.

an immanent look at Deleuze and Guatarri
through the discourse of war, through two
kinds of thought spaces based upon notions
of smooth and striated structures ...

a striated space is a closed system,
measurably dimensional and partitioned
like a city, like the Cartesian grid of woven
fabric, with points geometrically fixed in
place and offering a sedentary dwelling place
comprised of identifiable matter. striated
social spaces shape the linear control of
hierarchical, rule-intensive nation-cultures,
a binary system that produces autonomously
-meaningful packets of information. this is
the modern ideal.

a smooth space is an open system, eventfully
directional and infinately continuous like the
sea, like the random arrangement of felt and
paper fibres tangled into an amorphously
rhizomal anti-fabric. smooth spaces offer a
migratory journey, a nomadic line of flight
filled with trajectories and haptic intensities
that unfold along the way. smooth social
spaces shape a system of multiplicities that
produce de-centralized information organized
into lattice-like networks of inter-textuality,
like what`s found in the fluid electronic
information space of the www. this is
the post-modern ideal.

if multinational corporations are not static but
nomadic (here today and there the next), so too,
the military. power finds a home in anything that`s
on the move and within the deleuzoguatarrian war
machine, the enemy thinks these same thoughts
like "operational architects", and while the space
for criticality has seemingly withered away in the
face of late capitalism, it has potentially regained
ground on the reading lists of contemporary
military institutions with particular emphasis
on the writings of Deleuze, Guattari and Debord.

what does philosophy (and its application to
architecture) have in common with military
strategy? battleplans for war-in-the-streets
narrate an inverse geometry that reorganizes
the urban syntax of microtactical actions into
infestations of soldiers infiltrating a city. this
strategy uses D & G`s conception of smooth
and striated space to describe a swarm of
undetectable soldiers moving outside of public
passageways, travelling unnoticed by avoiding
streets, by drilling, hammering or exploding
civilian walls to get past their enemies, by
literally `unwalling the walls`, breaking down
the established architectual spaces to redefine
the division between inside and outside into
the inverse geometry of smooth space.

"A Palestinian woman identified only as Aisha,
interviewed by a journalist for the Palestine
Monitor, described the experience: ‘Imagine it –
you’re sitting in your living-room, which you know
so well; this is the room where the family watches
television together after the evening meal, and
suddenly that wall disappears with a deafening
roar, the room fills with dust and debris, and through
the wall pours one soldier after the other, screaming
orders. You have no idea if they’re after you, if
they’ve come to take over your home, or if your
house just lies on their route to somewhere else.
The children are screaming, panicking. Is it possible
to even begin to imagine the horror experienced by
a five-year-old child as four, six, eight, 12 soldiers,
their faces painted black, sub-machine-guns pointed
everywhere, antennas protruding from their
backpacks, making them look like giant alien bugs,
blast their way through that wall?’.

"He said: ‘this space that you look at, this room that
you look at, is nothing but your interpretation of it.
The question is how do you interpret the alley?"

"At the border between these two spaces of thought
lies a philosophy of invention. It is a traversal, where
new connections are made and new concepts are
conceived, which "don't add up to a sytem of belief
or an architecture of propositions...but they pack
a potential" (D & G)