Philosophies A Primer for Undergraduate Students of Architecture helenjrr
(c) Helen Runting, School of Architecture, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. Cover image: praiseculp4, 1 hour ago (9 September 2013), Instagram. The image is accompanied by the headline “My favorite teacher!!!!!!!! She is awesome!!! #philosophy #antoninka <#thatsherlastname”, and the response “erinelaine13: That girl sitting by her is in my zoology class.”
Table of Contents
Preface
Preface
p.1
Introduction
p.3
Chapter 1: Isabelle arrives late; the south lawn beckons; the unbearable lightness of the ecology of practices is discussed
p.7
Chapter 2: Sarah and Bob give advice; the sun gets too much
p.9
Chapter 3: A ride in the car; capsules and capitalism come up in conversation
p.11
Chapter 4: A visit to the Saleyards; Thrift plays some drone
p.13
This Primer formrs the final component of coursework for ResArc Philosophies, the third of four PhD courses given by the National Schools of Architectural Research in Sweden, ResArc (www.resarc.se). The course is hosted by the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm and coordinated by Dr. Hélène Frichot, Assistant Professor in the research group Critical Studies in Architecture.
The Primer builds upon previous assignments undertaken in the course, namely: (i) a contents page, “Not Yet But Soon: An Anthology of The Unread”; and (ii) a series of six blog posts based on readings in relation to three workshops (Relationality, Spatiality and Materiality) held in Stockholm in March, April and May of 2013. Further, it also develops a series of themes which lie at the heart of my doctoral reasearch - Towards new modes of criticism: art, architecture and the space of planning.
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Hauptmann (2010) Cognitive
Deleuze (1995) Control
BLOG 2
Thrif (2008) Affect
Arendt (1943) Refugee
Agamben (1998) Camp
Jardine (1987) Bodies
Sloterdijk (2007) Cell
SPATIALITY
Lazzarato (1998) Control
BLOG 1
Gibbs (2005) Fictocrit
Meuke (2002) Fictocrit
De Cauter (2004) Capsule
Bourriaud (2002) 3 x E
Guattari (2000) 3 x E
Stengers (2005) E.o.P.
RELATIONALITY
Deeluze (1998) Literature
CONTENTS PAGE
Latour (2004) Critique
Walle’ (2010) Noopol’s
Somol & Whiting (2002)
Fig. 1
MATERIALITY
COURSEWORK
BLOG 3 BLOG 5
BLOG 4 BLOG 6
PRIMER
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Introduction Welcome to Philosophy: A Primer for Undergraduate Students of Architecture.
The only way to set the agenda is to change the tone.
A Primer is a book that covers the basic elements of a given subject. It is also a protective coating, applied to unfinished materials in order to protect them from damage resulting from exposure to the elements. It is the ambition of this Primer to work in both of these senses: that is, both to cover a number of basic theoretical concepts and debates within philosophy that have a bearing on the field of architecture, but also to prepare its audience to repel the more corrosive effects of the architectural practice that awaits them following completion of their undergraduate studies. In this dual aim, this document draws inspiration from the interactive book found by the urchin Nell in Neal Stephenson’s hallucinatory visions of a post-cyberpunk future in ‘The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer.’1
This Primer picks up where the infamous ‘Notes Around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism’ left off: like television, and like Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting’s proposal for a “cool” mode of architectural theory and practice,2 the content in this essay is deeply compromised – it appears in low definition; it is incomplete, non-partial, and heavily filtered. Like the contemporary social world, the Primer unapologetically namedrops, alluding to its subject matter tangentially. Names and genders have been altered. Key figures and concepts have been taken out of context. For these reasons, it requires the participation of the user and it expects its audience to do some of the work. Whilst inverting the maxim that “it is often the force with which passion is
delivered which is more important than the message”3 – here, the force with which passion is deferred is more important – the logic of the Primer is embedded in a discourse of affect. It is very much about the delivery. In considering what atmosphere of address, what tone of conversation, might work best as a priming agent, it was decided that the “hot” address of critique, the forced neutrality of scientific text, and the happy-go-lucky irony of the architectural theory of the 1990s were all off-point, missing the mark with respect to a contemporary undergraduate audience. The aim was rather to achieve “a deceptively low-impact but precisely calibrated” tone, a format suited to “aimless hanging out” in a very specific semi-urban milieu”4 – in effect (and affect) a kind of mumblecore.
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Fig. 2
commathedestroyer, 4 likes, 11 months ago (October 2012) Instagram; Drink your #criticality away. cmgkt: is she mad? she looks mad. mamdashmooth: #postcritical
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Mumblecore as a genre “Mumblecore” is moniker “equally employed to celebrate and denigrate the shot-onthe-cheap, talkcentric, variously improvisatory films made by and about young postgrads,” thereby describing a contemporary genre of American independent cinema.5 Generally recognised as sparking the genre, the 2002 film ‘Funny Ha Ha,’ directed by Andrew Bujalski, has been described as functioning as an index of “the many ways in which a specific peer group (post-collegiate, white, comfortable with actively pursuing life with minimal financial resources) can fail to communicate with each other”.6 Whilst the genre is identifiable through a series of formal characteristics like natural flat lighting, improvisation, and static frames that produce a documentary feel,7 what is perhaps most relevant is the treatment of dialogue, and the rather
narrow demographic of the characters that are portrayed, and (presumably) the intended audience. This narrowness can be (and has been) critiqued, but, as acknowledged by Emily Nussbaum in a review of the HBO series ‘Girls’ (which shares some of the characteristics of mumblecore), issues of class and gender are also exposed and complicated in the focus on (in the case of ‘Girls’) white, privileged, 20-something women working on the edges of the creative industries. In architecture, professional stories about such demographics are few and far between,8 and could thus only serve to widen the existing discourse, perhaps even acting as a form of primer for young architects.
1 Stephenson, Neal (2000 [1995]). The diamond age: [or, A young lady’s illustrated primer]. Bantam Trade. New York: Bantam Books. 2 Somol, Robert and Whiting, Sarah (2002) ‘Notes around the Doppler Effect and other moods of modernism’, in Perspecta 33 ‘Mining Autonomy’. Connecticut: Yale University Press. 3 Thrift, Nigel (2008) ‘Spatialities of Feeling’, in NonRepresentational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect, London: Routledge. 4 Rizov, Vadim (2013) ‘All you need to know about mumblecore filmmakers today’, Indiewire, 25 July 2013. Accessed 8 September 2013 at http://www.indiewire.com/article/everything-youneed-to-know-about-mumblecore-today-an-updated-taxonomy 5 Hynes, Eric (2013) ‘Mumblecore Masters, Enunciating Clearly: The Directors Andrew Bujalski and Joe Swanberg Grow Up’, in The New York Times, 11 July 2013. 6 Ibid. 7 ‘The Formal Features of Mumblecore’ at http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=9hiNC7uKY1Y 8 See, for instance, Stratigakos, Despina (2012) ‘Why Architects Need Feminism’, in The Design Observer, 9 December 2012.
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Fig. 2
stefnw, 15 likes, 1 day ago (9 September 2013) Instagram; Re-Instagrammed (Filter: Rise) 9 September 2013 Spring #love #spring #sunny #green #nature #chilling #unimelb #southlawn #melbourne
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Chapter 1: Isabelle arrives late; the south lawn beckons; the unbearable lightness of the ecology of practices is discussed. Isabelle is late, and I nurse my coffee in an offhand manner. This feels contrived, I’m not relaxed at all; the café is busy, the table I’m sitting at is tightly wedged into a corner, and I’m decidedly nervous. I didn’t like the text. And now I have to talk about why, and to do so with its author, a highly esteemed feminist, philosopher, and professor about whom I know very little and whose work I have read embarrassingly little of. I test pushing back my chair, rehearsing the moves required to make a run for it, to escape to the south lawn and join the other students sprawled there, in the bright sunshine, discussing tv shows and politics. Lost in this thought, I fail to notice her enter and then suddenly she is at the table, smiling; caught off guard, I freeze, deer-like. Too late. Isabelle sits down, signals to a waiter, orders a double espresso and introduces herself all in one, extended, movement. She’s just escaped a long and caffeine-deprived meeting in the physics department where – she brushes her grey hair out of one eye, exasperated as she unloads on me, a complete stranger
– her suggestion that “physics needs a new habitat” was apparently met with some misgivings. “I have many friends, physicists, who get this, but here, at this school, it seems impossible for them to imagine that by defining a physical reality – a reality beyond fiction – that they claim a very exclusive position of judgement over other realities. In this way, they are both the addicts and the dealers of the strong drug of Truth, with all of its attendant power to judge, to deconstruct, and to criticize.” Oh God, I think, immediately despondent, we’re getting straight to the bit that I like the least. Like jumping straight into a cold bath. I take a deep breath, turn on the voice memo function on my phone, and try not to speak too quickly (a nervous habit). “And this – Isabelle – is why I wanted to talk to you. As I understand it,’” I pull out a text marked ‘Introductory notes on an ecology of practices’, photocopied from a 2005 issue of Cultural Studies Review, “this text effectively poses critical theory as inoperable, possibly unethical, destructive even.” “I mean,” I continue, “I guess that I’ve taken a lot from Raymond Guess’ definition
of critical theory,” here switching tone a little, aware that she knows the territory better than I do, but at the same time determined to be clear, “and have been very interested in the production of theory that produces enlightenment in the agents who hold it (enabling those agents to determine what their true interests are); and then that (secondly) aspires to be emancipatory, freeing agents from (largely self-imposed) coercion. That definition has been really valuable to me” – here, I start to sound defensive – ”yet it’s exactly that kind of theory that you describe as ‘ethics in a major key.’ You pretty much reject it outright.” I pause to draw breath, and then continue, words crashing into each other now in an effort to get to the end of what I needed to say. “But without ‘grounding definitions or an ideal horizon’ (your words) and without an ‘if… then’ – without ‘cause’ that exceeds the specificity of ‘case’ – and ultimately without justifying our proposals in terms of reasons that can be accepted in spite of borders, how can we change the world for the better? I know it sounds ridiculously naïve, but how can an ecology of practices actually change anything?
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It seems that as a theoretical position, it can only celebrate that which already exists, by describing it. At best, it can affect people in a way that they change themselves. But,” I falter, feeling like a child, “what if that’s not enough?” “Change the world? No.” She looks at me directly. “Absolutely not. Individual practices? Maybe. At least to the extent that the habitat of a practice, its surroundings, can affect its ethos. Through description theory produces, reinforces, and in some case solidifies those surroundings, the connections that form that network. Here is where we can work. This has to be enough.” “Like architects?” I ask. “Like diplomats.” She goes on to expand on her choice of figuration, switching terminology and situation several times, rapidly, in her advocacy for the deployment of this metaphor. She talks me though the idea of a model of change based on the reformulation of “obligations” associated with certain “attachments”, through the production of “belongings” (a quality that, as I understand it, informs obligations) – both
one’s own and others. I get a sense of a kind of performed change, that is embodied, enacted, and (she was very clear about this) definitively non-discursive. This is an immanent and performative model of the social world, then, whereby the effect and the cause present themselves simultaneously (in what she calls “the case”). A world without policy horizons, without The Future, without Utopia, and without critique. A world without urban planning, I surmise; or perhaps a planning of affect and experience, rather like the one of today – a planning that persuades, that seduces, that negotiates amongst actors, but that lacks a cause, an ideology, a doing that is for and on behalf of its diverse “publics”. Impressed though I am by the wide and simultaneously radically limited scope of her proposition, its shiny lightness, and its sense of generosity, my head is spinning trying to think it through in planning terms. I’m shaken out of my reverie when she gets up to go, shaking my hand and encouraging me to continue thinking about this. I finally notice the tattoo on her arm – “Empowerment Not Enlightenment” – and smile. I like Isabelle,
but I’m not so sure that I can be in her gang, I decide, as I walk towards the south lawn and finally slump onto the grass in the bright sunshine. I still have too many causes that, no matter how hard I try, fail to transform themselves into cases. I pull a book out of my bag, and decide to give myself up to the strong drug of Truth for the remainder of the afternoon.
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Chapter 2: Sarah and Bob give advice; the sun gets too much I open my eyes. An hour has passed and I’m still on the lawn, but now right in the middle of triangular patch of shadow – the errant turret of a faux-Gothic university building has come between the late summer sun and the page of my book, which I am only pretending to read anyway. I rouse myself to move out of the shade, spotting a few familiar faces on the western side of the lawn. As usual, Sarah and Bob preside over a gathering of architecture students, their latest batch of second-year groupies. Sarah and Bob have a band, called The Doppler Effect, which has somehow managed to bridge the otherwise impossible rift between the digital design kids’ penchant for electronica and the depressed hipster ballads of the “politically engaged” clique. At the feet of Sarah and Bob, an unofficial truce reigns and the otherwise oppressive mood of the heavily factionalized architecture school lifts considerably. The duo exude a different atmosphere, a disinterested brand of conviviality that rubs off on everyone in their vicinity and gently blunts even the sharpest of daggers.
“Hey, Sarah,” I say, throwing my bag down next to them. As a doctoral student, I have some privileges when it comes to seating arrangements on the lawn. “What’s up?” “Not much,” she answers nonchalantly. Bob nods in greeting. “Just had to get out of there” – she gestures at the steel-clad building behind us – “for a bit. I mean, seriously, do you ever feel like you’ve already heard the same opinions expressed by the same people somewhere or other, in the same way, with the same words, turn of phrases and gestures? I’m over it. You know: this nascent mix of a critical, neo-Marxism with a celebration of the vernacular or everyday? What is this, 1984?” Bob murmurs in agreement, and checks his phone, an object adorned with glittery stickers that somehow impress me despite their deliberate irony. It’s always like that with him. “1984 was probably worse, Sass.” “Bullshit. 1984, like Perspecta 211984, has got nothing on this! Now, they’re” – again, Sarah waves at the architecture building – “basically implying that all architecture
automatically occupies a de facto critical position. That our work is always situated in some kind of in-between.” The last word is extended disdainfully. “Culture and form. Kitsch and avant-garde. Objecthood and art…” “… Capitalist development and design,” Bob finishes for her, pointing with a yet unlit cigarette towards the copy of Architecture and Utopia that I realise I’m still holding. I shove it back in my bag, secretly glad that I won’t have to discuss that with these guys, after the tussle with Isabelle earlier. “Actually, I just had coffee with Isabelle.” I throw the statement into the ring, hoping that the two of them might be able to shed some light on my inner confusion. Their discussions were seductive in that way: as if just by talking to them, torturous ethical dilemmas could be sucked up and then spat out, like poison from a snake-bite. And after such operations, it almost felt like – here, I catch myself mimicking the Dutch accent of their alltime hero, the inimitable Koolhaas himself – we could all just live happily ever after, making fantastic architecture. I needed a bit of that right now.
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Fig. 3
guiescavasse, 14 likes, 1 month ago (August 2013) Por do Sol! #limeira #cosmopolis #sun
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Chapter 3: A ride in the car; capsules and capitalism come up in conversation. Eric was loitering in the parking lot next to the architecture school, where he said he’d be when I called. No one really knew the status of Eric Packer’s enrolment at the school: it was unclear whether he’d dropped out, or whether in fact he’d ever enrolled – he certainly had never taken part in an orientation day exercise, or queued for a student card. There were rumours that he’d been kicked out of the AA, or possibly the Berlage; there were rumours that he only did architecture in order to appease the demands of his mother, the CEO of a global construction company. Whatever the truth, Eric spent his days plying the share market, playing Candy Crush, and driving around the city in a slick German sedan with his best friend, Vija De Cauter. He referred to Vija as his “Chief of Theory,” presumably because they always submitted papers and projects based on conversations had whilst idling in peak hour traffic and aimlessly cruising the edges of the city. I liked Eric; even if he channelled a serious Patrick Bateman vibe at times.
“Afternoon,” drawls De Cauter as I get in on the driver’s side. “Eric wants a haircut. You wanna join?” I nod, immediately acquiescent. “Sure. What’re you reading, Vija?” “Deleuze. Agamben. Lazzarato. Foucault.” I shouldn’t have asked. The car crawls lazily through the boom gates of the campus perimeter, outwards – that is, towards nowhere – not in any discernable direction, not taking the main highways, and not the arterials, just the feeders and local streets of the surrounding suburbs, which are (as always) leafy, idyllic, and still. “You grew up in the suburbs, didn’t you?” Eric now, head turned, thumb hooked through the steering wheel. Not condescending, but not particularly committed to the notion. A foreign territory for the Erics and Vijas of the world. Hence their love of cars, I reflect. A novelty. “Yep,” I reply, trying to sound noncommittal. “Thinking of making the move?” “In one way,” muses De Cauter, “we’re all suburbanites. Even us fervent city dwellers
have to fight the suburbanization of daily life: cars, phones, tvs and computers are basically the tools – and, let’s face it, causes – of this process.” “Capsules,” continues Eric, going straight through yet another roundabout, “all of it. Home to office. Office to home. Neoliberal individualisation plus suburbanisation.” “The third law of capsularisation,” concludes Vija, happily. I smother a laugh at their entitled irony. “Capsularisation? From the two of you? You couldn’t be more cocooned if you tried. Driving around all day, in this… car? Seriously? You live in a dream world. And you love it.” “And don’t you love joining us in Disneyland?” Eric is laughing now. At me. “The grimmer and uglier reality on the outside becomes, the more hyperreality will dominate the capsular civilisation,” I respond, quoting De Cauter’s latest, and most infamous, essay, which she’d posted all over the school instead of just emailing to the professor. The Capsular Civilisation On the City in the Age of Fear was urban legend.
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The conversation reminds me of the last time I was in Eric’s car. Maybe Sarah was right, I reflect: maybe we had all already heard the same opinions, expressed in the same way, before. It was a few weeks back that I’d heard this last. Vija had asked Eric what it was that capitalism produces, according to Marx and Engels. (Clearly a trap.) “Its own gravediggers,” he’d said. “But these aren’t the grave-diggers,” Vija had responded, flipping through the pages of Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture, a book we were reading for our theory class, and pointing at various architects doing various things. “This is the free market itself. It breeds these men and women. They are necessary to the system they despise. They give it energy and definition. They are marketdriven. They are traded on the markets of the world. This is why they exist, to invigorate and perpetuate the system.”
“Haircut time. You wanna stick around and watch?” The offer is casual, excluding agreement in advance. “Nah, I’m good. Might get the bus into town,” I answer, somewhat reluctant to leave the leather-clad surroundings of the car, but in need of some air. I grab my bag, suddenly gasping for metropolitan urbanness. De Cauter and Packer disappear into the barbers.
The car pulls to a stop. Time in the car is always different, more slippery, than time outside. We’re in front of a suburban barber, nowhere special.
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Chapter 4: A visit to the Saleyards; Thrift plays some drone In the city, it’s warm and smells like it might rain. Hard surfaces radiate now-vanquished summer heat; the buildings and sidewalks collectively exhale. I switch to sneakers on the bus, and eat a hotdog as I walk towards the water: once I get to the Saleyards, there will be little respite in the way of comfortable seats or food. Drinks, I am told by Facebook, will be plentiful – some kind of sponsorship deal with an east coast micro-brewery has been brokered. Maurizzio Lazzarato, the Italian electronic producer, is playing tonight. After the day’s events, I feel like I need to unwind, have a few drinks, maybe even dance. The Saleyards are located under a bridge by the river. To get to them, you have to walk across a footbridge and then through a sports complex. All the tempting parts of facility – in particular, the aquamarine depths of the Olympic swimming pool – have been shut for the night, enclosed in high steel mesh fences, and protected by flood lights and CCTV. A G4S guard with an Alsatian patrols the perimeter of the tennis courts; she smiles brightly at me as I pass. I’m part of a longish line of hooded
and sneakered figures that wind its way deeper into the triangular space below the bridge. There are no fences or dogs at the Saleyards; its protective mechanisms lie rather in knowing when to be here, and where ‘here’ is. The promoters of the club play on the tension between running a venue with capacity for upwards of 1,000 people, and making it feel like an exclusive social club. As such, beneath all the apparent openness, the building itself – and its guardians, the door girls and boys – channels arriving visitors in different directions, separating flows from each other in order to avoid the sense that one is milling about in a mob. The corridors, rough stone that must be hundreds of years old, are tight, enclosing. The warmth of bodies is engaged in a constant fight against the sneaking coldness of a crypt. The lighting pulses, eliciting neural responses deep within the brain. Different systems then, operate synchronically, simultaneously moulding the body and modulating the (neural) experience of the space. The G4S guard is not replaced here, but instead is assembled as one of many dispositifs of power. The overall effect is excitement about being calm, the affect of
affect. Here, it seems to whisper, everything could be possible. I pull my jacket around my shoulders more tightly and head for the central space where Lazzarato is to play. My phone lights up, through my pocket. Nice trainers. I look around. The way the spaces are arranged, it’s difficult to get an overview. Nicolas must be here somewhere. I take the text message to signify some kind of olive branch. Of course he would be here. I find an appropriate emoticon – the one that looks embarrassed because it just received a kiss – and press send. Come to the side room, the one with the technodystopian wall mural that you hate. ‘K, I reply. The room is to the left of the main room. Here, apparently, Thrift is in the middle of his warm-up set. Everyone is seated and it’s oppressively hot. A man that looks like most popChristian renditions of God is sitting in the middle of the room, in a white shirt, with a long white beard. At the front, Thrift is buried in piles of equipment. The room is full of
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Fig. 4
gaiasale, 3 likes, 15 months ago (May 2012), Instagram #saledocks #lazzarato #crisi #debito
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a low humming, a viscerally deep sound characterised by repeated loops made up of tone-clusters. Drone is not my favourite music genre, and Nicolas knows this. He’s nowhere to be seen and I conclude that this is simply another act of revenge, one in a long line of traps sprang since the Claire incident. I take a seat and concentrate. Thrift and Lazzarato both produce for a label called Modulation, the aim of which is a chrystallisation of sound waves, vibrations, and “packets of bits”. They believe that by harmonizing waves, a polyphony emerges through which artificial memories can emerge. Real Diamond Age stuff. I take a seat and close my eyes. Gotta go. See you ‘round, Nell. Nicolas leaves.
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