Plasticity and the emancipatory architectonics of mutual wholeness and destruction.

Abstract

The emancipatory appropriation of space, in the sense making personal adjustments and manoeuvres in order to raise a sense of space, can be understood in terms of giving and taking form, or what Catherine Malabou calls “plasticity”. Spatial production is in this sense defined relationally and cannot be fully provided by programmed architectural functions. That kind of relational and emancipatory view is reminiscent of how Perla Korosec-Serfaty (1973), in an early interpretation of Henri Lefebvre’s thoughts on spatial production, presented a tangible view on the oxymoronic forces at stake in appropriations of space, realised in acts of: inviting other people to rooms made for single living; using forbidden zones of passage; personalising a place through the display of foreign objects; destructing material elements, etc. Korosec-Serfaty’s view on architectural space could be seen as a concise forecasting of some of the thought in Malabou’s broad philosophical account on plasticity as a matter of mutual creation of wholeness and destruction. In a reflection on hospitalisation, more precisely on Merleau-Ponty’s example of how patients may lose their capacity to retain wholeness in the kind of unfamiliar perception of the world that hospitalisation may cause, Malabou claims that a hospital patient deals with not one, but several losses at the same time, for instance being clothed in borrowed, oversized hospital garb, which make one “looking like nothing” (2012: 71). Deprived of the sense of being able to achieve and give form in a given situation thus becomes a disturbance in the relationship between a subject and its environment. It is not a far-fetched thought then, that the environment and its capacity to meet a hosted persons’ perceptual needs, is also the capacity to let the environment be in the hosted person’s own control.

Korosec-Serfaty, Perla. 1973. The Case of Newly Constructed Zones: Freedom, Constraint and the Appropriation of Spaces, Lund: Lund University.
Malabou, Catherine. 2012. Ontology of the Accident, an Essay on Destructive Plasticity Cambridge/Malden: Polity Press.

Abstract (Swedish)

The emancipatory appropriation of space, in the sense making personal adjustments and manoeuvres in order to raise a sense of space, can be understood in terms of giving and taking form, or what Catherine Malabou calls “plasticity”. Spatial production is in this sense defined relationally and cannot be fully provided by programmed architectural functions. That kind of relational and emancipatory view is reminiscent of how Perla Korosec-Serfaty (1973), in an early interpretation of Henri Lefebvre’s thoughts on spatial production, presented a tangible view on the oxymoronic forces at stake in appropriations of space, realised in acts of: inviting other people to rooms made for single living; using forbidden zones of passage; personalising a place through the display of foreign objects; destructing material elements, etc. Korosec-Serfaty’s view on architectural space could be seen as a concise forecasting of some of the thought in Malabou’s broad philosophical account on plasticity as a matter of mutual creation of wholeness and destruction. In a reflection on hospitalisation, more precisely on Merleau-Ponty’s example of how patients may lose their capacity to retain wholeness in the kind of unfamiliar perception of the world that hospitalisation may cause, Malabou claims that a hospital patient deals with not one, but several losses at the same time, for instance being clothed in borrowed, oversized hospital garb, which make one “looking like nothing” (2012: 71). Deprived of the sense of being able to achieve and give form in a given situation thus becomes a disturbance in the relationship between a subject and its environment. It is not a far-fetched thought then, that the environment and its capacity to meet a hosted persons’ perceptual needs, is also the capacity to let the environment be in the hosted person’s own control.

Korosec-Serfaty, Perla. 1973. The Case of Newly Constructed Zones: Freedom, Constraint and the Appropriation of Spaces, Lund: Lund University.
Malabou, Catherine. 2012. Ontology of the Accident, an Essay on Destructive Plasticity Cambridge/Malden: Polity Press.

• author: Sandin, Gunnar
• organization: Department of Architecture and Built Environment
• publishing date: 2016
• type: Contribution to conference
• publication status: unpublished
• subject: Architecture
• conference name: Architecture and Feminisms: ethologies, economies, technologies
• conference location: Stockholm, Sweden
• conference dates: 2016-11-17 - 2016-11-19
• language: English
• LU publication?: yes
• id: a93479ef-0a21-43a6-a61c-56d6a29fe1ca
• date added to LUP: 2017-03-16 22:34:26
• date last changed: 2018-11-21 21:30:47