Flows of Capitalism, Flows of Architecture: An Extended Exposition

Tim Gough’s article “Flows of Capitalism, Flows of Architecture” develops a sophisticated reworking of Marxist and Deleuzian concepts in order to reconceive architecture as an active, differential nexus of flows, rather than as a static production of forms or objects, and he does so with the explicit aim of clarifying how architecture, despite its intimate entanglement with money, can still mount an effective resistance to neoliberal capitalism.123 The core thesis of the paper is that Deleuze and Guattari’s transformation of Marx’s notion of surplus value into a general ontology of flows enables a non-essentialist, non-formalist understanding of architecture as a conjugation of heterogeneous flows—economic, political, material, social, subjective—whose surplus value of architecture is more primary and more versatile than the negative, exploitative surplus value characteristic of capitalism.423 By re-situating architectural practice in these terms, Gough argues against readings that either confine architecture to a stoic resignation before the overwhelming power of capital (as in certain interpretations of Tafuri and Aureli) or disperse it into a tactical field of disconnected micro-interventions (as in Sorkin), and equally against Douglas Spencer’s critique of “architectural Deleuzism” as merely the aestheticization and normalization of neoliberal spatial regimes.145 Instead, Gough suggests that once architecture is understood ontologically as a haecceity of flows—an intensive individuality that always “interplays” with money but is never reducible to it—architects can mobilize the same underlying flows that capitalism harnesses, but conjugate them in ways that interrupt, re-route, or contest capital’s apparent necessity, thereby opening genuine avenues for political action within and through architectural practice.65783

1. Situating Gough’s Argument: Architecture, Capital, and the Problem of Resistance

1.1 Architecture’s entanglement with money and neoliberalism

Gough begins from a widely recognized but seldom fully theorized predicament: architecture as a discipline and practice is deeply and structurally entangled with money, from the financing of projects and the commodification of land to the circulation of design services within global markets and the speculative logics of development.13 Neoliberal capitalism intensifies this entanglement by generalizing competition, privatization, and financialization across all spheres of social life, thereby transforming space into a direct instrument and expression of market rationality, which in turn shapes architectural briefs, procurement modes, and institutional frameworks.157 For architects concerned with social justice or emancipatory politics, this pervasive implication in the flows of capital often appears to leave little room for resistance: the discipline can seem condemned either to collaboration with neoliberal imperatives or to marginalization and withdrawal.

In surveying existing responses, Gough evokes two poles that dominate much recent critical discourse. On the one side stand positions associated with Manfredo Tafuri and, in contemporary form, Pier Vittorio Aureli, which can be summarized as advocating a kind of stoic or eremitic resignation.13 In these narratives, architecture is recognized as structurally bound to capital and the state; any attempt to imagine an autonomous architectural politics is deemed illusory, so that the only honest stance is either critical demystification or austere formal autonomy that refuses to participate in the spectacle of capitalist urbanization, while accepting that such autonomy cannot directly transform the broader socio-economic order.19 On the other side, Gough notes, stand positions such as those of Michael Sorkin that embrace a proliferation of local tactics, experimental practices, micropolitical interventions, and spatial subversions that operate within the cracks and margins of neoliberal city-making without claiming systemic transformation.17

Gough recognizes the value of both poles—the insistence on structural critique and the celebration of inventive tactics—yet he also identifies a shared limitation. Both tend to leave the fundamental ontology of architecture under-theorized, treating architecture either as a medium fatally captured by capital or as a field of tactical maneuvers operating in the shadow of an unchanged structural horizon.483 This, he suggests, leads to a kind of conceptual paralysis: if architecture is essentially subordinated to capitalism, resistance appears either impossible or relegated to marginal, symbolic gestures. If, conversely, tactics are all that remain, the question of architecture’s distinctive capacity to alter or re-route the flows on which capitalism depends risks being dissolved. Gough’s central aim is therefore to rethink the ontological status of architecture in such a way that its imbrication in money is acknowledged but not absolutized, and its potential for political agency is re-opened.

1.2 Jameson’s suggestion and the turn to Deleuze and Guattari

The pivotal move in Gough’s argument comes from a “hint” he attributes to the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson, whose work has repeatedly explored the relationship between architecture, capitalism, and cultural form.173 Jameson, notably in his reflections on postmodern architecture and late-capitalist culture, has suggested that Deleuze and Guattari’s reworking of Marxist categories, particularly in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, offers a way to understand capitalism not simply as an economic system but as a specific mode of organizing flows of desire, labor, money, and information.710 This perspective, Jameson intimates, could be used to reconceive the relation between architecture and capitalism at a more fundamental level, beyond the usual dichotomy of critique versus complicity, by interrogating the very ontological assumptions that underpin architectural thought.73

Gough seizes on this suggestion and makes it central to his project. He argues that Deleuze and Guattari’s transformation of Marx’s notion of surplus value into a broader, positive concept of surplus value of flow—a concept that names the way processes of differentiation and intensity generate “more” than the identities and structures that capture them—can be re-appropriated to rethink the ontology of architecture.4810 Instead of understanding surplus value purely in the economic sense of capitalist exploitation, Gough follows Deleuze and Guattari in seeing surplus value as a general feature of processes in the Real: flows of matter, energy, affects, signs, and social relations continually produce emergent values and differences that exceed their codified or commodified forms.810 Capitalism is, in this frame, a system that captures and harnesses these flows to convert their surplus into profit, but it does not generate the flows themselves; rather, it parasitizes a more fundamental ontological field of becomings and relations.8910

Jameson’s role here is less that of a direct source and more that of a catalyst: his suggestion that Deleuze and Guattari offer a “positive transformation” of Marx’s critique of capitalism encourages Gough to read Capitalism and Schizophrenia not as a rejection of Marxism but as an ontological extension of its insights.178 By aligning Marx’s analysis of surplus value with Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology of flows, Gough finds a conceptual framework in which architecture can be understood as a particular configuration of flows whose surplus value is not reducible to, and indeed precedes, capitalist surplus value. This framework becomes the basis for his rethinking of architecture’s relation to neoliberalism.

1.3 From resignation and tactics to an ontological reorientation

Having set out this theoretical horizon, Gough returns to the problem of architectural resistance with renewed tools. The question is no longer simply whether architecture can resist capitalism while being funded by it, or whether the discipline must accept its capture and retreat into critical commentary; instead, the question becomes how architecture participates in, conjugates, and transforms the flows—of money, labor, form, material, discourse, affect—that constitute the Real of social life, and how it can thereby redirect or recompose these flows in ways that contest their capitalist capture.468

Gough’s wager is that if architecture is reconceived as a differential and multiple reticulation of flows, rather than as the production of solid, essential forms, then the locus of political agency shifts from the opposition between autonomy and complicity to the manner in which architectural practice organizes and transforms these flows.4611 Within such an ontology-of-flows, architecture is always “in the middle,” to use a phrase Gough employs in related work: it is an intermediate, relational process that neither originates nor ends flows but connects, channels, and intensifies them.1110 This means that architecture can never position itself outside capitalism, but it also means that capitalism can never fully determine architecture’s operations, because the flows on which both depend are ontologically more fundamental than their particular capitalist or architectural articulations.893

Thus, instead of endorsing either resignation or a dispersion into disconnected tactics, Gough proposes an ontological reorientation in which architecture’s political potential consists in its capacity to conjugate flows differently, to produce a surplus value of architecture that opens spaces and subjectivities not anticipated by capitalist norms.463 This shift in perspective requires substantial theoretical work, and the bulk of the article is devoted to unpacking Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology of flows, clarifying the notion of surplus value as it applies to architecture, and responding to contemporary critiques of Deleuzian-inspired architectural theory, most notably Spencer’s charge of “architectural Deleuzism.”

2. Theoretical Foundations: Marx, Surplus Value, and Deleuze–Guattari’s Ontology of Flows

2.1 Marx’s surplus value and its conventional architectural reception

At the heart of Marx’s critique of capitalism lies the concept of surplus value, the difference between the value produced by labor and the value paid to labor as wages, which is appropriated by the capitalist as profit.148 In Marx’s account, surplus value is generated through the exploitation of labor-power within the social relations of production, and it is this expropriation that underpins the accumulation of capital and the reproduction of class domination.810 Within architectural theory, Marx’s concept has often been mobilized to highlight the role of buildings and urban spaces in reinforcing capitalist relations, whether by housing the means of production, structuring the circulation of commodities and workers, or materializing ideological representations of bourgeois power.793

In such readings, architecture tends to be seen as a superstructural expression of underlying economic forces, or as a medium through which surplus value is realized and expanded (for example, through rent extraction, property speculation, or the commodification of architectural design itself).17 This has fueled analyses of architecture’s complicity with capitalism, including Tafuri’s diagnosis of architecture’s “ideological function” and critiques of spectacular iconic buildings that serve as instruments of urban branding and financial speculation.19 While these analyses are important, they generally treat surplus value as exclusively a matter of economic exploitation and consider architecture primarily in terms of its contribution to profit-making and ideological legitimation.

Gough does not reject these insights but suggests that they are limited insofar as they leave untouched a deeper question: whether surplus value might also name a more general phenomenon of excess, differentiation, or creative emergence that is not inherently tied to capitalist exploitation.48 Marx himself, in focusing on capitalist social relations, does not develop such an ontological account, but Deleuze and Guattari, Gough argues, effectively extend his concept into a broader philosophy of flows and becomings.810 It is this extension that allows Gough to conceive an architectural surplus value that is not simply a matter of financial profit but is instead concerned with the differential conjunction of multiple flows.

2.2 Deleuze and Guattari: from capitalist surplus value to surplus value of flow

Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia reworks the Marxist apparatus by situating capitalism within a general ontology of flows in which social, libidinal, material, and semiotic processes are all understood as continuous, deterritorializing movements that are subsequently recoded and reterritorialized by various regimes, including but not limited to capitalism.8910 In this framework, the Real is not composed of discrete, stable entities but of dynamic flows and intensities that constantly produce differences; objects and subjects are secondary effects or “after-images” of these flows, stabilized by social, symbolic, and economic codes.810 Capitalism’s distinctive feature is that it both unleashes and constrains flows: it deterritorializes traditional social forms, opening unprecedented mobility and flexibility, yet it also imposes an abstract regime of value—money as a universal equivalent—that recodes these flows, converting their surplus into profit.910

Crucially for Gough, Deleuze and Guattari generalize surplus value beyond the economic domain, speaking of surplus value of flow and surplus value of code, among others, to emphasize that any process of intensive differentiation generates an excess that cannot be fully captured by the structures that attempt to regulate it.810 Surplus value, in this sense, is not primordially negative; it names the positive, productive dimension of flows—their capacity to yield more than the identities, roles, and commodities into which they are channeled. Capitalism harnesses this surplus, but the surplus itself belongs to a more fundamental ontology of becomings.

Gough underscores that in Deleuze and Guattari’s account, capitalism is effective not because it is a solid, coherent system, but because of its extraordinary capacity to harness and redirect flows in the service of profit.8910 The “massive effectiveness” of capitalism derives from its nimbleness and adaptability, its ability to plug into diverse flows (of labor, desire, knowledge, finance) and extract surplus value by converting them into exchangeable quantities.89 Yet this very dependence on flows implies that capitalism is never absolute: it cannot exist without the flows it captures, and those flows always exceed and escape its codes. The ontology of flows is thus conceptually prior to capitalism, and it is in relation to this ontology that Gough proposes to rethink architecture.

2.3 An ontology of flows: architecture and the Real

Gough takes Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology of flows as a general model for understanding the Real: reality is composed not of substances or essences but of relational systems, processes, and intensities that extend “all the way down, all the way across,” to borrow a phrase from contemporary systems-theoretical work influenced by Deleuze and Guattari.81210 Within this ontology, any given entity—be it a building, a city, or a subject—is a provisional stabilization of flows, a relational node in a larger network of becomings. Architecture, therefore, is not primarily a matter of static objects or forms; it is an ongoing conjunction and modulation of diverse flows that pass through and around the built environment.

Gough notes that discussions of architecture’s relation to capitalism often presuppose a naïve ontology in which architecture is imagined as a solid thing—an object that either reflects or resists external forces—without interrogating the ontological status of space, form, and matter themselves.683 He argues that this object-based view “does not stay true to the flowing reality of the world” and thus misrepresents the Real; it inadvertently reinforces capitalism’s tendency to treat the world as a collection of commodifiable objects rather than a field of processes and relations.68 By contrast, Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of flow and becoming offers a cogent refutation of this reification, insisting that architecture must be understood as a haecceity—an intensive, singular configuration of flows—rather than an inert object.61110

To adopt this ontology-of-flows is to acknowledge that architecture participates in the same Real as capitalism, but in a way that is not automatically determined by capitalist codes. The flows that constitute architecture include, among others, the flow of money, the flow of labor, the flow of materials, the flow of energy, the flow of bodies, the flow of images and meanings, and the flow of institutional decisions and regulations.4611 Each architectural project is a particular reticulation of these flows, an arrangement that produces a distinct surplus value of architecture: a difference in spatial experience, social relation, and material configuration that cannot be reduced to its economic cost or profit. It is this surplus value of architecture that Gough seeks to bring into focus, both conceptually and politically.

2.4 Surplus value of architecture: beyond economic exploitation

Drawing on the generalized concept of surplus value of flow, Gough proposes that architecture itself creates a surplus value beyond (or before) capitalist surplus value, and that this architectural surplus is a positive phenomenon that capitalism merely appropriates in one of its negative instances.423 When an architectural work brings together disparate flows—labor, capital, materials, regulations, cultural meanings—it produces a singular spatial and social configuration whose effectiveness, intensity, and experiential richness are not equivalent to the sum of its inputs, nor to the profit it might generate.46 This surplus value of architecture resides in the difference, the haecceity, that the work introduces into the world: a new pattern of relations, affordances, and perceptions that alters the way flows circulate and bodies inhabit space.611

Capitalism may exploit this surplus by commodifying it, branding it, or using it to attract investment and tourism, but such exploitation is secondary to the ontological fact that the architectural work organizes and transforms flows in a manner that exceeds any particular economic calculation.483 Gough’s insistence on this point is crucial for his political argument: if architectural surplus value is prior to capitalist surplus value, then architecture has an irreducible capacity to generate differences that are not defined by profit-making, even if they are entangled with it. This means that architectural practice can potentially conjugate flows in ways that displace or contest capitalist codings, rather than simply reinforcing them.

In conceptual terms, Gough’s reformulation of surplus value allows him to reframe architecture’s relation to capitalism from one of external determination to one of internal struggle over the organization and direction of flows. Capitalism, in its neoliberal form, seeks to capture architectural surplus value by aligning design decisions with market-driven imperatives—flexible space for adaptable leasing, iconic form for global branding, and controlled circulation for consumption optimization.579 Yet the flows that architecture necessarily engages—flows of labor, community, climatic conditions, embodied experience, institutional power—are not exhausted by these imperatives, and architects can choose to emphasize, intensify, or re-route different flows to produce alternative forms of surplus value, such as collective use-value, social solidarity, ecological resilience, or aesthetic intensity that resists commodification.4611

This conceptual move sets the stage for Gough’s engagement with critiques of Deleuzian-inspired architectural theory, particularly Douglas Spencer’s analysis of “architectural Deleuzism,” which he sees as misrecognizing the political potential of an ontology-of-flows by conflating it with the aestheticization of neoliberal flexibility.

3. Neoliberalism, “Architectural Deleuzism,” and Gough’s Response

3.1 Douglas Spencer’s critique of architectural Deleuzism

Douglas Spencer’s essay “Architectural Deleuzism: Neoliberal space, control and the ‘univer-city’” has become a key reference in debates about the role of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy in contemporary architectural theory.58 Spencer argues that a significant strand of recent architectural practice and discourse has embraced Deleuzian notions of fluidity, smooth space, complexity, and emergence in ways that dovetail with neoliberal agendas of flexibility, innovation, and control, particularly in projects for universities and creative economies.58 In his view, “architectural Deleuzism” tends to celebrate open-ended, adaptable spaces and dynamic forms that are ostensibly emancipatory but in practice facilitate intensified monitoring, modulation, and market-driven reconfiguration, thus reinforcing control rather than liberation.5

Spencer further contends that the appropriation of Deleuzian concepts by architects often strips them of their critical and political edge, reducing them to stylistic tropes or rationales for managerial strategies that valorize constant change and responsiveness.58 Smooth spaces become arenas for perpetual rebranding; multiplicity becomes a code word for diversified consumption; deterritorialization becomes a euphemism for precarity and instability. In this context, he suggests, Deleuzian theory risks becoming complicit with neoliberalism, providing a pseudo-radical vocabulary that legitimizes exploitative and controlling spatial regimes.

Gough is acutely aware of Spencer’s critique and takes it seriously, acknowledging that many architectural invocations of Deleuze and Guattari have indeed operated at the level of imagery or rhetoric, aligning too neatly with neoliberal aspirations.458 However, he argues that Spencer’s analysis, while incisive, ultimately targets a restricted and superficial use of Deleuzian concepts rather than the deeper ontology of flows and surplus value that Deleuze and Guattari articulate.48 In conflating the notion of flow with neoliberal flexibility, Spencer, Gough suggests, risks dismissing a powerful ontological framework that could, if properly understood, support rather than undermine architectural resistance to capitalism.

3.2 Neoliberal space, control, and the ontology of flows

To clarify this point, Gough distinguishes between two levels of engagement with Deleuze and Guattari. On the first level, which Spencer predominantly analyzes, architects adopt a vocabulary of flows, smoothness, networks, and complexity to describe and justify design strategies that align with neoliberal demands for adaptability, innovation, and user-centered environments.58 Here, “flows” often refer simply to circulation patterns or programmatic flexibility, and “smooth space” is equated with open-plan layouts and blurred boundaries between functions. This level of engagement indeed lends itself to the critique of “architectural Deleuzism” as a style that masks intensifying control.

On the second level, however, Deleuze and Guattari offer a rigorous ontology in which flows are not mere circulation diagrams but the fundamental constituents of the Real, and in which surplus value, deterritorialization, and haecceity name structural features of processes that precede and exceed neoliberal instrumentalization.8910 Gough argues that it is this second level that matters for a serious rethinking of architecture’s relation to capitalism. If one stops at the first level, one inevitably concludes that Deleuzian imagery has become a tool of control. But if one engages the second level, one finds resources for contesting and transforming the very flows on which neoliberal control depends.

Gough emphasizes that in an ontology-of-flows, control is itself a particular modulation of flows, not an external imposition on static entities.81210 Neoliberal regimes, including those governing university campuses and creative clusters, operate by organizing flows of people, information, capital, and affect in ways that optimize productivity and profitability, often through spatial strategies that appear open and flexible but are structured by pervasive metrics and surveillance.58 Recognizing this, however, does not imply that flows are inherently neoliberal; rather, it shows that flows can be conjugated in multiple ways, some of which reinforce control, others of which disrupt or reroute it. Architecture, as a reticulation of flows, can be designed to intensify control or to thicken and complexify relational patterns that escape commodification.

3.3 Gough’s non-essentialist, non-formalist architecture

To respond to Spencer’s criticism and to differentiate his own position from “architectural Deleuzism” in the pejorative sense, Gough insists on a non-essentialist and non-formalist conception of architecture that takes the ontology of flows seriously.483 Non-essentialist here means that architecture is not defined by any fixed essence—such as building, shelter, form, or function—but by its role in conjugating flows in the Real; non-formalist means that architecture is not primarily a matter of autonomous forms, divorced from social and economic relations, but rather of relational configurations that involve both form and the flows with which form interacts.465

In this conception, the architect’s proper intention is not to create a static building or a self-sufficient formal object but to create a difference, an individual or haecceity, a particular surplus value of architecture that consists of a synthesis or conjunction in which the subject and object are not pre-determined.611 The architect works “in the middle,” shaping intermediate spaces where multiple flows meet and transform one another, including political and economic flows that appear dominated by capitalism.611 To design is to decide how these flows are tied together, intensified, diverted, or made to resonate, and this decision has ontological and political consequences.

By adopting this non-essentialist, non-formalist stance, Gough argues, one can avoid both the resignation that follows from treating architecture as a mere instrument of capital and the superficiality that follows from mimicking Deleuzian slogans about fluidity without interrogating their ontological basis.483 Architecture becomes a site of struggle over the organization of flows, a place where capital’s codes are confronted by alternative configurations that may open up other subjectivities and solidarities. Spencer’s critique, on this reading, identifies a real problem—the assimilation of Deleuzian imagery into neoliberal design—but does not exhaust the possibilities of a genuinely Deleuzian rethinking of architecture, which Gough seeks to advance.

3.4 Effective political action within architecture

Gough’s most provocative claim, in light of Spencer’s argument, is that once architecture is reconceived as a reticulation of flows with its own surplus value, effective political action is entirely feasible within the broad discipline of architecture.43 This feasibility does not depend on architecture achieving autonomy from capital in the sense of complete independence from funding, markets, or institutions, which he judges impossible and unnecessary. Rather, it depends on architects recognizing and engaging the multiplicity of flows that constitute their practice, including but not limited to money, and making deliberate choices about how these flows are conjugated.

Political action in architecture, for Gough, may involve focusing on flows of labor—conditions of work on site, participatory processes, community involvement—and organizing them in ways that resist exploitation and precarity, even within capitalist projects.51311 It may involve emphasizing flows of ecological processes—water, energy, biodiversity—and designing in ways that challenge extractivist logics by foregrounding regeneration and mutual dependence.913 It may involve intensifying flows of publicness and encounter—shared spaces, accessible thresholds, collective facilities—in environments otherwise structured for privatized consumption, thereby introducing surplus values of commonality that exceed their commodified uses.463

The key point is that because architecture is always intertwined with money, political action will never take the form of a pure exteriority; yet because money is only one flow among many, its dominance is not inevitable, and architects can conjugate other flows in ways that call into question capitalism’s apparent necessity.578 This is not, Gough insists, a “gradualist capitulation,” as if one simply made minor adjustments within an unchangeable system; rather, it is a strategic harnessing of underlying flows—the same flows from which capitalism draws its strength—but oriented toward different values and futures.783 In this sense, architecture’s entanglement with capital becomes not a reason for resignation but the terrain on which resistance must be articulated.

4. Architecture as Haecceity: Flows, Subject–Object, and Surplus Value

4.1 Haecceity and the refusal of static ontology

One of the most important conceptual tools Gough borrows from Deleuze and Guattari is the notion of haecceity, a term they use to describe singularities, events, or individuations that cannot be reduced to a stable subject or object.61110 A haecceity is a “thisness,” an intensive configuration of time, space, and relation—such as a fog, a day, a relationship—that is defined not by intrinsic properties but by the pattern of connections and differences it embodies. For Deleuze and Guattari, haecceities exemplify the ontology of flows: they show that the Real consists in varying degrees of intensity and relation rather than in discrete substances.10

Gough applies this concept to architecture, arguing that an architectural work should be understood as a haecceity, a singular configuration of flows in which subject and object are not pre-given but emerge through relational patterns.611 This means that architecture is not primarily a physical object with predetermined users (subjects) and functions (objects) but an ongoing process of composition and inhabitation that constantly produces and reconfigures subjects and objects. The spatial arrangements, material properties, and symbolic references of a building act on bodies, perceptions, and practices, while being acted upon by them; the subjects and objects of architecture are co-constituted in these flows.

By refusing a static ontology that separates subject and object, form and use, Gough challenges familiar architectural categories that frame design as the creation of objects for subjects, or forms for functions. This traditional framework, he argues, fails to stay true to the “flowing reality of the world” and thereby misrepresents the Real.68 It encourages designs that stabilize identities and roles—user groups, programmatic functions, market segments—rather than opening spaces for new relations and subjectivities to emerge. In doing so, it aligns with capitalism’s tendency to treat individuals and things as pre-formed vessels into which flows of capital and commodities are poured, reinforcing reified identities and exploitable roles.69

4.2 Conjugating flows: architecture as synthesis

If architecture is a haecceity, then its essence lies not in being but in conjugation—the synthesis of flows into a particular surplus value.4611 Gough describes architecture as conjugating “all sorts of things (‘flows’, in the terminology used here)” to create a surplus value beyond or before capitalist surplus value.42 These flows include money, labor, material, technology, discourse, law, climate, and bodily movement, among others, and architecture’s role is to knot them together in ways that define spatial and social configurations.46

For example, a public library project conjugates flows of municipal funding, professional expertise, citizen demand, knowledge circulation, and digital infrastructures; the resulting architectural haecceity—its spatial layout, atmospheres, accessibility, and institutional practices—produces a surplus value that takes the form of intensified public learning, encounter, and memory.67 Capitalism may seek to monetize aspects of this surplus, by turning services into commodities or, in neoliberal regimes, by promoting entrepreneurial uses of the space. Yet the architectural configuration itself may simultaneously sustain non-commodified forms of sociality and knowledge-sharing, depending on how designers have conjugated flows of access, visibility, and spatial hierarchy.

Gough’s emphasis on synthesis highlights the active, creative dimension of architecture: architects are not merely mediators of pre-existing flows but active composers who decide which flows are allowed to enter a project, at what intensities, and in what relational patterns.4611 These decisions determine the surplus value of architecture in both ontological and political senses. A design that conjugates flows of labor in exploitative ways—using precarious workers, excluding community voices—will produce an architectural haecceity that reinforces capitalist relations, even if its forms are aesthetically innovative. Conversely, a design that consciously reorganizes labor flows—through cooperative construction, participatory design, or equitable contracts—may generate a surplus value of solidarity and empowerment that challenges capitalist norms, even if the building is materially modest.

4.3 Undercutting subject–object formation: spaces of resistance

Gough’s notion of architecture as haecceity extends to a political proposal: by undercutting the formation of pre-determined subjects and objects, architecture can create spaces for “something other than these pre-formed vessels into which capitalism, above all, pours us.”69 In other words, architectural design can interrupt the channels through which capitalism shapes subjects—consumers, entrepreneurs, human capital—and objects—commodities, assets, instruments of control—by configuring flows differently, thereby enabling alternative forms of life.

This undercutting need not take the form of overt symbolic gestures or oppositional iconography. Instead, it can occur at the level of everyday spatial arrangements and relational patterns. A housing project that refuses the segregation of units by income category and instead interlaces diverse social and economic flows may undermine capitalist tendencies toward stratification and gated communities.713 A university campus that prioritizes informal, non-commercial gathering spaces over branded retail environments may weaken the hold of neoliberal subjectivities centered on consumption and competition.57 A workplace that introduces porous boundaries between work and community, facilitating shared childcare, collective decision-making, or public events, may disrupt the flow of labor-time as purely commodified input.

By focusing on flows and haecceities rather than static objects, Gough invites architects to consider resistance in terms of reconfiguring relational patterns rather than merely erecting alternative forms. The goal is to design spaces in which the subject–object relations presupposed by capitalist regimes—worker-machine, consumer-product, student-institution—are complicated, multiplied, or transformed, giving rise to new compositions that cannot be easily integrated into profit-driven schemas.61110 Architecture, in this sense, becomes a practice of ontological and political experimentation within the Real, using flows as its medium.

4.4 Money as one flow among many

A recurring theme in Gough’s article is that while architecture inevitably “interplays with the flow of money,” this does not exhaust its ontology or rule out political action.573 Money is certainly a powerful flow: it conditions which projects are built, who commissions them, how resources are allocated, and how spaces are maintained. In neoliberal capitalism, the abstraction of value into monetary quantities extends this conditioning into almost every sphere, converting even public goods into calculable investments.79

Yet, Gough insists, within an ontology-of-flows, money is one flow among an indefinite number of flows that constitute the Real of architecture.5811 Other flows—labor, form, material, affect, discourse, ecology—are not reducible to monetary valuation, even if capitalism attempts to monetize them. The consideration of form itself, and the autonomy of form emphasized by Aureli, is one such flow; the flow of labor, highlighted by William Morris and Marxist critiques of production, is another; the flow of ecological processes like water and energy, explored in environmental design, is yet another.579

By recognizing money as one flow among many, architects can begin to see political action as a matter of accenting, re-routing, or intensifying non-monetary flows within projects, thereby counter-balancing or contesting monetary imperatives.583 A design might accept the necessity of working within a given budget but still reconfigure labor relations, environmental impacts, and social uses in ways that do not simply maximize profit. In doing so, architecture participates in harnessing the same underlying flows that capitalism exploits but directs their surplus value toward different ends—collective wellbeing, ecological repair, or aesthetic experience that resists commodification.

This approach does not deny the constraints imposed by money, nor does it claim that architecture can simply transcend capitalism through idealistic gestures. Rather, it situates architectural practice within the Real of flows and insists that even under capitalist conditions, the way flows are conjugated remains open to contestation. Money’s dominance is contingent, not ontologically necessary, and architecture can contribute to denaturalizing this dominance by foregrounding other flows in its designs.

5. Labour, Form, and the Multiplicity of Architectural Flows

5.1 William Morris, labor, and the value of work

Toward the conclusion of his article, Gough revisits William Morris’s insistence that “there can be no great architecture without consideration of the flow of labour,” aligning this claim with his own ontology-of-flows perspective.514 Morris, a nineteenth-century designer, writer, and socialist, argued that the quality of art and architecture is inseparable from the conditions under which labor is performed and the social relations that surround production.14 For him, the degradation of work under industrial capitalism—the reduction of craft to mechanical repetition, the alienation of workers from their products—led directly to the degradation of architectural and artistic quality, because the creative surplus value of labor was stifled.

Gough reads Morris’s emphasis on labor flow as identifying one crucial dimension of architecture’s Real: the processes, rhythms, and relations of work that go into constructing and maintaining buildings.514 In an ontology-of-flows, labor is not merely an input into production but a series of embodied, temporal, and social flows—skills, collaborations, efforts, negotiations—that shape the haecceity of architecture. The way labor is organized—hierarchically or cooperatively, precariously or securely, inclusively or exploitatively—contributes to the surplus value of architecture by influencing how flows of knowledge, care, and community are embedded in the built environment.4611

Under neoliberal capitalism, the flow of labor is often subjected to fragmentation, outsourcing, and casualization, leading to precarious working conditions in construction and design industries alike.513 Gough suggests that political action in architecture must therefore attend to labor flows, seeking to conjugate them in more equitable and empowering ways. This might involve supporting unionization, designing procurement processes that reward fair labor practices, or engaging communities in participatory design, thereby redistributing control over architectural decisions.51311 Such actions alter the surplus value of architecture by embedding relations of solidarity and collective agency in the work itself, challenging capitalist exploitation at the level of flows rather than merely at the level of symbolic representation.

5.2 Pier Vittorio Aureli, autonomy of form, and formal flows

Gough juxtaposes Morris’s focus on labor with Pier Vittorio Aureli’s insistence that “there can be no great architecture without the autonomy of form,” noting that these two positions represent seemingly extreme poles of architectural thought.59 Aureli, drawing on Italian Marxist debates and political philosophy, has argued for an architecture of formal autonomy, in which rigorous, self-limiting geometries and compositional disciplines resist absorption into capitalist spectacle and functionalist pragmatism.9 For Aureli, the autonomy of form is a critical stance that withdraws from the endless proliferation of images and flexible spaces demanded by neoliberal urbanism, asserting an architectural language grounded in collective, political determination rather than market-driven variation.

At first glance, Morris’s emphasis on labor relations and Aureli’s emphasis on formal autonomy seem to point in divergent directions: one toward social processes, the other toward abstract form. Gough, however, argues that in an ontology-of-flows, these are not opposed concepts but rather two among an indefinite number of flows that make up the Real of architecture.5811 The flow of labor and the flow of form both contribute to architectural haecceities; they are different dimensions of the surplus value of architecture, each with its own implications for resistance and complicity.

Form itself, Gough suggests, should be understood as a flow or a nonpersonal hylè—an element or ether on which things “take” as after-effects of difference.812 The process of formal composition is a flow: lines, surfaces, volumes, proportions, and rhythms are arranged in patterns that resonate with other flows (social, ecological, economic). To treat form as autonomous is to prioritize certain formal flows, making them relatively independent of direct functional or economic demands, but this does not remove them from the Real; instead, it foregrounds their capacity to shape relations in ways that may resist or complicate capitalist codings.59

By integrating Morris and Aureli into his ontology-of-flows, Gough shows that labor and form are both crucial to architectural resistance. Attending to labor flows ensures that the production of architecture does not reproduce exploitation; attending to formal flows ensures that the expressive and spatial qualities of architecture do not simply mirror neoliberal imperatives. Political action involves conjugating both labor and form flows, along with many others, in ways that create surplus values of solidarity, autonomy, and meaning that exceed capitalist valuations.4511

5.3 Multiplicity of flows: money, labor, form, ecology, and beyond

Gough’s repeated emphasis on the plurality of flows underscores that architecture is constituted by an indefinite multiplicity of dimensions, none of which can be reduced to or fully subsumed by another.458 Money, labor, form, ecological processes, regulatory frameworks, cultural narratives, technological systems, and bodily movements all flow through architectural projects, interacting and transforming one another. The Real of architecture is this multi-flow field, and the surplus value of architecture emerges from the way these flows are conjugated.

The multiplicity of flows means that resistance cannot be located in any single dimension. Focusing exclusively on money risks ignoring the ways labor, form, and ecology can be politicized; focusing exclusively on labor may neglect how formal and spatial arrangements shape subjectivities; focusing exclusively on form may overlook the material and social conditions of production and use.5811 For Gough, the ontology-of-flows is valuable precisely because it obliges architects and theorists to consider the interplay of multiple flows in each project and to recognize that political action involves reconfiguring this interplay in a holistic manner.

For instance, in city-regional transportation planning, flows of capital investment, commuter patterns, land use, and governance interact to produce metropolitan architectures.13 A critical, flow-oriented approach would examine how these flows are mobilized, whose interests they serve, and how alternative configurations might redistribute benefits and burdens more justly.13 Similarly, in curatorial practice, Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophies have been used to think about immanence and the transmission of forces in art, emphasizing the flow of affects, meanings, and encounters through exhibitions.6 Gough’s architectural ontology intersects with these perspectives, suggesting that architecture and curatorial work both operate by modulating flows, and that both can be sites of resistance when they redirect flows away from commodification and control toward collective experimentation.

5.4 Conjugating flows against capitalist necessity

The ultimate political implication of Gough’s multiplicity of flows is that capitalism’s apparent necessity—its claim to be the only viable way of organizing social and economic life—is revealed as false when one recognizes the underlying ontology of flows.789 Capitalism does not create the flows; it harnesses them. Its effectiveness derives not from its solidity but from its capacity to capture surplus value by organizing flows of labor, money, and desire in particular ways.8910 If architects accept a solid, essentialist ontology in which capitalism appears as a monolithic structure that determines all outcomes, they will be inclined to either resign or make minor tactical interventions. But if they acknowledge that the Real consists of flows and that capitalist organization is one contingent, contestable way of conjugating them, they can begin to design architectures that call into question capitalist necessity.

Gough insists that this calling into question does not involve trying to block flows through solid walls or essentialist categories; such strategies would misrepresent the Real and fail to grasp capitalism’s flexibility.78 Instead, architects are “called by this philosophy to acknowledge the effectiveness of flows and to conjugate them in a manner which calls into question the false necessity and the operation of capitalism.”78 This may involve creating spaces that foreground non-monetary values, facilitating collective use, mutual aid, ecological regeneration, or democratic decision-making, thereby generating surplus values that do not translate neatly into profit.4611 It may involve collaborating with movements and institutions committed to alternative economic models—cooperatives, commons-based initiatives, solidarity economies—and designing architectures that support their flows rather than those of corporate capital.1312

In all cases, the ontology-of-flows gives architects a conceptual basis for understanding their work not as a mere reflection of economic structures but as an active participation in the Real, capable of redirecting flows at multiple scales. The political challenge is to undertake this participation consciously and critically, recognizing both the constraints and the possibilities opened by architecture’s position “in the middle.”

6. Implications for Architectural Theory and Practice

6.1 Rethinking autonomy and realism in architectural theory

Gough’s article has significant implications for long-standing debates about autonomy and realism in architectural theory. Autonomy has often been framed as the degree to which architecture can operate according to its own internal logics—formal, typological, linguistic—rather than being determined by external forces such as economics, politics, or technology.9 Realism, conversely, has been understood as the insistence that architecture cannot escape these external forces and must therefore be analyzed primarily in terms of its social and economic conditions.

By redefining architecture as a haecceity of flows with its own surplus value, Gough complicates this dichotomy. On the one hand, he rejects any notion of autonomy that imagines architecture as separate from the flows of money, labor, and politics; these flows are integral to the Real of architecture and cannot be bracketed.458 On the other hand, he also rejects a crude realism that reduces architecture to an effect or instrument of economic structures, ignoring the ontological specificity of architectural conjugations of flows. Architecture has an irreducible surplus value that is not exhausted by its role in capital accumulation.

In this sense, Gough proposes a hyper-relational theory of architecture, akin to broader systems and relational philosophies that argue that systems and relations go “all the way down, all the way across.”12 Autonomy is reinterpreted not as separation from the Real but as a particular way of organizing flows—an emphasis on formal or spatial flows that resists certain external codings. Realism is reinterpreted not as an admission of defeat before capital but as an acknowledgment of architecture’s immersion in the Real of flows, which includes but is not limited to economic processes.4812

This reconceptualization invites architectural theorists to develop more nuanced accounts of projects and practices, examining how they conjugate flows at multiple levels—formal, social, economic, ecological—and how these conjugations contribute to or resist capitalist dynamics. It discourages simplistic condemnations or celebrations and encourages close, relational analysis.

6.2 Practice “in the middle”: design, planning, and curating flows

For practitioners, Gough’s ontology-of-flows suggests a shift in how design, planning, and curating are conceived. Rather than seeing design as the production of forms to satisfy programmatic requirements within given budgets, architects are encouraged to see themselves as working “in the middle,” shaping the flows that constitute architectural haecceities.611 This involves recognizing, mapping, and engaging the diverse flows at stake in each project—money, labor, materials, users, regulations, ecological processes—and making deliberate decisions about how they are conjugated.

In urban planning, for example, flows of transportation, land value, demographic change, and governance intersect to produce metropolitan patterns.13 A flow-oriented planner might ask how these flows can be reorganized to enhance social equity and ecological sustainability, perhaps by prioritizing public transit over private cars, affordable housing over luxury development, and community governance over corporate control.1312 Architecture, in this context, provides the spatial and material means to implement such reconfigurations, designing infrastructures and environments that support alternative flows.

In curatorial practice, Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophies have influenced approaches that emphasize immanence and the transmission of forces—curators think about exhibitions as fields of affective and conceptual flows rather than collections of discrete objects.6 Gough’s perspective resonates with this, suggesting that architectural settings for exhibitions and cultural events can be designed to intensify certain flows—dialogue, reflection, collective memory—while minimizing others—spectacle, commodification. The surplus value of architecture here lies in its capacity to shape the relational and temporal patterns through which art is encountered, thus influencing its political and social effects.

6.3 Beyond tactics and totalizing critique: a middle path for resistance

One of Gough’s most important contributions is to articulate a middle path between two common strategies of resistance: totalizing critique, which diagnoses architecture’s complicity with capitalism and often concludes that resistance is impossible, and dispersed tactics, which celebrate local interventions but sometimes lack a coherent theoretical framework.145 The ontology-of-flows allows him to acknowledge the validity of both perspectives while situating them within a broader account of architecture’s position in the Real.

Totalizing critique, exemplified by Tafuri and certain Marxist analyses, is valuable insofar as it reveals the structural entanglements of architecture with capital and the state, preventing naïve claims of pure autonomy.19 However, when coupled with an object-based ontology that treats architecture as a static instrument, it tends to produce resignation, as if all flows are already captured by capital. Gough’s flow-based ontology shows that capture is always partial and that flows can be reconfigured, thereby reopening the question of resistance.8910

Dispersed tactics, exemplified by Sorkin’s advocacy of small-scale interventions and micropolitical maneuvers, are valuable insofar as they demonstrate the possibility of local transformations and improvisations within constrained conditions.17 However, without an ontology-of-flows, such tactics may appear as isolated, lacking a conceptual connection to broader structural dynamics. Gough’s account situates tactics within the Real, showing how they conjugate flows differently and how multiple local reconfigurations may cumulatively challenge capitalist codings, especially when they attend to labor, form, and ecology flows in systematic ways.4813

Thus, the middle path Gough proposes is not a compromise but a reorientation: resistance is understood as the ongoing practice of conjugating flows in architectures that generate surplus values incompatible with capitalist norms, undertaken with clear awareness of structural constraints but also of ontological possibilities. Architects are neither heroic saviors nor powerless victims; they are participants in a field of flows who can, with care and critical thought, direct some flows toward emancipatory ends.

6.4 Limitations and open questions

While Gough’s article offers a powerful framework, it also raises questions and potential limitations that warrant further discussion. One concern is the risk of abstraction: an ontology-of-flows, if not grounded in concrete case studies and empirical analysis, may remain at a high level of generality, making it difficult to translate into specific design decisions.1312 Gough gestures toward examples—labor conditions, formal autonomy, public space—but does not extensively elaborate particular projects. Future work could develop his insights through detailed examinations of buildings and urban spaces that exemplify emancipatory conjugations of flows, demonstrating how theory can inform practice.

Another question concerns agency and scale. Flows operate at multiple scales—from micro-level bodily movements to macro-level financial systems—and architecture’s capacity to influence them varies. While architects can readily shape flows of circulation and perception within a building, their influence over global capital flows or national labor laws is more indirect.1312 Gough acknowledges this but suggests that even local reconfigurations matter; still, further work is needed to articulate how architectural actions interact with political, legal, and economic struggles at larger scales.

Finally, there is the question of disciplinarity. Gough speaks of “the broad discipline of architecture,” which includes design, theory, planning, and related practices.43 Yet flows cross disciplinary boundaries: political organizing, ecological activism, and technological innovation all shape architectural haecceities. A fully realized flow-based politics of architecture would thus require collaboration across fields, and the role of architects within such collaborations remains to be specified.

Despite these open questions, Gough’s contribution lies in offering a conceptual basis for thinking about architecture’s relation to capitalism that avoids both naive optimism and paralyzing pessimism, positioning the discipline within an ontology-of-flows that highlights its capacity to generate surplus values of resistance.

7. Conclusion: Architecture, Flows, and the Possibility of Resistance

Tim Gough’s “Flows of Capitalism, Flows of Architecture” confronts a central problem of contemporary architectural theory: how can a discipline so tightly intertwined with money resist neoliberal capitalism without either retreating into formalist autonomy or dissolving into disconnected tactics?143 His answer is neither a prescriptive program nor a utopian blueprint but an ontological reframing grounded in Deleuze and Guattari’s transformation of Marxist concepts. By generalizing surplus value into a surplus value of flow and situating capitalism within an ontology-of-flows, Gough shows that architecture can be understood as a differential, multiple reticulation of flows whose surplus value of architecture is more fundamental than capitalist surplus value.483

In this framework, architecture is a haecceity—a singular configuration of flows of money, labor, form, material, discourse, ecology, and subjectivity—rather than a static object or an autonomous form.61110 The architect’s task is to conjugate these flows, creating a surplus value of architecture that consists in difference, intensity, and new relational patterns. Capitalism seeks to harness this surplus, converting it into profit, but its capture is partial and contingent; the flows themselves belong to the Real and can be organized otherwise.8910

Gough responds to Spencer’s critique of “architectural Deleuzism” by distinguishing between superficial uses of Deleuzian imagery, which may indeed align with neoliberal control, and deeper engagement with the ontology-of-flows, which offers resources for resistance.458 He insists on a non-essentialist, non-formalist conception of architecture, in which neither labor nor form can claim exclusive primacy, and where money is one flow among many.458 Political action becomes feasible within architecture insofar as architects recognize their position in the middle of flows and deliberately conjugate them in ways that undercut the formation of capitalist subjects and objects, opening spaces for alternative forms of life.6911

Throughout the article, Gough weaves together insights from Marx, Morris, Aureli, Jameson, Spencer, and Deleuze–Guattari, integrating critiques of labor exploitation, formal autonomy, neoliberal space, and postmodern cultural logic into a coherent ontology-of-flows.157149 The result is a theoretical stance that neither denies architecture’s entanglement with capital nor accepts it as fate. Instead, architecture is seen as harnessing, to better effect, the underlying flows from which capitalism draws its strength, but for ends that contest capitalist necessity.783

For architectural theory, this means rethinking autonomy and realism as relational concepts rather than as opposites, recognizing that architecture’s specificity lies in its mode of conjugating flows. For practice, it means designing, planning, and curating with an acute awareness of money, labor, form, and ecology flows, seeking to generate surplus values of solidarity, commonality, and ecological care that do not collapse into profit.4613 For politics, it means situating architectural actions within broader struggles to reconfigure flows at multiple scales, acknowledging both constraints and possibilities.

The strength of Gough’s contribution lies in its refusal to offer easy answers. Resistance is not guaranteed; capitalism remains massively effective in harnessing flows.89 Yet by revealing that this effectiveness depends on ontological conditions that capitalism does not own, Gough opens conceptual space for architecture to act otherwise. In the end, “Flows of Capitalism, Flows of Architecture” invites architects and theorists to think with flows, to see buildings and cities not as solid givens but as dynamic haecceities, and to remember that within these flows, the surplus value of architecture can still become a medium for contesting and transforming the capitalist present.463

Footnotes

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  7. www.azuremagazine.com 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

  8. spatialregister.wordpress.com 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

  9. www.susana-ventura.com 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

  10. deleuze.cla.purdue.edu 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

  11. www.academia.edu 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

  12. journals.open.tudelft.nl 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  13. www.academia.edu 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

  14. www.rosenbergesellier.it 2 3 4

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