1In the wake of an expansion of the usage of the term decolonization in academic institutions, pedagogical and public discourses, in 2012 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang published a text that soon became a fundamental reference (Tuck, Yang, 2012). It was a direct attack and a straightforward call to “remind readers what is unsettling about decolonization” and to not mistake, reduce, depotentiate it with a simplistic call to social justice and reconciliation. The risk they identified was the one of a “metaphorization of decolonization” as it “makes possible a set of evasions, or ‘settler moves to innocence’, that problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity” (ibid.: 1). With a series of moves of what they called “unsettling innocence” (ibid.: 4), Tuck and Yang reject it becoming a metaphor and call us to think decolonisation “not as an ‘and’” but as “an elsewhere” (ibid.: 36).

2Despite my interests in the decolonial approach, I’m not developing it here. Rather, I wish to flag up the same risk of metaphorization that I sensed emerging in the Burn-Out, “Ardeth” Issue #08. Forcing the architectural project to confront burn-out as concept, as affect, as condition and as practice was a promising idea. Maybe, like all ideas born in captivity, it lacks both some fresh air and vital space to breathe, to mature and, especially, to take some critical distance from the already usual regressive adoption of it in the design discourse since the pandemic. The fatigue is evident in putting together a cohesive and critical series of thoughts on the present condition without allowing other languages and alternative vocabularies to emerge. I had the impression that burn-out was metaphorized, as it was not fully able to suggest an experimental “otherwise” as Tuck and Yang specify. It was limited to a naïve, reactive and, somehow conventional, discussion on the role of the architectural and urban project.

3Why this? What makes such an affective shared condition unable to provoke fertile architectural design thoughts? What makes architectural thoughts so incapable of thinking the exhaustion beyond confined environments, cultural perimeters and conventional references? I would argue that any attempt to theorise and debate the current condition and its architectonics cannot do so without a serious engagement with a central register: the precariousness of life as a constituent element of design.
As usual this “Ardeth” issue is introduced by two different editorials framing a sort of controcanto in style and perspective that shapes the tone and connects the different contributions. This time the format is not different but the two editorials drive towards very different directions. Both miss the point, metaphorizing the burn-out but making different metaphorical slippages. In one editorial the equation of burn-out with exhaustion, (or better, with the slippage from the original interest in exhaustion intended as “loss, consumption and bewilderment affecting subjects and their relationships”) escalated from hard science to social science to embrace things as tiredness, incapacities and, more generically, as inability. It even embraced the detachment of and the disciplinary paralysis caused by a global condition of “uncertainty and unpredictability” rethinking the project in the paradoxical dimension of the project, which exists in its “future” dimension even when the future might not be given the conditions to exist.

4In the other editorial, burn out is equated with the fatigue to cope, to adapt and keep going and its concurrent space to endure and develop as if nothing has happened in a business-as-usual manner. In this way “our fatigue at the end of a day of endless virtual meetings is mirrored by the exhaustion we are inflicting on the planet”. This calls for “responsibility and care” in the form “public infrastructures”. It is a fatigue that can be cured, ameliorated with a different engagement, a different form of infrastructure, and involves a common sense notion of fatigue that is “the intolerance of any effort” making the burn out a “generative point of departure to rethink the role of bodies, institutions and infrastructures towards non-exploitative structures and relations”. While the first editorial sees a void at the centre of the contributions, where the different contributions gravitate, “withdrawing” from engaging with the central question of burn-out, the second editorial puts at the centre the call for the construction of infrastructures of care that are able to confront the inability to cope and endure, making even more evident that “inability (exhaustion) and unwillingness (withdrawal) constitute two inseparable parts of the burnout phenomenon” (Schaufeli, Taris, 2005: 259).

5What seems to me to be happening is that in both ways of reading the issue – despite the quality and the reflections provided by each contribution – together they are unable to touch on the exhaustion of the project. The converging ecological and sanitary crises have challenged architecture and urbanism. Functionalist thinking, however, including digital and calculative tools and conservative paths on biophilic, appeals to smart-green-sustainability and renewed multi-use and multi-purpose spaces. This calls for spatial strategies and care that are simplified and romanticised in a return to nature, to responsibility, to proximity and to the messianic salvation of architecture: platforms, schools, nature are not new declinations of the project, either in their use, space, assemblages.

6Despite its recent popularization in architectural discourses (Power, Mee, 2020; Fitz et al., 2019) the rhetoric of care, and infrastructures of care, while certainly needed, appears to be instrumentalised as it misses “horizon of chaos, exhaustion and tendential extinction” (Berardi, 2021: 10). The idea of infrastructures is not in itself wrong, nor new, as it entails operative possibility, inherent to any spatial dispositive. It doesn’t centre the problem, however. It remains physical, linear, simple: it doesn’t problematize, it doesn’t relaunch, it doesn’t put life at the centre in its biopolitical dimension, in the new biopolitical configuration of the Anthropocene. The key question is whether there can be design without a minimum of stability. Today, everything is in motion: everything is in a state of flux, without any certainties. This imposes a constant process of problematising what we are, what we want and what we can.

7We are grappling with an exhausted present that undermines all certainties. A kind of radical precariousness of existence where disorientation is endemic. We move forward in uncertainty and, of this uncertainty, we must make our certainty. Incipient thoughts and spaces, never realised, always to be initiated and unfolded.

8With the small space available here, I will try to reflect on such a missing target in relation to this “Ardeth” issue, suggesting an alternative reading for a critical reflection on the urban and architectural project around the notion of precariousness as an ontological condition. There is a need to reclaim the centrality of exhaustion as generative term and attempting to rectify what I perceived to be reading the whole issue, the refusal to couple the pandemic affective perception of burn-out with the abyss of the anthropogenic condition or the incapacity to move beyond the singular (intended as disciplinary as well as personal) to the planetary (intended as multiplicity and geographical). To achieve this I would suggest a return to the work of Deleuze on exhaustion – completely ignored beyond its metaphorical use and the need to reframe the question of life, its protection as the central feature of the architectural and urban debate.

Recentring the exhaustion foregrounding brutalism and catastrophe: precariousness

9Achille Mbembe argues that the spread of Covid-19 appears as a continuation of the war modernity wages against life, humanity being already threatened with suffocation, with lack of air, before the virus (Mbembe, 2021a). A planetary condition that is “a time without guarantees nor promises, a time obsessed with its own end” (Mbembe, 2021b: 249). For him the planetary exhaustion is called brutalism. Brutalism is described as “a contemporary process whereby “power is henceforth constituted, expressed, reconfigured, acts and reproduces itself as a geomorphic force. How so? Through processes that include fracturing and fissurin’, emptying vessels, drilling, and expelling organic matter, in a word, by what I term depletion” (Mbembe, 2020: 9-10) and a more general production of “frontier-bodies” (Mbembe, 2021a: 60) and “choking subjects” (Tazzioli, 2021). Mbembe identifies three of such megaprocesses: (I) the impending ecological crisis, (II) techno-molecular forms of colonialism and, (III) the dialectic between entanglement and separation (Mbembe, 2021c).

10Both the ecological crisis and techno-molecular practices are framed by the consolidation of corporate sovereignty, which has exceeded the creation of markets and information transfer while producing new social metabolisms through a form of necrocapitalism, whereby both life and death are turned into waste through forms of depletion, such as extraction and digestion. Finance capital, in a ubiquitous, digital and extractive guise, “is a magnetic field with the power to affect the Earth’s climate. It has made a world of itself: a hallucinatory phenomenon of planetary dimensions” (ibid.: 16). The second megaprocess is comprising the effects of techno-molecular colonialism. Hence, technologies “are being granted the powers of reproduction and independent teleonomic purpose” as “all societies are organised according to the same principle – the computational” (ibid.: 19). Mbembe argues that the computational process is the core principle of “speed regimes” and of the infrastructures and qualities that allow such regimes to turn “all substances into quantities” (ibid.: 20), between entanglements and separation. In speed regimes life is tantamount to movement and, thus, impediments on speed are limitations on life. The third process, the dialectic relationship between entanglements and separation, is defined by the perceived risk posed by proximity and exposure on the one hand, and the practices of partitioning space to slow-down and impede people with carceral and violent ends, on the other. Such “borderization”, leads to “the creation of a segmented planet of multiple speed regimes” (ibid.: 21). Practices of borderization and related biometric technologies are selective in separating those who are insured from those who are not. These latter, uninsured bodies are “bioavailable”, and in “[…] a relation of radical inequivalence” (ibid.: 23) with the insured bodies, following a bifurcation between life and bodies.

11Such an overwhelming reality of the terrestrial condition stirs and disrupts the ground of human existence. Terrestrial beings cease to be a stable and passive background for human activities to the point they threaten human existence itself. Chakrabarty claims that “with the crisis of anthropogenic climate change coinciding with multiple other crises of planetary proportions – of resources, finance, and food, not to speak of frequent weather-related human disasters” (Chakrabarty, 2021), both the future of humanities and the one of earth are threaten. Franco “Bifo” Berardi calls this “a society that is on the brink of an environmental, financial, but also psychic collapse” and a “landscape of anxiety” (Berardi, 2021: 16).

12With this scenario, the project manifests the inconsistency of life and its inherent contradiction: the immanence of death in life. It gives itself to life, to protect it, to improve it, to cure it, even though it knows it must die and therefore fail. It imagines a future that escapes like the world itself, incapable at the same time of excess. Today’s alternative, beyond the rhetoric, does not lie in the possibility of reversing course or securing ourselves on the edge of the abyss. This is now too late. We are left only with the awareness that today it is a matter, perhaps, of succeeding in slowing down the catastrophe by opting for different gradations of ecological hell to its extreme consequences: the end of the species. Current events disturb and paralyze us because they show scientific projections that scan the future as an evolutionary dead end: an absence of future. The future comes to us from the IPCC scenarios or in any Netflix dystopic series, as well as with the vanguard of the scientific community: in the comfortable techno-green salvation and the consolation of the community and the reuse of spaces.

13Bedour Alagraa in The Interminable Catastrophe (Offshootjournal, 2021) writes against the claim that we need to simply believe science, or have better science, or better mechanics to address the problem of our earth’s ecology. To develop an adequate grammar, Alagraa locates in Black life post-Middle passage the historical and epistemological point that helps to rephrase catastrophe with the constitutive element of “cruel mathematics” a massification of all aspects of the enslaved African’s life/death cycle. As opposed to biopolitics’ emphasis on control over prescribing forms of life, cruel mathematics imposes, and then normalizes, a violent foundation for our relationship to our planet, placing certain lives as a threat to the planet’s future and others as stewards or guardians of the planet.

14Franco “Bifo” Berardi in The Third Unconscious. The Psycho sphere and the viral Age characterize the current situation of catastrophe as “the end of human history, which is clearly unfolding before our eyes; the ongoing disintegration of the neoliberal model and the imminent danger of the techno-totalitarian rearrangement of capitalism and the return of death to the scene of philosophical discourse, after its long denial by modernity” (Berardi, 2021: 31). To paraphrase Antonio Moresco, something enormous is happening (Moresco, 2018): ours are the first human generations to live to the blink of an extinction. To survive, we must return to all living things – including the biosphere – the space and energy they need, which reminds Mbembe again: “in these conditions, one of the possibilities is to worry about the death of others, from a distance. Another is to become immediately aware of one’s own putrescibility, to have to live in proximity to one’s own death, to contemplate it as a real possibility” (Mbembe, 2021b: 252).

15This seems to be the real point of burn out: the exhaustion of a life in constituent proximity with death. In this, the architectural project cannot be simplified to a requalification, a functionalist infrastructure to extend life, to renaturalise it, to open to a natural system. Rather we must reframe its biopolitical essence as a question of inhabitation. For Agamben, questioning inhabitation from such spaces means revealing “the very possibility of living and inhabiting is indissolubly intertwined with death” (Agamben, 2020a: 11).

16We can maybe, audaciously, suggest that the project today should be less consolatory and seen more as “a creative process through which they withdraw from death in order to escort it [...] And yet if human communities are not destined, as so many today seem to suggest, for simple disintegration, if human life is an inhabitable life, men will necessarily have to try to rediscover and reinvent a way of inhabiting their city, their land” (ibid.: 11-12).

17What seems to be important to think, therefore, is an inhabiting life, which we know to mean “to be in what one holds dearest, one’s own and at the same time common. That is, to be and to enjoy, one’s own nature. It is certainly a way of resisting, of staying, of preventing oneself from being dragged elsewhere, but also,” Agamben continues, “a way we have to protect (sheltering) life from its devastating fury” (ibid.: 11-12).

18The inadequacy of the project disciplines to read and to understand the present is evident. Design faces an epistemic debt towards the intersectionality – and therefore the complex articulation of causes, effects and spatial figures – of the great planetary changes and of technological hegemony just because they are anachronisms that distort the image of the present and are incapable of any prognostic thought if not the constant production of simplified, momentary, conceptually impoverished utopian models. Design thoughts are linked to the privilege of position, negation of otherness, terraplatism and negationism of various kinds that paint an exhausted world, to be cured, rehabilitated and mended, but always centered on an anthropos so powerful as to signify a geological era – the Anthropocene.

From infrastructure of care to infrastructures of life1

20However, the shift to biopolitics is not to define a contemporary variant, but to turn analytical attention to heterogeneous practices which, through different rationalities and technologies of governability, coexist and intertwine. The insurance of life is connected to an imperative of death we should remember from reading Foucault. To re-centre the spatial nexus between politics and life means, first, to pluralise the forms of life, opening in multiple directions; to multiply the investigations into contemporary modes of protection and exclusion and of empowerment and impairment of life. It calls for a political - and therefore critical – excess: moving “beyond biopolitics” as a condition of government of life and death and shifting its margins. Perhaps breaking that short-circuit that was well highlighted by Esposito: “not only is death co-present with life, but it seems to spring from it, from a sort of vital excess which, beyond a certain limit, appears to overturn into its opposite” (Esposito, 2020: 39-40). In this mixture, ambivalence, dark side and biopolitics cannot be read as “all on one side of the productivity of life, without considering its possible tanatopolitical returns, and on the other in a zone of indistinction between life and death” (ibid.: 43). Therefore, it cannot be read only as additions, securitisations, containments, protections, but also bans, exclusions, subtractions, violent inactions such as those imposed in the government of migrants at the European borders with the complicity of the humanitarian system, which does not favour but at the same time does not let migrants die, making them simply hypermobile, with no possibility of permanence.

21Directly addressing the neglect, the dis-ability of life, forces a new perspective of life/death that shapes most discussions of biopolitics beyond conceptual frames such as naked life, slow death, necropolitics that presume death as the opposite of life. This allows the ambivalences of extracting value from otherwise disposable populations to become visible, and to liberate and set in motion “viscous deviations” digressions and shortcuts. It reveals the obscurities that authorise violence as a vital layer in the realms of modern sovereignty “whether found in the current practices of torture in American and foreign prisons, or in the haunting histories of the Holocaust, slavery and colonialism” (Weheliye, 2014) or on the borders of Europe. The viscosity of life, rather than its mapping in the sheer variety of abjection, capable of offering flavours and textures found in imprisoned lives. However, the present conditions that we have all witnessed globally and their architecture and infrastructural projects, redevelopment, architectural narratives, etc have long-term consequences in terms of making or unmaking inequalities of life, constructing literally a number of “zone of abandonment” (Biehl, 2005).

22What seems to appear maybe is a signal to describe the world as it is structured, made, organised, or, as Keller Easterling would say, infra-structured. But it is also something that explains it and helps to think about the future of life, as Mbembe suggested it is a central issue for our century. A Story of Perpetual Planetary Conflict, close to the one that Guinard, Latour and Lin used to title the 2020 Taipei Biennial: You and I Don’t Live on the Same Planet (Guinard, Lin, Latour, 2020), where several planets collide. The planetarium includes: planet globalization, constructed around the promise of modernity in its world-making violence with its massive rise in inequality, neoliberalism and unlimited growth; planet security, where people betrayed by the ideals and the violence of globalization, ask for a piece of land - a fenced or a bordered haven to live in, protected from others; planet escape, where a limited number of privileged people invest hyper-techno fix security solutions or leave the earth. For all the others excluded by the modernizing project, the privileged full-security-bordered-land or the escape idealized-communities-of-equals, the only option is to be in an uninhabitable territory, that the curators call the “terrestrial planet” (ibid.).

23This metaphor of planetary conflict is maybe illustrating a form of violence that is simultaneously destructive and constructive: not an interruption but rather a continuous process that traverses the political history of the planet itself. The landscape emerging in the terrestrial planet is uninhabitable, not because of the conditions and limited ability for people to reside, to shelter or to find a refuge but, rather, because habitation is not only probable or possible but is just a matter of life. A life that by nature is on the verge of its dissipation. The very possibility of living and inhabiting has always been inextricably intertwined with the promise of death, destruction, disappearance, displacement and eviction that is regularly and invariably fulfilled. However, the inhabitable is also a continuous creative process through which inhabitants withdraw from death in order to escort it, constituting an industrious community capable of building, maintaining and repairing its living space. The project here becomes a tenacious struggle to resist the violent subtractions of the future, of space, of possibilities, through creating space and forms of life.

24As Anna Tsing says, precariousness is a life without the promise of stability (Tsing, 2021: 24). Living in the burning house, in the burning world and in its relative impossibility of breathing and of redemption, in the refusal of any messianic adjustment, correction or redemption, implies not only analyzing the processes of privatization, oppression, extractivism but at the same time to refuse its immunity dimension. To inhabit not as having, disposing, infrastructuring, organizing, but as our way of being in the world consists of weaving relationships, incorporations, knotting, taking distance “[...] inhabiting is something vacillating […]. One inhabits in a continuous ‘failure’, in a ruin of plans, of ideologies, of possibilities, in a perpetual dysfunctionality” (ibid.).

25Late capitalist imperialism, misogyny, racism, climate change, all the debilitating conditions of planetary life, have foregrounded the pandemic and its urban imaginaries. Precarity takes differently gendered, historied, embodied, geopolitical manifestations and challenges the project in its being burned-out, incapable to imagine dehumanization, the inhumane, the inhospitable: “precarity is first and foremost the form of life in the age of crisis as art of government”, Dario Gentili reminds us (Gentili, 2021: 11).

26A living and a life, therefore, is not qualified by norms, conventions, dispositivs but is delineated by forces of friction. Paraphrasing Anna Tsing, who follows matsutake mushrooms, following Lifelines in devastated landscapes “allows one to explore the ruins in which we all now inhabit” opening “the possibility of coexistence within environmental disturbances” and revealing a “tangible example of collaborative survival (Tsing, 2021: 27), and “ecologies born of perturbations in which many species coexist without harmony or conquest” (ibid.: 29). Precariousness is the condition in which we are vulnerable to others. A precarious world is a world without teleology. Indeterminacy is frightening, but thinking through precariousness shows that indeterminacy makes life possible (ibid.: 48). When reaffirmed through the dimension of precariousness, the spaces of the project and of simply living become defined by the “strength of what they unite as much as of what they disperse” (ibid.: 79) and by the indetermination between ineffability and presence.

Returning to Deleuze

The climate crisis makes large parts of the planet uninhabitable; the patina of colonialism and extractivism as well as the health crisis displace bodies in their own ways in physical space, in social space, in the space of control and limitation of freedom; they shape forms of protection, spaces of immunity across scales, and immobility around secured borders. While around us is disintegrating at such a vertiginous speed that any descriptions of its physical, social, economic, or political makeup yield to the image of the “burning house” Giorgio Agamben used as the title of one of its recent books (Agamben, 2020b: 8).

27We know this all too well and we named it exhaustion. However, as Michael Marder suggested, the world is “also building itself up through this disintegration” shifting from “the clarity of geopolitics, broadly understood as ‘the politics of the earth’, to the explosive ambiguity of pyropolitics, or ‘the politics of fire’” (Marder, 2015). Exhaustion, extinction, proximity of death, ashes are all evident in front of us but the response of the architectural and urban project is the same: “aimed at relaunching economic growth at all costs, we will enter a spiral of violence, racism and war. Instead, we must accept the reality of exhaustion and face reality on egalitarian terms: share frugally what knowledge, solidarity and technology can provide. Redistribution of wealth egalitarianism, frugality: this is the recipe for survival, and possibly for a new pleasurable social life” (Berardi, 2021: 193).

28Why not go back and find some refuge in the Deleuzian concept of exhaustion? Deleuze treats the term in the Powers of the False, a chapter in Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1986/1989) and in The Exhausted (1992/1995), an afterword to a Samuel Beckett book, published in 2015 in Italian with a commentary by Giorgio Agamben. While not directly mentioned in any of the two editorials, Deleuze was echoed in the notion of burn-out. He describes exhaustion as distinct from mere tiredness: “Exhausted [L’èpuisé] is a whole lot more than tired [le fatigué]” (Deleuze, 1995: 3). To be tired is to no longer be able to realize one’s projects, plans, or intentions, but to be exhausted, by contrast, is to be rid of the possible itself: “The tired has only exhausted realization, while the exhausted exhausts all of the possible. The tired can no longer realize, but the exhausted can no longer possibilitate [ne peut plus possibiliser]” (ibid.).

29As Ginevra Bompiani reminds: “exhaustion is not an essay about the end, but about another Deleuzian concept: the penultimate, penultimity” (Bompiani, 2015: 6). She continues, “like the drunkard aspires to the penultimate last drink (that of satiety) and not the last (that of the loss of consciousness), so the damned of Beckett are penultimate creatures, that the event, theatrical or narrative, will bring to an end. Exhausting is a space, is a politics of space as a minimal assurance concerning an emergent creativity: “It is, rather, the end, the end of all possibility, that teaches us that we have Deleuze and made it, that we are about to make the image” (ibid.: 6-7). A figure of the exhausted, of the one who exhausts all possibilities by creating: a figure in which extreme nothingness is reversed into a creative process. What finally produces the end, is a creative process, which Deleuze calls: the making of an image.

30The image is precisely what precedes that produced that triggers the end. This interpretation, beyond the fatigue, seems to be illuminating a different reflection on architecture and design that, in the current production, with the current vocabulary, are shaping forms and images that produce the end. Architecture and the urban project are exhausted because they have exhausted every possibility by creating itself and the world, where an extreme nothingness is reversed in a creative process. The project is not capable of an alternative imagination. It means resisting atrophy, flattening the form, delegation to certain expertise and mode of practice. But it also means multiplying possible visions, imaginable lands, forms of life, monsters and companions. The language of infrastructure and care is needed but is not sufficient to imagine oneself elsewhere, which means not resigning oneself to the idea that today’s world is the only possible one. The insomnia of the present, another synonymous of the exhausted, has a power: that of making the image not of the future, but of an otherwise. An otherwise “require a commitment to not knowing” suggest poetically Lola Oufemi (Olufemi, 2021). In her book, hidden almost in the fold of an intense topography of thought’s, she thinks design with the words of June Jordan I offer them below:

I would wish us to indicate the determining relationship between architectonic reality and physical well-being. I hope that we may implicitly instruct the reader in the comprehensive impact of every Where, of any place. This requires development of an idea or theory of place in terms of human being; of space designed as the volumetric expression of successful existence between earth and sky; of space cherishing as it amplifies the experience of being alive, the capability of endless beginnings, and the entrusted liberty of motion; of particular space inexorably connected to multiple spatialities, a particular space that is open-receptive and communicant yet sheltering particular life (Jordan, 1995: 28).