Haecceity

Definition

Haecceity — Duns Scotus's haecceitas, "thisness" — is the Deleuze-Guattarian term for a mode of individuation utterly different from that of a subject, object or substance: an individuation "consisting entirely of relations of movement and rest," proper to multiplicities, events and weathers rather than to things. In A Thousand Plateaus it names the individuation of a season, a hour, a wind — "Bernard and the school of fish" (Woolf's Bernard designating "an individuality designating a multiplicity") — the element of existence on which individuality depends when that individuality is not the form of a thing but the composition of speeds and slownesses, movements and rests. Haecceities have no determinate form: they are "indeterminate" — and this is precisely their ontological dignity, not a deficiency. On the plane of consistency (vs. the plane of organisation — forms and subjects), haecceities are what populate the world when subjects and objects are dissolved into their processual compositions. See assemblage for the machinic assemblage that individuates as a haecceity, and smooth-and-striated-space for the spatial politics of the distinction.

The concept's architectural career in this wiki runs through Tim Gough: architecture is "not essential (not Alberti's ideational, Laugier's shelter, Pevsner's aesthetic object, or form per se) but a multiplicity of flows — economic, material, thought, memory, history, technology, political. 'Architecture is just such a haecceity.'" And through Mark Taylor's 2001 essay, the concept acquires its interior-design register — the strongest claim in the wiki that the interior itself is a haecceity: "Could interior be thought of as haecceity – an element of existence on which individuality depends?" — with the corollary that explains a canonical absence: "Perhaps the classic architectural theorists… could not write the interior because it lacks determination: like haecceities they are indeterminate."

Key Thinkers

• Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari — the concept's source (A Thousand Plateaus, 1980): haecceity as the mode of individuation of multiplicities — movements and rests, speeds and slownesses — against subject/object form; "Bernard and the school of fish" as Taylor's exemplary citation (p. 252).
• Tim Gough — the concept's architectural ontologist: bread-and-butter architecture as machinic assemblage and haecceity; "Conjugate the flows"; architecture as "a mode of individuation utterly different from the solidity of a subject, object or substance" (2015, 2018).
• Mark Taylor — the concept's interior-design application: the interior thought as haecceity — "an element of existence on which individuality depends" — and the indeterminacy thesis ("the interior… lacks determination: like haecceities they are indeterminate") as the reason the canonical theorists never wrote the interior (2001/2006).
• Duns Scotus — the medieval source of the term (haecceitas, the "thisness" that individuates); taken up and transformed by Deleuze into the individuation of multiplicities (via Gough; via assemblage).

Related Concepts

• Assemblage — the concept's carrier: the machinic assemblage (agencement) is "the entire assemblage in its individuated aggregate" — haecceity is what an assemblage is when individuated.
• Becoming-Interior — the process-form of Taylor's haecceity-thesis: "room becomes interior in a molecular or atomic sense and… becoming-interior is ever-changing" — the interior as haecceity is always becoming, never determined.
• Smooth and Striated Space — the spatial politics the haecceity inhabits: smooth space as the plane of haecceities (multiplicities, nomadology) against striated space's forms and measures.
• Deterritorialisation — the operation that releases haecceities: Deleuze and Guattari's "attempt to displace prevailing centrisms, unities and strata" (Taylor's summary) is the displacement that lets haecceities appear.
• Interiority — the cluster Taylor's haecceity-register joins: interiority rethought as indeterminate, molecular, ever-changing rather than sheltered or fabricated.
• Event Space — the evental kin: "it becomes events, 'in assemblages that are inseparable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life'" (Taylor quoting D&G) — haecceity as the ontological floor of the event-space claim.
• Everyday Architecture — the register where Gough's haecceity-architecture operates: bread-and-butter architecture as flow-multiplicity, not form.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Architecture and Interior: A Roam of One's Own (Taylor 2001/2006) — the concept's interior-design statement: "Could interior be thought of as haecceity – an element of existence on which individuality depends?" (p. 340); Woolf's 'Bernard' read through D&G as "an individuality designating a multiplicity: 'Bernard and the school of fish'" (p. 340); the indeterminacy thesis — "the classic architectural theorists… could not write the interior because it lacks determination: like haecceities they are indeterminate" (p. 343); and the essay's positive definition in the same Deleuzian vocabulary — the interior "becomes events, 'in assemblages that are inseparable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life'" (p. 343).
• Architecture is Always in the Middle (Gough 2015) — the concept's fullest architectural statement: bread-and-butter architecture as machinic assemblage, haecceity, alloplastic stratum; plane of consistency vs. plane of organisation.
• Flows of Capitalism, Flows of Architecture (Gough 2018) — architecture as a multiplicity of flows and an "haecceity": "Architecture is just such a haecceity… a mode of individuation utterly different from the solidity of a subject, object or substance"; the "surplus value of a code."
• Home: Territory and Identity (Wise 2000/2006) — the haecceity-case in motion, and the home as temporal individuation: "The bass-heavy rhythm pounding from a car driving by shapes the space of the street, changes the character of that space… The resonant space thus created is a milieu" (p. 391) — the car-and-its-rhythm as the individuation by speeds and rests (Wise's example is kin to A Thousand Plateaus' own vehicle-and-weather cases, though the term is not used); the territory's individuation made temporal: "the living of the territory (a temporalization of the space)" (p. 394); and the street's layered milieus ("quiet suburban, congested downtown") that "reassert themselves after it leaves" (p. 392) — individuations of speeds and rests, not of substances, exactly the mode "different from that of a person, subject, thing, or substance." Where Taylor's haecceity is the interior and Gough's is architecture, Wise's is the territory lived in time — the home as a composition of movements, habits and radiances rather than a bounded form. See milieu, home, territory.

Open Questions

• Taylor's haecceity-thesis makes indeterminacy the interior's ontological condition — and the canon's silence about the interior its proof. But the wiki also carries registers that determine the interior (Hillier & Hanson's gamma-analysis, Vanucci's envelope-difference). Is haecceity a competing definition of the interior or its floor condition — the indeterminacy every determined interior presupposes before it is determined?
• If the interior "lacks determination," can interior design be a discipline with a knowledge base at all — or does the haecceity thesis align interior design with Brooker's uncodifiability thesis (dialectics-of-appropriation): a discipline whose object resists exactly the determination the founding charge demanded?
• Gough's haecceity is architecture's; Taylor's is the interior's. Is the interior then architecture's haecceity (the flow-relation architecture individuates from the inside) — or a different haecceity entirely, with different movements and rests (the room and anger, the door and coming and going, the threshold and pausing)?