Convergence Copyright 2005 SAGE Publications. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi.

Vol. 11(4): 7284. DOI: 10.1177//1354856505061055

www.sagepublications.com

Hybrid Architecture:

An Environment for the

Prosthetic Body

Georges Teyssot

Abstract: Drawing from philosophical, literary, artistic and technological

sources, this text focuses on the theoretical relations between body and
environment. It illustrates the argument by probing into various topics such
as: desiring machines, body without organs, organs without body,
gymnastic implements, body-building, celibate machines, incorporation,
disembodiment, androids, robots, cyborgs, electro-mechanical and
electronic apparatuses, spacesuits, wearable computers and augmented
reality, the eco-technical spheres and the matrix. In addition, it looks into
theories of medical devices that help explain the notion of the prosthetic
body. Finally, within the context of theories of tools and cyber-organism, it
attempts to rethink design through the terms of contemporary practices of
daily life.
Key words: hybridity, body and environment, prosthetic body, cyborg,
robot, disembodiment, eco-technics

he historical and continued close connections between architecture

and the body, established either analogically or in reality, seem
irrefutable, from Vitruvianism to seventeenth century mechanicism,
eighteenth century sensualism, nineteenth century organicism, and to
twentieth century celibate machines and dwelling-machines . The Greek
and Roman conception of isomorphism was based on the representation
of a canonical body, which was conceived prior to the production of the
work of art. Following the dismissal of a theory that calls for the imitation
of the human bodys proportions in architecture, how is it possible to
rethink the relations between body and built environment? It seems urgent
to question the dynamic relations between the bodys constituents and the
world. Is there a body? Is it a possession or a tool? Do we have a body?
What is a body? Do we inhabit the body? It is necessary to briefly
examine various theories of the body in order to understand how they
might interfere with the environments conception, whether built or not,
and also with notions of architectural design.
Body without In the Logique du Sens (1969), Gilles Deleuze refers to the dramatic
organs lamentation pronounced by Antonin Artaud, just after he was released

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from his prolonged sojourn in the psychiatric hospital of Rodez: No

mouth No tongue No teeth No larynx No oesophagus No stomach No
belly No anus I will rebuild the man that I am.1
This invocation was calling for a body, welded together and fluid, made
of bones and blood, which could not be reduced to each of its organs.
Later in Anti-Oedipus (1972), Deleuze and Guattari return to this
invocation, while exposing their hypothesis of the body conceived as a
libidinal machinery, that of a desiring-machine, leading to the theoretical
possibility of a body without organs.
Again, this notion was based on texts by Artaud, such as Pour en finir
avec le Jugement de Dieu (1947): For you can tie me up if you wish,
but there nothing more useless than an organ;2 or this other summon
(1948): The body is the body/it is all by itself/and has no need of
organs/the body is never an organism/organisms are the enemies of the
body.3
Today, it seems we are confronted by two hypotheses, which are most
likely mutually exclusive: (a) a body without organs, i.e. a notion of the
body that does not hinge on the singularity and the autonomy of each
organ, but where organs would be indeterminate; and (b) a notion based
on the organic organization of organs, called the organism, which
corresponds to the standard notion of the body and would be conceived
as a fixed hierarchy organised by an internal functional logic. These two
approaches to the explanation of the corporeal are clearly opposed,
however one does not really exclude the other. On one side, there is the
body-without-organs, a fertile schizophrenics dream, considering the
body in its exteriority, in its relation to other bodies, perceived through
relations of surfaces, differences, affects, desires, functioning like a
virtual and smooth space, connected with fluxes that traverses it and get
intercepted in it.4 On the other, there is the reality of the organism,
conceiving the body only in its interiority, in its regime of internal
distribution, where autonomous organs (de)compose the whole in multiple
parts, breaking up its integrity. This logic is reflected in the distribution of
a hospital in various medical specialties. It is also this type of
functionalism that lies at the base of all modernistic architecture, which
was nothing else than an application of organicism.
Deleuze and Guattari place themselves in opposition to some tendencies
in psychoanalysis that were influenced by linguistic structuralism, accusing
such tendencies of conceiving the body as void, as tabula rasa, a blank
space, a kind of slate on which events, traced by language, may inscribe
themselves; and power can write the text of the law.5 Briefly stated, a
certain conception of the body, Lacanian in a broad sense, seems to
maintain that idea of the punctuation of the void desire by signification
(Fr., Signifiant), creating a phallic order, that of the family, and, by
extension, that of the state. Deleuze and Guattaris conception insists on
the fact that desire does not lack anything, does not miss its object, that
desire and its object are one, a unique and only thing, and that desire is

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a machine and that the object of desire is another machine connected to

the first one.6 Furthermore, in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Deleuze and
Guattari describe the body as multiple surfaces, or as a folded skin, in
[i]t is also the skin as envelope or ring, and the sock as
reversible surface. It can be a house or part of a house, any
number of things, anything. A body without organs is not an
empty body stripped of organs, but a body upon which that
which serves as organs . . . is distributed according to crowd
phenomena, in Brownian motion, in the form of molecular
multiplicities. . . . [Thus] The body without organs is not a dead
body but a living body all the more alive and teeming once it
has blown apart the organism and its organization. . . . The full
body without organs is a body populated by multiplicities.7
In such a topology, houses present themselves as something reversible,
like the skin of a dead animal, and like socks. In this new kind of
organicism, the interior becomes an exterior, while, vice versa, the
exterior folds itself into surfaces, smooth or striated, folded and unfolding
in vagina-like forms or in a tubes excrescences.8
Organs without Today, the very idea of a prosthesis is pulled towards applications that
body essentially encompass restoration of infirmities of perception (whether by
improvement or substitution), and towards trials in the culture of cellular
tissues and the graft of organs, which, with various results, are becoming
increasingly common. As it were, the most sophisticated form of
prosthesis is the graft: it links together separation of matter and functional
repair in an exchange of alterity. Nowadays, the body-without-organs
has been confronted by the disturbing prospect of an organ without a
body transplants, that is, preserved in aptly named organ banks. A
hybrid, almost monstrous, the graft is a species of flesh and apparatus.
Isolated from the donor organism, the transplant (graft) is a free organ,
in other words, available on the market like any other commodity, as
already it was illustrated in Michael Crichtons film, Coma (1978). Here,
demand exceeds supply, and a world-traffic has arisen. Thus, the graft is
without body, orphan and celibate, between life and death. It comes from
the interval produced between relational and functional death.9
Transplant surgery also introduces a caesura between organ and body,
the transplant remaining other in its new body and requiring intense
pharmaceutical regulatory regimes to prevent the host body from rejecting
it. The graft becomes an-other, an extraneous entity able to substitute an
ailing part in the receivers organism, but at the same time, it creates new
regimes of regulations, brings about an other regimen of normality, which
will lead to new pathologies, as many survivors will testify.10
Deleuze and Guattaris description of the libidinal machinery also
introduces fragmentation:
everything functions at once, but in hiatuses and interruptions,
breakdowns and failures, fits and starts and short-circuits,

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through distances and dis-aggregations in a totality which

never unites its parts in a whole. . . . We live in the age of
partial objects. . . . We no longer believe in an original totality,
nor in the totality of a final destination.11
For Deleuze and Guattaris desiring-machine cuts are productive and
are, themselves, joinings. Through reflection or representation, Lacans
mirror no longer succeeds in re-assembling the parts of the body in
pieces, the fragmented phantasms of the pre-narcissistic body. For
Deleuze and Guattari, the mirror stage becomes the repression of
fragmentation, and once the body is repressed, all that remains is the
fetishisation of the lost object of desire. Instead, Anti-Oedipus is a
celebration of divisions, splices, cuts, partial objects, conjunctions and
disjunctions, connections and recordings.12
What emerges, then, is an outline of two hypotheses of the fragmentation
of the body distinct but related to one another. The first is defined by
the formulation organ-without-body. Such an organ, released from the
body, can be sold as a commodity, as well as grafted on to another
body, another organism, be it living or not, be it mechanical, biological,
or computational. Insofar as the term graft derives etymologically from
graphein, the Greek word for writing, every graft becomes a writing, a
script or a code, and every writing, every graph, becomes a graft. The
second hypothesis defines the body-without-organs. The body becomes
liberated, libidinal, desiring. It would be incessantly traversed by
ephemeral experiences that give rise to artificially induced vital effects:
tact and contact, sensation and vibration, brush and touch, caress and
rubbing, fleeting pleasures and momentary satisfaction, flux and outflow.
Incorporation In the visual arts during the 1960s, the human body was reintroduced
into art through performances during orchestrations in which, for the most
part, the artist would engage his/her own body an ephemeral practice
enacted in real time and photographically documented: a registering of
traces of an occasional action.
Such were the seminal works of Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, or Vito
Acconci. At the centre of body art is a de-centered body, as in the
footprints and rulers of Robert Morris 1964 sculpture, Untitled (Footprints
and Rulers), engaging the gallerys space. In works such as Bruce
Naumans study of lips of 1967, in which a series of lips float on a sheet
of paper, the body becomes fragmented. Later the lip study became a
self-enacted performance, entitled First Hologram Series: Making Faces
(1968). Or the body is edited, as in Vito Acconcis first photoworks. In
Drifts (1970), he photographs traces he left on sand; or, in Trademarks
(1970), he records the actions and then the traces left on his own body
by bites and kisses. In Lick (1970), a filmed three-minute performance, the
artist, unleashing his masochistic drive, licks the gallery floor. In
Conversions (1971), he hides his genitals between his legs while standing
naked before the camera. By this change of attributes, he attempts to

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recreate a hermaphrodites body. Becoming smooth, his body turns into a

surface of inscriptions, which can be either engraved or erased.
The uncanny and poignant early works of Rebecca Horn attempt a
cartography of subjective and physiological functions of the human body.
Her body-sculptures are made from fragments of biomedical equipment
(such as pipes, ligatures, membranes and pumps) for example, her
Overflowing-blood-machine (1970), in which eight transparent tubes,
vertically placed and linked by belts around the nude body of a model,
reveal the flux and rhythmic pulsations of blood-circulation, projected
through the skin. In Cornucopia (1970), a device resembling lungs
establishes a direct, sensorial exterior connection between the mouth and
the breasts of a half-nude female model. The multi-functional apparatus
allows for a variety of uses, not excluding auto-eroticism; thus, it appears
as a body that follows the rules of its own desire, seeking pleasure
outside any kind of organo-logical conception.13 Rebecca Horns work
reveals in the same manner as surgical operations or technological
incorporations (endoscope, stethoscope, X-rays, ECG, EEG, TEP, MRIs,
etc.) the workings of the viscera and isolated parts of the vegetative
system (circulation and respiration) to a gaze hitherto forbidden,
dangerous, or even fatal.
In these projects, a double movement is at work: traces left by the body
and traces left on the body. The de-centered, objectified, marked body
thus becomes a critique of social or political means of controlling and
dominating the body. One of the best instances was offered by Chris
Burdens performance Shoot, staged at the F Space in Santa Ana in
California on November 19, 1971. That he was shot in the arm by a
pistol is only an accidental even, after all, anecdotal aspect of that
happening. What are played and replayed here are the many mise-enscenes of explorations operated on the body itself, considered to be the
ultimate end of experimentation.14
The early works of Cindy Sherman pick up on this circumstance and
dissect production procedures used in the film industry to fabricate images
of the female body. Her more recent work has developed notions of
distortion and fragmentation, through transformations effected on her own
body, her own figure, which are highlighted and recorded in gigantic,
perturbing cibachromes that induce a feeling of discomfort in the viewer.
In her 19891990 series Untitled, her body is garbed in a bulbous
breast and various protuberances and tumescences recalling the
Madonna Lactens archetype, among others. Art, Cindy Sherman seems
to indicate, can and does make the real more so.15 It can achieve a
hyper-realism that unnerves us in relation to the realism of our body,
blurring any logical or semiotic associations.
In the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa) in 1991, Jana Sterbak
displayed the well publicised Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic
(1987). The so called meat dress, which was made of fifty pounds of
raw flank steak stitched together on a female model, was displayed on a

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hanger and left to be cured over a period of several weeks, until the artist
replaced it with a fresh meat dress. The performance offers a sly
commentary on the accepted codes of womens beauty, on the attraction
and repulsion caused by raw flesh, on the shedding of an old skin for a
new one, and on the fleshs inexorable decay over time. In another
photographic work, Generic Man (198789), Sterbak shows a man from
behind, with his head shaved and a code bar printed on the back of his
neck, again an effective allegory of codes imprinted on a bodys skin,
perhaps an allusion to Franz Kafkas device in the Penal Colony.16
However, she refrains from any judgmental attitude.17
The corporeal fragmentation is taken up by artist Gary Hill who, in his
video installation, As It Is Always Already Taking Place (1990), exposes
the partial images of a single body on sixteen monitors in real time. In
what could be thought of as a curious inversion of the mirror stage, the
body is first decomposed in partial objects, then recomposed
technologically as the image of the body in pieces in which cut-out and
reinforced body parts are simultaneously fetishised and rendered
inaccessible.18 Again, in Matthew Barneys video art project, Cremaster
4 (1994), bodies and machines engage in (genetic) mutation, producing
incontrollable morphologies, with the sudden emergence of excrescences,
both ephemeral and not quite explainable.19
Stelarc has used medical instruments, prosthetics and robotics to explore
unexpected connections with the body. Sublimely masochistic, he first
experimented with the series of twenty-five Body Suspensions
(19761988), undergoing the painful insertions of hooks into his skin,
which were able to lift him up in the air. In the undefined and blurred
space between art and science, he has created his famous Third Hand
(ca. 1990), an artificial manipulator, attached to his right arm as a
supplemental hand, controlled by EMG signals emitted from the
abdominal and leg muscles. A visionary artist, Stelarc has studied
different ways of altering the architecture of the body, in order to adjust
and extend its awareness of the world.20 The amplified body thus calls
for a post-evolutionary projectile; and, by remapping, reconfiguring and
redesigning the body, Stelarc seems to have successfully actualised what
had been announced by the cyborgs paradigm.
From Hermann Nitsch to Dan Graham, Gordon Matta-Clark, Charles Ray,
Robert Gober, Kiki Smith, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Sophie Calle,
Andrea Blum, Andrea Zittel, Vanessa Beecroft, Dinos and Jake Chapman,
Atelier van Lieshout, Bernard Lallemand, the body becomes not only the
site of criticism of the disciplinary apparatuses of society, but, most of all,
the place of a process of incorporation, or of incarnation, which, at least
in theory, can be tested to the extreme limits of disembodiment. Eventually
and eventfully, the process of incarnation must be probed to the limit of its
disincarnation. That limit is the vulnerability of the body itself.
Cyborgs The development of the bioapparatus during the twentieth century has
been marked by two principal stages worthy of the status of theoretical

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fiction or paradigm. First came the inception of the term robot that
arose as a figure for the worker in an industrial environment. The term
apek (18901938) in his 1921 play
was coined by the writer Karel C
R.U.R. an acronym for Rossums Universal Robots.21 Robot derives from
the Czech word robota meaning boredom or drudgery, and refers to
slavery, or repetitive factory-work, particularly in the production-line plant.
While man had to become an engine, or a motor, the machine had to
resemble man.22
Second came the creation of the term cyborg, which is short for
cybernetic organism and characterises a hybrid being, an embodiment
of a monstrous idea a part-human, part-alien type of automaton.23 The
terminology was proposed by two physicians, Manfred Clynes (engineer
and neuropsychologist, who studied music, physics and mathematics),
and Nathan S. Kline (psychiatrist), at the bio-cybernetics research
laboratories at Rockland Psychiatric State Hospital in Orangeburg, New
York, in a study related to astronautics for NASA during the 1960s.24 It
may well be that robots and cyborgs are not just two stages in
technological evolution but rather two alternatives, two paradigms for
development. After all, it is significant that one was born in an industrial
factory, and the other in a hospital, like you and me, in an environment
managed by fin-de-sicle electronics. More recent technological
developments have moved from the electronically managed environment
of Norbert Weiners cybernetics toward the electronically simulated
environment, studied in its biological phantasm, and utilised in the
development of devices for sensory perception, specifically Virtual
Reality, which must be understood as a (now rather banal) form of
cyborgism.25
Today, it seems that dichotomies other than the obvious one of
organism/machine can be called into question by cyborg culture for
example, mind/body, animal/human, public/private, nature/culture,
male/female, primitive/civilised, virtual/real.26 The biologist and cyborg
theorist Donna Haraway offers insight onto such challenges in a section
of her Cyborg Manifesto:
High-tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways. It
is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between
human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what is
body in machines that resolve into coding practices. In so far as
we know ourselves in both formal discourse (biology) and in
daily practice (the homework economy in the integrated circuit),
we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras.
Biological organisms have become biotic systems,
communication devices like others. There is no fundamental,
ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and
organism, of technical and organic. The replicant Rachel in the
Ridley Scott film Blade Runner (1982) stands as the image of a
cyborg cultures fear, love, and confusion.27

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Haraways work helped, in the 1980s at least, to define a new type of

hybridity that goes beyond the Greek Chimera and the classical Monster
(from the Golem to Frankenstein) to arrive at the information revolutions
hybrid product the cyborg. This cybernetic version of the chimera
describes new kinds of mutations. It even leads to a reconsideration of the
notion of evolution. With the cyborg, bodies are, as Haraway makes
clear, no longer born, they are made. Today organisms are constructions,
the creations of the discourse of immunology. The cyborg has displaced
the limit between organism and machine by coupling cybernetic devices
with biological organism; it has blurred the distinction between animated
and unanimated through the theory of the behaviour of homeostatic
systems.28
Eco-technics We well know that our being is in no way reducible to each of our
organs we can change them without modifying it in any way. However,
as Stphane Ferret writes, reasoning on a part is not the same as
reasoning on the whole, and it is precisely at this subtle disjunction
between the body and each of its organs where word-play arises
between having and being a body.29 Elizabeth Grosz, in her book
Volatile Bodies (1994), has charted the passage from the visible, and
savage inscription of bodies scarification and tattoo through the
Foucauldian violent inscription of prisons, hospitals, and other disciplinary
regimens, to less obvious and less coercive but none the less rigorous and
pervasive inscriptions of cultural and personal values, norms, and
commitments according to the morphology and categorization of the
body into socially significant groups. She points to the voluntary marking
that is incised through [. . .] life-styles, habits, and behaviors.30
Cogently, in her later works, Elizabeth Grosz states that the subject is not
a mind inhabiting a body it is not that we have a body, we are a body,
a body moreover that thinks itself.31 Jean-Luc Nancy goes even further,
affirming that: There is no such thing as the body. There is no body.
Instead, there are patient and fervent recitations of numerous corpuses.
Ribs, skulls, pelvises, irritations, shells [. . .].32 Furthermore, in his seminal
essay on bodies techn, Nancy asserts:
Our world is the world of technic, that is the world in which
cosmos, nature, gods, and complete systems in all its intimate
articulation, exposes itself as technic: the world of an ecotechn.
The ecotechn operates through technical apparatuses, which
permeates and plugs every part of ourselves. What is being made
here is actually our bodies, that it gives birth to and plugs into this
system. Thus created, our bodies become even more visible, more
proliferating, more polymorph, more saturated, more contracted
in masses and zones, more than they ever were.33
Like a cyborg, but without the excitement of science fiction, first the body
is created, then it is plugged to every possible device, and at last it can
be reconfigured.

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The cyberpunk novel of William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984), introduces

us to the contemporary, incestuous mating between organs and machines,
with all the sexual connotations of total incarnation in desiring machines,
and couplings in continuous flux.34 Jacking into cyberspace is equivalent
to grafting a machine-organ onto an energy-machine, a theme already
invoked by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus.35 Through an
imaginary branching of neural systems and digital networks, users can
travel through a new landscape, which is described persuasively: [. . .]
and still hed see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding
across the colourless void. The matrix appears here, however this
concept both biological and mathematical had figured already in
Marshall McLuhans and Jean Baudrillards texts. While Jean-Franois
Lyotard was readying his exhibition on Les immatriaux (Centre Georges
Pompidou, Paris, 1985), Gibsons cyber-novel calls for a non-material
space of representation, where what you observe is actually the data
from digital simulations, enabling you to explore the void that separates
the physical presence and the consciousness of a spirit, a ghost who
hauntingly will navigate the expanses of such a consensual illusion. To
recall a landscape where statistical data give shape to the new city is
precisely what the Dutch architects MVRDV have attempted in their video
installation METACITY/DATATOWN (1998).36 The French architect
Franois Roche (R. DSV & Sie. P) has conceived an architectural
setting, which, through graph and graft, evolves in a perpetual
mutation.37
Spheres The so-called radical architecture from the end of the 1950s to the
beginning of the 1970s revealed and displayed deficiency, an inherent
zoological weakness, of humanity: wo-mans frailty in front of industrial
and technological developments, wo-mans solitude when confronting
abysses of digital landscapes, the vertiginous erasure of differences
between animated and unanimated beings, the disquieting mutations of
the human body at the immunological level. This extreme architecture
exposes and experiments with the bodys state of extreme
defencelessness: from the plastic architecture of Peter and Alison Smithson
and Ionel Schein, to the bubbles and balloons of Michael Webbs quasi
medical Cushicle (1966), and David Greenes lunar Pod (196667);38
from the Viennese Haus-Rucker-Cos space lab apparatuses Mind
Expander I, and Pneumacosm (1967);39 to Coop Himmelblaus prosthetic
equipment, the inflatable Villa Rosa (1967), and their design for a Cloud
(1968), that would breathe like a pair of lungs;40 from Huth and
Domenigs organic devices Floraskin (1971),41 to Superstudios
psychedelic 16 mm film Life/Superface (MoMA, 1972).42 What is tested
here was announced by Marshall McLuhans writings during the same
years: like media, architecture is the extension of man. Therefore,
environment is designed by the superimposition of different spheres: skin
and epithelial envelopes, things and tools, earth and fire, air and water,
lights and clouds, climate and weather, apparatuses and machines,
media interface. It is actually an atmo-spheric architecture.43

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In order to fully grasp the new condition of a hybrid space, one must deal
with the situation of our body in society. It seems no longer possible to
base oneself on metaphysical, traditional and fallacious oppositions such
as interior/exterior, public/private, organ/function, because with the
introduction of digital technologies those distinctions have been blurred. At
issue, then, are projects that retrace the various folds our bodies weave
with the world.44 The urgent task architecture ought to assume, therefore,
is that of defining and imagining an environment not just for natural
bodies, but for bodies projected outside themselves, absent and ecstatic,
by means of their technologically extended senses. Far from assimilating
the tool with the body according to the mechanistic tradition of Cartesian
dualism, we must conceive tools and instruments like a second sort of
body, incorporated into and extending our corporal powers.45
It then becomes possible and even necessary to logically invert the terms
of traditional propositions on the task of contemporary architecture. The
incorporation of technology is not effected by imagining a new
environment, but by reconfiguring the body itself, pushing outward to
where its artificial extremities encounter the world. It is not so much a
case of imagining new houses for cyborgs.46 This hybrid being, partorganic, part-automatic, is always already ambience, environment,
interface, surface where the relation of self and the world are put into
play, atmosphere. Rather, our instrument-enhanced and equipped body
should be redesigned and literally re-crafted, so that it can inhabit the
world and enter into transactions with the multiple spheres of comfort,
media, and information.
The interior could be defined as the projection of the body in a state of
ex-stasis towards an exterior, crossing inside-out through the surfaces
which delimit our surroundings: pores, scars and stitches, cells and
somatic membranes, splices and cuts, convertible furniture, gymnastic
implements, niches and nooks, cove and alcove, ramps and elevators,
chutes and airshafts, air-conditioning devices and mobile homes, electromechanical and electronic apparatuses, thresholds and frames, doors and
windows, skin as envelope or ring, epidermic layers and epithelial
prophylactics, mesh of techno-fabrics and arrays of armoured garment,
bandage and bondage, orthopaedic apparel, capsule hotels, spacesuits,
grids, maze of wires, wireless devices, remote control, wearable
computers, screen and interfaces, clusters of ports linking to nets, knots
and denouements, graphs and webs, etc., or, like in a Klein bottle, strips
of reversible surface.
Notes

1. Antonin Artaud, originally published in: 84, no. 56, 1948 [no page]; now in:
uvres, d., tablie, prsente et annote par Evelyne Grossman (Paris, ditions
Gallimard, 2004), p. 1581; quoted by Gilles Deleuze, Logique du Sens (Paris:
ditions de Minuit, 1969, reprint, 2002), p. 109, n. 8.
2. Antonin Artaud, Pour en finir avec le Jugement de Dieu, 1947; in: Antonin Artaud,
Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag, trans. Helen Weaver, (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988), p. 571.

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3. Antonin Artaud (84, nos 56, 1948, no page); quoted by: Gilles Deleuze; Flix
Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark
Seem, Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking Press, 1977); reprint (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1983), 4th printing, 1989, p. 9.
4. Robert Sasso; Arnaud Villani (eds), Le vocabulaire de Gilles Deleuze, Les Cahiers de
Noesis, vol. 3 (Printemps 2003), p. 62.
5. For an important discussion of this issue by an Hegelo-Lacanian: Slavoj Zizek,
Organs without Bodies, On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge,
2004).
6. Gilles Deleuze; Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, cit. pp. 2627.
7. Gilles Deleuze; Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 3035,
particularly p. 30. See also: Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans.
Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: The Athlone Press, 1987),
pp. 8990 and pp. 103107.
8. Ellen Lupton (ed.), Skin: Surface, Substance and Design (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 2002).
9. Michel Guillou, Le corps et lappareil, Traverses 14/15 (April 1979), p. 136, and
138.
10. Furthermore, in a heart transplant, the heart is no longer enervated, since the
intervention irreversibly severs cardiac nerves linking the organ to sub-cortical
cerebral centers; consequently, it suppresses reflex adaptation circuits. The patient is
deprived of any immediate physiological translation during emotional outbursts which
may accompany feelings like joy or fear; see: Jocelyne Vaysse, Coeur tranger en
corps daccueil, in Georges Vigarello (ed.), Le gouvernement du corps,
Communications, no. 56 (1993), p. 176.
11. Gilles Deleuze, Flix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 42.
12. Michel Guillou, p. 139.
13. Mina Roustayi, Getting Under the Skin. Rebecca Horns Sensibility Machines, Arts
Magazine, no. 63 (May 1989), p. 59.
14. Marc Selwyn, Chris Burden: I think museums function the way churches function for
religion its the place where you go to do it, Flash Art, no. 144 (Jan./Feb. 1989),
pp. 9094.
15. Thomas W. Sokolowski, Iconophobics Anonymous, Artforum, no. 28 (Summer
1990), p. 118.
16. Franz Kafka, The Penal Colony, Stories and Short Pieces, trans. Willa and Edwin
Muir (New York: Schocken Books, 1976).
17. Gilles Godmer (ed.), Jana Sterbak. From Here to There (Montral: Muse dart
Contemporain de Montral, 2003), pp. 7779, and p. 91. For other examples of
sadomasochistic, post-Duchampian, trans/formations in architectural design one could
consider Vito Acconcis Bad Dream House (1984) and Jana Sterbaks House of Pain
(1987).
18. Christine van Assche (ed.), Gary Hill (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1992).
19. Matthew Barney, Cremaster 4 [video], (New York, Barbara Gladstone Gallery; Paris:
Fondation Cartier, 1995).
20. See: http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/
apek, R.U.R. (Rossums Universal Robots): A Fantastic Melodrama in Three
21. Karel C
Acts and an Epilogue, trans. Paul Selver, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1923); see:

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Peter Wollen, Le cinma, lamricanisme, et le robot, Communications, no. 48

(Paris: Seuil, 1988), pp. 737.
22. Geoffrey L. Simons, Robots: The Quest for Living Machines (London: Cassell; New
York: Sterling Pub. Co., 1992).
23. Kathleen Rogers, in: Virtual Seminar on the Bioapparatus [transcript of seminar held
at Banff Centre for the Arts, on 2829 October 1991], (Banff, Canada, 1991),
p. 82.
24. Manfred E. Clynes, Nathan S. Kline, Cyborgs and Space, Astronautics, Journal of
the American Rocket Society, Washington, DC, September 1960, pp. 2627,
pp. 7476; The Cyborg Handbook, ed. Chris Hables Gray (New York, London:
Routledge, 1995), pp. 2933.
25. N. Katherine Hayles, How we Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,
Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
26. At the confluence of organic and mechanical states, the body can also undergo a
mutation, becoming a living (and thus dying) machine, as in Shinya Tsukamotos stopframe animation film, Tetsuo: Iron Man (1990), and in David Cronenbergs film
adaptation of the cult classic by J. G. Ballard, Crash (1996). The theme of artificial
reality was developed in numerous films, including: Total Recall, Paul Verhoeven (dir.),
1990; The Matrix, Andy and Larry Wachowski (dirs.), 1999; eXistenZ, David
Cronenberg (dir.), 1999; Being John Malkovich, Spike Jonze (dir.), 1999; see: Film
Architecture: Set Designs from Metropolis to Blade Runner [exhibition catalog],
Dietrich Neumann (ed.), Munich/New York, Prestel, 1999; and: Alain Badiou et al.,
Matrix, Machine philosophique (Paris: Ellipse, 2004).
27. Donna J. Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-feminism
in the Late Twentieth Century, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women the Reinvention of
Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 177178.
28. Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World. Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold
War America (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997).
29. Stphane Ferret, La philosophie et son scalpel. Le problme de lidentit personnelle
(Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1993).
30. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 140142.
31. Elizabeth Grosz, Futures, cities, architecture, in Architecture from the Outside:
Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 4953;
on the bodys exteriority, see also: Jacques Derrida, Khra (Paris: Galile, 1993).
32. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, in: Thinking Bodies, eds Juliet Flower MacCannell; Laura
Zakarin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 31; Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus
(Paris: Mtail, 2000), particularly pp. 7781.
33. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, op. cit., p. 78.
34. William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984); reprint: 2000.
35. Gilles Deleuze; Flix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, pp. 150.
36. MVRDV, METACITY/DATATOWN (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1999).
37. Mutations @ morphes R, DSV & Cie (Orlans: HYX, 1998).
38. Archigram (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999).
39. Heinrich Klotz (ed.), Haus-Rucker-Co: 1967 bis 1983 (Wiesbaden/
Braunschweig u.a.: Fried. Vieweg & Sohn, 1984).
40. Frank Werner, Covering + Exposing: The Architecture of Coop Himmelb[l]au
(Basel/Boston: Birkhuser, 2000).

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41. Marie-Ange Brayer (ed.) Architectures exprimentales. 19502000. Collection du

FRAC Centre (Orlans: Editions HYX, 2003).
42. Frdric Migayrou, et al. (eds), Architecture radicale [exhibition catalog],
(Villeurbanne: Institut dArt Contemporain, 2001); Peter Lang, William Menking,
Superstudio. Life without Objects [exhibition catalog] (Milan: Skira, 2003);
Dominique Rouillard, Superarchitecture, Le futur de larchitecture, 19501979 (Paris:
ditions de la Villette, 2004).
43. Peter Sloterdijk, Sphren, Mikrosphrologie, 1. Blasen (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp,
1998).
44. See: Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993).
45. Georges Teyssot, Erasure and Disembodiment, in Joke Brouwer (ed.), Book for the
Unstable Media (s-Hertogenbosch: V2 Organization, 1992), pp. 129163; The
Mutant Body of Architecture, introduction to: Elizabeth Diller & Ricardo Scofidio,
Flesh: Architectural Probes (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995),
pp. 835; Body-Building. Towards a New Organicism, Fisuras de la cultura
contempornea, no. 8, Madrid, 2000, pp. 15683; A Topology of Thresholds,
Home Cultures, vol. 2, no. 1 (London: Berg, 2005), 89116.
46. For instance, Chris Hables Gray, Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age (New
York: Routledge, 2001); Marie OMahony, Cyborg. The Man-machine (New York:
Thames and Hudson, 2002).

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