Trans-Architecture

imperatives. That night I experienced, as if for the first time, the pure pleasure of the force of the existential in all of its singular multiplicity.

imperatives. That night I experienced, as if for the first time, the pure pleasure of the force of the existential in all of its singular multiplicity. 2 Ricco has a different conceptual apparatus to that of Betsky, who retains a conventional representational mode of analysis, hinted at by his references to the 'spectacle' and the idea that this queer space can make no difference, that it has 'no issue'. Ricco's interest in pornography avoids subsuming it under specularity or representation or, importantly, under a logic of use or fertility (or lack thereof). Nonetheless, his evocation of the architecture of the Limelight club remains, as with Betsky, sui generis. He proposes no general architectural theory or philosophy that would at the same time respect the specificity of this experience of the gay club. It is significant that these scenes are included in the introduction or the preface. Somehow, they get the writing going, they act as a stimulus to action, but remain outside the scope of the main part of the text which they prompt.
In this essay, I want to ask whether, and how, we can make a connection between the intensity of Ricco's and Betsky's experience of these spaces and happenings, and the spaces that architects and others more generally work with, create, theorise, inhabit and experience. In other words, is there an exceptionalism of the gay club, of the freedom it allows, of the acts that it contains and encourages, or is it possible for this architecture to have an issue, to make a difference, to carry its logic through to, on the one hand, the undermining of everyday minor a small, rather quiet, dark, and nearly stifling hot room packed full of men and boys, pants around their ankles, hands groping crotches, t-shirts pulled behind necks, kissing, sucking, jacking, licking. I instantly realized that I had entered a space of erotic, ethical, and perhaps political potential unlike any other, in its refusal of so many codes, protocols, laws, and

Trans-Architecture
Tim Gough blows apart all the things we know about sex, genders and sexualities. 4 What transing does is to put into effective and political play Jacques Derrida's quasi-philosophical act of deconstruction, not as a change in how we think about things, but as an intervention in the real itself (which is why it is quasi-philosophical). Essentialist notions of sex and gender are deconstructed.
As Whittle says, this is not just a question of the blurring of boundaries between categories; rather it involves the deconstruction of the hegemony of categorical thought itself. A similar point is made by Jasbir K. Puar, whose essay 'Queer Times, Queer Assemblages' draws a distinction between intersectionality and the Deleuzian question of the assemblage (which we will come to below) and suggests that we need to move on from the one to the other. 5 In the preface to the second edition of Gender Trouble, Judith Butler contends that gender -as a performative issue -is not simply an appeal to the notion of the event, of acts of (repeated, iterated) performance that engender gender. Rather, she highlights the deconstructive tone of the word by citing Jacques Derrida's text Before the Law. Derrida's deconstruction is always primarily a deconstruction of identity. Identity can be deconstructed, precisely because it has been constructed in the first place. But that construction is shown never to be straightforward for the reason that that which is constructed presents itself instead as foundational, or essential. This means, the constructed quality of identity is elided. The aim of deconstruction is thus to unmask that constructedness: 'Neither identity nor non-identity is natural, but rather the effect of a juridical performative. ' 6 In his analysis of Franz Kafka's short story Before the Law, Derrida displays this text's deconstructive quality by showing how the law is an effect of an expectation and a co-performance between the one who seeks the law and the gatekeeper of 'it'.
The result of deconstruction is that the 'it' has to be put into scare quotes, since there is no identity fascisms -in particular, the spatial ones -and on the other hand to a general theory of architecture?
In this question, feminist-, queer-and transstudies can guide us as to how architecture might be rethought. 3 But more than this: the continuing investment in cis-normative modes of thinking on the part of much architectural theory means that, looking from where we stand now, a transgender or queer way of thought and being has in fact been the only location where such rethinking has occurred.
The aim here is not simply to take into account within architecture the theoretical, philosophical and political advances that these other 'disciplines' have made, nor to make connections between the two (instructive though this is), but rather to call into question and reframe the very ontology and, as we shall see, epistemology of architecture. The queering, or transing of gender will lead to a transing of architecture, of its very mode of being. This will then lead us back to Betsky's and Ricco's experiences in the gay club, not to make these exemplary of architecture, since there is no necessary equivalence between their (experience of) architecture and that of the indefinite series of others (feminists, lesbians, female to male trans, male to female trans, intersex, interrace…), but rather to call into question the exemplary as the founding trope of what architecture is. This is seen already in the 1998 'Transgender' issue of the Journal of Gender Studies, edited by trans academic and trans activist Stephen Whittle, who highlights that this special issue is a first because it is queer/feminist writings, not one nor the other, it trans'es that border, by which I mean something specific. Trans'ing is not just 'crossing over', not just 'blurring boundaries', not just 'blending categories', but it fully queers the pitch by highlighting, clarifying, deconstructing and then blowing apart the border between queer and feminist theory, just as in 'real' life it highlights, clarifies, deconstructs and then distinction between building and architecture, and the associated binary distinction between the everyday and the exemplary and also between subject (us) and object (building). As exemplary, architecture is conceptualised as a formal discipline of design, taking a lead from Kant: 'In … architecture …, design is what is essential; in design the basis for any involvement of taste is not what gratifies us in sensation, but merely what we like because of its form.' 10 But at the same time, architecture is often given meaning, be that a phenomenological or an iconographic one, and is therefore framed within the binary distinction between form and meaning.
Architecture is caught within these normative categories; it is made to fit within what Deleuze calls the 'binary machine' of categorisation or the strata of thought. This binary machine operates by splitting every question and every ontology into a radical (i.e. root-like) question, a question of roots and branches, a tree-like structure composed of a series or sieve of binary distinctions into which the matter at hand -here, architecture, there gender -is forced. 11 The transing task, then, is to queer this binary machine, to make of architecture not something sieved through the categories, but mixed across them. Thereby it transes these categories themselves in such a manner that they become an after-effect of the mixture, and not a representation of ontologically pre-existing things. (Pre-existing things, because pre-existing categories: ontology and epistemology intertwined.) Therein, transbodies radically differ from 'hybrid' others that leave these categories fully intact, perhaps even reinforcing them. And it is indeed in queer studies of architecture that we can find how this différance of architecture can be thought more precisely. In These include the concept of architecture as exemplary in relation to the aesthetic. What distinguishes architecture, properly speaking, is said to be that which stands out from the everyday as an object of aesthetic discourse. More generally, architecture is therefore framed within the binary the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari from the early 1990s onwards, we would be hard-pressed to find any such transing use of the concept of assemblage within that entire co-option. But in this queer, transing concept of the assemblage -i.e.
as an essentially social/material/spatial mixture or individuality, or individuation (as Deleuze and Guattari name it) -we find nothing other than architecture 'itself', or architecture thought and experienced (as literature was for Derrida) beyond the binary machine. Architecture does not have the quality of an object (that, we can call building). 15 It is not something to do with a subjective aesthetic response, nor with form deployed in design; nor is it inherently meaningful. And it is no co-incidence that this concept of assemblage is perhaps first most aptly applied to mixtures that include spatial configurations (and which are therefore inherently architectural) within queer studies.

The notion of assemblage within Deleuze and
Guattari is itself decidedly queer, in that it produces a shared deterritorialisation. One of the key examples of an assemblage given by Deleuze and Guattari -one that they come back to on many occasions -is that of the wasp and the orchid.
There is a symbiotic relation between these two creatures. One might see the relation between them as essentially imitative or representational: the orchid imitates the wasp in order to attract it. But, Deleuze and Guattari say, this is to conceptualise the relation between the two within the grid or sieve of pre-existing categories ('on the level of strata'). 16 Imitation is not what happens: rather, it is the 'aparallel evolution of two beings that have absolutely nothing to do with each other' occurring here. 17 In this 'symbiogenesis', both mutually become different with another. 18 The wasp and the orchid, in other words, form an assemblage in the same way that cock-mouth-glory hole occurs in the bathhouse. It is not a question of a pre-formed subject and pre-formed object coming into conjunction in the assemblage. Rather, as they make clear, the assemblage is primary, since 'for Deleuze and Guattari the fixed identity of the Modern subject is nothing more than the particular way in which bodies have been mapped or stratified (cartographié)'. 14 In other words the subject is nothing more than the result of the workings of the binary machine we looked at above.
If cis-normative architectural theory has co-opted the baron and the tailor in Proust's courtyard. It is indeed this situation that gives us a clue to deconstructing architectural theory.
Later, there is an even more intense queer architectural assemblage between these two characters, in Proust's Le temps retrouvé. Jupien has procured a gay brothel where Charlus's extreme masochism can be indulged; the narrator witnesses him, chained to a bed, being whipped to shreds by young male prostitutes. There is here a precise description of masochism as an experience of intensity, an intensity linked to its architectural 'setting' and to other things supposedly remote from the usual definitions of masochism, such as humour. The scene where Charlus, having been beaten, chats with his torturers, in the hope that they are real murderers (he wishes to be truly threatened by them), and is disappointed when they let slip that they've never that collapses the boundary between the embodied self, its world and others, allowing one to interpenetrate the others and thereby constitute a specific place.' 29 The use of the word 'place' indicates here that Stryker regards this poesis as the production of architecture, using the term 'architecture' in the surprising that the bathhouse and the glory-hole is the place where the full architectural import of the assemblage is best revealed. Nor surprising that cis-normative discourses seem unable to fathom the assemblage's architectural ontological import; either that, or they actively intend to suppress it. But the exemplary quality of the glory-hole then needs to be generalised and understood as being a specific instance of the play of the entire world (or cosmos, as Deleuze would say) and the play of architecture.
This ontology of architecture is concerned primarily with difference and relations, and not with the terms of relations. It is an ontology that operates outside or before categories, and in that sense, it does not ask what architecture is, but rather asks how it is or what it does. This is an ontology that respects the différance of architecture, its 'essentially' differential character, or its hyper-relationality. Yet, cis-normative notions of essentialism, formalism, typology, and the various architectures of identity all concern themselves with the terms of relations, i.e. with what is held to be substantial, material, capable of being formed. It is by this means that the sieve of categories is utilised to define what architecture is. But a transing ontology of architecture as assemblage sees architecture as inherently a question of differences, of differences between a multiplicity of 'things' that generates, as an after-effect, what subsequently becomes solidified into terms of the relationships that those differences create. For us, architecture therefore becomes (is seen and understood as) the event of those differences, the constant movement of the multiplicity, and the task of the transing architect is to respect this anti-essentialism/anti-formalism/antitypology and return therefore to a location where differences play a more productive role, where they make a difference. Deleuze and Guattari name this location the plane of consistency.
Deleuze's book on masochism was published just before his two books on Spinoza, and one folds to infinity, and those infinite folds are the real. 34 Fourth, Crawford emphasises that this is nothing to do with identities: these are 'happenings or movements rather than objects or presences'; 35      Despite the advances within the state organisation (legality, marriage, etc.), the task remains to open up a space, to return to the plane of consistency, to not allow the forces of organisation to take over entirely.
As Hensher states, 'The current situation feels as if an exasperated majority is telling us that we have been given a generous legal framework. We used to insist on your silence; these days, we've kindly ensured that there is no reason for you to speak up. That's an improvement, isn't it? Now go away.' 49 The movement, he implies, has to stay suspicious of the plane of organisation -despite desiring the   its interplay between the planes and its nurturing, for just a while, of the plane of consistency, is the real, is trans-architecture. That is, it is architecture tout court.
We return, therefore, to where we started, but seen in a different light. The scenes that Betsky and Riccio described, those intensities that set their discourses going, were nothing other than an instance of architecture, of the real of architecture.
Far from having no issue, they serve to show that the 'force of the existential in all of its singular multiplicity' is the reality of trans-architecture. 50