Transversality
Benjamin TrittTransversality (or transversalité) comprises a series of philosophical investigations originating in the 1950's through the work of Jean Paul Sartre, later developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in the 1970's. Transversality has become increasingly relevant in recent years in the fields of architecture, transdisciplinary design and various media-related artistic practices.
(The following is an excerpt from Susan Kelly, lecturer at Goldsmiths)
A movement or mode of transversality explicitly sets out to de-territorialise the disciplines, fields and institutions it works across. Recently, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, as well as critics such as Gerald Raunig have used the term to describe new terrains of open co-operation between different activist, artistic, social and political practices. For Raunig in particular, these modes of co-operation are not forms of 'solidarity' between actors or areas of 'inter-disciplinarity' between fields, but rather signal a non-representational and additive form of alliance. The co-ordinating conjunction 'and' is not an inclusion mechanism, a random stringing together, or a series of contextual filiations. It is rather a modality of the between that produces temporary alliances between practices and 'fields': forms of alliance that are appropriate to their collective actions. Crucially, they cannot leave intact the fields that they have worked across. The transversal is an organisational form that does not separate the how and the why of collective activities. Guattari intended the work of transversality to rupture inherited forms of political organisation that create institutional objects or what he called 'deathly organisational reproduction'. And so,transversality cannot be seen as 'there' as a given. It is not a form into which one steps, but is rather continuously constituted through events, acts of alliance and temporary organisation. Since the transversal is in a permanent condition of taking place and cannot be defined as a positive thing or entity, but rather a production that retains organisational structures in a state of becoming, it is also crucially linked to production – the production of subjectivity and what Guattari calls self-engendering practices that seek to create their own signifiers and systems of value.
As such, transversal practices are often not recognisable as traditional activist campaigns or 'art practices' and are disinterested in debates that impose what Sarat Maharaj has called 'nominal closure' on their activities. They are also often involved in intervening not only in the structures of artistic representation but also the institutional structures that produce and reproduce objects and encounters.
Now, much of what goes on within the practices named above involves bringing different people together, creating sometimes temporary, sometimes not, social spaces for interaction....