SUPERHUMANITY: POST-LABOR, PSYCHOPATHOLOGY, PLASTICITY Nick Axel, Beatriz Colomina, Nikolaus Hirsch, Lee Jihoi, Anton Vidokle, Mark Wigley, Editors
National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea e-flux Architecture Actar
Contents
Foreword 6 Introduction 8
POST-LABOR Chin Jungkwon
Play and Labor 12
Yuk Hui
On Automation and Free Time 24
Kim Jaehee
Posthuman Labor 38
Arisa Ema
Tasks and Values
48
PSYCHOPATHOLOGY Mark Wasiuta
Ecstatic Purification 56
Hong Sungook
Joey the Mechanical Boy, Revisited 80
Hannah Proctor
Mournful Militancy 90
PLASTICITY Catherine Malabou
Repetition, Revenge, Plasticity 104
Common Accounts
Going Fluid 112
Erik & Ronald Rietveld Affordances and Architecture 130
Biographies 143 Image Credits
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FOREWORD
Museums are no longer safe boxes that protect precious, often expensive objects that are separated from the real world and exhibited in white cube-like architectural environments. Museums are neither exclusively part of the entertainment or industries of tourism, even if some of them play a central role in the experience economy of some cities and metropolitan centers of the world. Museums are also dynamic engines for the collective intelligence and deserve to be considered essential institutions in the achievement of contemporary democracies. I believe that “Superhumanity: Post-Labor, Psychopathology, Plasticity” recently performed at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) is a vivid example of the absolute conviction that museums, including our museum, are much more than a receptacle, passive container of aesthetic objects with determined historical relevance. MMCA is proud to have organized and hosted the second edition of the International Symposium, initiated at the 2016 Istanbul Biennale in collaboration with e-flux and under the guidance and intellectual leadership of Beatriz Colomina, Mark Wigley, Nikolaus Hirsch and Anton Vidokle. Museums create experience and opinion; they generate knowledge and stimulate debate on issues of significance in our societies. As Patricia Falguières recently explained,
the modern museum created in Italy in the 15th Century in order to reconnect with the grand, classical civilization of Rome and Athens, reconstructed the essential space of public debate, the Forum, the Agora, as its first architectural container. The Mouseion, the grand-father of the museums we now have, wanted to be the place where citizens discuss the issues of common concern, the “res publica.” This is the perfect definition of the classical idea of politics: the museum is an essential element to the existence of a democratic society. Art is, and the different areas of design, also shapes usas individuals and as collective entities: art defines us as humans. Artists, intellectuals, scientists, technicians and practitioners in different fields, from medicine to philosophy generously shared their views and discoveries with us these days and beyond. Superhumanity is a good example of our policy to make Korea and MMCA a center for international debates of the highest quality, in which Korean, Asian and global creative minds engage in sharing experiences and ideas. I truly believe that, leveraged by the wonderful result of the symposium, we will advance in our comprehension of how the humanities, the sciences of the spirit and material perform an intense interdependence within our institution. It is our wish that partnership with our guests continues to inspire, as a tool to understand the present and imagine the future of our human condition. I would like to warmly invite you to enjoy the insightful essays by the
participants of the symposium and hope that you will continue enjoying MMCA as a place of innovation, an institution driven by ideas and a stage in Korea for the world’s leading intellectual debates. I would also like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to all the people who made this very successful event and publication possible: our intellectual and organizational partners, all the speakers, and all the staff and teams involved at MMCA led by Ms. Lee Jihoi, curator, as well as to our editing and publishing staff and partners. — Bartomeu Mari Director The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea
6–7
Chin Jungkwon
Play and Labor The Extinction of the Magic Circle In Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga writes that “civilization arises and unfolds in and as play.” According to Huizinga, almost every human activity, whether political, economic, or cultural, was originally conceived in play. In the past, labor was accompanied by play and festivities. Scholarship grew out of puzzles in which sages dueled with their sagacity. Even wars were a sort of sport. An enormous magic circle hung over reality. But at some point in history, humans became incapable of playing. What was it, then, that drew the magic circle away from reality? Max Weber says that our era is characterized by “intellectualization, rationalization, and disenchantment,” each of which ultimately imply drawing the magic circle away from reality. René Descartes taught that to be a rational being meant to exclude imagination. The rationalization of labor that emerged after the Industrial Revolution (e.g., Taylorism and Fordism) completely stripped labor of its playful attributes. What Walter Benjamin called the “destruction of aura” is the last phase of disenchantment. Through this process, the Homo ludens of the past became transformed into Homo sapiens, who lacks imagination; into a Berufsmensch, who thinks only of work; and into Homo economicus, who suppresses all desire and emotion for the sake of his interests. However, as society evolves from an industrial to a postindustrial logic, the magic circle that disappeared is returning. This change
12–13
The magic circle illustration from Francis Barrett's Book The Magus, 1801.
is ever more accelerated by digital technologies that superimpose the virtual on reality, such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). The Return of the Magic Circle As Jean Baudrillard points out, humans under late capitalism do not consume goods, but instead the “gap” or the “difference” between goods. Thorstein Veblen discovered a similar phenomenon about a hundred years ago in the American upper class, where expensive, so-called “Veblen goods” sold better if they were priced higher, meaning that high-priced goods are consumed not for their utility but as a marker of status. This conspicuous consumption, which might have belonged to the upper class a
Chin Jungkwon
Seven PC cafe near Sungsin Women’s University in Seoul.
Play and Labor
20–21
Kim Jaehee
Posthuman Labor With the emergence of information technology and cybernetics, it became possible to see humans and machines within the same information conveyance and feedback control system. This, in turn, made it possible to both humanize machines and machinize humans, while opening up a discussion of the “posthuman.” “Posthumanization,” an evolutionary process founded upon the advancement of science and technology, evokes both anticipation and apprehension. While humans might largely welcome the utility and convenience of weak artificial intelligence, such as IBM’s Watson or Google’s AlphaGo, there is fear that superior nonhuman beings, such as strong artificial intelligence and artificial superintelligence, will come to dominate humans. Similarly, while the transhumanization or cyborgization that removes disabilities and enhances physical and mental capabilities might be welcomed, the machinization of desire and thought and its subjection to computers that turn everything into data through algorithmic language is largely met with alarm and dread. This apprehension of “posthumanization” is especially pronounced when it comes to the question of labor and the concept of alienation that surrounds it. The idea that humans would become simplistic tools or even completely useless after being replaced by machines seems to have struck a nerve in public discourse. But do machines actually cause alienation from labor? Or could this existential anxiety emanate from the way we view our relationship to machines and labor more widely? If machines can indeed replace human labor, does this not mean that humans would be able to
38–39
engage in activities other than labor? The transition from a human society to a posthuman society demands a transformation not only in the relationship between humans and machines, but also in an understanding of labor itself. Alienation and Technology In the late 1950s, Gilbert Simondon pointed out the limitations of Marx’s understanding of labor and worked to resolve the problem of alienation in a different way. As opposed to the ownership of the means of production and the opposition between labor and capital, by tracing the origin of alienation to the emergence of factories and the transition from handicraft to machination in the nineteenth century, Simondon focuses on the physio-psychological discontinuity between the human laborer and the technical object being worked with.1 While the asymmetrical construct of capital and labor is certainly a precondition for distorting the relationship between humans and machines, Simondon emphasized the fact that all humans—whether a worker or a capitalist—could no longer directly engage with technical objects. In other words, craftsman were not alienated when they were able to move tools with their own body and feel the accuracy of their motions. But when technical objects stopped extending human motion and became automated, humans lost this quality of relation. As machines increasingly became not tools in and of themselves but tool-movers, a position previously thought to be occupied by humans alone, humans were left to either organize or assist the operations of machines. Does this situation, which makes humans not a direct subject of labor but assistants to or managers of working machines, inevitably produce alienation? Or can we understand this discontinuity as the emergence of a new relationship, based not on alienation, but rather post-labor? According to Simondon, what is necessary to overcome alienation is not to fight machines, but rather to abolish the paradigm of labor. “Labor” is a concept that was appropriate in a time when technical 1 “The alienation of man in relation to the machine does not only have a socio-economic sense; it also has a physio-psychological sense; the machine no longer prolongs the corporal schema, neither for workers, nor for those who possess the machines.” Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2017), 133.
Kim Jaehee
Women working in ordnance plants at Gray & Davis Co., Cambridge, Mass., during World War I.
Posthuman Labor
42–43
Kim Jaehee
Orlando Mini Maker Faire, May 2012.
Posthuman Labor
44–45
PSYCHOPATHOLOGY “Every age has its signature afflictions,” writes Byung-Chul Han in The Burnout Society. We can add that each affliction has its architecture. The age of bacterial diseases—particularly tuberculosis—gave birth to modern architecture, to white buildings detached from the “humid ground where disease breeds,” as Le Corbusier put it. The age of smooth surfaces, big windows, and terraces to facilitate taking the sun and fresh-air cure ended with the discovery of antibiotics, and particularly streptomycin in 1943 (the first antibiotic cure for tuberculosis). In the postwar years, attention shifted to the mind. The same architects who were once concerned with the prevention of tuberculosis became obsessed with psychological problems. The architect was not seen just as a doctor but as a shrink, and the house not just a medical device for the prevention of disease, but for providing psychological comfort, or what Richard Neutra called “nervous health.” The twenty-first century is, according to Han, the age of neurological disorders: depression, ADHD, borderline personality disorders, and burnout syndrome. What is the architecture of these afflictions? What do they mean for design? The twenty-first century is also the age of allergies, the age of the “environmentally hypersensitive,” unable to live in the modern world. Never at any point in history have there been so many people allergic to chemicals, buildings, electromagnetic fields (EMF), fragrances… Since the environment is now almost completely man-made, we have become allergic to ourselves, to our own hyperextended body in a kind of autoimmune disorder.
Mark Wasiuta
By association with the history of Southern California rehabilitation centers—from the Betty Ford Clinic to Synanon—and in response to the current wave of opiate and heroin addiction, Los Angeles is the nucleus of an expanding American territory of drug addiction clinics and detox centers. In Los Angeles, and elsewhere, both rehab clinics and the analysis of aerial pollutants belong to processes of contamination and purification that became increasingly legible postwar. Together they signal a toxic economy encompassing habits, consciousness, morality, legislation, and pollutants. It is a pervasive project—at once identifying, framing, and representing toxicity alongside related purifying operations and environmental controls. Over the last century aerial pollutants, radioactivity, and communication infiltration were read—along with drugs—as a family of dangerous supplements for which cities and communities became contested sites of contamination. Through rehabilitation clinics and detoxification centers, the administration of the postwar environment entered the body, dividing the chemically altered from purified citizens. Healing Experiences The most visible bodies belong to Lindsay Lohan and other celebrity exemplars of the condition of chemically altered existence that Avital Ronell describes as “Being on drugs.”4 Yet, for all “clients,” detox doubles as a clinical process and a form of appetite management, spanning from methadone cures to kale smoothies. As the roster of contemporary addiction expands—drugs, sex, love, porn, phones— so do approaches to therapy and to “healing experiences.” From stays at Promises in Malibu to Wonderland in Studio City, Lohan has been the most visible guide to this detox territory. But her six stints in rehab barely hint at its scale: there are now more than twelve thousand rehabilitation centers in the United States and tens of thousands of detoxification retreats around the world. In the US, the rise of detoxification relies not only on waves of dependency and the desires of health consumers, but also on the surge of drug courts that mandate “voluntary” rehabilitation in place of incarceration. Detox centers are the experimental, therapeutic extension of the American carceral network. 4 Avital Ronell, Crack Wars (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 11.
Ecstatic Purification
Cliffside Malibu addiction treatment center. 1) Lavender garden with view to the Pacific Ocean, 2) Private chef preparing meal, and 3) Private room.
58–59 
Erik & Ronald Rietveld
Affordances and Architecture I’m not interested in living in a fantasy world … What interests me is what the world would be like if we were free of conventional limits. Maybe I can show what could happen if we lived by a different set of rules. —Lebbeus Woods According to a theory developed by the influential psychologist James Gibson, daily life entails engaging with and enacting the “action possibilities” of the environment, which he calls “affordances.”1 Affordances are possibilities for action offered by the environment—an environment which, in the case of humans, is to a large extent designed. Many interpretations of this theory of affordances are tied to motor behavior, such as the fact that something—like a cup or a book—can be grasped because of its dimensions, shape, texture, etc., or that the relatively horizontal, structurally supported, elevated surface of what we call chairs allows one to sit on them. However, affordances do not only depend on the way our environment is designed, but also on people’s abilities and thus on the patterns of activity that have been cultivated by sociocultural practices. The affordance of sitting on a chair created by a carpenter, for instance, exists only against a wider background 1 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979). See also Erik Rietveld and Julian Kiverstein, “A Rich Landscape of Affordances,” Ecological Psychology 26, no. 4 (2014): 325–52.
130–131
of sociocultural practices of sitting on chairs, rather than sitting on the floor, on carpets, or perhaps living in a non-sedentary way altogether. To emphasize this social, or rather sociomaterial, nature of our environment—meaning we cannot clearly separate material and social spheres—we can understand affordances as relations between aspects of the sociomaterial environment and abilities available in a form of life.2 Because of the many different abilities available in the human form of life, the human environment offers humans a rich landscape of affordances. Both cognition and action are situated within and constrained by this rich landscape of affordances. In this philosophy of affordances, a form of life (including the human one) is not static, but rather consists of behavioral patterns manifested over time which can be changed by offering alternative or different affordances. This is crucial because it allows for ways of generating behavioral change to be conceived. Because of their dependence on affordances, sociomaterially patterned practices, like the practice of making sedentary environments as opposed to the practice of making environments that support standing, should not be seen as a static given, but as changeable. This means that architects and designers do not only make new objects or buildings, but can also create new affordances that have the possibility to alter patterns of human activity, and might even change entire sociocultural practices. Affordances and the Body An affordance-based approach to architecture means giving special attention to the significance of the human body, which is an important and multifaceted aspect of the world: it is skillful yet limited, a locus of lived experience, a physical body of flesh and blood with a certain size and age, a gendered and encultured body marked by certain abilities (which include not just motor 2 The sociomateriality of the human environment is discussed in greater detail in Ludger van Dijk and Erik Rietveld, “Foregrounding Sociomaterial Practice in Our Understanding of Affordances: The Skilled Intentionality Framework,” Frontiers in Psychology 7 (2017); and Rietveld and Kiverstein, “A Rich Landscape of Affordances.” For a classic study on sociomaterial practices, see Annemarie Mol, The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (London: Duke University Press, 2002).
Erik & Ronald Rietveld
RAAAF and Barbara Visser, The End of Sitting, Amstedam, 2014.
Affordances and Architecture
132–133
Erik & Ronald Rietveld
RAAAF, Breaking Habits, Amstedam, 2017.
Affordances and Architecture
134–135
Erik & Ronald Rietveld
applicable to a home environment. This experimental domestic landscape of the future breaks with entrenched living habits. Just like the offices and the rest of our sedentary society, our living rooms are filled with chairs. Breaking Habits explores what a world without chairs and sofas could look like in 2025. This physical thinking model materializes a philosophical worldview and makes it tangible: a diagonal landscape of affordances scaffolds a more active lifestyle by inviting users to change positions and explore new diagonal standing postures. Will diagonal living become the new norm? Using more horizontal (but still diagonal) surfaces and applying a softer material, the affordances provided by this particular installation cater more to the relaxing environment of a dwelling, but still omit the sofas and armchairs that have been a part of Western living rooms from time immemorial. Underutilized Affordances The environment is also full of affordances that are underutilized or ignored. One obvious example of this is empty buildings, which offer many possibilities for action and can be seen as available social resources. This not only includes empty offices owned by corporations or investment firms, but also governmentowned built heritage like abandoned lighthouses, military bases, prisons, train stations, police offices, research facilities, etc. Governmental policies and practices make it so that their affordances are off-limits. These vacant buildings could be used temporarily in all sorts of ways if only people were granted access to them. If architects, governments, and private parties alike would not just focus on creating new affordances by exclusively constructing new buildings, but were also attentive to recognizing and utilizing the affordances of empty buildings, we could make better use of our urban environment and avoid unnecessary exploitation of scarce resources. Vacant NL called upon the Dutch government to make use of the enormous potential of inspiring, unoccupied buildings from the seventeenth century to today for knowledge development by researchers from the sciences and the arts. This project aimed to increase temporary access to the many affordances of ten thousand unused (vacant) public and government buildings. The
Affordances and Architecture
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creative industries need good spatial conditions (affordances) to be able to temporarily use the sea of vacant government-owned buildings. It is necessary to educate vacancy specialists who can develop solutions for “sequential” temporary use: the rapid moving from building to building. This is important because it is often easier to obtain an owner’s permissions for short-term use. One particular recommendation for the didactics of vacancy studies is for designers to engage in traineeships with specialists outside their own field of expertise, an experience which can help them acquire new skills that could be translated to designs for temporary use. One example of this is the application of so-called “moldcasting”—a technique used for the development of orthopedic implants that involves liquid plastic being poured into a mold—to the context of vacant buildings to create partitions that assume the historic character of the walls from which they are copied. This could open a whole world of new affordances for the temporary partitioning of vacant buildings. Conclusion As each of these projects demonstrate, an academic philosophy of affordances can be materialized to create real-life thinking models and visions of the future. Affordances can be incorporated in many different ways: through deliberately designing environments that provide radically new affordances, such as with affordance landscapes; by emphasizing the potential of underutilized affordances, like the potential of vacant government-owned built heritage; or even by offering makers the opportunity to acquire tools and techniques from different practices through traineeships—skills that would allow them to be responsive to unorthodox affordances. Affordances, defined as relations between aspects of the sociomaterial environment and abilities available in a form of life, can thus be manipulated or created through transforming either these aspects of the sociomaterial environment or people’s abilities, or both, via the work one builds. Thanks to Janno Martens, Julian Kiverstein, Ludger van Dijk, and Maarten van Westen for feedback on an earlier version of this text. Erik Rietveld would like to acknowledge the research funding awarded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) in the form of a VIDI-grant, and the European Research Council in the form of ERC Starting Grant 679190 (EU Horizon 2020), for his project AFFORDS-HIGHER. This research also would not have been possible without the Stipendium for Established Artists awarded to Ronald Rietveld by the Mondriaan Fund for the Visual Arts.
Superhumanity: Post-Labor, Psychopathology, Plasticity
© 2018 National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art and e-flux Architecture
Nick Axel, Beatriz Colomina, Nikolaus Hirsch, Lee Jihoi, Anton Vidokle, Mark Wigley, Editors
All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced in any manner without permission in writing from each copyright holder: MMCA, e-flux Architecture, the authors, and image right holders.
ISBN 978-1-945150-96-8 PCN 2017964075 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., USA Published by National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art 30 Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul, 03062, Korea +82 2 3701 9500 www.mmca.go.kr
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders of images published herein. The publishers would appreciate being informed of any omissions in order to make due acknowledgement in future editions of this book. All essays were originally published online at www.e-flux.com/architecture/superhumanity/
e-flux Architecture www.e-flux.com/architecture architecture@e-flux.com
This book is also published in Korean as 슈퍼휴머니티: 인간은 어떻게 스스로를 디자인하는가 by (주)문학지성사Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd.
Actar 440 Park Avenue South, 17th Fl., New York, NY 10016, USA www.actar.com
Editors Nick Axel, Beatriz Colomina, Nikolaus Hirsch, Lee Jihoi, Anton Vidokle, Mark Wigley
Distribution Actar D, Inc. New York, Barcelona. New York +1 212 966 2207 salesnewyork@actar-d.com Barcelona +34 933 282 183 eurosales@actar-d.com
Contributors Chin Jungkwon, Common Accounts (Igor Bragado, Miles Gertler), Arisa Ema, Hong Sungook, Yuk Hui, Kim Jaehee, Catherine Malabou, Hannah Proctor, Erik Rietveld & Ronald Rietveld, Mark Wasiuta Translation Sophie Kim Copyeditor Mike Andrews Design Practice Printing Youngsinsa (Paju, Korea)
This book has been published in conjunction with the MMCA × e-flux Architecture International Symposium “Superhumanity: Post-Labor, Psychopathology, Plasticity”
Supervised by Kang Seungwan, Chief Curator MMCA Curator Lee Jihoi
October 27–28, 2017 Organizers National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea e-flux Architecture Sponsor Embassy of Spain
e-flux Architecture Curators Nick Axel, Beatriz Colomina, Nikolaus Hirsch, Anton Vidokle, Mark Wigley Participants Chin Jungkwon, Common Accounts (Igor Bragado, Miles Gertler), Hong Sungook, Yuk Hui, Kim Jaehee, Shim Kwanghyun, Catherine Malabou, Hannah Proctor, Erik Rietveld, Mark Wasiuta, Hiroshi Yamakawa Curatorial Collaboration Choi Jina Public Relation Team Lee Sunghee, Tiffany Yun, Yi Giseok, Kim Eunah, Noh Haewon, Ki Sungmi Event Management Chris & Partners Multi-Project Hall Manager Ji Jungsoo Curatorial Assistant Byun Youngsun Intern Shin Ahyeon