As a form of permanent individuation internal to and constitutive of a system, internal resonance offers a concept of unity that does not rely on internal closure; specifically, it allows for the maintenance of an optimal level of creativity (heterogenesis) at the same time that it ensures the maintenance of the system (autopoiesis). Put another way, internal resonance permits a system to maintain its life-giving "communication' with the metastability of the material flux while at the same time giving the mechanism for a system to individuate itself—that is, to achieve a certain degree of autonomy vis-à-vis that metastability.
Although it may stop short of rendering architecture a living system, internal resonance accords it a capacity that is not available to it on the machinic paradigm of today's cyberartists: the capacity to transform its interiority by opening it to forces in the environment or, more precisely, by encompassing the body as a locus of such force.x In this way, internal resonance answers to the problematic that architecture faces in our contemporary informational culture: can and how can it maintain a minimal autonomy or system closure even as it embraces the “active, informational penetration of matter" carried out through the microchip and the development of so-called “smart" materials?¹4
Eisenman's particular recipe for internal resonance—the conjunction of digital deformation and affective bodily spacing-addresses the softness" that, for architectural theorist Sanford Kwinter, has come to define the contemporary material domain, "a world where everything flows seamlessly together in real time" (227). Specifically, Eisenman's reconfiguration of architectural interiority through the internalization of forces and their conversion into affect articulates a "soft system"—a system “driven by its very softness" or openness to the environment, by its capacity to move, to differentiate internally, to absorb, transform, and exchange information with its surroundings, to develop complex interdependent sub- and supersystems whose global interaction ... creates secondary effects of damping and self-regulation" (210–211).
The emergent result of subsystems of digital deformation and bodily affect, Eisenman's soft system produces internal resonance specifically by introducing two concrete "delays" into the material flux: the extrusion of a third dimension (the figural) and the conversion of this matrix of forces into affect. This conjunction of digital and infralinguistic, indeed infratactile, translations functions to process the material flux in a way that parts company with the monist ontology central to the Deleuzean model embraced by younger architectural practitionersxi Insofar as it selects forces and solicits their bodily conversion into affects, architecture is better seen as an intervention into the material flux designed to trigger new affections than as a “phenomenological integration of the human nervous system into ... multilevel, multiscaled networks and environments."15
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