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Johannes Knesl
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The City as/in the play of urban architectures.

A quick look back.

Remmi Demmi - “Krach", eruptions of trespassing play feeling around in the dark! Henri
Lefebvre claims the right to (make) the City, to amount to more than (re)production
factor. The heart of the City is the festival’s “eventing” that suspends the structure of
power on condition that things return to normal when play-time is out. But play that was
freed up will try to continue, even become autonomous: Anarchist movements build
permanent play right into the very power structure, massive demonstrations in the
streets change their image from “property” of the state to the common space of Elias
Canetti's crowds whose free movement through the streets reaffirms their nascent
solidarity and persuades them of their unsuspected strengths - and rights. Such play
reclaims the sovereign’s entitlement to the throne of spectacularity, and soon it will turn
into the urban games that exhibit the Fascist will to power and refashion the whole City
into scenery for its theater of marches, parades, and twilight of the gods son et lumiere
in the stadium. And just before, the futurists take over the City as playground - or is it
game board? - for techno-machinery that will make bloody war on any and all bodily
individualities that still stand in the way of a new technocratically mobilizing uniformity
that turns infrastructure into all that is. And after WWII the new US-dominated global
order inspires the Situationists to follow Walter Benjamin’s flaneur who flaunts the
paternalistic reglementation that the welfare state demands to orchestrate “happenings”
that free up space for play that will be coopted and defanged by the regime of Herbert
Marcuse’s “repressive tolerance”; and if that fails situations will be managed to reach a
crisis status that warrants forcible “sanitizing” by police action - which includes
reclamation by newly gentrifying privatization. Both global Capital and the
(self)consuming public are stuck in demanding ever more spectacularity that infuses
them with a totally manipulating massive intensity, and so we ourselves are Reality TV
and live in the ubiquitous programmed media-driven games that exploit us and the
urban space. Installation art serves as commercially effective enhancement and a
cultural fig leaf for spectacular architecture, used in “urban intervention” to displace and
put other more critical interventions out of sight and mind. To cope with the
ambivalence between play and game that pervades all urban Remmi Demmi we can
begin with James Carse’s distinction between “finite” games that are devised to
constrain play by rules that “fairly” distribute finite societal rewards - and thus power -
to reproduce the governing power relations, and, on the other side, “infinite” games that
do not end with win or loss but are-continued/continue-themselves as creative play
with(in) the ruling conditions in which the game is embedded.

The City has been game/play - and “gamer/player” - from the outset.
History the City is the polarity of coupled con-centration and de-centration of power that
both frees and re-institutionalizes play in (re)producing itself in a unique hybridical union
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between the collective “athleticism” of armies - of all sorts - and religiously or profanely
argued ideology and aesthetic ritual; between these poles there opens up the urban
space as an ever new and freer terrain for play and games that will realize new rules for
an economy of commerce and the separation from their origin, transportation,
resettlement, and classification of ever new kinds of people and goods. The City begins,
and continues, to be invented, and invent itself, as the made-over artificial commons of
the Earth, both terrain for play and territory for the games that invent agriculture,
industry, nation, and the individual/dividual, it builds itself as a space that sustains rules
for communicative cohabitation that can go either way, more mutually overpowering or
more freeing communication. From the outset the City is a power-growth machine
designed to make you play for power, and designed to play you as pawns, as it
functions as the reifying game board that conducts the accumulation of ever new kinds
of “stock”, including Pierre Bourdieu’s “symbolic capital”, for what is Capital but a
calculating system for denominating “value” as the measure of power, the power to play
the games that produce more power?

City as signifying/signified power structure.

While the Zoning Ordinance (re)presents the City as both game board and player/gamer
its spatiality penetrates deeper: Akin to Henri Focillon's “play of forms”, the City’s
architectural bodies act as/in a language of spatial gestures and tropes that convey to
all inhabitants of the Field meanings that help and compel, them to fulfill certain roles
and conduct themselves in assigned bodily comportment. Today’s reality TV presents
the City as a silent background that supports the story line, the City deceptively seems
all in the open but it also remains elusive as it pulls invisible strings while in plain sight.
To discern between strategic games and liberative play we need to give primacy to
individuating/individuated bodies as modalities of being with their own potentials for self-
consciousness and autonomy - arising from a polarity between the structurability of the
Image, of the Sign, and the organizeability of substance; between these poles unfolds a
capacity to recognize the “self” (with)in the image of the “other.” Only when and where,
the image does not reduce any other to a definitive object in a game over how to gain
possession of it for oneself, only then the City can be its own liberative play of “forms”.
The secret that haunts our not yet trans-human psychological make-up is that it is
entrained in us to feel a deadly threat in the radical exchangeability of self and other,
even though this is how we ”made” ourselves in our own infancy. Here is the source for
the terror that Capital's globalized political economy infuses into to keep us striving ever
harder not to get lost by playing the game so well that, recognized as uniquely
ourselves we cannot be replaced. The propagation of mutually exploitive self-creativity
“works” because early on we had to learn to imitate the other - to take his power and
incorporate it.

The architecture of the City is streaming through us a secretive terror that we

postmodern urbanites must live (in). Under the fear of getting blown to bits there dwells
the unspeakable horror of a self that must realize that it lives at the pleasure of an
impersonal and ungraspable power structure that controls all things entirely from its
realm, from the sphere of the logos that writes itself not just into ourselves but as the
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image that is this “ourselves”. The logos is terrible, for it cannot help but drive us, its
subject bodies, to help it become One as a totality that has all the world inside itself.
Terror dwells where we realize that any self-liberation must occur in/as resistance to the
over-powering semio-apparatus so as to re-name and re-position oneself, albeit still
standing under the eyes of the Image, of Language: There is no self but as/in the play/
game between the elevated “othering/othered” Sign and the subjected bio-machinery
that in turn needs, and harbors, the Image to claim a self-domain that “hangs in there”
between the insubstantial-virtual and the substantial-real.

The games stave off the horror that wafts through the totalizing semiotization of the
world, horror that there is no ground anywhere - neither in “real” facticity nor in
idealized formal structure. For there has to be a void that allows the semio-system to
set up itself, a void that it must cover up and exclude by picking on certain of its
“elements” as culprits for its own failure to attain total Oneness. The openness of the
City does more than make us feel and know, the evanescence of the “real” and of the
“ideal”: Instead of damning our individual/dividual bodies for their lacking
consciousness and for staying in the confines of their evolved biology, the City offers us
a grounding/being-grounded without ground. It opens the image-structure and the
subject-bodies into one another and thereby enables them to become self-distinct and
to enter a union, which makes for beings that are both inside of and outside, both real
and virtual, both immanent and non-immanent. Such simultaneous being inside and
outside is to play, seeing the other, and yourself, both in light of the rules and outside of
them. Bodies “see” the world through the semio-structure’s imaging/being-imaged that
appears on the bounding/being-bounded surfaces of their self-domain: Walking down
the street, the City around comes into you as the incoming image-wavefront of the other
- constructed by the logos - that crosses the out-going image-wavefront that your self-
domain projects as itself into the City that is entering you. 


The City of (all of) us: Games vs. Play - and terror in either.

Any “systemic whole” must “work” within the game rules established by “initial
asymmetries” in a universal space to arise as/in itself, to attain a continuity of its own in
maintaining balance between itself and its other. Thermodynamics dooms all such
wholing-wholed existences to dissipative oblivion - unless they learn to continue
themselves as a new play inserted into the “lawful” rules that enables us to become the
post-humans. The immanent ambivalence between semio-structure and substantial
bodies is ontological when the “blind drives” that preserve our species being are gamed
by culturally derived meta-systems that wreak havoc with inherited behavioral
mechanisms and affectively fixated patterns of perceiving and imaging. Vilem Flusser
argues that play is the creative aspect of our evolution that abruptly lets the hominid see
the ground as more than what is under his feet affording him to get to food and sex:
The ground now is a terrain, a plane that allows her to relocate, hands free, to make
another place. The internal “informational” apparatus and system of imaging is tasked
with finding continuity by seeking to encompass everything from its perspective on
“things” inside and outside - and then language projects this semio-structure into the
environment. Our inner and outer brains are anticipation machines that must
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continually work out all their inner “contradictions” which are brought up by ill-anticipated
responses of the world to the divisions, and multiplications, which the semio-systems’
language forces onto, and into the bodies of the world. When we dream we play to
change these anticipation rules; the City as an opening/opened structure is fondly kept
surrounding us with dreams.

Etoile, Paris.

But the villainous semio-structure's desire to become total also makes it feel that it must
invite play to radically be undone itself. Michel Foucault’s nexus between knowledge
and power demonstrates how power comes about as/in semiotic machinery that will
relentlessly work out its syntactic-semantic contradictions to control the other, the
referent outside - and inside, so its logic will persist forever in the real bodies. The
system plays with(in) itself where it overreaches or imposes untenable strictures and
exclusions on the things that cause terror and so it acquires a taste for curiosity, for
going a little too far, and learning how to encase dangerous play in safe zones, outside
in the world and, correspondingly, inside in providing a certain excess of internal
semiotic structurability that will both help and oblige it, to change its constitution to rise
to a higher level of continuity in itself. But of course, the semio-system has to rely on all
“its” servant bodies play with its rules to clear up, contest, ignore, negate, invalidate,
ironize, vilify, re-construct, reaffirm - to let consciousness play between both poles.
Play means to be both inside and outside of the ruling/ruled situation so that we can feel
ourselves anew and differently, both more deeply and wholly intertwined with all the
other there is, and more completely self-distinct, as a more freely and encompassingly
conscious being in the field between and around the poles. This is what happens when
we get the rules of the game to exhaust themselves to set free what emerges and finds
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itself in between, and in-between only, between the “heaven” of the internalizing/
externalizing semio-systems and, at the other end, the “earth” of the multiplicity of the
“machinic” parts of the substantial bodies that are “inspired” by them and in turn,
“animate” them.

Terror comes from the semio-structure that obsesses with continuing indefinitely as/in
itself; but terror also comes from the re-semiotizing machinic partial bodies, winding
themselves up and spinning down along their “lines of escape.” Terror is what happens
to a self that is prevented from finding the centering/centered point of balance that
empowers it to play for itself in the games that go down between the image-whole and
the “parts” - and that is where the void of creative emptiness lets play arise between the
semio-structure and the partial bodies that are holding on to themselves. To have
radical play we must let go of all the balancing that has made us into ourselves, we
must go so far as to presume a universal equality between all modes of being if we wish
our play to make moves toward more mutually freeing life for any and all. Since who
“we” are can never really be captured wholly by these polarly opposed tendencies, we
are who can suspend the rules that govern the interaction between the poles that sets
up stage and scenery for our lives. We, we as this interplay, are necessary because left
to themselves both the structure and the bodies cut out play that puts in question their
presumptive autonomy - and so play is everywhere, from skill training that seems
exclusively to serve the interest of the structure to the most daringly existential
anarchism.

LeCorbusier: Plan Voisin.

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City as the game/play of centering/decentering, voidness/plenitude, clarity/

labyrinth.

Radical play in the architectural “disposition” of the City requires that its empty center be
both everywhere and nowhere, that the sites of concentration/decentration be
excessively mobile so that instantaneously a local empty focus can act as a chaotic
attractor that realizes a particular configuration of interaction between the semio-
structure and the bodies. Historically, the City fetishizes its centers to announce to
every-thing in it and to itself, that it possesses total power as embodied in temple
precinct, palace, agora and forum, in the plan of the ideal city as the center of all the
world in perfect balance between the signifier-princeps with his functionaries and the
servant classes of subject-bodies. Terror installs itself by occupying the center as an
all-seeing eye that keeps in check all the “wild’ bodies who agree to be redeemed by the
discipline it instills in them. This terror strives to push off forever the horror of the
intolerable, the unthinkable recognition that neither semio-structure nor bodies can have
real existence - except as returning flows along polar gradients whose direction,
intensities and extensivity, are determined by “empty” centers of balance - which
themselves are both inside and outside of the particular flows and events and allow
individuation and consciousness to site/be-sited there, at the boundaries and surfaces
where the image lives. Games modulate terror to keep it manageable, but the semio-
structure instills pervasive anxiety over being-annihilated and over being forced in turn
to annihilate-the-other just to survive. Terror takes over when its subjects - the subject
bodies and the structure itself - “actively” desire to be terrorized because living in/as the
terrorized self seems preferable to utter dissolution.

Otto Wagner uses classical (con-)centration to counteract the centrifugal expansivity ad

infinitum of the modern City so as to manage the horror that dwells in the absolutely
indifferent (ex)changeability between all blocks by an aesthetic of sublimity: The horror
in front of the awfully uncaring power of second nature is allayed in the image of
peaceful resolution presided over by the center. The play in the city plans of modernity
teaches us that the automatic response to terror is to fortify one’s self-emplacement in
order to launch counter-terror to de-stabilize the threatening other, and that play must
give primacy to orientation and direction over established positionality, origin, assigned
functionality so that playful action can first see, identify, and play out the terror that
paralyzes the self-creativity in all individuating/individuated being(s.)

In the spatiality of the City terror - and the underlying horror - has been represented in
the image of self-sustaining thus perfect order - the circle - that overpowers the
labyrinthine. Friedrich Nietzsche’s Ariadne, allegory of culture as play, stands for
Apollonian semiosis that weaves through the labyrinth of the dark body, marking it out to
make it over-seeable, designating all its folds in terms of its own presumed syntactic/
semantic autonomy. The signifying thread externalizes individuating/individuated
memory and makes it communicable, exchangeable, and produces new rules for
orientation that improve on the bodily-substantial memory as the first writing that is
inscribed directly on the body of the world to penetrate it by structuring it as sequences
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of presences and absences. But the thread, the technique and technology employed
also employs the semio-structure in imposing its own material/formal structurability
which itself arises as in-between the bodily-substantial and the systematizing structure

of signs as quasi-bodies. Dark material nature as structurability is in-between and

therefore can play as/in communication between them and allow the substantial bodies
first to descend guided by their Apollonian image and second to re-turn up from their
own un-conscious machinic bodily menagerie to remake the world in a new lightness
that plays on the surfaces of the Mediterranean bodies. But the void remains, every
kingly place of exalting/exalted enlightenment is built on its own basement where the
labyrinth goes on playing, weaving its way up into stories of the piano nobile - what are
the tectonic-symbolic motivations that make Minoan columns taper downward?

Imperial Fora, Rome.

Image already is game/play and direction.

Play can only begin when the semiotization of the substance reaches a critical stage in
its game that disposes it to open itself to the internal and external pressure and tension
on its desire to become totalizing power. Then the inner environment of semio-bodies
combined with the outer environment of substantial bodies spawn zones for
“experimental” play that appear on the new surfaces of the world it that play draws on
and into it. Anthropologically, play is an excessive underdetermination that both results
from and propagates capacity to image an outside - thereby also an inside, which come
about as an invaginating, an enfolding of outside in returning from expenditure into the
recovered inside of an “itself.” In the City play plays on and through the surficial zones
where the semio-structure projects/is-projected in the image of the other, the one we
enter into in outgoing action and the one that enters ourselves as incoming affect. The
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self-organizing/other-organized modalities of self-consistency that are the “we” and “I”,

are developed in, by, for the semio-systems’ informational exchanges, by way of
imaging that “cuts” into the thick of reality to divide and reproduce the power that
sustains itself as the “real”. Once we realize that the image itself is game or play we are
past Sigmund Freud’s neurotic characters from Hellas also past Deleuze & Guattari’s
machinic routes of escape. Friendly and compassionate invention is only in-between, in
the imaging/imaged surfaces, for left to itself the semio-god will “reformulate” all the
real, imperfect lives presenting this game as the redeeming transfiguration of the flesh,
and the partial body machines will just act out. We now can move around the City by
way of self-insinuating directional horizons that appear from the new balance points of
play, we see where and how the signifying structure images its substantial bodies and
denotes them as fair prey, as “content” that needs to be secured by calculation, stored
in the armories: Any site, any moment and place then becomes an individual/dividual
passage, a “translation” of the older other and the older self in moving on guided by new
“re-centering” balance points, remaking both us and them all.

G. B. Piranesi: Villa Adriana.

Play cuts through the apparent solidity of objects/subjects and of processes/

status.

Global semio-capital perpetrates an endemic violence on the City’s bodies hat

propagates criminality that violates the normative rule of property rights. The City has
always been war machine, (un)maker of power, agonic and orgasmic theater, where the
public space, from squares and streets to their internalization in muni-hall, theater, and
our handheld prosceniums, the semio-structure finds out how to preserve itself - and
where its subject bodies claim their own authority. Terrorists focus on places of
assembly because they need to destroy what sustains the continuity in the spatio-
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temporal fabric that allows the bodies live together with the power structure, to kill what
makes up their joint sovereignty. To invalidate a system-reaffirming game rule play has
to cut the continuity that the rule is maintaining for the structure; this “frees” the partial
bodies from serving as units of the system: Gilles Deleuze shows how the cinematic
cut breaks up the spatio-temporal self-consistency of the patterns and stories in/as
which things and bodies are imaged - and thereby sets up a new serial ordering of the
world. Nevertheless, the structure itself is complicit; seeking its own survival it guides
the cut to reach down to the foundational characters, close to Julia Kristeva’s chora of
pre-semiotic masses. The cuts inflict new division and addition on the wholeness of the
set of rules and thus of what they (re)present, and enforce, as valid and legitimate
continuity.

The structure avoids getting cut or cutting itself by placing itself in/as the center to
occupy Louis Kahn’s Volumn Zero, the origin of all forms - thus of semio-life, that
architecture reifies in the rotational center of the building and the City that anchors the
presumptive authority that dwells in the structure. While also the decentering/
decentered (post)modernist image dislocates the center only to imply it again by a
sense of direction that embodies a universal and ubiquitous “spirit” of progress, the
deconstructionist project forces semio-power to face the real emptiness in its own
center. Cutting the image gets at the void behind the center, because the “real” void is
is dependent on all the bodies that rotate around it designated as “peripheral” as much
as a whole is on all the bodies involved in it, directly and indirectly. This is what makes
play possible at all, as changing parts’ location, speed, direction to where they can
break relatively free of the imposed/imposing attractors of the game - and where the
structure in turn can loosen itself from what it claims as its parts. Louis Kahn’s project
was to get the center to give itself up, by eviscerating it to let all its partial bodies
breathe freely the formless light inside them, by stretching the structure’s formal self-
consistency to the point where it would submit like a daughter to the void inside itself.

The system’s cut: Micro-modularization.

Our postmodern condition engulfs us in ubiquitously pervasive gaming/being-gamed

that is propagated by massive and penetrating digitalization: The game rules no longer
modulate but replace the continuity of real life by a combinatorics of procedural
modularity. The modules no longer (re)present as functional images of the wholeness
and continuity of what their linkings instantiate: They stand in as mechano-semiotic
elements that simulate the wholes and “translate” our globally urban society to a sphere
of mediation where every-thing exists precisely and only, in how it (dis)simulates itself -
as/in procedural events that exhibit themselves as hyper-realistic simulations of
simulations of “themselves” that displace the evanescent “real” and leave no room for it:
Thus no image, only simulation. When Foucault described the beginning of this
reductively objectifying micro-management of all bodies, the image was still there as the
words and the tacitly speaking geography the City: Now the order of things is a micro-
technology of the (dis)simulative graphism that translates any-thing into a
self(dis)simulation that signals to the prospective owner exactly what its power is as a
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game-piece. The modules of reality TV call upon all the bodies of the City to
(dis)simulate themselves in/as their reality-tweets.

P(l)ay me in units of affect.

The game is about winning semio-power, play is about inventing more mutually freeing
life. Capital transfigures real creative labor into abstract value that can no longer be
calculated according to classical theory. Looking at a political economy that
(re)produces and consumes ever more complex experiences as assemblages of
modular units, “Affect Theory” replaces market value by “affect-itself” as a currency that
does not stand as a sign that expresses “real” value but as what itself is the value. As
long as affect theory does not reify the bodily, or the semio-structures, we can see play
here rushing in and effortlessly tie value to how real bodies are affected and affect one
another - by way of the semio-power that penetrates them and which they exchange
between one another. Are there previews of this in the Situationists’ take on the City, in
Walter Benjamin’s flaneur, in the butterfly of bourgeois capitalism? Now that “work” is
becoming a ubiquitous “working-on-everything” that invades all the spaces of the City to
over-code every instant of our collective and individual lives, does such “working for-life”
not constitute the perfect self-simulation of life? This fusing/being-fused of work and
non-work leaves no room for a differentiating play of “otium”, the rules that wrap labor
into games are shifting too rapidly for play to destabilize the ruling structure. Affect
Theory might reorient the calculated deployment of “innovation” away from opening up
ever new fields for the profitable (self)exploitation of bodies by unfolding a critically
body-born(e) sensibility that plays out freely in-between the darkness of the bodies and
the shining signs of the structure. It might theorize the give-and-take of a liberative bio-
economy between the semio-systems and the partial bodies where there is real equality
- of power to become life - between the ones who give and the ones who receive: A
loaf of bread, conceived, baked, and delivered as a co-creating act for freer and more
joyful lives for both recipient and maker, will then again represent an image of measure
of the creative potentials which it helps to realize in both maker and receiver - equally,
and yet differently for any two others. As global Capital promotes the City as flexibly
structured “resilient” multifunctional complexes that institute the most profitable games,
liberative urban play will be meta-functional Its ends are - both immanently and
transcendently - in all that affects/is-affected and so prevent exploitive monetization of
“value”. Radical rule shifts towards more mutually freeing existences for all requires
play to enable a new - and previously formally impossible - recognition between all the
gamers/players that each and any one must be accepted as essentially equal
instantiations of the becoming of a freely individuating/being-individuated whole as and
with and in all the partial bodies involved. The moment of transgression and
suspension is where the player realizes herself as the “same” as and equal to all others,
in becoming themselves as/in equally valuable particular and unique whole/parts
specimens.
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Eugene x Simart, Paris.

(Dis)simulation: Remembering versus rewind.

We are being (en)training by pervasive (dis)simulation: While the image guides

perception into more encompassing sense - of a whole - in setting up a risky and
bilaterally interactive play between the referents - who sends it and who receives it, the
simulative modular model forces itself on us as a facticity that is directly given a
coinciding of the signifier with the signified in signifying only itself as totally complete
and fulfilled. Simulation intends to eliminate the fearful uncertainty in having to find
one’s own truth, it is security that promises to cover all eventualities so that no unknown
will remain. With this, simulation ups the game from “second reality” to a terminal
hyper-reality in which everything exists but in/as a simulation of itself, a post-human
“third nature”, after Szigmund Baumann's “second.” That simulation becomes the
weapon to abort play we find as subtext in “Funny Games”, a movie set in a rural
retirement “community” of private lake frontages. What begins as a criminal irruption of
murderous violence into the family vacation home becomes revenge taken by primal
bodily instinct on the semio-structure. When, within this trope, the father wakes up to
his own body and overpowers the intruders, they use the TV’s remote control - a power
device that is in the arsenal of the middle class - to “magically” rewind the flow of
events back to where/when they can take prevent this act of resistance. In such
“blurring” of the boundaries between reality and fiction, we see simulation being granted
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power to grant godlike power over all the “real” - simulation henceforth can (re)create
anything. The rewind replaces memory by a technical procedure that simulates real
consciousness that arises in the wholing/being-wholed that emerges from the instant-
by-instant comparisons between predicted outcomes and actually received answers.
The rewind becomes the technical replica of repetition that runs the gamut between
Nietzsche’s nightmare of the eternal return and creative repetition that is in ever
beginning anew to engage the real again. Repetition is Bergson’s memory image in
which we recreate what we have lost as fonds perdu, translating the rules into freeing/
freed play, repetition begins an entirely new series of games. The writing of stories
builds our cultural memory, the building of the City makes our natural-social memory.
Rewinding presumptively gives power over time and causal flow to the re-winder and
with “wiping” the unpleasant it also seeks to prevent negative “boundary conditions”
from destabilizing the “picture.” This movie shows that the City offers both resistance to
the generalized substitutability of all that is real in its self(dis)simulations, and facilitates
“wild” imaging and imagination. No surprise that the City is used as a background for
reenactments in which it becomes a simulation of itself as authoritatively “real” and
“objective” ground of theatrical enactments. And the rewind in the City arrives as “urban
renewal” and “revitalization”, with political correctness, to rewind the clock for the next
investment cycle - affordable housing thrown in in exchange for square footage
bonuses.

Are there strategies for play?

The City as chameleonic structure/body can move us, and itself, either toward more
individuating/individuated liberty or into anomic desolation since it endows each and any
singular body with potential to join (with)in many others to become an unpredictably
heterogenous hybrid body. Between the semio-structure and the partial bodies there is
potential for a meta-structurality that undoes the modules’ containers and connectors
and re-conceives them in/as new continuity of mutually freeing communicative
engagements between all bodies that go face to face whatever their distance. Each
partial space becomes a whole that in itself can encompass all the other wholes in itself
and so sets up direct communication “lines” between most distant and disparate bodies
which therefore can build ever new bodies that transgress the limiting rules.

How to get there? People live in often unrecognized, even unrecognizable, despair, in
embodying the opportunism of the Common Intellect, they feel that minimizing loss of
privileges and gaining small comforts are all one can hope for. Thus why not manage
the system of semiotically charged urban spaces and let there be games with(in) them?
Such might go the game strategy of both the administrators and the administered of
semio-power. If there be something like a strategy for liberative play it is a twofold
disposition:

One, to sidestep regimenting structural power to find lacunae in the system, and
two, to undermine the system’s power positions to strengthen what the system attacks
or suppresses as its enemy. Could game theory critically analyze from inside, and
prepare paths for transgressing the rules that “territorialize” the fields of the City since
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gaming simulation has refashioned any action as activity that rewards with possession
of more power-over the substantial, the bodies? After all its job is to decode the semio-
systems' drive to work themselves out in their substrate in order to appropriate its power
potentials. To work out its contradictions, the semio-system, the postmodern godhead,
must continually (re)name to redefine its heroes, its enemies, making the both into its
scapegoats both that serve to represent the undigested otherness that comes from its
own inner void. In the regime of post-industrial globalized Capital the evil other is the
terrorist - the ones that we see later on the surveillance cameras, not persons but
allegoric representations of resources that refuse to more efficiently and effectively
exploit others and themselves. The terrorist-body - and the victim-body - are named
as the enemy of the bodies that have accepted the rules for their subjectivation.

Mall of Africa, Atterbury.

The more the rules for our daily bodily comportment present an other as the enemy-
object whose self-identity must either be annihilated or incorporated without rest into our
self-domain, the more our lives lived in/as the game tends to anticipate any other as
(re)presenting a positive or negative resource to be “liquidated.” And the games spawn
more games that translate more of the world to “take place” on their plane. There is
then a strategy of liberative play: To insist that all of the wholing/being-wholed of the
real bodies enter into and inhabit the particular game field and thereby penetrate and
disperse themselves through all other rule-delineated fields. This constitutes a properly
“aesthetic turn” since this manifests in synecdoche e, in new meaning for things and
actions that change the rules. This turn must come from the bodies for only their own
wholing/being-wholed can force the semio-structure’s totalizing unicity to reopen itself to
the multiplicity of enfoldings/unfoldings that we call reality. It makes the argument for a
trans-human aesthetics of the City that works throughout, from the very “bottom” to the
very “top “ of it all, both the semio-structures and the littlest bodies, any-body arising
between the poles of the nonlocal - power - (re)presentation - virtuality and, on the other
side, the local - force - affect - reality.
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The current turn to an urban aesthetics is a turning back on the aesthetization of urban
life that is ruling over our ways of life. Such aesthetics breaks out of culture’s reserve of
tasteful adventurism to become translational practice that radically changes the rules of
all games to reconceive the very nature of the affected game domains. The City offers
itself as potential par excellence for such “transference”, speaking psychoanalytically,
and transposition, speaking ontologically since any move on the board cannot help but
implicate all the other fields and dimensions of existence that are captured and
developed in the heterogeneous multiplicity of games and play. For any concrete self-
domain can only ontologically whole/be-wholed in respecting how all the partial bodies -
which the domain rules claim as its very own - are available only in/as they are
themselves communicatively involved with specific other bodies, and semio-bodies, that
are claimed by the rules and roles that establish/are-established-in so many other fields
- whether they are explicitly recognized or not. The aesthetic edge in play challenges
and helps all players/gamers to bring themselves into the game without the reserve of
compartmentalization, self- or other-imposed to move into both contested territory and
into terrain that is not yet colonized by the games. A meta-structural aesthetic therefore
inflicts cuts that allow for incursions that can attack actors and rules directly or indirectly
by making rom for eruptions, leakage, seepage, invasion, evasion that deprive the
semis-structure - and the bodies - from power to keep moves strictly within bounds.
When bodies sense potential to live more freely, the borderlines can shift like an
earthquake that suddenly exposes the intimacy of a bed to everyone. We know
translational rule changes from how the Berlin proletariat learned that they could escape
from the police if they stopped obediently to use the park’s pathways and ran, like the
police, straight across the lawn, we know how the Remmi Demmi of a “shooting war”
changes the rules of behavior not only to devaluing anything that does not expressly
serve to kill the enemy-other but also to make room for compassionate acts unheard of
in peace time. Thus the strategy for liberative aesthetic aims to make bridges and
flights across and deep into, especially what the norms represent as the most extremely
“other” fields in order to unseal the rules that colonize them.

Where play should begin, and how to sustain it, this is discernible (only) in/as another
polar field, one between deficit and over-abundance. The rules generate an inchoate
sense of having to endure a lack, of real food, of companionship .. and the spaces that
seem to free one from all weighty cares become temporary refuge. Our historical
experience with molar revolutions and spectacular measures and also our experience
with micro-managed psycho-social engineering teaches us that it behooves us to not
give up on moving toward radical change in all our conditions but to keep on moving by
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affecting all things, all lives, in ways that are enable them to freely agree and so
smoothly and effortlessly to perform the changes by and in themselves. Any molar play
needs to come from “minor” plays performed by the smallest units in just such small
steps as execute rule changes that can be envisioned from a position of freely willing.
This is not systemic incrementalism but a radically aesthetic mode of comportment in
which the smallest part holographically makes its play by encompassing in itself the
largest whole - in how its actions/passions communicatively engage it. And enduring
change happens in this way as the urban boulevard-bodies after Haussmann will
measure their own stepping and stare back into the eye - without pupil - of police
surveillance, as when the “play-street” curbs the grip of the automobile on the
thoroughfare. A liberative aesthetic needs to put in play in the same move any and all
decisions - thereby constructing cogent communicative linking between the very
smallest and the very largest - decisions that affect the opportunities for self-
determination for the “smallest” of the lives lived between semio-structure and the
bodies; a play that will strain the democratic gestus of Capital managed as the game of
the privileged who represent for the demos.

Play where now the City is on its game.

Disruptive cuts - and also disruptive joinings - in the City come as self-inflicted breaks
in its self-consistency, initiated by the semio-structure or pushed by “revolution” from
below. Understanding the phenomenon “City” as an institutionalization of play -
specifically as the spatial plays in which power sites-itself/is-sited - we need to make
projects that play within the City to find out what urban architecture can do - at all its
scales. Changing the rules, invalidating “reality” as architecture is tasked to set it up to
be, is hard for a discipline that historically has functioned as testament to the legitimate
permanence of established semio-power. Within its own stability, the architecture of the
City has to play to freely change itself - so as to let change all that happens in it. Play
has to follow the game so as to reproduce itself in changing the game: In the City there
have emerged event-fields in which the principal dynamics are in process: The
multifunctional complex, the poly-nucleated city, the ubiquitous “eventing” of
spectacularity, the reclamation of urban infrastructure.

One, the multifunctional “complex”, now at all scales from XL to the new
“Existenzminimum” studio apartment, taking in also open urban space from the squares
to all linear corridors:
This is to further liquefy all that is substantial in moving the game from exploitation
along lines of communication and transportation to establishing “seas”, semio-material
fields, in which (de)linking and (re)assemblage can proceed to set up any new direction
that promises the least cost and the most profit. Such fluid de- and re-differentiation
can help the subject bodies to play along both with and against what this
reconfigurability in the classification of “uses” and of ”activities” intends: Any “activity”
now is “working” since for anything to be recognized, it needs to be value-producing.
The multifunctional complex is designed to be the simulation of a socio-natural quasi-
organism to express in the differentiating/being-differentiated that goes on between the
pre-engineered modules, the existence of a greater whole that counts. The unicity that
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counts here, for One, as Badiou says, is that all the units are designed to perform in/as
a micro-modularized team. Therein the apparent de-functionalization is reversed to
become more insidious functionalization that becomes ungraspable as the new
(dis)simulative modality of existence itself. This mines the local-temporal specificity of
individuating/individuated experience to turn lived/living substantial bodies into the gold
of marketable typology. Thus in such an urban space of fusibility, liberative play has to
expose the rules that drive the fusing of formerly distinct practices to empower their
desire for a self-determinative individuating/being-individuated that enables them to
speak and act, for and in, themselves.

Two, the poly-nucleated City, a dispersive/dispersed “ multifunctional complex”

that fashions a territory where different spaces are orchestrated by a power that both
concentrates and disperses them:
The center of abstract globalized power, implicit everywhere and therein unreachable,
disperses power as a decentralization to make the real center more powerful as the
“liberal” poly-centric City offers the benign comforts of a re-centering that caters to
“human scale. ”Revitalization” unifies derelict districts into multifunctional “innovation
quarters” that come with ready animation programmed in the spirit of NEA’s: “Art
Works!” Ecological initiatives submit to production for Capital that rules sustainably from
its center while eco-theming simulates another center: Mother Nature approving smile.
(Dis)simulative design serves as the power-procedure to set up such power-centers, be
this a transportation hub that attracts a “mix” of profitable uses, another shopping center
to “anchor” swirling urban blocks, a park to “settle” a metropolitan swath of disparate
uses. Play needs to undo how designed continuity signifies an absent real center to
mask the actual, the globally dispersive/dispersed center that is the universal signifier,
the $ that covers the void that is the opening of the polarity between semio-power and
substantial bodies. Not easy to question the “real service” that poly-nucleation performs
in making available a common sense that comforts our individual and collective lives,
not easy to argue with locally sustained urban utilities or the amenity of a supermarket
where sociality can survive at the lunch counter - and Walmart now has neighborhood
stores, too! Play is what recognizes in which ways specific moves of centering/de-
centering - each move cannot help but “do” both - are freeing/un-freeing - also here
any action brings into play both directions. Exploitive structure is self-centering in order
to incorporate all other around to have it inside itself, while (re-)centering play brings
about a unique point of view and action that is in play between the non-local structure
and the concrete bodies - and here play unmasks the spectacle of the idiosyncratic and
the wholly private. An architecture of play is precisely not imagery of fragmentation and
discordance that secretly reinforces that forever inaccessible center; instead it makes
subtle plays for re-centering - and thereby also de-centering - space to oblige the
games that install structuring/structured power equally to serves the bodies:
Reorienting any and all smallest and largest thusness of space to let their self-
determined consistency balance with the self- consistencies that it engages in all the
other spaces, from intimately close to the next planet.

Three, architectural “events” that serve as spectacularly acrobatic haecceities

that (dis)simulate the “pure” power of something that simply and authoritatively stands
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for reality as such, as what, both uniquely and universally, will stand as resting in a
reality that it embodies directly without any mediated meaning:
There can be no question what “it” means, nor of what it does, for it simply irrupts as the
total and perfect explosion of a power that we used to think as nature, as universal law.
Spectacular bodies simulate themselves as the eventing of such a final manifestation of
power as such. Spectacularity leaves nothing behind or under its unarguable authority,
for it annihilates distance, it rushes our gaze, it is inside before we know it, and this is
exactly what makes removes beyond any distance, makes it untouchable. While
spectacularity seems to launch an infinite series of unique Ones, its game is finite
insofar as all these uniquely powerful events exist only in how they simulate themselves
as the absoluteness of the facticity that power “IS” - and purely so - in the totalizing
drive of the signifier itself. Any unique individuating/being-individuated is completely
interchangeable and so every “space” needs to be elevated and become reality TV so
that in it spectacular power can name and establish itself as just itself, no further
questions. Spectacularization is how pure structural power transfigures its subject
bodies to lock themselves in their own spectacular self-representation. The ascent of
art as spectacular uber-value paradoxically converts art, our most sincere effort to
communicate directly with the power of the “real” and the “substantial”, into the
banknote as the most exchangeably empty sign that comes to stand in for the real and
so what has least use value underwrites the system of all values. Play cannot simply
reverse the spectacular by making it ordinary but must get to how it founds itself on
totalization as its first rule: Spectacularity can only be undone by infusing into its
center-in-hiding a new multiplicity of very “other” ways of seeing and acting as oneself
that violate the seamless continuity in the spectacularly self-simulating image. The
soccer game can incorporate us into its chauvinist game only if we stay in our assigned
places and stare in fascination; this changes, in small but potentially large ways when
“tailgating” begins to trump the (non)events in the stadium. Spectacularity must be
pushed to deflate itself, blown apart by the death instinct that lives inside its relentlessly
bombastic drive to become total unity - which is of course only possible in/as appear
once of pure form that blots out all the real efforts and sufferings and little joys that labor
behind a unicity that figures out how to misrepresent its parts as modules perfected b
the superior will orchestrating them from the top down. Play inserts rules that displace
such absolute unicity outside of any contradictability, total and final in how it holds truth
inside of itself alone, the truth that exercises power over the real-bodily, and replace it
by mutually freeing wohling/being-wholed that applies equally to the wholes and to the
parts.

Four,
the “recovery” of urban infrastructures, of the machinery that the structure had either
kept from sight or elevated to heroic gesturally - as amenity that exploits their central
location, connectivity, and scale to reclaim them as a vast park where the success
stories promenade that confirm the rightness of the rules that obtain between the
structure and its compliant bodies:
The structure keeps its own void inaccessible in simulating itself as the very fullness of
generative power in/as exemplary urban bodies whose self-simulation represents it as
ubiquitously there by its own right. An elevated highway that had impacted negatively
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on both near and far, now ”redeems” itself as a park for subject bodies to teach
themselves how to better exploit their other and themselves in how they perform in
simulative engagements. Such reclamations are designed to underwrite the precariat’s
life style of working long hours and taking care of kids and spending on dining …, by
providing scenarios for enjoying privileges that are justified simply by being there, as
authoritatively reassuring evidence that the world approves of a way of life in which
individual comportment and collective roles are integrated. Whether gated, or not, by
virtue of distance or management, such amenities repeat Frederick Law Olmsted’s
ideological conception of Central Park as the one place where the more and the less
achieving/achieved tribes can acknowledge their equality as natural beings, where both
are allowed to heal enough to keep up with the way of life the next day. Of course,
there will be occasions where theres for such communication strays beyond the norms,
play frees up unstructured performativity in a temporary space where compassion and
personal re-invention can unfold for just a bit: Here arises the (false) alternative
between “beautiful” meadows for the afternoon walk and letting people grow vegetables.

The term infrastructure identifies it as labor for the top of the structure that colonizes the
lower story to turn the socio-natural common into resources to be “developed.” We are
now experiencing a second technification of the City’s body after its penetration by the
lines of industrial transportation as pioneered by Baron Haussmann and Karl Lueger: A
master plan by OMA tends - under the guise of programming to elicit animation by the
unexpected - to designate bodily-spatial qualities as formalized resources which will
make up the super-structure of a City where there is no more distinction between infra-
and supra-structure. For now the City is all “program”, all structure made up of
instances of processing/being-processed which support one another, as safety net just
the ubiquitous semio-system that abstracts the City as the plane on which to inscribe
the figures in/as which bodies henceforth will simulate themselves as “real”
individuations. What is left of the City is all infrastructure for a power that no longer
rides it but exists only in how this infrastructure signifies it; we feel this in the
metropolitan conurbation soup. In OMA’s buildings designed as programs, we feel an
underlying abhorrence of the bodies that produces a “non-architecture” that oppresses
the bodies to force them to invent new games for themselves - we need an architecture
of the City that plays with, and in, all of its bodies - whether they talk or not.

The games at
Kowloon:
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20 of 22
 21 of 22

Kowloon the walled City, once a play waged against the abusive City and for the
people’s bodies, then game lost and reared to make room for the orderly life and
sanctified as a park, and then reborn, in effigy, and now itself a virtual reality piece of
itself. The City is in play.

References:
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Roland Barthes: Empire of Signs. Hill and Wang. 1983.

Jean Baudrillard: Simulacra and Simulation. In: The Body, In
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James Carse: Finite and Infinite Games. Free Press. 2013.
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