Playing Dumb, or the Power of Indifference Ciro Najle

A system of splines is displayed between the centroids of niches and columns of the perimeter system and the central points and the different edges of the steps. The splines transversal to the axis of symmetry constitute the matrix of steps on which the flow of longitudinal splines unfolds. Michelangelo Buonarroti, Laurencian Library. Florence, Italy, 1525. Drawing by Santiago Miret

Yes, symmetry; because symmetry is, at present, one of the few, definitely the coolest and most gracefully effortless, and probably the most effective way to deal with unnecessary difference in a world where worthlessness has become currency, comfort zone, cliché, and commodity; because symmetry turns the inherent impoverishment of the value of difference upside down by reducing it and constructing higher levels of intelligence and beauty with its absence; because symmetry is the means to sharpen difference through sameness, distilling traits and individuations out of the general indifference resulting of the addiction to difference for the sake of it; because symmetry is a resource to the power of indifference, an aggressive cultural form that generates difference in kind by eroding from within the lowest degree of difference: that which makes no difference; because symmetry fastens up form and raises organization to the status of archetype; because symmetry dries out lagoons and secures knowledge; because symmetry is a breach opened up in the midst of the nothingness of fullness; because symmetry speaks unheard of voices and creates little cores of significance across the mute continuum of difference; because symmetry constructs speech in a speechless world without relying on discourse; because symmetry is the spoken word that both murmurs and shouts out new forms of language; because symmetry is fundamentally a culturally loaded short-circuit, an instantaneous relationship between in principle lonely fractions of matter that become a set, the most archaic and, at the same time, the ultimate technique for containment, a sudden method for enrichment, wit, and humor that reverses and reloads the magma of sheer opulence, empty extravagance, and false gravity that surrounds us; because symmetry creates apparently default conditions; because symmetry involves a tragic loss (the fatal loss of unrecoverable information) and turns the comedy of formlessness into a peculiar, at times high-pitched, often pervasive weapon; because symmetry congregates and assembles what is otherwise disintegrated and disperse; because symmetry organizes differences, forms organizations, shapes forms, and figures shapes; because symmetry transfers all of those and their knowledge across domains (material, abstract, conceptual, visual, sensible, theoretical, critical, analytical, projective), through mimicking or through rationality; because symmetry imbues appeal and permeates poignancy in anything it encounters; because symmetry is the spreading of auto-morphism both across the board of fields and between fields, until the form of knowledge becomes ubiquitous in a peculiar, distinguished manner; because symmetry is the ultimate medium for the construction of models out of systems (while “symmetry endures, symmetry changes,” as Salomon says); because symmetry is the “surprisingly supple and inclusive” medium by which architecture “simultaneously produces specific disciplinary knowledge and establishes connections with other fields;” because, far beyond the composition of parts that creates the appearance of order by means of mirrors across objects, symmetry is the slippery, kaleidoscopic choreography of those mirrors, the infusion of enigma and ingenuity where there is sheer transparency and vulgarity; because symmetry is the nesting of otherwise chaotically scattered attributes embedding one within the other, because symmetry is the incorporation of precedence where there is numbness, and the progressive configuration of timelessness by means of the propagation and contradiction of various kinds and degrees of precedence; because symmetry introduces and then blurs the distinction between the before and the after; because symmetry mingles the world and raises it above the mundane; because symmetry interlaces, stitches, sutures, and knits the world; because symmetry transforms through preservation; because symmetry is the engendering of order through the repetition and reverberation of the same;

because symmetry is an echo machine, a both-here-and-there, and also-here, and twistedhere, and intertwined-here, and inverted-here, and not-anymore-here, and should-be-there; because symmetry is the here-but-not-really and, therefore, the here-everywhere; because symmetry propagates resonance, structures order, and configures value where there is only nonsense; because symmetry is the nesting within, the nesting within the nesting, and the cross-nesting of sameness; because symmetry entertains (inter-possesses) diversions, flipping them, convoluting them, and turning them into a single joy machine; because symmetry cleverly enmeshes the political correctness of diversity and softly threatens the innocuousness of plurality; because symmetry involves the paradox of harm through harmony (and turns harmony into an elevated form of harm); because symmetry is the most sophisticatedly deceitful, skillfully disguised, concealed vehicle for transferring and cross-referencing across the dense sea of irrelevance; because symmetry creates knowledge out of information; because symmetry is the immersion into and out of difference, the making of sound from within the very guts of noise, the making of sound that turns noise and its pain altogether necessary; because symmetry is the deepest diagrammatic level of figures, and drafts the coordinates of its plane of immanence; because symmetry is the astringent and antiseptic formula to revitalize difference and give back life, signification, and sympathy where there is only amenity, triviality, and apathy; because difference is a sterilizer that fertilizes, the sine qua non technique to recognize, nurture, engender, consolidate, and radiate difference that makes a difference; because symmetry sinks perception down into the sleepy limbo of naturalness and raises it up to the fiction of organization; because symmetry is the most persuasive mechanism for forcing the distracted glance to look back and pay attention, the ultimate means for meaningful suspensions, the resonance box that neutralizes irrelevance, the sweet revenge of oneness in a world of multiplicities, and the fold by which indifference turns into its very opposite: singularity. Symmetry is the self-conscious act of playing dumb in a world of foolishness on steroids.

Transversal splines are constructed by interpolating the centroids of the columns and niches of the perimeter system with the centers and edges of the steps of the central system. The splines that form the central flows emerge from the proportional subdivision of the transverse splines. Michelangelo Buonarroti, Laurencian Library. Florence, Italy, 1525. Drawing by Santiago Miret