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Abstract
Rosi Baidotti argues that in late neo-liberal capitalist society the nomadic subject is too easily equated with the "hyper-individualism" traits of advanced capitalism and conflated with "quantitative multiplications," rather than "qualitative differences and multiplicities." During the events and projects implemented by the feminist group taking place between 2000 and 2012, the nomadic subject was a key figuration that inspired discursive and material interventions into architectural and public institutions. Taking these interventions as starting point this paper is adapted from a transcript of a conversation presented at Architecture and Feminisms and focuses on a critical examination of a strand of feminist practice, spanning three decades, including Matrix, WAFER and taking place. In dialogue with these practices, the paper explores the demands on practice and subjectivities a nomadic mode of thinking and acting produces while questioning if these are still radical positions within feminist spatial practice today.
Notes
1 taking place is a collective of women artists and architects that formed in 2000 with the aim of finding ways of operating together which might constitute feminist spatial practice.
2 The term “figuration” refers to a style of thought that offers an alternative vision of subjectivity; Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
3 Ibid.
4 Rosi Braidotti, “Toward a New Nomadism,” in Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, ed. Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski (London: Routledge, 1994), 169.
5 Rosi Braidotti, “Affirming the Affirmative: On Nomadic Affectivity,” Rhizomes nos. 11/12 (2005–06), https://www.rhizomes.net/issue11/braidotti.html (accessed August 17, 2016).
6 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus:Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: The Athlone Press, 1998).
7 Briadotti, Nomadic Subjects, 158 (for a longer discussion of the nomadic subject in relation to architecture, see also Helen Stratford, “Micro Strategies of Resistance,” in Altering Practices: Feminist Politics and Poetics of Space, ed. Doina Petrescu (London: Routledge, 2007), 125–139.
8 Briadotti, Nomad Subjects, 169.
9 Braidotti, “Toward a New Nomadism,” 161.
10 Rosi Braidotti “Writing as a Nomadic Subject,” Oxford University talk 2013, https://www.lmh.ox.ac.uk/getattachment/3f8c8c36-d2a7-4554-a612-079274c7bfa4/Writing-as-a-Nomadic-Subject-PRESENTATION.pdf.aspx (accessed September 14, 2016).
11 For an account of this earlier phase of the work of taking place, see Teresa Hoskyns, Doina Petrescu and other mixed voices, “taking place and altering it,” in Petrescu, Altering Practices, 15–38.
12 The Other Side of Waiting was a public art project at Homerton University Hospital in Hackney, London, between 2007 and 2012, consisting of a collection of interconnected and interwoven artworks generated with and for people in the new Mother and Baby Unit (perinatal centre).
13 For a further discussion of this approach in relation to the work of taking place, see Katie Lloyd Thomas and taking place, “Open Space the Other Side of Waiting,” Feminist Review 93, no. 1 (2009): 122–127
14 Delores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
15 Braidotti, “Writing as a Nomadic Subject.” Braidotti’s nomadic subject offers a useful definition of women’s subjectivity for practices such as taking place because it is non-unitary and describes subject formations and relational subjectivities rather than a fixed identity of women.
16 Jane Rendell, “How to Take Place (But Only for So Long),” in Petrescu, Altering Practices, 69–87.
17 Braidotti, “Writing as a Nomadic Subject.”
18 Rosi Braidotti, “Teratologies,” in Deleuze and Feminist Theory, ed. Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 171.
19 As Deleuze and Guattari describe, “a performative statement is nothing outside of the circumstances that make it performative.” The circumstances of a figuration gives it meaning, a subject and an addressee as well as credibility, making it a “veritable assemblage”; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 82.
20 Jen Harvie, “Agency and Complicity in ‘A Special Civic Room’: London’s Tate Modern Turbine Hall,” in Performance and the City, ed. Kim Solga, Shelley Orr, and D. J. Hopkins (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). See also Jen Harvie, Theatre and the City (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 205.
21 Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004).
22 Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2003): 801–831, at 828.
23 Braidotti, “Affirming the Affirmative,” 2.
24 Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza Past and Present (London: Routledge 1999), 104.
25 Braidotti, “Affirming the Affirmative,” 2.
26 Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity/Blackwell, 2002).
27 Jane Rendell, “Giving an Account of Oneself: Architecturally,” Journal of Visual Culture 15, no. 3 (2016): 334–348.
28 Deborah Withers, “Transformative Thresholds: Braidotti, Butler and the Ethics of Relation,” September 26, 2006, https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/transformative-thresholds-braidotti-butler-ethics-relation.# (accessed 12 September 2016).
29 Braidotti, “Writing as a Nomadic Subject.”