Lines of Archi­tec­tur­al Potency

I. Life-Lines

For human beings the abil­i­ty to live (liv­ing) and the exer­cise of that abil­i­ty (liv­ing well) are dis­tinct, though inti­mate­ly inter­de­pen­dent. Each time, in the sin­gu­lar for every human being expe­ri­ence of such an exer­cise, more pos­si­bil­i­ties (or, as I shall call them, poten­tial­i­ties) are expe­ri­enced than can be actu­alised. We need to, in a rel­a­tive sense, choose one poten­tial­i­ty each time. Yet this entails risks, giv­en that as a species we are aware that we can choose and could have cho­sen dif­fer­ent­ly than what is or was actu­alised. We become aware of this risk in a myr­i­ad of ways, friv­o­lous ones as well as more seri­ous, prospec­tive­ly as well as ret­ro­spec­tive­ly, rang­ing from our the­o­ret­i­cal con­tem­pla­tion as to ​“what could have been”, to per­ma­nent psy­cho­so­mat­ic con­di­tions and con­se­quences. Human beings are, fur­ther­more, both with­in the poten­tial­i­ty-actu­al­i­ty of liv­ing, in its rel­a­tive sen­si­ble imme­di­a­cy and com­plex­i­ty, and at the same time in a state of con­tem­pla­tive inde­ter­mi­na­cy: our con­tem­pla­tion or intel­lect is not pre­de­ter­mined by the imme­di­a­cy of being alive or liv­ing (at least not in an absolute or com­plete way; and cer­tain­ly not in a ful­ly express­ible or sensed way). Oth­er­wise we would be entire­ly (pre)determined by our ​“mere” liv­ing and we would have noth­ing to con­tem­plate as well as noth­ing ​“to do”. 

The pow­er (in oth­er words, the poten­cy, abil­i­ty) of the intel­lect needs to be first ​“used” by a human being, and thus be medi­at­ed (i.e. made one’s ​“own”); which means that our pow­er of the intellect/contemplation (as far as it is expressed in lin­guis­tic being) is not only affect­ed by our own liv­ing in its imme­di­a­cy (non-lin­guis­tic being), but gives it a cer­tain form (includ­ing the very sense or illu­sion of ​“choice” in itself). It is pre­cise­ly because ​“our” liv­ing is not imme­di­ate­ly our ​“own” from the start (i.e. it is sub­ject to an appro­pri­a­tion), that liv­ing well remains a ques­tion for us (an objec­tive­ly unan­swer­able ques­tion in any ulti­mate sense) to the point that ​“liv­ing well” can be defined as the gen­er­al hori­zon of pos­si­bil­i­ties. Hence, human beings expe­ri­ence an inevitable scis­sion between the so-called imme­di­a­cy of the ​“real” and its con­tem­pla­tive appropriation/mediation in lin­guis­tic expres­sion (the sub­ject that says ​“I”). Con­tem­pla­tion is the name for the bat­tle­ground of this scis­sion and the place where it can be indi­cat­ed as such. How this scis­sion is to be thought is, then, the essen­tial ques­tion of phi­los­o­phy and ethics, and I would like to argue here that this is so for archi­tec­ture also when it reflects on what ​“it can do” (its pow­er to plan and order spa­tial con­fig­u­ra­tions). Archi­tec­tur­al the­o­ry is, thus, nei­ther neu­tral and apo­lit­i­cal, nor a mere side-kick to archi­tec­tur­al practice.

This scis­sion, under­stood as a dual state of being, was observed ear­ly on by the Ancient Greeks and it had a num­ber of sig­nif­i­cant con­se­quences in phi­los­o­phy, sci­ence, pol­i­tics, the arts and ethics. Philo­soph­i­cal­ly it marks (as it is marked by) the west­ern under­stand­ing of pow­er and being (and of human being under­stood as an exis­tent being-in-pow­er, a being that has a simul­ta­ne­ous exis­tence as a pow­er, i.e. as its oth­er poten­tial­i­ties). An under­stand­ing that emerges most clear­ly, as we shall see below, through Aristotle’s attempt to deci­pher the sci­ence of nat­ur­al and sen­si­ble being. There is, then, I pro­pose a thin, almost invis­i­ble, crit­i­cal line of dis­tinc­tion that has defined the west­ern par­a­digm of what it means to be and, by exten­sion, to act (which, inter­est­ing­ly, was orig­i­nal­ly sig­ni­fied for the Greeks by the verb to use–chrē­sis, chrēsthai–a pow­er), to cre­ate or trans­form (to become), based on an under­stand­ing of being as pow­er (a poten­tial­i­ty and an actu­al­i­ty of being). 

Aristotle’s phi­los­o­phy estab­lished the dis­tinc­tion between being as poten­tial­i­ty (dynamis) and being as actu­al­iza­tion (energheia, ent­elecheia) (Meta­physics 1009a32–36). This is based on the (onto­log­i­cal) obser­va­tion that sen­si­ble beings are beings of both actu­al­i­ty and poten­tial­i­ty. It should be not­ed that Aristotle’s whole sci­ence (epistēmē) of physics depend­ed on this and the key ques­tion was: how is one to explain the poten­tial­i­ty or capac­i­ty of some­thing in its com­ing-to-be? And this was a key ques­tion since poten­tial­i­ty when not actu­al­ized was thought by some philoso­phers of his time in terms of actu­al­i­ty only. Poten­tial­i­ty or pow­er was seen as exhaust­ed in reality/realization, and was con­sid­ered as a ​“weak­ness” that could nev­er be shown in its exis­tence as a poten­cy. Realization/reality once ​“com­plete,” as the Ancients would have it, had no need to think about poten­tial­i­ty in itself, since it sta­bilised being in actuality. 

This may have led also to the unin­tend­ed con­se­quence of the way in which real­i­ty became con­ceived in moder­ni­ty as a modal­i­ty of deter­min­is­tic func­tion­al­ism and effi­cien­cy, and ulti­mate­ly as an iden­ti­ty or rep­re­sen­ta­tion. In addi­tion, it should be not­ed that already in Aris­to­tle the under­stand­able philo­soph­i­cal sep­a­ra­tion (for rea­sons of log­i­cal analy­sis) of the ​“hav­ing” of a pow­er (i.e. the ​“mere pos­ses­sion” of a poten­cy or pow­er) and its actu­al exer­cise or enact­ment (actu­al­i­sa­tion), may be at the heart of the unin­tend­ed (and ulti­mate­ly mis­lead­ing) sep­a­ra­tion in moder­ni­ty between the­o­ry and prax­is (or thought and real­i­ty, form and mate­ri­al­i­ty) that to this day trou­bles the very sense of what con­tem­pla­tion or the­o­ry is in its prac­tice (includ­ing that of archi­tec­tur­al the­o­ry as an activ­i­ty and dis­ci­pline). Instead, think­ing of action/creation as a con­junc­tion between poten­tial­i­ty and actu­al­i­ty means that both poten­tial­i­ty and actu­al­i­ty are actu­al, exis­tent and that between them is not a rela­tion of with­draw­al or weak­ness, but a con­sti­tu­tive pas­sion of a reality/realization that is always risky, con­tin­gent and imper­fect. To use an image: to the illu­sion­ary iden­ti­ty and solid­i­ty of the actu­al, the real (and the sup­posed nor­ma­tive dis­junc­tion of ​“real­ly” act­ing, ​“pur­pose­ful­ly” decid­ing, design­ing as ​“pro­duc­ing the true” etc.) poten­tial­i­ty is the air flow that runs through an actu­al­i­ty that is jagged with exits and entries, porous, incom­plete, ren­der­ing all claims to mas­tery, total­i­ty, author­i­ty and so forth as only tem­po­rary fig­u­ra­tions of authen­tic­i­ty. The poten­cy of cre­ativ­i­ty, nei­ther an excess, a weak­ness or lack in being, is ren­dered, in part, vis­i­ble in and to our con­scious and uncon­scious con­tem­pla­tion as the most elu­sive con­sti­tu­tive ele­ment of our being’s exis­tence: the exis­tence of poten­cy, our exis­tence in poten­cy. Ren­der­ing the actu­al­i­ty of poten­cy, mas­ter­less, use­able and spa­tial­ly com­po­si­tion­al is, it seems to me, architecture’s con­tri­bu­tion towards living-well.

My core aim in engag­ing with dynamis or pow­er in the dual sense of (being in) poten­tial­i­ty and (being in) actu­al­i­ty, is to show that poten­tial being par­tic­i­pates in being (and does not lag behind real­i­ty or actu­al­i­ty as the negat­ed oth­er of the cre­at­ed). Which means that poten­tial being, as one of the ways in which we and things exist, is para­dox­i­cal­ly exis­tent along and with­in the actu­alised. Which is anoth­er way of say­ing, more tech­ni­cal­ly, that non-being par­tic­i­pates in being, the unthought par­tic­i­pates in thought, the unde­signed par­tic­i­pates in the designed. How to think of this dual sense of being remains a core task of the­o­ris­ing, of ​“con­tem­plat­ing con­tem­pla­tion” and poten­ti­at­ing it. Par­tic­i­pa­tion marks the very nature of con­tem­pla­tion as an expe­ri­en­tial activ­i­ty when under­stood against the con­ven­tion­al dis­tinc­tion between mat­ter and form (as that of an out­side and an inside).1 In addi­tion, it marks the need of ped­a­gog­i­cal con­tem­pla­tion to be made more wide­ly avail­able to archi­tec­ture stu­dents and archi­tects to engage with the lines of archi­tec­tur­al poten­cy affir­ma­tive­ly and not con­fine and sti­fle its prac­tices to its discipline’s and the built environment’s cur­rent present as the only motor of reality.

II. Act!

It could be said that a dis­ci­plined archi­tec­ture due to its own ​“func­tion­al dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion” (Niklas Luh­mann) in moder­ni­ty enacts its ​“end” through its self-extrac­tion from a wider exis­ten­tial potency—its gen­er­al (by def­i­n­i­tion polit­i­cal) pow­er of creativity—when it replaces this expe­ri­ence of loss by procur­ing an effi­cient, but much more lim­it­ed in descrip­tive and nor­ma­tive scope, self-val­i­da­tion for itself as a techne, as an end in itself. This is, per­haps, even more depress­ing an expe­ri­ence today when archi­tec­ture, for the most part, thinks of itself as near-exclu­sive­ly serv­ing and sus­tain­ing the axis of pro­duc­tion (reac­tu­al­i­sa­tion) and com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion (depo­ten­tial­iza­tion). What bet­ter start­ing point, then, in order to rethink this par­a­digm of pow­er (of archi­tec­tur­al think­ing and prac­tice), oth­er than by re-exam­in­ing its foun­da­tion­al for­mu­la­tion as dynamis and energheia in Aris­to­tle (Meta­physics 1069b19–20). A para­dox­i­cal def­i­n­i­tion of poten­tial­i­ty (dynamis), giv­en that a poten­tial­i­ty, by def­i­n­i­tion, is, to put it in a mod­ern sense, a ​“pos­si­bil­i­ty” that exists; though a poten­tial­i­ty is not to be con­fused with a mere pos­si­bil­i­ty. Such a def­i­n­i­tion of pow­er draws with­in it a line (and hence a rela­tion) between what could be called an exis­tent (and not mere­ly pos­si­ble or prob­a­ble) being of poten­tial­iza­tion. His­tor­i­cal­ly, the pow­er of exis­tence itself (or the real) has been sub­ject to an under­stand­able line of scis­sion between ​“what is actu­al” and ​“what is poten­tial” giv­en that log­i­cal­ly what is poten­tial is always thought in rela­tion to an actu­al­i­ty. Yet, what may be a log­i­cal pri­ma­cy of actu­al­i­ty became in long moder­ni­ty an onto­log­i­cal motor of truth or real­i­ty pro­duc­tion on the basis of the state of things, includ­ing of polit­i­cal, eco­nom­ic and archi­tec­tur­al truth pro­duc­tion (of the sta­tus quo and its preser­va­tion), which led to a mis­un­der­stand­ing of poten­tial­i­ty as some­thing that once actu­al­ized belongs to a repro­ducible past, defutured. 

How­ev­er, in the orig­i­nal for­mu­la­tion in Aris­to­tle, read here in a wider sense than he intend­ed, poten­tial­i­ty as a philo­soph­i­cal and eth­i­cal prob­lem is pre­cise­ly that of a poten­tial­i­ty which is co-exis­tent with, rel­a­tive to but not reducible or exhaustible in actuality—and this becomes the ker­nel of his Meta­physics. Aris­to­tle, in oth­er words, dis­cov­ers that there is an inter­nal con­sis­ten­cy and con­ti­nu­ity to the com­ing to be of a pow­er despite its para­dox­i­cal nature, a pow­er that is both pas­sive and active, resis­tant and creative. 

But how are we to think of such a para­dox­i­cal exis­tence of non-being (or of the unthought), that has, through a polit­i­cal­ly con­scious mis­un­der­stand­ing, crip­pled the pub­lic pol­i­tics of cre­ativ­i­ty, includ­ing, that of archi­tec­ture? A cre­ativ­i­ty that wills to pro­duce a near per­ma­nent­ly exploita­tive built envi­ron­ment, estrang­ing build­ings and their users from their poten­cy. In con­trast, a poten­cy or pow­er, that as we will see below with Aris­to­tle, is as much a dynamis (poten­tial­i­ty) as an ady­namia (impo­ten­tial­i­ty). Pow­er con­ceived as dynamis/adynamia, in Aris­to­tle is gen­uine­ly dynam­ic, in that one can always locate an avail­able way to not act at all, or to act dif­fer­ent­ly. And it seems that the obses­sion with solid­i­fied, repro­ducible action, the exhaus­tion of human as well as objec­tive poten­cy has estranged us first from this nec­es­sar­i­ly risky dynamism of poten­cy. In this light, Gior­gio Agam­ben dis­tress­ing­ly asks: how are we to avoid being impov­er­ished by our ​“estrange­ment from impo­ten­tial­i­ty”2? I would like to pro­pose that we can attempt to do that, as a pre­lim­i­nary the­o­ret­i­cal step, by explor­ing what Aris­to­tle thought of potency/power, in order to under­stand the dynam­ic exis­tence of/in creation.

Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger in The Let­ter on Human­ism writes: ​“We must free our­selves from the tech­ni­cal inter­pre­ta­tion of think­ing. The begin­nings of that inter­pre­ta­tion reach back to Pla­to and Aris­to­tle. They take think­ing itself to be a techne, a process of reflec­tion in ser­vice to doing and mak­ing” (1977: p.194). This may be to an extent true and while it may have been much lat­er uti­lized to con­demn the tech­nai as mere instru­men­tal­iza­tions, my inter­est lies in what may be one of the key ele­ments to this ​“tech­ni­cal” or instru­men­tal­ized con­cep­tion of (archi­tec­tur­al) think­ing. And I have in mind the pre­dom­i­nance of an anx­ious ide­ol­o­gy of mas­tery in action. That is, a propen­si­ty to define being in terms of doing/working in an illu­sion­ary over-deter­mined actu­al­iza­tion. To such an extent, even, that it forms a cer­tain ​“activism” of a kind which sep­a­rates, it is my con­tention, whether con­scious­ly or not, the present from the future (defu­tur­ing it). The par­a­digm of mas­tery-in-action in west­ern thought, in claim­ing to enact the future, can­cels, in the name of a delu­sion­al demi­ur­gic mas­tery, the plurivoc­i­ty of the very nature of the future. 

It should be made clear from the start, with ref­er­ence to Aristotle’s con­cep­tion of poten­cy (dynamis), that the expres­sion ​“exis­tent futures” does not project a nihilis­tic sense of unlim­it­ed futu­ri­ty, or some naive­ly open realm of infi­nite pos­si­bil­i­ty. A neces­si­ty derives, nat­u­ral­ly, from the mat­ter or nature of an object ​“that can be pro­duced” or a sub­ject ​“that can be con­struct­ed”, with a giv­en mate­r­i­al con­di­tion­al­i­ty which is nev­er unlim­it­ed, or infi­nite­ly open to any forms and uses. But here I am think­ing, to be more pre­cise, of poten­tial­i­ty (pow­er, dynamis) with par­tic­u­lar regard not to the poten­cy of things (or mat­ter itself), but that of thought/theory (includ­ing archi­tec­tur­al thought); a con­tem­pla­tive poten­cy dif­fer­ent in nature to that of an object or mate­r­i­al. In oth­er words, the phrase ​“exis­tent futures” does not invite us to mere­ly say ​“anoth­er world or build­ing is/was pos­si­ble” (lead­ing us to a spec­trum of ret­ro­spec­tive or pro­jec­tive deci­sion­ism), but rather to locate in the ​“actu­al present”, the here and now, the oth­er side of a dual motor of being that enables think­ing and imag­in­ing anoth­er world or build­ing in the poten­cy of an act, with and despite of its cur­rent actu­al­i­sa­tion. It is to recon­di­tion the future as the enabling con­cept of the present (“what is poten­tial can become actu­al”) and, at the same time, to sus­tain (by design to the extent pos­si­ble) the con­tin­u­ous exis­tence of the future in the actu­al­iza­tion of a present (“what is present can become poten­tial­ized anew, chal­lenged, cri­tiqued, reimag­ined and so forth”).3

It is with this in mind that I turn atten­tion to Aristotle’s attempt to, among else, think in a con­sis­tent man­ner the prob­lem of pow­er (dynamis, poten­cy) in the sense of the way in which nat­ur­al mate­ri­als, as well as, more cru­cial­ly for my pur­pos­es, sen­si­ble beings and thought itself (“rea­son”, ​“learned capac­i­ties”) can under­go change or trans­for­ma­tion (or what in clas­si­cal phi­los­o­phy was called the rela­tion between non-being and being). If Aris­to­tle noticed, in some sense in con­trast to his pre­de­ces­sors, that the use of, for exam­ple, a mate­r­i­al can lead to a range of objects which are present (exis­tent) in poten­tial­i­ty pri­or to their actu­al­iza­tion (as well as para­dox­i­cal­ly after­wards by the fact that poten­cy is still relat­ed to its being ​“ful­filled”), his wider inno­v­a­tive con­tri­bu­tion was as to how to think of such a trans­for­ma­tion, and its for­ma­tive poten­cy, in onto­log­i­cal terms, or in the terms of the being of exis­tent futures.

Lisa Lan­drum in her nice­ly con­ceived review out­line of the ancient Greek ref­er­ences to archi­tects and archi­tec­ture in Pla­to and Aris­to­tle, titled ​“Before Archi­tec­ture: Archai, Archi­tects and Archi­tec­ton­ics in Pla­to and Aris­to­tle”4, offers a reminder of two cru­cial points when con­tem­plat­ing, what I would call, architecture’s ​“tightrope line of thought” between the tech­ni­cal and the polit­i­cal, as this issue invites us to reflect upon. With ref­er­ence to Aristotle’s Pol­i­tics, Lan­drum apt­ly quotes Aris­to­tle stat­ing in book 7: “[the archi­tects (tous architek­tonas), through their think­ing (tais dianoiais), are] most tru­ly said to act” (1325b20–24).5 Here I would like to add empha­sis to the ref­er­ence to archi­tec­tur­al think­ing as an act; and to under­line the impor­tance of this think­ing, in Aristotle’s Physics and Meta­physics, of action (as energheia/entelecheia and also in the sense of prax­is in his Ethics and Pol­i­tics). This is to remind, being a mere observ­er who hap­pens to have taught in an archi­tec­ture school, of the lines that quite lit­er­al­ly draw and redraw, set and can­cel poten­cy and actu­al­i­sa­tion, between archi­tect­ing as a pub­lic trans­for­ma­tive social good, and archi­tect­ing as a pri­vate cap­i­tal­ist devel­op­ment of, essen­tial­ly, the mar­ke­ti­za­tion of actu­al­i­ty and its defu­tur­ing of the future. Espe­cial­ly at a time, and for a long time now, when the mar­ket and ​“the good” have merged and are almost inde­ci­pher­able. Yet, I wish to argue, ulti­mate­ly, that the pow­er or poten­cy inher­ent in thinking/theorising archi­tec­ture is inti­mate­ly asso­ci­at­ed with what in old-fash­ioned philo­soph­i­cal lan­guage was called virtue, in the sense that appre­ci­at­ing and nur­tur­ing the co-exis­tence in action of sus­tain­able and plurivo­cal futures is the sus­te­nance of the good. I will return to this in the final section.

Lan­drum ends her piece with ref­er­ence to Christo­pher Long, quot­ing him as fol­lows: ​“The good is […] at once elu­sive and allur­ing. Its trans­for­ma­tive polit­i­cal pow­er comes not to those who pre­tend to pos­sess it but rather only to those who rec­og­nize that the source of its pow­er lies in the way it requires each new gen­er­a­tion to take it up as a ques­tion and work it out in liv­ing dia­logue togeth­er.”6 What I take from this, apart from a cer­tain serendip­i­ty of thought, is the need to take up ​“pow­er” as a ques­tion and think its sense for a com­ing gen­er­a­tion, or more pre­cise­ly to think of the nature and ​“source” of pow­er (which I will explore below more pre­cise­ly with ref­er­ence to its Aris­totelian names, energheia and dynamis) as gen­er­a­tive and trans­for­ma­tive. There lies I think a key, obvi­ous as it may be, to the fact that architecture’s thought, its poten­cy, is to remain open, meta­mor­phic and ques­tion­able, rather than a quest for an absolute archi­tec­tur­al end, essence or truth. Indeed, as Lan­drum notes, Pla­to and Aris­to­tle, in their time, con­sis­tent­ly present archi­tects as ​“exem­plary civic and intel­lec­tu­al lead­ers act­ing in aware­ness of their own (and oth­ers’) lim­its, with knowl­edge of the most appro­pri­ate archē, and with a view to the most com­pre­hen­sive aims—the com­mon good.” And Lan­drum con­cludes: ​“This dis­clos­es an alter­na­tive and more accu­rate ety­mol­o­gy of archi­tects: not as mas­ter-builders but as lead­ers and mak­ers of begin­nings (archai)”7.

What would it mean for archi­tects and archi­tec­tur­al thought and train­ing to be con­cerned with archai? Reflect­ing on the good of archi­tec­tur­al thought may be today near­ly impos­si­ble as it would require too many para­me­ters to be recon­sid­ered and com­pro­mised, but in this the­o­ret­i­cal attempt I would like to focus on only one. That is the pre­sup­po­si­tion­al nature (or con­di­tion) of the ​“will to act”, which so char­ac­teris­es a cer­tain dom­i­nant (whether pro­gres­sive or con­ser­v­a­tive) atti­tude among archi­tects (as sov­er­eign mas­ters) and archi­tec­tur­al train­ing itself. My aim, in fact, is more mod­est than it may seem: to offer a brief and spec­u­la­tive glimpse from the ancient past, that could in turn trig­ger a glimpse of a future, a genealog­i­cal seg­ment, if you like, of the future present via a future past. 

Before I turn to this in the next sec­tion let me make some final pre­lim­i­nary clar­i­fi­ca­tions. It should be not­ed at the out­set that by con­cen­trat­ing today on the word pow­er (in its Aris­totelian sens­es of energheia and dynamis) I, by no means, sug­gest that we can ignore his­tor­i­cal speci­fici­ty (and thus vast his­tor­i­cal dis­tance), or the con­tem­po­rary inter­nal den­si­ty and dif­fer­ence of the dis­ci­plines of phi­los­o­phy and archi­tec­ture. Rather, it is to offer a demon­stra­tion of a par­a­dig­mat­ic (in both sens­es of the word: a sin­gu­lar-exem­plar key to a wider pic­ture) line of thought, that is defined by the notion of action and a cer­tain dri­ve towards activ­i­ty; and by exten­sion a state of actuality/actualization (as the end/telos or ful­fil­ment of a poten­cy). A line of thought as its pow­er that remains elu­sive, because it has been in one sense for­got­ten in the meta­mor­phic den­si­ty of the his­tor­i­cal mate­r­i­al that envelops it through many cen­turies and its many dif­fer­ent, though relat­ed, meta­mor­phoses: from Aristotle’s Physics and Meta­physics to its redis­cov­ery in medieval times by the­olo­gians and canon­ist lawyers who use ele­ments of it in order to define the pow­er of the omnipo­tent God, the pow­er of the Pope and the Sov­er­eign King, to the sense in which Nation-States are defined as sov­er­eign poten­cies (each time for­mal­ized between an absolute capac­i­ty and an ordi­nary action or actu­al­iza­tion).8 I will not be able to delve into these trans­for­ma­tions here in any detail, but they are real­ly quite remark­able and they point to a con­se­quence that is cru­cial: the line of think­ing that defines pow­er as between a poten­cy and an actu­al­i­sa­tion has become an illu­so­ry epis­te­mo­log­i­cal reg­is­ter of the real, a for­mal­iz­ing fil­ter for a sta­t­ic real­i­ty-pro­duc­tion and of what it means to act as such. Instead, ​“pow­er” is to be posed as a prob­lem to the point that it unde­ter­mines not only what it means to act but what it means to transform. 

A prob­lem, to use Man­fre­do Tafuri’s (1987) terms in a dif­fer­ent though per­haps relat­ed con­text, or, rather a project of dom­i­na­tion, the dom­i­na­tion of real­i­ty. This is because activ­i­ty (and the inter­minable dri­ve to activ­i­ty), in gen­er­al, and the archi­tec­tur­al impe­tus towards action/transformation (of the same) are them­selves now an insti­tu­tion; and there seems to be an almost mys­ti­cal (or blind) belief in action, that inti­mate­ly ties pro­gres­sive and avant-garde ​“move­ments” to the most basic cap­i­tal­ist inten­si­ties of the neolib­er­al tech­niques of gov­er­nance and com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion as gen­er­a­tive of every action and actu­al­iza­tion. To turn this nau­se­at­ing ten­sion into some bet­ter ​“pro­duc­tive mech­a­nism” with­out chal­leng­ing the very motor­iza­tion of action (as the actu­al­iza­tion of the pow­er of the ​“real”) towards the pro­duc­tion of a uni­ver­sal monoc­u­lar real­i­ty, to fol­low once more Tafuri’s reflec­tions on the ​“his­tor­i­cal project”, would defeat the very pur­pose of indi­cat­ing the intan­gi­ble aspects of the prob­lem in the con­cep­tion of the pow­er to act (i.e. that the west­ern par­a­digm of pow­er con­ceives of two modes of being: poten­tial­i­ty and not just activ­i­ty; but a neg­a­tive under­stand­ing of their dynam­ic rela­tion has dom­i­nat­ed their think­ing). To reopen the ques­tion of the ​“source of pow­er” in this mod­el between poten­tial­i­ty and actu­al­i­ty means also to aid the mul­ti­pli­ca­tion of the redis­cov­ery, a con­tin­u­ous redis­cov­ery, in archi­tec­tur­al train­ing, reflec­tion and prac­tice of begin­nings (archai), cuts and bruis­es, meth­ods and acci­dents, con­sis­ten­cy and com­plex­i­ty, towards the very poten­cy of archi­tec­tur­al goods as virtues. The point, how­ev­er, is not to recov­er some long-lost poten­cy or ever more sub­ver­sive prax­is of that poten­cy; for that would repeat the very way in which poten­tial­i­ty is mis­con­ceived as a neg­a­tive reser­voir that remains to be realised and exhaust­ed in the act. 

Pri­mar­i­ly my aim is to indi­cate a ​“prob­lem” in the now insti­tu­tion­alised par­a­digm of action and actu­al­i­sa­tion with a pri­ma­ry eco­nom­ic func­tion in pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and work, and a sec­ondary, tech­ni­cal func­tion span­ning across pol­i­tics, archi­tec­ture and lan­guage itself, in the name of the pri­or­i­ti­za­tion of action and the ​“actu­al­iza­tion of” cog­ni­tion through a sti­fling causal­i­ty, a pseu­do-final­i­ty and a turn­ing of neces­si­ty into an ine­gal­i­tar­i­an, neo-impe­r­i­al and self-defeat­ing modal­i­ty of real­i­ty dom­i­na­tion, to jus­ti­fy the eclipse of the con­tin­gent futures that are the nat­ur­al source of our being.9 This is based on the obser­va­tion of cur­rent par­a­digms of archi­tec­tur­al the­o­ry and prac­tice that are pred­i­cat­ed on the instru­men­tal­i­ty of action, the assump­tions and sta­tus of mas­tery, a self-sat­is­fied real­i­ty and a lin­ear, sup­pos­ed­ly absolv­ing, res­o­lu­tion of poten­tial into act. To do this means inhab­it­ing modernity’s ruins, where equal­ly the anx­i­ety of guilt (for things not actu­alised or over-actu­alised) and the inno­cence of ori­gins or arche­types (that remain to be actu­alised or be eter­nal­ly post­poned) no longer resus­ci­tate any­thing oth­er than their nos­tal­gic dream of a con­ser­v­a­tive or rad­i­cal full­ness. Pow­er in its phys­i­cal and meta­phys­i­cal sense (the den­si­ty of the coex­is­tent poten­tial in the real­i­ty of every act), is not the pow­er with a cap­i­tal ​“P” that one would use to describe its insti­tu­tion­al or sys­temic incar­na­tions, but rather the for­mu­la­tion (and in that sense the form­ing) man­ner or modal­i­ty of the idea of a com­ing to be. Which implies two things. One fears, con­tra Tafu­ri at least in tonal­i­ty, that a geneal­o­gy or a crit­i­cism (to use his term) that ​“con­stant­ly” puts ​“itself into cri­sis by putting into cri­sis the real”10 risks rein­vig­o­rat­ing the pri­ma­ry motor of cri­sis-pro­duc­tion, which is the par­a­digm of pow­er as actu­al­iza­tion or ​“enac­tion” (an exhaus­tion of real­i­ty itself through its rev­o­lu­tion­ary sus­pen­sion); what I would call, with Tafu­ri this time, the incli­na­tion towards ​“a cure that exor­cizes its own pow­er as a sickness”.

The oth­er impli­ca­tion is the com­mon and right­ly crit­i­cized in the mod­ern his­to­ry of phi­los­o­phy (and not only) west­ern bina­rism that dual­izes what is called real­i­ty between a rep­re­sen­ta­tion and a self-iden­ti­ty; only in order to serve the identity’s impo­si­tion as a dis­cur­sive for­ma­tion that forms dis­course, and as the norm of ver­i­fi­ca­tion of itself and any oth­er pos­si­ble dis­course. This is per­haps the par­a­dig­mat­ic west­ern line between polar oppo­sites, a line that wish­es to ren­der itself ​“always-already” invis­i­ble when it deter­mines what can be vis­i­ble. Yet, the ​“line” or ​“rela­tion” between poten­tial­i­ty and actu­al­i­ty (dynamis and ent­elecheia), that defines the ontol­ogy of pow­er in Aris­to­tle is not so much a bina­rism. It becomes such lat­er and most emphat­i­cal­ly so in its meta­mor­pho­sis by Chris­t­ian the­olo­gians and medieval jurists, all the way to, as Agam­ben has shown, becom­ing the par­a­digm of sov­er­eign law in the nation-state (and by def­i­n­i­tion the ker­nel of the state of excep­tion as the per­ma­nent source of pow­er and the rule of normalcy/actuality, even after the nation-state’s pow­er dissipated). 

The incen­tive to return to Aris­to­tle is, there­fore, that when poten­tial­i­ty and actu­al­i­ty (or pow­er) are thought as a bina­rism and their rela­tion is depict­ed in the image of a ten­sion­al in-between space of exper­i­men­ta­tion and recon­sti­tu­tions (of the same), futu­ri­ty is replaced by fan­ta­sy. Pow­er (dynamis-energheia), in Aris­to­tle, is inher­ent­ly incom­plete, with­out a pre­de­ter­mined total­i­ty. Aris­to­tle, in his own way, con­ceived the ​“real­i­ty” of sen­si­ble beings and things as con­tin­u­ous inten­sive con­tact between pow­ers rather than deter­mined by a bina­ry process between ori­gin and end). We are used to think­ing what is poten­tial in the past tense, once its actu­al­i­sa­tion gives it form. We con­ven­tion­al­ly think of some­thing being in the state of becom­ing or poten­tial­i­ty until it ​“comes and com­pletes” itself, form­ing an iden­ti­ty with itself, self-jus­ti­fy­ing and secur­ing its all-present pow­er. Much of this is owed to a read­ing of Aris­to­tle, but it is a one-sided read­ing. The oth­er side to this is that when noth­ing is left incom­plete, what Aris­to­tle locates in the pres­enc­ing of the actu­al is an irre­ducible dimen­sion of poten­tial­i­ty that is also exis­tent. In my wider read­ing, which I can­not devel­op here in any detail, such an irre­ducible immer­sion of the actu­al or ​“the here and now” in poten­tial­i­ty or futu­ri­ty is Aristotle’s para­dox­i­cal­ly empiri­cist answer to Plato’s chōra as the imag­i­nary ​“recep­ta­cle moth­er of the universe”. 

The inven­tive­ness of archi­tec­tur­al think­ing and design appears to be often exhaust­ed not only by the nec­es­sary lim­i­ta­tions of a pro­fes­sion­al mar­ke­tized con­text and the pri­mar­i­ly prof­it-dri­ven attain­abil­i­ty of what­ev­er may be poten­tial, but also by the onto­log­i­cal mod­el of the under­stand­ing of action or actu­al­i­sa­tion as a process that leads a poten­tial project to its actu­al­iza­tion. Per­haps the most prized aim of good archi­tec­ture is dura­tion, but not just in the sense of longevi­ty of use and enjoy­ment (as well as effi­cien­cy and sus­tain­abil­i­ty). What of the design of an inher­ent futu­ri­ty, a poten­cy that is not exhaust­ed in a ful­ly pre­de­ter­mined orga­ni­za­tion of a spa­tial fig­u­ra­tion, but one that is enabling and con­fig­ured by its uses in its present-futures? While lines are drawn and cut across the present and the future past of the poten­cy of what­ev­er is actu­alised and designed, such a line—with this read­ing of Aristotle—remains dynam­ic, akin to what Jacques Der­ri­da once called ​“spac­ing tem­po­riza­tion”.11 This is what Aris­to­tle helps us observe as the para­dox­i­cal exis­tence of poten­tial­i­ty and I would add, with archi­tec­ture in mind, the exis­tence of spa­tial poten­tial­i­ty, the use and inhab­i­tan­cy (oikeiō­sis) of exis­tent-futures as architecture’s key virtue. 

Aris­to­tle has been thought as the inven­tor of the log­ic of iden­ti­ty and self-con­tain­ment, but what is self-con­tained is a self or a spa­tial real­i­ty with­out a sta­t­ic actu­al­i­ty, or at least with anoth­er equal­ly exis­tent modal­i­ty of being to that of actu­al­i­ty. Poten­tial­i­ty is, in this sense, not a ques­tion of degree of actu­al­iza­tion that is dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed and exhaust­ed; and which could be lat­er per­haps improved but ever ema­nat­ing from the iden­ti­ty of the orig­i­nal same. Rather, poten­tial­i­ty is the abstrac­tion to the sec­ond degree of the real as the being of the future in the very moment of pres­ence or actu­al­i­ty (after all, action or actu­al­i­ty in Aristotle’s invent­ed term ent­elecheia means ​“being with­in its telos”, being with­in, becom­ing towards an end-line or lim­it). Poten­tial­i­ty exists in the dura­tion of a lim­it that con­tin­u­ous­ly con­tracts (some­times it dreams, some­times it stut­ters, to remem­ber Deleuze). Our imag­i­na­tion is accus­tomed to pre­fer to think of the future on the basis of the pre­sent­ed-past, when in fact the future con­tracts with­in the very expres­sion or com­ing-to-be of the actu­al. Poten­tial­i­ty is the name giv­en to the imma­nent exis­tence of the future in the present. It is a form of para­con­sis­ten­cy in being. 

The dom­i­na­tion of actu­al­i­ty, each time a ver­sion of real­i­ty, and of actu­al­iza­tion as a type of process that exhausts or crush­es the poten­tial into the real, is not only a dis­cur­sive strat­e­gy that dom­i­nates as a norm of ver­i­fi­ca­tion (a motor of real­i­ty pro­duc­tion), it is also a fig­ure of epis­te­mol­o­giza­tion that deter­mines what a sci­ence or dis­ci­pline is as a whole. Both a fig­u­ra­tion, a sketch, that cap­tures the imag­i­na­tion (and gives it an archē-tec­tur­al mod­el) and a dis­fig­u­ra­tion of what is poten­tial (which includes but is not iden­ti­cal to the pos­si­ble). In oth­er words, there is attrac­tive­ness in the preva­lent mod­el of actu­al­iza­tion (it breeds action-seek­ing, present-suf­fused, pro­duc­ers of final­i­ty) but also an inter­nal neg­a­tiv­i­ty (the future gets can­celled in the name of a present intel­li­gi­bil­i­ty), one that ren­ders the par­tic­u­lar here and now as a uni­ver­sal neu­tral­iza­tion (a safer invest­ment) of the good to come. Such anaes­thet­ics breed a par­tic­u­lar aes­thet­ics, the neces­si­ty of a dis­in­ter­est­ed aes­thet­ic judge­ment on the present-future, such as the one, for instance, that neces­si­tates the search of the good to become an inter­minable ​“man­age­r­i­al effi­cien­cy or resilience”. This kind of imposed con­for­mi­ty and trained com­pla­cen­cy has its root in the epis­te­mol­o­giza­tion of a par­a­digm of think­ing, where act­ing and design­ing feels con­fi­dent enough to con­ceive and delim­it itself as phal­lo­crat­ic ​“present”, at the cost of only per­ceiv­ing the future through a process between means and ends. 

Such a process acquires the nature of a com­mon-sen­si­cal neces­si­ty, a ​“there is no alter­na­tive” type of dis­fig­u­ra­tion of real­i­ty, that nev­er feels con­fi­dent enough to have its intel­li­gi­bil­i­ty exposed (or what philo­soph­i­cal­ly is called sin­gu­lar­i­ty, the pecu­liar modal­i­ty of the exis­tence of poten­tial­i­ty-in-actu­al­i­ty, that is nei­ther uni­ver­sal, nor sim­ply par­tic­u­lar). Yet this is how an epis­teme and an expe­ri­ence of knowl­edge can actu­al­ly become pos­si­ble. The his­toric­i­ty of an epis­teme, includ­ing the knowl­edge that archi­tec­ture pro­cures, is nei­ther diachrony (some ori­gin that autho­ris­es what is good archi­tec­ture in the present), nor in, one sense, syn­chrony (a present that is in con­stant con­flict with anoth­er present, as with the con­flict of the mere­ly possibles—a nihilist, at its core, expe­ri­ence of a civ­il war of ideas, mar­kets and bod­ies). Rather, the expe­ri­ence of an epis­teme lies in between diachrony and syn­chrony, in a inline cross­ing of the two, ren­der­ing inop­er­a­tive (to use Agamben’s term) the dichoto­my between the past-present and the present-futures. The onto­log­i­cal char­ac­ter of the present, its modal­i­ty, makes no good sense oth­er­wise, since the so-called present is nei­ther just a mate­r­i­al fig­u­ra­tion of what­ev­er is pro­duced or actu­alised each time, nor a mere­ly cog­ni­tive (abstract) rela­tion of a cause to an effect, a means to an end, that meets in the present its ​“end” (in both sens­es of the word). The present, the here and now, has always been, a syn­chron­ic elsewhere. 

III. A Para-Ontology of Action

Aristotle’s ontol­ogy of pow­er is com­plex and mul­ti-faceted and my pur­pose is not to sum­ma­rize or explain it in any ade­quate detail. I am going to briefly focus on just one key aspect of it as expound­ed in Meta­physics, book Theta.12 In book Theta, 3 Aris­to­tle argues against a group of philoso­phers known as the Megar­i­ans (who hold that pow­er exists only in doing or in being done, i.e. in its exer­cise and actu­al­iza­tion) by devel­op­ing a the­o­ry that shows pow­er or poten­tial­i­ty (dynamis-energheia) as exist­ing inde­pen­dent­ly from its exer­cise or actu­al­iza­tion. Poten­tial­i­ty (pow­er) is one way, among oth­ers, in which being is (1017a8–1017b7). Pow­er (dynamis-energheia) draws Aristotle’s atten­tion because it is para­dox­i­cal: in one sense it has the onto­log­i­cal sta­tus of being (in its actu­al­i­sa­tion) and, at the very same time in one sense, of not-being (in its poten­cy). This poten­tial being is how­ev­er with­in being, by the fact that it exists as a pow­er (poten­tial­i­ty). The dis­tinc­tion between poten­tial­i­ty and actu­al­i­ty (the two forms of being of a pow­er) lies with­in being, not as a mere mat­ter of the­o­ret­i­cal con­tem­pla­tion, but as in the very nature (physis) of a (sen­si­ble) being. This may seem like a mere log­i­cal schema­ti­za­tion, but I would like to sug­gest that draw­ing on a read­ing of Aristotle’s inno­v­a­tive for­mu­la­tion we can appre­ci­ate some­thing fur­ther than that. 

To enlarge this sense, and to speak of con­tem­pla­tion, or the being of con­tem­pla­tion, as an exis­tent form of being, we can say sim­i­lar­ly that the pow­er of (archi­tec­tur­al) think­ing exists both in a state of poten­tial­i­ty and in a state of actu­al­i­ty, in a par­tic­u­lar expe­ri­ence of con­tem­pla­tion that equates the being of an active and a poten­tial thought while it also ren­ders them dis­tinct. An active thought in its lin­guis­tic being and the cut that the state­ment ​“I, think …” per­forms, co-exists with the poten­cy of think­ing in its con­tin­u­al com­ing to be with­in an (also) non-lin­guis­tic body. To appre­ci­ate the act of con­tem­pla­tion as expe­ri­en­tial­ly exis­tent in a state of con­tin­u­ous poten­tial­i­ty leads per­haps to an appre­ci­a­tion of its own dual sta­tus and of its exis­ten­tial knot giv­en its actu­al yet unde­ter­mined ethos (way of being). The co-exis­tence of poten­cy and actu­al­i­ty has the effect of a rad­i­cal equal­iza­tion, a cer­tain egal­i­tar­i­an­ism of existence’s present futures, and this becomes most vis­i­ble in the open plateau that is think­ing as an ethos, the con­tem­pla­tive way of being. 

But there is more that we can draw from Aristotle’s the­o­ry of power/potentiality. A poten­tial thought is still pow­er­ful when its think­ing is actu­al­ly expressed, and what I would define as good thought does noth­ing else than strug­gle to ​“save” that poten­tial­i­ty in its actu­alised expres­sion. This may also explain how cum­ber­some the expe­ri­ence of expres­sion and thought is between poten­cy and actu­al­i­ty. This how­ev­er does not mean that one should exis­ten­tial­ly priv­i­lege one state over the oth­er. Aris­to­tle adds one more lay­er to this, since in book Theta, 8 he aims to show that potentiality’s exis­tence is nev­er inde­pen­dent of actu­al­i­ty. In fact, poten­tial­i­ty, Aris­to­tle will say, is onto­log­i­cal­ly depen­dant on its cor­rel­a­tive actu­al­i­ty; which is to say that with­out actu­al­i­ty, poten­tial­i­ty can­not be. Yet, Aris­to­tle speaks of the pri­ma­cy of actu­al­i­ty, here, in a par­tic­u­lar sense: actu­al­i­ty is pri­ma­ry because it is more prox­i­mate to the telos (the actu­al­ized state) of a being or thing, than poten­tial­i­ty is; and so it is pri­ma­ry in that sense of prox­im­i­ty to an end, and only. 

Focus­ing or ground­ing our con­tem­pla­tion on just one side of being (what is poten­tial or what is actu­al) would miss the point. These two lay­ers com­prise on the one hand a ​“spa­tial” equal­i­ty of exis­tence between poten­tial­i­ty and actu­al­i­ty, and on the oth­er a ​“tem­po­ral” pri­ma­cy of actu­al­i­ty (with regard to the present state of a being or thing). We per­ceive what is poten­tial from either side, while the line of poten­cy will inevitably expe­ri­ence also the cut of expres­sion or present being. Which is to say that at the state of an actu­al­ized thought, being or thing, its poten­cy is not ful­filled in the sense of a dis­si­pa­tion or expen­di­ture, but ​“saved” in a spec­trum of pow­er. Which is anoth­er way of say­ing that our being of con­tem­pla­tion is a sec­ond nature with­in anoth­er, and in this sense our sec­ond chance at a good life. How are we to think of such a poten­cy that sur­vives action or actu­al­iza­tion and why would it mat­ter for archi­tec­tur­al thought and theory? 

Before we go into some of the detail of this for­mu­la­tion of our being in the dual exis­tence of pow­er as poten­cy and actu­al­i­ty or action, it is worth not­ing some of the philo­soph­i­cal con­text to Aristotle’s meta­phys­i­cal treat­ment of pow­er by remind­ing that the vol­umes titled (posthu­mous­ly) as Meta­physics lit­er­al­ly fol­low his books called Physics. In Physics, Aris­to­tle seeks to dis­cov­er the ground­ing or foun­da­tion of real­i­ty (that is real­i­ty under­stood as the total body of mat­ter and form). The ker­nel of his reflec­tion at this point is led to a core char­ac­ter­is­tic or prin­ci­ple (archē, in the sense of a begin­ning) of pow­er: what he calls metabolē, kinē­sis or change/movement, tak­ing place in dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed ways in terms of ousia (sub­stance), qual­i­ty, quan­ti­ty and place (III.1,200b33–201a16). Real­i­ty, for Aris­to­tle, is a total­i­ty com­pris­ing pow­ers that con­tact each oth­er and such con­tact is con­tin­u­ous. Move­ment (kinē­sis) or change/transformation (metabolē) is con­tin­u­ous for beings and gen­er­a­tion (gen­e­sis, com­ing-to-be) does not derive at any point from noth­ing (absolute non-being) or from a deter­min­is­tic orig­i­nal cause (absolute being). Each metabolē or move­ment (and hence each con­tact between dynameis or pow­ers) takes place between dynamis and entelekheia (a poten­tial­i­ty or capac­i­ty and an actu­al­i­sa­tion or ful­fil­ment); or to put it in a more con­tem­po­rary sense between a future and a present, a poten­cy and an act. While such metabolē is con­tin­u­ous, it is not unlim­it­ed, in oth­er words it is nev­er mere­ly inde­ter­mi­nate. To ven­ture a dizzy­ing tran­shis­tor­i­cal sketch, move­ment or being, in Aris­to­tle, approx­i­mates what will be under­stood much lat­er by medieval philoso­phers and the­olo­gians as a syn­chron­ic con­tin­gent being: i.e. being is nei­ther mere­ly poten­tial, nor mere­ly actu­al but the total­i­ty of its poten­cy and its actu­alised present power.

Let’s take a few steps back and revis­it Aris­totelian pow­er. Before Aris­to­tle, philo­soph­i­cal ref­er­ence to dynamis can be, for instance, locat­ed in the def­i­n­i­tion of being (on) by Pla­to, in the expres­sion: ​“ouk allo plēn dynamis” (“noth­ing else but dynamis”; Sophist 247^e). In Aris­to­tle, how­ev­er, we find an inno­v­a­tive the­o­riza­tion of being/power, and the first treat­ment of the con­cept is met in Top­i­ca D 4.124a31–34 and 5.126a30–b6. Though there are many mean­ings of dynamis, Aris­to­tle thinks there are ways in which they relate to one anoth­er, and this was prob­a­bly the ini­tial seed for his inves­ti­ga­tion in Physics. At the heart of this intu­ition is the fact that there is a mean­ing of dynamis quite close to the much ear­li­er Home­r­ic use of the term: it is dynamis as an ​“active pow­er”. For dynamis used in this way, Aris­to­tle gives even­tu­al­ly in his Meta­physics the fol­low­ing def­i­n­i­tion: ​“Dyna­mis means a source (archē) of move­ment (kinē­sis) or change (metabolē), which is in some­thing else or in itself as some­thing else.” (Meta­physics, 5.12). The def­i­n­i­tion, ground­ed as it is in the expe­ri­ence of being, leads him to the rela­tion between poten­cy (dynamis) and act (energheia), first, in terms of what dis­tin­guish­es them. The prob­lem being that a poten­tial­i­ty is a pos­si­bil­i­ty (or a future) that exists. How­ev­er, unlike mere pos­si­bil­i­ties which can be con­sid­ered from a pure­ly for­mal stand­point as equal among them­selves, poten­tial­i­ties present them­selves above all as things that exist sin­gu­lar­ly, but that at the same time, do not exist in the same way in which actu­al things exist (i.e. poten­tial­i­ties that have been actu­al­ized). They are present, yet they do not appear in the form or mode of present things. In what way do poten­tial­i­ties appear or are existent?

What is at stake for Aris­to­tle is the mode of exis­tence of poten­tial­i­ty as not reducible to actu­al­i­ty. This is no minor prob­lem, or dis­cov­ery, for Aris­to­tle, since this is a core ele­ment of his Meta­physics with­out which he would not be able to encounter a key way in which the expe­ri­ence of being is to be under­stood. With­out an under­stand­ing of power/potentiality a core form of real­i­ty would go amiss. This becomes even more acute when one con­sid­ers that being for Aris­to­tle is at stake in every sense of the term ​“dynasthai” (to be able). If what is actu­al­ized appears in our expe­ri­ence as ​“more real” than what remains poten­tial, this is already an indi­ca­tion of the prob­lem in con­tem­plat­ing the expe­ri­ence of being. When Aris­to­tle notes actu­al­i­ty as pri­or (or pri­ma­ry) in being to poten­tial­i­ty, he means that actu­al­i­ty is inde­pen­dent­ly of the poten­tial­i­ty as a dif­fer­ent mode of being, that is, as inti­mate­ly con­nect­ed to a being’s mode of being (as its telos or end). This is why Aris­to­tle says that active pow­er is the core con­cept of dynamis, its kyrios horos (Meta­physics 5.12, 1020a4). As we said already, this can be eas­i­ly mis­un­der­stood as a priv­i­leg­ing of activ­i­ty or actu­al­ized poten­tials. There are, though, two modes of being and they are both rel­a­tive because, as it was not­ed, Aris­to­tle con­ceives of his ontol­ogy as an ontol­ogy of pow­ers that are in con­tin­u­ous con­tact, they come to be in act­ing, rather than in a lin­ear pro­duc­tion line. 

In Aris­to­tle, then, the pri­ma­cy of actu­al­i­ty is a log­i­cal strat­e­gy, not a nor­ma­tive one. This becomes more evi­dent when he moves by anal­o­gy to oth­er types of dynameis (ones that are not dis­po­si­tions of change, but dis­po­si­tions for being some­thing). And it is with those par­tic­u­lar dynameis that I am con­cerned here in order to think of the poten­cy of archi­tec­tur­al thought. Aris­to­tle writes: ​“our mean­ing […] is as that which is build­ing is to that which is capa­ble of build­ing, and the wak­ing to the sleep­ing, and that which is see­ing to that which has its eyes shut but has sight, and that which has been shaped out of the mat­ter to the mat­ter, and that which has been wrought up to the un-wrought. […] some [of these] are as move­ment to dynamis, and the oth­ers as sub­stance to some sort of mat­ter.” (Meta­physics 11.6,1048a35–b9; Ross, 1936). Aristotle’s claim is that, in a way, a sub­stance (a dis­po­si­tion for being some­thing) relates to its mat­ter like a change relates to the respec­tive dynamis. Here, we sense that Aristotle’s the­o­ry of dynameis becomes rel­e­vant to the very heart of his ontol­ogy of being, the hylo­mor­phic composi­tion of substances. 

Fur­ther to this, Aris­to­tle dis­tin­guish­es between two types of poten­tial­i­ty: a gener­ic poten­tial­i­ty (e.g. the poten­tial­i­ty of a child to become a painter) which does not inter­est him specif­i­cal­ly, and a par­tic­u­lar, exist­ing, poten­tial­i­ty (e.g. the archi­tect who has the poten­tial to design, think and build) which dif­fers from the for­mer type in the obvi­ous sense that the archi­tect does not need to suf­fer an alter­ation, but ​“has” (thanks to a hex­is, a ​“hav­ing”) a poten­tial­i­ty to, for instance, build (as well as not built—mē energhein). It is this pecu­liar hav­ing (echein) of a poten­tial dynamis that is enig­mat­ic, as Agam­ben notes, for the Aris­totelian for­mu­la­tion of power/potentiality. Sen­si­ble beings are char­ac­ter­ized by a dual mode of being in terms of their pow­er of being (poten­cy and act) and their potency’s being is that of an equal­ly exis­tent pow­er to do or to not do some­thing (i.e. it is sub­ject to contemplation).

Agam­ben has lucid­ly observed, as we will see in the next sec­tion, that it is the nature of the exis­tence of poten­tial­i­ty that forms the ​“secret ker­nel” of Aristotle’s (meta)physics of real (exis­tent) being. In the par­tic­u­lar dis­cus­sion in De Ani­ma, which Agam­ben refers to in order to indi­cate this, deal­ing with why there is no sen­sa­tion of the sens­es them­selves, Aris­to­tle pro­pos­es that poten­tial­i­ty is (also) the under­go­ing of a sterē­sis, not in the sense of ​“a sim­ple pri­va­tion (i.e. non-Being) but rather as indi­cat­ing the exis­tence of non-Being, the pres­ence of an absence”.13 To ​“have a pow­er” means ​“to have a pri­va­tion”, not as a mere log­i­cal hyposta­sis of pow­er but as ​“the mode of exis­tence of this pri­va­tion.”14 Pri­va­tion (sterē­sis) in Meta­physics book Theta has, in fact, two mean­ings: a) the ​“miss­ing” or ​“fail­ing” of some­thing pos­i­tive (i.e., the Form, eidos); b) the ​“sub­strate” from which the pos­i­tive some­thing is miss­ing. In fact, this under­stand­ing of a steretic expe­ri­ence, a suf­fer­ing or pas­sion, is cen­tral to Aristotle’s under­stand­ing of hulē (mat­ter). And mat­ter, in the sense that most con­cerns us, is hulē noētē (intel­lec­tu­al mat­ter or dynamis) defined as pure dynamis. In Physics (193b19–20), Agam­ben notes, ​“pri­va­tion is like a face, a form (eidos), so that when Aris­to­tle under­takes to con­ceive of the mode of exis­tence of dynamis in Meta­physics book Theta, he does so pre­cise­ly in order to ​“assure the con­sis­ten­cy of this ​‘form’ or ​‘face’”.15 This serves to explain why Aris­to­tle in Meta­physics Theta has to coun­ter­pose, in part, his the­o­ry of dynameis against an alter­na­tive posi­tion put for­ward by a group of philoso­phers called Megarians. 

Aris­to­tle describes their posi­tion as fol­lows: ​“There are some who say, as the Megar­i­ans do, that a thing can act only when it is act­ing, and when it is not act­ing it can­not act, e.g. that he who is not build­ing can­not build, but only he who is build­ing, when he is build­ing […].” (Meta­physics 11.3,1046a29–32). The Megar­i­ans regard the real­iza­tion of some­thing as both nec­es­sary and suf­fi­cient for hav­ing the pow­er to do this/that. Such an empha­sis, how­ev­er, on the suf­fi­cien­cy of the actu­al­iza­tion of some­thing leads, Aris­to­tle argues, to some pecu­liar con­clu­sions. For exam­ple, an archi­tect would not have any design­ing poten­tial when not design­ing; and there would be no dif­fer­ence between a non-design­ing archi­tect and some­one who is not an archi­tect at all. In addi­tion, and more cru­cial­ly, if only what is actu­al­ized is per­ceiv­able and, thus, exists, then some­thing would only be per­ceiv­able when encoun­tered as a mat­ter of fact. Final­ly, no prin­ci­ple (archē) of change or metabolē could be con­ceived if all that is encoun­tered is actions and their actualisations. 

In oth­er words, pow­er can­not and should not be thought only from the van­tage point of actu­al­i­ty (or mate­ri­al­i­ty in the sense of ​“pres­ence”) as this miss­es a fun­da­men­tal way in which being is. Pow­ers exist whether they are real­ized or not. This dual­i­ty of being ren­ders archi­tec­tur­al thought and design not just a tech­ni­cal mat­ter that is to be acted/executed irre­spec­tive of its con­tem­pla­tive poten­cy, but a mat­ter (also) of ethics (i.e. as to whether it should be act­ed or exe­cut­ed at all or in anoth­er way). Unre­al­ized, though exis­tent, dynameis show that action or real­iza­tion can no longer be regard­ed as being the nec­es­sary or suf­fi­cient con­di­tion for ​“hav­ing”, or bet­ter, being a pow­er. One does not, in oth­er words, think well (archi­tec­ture) if exclu­sive­ly from the van­tage point of cur­rent actu­al­i­ties or actu­al­iza­tions (and their sup­posed nec­es­sary con­di­tions). If that were so, then archi­tects would mere­ly have to do their ​“duty” accord­ing to the dic­tates of what has been already actu­al­ized in the built envi­ron­ment, or what­ev­er the ​“mar­ket forces” demand. The unty­ing of the ide­o­log­i­cal knot of pow­er as action (ignor­ing its, to put it in anoth­er way, pas­sions), is not to give way instead to a license towards ​“any­thing goes” (or equal­ly ​“noth­ing goes”), as if one could con­tain all poten­tial­i­ties in a sin­gle per­fect actu­al­i­ty or in a state of pure poten­tial­i­ty; nor is it a license to ​“man­age” poten­tial­i­ty in the name of the present state of things and only, i.e. to depoliti­cize poten­tial­i­ties and actu­al­ize only those that are suf­fi­cient or nec­es­sary to the sus­tain­abil­i­ty of the present. 

Let’s out­line then some fur­ther ele­ments to the the­o­ry of pow­er that has quite lit­er­al­ly cap­tured the west­ern imag­i­na­tion, before we can respond more ade­quate­ly to this knot. Aris­to­tle sum­ma­rizes some key char­ac­ter­is­tics to pow­er in the sense that con­cerns us: (a) every pow­er is at the same time the pow­er for the oppo­site (pow­er is two-sided in its very exis­tence); (b) every­thing that is capa­ble of being is not nec­es­sar­i­ly actu­al; © the con­di­tion of actu­al­i­ty is not the action but its pow­er; (d) com­ing-to-being (gen­e­sis) is always out of a rel­a­tive non-being (poten­tial­i­ty) that is a form of being. This lat­ter point is cru­cial and this is how Aris­to­tle describes it in anoth­er work: ​“Now for things which are of a nature to come-to-be, the mate­r­i­al cause con­sti­tutes ​“the pos­si­bil­i­ty of being and not-being”” (De gen­er­a­tione 2.9, 335a32–33.) Archi­tec­tur­al thought is an act that, in this sense, has to be con­tem­plat­ed as con­sti­tut­ed in the simul­ta­ne­ous ​“pos­si­bil­i­ty of being and not-being”. What would that mean for its prac­tice? I will return to this more direct­ly below, but for now let me pose it enig­mat­i­cal­ly: what if what archi­tec­ture main­ly does is active­ly think­ing and express­ing its poten­cy? What if archi­tec­ture is too often over­tak­en by the speed and ten­sion of cre­ativ­i­ty as actu­al­iza­tion, that it miss­es the oth­er equal side of its cre­ative pow­er, the sav­ing of its poten­cy, includ­ing a high­er form of ces­sa­tion or rest, a pas­sion or suf­fer­ing (an impo­ten­tial­i­ty) in the Aris­totelian sense. The actu­al­iza­tion of a poten­cy is, in this sense, the rel­a­tive­ly more prox­i­mate poten­cy in the midst of poten­tial­i­ties which exist (also) as a pri­va­tion which can be filled, a desire which can be sati­at­ed (mē on, not-being) or not. 

“Active think­ing” may, thus, mean that archi­tec­tur­al con­tem­pla­tion is nev­er an exer­cise in ​“mere” the­o­ry or abstrac­tion under­stood as the means towards the sat­is­fac­tion or ful­fil­ment of an actu­al­i­sa­tion, but is inti­mate­ly and con­tin­u­ous­ly tied to both con­di­tions nec­es­sary to the expe­ri­ence and being of the good. That pow­er in Aris­to­tle is not under­stood as the expe­ri­ence of a self-iden­ti­ty, or as some­thing that can ever be ful­ly achieved, means that an act of archi­tec­ture is nev­er com­plete on its own. A thing may nev­er be what it is not (i.e. a con­tra­dic­tion), yet the obser­va­tion that a thing can become what it is not (i.e. a con­tra­ri­ety) leads Aris­to­tle to rede­fine the very nature of what it means to ​“have” a pow­er as a mat­ter of being and exer­cise it; plac­ing, hence, human action in the open­ness of eth­i­cal con­tem­pla­tion (not a lin­ear­i­ty of liv­ing, but the con­tin­gent plurivoc­i­ty of liv­ing well). The role of the­o­ry, includ­ing archi­tec­tur­al the­o­ry, is in this way also affect­ed. Phi­los­o­phy (or the­o­ry) itself, for Aris­to­tle, con­cerns this very under­stand­ing, that is, phi­los­o­phy aris­es out of the desire all human beings have for insight (eide­nai), for con­tem­pla­tion, or bet­ter per­haps for encoun­ter­ing their poten­tial. Appear­ances are, char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly, at stake for human beings in a par­tic­u­lar man­ner. Won­der (which gen­er­ates as well as errs, planē) does not cease, because it is not a pos­ses­sion to be ​“had” once and for all, but a nature (physis) to be con­tin­u­ous­ly encoun­tered as it saves its open exis­tence in a poten­tial dura­tion. In oth­er words, when in Meta­physics 11.3 Aris­to­tle for­mu­lates actu­al­i­ty he says that ​“actu­al­i­ty is mal­ista—above all else—movement” (1047a32; Ross 1936), this is to be seen as close­ly linked to the under­stand­ing of energheia (actu­al­i­ty) as a finite or incom­plete motion. Energheia can be under­stood as what Aris­to­tle called ​“that per­fect motion” (not an exhaus­tion upon its real­iza­tion, as the Megar­i­ans pro­posed, but as the syn­chron­ic con­tin­gency of potentiality/dynamis and impotentiality/ady­namia).16

Inci­den­tal­ly, for this rea­son the­o­ret­i­cal reflec­tion is not, as some would still have it oppos­ing (neo-)idealisms to (neo-)materialisms and back again, detached from expe­ri­ence or prax­is, but its high­est expres­sion. A power’s poten­tial­i­ty (which is always an impo­ten­tial­i­ty also) is imma­nent in, while dis­tinct from, its action or actu­al­iza­tion. Imma­nence, in this sense, points to a dif­fer­ent mode of con­tem­pla­tion. What some­thing is, expressed by ques­tions of ​“to ti on” are trans­formed in Aris­to­tle to ​“dia ti” ques­tions. As Agam­ben writes: ​“what is clear­ly at work here is the exem­plary prin­ci­ple of Aristotle’s thought, the prin­ci­ple of archē. This prin­ci­ple con­sists in refor­mu­lat­ing all ques­tions that have the form of ​“what is it?” as ques­tions that have the form of ​“through what thing (dia ti) does some­thing belong to some­thing else?”17

On the one hand, the life of con­tem­pla­tion is bound to its present-future. On the oth­er hand, it con­stant­ly remains with the source of ​“move­ment” that it itself is. It is at this point that one could note the ancient Greek mid­dle voice, which as a verb form denotes a tran­si­tive sit­u­a­tion, a ​“going through” or pas­sion, con­cep­tu­al­ized as a sin­gle enti­ty act­ing on itself (both active and pas­sive in a sense). Or, to put it in anoth­er way, where the tran­si­tive and intran­si­tive can no longer be dis­tin­guished. In the mid­dle (voice), the archi­tec­tur­al capac­i­ty to con­tem­pla­tion, in its ever-poten­tial exis­tence in the actu­al, shows itself in its com­ing-to-be-realised as the eth­i­cal expe­ri­ence of project and design. Archi­tec­tur­al think­ing can­not be enclosed in the actu­alised present, since its present is also a state of poten­cy which can­not be pre­de­ter­mined or overde­ter­mined. This places archi­tec­ture with­in an inher­ent chal­lenge but it can also be a bless­ing in that this does not ren­der con­tem­pla­tion as an all-pow­er­ful ​“pres­ence”, but as exposed to the dis­clo­sure of a pri­va­tion or sterē­sis, the pas­sion of what is oth­er than itself in itself, each time, and where a com­ing archi­tec­ture encoun­ters its vir­tu­al ethos.

IV. Agamben’s Critique of Master-Power

It is with this in mind that Agam­ben turns to reread Aristotle’s analy­sis in book Theta of Meta­physics in order to under­stand the eidos (face) of this pri­va­tion which at the same time is also the poten­tial­i­ty for pres­enc­ing, actu­al­is­ing. It is nec­es­sary to engage with Agamben’s read­ing as it is the most incite­ful and influ­en­tial read­ing of our time, sig­nif­i­cant­ly expos­ing the lay­ers that tie this meta­physics of pow­er to its polit­i­cal and juridi­cal man­i­fes­ta­tions. Agam­ben cen­tres his reread­ing on two key relat­ed propo­si­tions of Aristotle’s, which we have met this far only by impli­ca­tion. Briefly: 

V. The Virtuality of Virtue 

That we need to veer away from the dom­i­nant par­a­digm of mas­tery (across the right and left of its spec­trum) in activ­i­ty (i.e. the acti­va­tion of a reser­voir of pow­er that is to be exclu­sive­ly ​“had” impos­ing the sus­tain­abil­i­ty of the actu­al­iza­tion of always-already exhaust­ed poten­tial­i­ties) appears self-evi­dent today in the cat­a­stroph­ic plan­e­tary sit­u­a­tion in which we find our­selves. The dom­i­nant par­a­digm of action (cen­tred on the mas­tery of the will) is ground­ed on noth­ing but the abstrac­tion of willed-free­dom in its full vacu­ity (where­by free­dom is con­ceived as the pow­er over poten­tial­i­ty, and as the pow­er of the indi­vid­u­al­ized will to act: to pro­duce, to con­sume and exchange). Is it, then, an acci­dent that hard­ly anyone—including architects—genuinely loves or desires what they seem to enact with such mas­tery? Each time, it seems, a mere metaphor of pow­er is enact­ed though one in great demand (an invest­ment towards a self and a mas­tered life that leaves no chance to liv­ing well for the vast major­i­ty of peo­ple). In this instance, metaphors, despite of what their name sug­gests, do not move us to ​“anoth­er bet­ter place”. They just pos­tu­late yet anoth­er place with­out a sub­ject. Veer­ing away from this par­a­digm of action (and the false expec­ta­tions of mas­tery it rel­ish­es) will prob­a­bly involve a recon­cep­tu­al­iza­tion of our social and polit­i­cal ecol­o­gy of act­ing, requir­ing some­thing as chal­leng­ing as ren­der­ing inop­er­a­tive the will to act out of/a mas­tery (where, by def­i­n­i­tion, every act is always an expro­pri­a­tion of another’s will to appropriate).

I would like to empha­size one side of this, the eth­i­cal side of such a para-ontol­ogy of poten­tial­i­ty where poten­tial­i­ty exists beside (para) actu­al­i­ty. The eth­i­cal focus does not derive from an attempt to reverse the onto­log­i­cal pri­or­i­ty of actu­al­i­ty. It is under­stand­able why poten­tial­i­ty can­not be thought as sep­a­rate from actu­al­i­ty, or to put it more gen­er­al­ly pow­er can­not be thought out­side of the real­i­ty it encoun­ters (as its end/telos). Aris­to­tle empha­sizes actu­al­ized being or exis­tence as the telos of poten­tial­i­ty, not in the sense of an exhaus­tion or final­i­ty, but in the sense of a ful­fil­ment: ​“for the func­tion­ing (ergon) is the end (telos), and the actu­al­i­ty (energheia) the func­tion­ing (ergon); and that is why the name ​“actu­al­i­ty” (energheia) is employed with respect to the func­tion­ing (ergon) and points towards the ful­fil­ment (ent­elechi­an)” (Meta­physics Theta, 1050a22–24; Makin, 2006). To ren­der this in anoth­er man­ner: if the actu­al­i­ty of some­thing is its end (in the sense of a telos rather than final­i­ty), the actu­al­i­ty of a poten­cy is in the activ­i­ty; and, in this way, the mean­ing of the very term ​“actu­al­i­ty” can only be derived from the joint ​“activ­i­ty” of the com­ing-to-be of a poten­cy in actu­al­i­ty, nev­er arriv­ing to the sense of a ​“com­plete or total reality”. 

It ought to be remem­bered, how­ev­er, that for the Greeks and Aris­to­tle in par­tic­u­lar, the telos or end is not the achieve­ment of what­ev­er end may be willed. For exam­ple, the par­tic­u­lar poten­tial­i­ty of con­tem­plat­ing (of rea­son­ing and the­o­ry), needs to find its way towards the vir­tu­ous telos of con­tem­plat­ing well. This may explain why con­tem­pla­tion as a way of life (ēthos) was revered by the Greeks. This means that con­tem­pla­tion to achieve its end, the con­tem­pla­tion of the good, needs to be ful­ly in use (rather than remain an abstract poten­tial, that is sus­pend­ed or deformed in a melan­cholic com­pro­mise with an actu­al­ized state). This brings us back to our prob­lem, as I hope I have indi­cat­ed: the dom­i­nant par­a­digm of mas­tery in action as an appro­pri­a­tion, rather than a use, is not acci­den­tal in the west­ern imag­i­nary of pow­er. To cri­tique, how­ev­er, the dom­i­nat­ing par­a­digm of sov­er­eign appro­pria­tive action is not to say that human beings are not the ani­mals that are char­ac­ter­ized by the need to act, in the sense of the exercise/use of their non-pre­de­ter­mined capac­i­ties or poten­tial­i­ties, or that they live any­where but in the realm of possibility. 

We are the species that when self-con­scious and reflec­tive realise that we do not have a des­tiny or pre­de­fined essence/end. The par­tic­u­lar kind of ​“action” (con­tem­pla­tion or the­o­ry) that I am point­ing to, how­ev­er, as shown in the Nico­machean Ethics of Aristotle’s, and which dif­fer­en­ti­ates this ani­mal from oth­ers, is not lan­guage or any oth­er pre­de­ter­mined char­ac­ter­is­tic, but ​“rea­son” in the sense of non-pre-deter­mined think­ing or self-reflec­tion: ​“Of that which has rea­son, (a) one part has rea­son in the sense that it may obey rea­son, (b) the oth­er part has it in the sense that it pos­sess­es rea­son or in the sense that it is think­ing” (1098a4–7; Apos­tle, 1980). While ​“nat­ur­al pow­ers”, like sen­sa­tions, exist as poten­tial­i­ties and are then used or expe­ri­enced, rea­son as a pow­er or dynamis is first used (prac­ticed) and poten­tial­ized in think­ing. This dif­fer­en­tial line, which marks human beings as much as it is marked by human beings, could be thought as the thresh­old with­in which what we can call our eth­i­cal ker­nel of expe­ri­ence takes its very place as a thresh­old between actu­al­i­ty and poten­cy (and it is this thresh­old that has been dis­placed by the dom­i­nant par­a­digm of the will to act in order to leave poten­cy behind). Could it be that act­ing can be rethought along the lines of com­mon use, rather than the will­ing of a mas­ter­ful act­ing and hav­ing? And could it be that this prac­tice of a cer­tain poten­tial­i­ty (in use)41 is what archi­tec­ture is called to nur­ture and ​“save” in the built environment? 

In this sense, a ​“just” archi­tec­ture, to bor­row a famil­iar phrase in crit­i­cal spa­tial stud­ies, does not exist in any oth­er man­ner than as the com­mon prac­tice of poten­tial­i­ty (it is not a des­tiny that can be infi­nite­ly post­poned in the form of a mere hope, or an ​“out­side” that can­not be expe­ri­enced in the form of anoth­er utopia). Com­mon use or prac­tice of it is the only way to attain it. Not attain­ing it, not prac­tic­ing it, is the pri­ma­ry goal of the dom­i­nant par­a­digm of action that dis­places the act’s poten­cy in the will, and makes of it an abstrac­tion, an expec­ta­tion that can­not meet its gen­uine ful­fil­ment, can­not be lived but be dis­placed in post­pone­ment. The dis­place­ment of the act in the will of its mas­ter is also a dis­place­ment of con­tem­pla­tion, but con­tem­pla­tion can­not ulti­mate­ly be fooled by the expe­ri­ence of the pseu­do-sen­so­r­i­al device of the will. The age-old invest­ment in willed or actu­alised action, in its set­up oppo­si­tion to its expo­sure in con­tem­pla­tion, does not ulti­mate­ly work (and it should be not­ed that energheia has been also trans­lat­ed as work, ergon). It is to a spa­tial regen­er­a­tion of the virtue of con­tem­pla­tion as the phe­nom­e­nal co-exis­tence of poten­tial­i­ty and actu­al­i­ty, that pro­gres­sive social­ly-engaged archi­tec­tur­al prac­tice could turn anew. 

It is now time to note, too, that Aris­to­tle con­ceived of a power’s dual onto­log­i­cal sta­tus (as poten­tial being and actu­al being; in Physics I) in order to resolve the very apo­r­ia of how to think of change or metabolē/transformation in and as being, which I hope now appears more fit­ting a ref­er­ence to archi­tec­tur­al the­o­ry as a spa­tial prac­tice, than per­haps at the start. The pri­ma­ry con­se­quence of this dis­cov­ery of Aristotle’s is that it ren­ders change (power/potency) itself a being (i.e. exis­tent, a way of being and a life that can be attained, that is formed and con­tin­ues to be form­ing through use, and not as a mere­ly abstract pos­si­bil­i­ty that could be pre­de­fined or reserved, ful­ly repressed or par­tial­ly erased). Archi­tec­ture can then speak of its con­tem­pla­tion and cre­ations in terms of two forms of equal­ly exis­tent being that are inter­de­pen­dent in the present (and, in this sense, thrown into inter­minable antag­o­nism of sorts between poten­tial­i­ty and actu­al­i­ty).42 How to think this antag­o­nism is not pre­de­ter­mined and that is the task, if that is the right word, of con­tem­pla­tion or the­o­ry in architecture.