Book Chapters by Stavros Kousoulas
Deleuze and Guattari and Fascism, 2022
The massive and ongoing influx of refugees to Athens that started in the beginning of the century... more The massive and ongoing influx of refugees to Athens that started in the beginning of the century would meet a radical change that occurred after the Olympic Games of 2004, producing the germ that would transform the Athenian urban ecologies: an absolute retreat to the private, understood not in financial or market terms but in terms of stratification and rigidification. Examined from that point of view, the urban unrests of the past decade can be approached as the gradual formation of a black hole: before the formation of molar fascist assemblages in the Athenian urban ecologies, there is the formation of infinite micro-fascists. The immense proliferation of micro-fascist subjectivities is no other than the emergence of infinite reactive subjects out of the Athenian urban ecologies and their technicities themselves. Precisely for this reason, any attempt to speak of an Athens yet-to-come should not involve the production of yet another narrative (of urban change, social justice or political emancipation) but rather the affirmative production of a futurity through the actual and virtual potentials of an environmental manipulation that occurs here-and-now while aiming at a not-here-and-not-yet.
Contingency and Plasticity in Everyday Technologies, 2022
Philosopher Gilbert Simondon claims that what one perceives is neither outlines nor shapes, but t... more Philosopher Gilbert Simondon claims that what one perceives is neither outlines nor shapes, but thresholds of intensity. Therefore, Simondon points out that sensation is nothing but intensive and differential; it is the ‘seizure of a direction, not of an object.’ However, the issue is how one can examine the sensation of a direction that does not address the present but rather that which is yet to come. To do so, one can approach it as an issue of synapses. A synapse is a junction, an almost imperceptible gap through which an impulse of intensity passes by. As such, synapses manage to capture both the passage of an intensity (as a synaptic moment) and the formation of an extensity (as a synaptic location). In other words, synapses can be understood as constraints and for this reason, as information; after all, information is nothing but the reduction of potentials.
In this paper, I will examine how architecture, in its technicities, operates as a synapse: how it allows for both the formation of an extensive space as well as for the very possibility of intuiting a space yet to come, and consequently, a subject yet to individuate. To do so, I will focus on how architectural technicities allow for a certain degree of indeterminacy due to their metastability and auto-normativity. With the help of goddess Ananke and her spindle, architecture will be understood as an intensive exercise on the indeterminate, on a figure that is not yet figured out, but does so on the basis of synaptic passages.
Ambiances, Alloaesthesia: Senses, Inventions, Worlds. E-conference. Proceedings of the 4th International Congress on Ambiances, 2020
The philosophies of substance presuppose a subject which then encounters a datum. This subject th... more The philosophies of substance presuppose a subject which then encounters a datum. This subject then reacts to the datum. The process ontology presupposes a datum (firstness) which is met with feelings (secondness), and progressively attains the unity of a subject (thirdness). It is in this sense that our bodily experience is primarily an experience of the dependence of the actual presentational immediacy upon the virtual causal efficacy, and not the other way round. To put it bluntly, the world does not emerge from the subject, but processes of subjectification emerge from the interactions between the body and world. The chapter is meant to provide the basis for the panel that will stage an encounter between cognitive neurosciences and architecture.
Critical & Clinical Cartographies, 2017
Unabridged, final author’s version in:
Critical & Clinical Cartographies, eds. Andrej Radman & H... more Unabridged, final author’s version in:
Critical & Clinical Cartographies, eds. Andrej Radman & Heidi Sohn, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017)
Book chapter, originally published in Spanish as ‘Prácticas de conexión común y la producción del... more Book chapter, originally published in Spanish as ‘Prácticas de conexión común y la producción del espacio urbano: comprendiendo asimetrías urbanas en Atenas’, with H. Sohn, in Repensar la Metrópoli II: Políticas e instrumentos para la gestión urbana, Vol. I. R. Eibenschutz & BR Ramírez Velázquez (Mexico: UAM-X, 2015)
Architectural and Urban Reflections after Deleuze and Guattari, 2017
Unabridged, final author’s version in:
Architectural and Urban Reflections after Deleuze and Gua... more Unabridged, final author’s version in:
Architectural and Urban Reflections after Deleuze and Guattari, ed. by Constantin V. Boundas and Vana Tentokali, (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017)
Paper Contribution and Panel Participation at the What's The Matter, Materiality and Materialism ... more Paper Contribution and Panel Participation at the What's The Matter, Materiality and Materialism at the Age of Computation, International Conference, COAC, ETSAB, ETSAV, Barcelona, September 4-5-6, 2014
ISBN 978-960-89320-6-7
Andrej Radman and Stavros Kousoulas, eds. Critical and Clinical Cartographies: International Conf... more Andrej Radman and Stavros Kousoulas, eds. Critical and Clinical Cartographies: International Conference Proceedings (Delft: Architecture Theory Chair in partnership with Jap Sam Books, 2015), pp. 1-6.
Journal Articles by Stavros Kousoulas
Footprint Delft Architecture Theory Journal, 2021
While there have been significant discussions about the relevance of cybernetics within architect... more While there have been significant discussions about the relevance of cybernetics within architectural and urban studies, the focus has mainly been on computing and digital practices. Since its emergence in the post-war period, cybernetics – in both its first and second-order versions – has introduced to architectural discourse systematic design methods and practices, while also tackling issues of reflexivity and complex problems. In this introduction, we examine the relation between cybernetics and architecture by focusing on a problem they both share. To this end, we approach cybernetics as the study of the production, consumption and flow of information, an account that has little to do with digital logics, unless one wants to pursue that special case. Therefore, cyberneticisation can set the foundations for a relational account that examines how signs are communicated and how meaning is produced and experienced within systems. This third-order cybernetics extends beyond the original scope of living organisms and their environments in order to include ecologies of ideas, power, institutions, media and so on. In this sense, cyberneticisation is radically environmental, positing the primacy of relations over fixed terms, binary oppositions and linear logics, making it high time for architectural and urban studies to take into consideration its ground-breaking potentials. By introducing five short points on the relation between architecture and cybernetics, we aim to assist in this endeavour.
Villardjournal: Communicate, 2020
In this paper, the limits between an already structured individual and its milieu are brought int... more In this paper, the limits between an already structured individual and its milieu are brought into focus. The significance of the limit lies between the operational potentials of an individual and its milieu: that which is neither structure nor potential yet. In other words, the architectural limit belongs neither to the past nor to the future, but to a constant present, the a praesenti of being in becoming and becoming in being. On the limit that constantly shifts and transforms, grows and shrinks, both the past and the future inform each other. Through the disparity of their informational differential, any architectural entity passes through the ongoing unfolding of its individuation. For Simondon, the limit is the here-and-now of individuation. It is where the propagation of information on a yet undetermined milieu occurs; in other words, it is where transduction takes place. Through this paper, architectural transduction will be defined as the process whereby architecture undergoes information, where one architectural individual finds its principle of constitution in another. If the limit is the here-and-now of individuation, then architecture, aiming in the production of new processes of individuation, has to deal with the reciprocal practice of finding new ways to perform a play of limits; a play on what is yet to come.
Journal of Posthuman Studies, 2020
If any individual is determined by its affects as they are catalyzed in the technicities it unfol... more If any individual is determined by its affects as they are catalyzed in the technicities it unfolds, then one can no longer speak of posthumanism or transhumanism but of transaffectivity. Among genetic, epigenetic, and epiphylogenetic elements, there unfolds a play of intensive material informational exchange that determines both the structural and operational affects of any entity. Hence, evolution returns to its original Latin meaning, namely from the term evolutio: to unfold. Contrary to the logic of the survival of the fittest, unfolding does not dictate in advance which forms come forth, but instead, it determines which of them are not viable. In other words, it is the condition that brings forward a new world, one that is viable through the very differentials that determine the condition, and not the other way around. In this paper I will examine how structurally coupled individuals unfold an intensive continuum where there is no natural selection prescribing any outcome, but a continuous natural drift. The affective potentials that produce and are produced in the technicities of the drifted unfolding do not need to be the best, but simply good enough. Put succinctly, evolution, or more precisely, individuation, is satisficing rather than optimizing. Love—human, machinic, everything in between—and not Darwinian struggle or opposition is what determines evolution: not an affective diminution but instead an affirmative, transaffective amplification, where any individual structurally coupled with another brings forth a world through an aberrant nuptial, not because it must but simply because it can.
International Journal of Architectural Computing, 2018
This article attempts to reverse a fallacy often met in architectural theories and practices: tha... more This article attempts to reverse a fallacy often met in architectural theories and practices: that of a supposed input which through processes of what one can broadly call translations generates a built output. The input–output fallacy produces an architectural black box that treats both architectural thinking and doing as a mere process of projecting, representing and annotating 'properly' what will later be executed. On the contrary, a manipulative account of architecture as an active process of ecological engineering will pave the way for not only reversing the fallacy but also towards a particular understanding of architectural practices: architectural technicities and their reticular, affective potentials. Drawing on the theories of Gilbert Simondon, André Leroi-Gourhan, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, I will examine how architecture can be genealogically approached as a reticular technicity which evolves by a reciprocal concretisation of its technical objects and a generalisation of its active practitioners: no longer the application of transcendental design rules, of symbolic deductions or statistical inductions but rather abductive heuristics of affective techniques; no input nor output but practices of sensorial amplification via material manipulation and vice versa.
Footprint Delft Architecture Theory Journal, 2018
In the editorial introduction of this issue of Footprint, the question of architectural form is a... more In the editorial introduction of this issue of Footprint, the question of architectural form is approached from a population of minor perspectives. Inspired by Bateson’s metalogues, the authors wish to bring forward multiple questions on architectural form instead of a single generalizing one: from ‘what is form’ to ‘how, when, where and why is form’. In this respect, they examine the ways for a possible reconciliation between the genetic and the generic, between the discursive outlines of various formalisms, opting for an approach that is both syncretic and transversal. Committed to architectural form, they conclude by claiming that it stands for much more than simply a concept. Form, in its ambiguity and heterogeneity, stands for a shared problem, one that brings together disciplines, schools of thought and variant methodological practices, turning therefore the discursive constraints of the past in productive chances for the future.
H. Sohn, S. Kousoulas and G. Bruyns, (2015) “Commoning as Differentiated Publicness” in Footprint... more H. Sohn, S. Kousoulas and G. Bruyns, (2015) “Commoning as Differentiated Publicness” in Footprint Issue#16 Spring 2015 eds. H. Sohn, S. Kousoulas and G. Bruyns, Delft: Architecture Theory Chair in partnership with Stichting Footprint and Techne Press, pp. 1-8
Contemporary commoning practices do not constitute a mere alternative, but instead comprise a qualitative threshold: a moment of critical differentiation. As such, they call out for the development of a set of renewed methodological, analytical and synthetic tools and devices that are better equipped to understand the in-between as a ‘thirding’: as a form of differentiated publicness. The editorial introduction offers a platform of negotiation, which far from disregarding the already established approaches to the thematic in question, aims at expanding their scope, complementing them with non-dialectical readings. By presenting non-hierarchical understandings of urban practices, as well as fostering the intersection of different trajectories and discourses, the introduction to this issue strives to provide a fertile ground for the encounter of the multidimensional and relational potentials of contemporary commoning practices.
Papers by Stavros Kousoulas
THE SPACE OF TECHNICITY: Theorising Social, Technical and Environmental Entanglements, 2024
Desperate times demand optimistic transdisciplinary measures. This volume unites a select group o... more Desperate times demand optimistic transdisciplinary measures. This volume unites a select group of thinkers who courageously traverse disciplinary boundaries. What brings them together is the least stratified ‘component’: a shared problem. It is a widely recognised that a problem gets the solution it merits. However, only a few acknowledge that a problem seldom neatly fits within a single discipline, nor does it conform to the principle of general equivalence. Handling its irreducibility and non-entailment is a skill possessed by very few. Even fewer take the quasi-causal capacity of what we term the ‘space of technicity’ seriously.
Routledge eBooks, May 14, 2022
Footprint 36, 2025
Stavros Kousoulas and Andrej Radman are editing Footprint 36, dedicated to the topic of ‘Who’s St... more Stavros Kousoulas and Andrej Radman are editing Footprint 36, dedicated to the topic of ‘Who’s Stupid Now: Architecture, Intelligence and Transdisciplinarity’.
Rather than focusing on the essentialist question of what architectural intelligence is, we are interested in the pragmatics of how it occurs, who institutes it, and through which technicities it is archived and disseminated.
https://journals.open.tudelft.nl/footprint/announcement/view/400
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2023
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Book Chapters by Stavros Kousoulas
In this paper, I will examine how architecture, in its technicities, operates as a synapse: how it allows for both the formation of an extensive space as well as for the very possibility of intuiting a space yet to come, and consequently, a subject yet to individuate. To do so, I will focus on how architectural technicities allow for a certain degree of indeterminacy due to their metastability and auto-normativity. With the help of goddess Ananke and her spindle, architecture will be understood as an intensive exercise on the indeterminate, on a figure that is not yet figured out, but does so on the basis of synaptic passages.
Critical & Clinical Cartographies, eds. Andrej Radman & Heidi Sohn, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017)
Architectural and Urban Reflections after Deleuze and Guattari, ed. by Constantin V. Boundas and Vana Tentokali, (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017)
ISBN 978-960-89320-6-7
Journal Articles by Stavros Kousoulas
Contemporary commoning practices do not constitute a mere alternative, but instead comprise a qualitative threshold: a moment of critical differentiation. As such, they call out for the development of a set of renewed methodological, analytical and synthetic tools and devices that are better equipped to understand the in-between as a ‘thirding’: as a form of differentiated publicness. The editorial introduction offers a platform of negotiation, which far from disregarding the already established approaches to the thematic in question, aims at expanding their scope, complementing them with non-dialectical readings. By presenting non-hierarchical understandings of urban practices, as well as fostering the intersection of different trajectories and discourses, the introduction to this issue strives to provide a fertile ground for the encounter of the multidimensional and relational potentials of contemporary commoning practices.
Papers by Stavros Kousoulas
Rather than focusing on the essentialist question of what architectural intelligence is, we are interested in the pragmatics of how it occurs, who institutes it, and through which technicities it is archived and disseminated.
https://journals.open.tudelft.nl/footprint/announcement/view/400
In this paper, I will examine how architecture, in its technicities, operates as a synapse: how it allows for both the formation of an extensive space as well as for the very possibility of intuiting a space yet to come, and consequently, a subject yet to individuate. To do so, I will focus on how architectural technicities allow for a certain degree of indeterminacy due to their metastability and auto-normativity. With the help of goddess Ananke and her spindle, architecture will be understood as an intensive exercise on the indeterminate, on a figure that is not yet figured out, but does so on the basis of synaptic passages.
Critical & Clinical Cartographies, eds. Andrej Radman & Heidi Sohn, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017)
Architectural and Urban Reflections after Deleuze and Guattari, ed. by Constantin V. Boundas and Vana Tentokali, (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017)
ISBN 978-960-89320-6-7
Contemporary commoning practices do not constitute a mere alternative, but instead comprise a qualitative threshold: a moment of critical differentiation. As such, they call out for the development of a set of renewed methodological, analytical and synthetic tools and devices that are better equipped to understand the in-between as a ‘thirding’: as a form of differentiated publicness. The editorial introduction offers a platform of negotiation, which far from disregarding the already established approaches to the thematic in question, aims at expanding their scope, complementing them with non-dialectical readings. By presenting non-hierarchical understandings of urban practices, as well as fostering the intersection of different trajectories and discourses, the introduction to this issue strives to provide a fertile ground for the encounter of the multidimensional and relational potentials of contemporary commoning practices.
Rather than focusing on the essentialist question of what architectural intelligence is, we are interested in the pragmatics of how it occurs, who institutes it, and through which technicities it is archived and disseminated.
https://journals.open.tudelft.nl/footprint/announcement/view/400
Proposed abstracts should be 600 words in length, excluding bibliography. Abstracts should focus on how their respective links to either of the three themes, through theoretical positions, design methodologies or practices. Authors are welcome to contact editors with other possible themes before the submission of abstracts. All submissions are to follow the Chicago Manual Style, 16th edition. All papers will be double blind peer reviewed.
All abstracts / submissions are to be send to both editors dr.ir. Gerhard Bruyns (gerhard.bruyns@polyu.edu.hk) and dr.ir. Stavros Kousoulas (S.Kousoulas@tudelft.nl) on 29th February 2020.
2012. Deleuze and Cultural Studies. University of Utrecht
2013. Affect. Delft University of Technology
2014. Passions. Erasmus University Rotterdam
2015. Aesthetics. Radboud University Nijmegen
2016. Machinic Ecologies. University of Amsterdam
2017. Pedagogies. AKI, Enschede
2018. Politics of Sustainability. University of Utrecht
In 2019 the conference returns to TU Delft Faculty of Architecture, with a very distinguished guest speaker from Newcastle University, Professor Andrew Ballantyne, alongside our dear Professor Rosi Braidotti from Utrecht University.
in collaboration with ArtEZ University of the Arts
and the Surroundings Lab network
18 November 2020 at 14:00-16:00 (CET) Zoom Session
A round table moderated by Andrej Radman, Stavros Kousoulas (TU Delft) and Marc Boumeester (ArtEZ University).
Architecture Theory: Ecologies of Architecture
TU Delft Architecture, Academic Year 2021–24
THE AXIOLOGY OF ARCHITECTURE:
RULES, NORMS AND ARCHITECTURAL VALUES
Under the auspices of the Graduate School of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at Delft University of Technology, the academic group Architecture Theory invites PhD dissertation proposals to help expand its Ecologies of Architecture research portfolio.
Architecture Theory is part of the Department of Architecture’s section Theory and Territories. We invite all interested academic and/or professional candidates – qualified to pursue PhD-level research work and aligned with the group’s research agenda – to submit their applications before Monday, 6 April 2020.
Proposed abstracts should be 600 words in length, excluding bibliography. Abstracts should focus on how their respective links to either of the three themes, through theoretical positions, design methodologies or practices. Authors are welcome to contact editors with other possible themes before the submission of abstracts. All submissions are to follow the Chicago Manual Style, 16th edition. All papers will be double blind peer reviewed.
All abstracts / submissions are to be send to both editors dr.ir. Gerhard Bruyns (gerhard.bruyns@polyu.edu.hk) and dr.ir. Stavros Kousoulas (S.Kousoulas@tudelft.nl) on 29th February 2020.
Stavros Kousoulas and Dulmini Perera will be the editors of this issue, dedicated to the theme "All is in Formation: Architecture, Cybernetics, Ecology". This issue of Footprint seeks to explore the encounters between architecture and cybernetics in an attempt to rethink the notion of the built environment. This call is open for full articles (6000–8000 words) as well as for review articles (2000 – 4000 words) and visual essays (2000 words, 2 – 5 images) that offer insight into the relation between architecture and cybernetics. Full articles must be submitted on Footprint’s online platform before 1 May 2020 and will go through a double-blind peer-review process. Authors interested in contributing review articles or visual essays should contact the editors before 1 May 2020 with an extended abstract of their proposal (500 words). The editors will select from the proposed review articles based on thematic relevance, innovativeness and evidence of an explorative academic level. A guide to Footprint’s preferred editorial and reference style is available at https://journals.open.tudelft.nl/index.php/footprint/about/submissions
Footprint 28 will be published in Spring 2021.
For submissions and inquiries, please contact editors Stavros Kousoulas and Dulmini Perera at editors.footprint@gmail.com.
Time: 21 May 2019.
Place: TU Delft Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, The Netherlands
Keynotes: Andrew Ballantyne and Rosi Braidotti
Deadline for the submission of abstracts: February 1st, 2019
For details kindly visit https://www.tudelft.nl/en/architecture-and-the-built-environment/about-the-faculty/departments/architecture/organisation/chairs/architecture-theory/research-publications/architectures-of-life-and-death/
transdisciplinary project – Pas une boussole juste, juste
une boussole: A Becoming of Deleuzian Concepts – to
trace a set of influential core concepts within the work
of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. The collective’s
aim is to analyse the genealogy of these concepts
which changed and transformed over time and to
present them in various cartographic ways so as to
develop a more profound philosophical understanding.
The research project will make extensive use of
network analysis software TextCompass. This tool is
designed for text analysis and network visualisation. It
generates a hypergraph that visualises connections
between related words based on their semantic
context. For this presentation, the first published text
of Deleuze, Desert Islands, was fed to the algorithm.
The question, then, is why one should stop at the determination of the architectural hand. If we can understand the individuation of the hand in terms of the differential relations that produce it, then why shouldn’t we approach all that a hand can do in a similar manner. Influenced by the thought of Leibniz, Deleuze, Leroi-Gourhan and Simondon, I will examine the reticular technicities that a set of fingers and a stilus produce, the architectural styles that should not be only approached in terms of classifications and typologies, but also on the potentials of the differential relations that condition them. Accordingly, the problematic field of the hand and the stilus, should be examined on the differentials that constitute it as an assemblage and on the singular and ordinary points it produces. Put succinctly, between each finger and each pencil, each hand, mouse and click, each hammer and drill held, lies a difference which produces the singularities of any technology, the ones that determine it via its technicities while, reticularly, determines us back. If, therefore, architecture wishes to expand its technicities –at least to correspond to the high concretization of the technical objects it has at its disposal and to the equally concretized sets of objects it wishes to intervene to- perhaps focus should be given on the affective amplification of its sensorial and sense-making apparatus, then one which makes new spaces and subjects emerge.
Structured along the three interdependent syntheses and ecologies, the conference focuses on three socio-techno-environmental regimes: Intelligence, Instituting, and Archiving. Its goal is to revisit the material-discursive ecologies of instituting and archiving practices as critical and creative endeavours that may counter systemic stupidity and engender collective intelligence. Instead of pondering the question of what intelligence is, the event will address the pragmatics of how it happens, who institutes it, and through which technologies it is archived. Starting from (post-)Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts and methods, extended through feminist, queer, and decolonial critiques, the aim is to render visible the reciprocally determinant structure and operation of these three regimes and through what methods, modes, techniques, and technologies dis/individuating becomings come to be differentially enacted.
Assisting this endeavour, the thought of philosophers like Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Gilbert Simondon and Raymond Ruyer will meet the latest developments in fields like affect theory, cognitive sciences, environmental studies and neuroanthropology. Eventually, by the end of this book, the readers – from architecture students and researchers to academics and practitioners with an interest in theory – will have been exposed to a comprehensive and original philosophy of architecture and the built environment.
This event is intended to facilitate a collective exchange aimed at adumbrating, defining, problematising what this strange design space could do; where it may be located; how it might be employed for engendering transformative becomings. We would like to interrogate especially the ways in which designed spaces — understood as a multiplicity of environmentally-constructed and embodied technicities — may be related to generating this systemic ‘design space’.