INTERSTICES 08 43

Introduction

The concepts of the coming community, which we discover in Giorgio Agamben’s
work, and of a future people, treated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in What is
Philosophy?, appear to be utopian formulations of community. They seem to forestall,
indefinitely, the arrival or satisfaction of community, making it an impossible
project. Yet, to assume the perpetual deferral of the coming community does
not allow for the ontological and ethical striving that participates, not in a fixed
idea of community, but in a fluid structure that opens up the possibility for new
forms of collective sociability. I would like to argue that the striving for a coming
community, and the formation of a future people, is an ethico-aesthetic activity
suffused with an affirmative joy that we can associate with Deleuze’s treatment
of the concept of a life. The insistence on the indefinite article, a life, determines
that no life in particular can be denominated, but that the singularity of any
life can participate in community. While admitting that utopia is not the best
possible word, Deleuze and Guattari stress that utopia as an idea can become useful
through an active engagement with contemporary geopolitical problems
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 100); for example, the question of refuge.

Within the specific limits of the discipline of architecture, how can we frame a
utopia (no-where) for the problems (now-here) of the present? The architectural
theorist, Reinhold Martin, has recently speculated on what he calls utopian realism
as a means of transforming feelings of helplessness. This vision is directed not
at the distant, inaccessible future, but suggests that in the present things can be
otherwise (2005: 5). With such a vision of hope in mind, this essay will address
ways in which the concepts of a coming community, a future people and a life can
be activated as a practical utopian attitude; an attitude that helps to confront the
problems of present architectural discourse and production in a globalized world,
where socio-political relations have become increasingly fraught. This essay cannot
offer a fixed answer to the question of what kind of architecture will solve the
problem of a coming community. Instead, what I attempt here is the articulation
of different philosophical constructions of community, to suggest ways in which
architecture might reframe its material and theoretical projects.

Striving for a Coming Community
and the Question of a Life

Hélène Frichot

INTERSTICES 08 45INTERSTICES 08 45

The Structure of the Coming Community

The structure of the coming community allows us to address contemporary
problems, which remain with us as part of our legacy, which demand our attention
in the present, and which threaten to pass into the future unresolved unless we
take up their challenge. To do so, we need to think, using creative, conceptual
processes in the ever mobile and elastic present. As Deleuze suggests: “to think
means to be embedded in the present-time stratum that serves as a limit: what I
can see and what I can say today?” He adds: “thought thinks its own history (the
past), but in order to free itself from what it thinks (the present) and be able finally
to ‘think otherwise’ (the future)” (1988: 119). To frame a practical philosophy,
Deleuze turns to 17th century Dutch philosopher, Benedict de Spinoza, for whom
the theme of a life evolves through the diminution and increase in our power to
act in a world. The greater our capacity to act, the stronger our force of existence,
and the more open we are to being affected. Of our relations and acts of creation
across a common plane of immanence, Deleuze suggests: “it is a long affair of
experimentation, requiring a lasting prudence” (125).1 The ethico-aesthetic task of
inventing a new people, and a new future, is never one that can be satisfied once
and for all.

What is required is the understanding that we are never separate from our
common world, and that we do not know in advance what we are capable of,
nor what good or bad compositions of the socio-political we might enter into.
Deleuze argues that there are “laws of composition and decomposition of
relations which determine both the coming into existence of modes, and the end
of their existence” (1990: 211). Every thing, person, institution, comes into being
through a series of relations, and is transformed in response to encounters, new
situations and the admixture of further materials and relations. “When a body
encounters another body, or an idea another idea, it happens that the two relations
combine to form a more powerful whole, and sometimes one decomposes the
other, destroying the cohesion of its parts” (1988: 19). From an architectural
point of view, it is important to apprehend that these compositions are not only
assembled from the socio-political relations between people, their thoughts and
actions.2 In the midst of these relations, different kinds of architectural materials
and surrounds, and different kinds of human and other bodies intermingle.
Architecture can augment forms-of-life by recognizing that its material is animate
and inanimate, made up not only of steel, concrete and glass, but also of the
social relations between people. New compositions arise through explorative
experimentation. Existence becomes an ethical test, though not to determine what
is right or wrong. Rather, it determines whether life is augmented or diminished,
depending on what compositions it enters into (Deleuze, 1988: 40-41). Whether at
the scale of the single cell, the human body, the building, or the institution, these
formations are made coherent by relations and compositions, or decompositions,
in response to different situations.

Beatitude is a perplexing Spinozist concept, or, rather, a state of being, which is
of especial importance in Deleuze’s late essay, Immanence: A Life … A life, or that
which participates in absolute immanence, is said to achieve complete potential,
and complete beatitude (Deleuze, 2001: 27).3 An entire chapter of Deleuze’s
Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza is dedicated to this important concept,
which frequently confuses secular audiences. Through the concept of beatitude,

1. In a similar vein, Agamben insists
that the concept of a life constitutes
a pressing problem for a coming
philosophy, one that can be re-
turned to a practical calling
(Agamben, 1999: 238).

2. An alternative term for compo-
sition developed by Deleuze and
Guattari is assemblage. Different
assemblages, for instance, machinic
assemblages and collective assem-
blages of enunciation, combine
bodies, actions, passions, and
acts, statements and incorporeal
transformations respectively. See
Deleuze and Guattari (1987).

3. In the English translation by
Anne Boyman, we find the term
beatitude diluted by being replaced
with the term, bliss.

INTERSTICES 08 45

4. Through the concept of beati-
tude Deleuze and Guattari de-
scribe how Spinoza gives infinite
movement to thought : “there he
attains incredible speeds, with
such lightening compressions that
one can only speak of music, of
tornadoes, of wind and strings”
(1994: 48).

5. I will not directly address
Blanchot’s unavowable commu-
nity, which is made in response
to Nancy. Though Blanchot’s
murmur might still be heard ask-
ing whether it is possible to belong
to any community at all, especially
that community to which we are
obliged to avow our allegiance.

6. This essay is translated as
“Beyond Human Rights” in
Agamben (2000). Its original
title, “We Refugees”, is inspired
by an essay written by Hannah
Arendt, also called “We
Refugees” (1943).

Deleuze and Guattari describe how Spinoza gives infinite movement to thought:
“there he attains incredible speeds, with such lightning compressions that one
can only speak of music, of tornadoes, of wind and strings” (1994: 48). While
this paper aspires to arrive at the conceptual moment of beatitude, a turn in
experience that transports us to an image of thought, it will in all likelihood,
and perhaps necessarily, fail.4 What I will focus on is the ethical striving for, and
composition of, the coming community, and a future people, which is driven
by a striving toward beatitude, or what is also known as Spinoza’s third kind
of knowledge. To achieve this I will, alongside Agamben, and Deleuze and
Guattari’s work, pass briskly through Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of the inopera-
tive community.5 Aside from an orientation directed toward a future, Deleuze,
Agamben, and Nancy all describe a circulation of singularities in their
formulations of a community to come. I propose that architecture is at the same
time composed of singularities, and can be seen as that medium in which further
singularities co-mingle.

Giorgio Agamben’s Whatever Singularities

Agamben’s coming community is presented to us as a series of fragments, more
affective than effective in their argumentation. Agamben does not even give a
description of the coming community, which we are to conceptually place in
conjunction with a coming philosophy and a coming politics. Instead, he intimates
that there is no such community, that it is perhaps nowhere, and, as such, utopian.
The coming community appears to be without a place; what’s more, it appears to
be a community that has never been. Resisting identification as this or that thing,
the coming community is patched together out of what Agamben names ‘whatever
singularities’, co-mingling and without identifiable attributes (Agamben, 1993:
85). A difficulty arises here with respect to what can be said about architecture if
it cannot be ascribed attributes.

The ‘whatever singularities’ composing Agamben’s coming community own no
common ground, no set of beliefs or practices that conjoin them; they merely
appropriate belonging as such, according to a structure of being-such (1993: 2).
Agamben argues that this is the greatest threat the coming community can level
against the state-apparatus. If the state has no means to identify the outlines of this
community, how can it placate, order and contain it? We might add that this does not
necessarily stop the state from denominating identity. For instance, a community
of suspect others may be manufactured on the basis of perceived threat, as in the
war against terror, or in the treatment of refugees in the Australian context. In
contrast, the striving for a coming community requires that the citizen learn to
acknowledge the refugee that he or she is. In We Refugees,6 Agamben goes so far
as to suggest that our political survival depends on the recognition that we are
all, in one way or another, refugees: “The refugee is perhaps the only thinkable
figure for the people of our time and the only category in which we may see
today … the forms and limits of a coming political community” (2000: 16). We
slowly realize that the so-called citizen has, in a global state of exception, or
emergency, become as vulnerable as the refugee.

Agamben asks us to look in the direction of the camp and the figure of the refugee
(rather than the nation-state and the figure of the citizen) to begin to imagine

INTERSTICES 08 47INTERSTICES 08 47

a community to come (2000: 16). But how might we begin to imagine a coming
community which – as Mark Holland suggests regarding Blanchot’s concept of
community – may “never constitute a community except in this mode of ‘yet to
be’”? (1996: 188). The formulation of a coming community as a state for which we
might yearn, but which remains always just out of grasp, only appears to deny the
very immanent particularities of a here and now. The permanent flux inherent in
the concept of a coming community is akin to becoming, that is, a transformative
metamorphosis that draws us into the sphere of life, so that new forms-of-life
might be created. Architecture can contribute here, not so much in terms of fixed
attributes of durability, beauty, or utility, but by opening up a flexible and responsive
material field for new forms-of-life to emerge. Encompassing an intimate
relationship with the present as it passes, and expanding into the past as into the
future, the coming community does not have to be located in an evasive ‘yet to
be’. Finally, the coming philosophy must take the concept of life, or a life, as its
pressing concern (Agamben, 1999: 238).

Jean-Luc Nancy’s Singular Plural Being

In contrast, Nancy’s coming community has always already arrived. Paradoxically,
this does not mean that the necessity of heeding its coming is in any way
diminished. In his essay The Inoperative Community, Nancy argues against the most
ancient myth of the Western world: the conception of a lost community as a lost
capacity after which we still yearn (1991: 9). For Agamben, the coming community
has never been; for Nancy, community has never been lost, and there is no such
person as the one who has nothing in common. Even in the extreme context of
the concentration or extermination camp, where we discover the “will to destroy
community”, we can also discover resistance (35). From time to time, such resistance
has become visible in Australian refugee camps; for instance, through acts of
arson, hunger strikes, lip sewing, or successful and unsuccessful attempts at escape.

Nancy identifies community as a “resistance to immanence” (1991: 35): “It is
precisely the immanence of man to man, or it is man, taken absolutely, considered
as immanent being par excellence, that constitutes the stumbling block to a
thinking of community” (1991: 3). This move away from immanence seems to
pit Nancy against Deleuze. However, the immanence Nancy critiques places the
human subject at its centre. On Deleuze’s plane of immanence, neither subject
nor object is given prominence, but relations between different moments of
becoming appear briefly only to fade away again. Nancy’s community is about
compearing: an event of singularities, or singular beings, appearing together,
a co-appearance that exposes us to our very finitude (1991: 28). Equally, it
depends on the concept of partage, a sharing out or division of singular being: “at
the limit, the exposition of singular beings to one another and the pulse of this
exposition: the compearance, the passage, and the divide of sharing” (1991: 38).
An incomplete passage of sharing conjoins at the same time as it splits us apart,
by turn distinguishing us, and making us indistinguishable. Nancy calls this
an “exposing-sharing” (29), that is, the paradoxical construction of the singular
plural. Nancy’s community, which has never been lost, while at the same time
never achieving completion, participates in a coming: “And what remains thus,
or what is coming and does not stop coming as what remains, is what we call
existence” (Nancy, 1997: 132). As such, the passage of the coming community

INTERSTICES 08 47

remains inconclusive (35). Importantly, community is not a work to be produced,
though it might be imagined through the creative impulses of writing, art or
architecture. These creative practices should not be concerned with erecting
monuments, but with facilitating action for the time being. For instance, in a
striving for community, the monumentalizing impulse of architecture would
have to be redirected to more provisional ends. Despite his questioning of
immanence, Nancy shares with Deleuze a belief in the emancipatory promise of
the creative act, as well as a formulation of community that does not anticipate
a moment of completion. In unison with Agamben, Nancy is also insistent that
community owns no essential attributes, but, instead, is an ongoing activity.7

The Ethico-Aesthetic Practice of Concept Creation

Like Nancy, Deleuze and Guattari believe that what a future people have in common
is resistance: “their resistance to death, to servitude, to the intolerable, to shame
and to the present” (1994: 110). Importantly, a resistance to capture, in a movement
of absolute deterritorialization (101), provides the potential for a new earth
and a new people. Deleuze and Guattari use the concept of utopia as a figure
of political promise, as a critical point from which the present milieu can
consider itself and its pressing problems. They appropriate Samuel Butler’s
formulation of Erewhon (utopia) to designate not only no-where, but also now-here:
the patch of new earth where we can pitch our tent for the meantime. A provisional
architecture, modest in its aspirations and durable only for as long as the
immediate circumstances dictate, could provide a space of potential for this kind
of realist utopia.

The coming community of a future people circulates around the construction of
new concepts and the identification of contemporary problems. Unlike Nancy’s
inoperative community, it seems to have work to do. Deleuze and Guattari tell us
that a concept is acquired by “inhabiting, by pitching one’s tent, by contracting a
habit” (1994: 105), but concepts can also be repulsive, and some tents become
despicable in their distribution and use. Concepts, much like built archi-
tectural forms, can create life possibilities but can also restrict forms-of-life.
In any event, the creation of concepts calls for a place where philosophy
and art, life and concept can converge, a place to which we can proceed
according to a practical, ethico-aesthetics and where the coming community
can engage in what Deleuze describes as “the problem of the work of art yet
to come” (Deleuze, 1990: 248). This work must constantly resist the
deadliness of banality, and the insistence of opinion and cliché. We can
work through the power of concept creation as an ethico-aesthetic activity,
but first we must increase our power so that we are capable of creative activity.

One of the most radical aspects of Deleuze and Guattari’s creative philosophy is
that concept creation – as well as the construction of affects and percepts of art,
the propositions or functions of science, even the framing capacity of architecture
– constitutes ethical and properly political activity. Foucault wrote of Deleuze and
Guattari’s first collaborative work, Anti-Oedipus, that it was a work of ethics, the
first book of ethics to be written in France for quite a long time (1983: xiii). The last
book Deleuze and Guattari collaborated on was What is Philosophy?. In pursuing
the restless question of the title late in their lives, they were not merely reflecting

7. The temporal orientation of
Deleuze and Guattari’s future
people, or a people to come, also
sets us upon a passage toward the
future, but with less passivity than
evinced by Nancy. Parenthetically,
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
argue in their influential book,
Empire, that Deleuze and Guattari
have not gone far enough here.
They suggest that the pair manage
to articulate a future people “only
superficially and ephemerally, as
a chaotic, indeterminate horizon
marked by the ungraspable event”
(Hardt and Negri, 2000: 28).

INTERSTICES 08 49INTERSTICES 08 49

on lives well lived, but laying out a new plan for ethical becoming. In Deleuze and
Guattari’s shared project, creativity and ethical activity operate simultaneously.
Their project requires a double becoming, a zone of exchange between philosophy
and non-philosophy that enables the constitution of a people to come, and a new
earth (1994: 109). Though, at first, the temporal structure of the coming community
might appear to require perpetual deferral, the ontological and ethico-aesthetic
striving we experience toward the constitution of community should not be
under-estimated.8

In response to Deleuze’s essay, Immanence: A Life …, Agamben argues that
Deleuze’s attempts to account for a life remain thwarted. A life is not something
that can be represented, only intimated. A life is impossible to approach directly,
for it shies from our face-to-face confrontation. Yet, something happens on the
approach to this question that is inextricably interconnected with the problem
of a coming community, a future people and a new earth. With respect to the
question of a life, Deleuze writes: “the life of the individual gives way to an im-
personal and yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from the accidents
of internal and external life” (2001: 28). However, we should not forget that
the “singularities and the events that constitute a life coexist with the accidents
of the life that corresponds to it” (2001: 29).9 Our passivity and our passions, the
life we lead, make up the necessary length of the passage toward community, and
toward the profound stillness of Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge, beatitude.
For Nancy, this passivity is non-productive; for Deleuze (after Spinoza), we find it
is a matter of progressing from passive to active affections by conjoining life and
concepts; that is, it is a matter of becoming active and creating concepts that enable
us to enact very material tests on the world in which we are immersed.

Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the passage from joyful passive affections to
active affections (Spinoza), or from the inadequate (yet adequate enough) ideas
and images of the imagination to the adequate ideas of reason,10 is more akin to
the uncoordinated leaps of a dog than the explanations of a reasonable person.
Caught up in haphazard movements, we proceed through an apprenticeship,
which advances in a futural direction not only toward an increase in the power of
corporeal and intellectual being, but toward the construction of signs of art that
help inaugurate the emergence of another world. Thus, we take a passage that
will eventually lead us toward Spinoza’s beatitude, as a third kind of knowledge,
and through a network of passages along which one becomes, in turn, both lost
and found. We will always find ourselves amidst sad and joyful passions. Power
constitutes a passage, or point of conversion, the capacity to shift from
passions to actions at a moment where ”we stop striving to think the world
and begin to create it” (Hardt, 1993: 59). We – however this ‘we’ is differentially
composed – arrive at a hiatus of sorts, a pause in our striving, only to continue again
into the active creation or construction of concepts, an ethico-aesthetic activity
that is fundamental to the ongoing creation of community. Finally, the task is
never complete; neither is community, as such, identified through determined
attributes. By striving to create new kinds of social relations, and new forms-of-life
in relation to environmental situations, community perpetually unfolds.

8. Passive, though passionate
passage.

9. Community incorporates
singularities in corporeal mixtures
and through the circulation of
incorporeal effects. For Agamben
these are whatever singularities,
for Nancy they are singular beings,
or singular plural beings as distinct
from individuals. Finally, for
Deleuze, singularities are less to
do with singular beings, as they
contribute to both physical states
of affairs and to incorporeal,
immaterial events: “Singularities
are turning points and points of
inflection: bottlenecks, knots,
foyers, and centers; points of
fusion, condensation, and boiling
points; points of tears and joy,
sickness and health, hope and
anxiety, ‘sensitive points’” (1990:
52). Singularities are not to be
confused with the individual,
the subject or the object. For
instance, Deleuze tells us that
very small children, who might
be viewed on the one hand as all
alike, have singularities, “a smile, a
gesture, a funny face”(2001: 30).
Singularities are turning points
between affections and processes
of creation and contribute as much
to the constitution of community
as they do to the question of a life.
Manuel Delanda, commenting on
Deleuze, insists upon a scientific
account of singularities that takes
us back to Henri Poincaré (2002:
14, 15). Singularities, for Delanda,
suggest the long-term tendencies
of a given system and lead to new
ways of viewing the genesis of
physical forms. While Delanda’s
definition might prove reassuring
to some, it is worthwhile remem-
bering that even if the genealogy
of Deleuze’s use of the concept
of singularities can be returned
to mathematics and geometry,
the philosopher is far more
interested in what concepts can
do once placed in contemporary
assemblages.

10. As well as the parallel passage
of thought (mind) and extension
(body), and the parallel
movement of theory and practice.

INTERSTICES 08 49

The Architectural Problem of the Contemporary Refugee Camp

As an ethical test of our existence, and the ramifications of our modes of being
and becoming, we can begin to apply the above to real spatial coordinates. As
Deleuze explains, this is not a moral test, but rather like the way in which “workmen
check the quality of some material” (1990: 317). Ethics, in this context, is opposed
to moral judgment, which determines in advance, according to a fixed code or
imperative to act, how a situation will be assessed (Deleuze, 1988: 40). Applying
the ethical test of existence is a difficult task, for there are no clear assessment
criteria; we are grappling with contemporary problems in the midst of things.
We are to remain attuned to how we affect others, and are affected in turn, and
that we are never separable from our relations in and with a world. Agamben
expressly includes the refugee in the midst of this ‘we’, and Deleuze allows not
just for human, but animal and other bodies. In addition, Martin points out that:
“we cannot use the pronoun ‘we’ to denote a self-consistent, geographically,
culturally, or economically unified agent” (2006: 15). Any coming community is
composed of diverse relations, compositions and decompositions. It is a matter
of aspiring toward the best possible composition, given the situation at hand.

From the midst of things, which situates us upon a plane of immanence, the
Australian processing and reception centre, that country’s local rendition of a
refugee camp, presents a contemporary problem. It could be argued that
the camp does not constitute a problem in the arena of architectural en-
deavour. On the contrary, I would insist that it is part of the task of architecture
to recognize the extent of the imbrication of the built environment
with modes of life. The body, in its compositions, can be thought of in spatial
terms; that is, that the body includes the coordinates of the architecture
through which it moves. Within architecture it may discover itself
captured in a bad composition, one that leads to its disintegration, or its
decomposition.

If the desert camp at Woomera, South Australia, was a bad composition,
the Immigration Processing and Reception Centre at Baxter, in the same state, is
even worse. From the relative appearance of temporariness at Woomera
(composed of so many tents and reterritorialized existing military infra-
structures), a permanent and rigid, spatial structure has evolved at Baxter.
This purpose-built desert camp, five hours drive from Adelaide,
is arranged as a series of nine rectilinear compounds with chamfered corners,
expressing a spare architecture. Further, each compound is organized around
a grassed courtyard, turning upon its own independent universe, operating
in isolation even from the desert setting. The detainees are further fragmented,
isolated into groups based on gender, ethnicity, or on whether they can
be collected in a family group, or whether they are a threat to themselves
and others. The community composed here is arranged so as to form
non-communicating cells, and attributes are forced upon the inmates as
ready-made templates inhibiting active community formation. Relations between
peoples and spaces is regulated and coagulated. The fragile compositions formed
are apt to decompose.

Similar socio-political, and very real, material compositions, are also to be found
in the midst of Australian cities; for example, in the suburban camps of Villawood

INTERSTICES 08 51INTERSTICES 08 51

(Sydney) and Maribyrnong (Melbourne). They exemplify Agamben’s intimation
that the contemporary city is increasingly indistinguishable from the camp. At the
end of tramline 57, the Maribyrnong Immigrant Detention Centre (MIDC), currently
the only federal detention centre in Victoria, is set in the gradually, but obviously,
gentrifying and redeveloping suburb of Maribyrnong. The briefest of histories of
the site reveals different successive compositions, which suggest ways in which a
coming community is either welcomed or rejected from within the body politic.
Initially, the site was home to British and other migrants who used the original
Maribyrnong Migrant Hostel as a transitory refuge before establishing a permanent
home in Melbourne. In sharp contrast, the detention facilities today occupy a
small wedge of land, a much reduced area of the former allotment. The larger
part of the original site, now owned by Victoria University, houses a somewhat
ramshackle student village into which the historic buildings have been seamlessly
transformed. On either side of a high security wall, mandatory detention and
student accommodation are set in a curious adjacency, while the land to the west
is being developed into a housing estate.

Inside the razor wire fence of the camp, building works continue to cramp the
living conditions of the mostly invisible inmates (see Frichot, 2006). An ethical
test applied to the potential composition of a coming community fails here on a
number of counts. The camp is spatially segregated, which means that singularities
are rendered immobile, thwarting the promise of new expressions of subjectivity.
The identity of the camp’s inmates is over-determined; they are figured as
unwanted others, and a possible threat to the broader community. The potential
of the coming community, as it pertains to the Australian context, is diminished
exactly through this architectural process of exclusion and stigmatization. Thus,
the camp reflects directly on the Australian body politic, negatively determining
its attributes. However, this reflection is difficult to perceive for much of the body
politic, due to successful attempts to render this suburban camp invisible. The
architecture is resolutely non-descript, without expression, generally blank where
it faces the outside world. The entire complex is set back from major roads and
hidden from view.

From its inception as a migrant hostel after World War Two, to its present day
composition of student village and detention centre (the latter surrounded by a
double layer of fence and under constant electronic surveillance), the architecture
of the site reflects the political attitude at our current socio-political juncture (see
Frichot, 2006). It is important to remember that architecture never acts alone in
such instances; it remains entangled with the actions effectuated by government
policy, material infrastructures existing and new, the migrations of peoples,
emerging subjectivities and so forth. Relations that circulate amidst a future
people and a coming community have the potential to allow for the creation
of socio-political compositions that augment life. In contrast, a composition
such as the Australian camp generally removes the capacity to create, and
particularly to imagine and create new forms of sociability and community.
As Martin suggests, the architectural imagination needs to remain open to the
promise that this is not the only possible world, and certainly not the best of all
possible worlds (2006: 15). How might architecture, as a specific set of activities,
create more positive compositions?

INTERSTICES 08 51

In the situation of the contemporary refugee camp, we discover the maximum
of sad encounters, not just on the part of the asylum seeker, but on the part
of those who seek to capture, contain and isolate them, even from their fellow
inmates. Thus, the question of the composition of the camp, which decomposes
the singularities captured within its confines, and impacts upon the ways in
which a coming community might be imagined, becomes an ethical question
in the Australian socio-political context today. Therefore, the test is how to
concatenate joyful passions, passions that may facilitate common notions that
orient active affections or joys toward the positive power of creation and even
beatitude. The architectural theorist, Martin, has suggested two simple tasks for
architecture: one aesthetic and the other territorial. Architects have the capacity
to participate in the aesthetic creation of new built environments that participate
in new forms of community. Likewise, architecture can participate in the
reconsideration of territorial boundaries that presently dispossess those on the
inside as well as those on the outside (Martin, 2006: 21). Yet, there can be no
hard and fast moral or ethical rules, as these work against the possibility of
responding to the particularities of each new encounter as it presents itself. Hardt
suggests that Deleuze “posed the common notion and its process of assemblage
as part of an ethical project (becoming active, becoming adequate, becoming
joyful)”; but, he asks, “how can we recognize this project in properly political
terms?” (Hardt, 1993: 108). If only we could learn to create our mixtures, and
form our compositions with some confidence, for as Spinoza frequently reminds
us, we are more apt to sad passions. Success or not, it is important to recognize
that there are no lasting instructions toward the best possible way of composing
community, nor of composing an architecture that responds to the promise of
a future people. And since there is never just one approach to a happy life, a
form-of-life, a people, a community, our compositions depend on a combination
of chance and necessity. We will always wind up with something different,
something that could not have been imagined beforehand, for we do not know
in advance what we are capable of, nor what good or bad compositions of the
socio-political we might enter into.

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INTERSTICES 08 PB

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