Flows of Capitalism, Flows of Architecture

Abstract

How can architecture, a discipline so tightly intertwined with money, resist neoliberalism? Is architecture inevitably consigned, with Tafuri or Aureli, to a stoic or eremitic resignation? Or, with Sorkin, to a series of disconnected tactics? This paper takes a hint from Fredric Jameson to suggest that Deleuze and Guattari’s positive transformation of Marx’s quintessentially capitalist notion of surplus value can allow us to rewrite the ontology (and epistemology) of architecture as a differential and multiple reticulation. Architecture conjugates all sorts of things (“flows”, in the terminology used here) to create a surplus value beyond (or before) the capitalist surplus value that is only one negative instance of a broader positive phenomenon. This non-essentialist and non-formalist idea of architecture allows us to respond to Spencer’s criticism of the neoliberal “architectural Deleuzism”, and shows how effective political action is entirely feasible within the broad discipline of architecture.