Grosz (2001) Architecture from the outside. Essays on Virtual and Real Space

Elizabeth Grosz does not simply receive the well-worn pages of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, or Henri Bergsonon the subject of duration. Rather her attempt is to open up a central thematic of modernist architecture — utopia — to a new consideration. Grosz, like Tafuri, suggests that utopia is the good place that is no place. She says that utopia might be the way for architecture to find its own place in the political by reconceptualizing itself as that movement of time which is duration: a concept of time as a perpetual becoming. For her this becoming is that of the becoming embodied. Instead of freezing time into an arrangement of space as an ideal of the present, Grosz suggests that time is the division of duration, is the very condition of simultaneity.

"This transformation in technology — let us call it computerization for short — is not simply the creation of a new tool or device more sophisticated than the rest but fundamentally the same in nature. Rather, global computerization is a mode of transformation of the very notion of tool or technology itself. The space, time, logic, and materiality of computerization threaten to disrupt and refigure the very nature of information and communication, as well as the nature of space, time, community, and identity. These technologies make possible knowledges/sciences, modes of art and representation, forms of communication and interaction, that not only are reconfiguring social and personal life but are also, in a fundamental sense, beyond the knowledge and the control of individuals and communities. These technologies, whose limits are unknown by their designers and foremost researchers, have become subject to historical, perhaps evolutionary processes or laws that we do not, and perhaps even cannot, know in advance. Computarization transcends the tool or mere cultural innovation, insofar as it has begun an inherently unforeseeable trajectory in global life. Such unforeseen trajectories are not new; they are the forces that shape global transformation, whether dictated by shifts in polar ice caps or the production of nuclear weapons. Technological transformation is not inherently different in its global effect. This is why it may be understood more in the long-term horizon of evolution rather than in the short-term horizon of development or historical change." p. 51-52