Paolo Ferrari

Plan of a City (of the third Millennium) in-absent Doubling:

dematerialisations and rematerialisations in-Absence

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a.       The city of the Third Millennium is a city in-Doubling (and) in-absence, a place which is abstract  and concrete at the same time. A specific place for experiential and mental coupling to the new dominion expressed by the higher activities of Homo sapiens s. in the direction of Homo abstractus.

This dominion or asystemic level is characterised by a lower resistance which manifests itself in the interaction of the concrete-material elements – the objects, the concrete things - with the affective and understanding activities of Homo s. who is in a phase of transformation towards a more complex inclination towards abstraction (ab-trahere) ―> H. abstractus.

Such a propensity-capacity will not limit itself to being a quality of the activity just on an intellectual and understanding level, that is a straightforward conceptual-abstract elaboration as it is showing itself in the present evolutionary stage; the stage of abstraction, a stage sine materia, will have instead propensity to extend over the entire universe of the thinking being, from res cogitans to res extensa, comprehending in a abstract whole – sine materia – the universe consisting of the observer and the observed. Such a transformation-interaction with the dematerialization of the concrete object does not only concern what we are already experiencing today in the field of high technologies and of computer science – where we can see the transformation of the  concrete object-thing (res) into algorythms and virtual realities (objects without matter) – but the mind (and the body) will have a propensity to apprehend and elaborate the object in a particular state: it will be apprehended, thought and experienced within the difference from itself (in abstract difference). The object will not be experienced and elaborated as a material being which one has to abstract later on, but as a being which has already been simultaneously abstracted (drawn from itself): empty object (non filling and rich in high conductivity) in a close relation to the thought thinking it, at whose basis (further in-becoming) there is a constant parameter – constant in-A – which is equal to degree zero or a degree (equal to) nothing in-Absence (in-difference from itself), inclined to dematerialise and to dematerialise itself (to produce itself in-difference) simultaneous with the manifestation of the objectivisation (of itself) in the external world, as a concrete and real body.

b.       The citizens of this new city will therefore be subjects who will be (further) in-transformation; persons who, belonging to a new somatomental condition – as a result of their transformation ―> H. abstractus - are ready to vehicle the whole quantity of pieces of information, with several foci and several directions, which are in part those of the today’s mental-technological stage, into a more and more complex space-time which coordinates the system ―> asystem and releases the object-thing-world from its reiterative identification bound to a mirroring fixity of itself (the object becomes equal to abstract nothing).
These new conditions are the catalysts of  new ethical requirements

c.         [The condition of a lack of fixity and of a (pre-)disposition to difference would be desirable, among other things, already at the present stage of the history of Homo sapiens s. who, surprised and bewildered by the development of technologies and computer-science (with little tactile matter), cannot find a proper answer, intelligibility and ethical direction because of his somatopsychic condition of animal origin to which he still is excessively linked].

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b.         The city is a temporal-spatial entity in a constant (degree zero) transformation: it is a transformation which is not linked to the direction of a concrete time; it is a phenomenon emerging from a time which, losing its own trace (abstract time), becomes in-alterity difference from itself  = temporality in-difference.

c.         Such a temporality shows its inclination, in its further manifestation (time without fixity and direction), to include (the dimension in-)death: it is time in-death, that is time capable  (inclusive) of (abstract) death.
It is time accepting – including in its own transformation – its own dying in-alterity.
[The time that dies at every instant should actually be present time which hasn’t yet assumed inclusive awareness (time cannot die of itself)].

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Constant sub-systemic condensations and rarefactions (the elements constituiting the city) in a unitary subsumption are now guided through digital processes – thus being more technological-mechanical – and now through the positioning and repositioning of the unities at-stake (analogue mode) by that abstract community which interacts with the environment in synchronic and diachronic terms, thus giving rise to the asystemic place-city of which  it is a constant participating creator: the community has a constant propensity for (abstract) coupling to the process of transformation and it tunes to it and further develops, according to self-organising modalities of the (complex) system, with several foci and directions, in-transformation just like a multi-layered network. The community also assumes the guide of this process, aiming at having the whole as empty as possible, this being its main quality: all this is achieved through particular relationships between the (architectural) objects at stake, their volumes, their forms, their colours and signs, their reciprocal influences with a view to constituting  a field which is open to that particular (a-)communication made of actions-objects-affects of an abstract body-mind; this entity has cut its umbilical cord (as well as any concrete fixity) and has definitely detached itself from  what has been the natural (evolutionary) field, yet without yielding to the cause-effect reiteration of the machine. What prevails is difference: difference from itself of each object and of each subject in their mutual interaction, as they have acquired a (degree zero) liberty because they no longer have to defend and preserve at all costs their own identity (the identity of their own mental and corporal scheme-role-power).

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(Through all this) it is given way to the realisation of an utopia (which is abstract = drawn from itself) as expression-experimentation of a place-time without the natural-animal materiality, in the direction of an entity which is rich in the absence of itself, although qualifying as a concrete being.
Ceasing does not consist (that much) in the evident matter being taken away; it (rather) consists in the capacity of expressing the complex and abstract (sine materia) coupling to a (simultaneously becoming) ultramaterial object: all this takes place in-the-absence of that resistance  (to sensoriality and perception) of an old and superseded (animal and thingly) kind. The (architectural) object, the ethical city expresses the time and places of this coupling which is prepared to allow the object-thing, which is poor in transformative thinking, to pass (through) rather than to fix it: the new stage bodes everlasting mutation, as it is supported by a level rich in (absolute) difference, which is equal to a nothing of a new kind, generating further abstract becoming, and passed through by the constant of relational mutation in-A, which is a principle paradox of not-fixity, of (varying) difference from itself.

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