Invited Papers
The Analog: Beyond Normativity and Non-Normativity
DIMITRIS GOURDOUKIS Aristotle University of Thessaloniki; object-e architecture director
The Difference Between Red and
Blue
Immanuel Kant in his “Critique of Pure Reason” argues that certain things must stay unchanged in order to create a stable environment that we can identify with and make sense of: "if cinnabar were now red, now black, now light, now heavy, [...] then my empirical imagination would never even get the opportunity to think of heavy cinnabar on the occasion of the representation of the color red” (Kant, 1922). In other words, Kant believes that certain standards need to be in place: cinnabar can only be red if we want the world to make sense. A hundred and fifty years later however, Pablo Picasso would indirectly challenge that concept: he allegedly once said that “when Ι don't have red Ι use blue”; emphasizing that color was not a standard but rather a variable of little importance. One would be justified to assume that, most probably, Picasso would not have a problem to represent cinnabar with the color blue and therefore break the ‘norms of representation’; at least the orthodox ones established by Kant. The two approaches indeed appear to be on opposite sides: Kant insists on the importance of norms as the necessary elements that create a common ground for the world to exist while Picasso argues that those norms can very well be broken within a creative process. However, one can argue that the two positions can in fact coexist quite successfully: The replacement of red with blue in Picasso’s creative process is meaningful only
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when the norm that dictates that cinnabar is red is in place. In other words, norms need to exist first in order to be subsequently broken; therefore, non-normativity can acquire meaning only through the normativity that it negates. In architecture and design too, as in almost every other discipline, norms are needed in order to define their properties, even if only to challenge them later on. Non-normativity - that is the breaking of the norms acquires meaning only within a normative environment. Only in that context breaking the norms can become liberating.
Dialectics, or the Digital
The above line of thinking however, is based on a purely dialectical argument: you need an antithesis to a thesis for synthesis to happen; you need a reaction to a problem in order to find a solution; or, in a pure Hegelian way, you need a negation to something abstract in order to form something concrete. As all dialectical processes, non-normativity can only exist by negating what is perceived as a norm; a negation that the first component of the word clearly illustrates. Accordingly, the juxtaposition of non-normativity to normativity is in essence a ‘digital concept’. A line of thinking that is based on a 'digital' logic: things can be either 0s or 1s; either follow the norms or break them. Unfortunately, such polarized ways of thinking and operating have al-
