Invited Papers

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 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-

ways the tendency to create a new normativity out of a non-normativity. What now appears as a liberating force that breaks all norms can very soon become the new norm. That process, how revolutionary ideas end up becoming the (new) establishment, has been described very effectively by Thomas S. Kuhn on The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn, 1962). The juxtaposition between any normativity and its negation results in a movement from one closed set of ideas to another closed one. It is this repetitive movement from one truth to another that reveals the problem behind ideas like that of the ‘Paradigm shift’: such concepts are digital in nature; they force us to understand the world through oppositions that in the end can be represented through 0s and 1s.

Modulation, or the Analog

A different approach to how we can overcome the limiting effects of strict rules, standards and norms would be a more organic way of thinking - that is an analog one. Such a way of thinking would have us move beyond dialectics towards processes where we replace negation with affirmation as a modus operandi. Affirmation in that context is the process of accepting what is already in place (for instance the perceived norm), not as something that stays unchanged but rather as something that is in a constant flux. Therefore, progressing from a norm towards a new condition would not require a ‘non-normativity’ - that is a condition that is opposed to the norm - but instead a constant process of modulation that operates through transformation, variation and mutation.

One could argue that the above line of thinking might be an interesting but rather generic philosophical discussion. A juxtaposition that can be expressed in many ways and it can be codified through many sets of words: dialectic and nondialectic, discrete and continuous, disparate and organic. However, it is when we codify it through the specific set of concepts that it reveals its fundamental relevance to our current condition: when thinking in terms of digital and analog processes we can more easily relate it to contemporary issues.

The Digital, the Analog and the Standards

Throughout modernity norms have been expressed through the setting of standards. Through the tireless definition of specifications. Modern architecture is a very representative example. Beginning with the infamous argument between Hermann Muthesius and Henry van de Velde in the 1914 Werkbund exhibition in Cologne, standards became the means for architecture to embrace modernity (Gourdoukis, 2018). They were formed around an optimistic view – in spite of, or maybe because of, the two world wars - where design and architecture were understood as solutions to specific problems (again: dialectics are in play here). Standards could guaranty efficiency in the process of providing those solutions. It was precisely ‘modern thinking’ that created the digital computer - a tool that is in fact the ultimate machine of modernity; one that is fully incorporating its principles. However, digital tools and media, while the result of modernity, they became also the means that pushed society beyond it and towards the current information age. Nevertheless, they kept its underlying principles: the standards. Arguably then, in the information age it is again the standards that play the most important role. Networks, the result of digital computers being able to connect to each other, are based on communication protocols, which in effect are nothing else than the application of standards. Protocols refer specifically to standards governing the implementation of specific technologies (Galloway, 2004) and they can be found in almost every aspect of our everyday life. But where standards during modernity could have had a certain tolerance, informational standards are absolute. In fact they are so absolute that they bring forth an almost totalitarian condition. One can either fully accept them or else not use them at all.

The Local and the Analog

Standards therefore are norms. They define how things should be done. Consequently, digital standards are a very strict, intolerant form of norms. Therefore, as a result of the dominating communication protocols, in a digital world non-normativity is almost impossible to exist. You either accept the norm, through the protocol, or you can’t exist in the system at all (on a technical level we can think of the Internet Protocol: one has to fully accept it in order to use the internet and connect to it, without any other option in place). That situations gives rise to two very important questions: the first is about who creates the protocols, who creates the standards and who creates the norms. The second question is about how we break the standards and the norms in order to sustain the ability of human activities to produce subjectivity.

Of course, the solution to the rather dystopic picture that is painted above is not to negate digital tools or to try to return to some previous, pre-digital condition. That would be, beyond anything else, impossible. In the attempt to face norms and the normativity that arise through the rigid application of digital standards there seems to be two directions one can follow as the means of resistance. Those directions are the possible answers to the two questions posed above. The first question - that asks who is building the protocols and who sets the standards and the norms - brings forth the concept of autonomy, which in our context means 'being able to create local norms'. In other words, an attempt to operate through local norms instead of global ones and therefore decentralize the protocol creation process. By straightening the concept of autonomy on all possible levels, normativity can become liquid and transformative. Trying to answer the second question - that asks how standards and norms break - would lead us to try and handle

norms not as ‘digital’ concepts that operate only as discrete, rigid elements. Instead direct us to use them through an analog way of thinking that operate through organic, continues modulations. And while in a digital world analog processes can be difficult and demanding, they can nevertheless signify the necessary raptures with the existing structures that will release subjectivity and ultimately produce freedom. Going back to the starting point, in order to move beyond norms, one doesn’t need to think in terms of red or blue as absolute values. But rather to understand that there are virtually infinite versions of red that change according to local conditions. And ultimately to realize that red and blue are not necessary ‘opposites’: One can go from the one to the other through a continuous, analog process of modulation of color.

Reference List

Galloway, A. (2004) Protocol, How Control Exists After Decentralization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gourdoukis, D. (2018) The Future is Analog: A Post-Protocological Approach to the Production of Form in Architecture. In D. D'Uva (ed.), Handbook of Research on Form and Morphogenesis in Modern Architectural Contexts (pp. 191-218). Hershey PA: IGI Global. Kant, I. (1922) Critique of Pure Reason (2nd ed.). (F. M. Müller, Trans.) Edinburgh: The MacMillan Company.

Kuhn, T. S. (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.