The siege of the tree

Notes on the Underground: The Siege of the Tree Sara Prat Soto Forgetting of air essay Sara Prat Soto MA AHTI

Notes on the Underground: The Siege of the Tree Sara Prat Soto Forgetting of air essay Sara Prat Soto MA AHTI Introduction According to the epic poem The Iliad Prince Paris of Troy captured Helen, the wife of Spartan king Menelaus, causing the Greeks to invade and lay siege to Troy for ten years. The siege came to an end after the cunning Odysseus devised a simple, yet brilliant plan.

The Greeks built a massive wooden horse, in which their best warriors would hide. The horse, presented as a gift and admission of defeat by the Greeks, was wheeled into Troy and under the cover of darkness; the Greeks emerged and defeated the unaware and surprised Trojans.

Yesterday Channel [UK TV] 1

Human beings have roots. As Ernst Cassirer argues in his essay An essay on man, in 1944: ‘Above all, the concept of above and below stands out, since it is conditioned by the upright posture of the human being. Of this we can indeed say that it arises from nature and not from human arbitrariness; for right and left, front and back, change when the person turns around, but above and below remain the same, even if the person lies down or moves in space in some other way’. Our entire world is based on his position on earth. It is an inward condition, nothing arbitrary, a part of our essence. Architecture meant to provide dwelling for human beings also has this condition of verticality because gravity in the first instance, and because of the upright condition of the person who is inside. The most intense part of this verticality is the contact with the ground and all the mysticism which has accompanied human natural condition in nature. Underground is the solid base to remain still, the mere condition of the mentioned verticality. The underground also contains roots, foundations of houses… Because finally, the human’s world is to Earth what a tree is to nature. It is a structure. Or not.

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According to the tradition of the Arunta tribe, the Achilpa, in mythical times the divine being Numbakula cosmicized their future territory, created their Ancestor, and established their institutions. From the trunk of a gum tree Numbakula fashioned the sacred pole and, after anointing it with blood, climbed it and disappeared into the sky. This pole represents a cosmic axis, for it is around the sacred pole that territory becomes habitable, hence is transformed into a world. The sense of verticality, as suggested, functions as the basis of the ancestral imaginary and architecture in the way Bachelard describes in Poetics of Space. Our particular Odysseus, Gilles Deleuze, together with Felix Guattari, struggled to dismantle the whole tree dictatorship in what it is called, our peculiar Siege of the tree.

Retrieving a fresh new brand concept of world, they strive to rule out the whole imaginary which has feed our lives, 3 memories and social lifestyles. A genuine claim against this verticality in A thousand Plateus is the basis of the new world they put forward. According to this theory, the tree alike or arborescent structure on what our entire life and knowledge is based is wrong. It is a vertical against a horizontal, the tree against the rhizome.

How do the wasp and the orchid interacts, being two completely diverse species, in this horizontal way to develop a multiplicity, is the basis of the rhizome horizontality. For Deleuze, the system is rootless and this doomed image is the main problem for a society which is too static, stuck in place, stuck in time. He rules out the origin and the time line and puts forward a model based on the image of a map. No start, no end but always in the middle [yet his book has both introduction and conclusion]. Rhizome means virtual, intangible and also impossible. It is not physical; we can think of it, even imagine it but not live it. In architecture the concept horizontal and vertical is also discussed in the texts mentioned before. Rhizome’s horizontality has much in common with the criticized horizontality of modern architecture which authors such Bachelard consider has lost the essence of axis mundi [earth-sky] or the natural position of the human being on the ground. Sky-scrapers cities, such as New York, are vertically formally proportioned but human beings still live in them in a horizontal way, on layers. To what extend is this horizontality reasonable?

1 Wikipedia: Ernst Cassirer [July 28, 1874 – April 13, 1945] was a German philosopher. He was one of the major figures in the development of philosophical idealism in the first half of the 20th century. Influenced by Hermann Cohen and rooted in the Marburg tradition of Neo-Kantianism, Cassirer developed a philosophy of culture as a theory of symbols founded on a phenomenology of knowledge.

2 As explained by Eliade in Das Heilige und das Profane, 1959.

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[Illustration A]: March Nqui illustrates the introduction of Deleuze’s book [paragraph 15].

Trojan Tree versus Deleuze Odysseus Hoope: So you’re looking for a city that’s greater than Athens?

Euelpoides: Not greater. Just easier to live in. […]

Peisthetaerus: ‘[…] Oh, the man’s an absolute bird –restless, shifty, unreliable, can’t stay in one place for two minutes on end’.

Hoope: What kind of city could birds found, I ask you.

Peisthetaerus: That’s a stupid question if ever there was one: look down there!

Hoope [looking down]: Well!

Peisthetaerus: Turn your head, look around you, that way, this way, behind you…

Hoope [looking up]: Well! […]

Peisthetaerus: The sky, exactly: the great vault of heaven. Revolving on its axis –to which only the birds have access. Build a wall around it, turn this vast immensity into a vast, immense city, an then – you’ll rule over man as you now rule over the insects: and as for the gods, they’ll starve to death, like the Melians The Birds by Aristophenes

In Aristophanes’ play The Birds, the Athenian Pisthetaerus decides to found a city in the sky, later named Νεφελοκοκκυγία or Cloudcuckooland in order to get rid of the boring life in Athens and take control over humankind.

The ‘perfect city’, as any imaginary architecture is floating in the air breaking the ancestral cosmic pillar which unites the ground and the heaven. Breaking the cosmic pillar in order to create a new life, to destroy everything which had already been created for the dwelling of mankind. This connection established according to the vision of the only natural axis which has always existed, the trees, constitutes the spiritual phenomenon which relates earth and sky, human and Gods. And also, which let world be a place habitable, cosmicized.

Our society and world is strongly based on the image of the tree. It is not difficult to imagine why. The human body seems to have some similitude with a tree. Is vertical, has the same ratio and has branches. Apart from the literary mimesis, there is a second big point: hierarchy. Trees are hierarchical structures with a start point and an end, as seen, from ground to heaven. Hierarchy has been the natural way of relate human beings in the whole tribes and primordial believes so it is also an inwards condition. It human beings are social beings, hierarchy is the only possible way to develop a plausible environment to let them live in.

This hierarchical picture seems to have ruled the world until the time when Deleuze and Guattari claimed ‘we are tired of trees’. They say: ‘the tree and root inspire a sad image of thought that is forever imitating the multiple on the basis of a centered or segmented higher unit’. The structure considered is from bottom to top and always refers to the up one to find its place in the world. Hierarchy has been found in society’s organizations, families or even in schools playgrounds. Even in the more rhizomatic lifestyles I can think of, a communist society, order must be set to regulate human interrelationships. Furthermore, a part from the visual and spiritual similarity tree-human body and the idea of hierarchy [most explicit, for example, in feudal societies], there is a third main feature which makes it the base on what world rests. It is the biological process in which it comes alive. Trees are alive and grow from a seed sunk in the ground. They grow up to sky looking for the light and, like human beings or other animals, contribute to the biological chain to make the world a habitable place. Trees, this way, seem to me sociable individuals which function according to others, like men who can only possibly live in communal lives in order to guarantee the survival of the specie.

Deleuze’s rhizome has six principles which can be summarised in the following way. The system based on the rhizome has connection and heterogeneity which means that can and must be connected to any other. The multiplicity is the basis that any individual is independent of the One; and also the rupture, which means, that in case is broken, it starts again from scratch or even using the old lines. The last two principles are called cartography and decalcomania. The system must be thought of the image of a map but never a line, with a start and an ending. For them, it is all about the tyranny of the tree. In the comparison drawn with the Battle of Troy, Deleuze’s way to interfere the perfect structured society is literal. It is a very peculiar and particular element; it is mobile and horizontal wooden horse on wheels which destroys the tree, the perfect strong and rooted society: Troy. Will our particular Odysseus win the battle?

Trees like human beings For man is a tree of the field Deuteronomy 20:19

The Jewish calendar has a particular date which interests us in here, the New Year for Trees on the 15th of Shevat. It is supposed to be a day for contemplation of our affinity with our botanical analogue, the tree. In the way this essay started, with Cassirer’s words, there is not a more directly literal mimetic figure for human body than the upright and 4 solid tree. We are accustomed to see the representative picture of Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’ of human beings evolution to the vertical position. It makes us different from animals; we are converted into perfectly vertical axis.

Human beings, are we usually hear, are two legged animals and their verticality aim to the sky; their arms’ freedom let them cosmicize the world. That’s why they are the rulers of the World.

Also it is inwards our mind the children’s fairy tale human tree speaking figure in enchanted woods. Trees have this essence of popular wisdom and develop human characteristics. ‘A story! A story!’ cried the children, drawing a little fat man towards the Tree. He seated himself under it and said, ‘Now we are in the shade, and the Tree can listen too.

But I shall tell only one story. Now which will you have; that about Ivedy-Avedy, or about Humpy-Dumpy, who tumbled downstairs, and yet after all came to the throne and married the princess?’ is written by Andersen in The Fir Tree. Trees listen and have always been very close to human gatherings. If there is an imaginary to go to illustrate what is the meaning of the social tree, we could go to the Avatar film. Trees function as hometrees [Kelutral in Na'vi] and as natural shelters for human beings. They are huge and shelter hundreds of inhabitants who live in the natural hollows its trunk has. They are related to shadows, which mean protection from the sun and the rain. They are shelters in an existential way, previous primordial huts.

‘Many people have a tree growing in their heads, but the train itself is much more grass than a tree’. Deleuze recognizes the arborsecent structure and relation to human figure to be on the foundation of any type of culture ‘from biology to linguistics’. They move forward mentality rather than nature or physical world. We could start to think about all the problems related to mind-body relationships and still get lost. Natural’s world on what Aristotle’s philosophy is based was changed after the discovery of science. The knowledge we currently have must go further than the things we can touch or see, just because we know, for example, atomic and universal world. This step forward could be a break in the natural way science and technology have been reinvented. To what extend is ‘looking at’ the only way to understand the world? May we change to a world based on the knowledge, how things work, rather than how we see them? Are Deleuze and Guattari right to present this universe rather than the pre-scientific natural one?

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[Illustration B]: Darwin: Illustration for Origin of Species

Biological trees v1 Now the snake was the most clever among all the wild animals that the *Lord God had made.

The snake said this to the woman: ‘Did God say that you can eat the fruit from all the trees in the garden?’ v2 This is how the woman answered the snake. ‘We can eat the fruit from the trees in the garden. v3 But God said, ‘You must not eat the fruit from a certain tree. That tree is in the middle of the garden. Do not even touch it, otherwise you will die.’ ’ v4 But the snake replied to the woman, ‘You will not die. v5 But when you eat the fruit, your eyes will open. God knows that. You will be like God and you will know right things and wrong things.’ v6 So the woman saw that the fruit was good to eat. And she saw that it was lovely to look at. She also thought that it would make her wise. She then took some fruit and she ate it. She also gave some fruit to her husband and he ate it. v7 Then their eyes opened. They realised that they were naked. They sewed together leaves from a fig tree to cover themselves.

The Bible [3:1-7]

Related to the literary resemblance of the tree and human body and soul, there is also the biological function of the body and the tree. The roots are the most important element of the tree’s parts. Are invisible, they don’t have the magnificence of the trunk or the colour of the leaves. But they are the survival key. They also maintain the equilibrium and make possible the height growth of the visible part of the tree. The spreader roots, the taller the tree is, the stronger and the healthier. Trees also contribute to the general environmental balance to make the Earth a habitable place. They work for the community and this sense of communal cleaning of air also includes their resemblance to the need of human being to have a social life. Trees reproduce to maintain their species like human beings do. Arts of seduction have necessarily lots of common points with bright beautiful fruits we can take from the ‘forbidden’ tree.

But general speaking the main idea we can attach to its inner function is the meaning of the roots. When in the film 5 Avatar, the giant Hometree [symbolicaly the tree of life] in Pandora is attacked, it is destroyed by human using missiles to the deposit of unobtanium where it is rooted. A rootless tree, a part from being dead, means the destruction of Identification in the symbolism of roots has always had. When destroying The Giant’s roots, all Na’vi’s clans made an alliance against the humans.

When formerly discussing the similitude of tree body and human body, we could think of men being mobile, rather rootless. But even physiologically true, the issue of roots is ancient as the beginning of the consciousness. Roots, as we have believed, belong to the field of feelings but there must exist in order to define the conscience. Roots are always related to seeds, to birth; also related to death, to memories. The Tree of Voices [Utral Aymokriyä in Na'v is the second more important tree to the Na'vi after the Tree of Souls in Avatar. It is smaller but its appearance is similar and it too is illuminated. It allows the Na'vi to hear the voices of their ancestors. It is the tree of the roots. In primitive societies the settlements were constructed on cemeteries with the aim of maintaining the contact with the roots. To let people live in a place, roots were essential as in the episode of Socrates’ choice for death instead of exile. When a place was conquered, the first action taken on by the conquerors was to destroy the subsoil, to destroy the roots. The sacredness of a building is always related to the concept of eternity, the main objective of the man who longs to live forever. This relationship, between the underground and death, is studied by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges in The Ancient City. Why were the roots so directly linked to burials? In Ancient times, before time of philosophers, it was believed that Death only meant a change of life. Until the poet Phocylides [560BC] did not even exist the belief of the soul going upwards to the heaven. According to ancient beliefs in Greece and Rome, the soul remained near men, continuing to live underground. The body and the soul were buried together and were not separated by death. Virgil, Pliny the Younger and Ovid also claim that the soul is buried with the body. The buried ‘alive’ person would enjoy and also suffer, and this is why they had to bury him with his personal belongings: wine, food, arms, utensils… Also killed horses and slaves to serve them. This was the reason for the need of burial, the confinement in the subterranean abode made them cover the corpses with earth. If a soul had no tomb it was a wanderer spirit, a phantom. ‘This belief and these rites are the oldest and the most persistent of anything pertaining to the Indo-European race’ says Fustel de Coulanges. Also in ancient Greece and Rome the tomb was close to the house door in order for children to meet with their parents and ancestors [a belief also shared with Chinese, as well as among the ancient Getae and Scythians, among the tribes of Africa and those of the new world]. Mesopotamia civilisation, with the first social revolution

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[Illustration C}: Image of the Home Tree

which was switching from nomadism to sedentarism, and the second, the creation of cities [Ur, Eridu, Uruk] where the first had to need to have a secure place, to need astaticism. Ziggurats, in every single city, were their vertical axis and Enki, one of the Sumer deities, had the cosmic tree arisen from his cradle, the primordial waters, in order to protect the whole Empire.

On the contrary, Deleuze presents the example of America to illustrate the rootless society. ‘The weed exists only to fill the waste spaces left by cultivated areas. It grows in between, among other things’ according to Henry Miller. The lack of a national identity have liberated, somehow, them from trees. Still they do seek them in European culture.

Deleuze’s America underground, bands and gangs. Everything with similitude to a net, with spontaneous connections with the outside, this is their biological rhizome. The successive waves of immigration make of America ‘neocapitalism’ by nature, inventing and reshaping constantly itself.

Hierarchy and trees ‘never plant!’ ‘don’t be one, be multiplicities!’

‘Run lines, never plot a point!’ ‘make maps, not photos or drawings’ ‘the middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed’ Deleuze and Guattari, A thousand Plateaus

When above I had to explain the biological function of a tree I started from above and went up to finish with the leaves. It is the natural structure it has, its natural development. Stratifications have direct translations, for example, to diagrams. Diagrams are trees: clear, concise and effective. And actually, any element which implies combination of more than one item, they necessarily need order, hierarchy and structure. Only when we say ‘One’ or ‘Two’ to distinguish two simple equal elements, we are using hierarchy. When we speak, we are using regulated and ordered structures and even when deciding what to wear in the morning we establish an order.

Feudal societies had a strong order: peasants, lords, tenants and kings. Also military world, Spartans for example, functioned as the quintessence of regularity and order. Our Trojan society where hierarchy was the major reason to live. It was Mircea Eliade who wrote The sacred and the profane, in 1959 on a basis of the contrary idea. He was a Romanian philosopher and for him, a space, the world, is based on the revelation of a fixed point, a centre ‘for nothing can begin, nothing can be done, without a previous orientation – and any orientation implies acquiring a fixed point-’ and claims that the centre is the creation of the world. For Eliade, Deleuze’s space is homogeneous and neutral. No orientation is possible, the world of chaos. The world of chaos is a world where no man can live in. He dies and this kind of terror corresponds to his terror of nothingness. Because, ‘Religious men thirsts for being’. Orientation literally means to determine the direction of sunrise.. ‘The terror of being lost comes from the necessity that a mobile organism be oriented in its surroundings’ says Norberg-Schulz. Roots and orientation to a central structure are the natural spaces for men to live in. The quintessence of the order would possibly be a fascist regime. Yet I can think of Communist societies sunk into even more hierarchical orders or Hippies communes, like Christiania, rule-less but still working in a scheduled manner. Human beings, so far, need roots, need rules. Hence, need trees.

Eventually, what Deleuze and Guattari reprehend more of the concept and tyranny of the tree is the need of hierarchy and order. It is based, as I have pointed out above, on how our brain, we, function in an uncertain way.

‘What are wrongly called ‘dentrites’ do not assure the connection of neurons in a continuous fabric. The discontinuity between cells, the role of the axons, the functioning of the synapses, the existence of synaptic microfissures, the leap each message makes across these fissures, make the brain a multiplicity immersed in its plane of consistency or neuroglia, a whole uncertain, probabilistic system’ said in the introduction. For them, the brain is grass rather than tree. They also illustrate this concept with the function of memory and the way it works . It is the type of the rhizome rather than long-term arborescentish which at the same times is associated with concepts such as race or civilization.

It is based on discontinuity and rupture and includes forgetting as a process. Memory and the ancestral imaginary of the tree we have seen before is not only negated but taken to the position of guilt. For Deleuze it is not a diagram, but a map. Diagrams, tree literal example diagrams, refer always to the centre. ‘It is a question of a model that is perpetually in construction or collapsing and of a process that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up again’. So let’s say, movement. The huge wooden deceiving horse going wisely through the heavy and impenetrable Trojan City Walls. Dismantling the myth.

Cosmogony and the tree. The architecture of roots.

The Tree of Life, or Etz haChayim [ ‫ ]החי י ם עץ‬in Hebrew, is a mystical symbol used in the Kabbalah of esoteric Judaism to describe the path to God [usually referred to as HaShem, or ‘The Name’, in Kabbalistic texts] and the manner in which he created the world ex nihilo [out of nothing]. The Kabbalists developed this concept into a full model of reality, using the tree to depict a map of Creation. Some people believe the Tree of Life of the Kabbalah corresponds to the Tree of Life mentioned inGenesis 2:9.

Font: Wikipedia

We could pick up the main ideas and gather them around two primordial poles: ‘in’ and ‘up’. ‘In’ means roots, means ground and ‘up’ means body, order and reproduction. It is a tree; also a tree in relation to others, to the social world.

But the imaginary of the tree goes further and converts it into a religious issue. The essay illustrated the tale of the Achilpa which explains the idea of the sacred pole, the cosmic axis to make a place habitable. And as said before, there is no more real idea of natural axis than the tree itself, the human body Cassirer’s puts forward. In and Up are gathered together in this point and simply construct a world.

Any public construction starts with a ritual: the setting of the founding stone. A hole is scratched the ground and all what is meant to remain is placed inside: page on the newspaper [day of ritual], some coins of the time [to pay Kharon] and copies of plans for the reconstruction. It is a religious ceremony carried out by politicians. All the items placed in the scratch are for the ‘underground world’. Traditionally elements were intended to pay the ground to let the building be set and remain still, hence to exist. This ritual was originated in Egypt or Mesopotamia and the Earth was thought as a Deity whose place was being stolen by the plot of the building and also whose muscle was being scratched by the placement of the foundations; some liquids were also poured [now it is the priest who actually bless with holly water the Earth]. The stone works as a seed and this is the reason the image of the tree has been used so sustain the cosmos, the world we live in as Deleuze objects. For many reasons, among them the direct relationship with the seeding fact, a building is considered [or was considered] a living place as many rituals in remote places show. Blood and violence are common in the myths all around the world when building a place. Its place had to be sacred, otherwise it would lose the category of place. This sacrifice, the ‘eating’ around the fire is the blood necessary to consecrate the ‘gathering’ of people, a place. A building necessarily needs to possess a soul in order to come alive, to become a building.

The idea of roots is totally related to identification. For Heidegger ‘gathering’ is the idea of defining and for NorbergSchulz, the only possible identification is thorough concrete objects to define a spatial structure. Also identification is the primary aspect of ‘man’s being-in-the-world’ and belonging is the only true freedom. In many religions, as we have seen above, this image is clearly used as a religious symbol. The most direct element would be the Jewish Kabala. In the film Avatar we can also recognize the religious or cosmogonic idea of the tree as the vehicle to communicate and sustain cosmos. The Tree of Souls [Ayvitrayä Ramunong in Na'vi] is a tree where the Na'vi are able to communicate with the biological network that exists throughout Pandora and is capable of transferring a specific consciousness from one body to another. Therefore, it seems clear, so far, that in ancient societies verticality [hence stratification] and the importance of the roots [therefore the feeling of a man related to a place] were essential.

Heidegger says:’ The buildings bring the earth as the inhabited landscape close to man, and at the same time place the closeness of neighbourly dwelling under the expanse of the sky’. This God which is reached with our tree ‘experiences’ is the God ‘who saw and reaps, as opposed to the God who replants and unearths [the Oriental God]’.

Transcendence is considered a Western disease by Deleuze, which makes rigid our bodies, minds and sexuality. Also 6 our buildings. They ask for ‘deterritorialisation’ which, according to Adam Shatz , means ‘uprooting people from the land to overturning the systems of belief to which they have been anchored”. Intending to derive to a more objective world , they put forward a project of ‘schizo-analysis’ which endeavours to move on from Freud’s paternalistic and nuclear family model to a more social and machine like one. Tree is family, tree is root and tree is Freud.

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Adam Shatz in the article: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersectin Lives by Francoise Dosse.

Rhizomatic skyscrapers.

When it comes to excavated ground, dreams have no limit. I shall give later some deep-cellar reveries.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

‘At 600 metres high, with 118 occupied floors, it will be the tallest naturally ventilated tower in the world and one of 7 the greenest new buildings in Europe’. It is Foster’s Russia Tower explanation in the official website. It is a pyramidal structure, overwhelming. Vast void interior space where several horizontal platforms make space accessible to tiny and embarrassed human beings inside. Sense of awe and placeness. Cassirer’s and Norberg-Schulz’s qualitative differences, up and down, are transformed into a huge mechanism. Techonolgy, lifts, are the only possible way to inhabit it. Deleuze, movement.

Lifts pretend to fit high skyscrapers for the use of humans. But there is a problem with the scale, the traditional use of space as considered human friendly. Horizontal layered cities shy away from human contextualization of up and down. No roots, no cosmic axis, no hierarchy. There not exist a tree at all in any fortieth floor apartment even pretending to. The apparently similar city trees in Avatar with Manhattan miss the non-capacity of human beings to move in the vertical axis, to fly. Moscow Tower is not a tree, yet its dimension reminds us of so. It is deriving to a ‘machine to live in’. Any floor is nothing but ‘in the middle’ and there is no hierarchy, no stratification. Everybody live in Delauzanian non essential space. Longing for touching the Earth is stronger than anything else.

Bachelard could not imagine a house without a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors. If so, there is space for ‘daydreaming’, to house the ‘calendars of our lives that can only be established in its imagery’. Analysing space from the point of view of psychoanalysis takes the issue of the memory for granted in defining it. Memory in the humanbeing life but also memory of ancestors. Illusions of stability are huts of human memory. Bachelard states that in the imaginary of the house, it is a vertical being to match our consciousness of verticality on the one hand, and centrality on the other. The verticality is ensured by the polarity of cellar and attic and attaches to the cellar the notion of irrationality. Is dark and partakes subterranean forces, the only place reachable by the unconscious as he says: ‘In our civilization, which has the same light everywhere, and puts electricity in its cellars, we no longer go to the cellar carrying a candle. But the unconscious cannot be civilized. It takes a candle when it goes to the cellar’.

Bachelard argues that verticality in cities is totally exterior and that ‘elevators do away with the heroism of stair climbing so that there is no longer any virtue in living up near the sky’. Verticality is the only direction to build a building to shelter our experiences, our dreams. Our memories need to understand the space thorough this verticality, which, on the other hand, is our heritage of our anthropologic roots. But New York, the city made of skyscrapers, is not vertical even though the exterior form of the skyscrapers. Deleuze says ‘the middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed’. Maybe this non static middle could shelter a virtual world: perfectly rhizomatic Facebook architecture. But not to shelter human being, at least not yet. Perhaps this essence of ‘placeness’ we feel in a virtual structure is fed only by the seeing of the world in the way Aristotle studied; the nature itself. The authentic revolution will start in the precise moment when the world off human scale will be the new. The day atoms will be the new ‘Measure of all things’, instead of nature or instead of God. Only this day Deleuze will provide dwelling to humankind on Earth.

Is the elevator, the technology which developed skyscrapers, guilty of transforming a vertical building in a plain horizontal rhizome? Skyscrapers are not related to men because of this proportion, but also because they negate its relation with the ground. This is the mere explanation about verticality: it is not only a proportion, is a proportion related to the man. It has to be on the ground and has the natural proportion to shelter him, to be his natural Heidegger’s hut. And again, because human beings still cannot fly.

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[Illustration D}: Image of the Moscow Tower [Interior and exterior]

Tree Romanticism We should therefore have to say how we inhabit our vital space, in accord with all the dialectics of life, how we take root, day after day, in a corner of the world.

Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space

Perhaps it is only a matter of opinion whether or not the role of architecture must leave space for imagination; but at least, historically and anthropologically, it has reason to be. It the end, there could be many concepts linked to the ground in architecture. It is a personal opinion whether or not a place [not to say a building] must be motionless, static and has roots or, on the contrary, does not need to. Ground, somehow, is synonym of history [hence identification] and solidity [hence aspiration of permanence]. The myth of the treehouse, the primitive shelter of childhood where the other world with other rules is possible, is still alive. And while men keep on being tree, it will be.

‘The language of desire, multiplicity and all the rest is no longer the language of revolution. It is the language of cyberspace, and of neoliberal capitalism” according to the article mentioned before. Astoundingly enough, but still the very illustrative image of a “temple of capitalism” a glass skyscraper like Foster’s, the cathedral of capitalism, plays the pretended “ultra left” Deleuzenian manifesto role. It functions exactly as the opposite: the middle is converted into the very top. Furthermore, Deleuze’s brain structures remain far from real space, real world. A kind of post post scientific technology would be the net which might allow space to manifest in motion, in the middle and shelter human beings. It is not but science fiction. Yet, the more technologically impossible a building is, which usually means the higher, the ‘hi-techer’, the more Deleuze it becomes. And as I suggested before, Deleuze will replace Bachelard only when people would have move forward to this ‘post post scientific’ world not based on human measurement, not based on what we see but on what we know. This seems far away. This time Odysseus lost the battle.

Bibliography Cassirer, Ernst: ‘An essay on man : an introduction to a philosophy of human culture’. New Haven, London. Yale University Press, 1944 reprinted 1962.

Deleuze, G; Guattari, F:’A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia’ London, New York. Continuum, 2004.

Azara, Pedro: ‘Castillos en el aire: mito y arquitectura en occidente’ Gustavo Gili. Barcelona. 2005.

Eliade, Mircea:’The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion’ Harvest/HBJ Publishers, 1957.

Bachelard, Gaston: ‘Poetics of Space’. Boston. Beacon Press, 1994 The Bible Aristophanes: ‘The Birds and other plays : The knights, Peace, Wealth, The assembly women’. London : Penguin, 2003 Fustel De Coulanges, Numa Denis: ‘The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome’. Batoche Books. Kirtchener [Ontario], 2001.

Norberg Schulz, Christian’:Genius Loci, Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture’. New York : Rizzoli, 1980 Shatz, Adam: ‘Desire was everywhere’.In ‘Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Live’s by Francois Dose.

London Review of Books.

Wikipedia Avatar [The Film] UK TV webside, Yesterday channel.

Illustrations [A] March Nqui illustrates the introduction of Deleuze’s book [paragraph 15] [B] Darwin: Illustration for Origin of Species

[C] Avatar Hometree [D] Foster’s Moscow Tower: Foster’s ’Hometree’