neither imaginary figures nor symbolic functions: Spontaneous Deterritorialization.

Thus the so-called private realm that a line of actuality exposes in the fictitious/real space of language is not at all a dust hole to be integrally realized within a rubbish dump, but rather the movement of a question that allows Form to detach itself from space or blow it apart to find the complexity of which it is capable; and conversely, the deep or intensive complexity of a language secretion is shown in those moments that hold it apart, taking it out of itself, so that it can be folded anew.

Might a generalized sub-communication account for this strange and powerful presence—absence?

The new industrial space is organized in a hierarchy of tangled fabrication articulated around A Silent Empty Center. Absolute space has not disappeared. But the slender elegance of these networks is submitted to the endless changing flows of information that bring together and separate at the same time their territorial components. The informational city is not a landscape

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filled with content, but a process characterized by the structural domination of the Space of Flows.

Space is the expression of the emptiness of the lost thing. A meaningful relationship between society and space hides a fundamental complexity. Social processes leak from all directions on the built environment through self-referential code. Space brings together those practices that are simultaneous in time. The proximity of material support is no longer of essence. Its significance wanes and vanishes. Flows are the expression of lines of leakage dominating our symbolic life.

Places do not disappear, but their logic and their meaning become absorbed in the network. Some places are rich in fantasies or phantasmagorias. Other places are rational and bureaucratic. Space plays a fundamental role in this mechanism, thus establishing monumentally degraded and obscured boundaries. The real cultural codes are embedded in an incomplete ‘virtual’ architecture in such a way that possession of these codes opens the access to even quite small lyrical futures, filled with voids and interstices.

‘Our’ space thus remains a strange invisible

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groundless depth beneath the sediments left behind by history, by accumulation, by quantification. Perhaps there exists a more irrational tendency, a tendency to expect the discovery of a kind of psychogeographical Great Passage, beyond which we will attain mastery of a new game from which irrupts something that creates its own time and space.

Directions here have symbolic force: left and right, of course — but above all high and low. They transform themselves and may even cross over the idea of folding together into an Ornamental 4-Gate Plan. It embodies the simple, regulated and methodical principle of coherent stability. Elsewhere other fragmentary beauties can be found—it is certain that they have nothing to do with language; it is, on the contrary, taken as indisputably true that language speaks to itself. It is certain that they have nothing to do with a signifier, and that subject is made up of sacred misapprehensions. It is certain that they have nothing to do with a structure, which always serves to prove the cold dream of structuralism.

Nothing has importance any longer, now that everything can begin anew, since they have wrenched

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the area from its natural context. Nothing will enter memory only by the grace of a clearcut ideology—everything was on the lines, between the lines, in the town that perceives itself as its double. From the height of its towers, it contemplates its image-and-reflection, without disjunction or conjunction, and all the more so in that it flees immediate consciousness.

Due to the insufficiency of the means available to us, we still do not know how to produce a satisfying psychogeographical representation; but the progress of this cartography is, nevertheless, undeniable, and the truthful criteria with which it identifies itself legitimates all that might appear—through the narrow optics of common sense—to be a deformation of known urban plans. It will be in relation with the architecture that we must invent. It is as if, through the crevices of the city and the cracks of its edifices, light were always seeping in, illuminating the symbiotic relationship with that in everything which surrounds it.

Which lines are you severing, and which are ritually affixable to any place? The flow of passion in time does not come after the emplacement of the terms and their relations, but actively participates in the drawing of the lines.

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Egg as Original Desire StructureInk, watercolor, ink jet print on paper, 11.3” X 7.8”

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Desire for ContainmentInk, watercolor, ink jet print on paper, 11.4” X 8.2”

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City as Reflected ConstellationInk, watercolor, ink jet print on paper, 11.2” X 8.5”

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Processes Without StructuresInk, watercolor, charcoal pencil, ink jet print on paper, 11” X 8.3”

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Decorative Flood PatternsInk, watercolor, ink jet print on paper, 11.5” X 8.3”

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Spinal Density PatternsInk, watercolor, ink jet print on paper, 10.8” X 8.1”

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Self Generated Weather PatternsInk, watercolor, ink jet print on paper, 11.7” X 8.5”

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000106Ink, charcoal pencil, watercolor, ink jet print on paper, 8.5” X 6.75”

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Layered Vibrational FieldsInk, watercolor, ink jet print on paper, 11.6” X 8.5”

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Subconscious DétournementInk, watercolor, ink jet print on paper, 11.6” X 8.4”

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Bi-Polar Growth PatternsInk, watercolor, ink jet print on paper, 11.7” X 8.5”

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Carnal Action PointsInk, watercolor, ink jet print on paper, 11.6” X 8.7”

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Proposed Network for AimlessnessInk, ink jet print on paper, 11” X 8.15”

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Waning Interest in the CenterInk, ink jet print on paper, 11.7” X 8.5”

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000113Ink, watercolor, charcoal pencil, ink jet print on paper, 7.5” X 5.5”

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Subliminal Decorative FormationsInk, watercolor, ink jet print on paper, 10.8” X 8.3”

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Coagulated DensityInk, watercolor, ink jet print on paper, 10.9” X 8.3”

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000128Ink, watercolor, ink jet print on paper, 7.5” X 5.5”

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Virtual HeterotopiaInk, charcoal pencil, ink jet print on paper, 10.7” X 8.2”

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City as Building Containing Other BuildingsInk, watercolor, pencil, ink jet print on paper, 10.8” X 8.5”

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000115Ink, watercolor, ink jet print on paper, 10” X 7.7”

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Spontaneous DeterritorializationInk, watercolor, pencil, ink jet print on paper, 11.5” X 8.5”

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A Silent Empty CenterInk, gouache, ink jet print on paper, 10.7” X 8.5”

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Space of FlowsInk, watercolor, ink jet print on paper, 10.7” X 8.3”

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Ornamental 4-Gate PlanInk, watercolor, ink jet print on paper, 11.5” X 8.3”

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This text was created by ‘braiding’ together words and phrases from the texts cited here to form new mean-ings. Except where indicated by footnotes, the excerpts are short—in almost all cases less than one sentence in length—and melded with the other texts so that attribu-tion is no longer relevant. The only original text I have added is the titles, in bold face, of the drawings repro-duced here. The titles are inspired by and refer to the chosen texts.

1 A Thousand Plateaus, p. 203. Full quote: As Deligny says, it should be borne in mind that these lines mean nothing. It is an affair of cartography. They compose us, as they compose our map.

2 A Thousand Plateaus, p. 203.

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Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizo-phrenia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Tr. Brian Massumi.

Chtcheglov, Ivan. Formulary for a New Urbanism, 1953. Situationist Interna-tional Anthology. Ed. Ken Knabb. Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981.

Debord, Guy. Psychogeographical Venice, 1957. Intended as a preface for a book by Ralph Rumney, who was excluded from the Situationist International a short time later because he failed to write it as promised. Published on notbored.org.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1999. Tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith.

Foucault, Michel. Of Other Spaces, 1967. This text, entitled Des Espaces Autres, and published by the French journal Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité in October, 1984, was the basis of a lecture given by Michel Foucault in March 1967. Although not reviewed for publication by the author and thus not part of the official corpus of his work, the manuscript was released into the public domain for an exhibition in Berlin shortly before Michel Foucault's death. Tr. Jay Miskowiec. Published on foucault.info.

Francke, Marieke and Ham, Else. Geographical Approaches – Manuel Castells & Space of Flows, published online: http://socgeo.ruhosting.nl, 2006.

Kafka, Franz. The Castle. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Tr. Anthea Bell.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publish-ing, 1991. Tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith.

Rajchman, John. Constructions. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998.