IN SEARCH OF THE
HYPOKEIMENON
Jacob Oscar Riman Architecture 2017
Barry Curtis 7,250 words
IN SEARCH OF THE
HYPOKEIMENON
An Aristotelian term in metaphysics meaning the "underlying thing" (Latin: subiectum). To search for the hypokeimenon is to search for that substance which persists in a thing going through change—its basic essence. Jacob Oscar Riman Architecture 2017
Barry Curtis 7,250 words The format of this work is intended as a series of booklets forming each section, they can be read in any order (excluding the Introduction and Summation), thus the order they are presented in this Pdf is only provisional
- CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
IN SEARCH OF THE
START
HYPOKEIMENON
CONTENTS INTRODUCTION COMPLEXITY AND IMMATERIALITY
BRICK
AND MATERIALITY HOW WE PERCEIVE
OBJECTS
HOW WE PERCEIVE
BUILDINGS HYPEROBJECTS AND THEIR PLACE
AGENCY OF
ASSEMBLAGES THE
VITALITY OF MATTER
SUMMATION
POSTSCRIPT
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INTRODUCTION
This work is set to the backdrop of an ever increasingly connected world. There is at best a quasi-mystical awareness of this flourishing, intangibly interconnected network. Perhaps it is most easily perceived in the growing variety of domestic goods clamouring to be connected to the internet of things; be it receiving a text from your self-aware bin telling you that it needs emptying or watching cooking programs on your multimedia fridge door, there is undoubtedly a movement in societal consumerism towards the hyper-networked. Such movements can be seen as symptomatic of a wider more serious series of connections and causalities. The continually increasing demand for and depletion of virgin resources, a clamour for the latest and newest of everything. Disregard a perfectly usable object for the newer edition with little more to offer than an ‘s’ after its name. Whimsical, fleeting objects born from a material circulation system that is far from cyclical. Haemorrhaging material and energy at every step. Such conspicuous consumption and a growing inability to recognise value in objects is seemingly a symptom of, as Bill Brown puts it, “a pathological condition most familiarly known as modernity”1.
It is perhaps this societal subject-object dialectic that has banished the connotations of circulation, transference, translation and energetics from our contemporary considerations of material things. Indeed, Bruno Latour charges modernity with artificially setting an ontological distance between objects and humanity. It is an ever-growing challenge to perceive a future where such consumption can continue to proliferate unimpeded by the reality of material and environmental vitality. With objects becoming the totemic centre of consumerist/ capitalist society it seems important to investigate their nature. As objects’ symbolic importance grows, the general understanding of their inherent material value withdraws and the ontological miscommunication grows. Contemporary materialism is growing increasingly detached from the material. Coming to this work as a pragmatist and practitioner of design over that of scholar I intend to ask with an obdurate voice two key questions. •
How do the ontological tendrils of material things impact on the role and ultimately the responsibilities of the designer?
•
How should a practitioner engage with such metaphysical constructs?
The body of this work of speculation is, as of its subject matter, manifest in individual writings and documentation that float freely and can be experienced in any order. However, through aggregation, it is hoped that an underlying recondite connection will grow.
Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 28.1 (2001), 1-22 (p. 10) 1
COMPLEXITY AND IMMATERIALITY
IN SEARCH OF THE
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HYPOKEIMENON
The architect, once a master craftsman, designer, surveyor, draft person, and commander of labour has become a smaller cog in a much larger, sprawling machine. With every schizophrenic new entity that emerges within the union that eventually births architecture, the architect seems to take a further step back from the observational, technological, and physical processes that eventually deliver an object into the world. At no point has the commencement of an architectural project started further from its physical realisation than today. This is by no means of any individual architects’ choosing but instead a creeping stratification of the built environment both conceptually and in its physical systems. The development of these layers was not inevitable nor accidental but in accordance with technological, social, and legislative development. New ‘desires‘ and ‘expectations’ are identified and broken off from the rusting hulk of architecture. This technological momentum1 draws its pace from a process of collective choice, that over time has produced the current system of multi-layered design and construction. The nuance between the terms ‘complex’ and ‘complicated’ becomes vitally important when confronted by such aggregated systems. To pick an easy target, the issue of liability must take some of the blame for the ever increasing division of the architect’s paycheck and growing list of hyper-specialist consultants. However, it is not simply the budget for moleskin notebooks and mechanical pencils that is being shortchanged, understanding and decisions on material and product are dissected and subdivided between subcontractors each focused on their own subassembly of a now stratified architecture.
For clarity, I am not attempting to heft a fiscal axe onto the grindstone in the name of the architect, we move through an increasingly complicated world (the emergence of Hyperobjects a potent signifier). Architecture, materials, and practitioners must be equipped to answer to this increased complexity, but the current system seems to displace material value even as it demands more to be added. Making the project as a whole inaccessible through complexity and fragmentation. Then it is not the subcontractor or any individual actor at blame but the essential seriality of the systems and tools we have constructed to deal with and further such complexity. Such systems cannot accommodate matter as anything but inert, for active entities are perceived as human alone. An institutionalised “partition of the sensible”, to borrow from Jacques Rancière2. A process which parses objects as simply inert things, systemised and ordered but granting no other properties than mere physical presence. We have created a binder of standardised frames through which to view all materiality. Through these prescription lenses the haecceity of matter is lost, its vibrance dimmed, its Grip coefficient too low to provide safe footing for anything but an indefinite technical understanding. Within the digital environment, the architect now inhabits the ‘creation’ of a new wall or an additional layer of insulation can be as simple a process as a few clicks of a mouse. In reality, these simple actions can summon and deploy tens if not hundreds of tonnes of material, each trailed by an intricate tangle of determinants and consequences (embodied energy, manufacture, transport cost, maintenance regime, end-of-life disposal, etc.).
Digital design can now be so complicated as to be only conceivable through computation and produced, if even possible, through highly specialised CAM processes. In such instances, the material rarely has any role other than to provide a physical manifestation for the 3-D geometry developed within cyberspace, any value is placed on the form relegating the material to merely subservience. The use of digital design begets the need for digital construction which promotes an increased complication of construction which requires more digital design. A spiralling process that moves the process of design progressively further from the material. “Whereas detailing once suggested coming together, possibly forever, of disparate materials, it is now a transcendent coupling, waiting to be undone, unscrewed, a temporary embrace with a high probability of separation�3 The ever-growing complexity driven by social and technological momentum engenders the creation of new tools, systems, and divisions of labour. Such by choice or necessity an ontological wedge is forming, separating the designer and material from the physical reality of the work whilst trivialising, and sometimes necessitating, the creation of further layers of complexity. A self-reinforcing cycle propagating an age of sublime immateriality. The advent of Building Information Management (BIM) is proof alone that the design and systems of architecture have become so complex as to necessitate the development of a new design infrastructure4.
So perhaps as with the Heideggerian tool, architecture must be broken, must provide some ontological friction, for material qualities and their corporeal ramifications to be perceived. Perhaps the pristine nature of the world that we expect and that we strive to seamlessly produce and maintain relegates material and to some extent architecture to that of inert objects lacking agency and thing power.
Kiel Moe, Convergence: An Architectural Agenda for Energy (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013), p. 87. –(See glossary) 2 Jacques Ranciere, Davide Panagia, and Rachel Bowlby, ‘Ten Theses on Politics’, Theory &amp; Event, 5.3 (2001) <https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2001.0028>. –(See glossary) 3 Rem Koolhaas, ‘Junkspace’, October, 100 (2002), 175–90 (p. 178). 4 Moe, p. 88. 1
BRICK
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AND MATERIALITY
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HYPOKEIMENON
“‘What do you want, Brick?’ And Brick says to you, ‘I like an Arch.’ And if you say to Brick, ‘Look, arches are expensive, and I can use a concrete lintel over you. What do you think of that, Brick?’ Brick says, ‘I like an Arch.’”1 Recognising inherent material value does not necessarily require one to talk to the object in question, but here Louis Kahn highlights a key concept. Materials have an inbuilt determination, a metaphysical vector born of physical properties, historic and cultural association and iconicism. The brick is the quintessential poster child of construction, man’s technological prowess in the face of gravity, wind, rain, and the murderous ‘outside’. The standardised brick we know today is a refined version of the fired brick that has been around since 3000 BC, proceeding it’s older rural grandfather, the un-fired (or mud brick) which has been around since at least 7000 BC (forming the foundations of the archaeosphere). The development of the steam engine and the advent of the Industrial Revolution towards the end of the 18th century quickly changed how bricks were made, used, and their intrinsic interobjective value. The allegorical journey of the brick provides an apt vehicle for demonstrating the changes wrought by industrialisation and mass production, heralds of mass ubiquity and an ontological flattening. Handmade from the earth, hardened by the sun. Handmade from the earth, baked by fire. Machine made from some-earth*, fired by electricity **.
*at this point ‘earth’ has become a somewhat abstract location potentially hundreds of miles away, tenuously connected by truck, train, or barge. **with its own extensive string of causalities that this overengineered essay structure here prohibits further exploration of. With each step, quantity and structural properties ramp-up, and the individual bricks object-ness retreats. The industrially produced, standardised, brick of today can be seen as a Hyperobject, massively distributed, rarely perceived as an aggregation of individual entities but as a monolithic assemblage of will given form. By sheer volume of number, they produce an effect both environmentally and of a more conceptual distancing of material appreciation through ubiquity. Bennetts definition of assemblages as “ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts”2 highlights an issue with the mechanised uniformity of modern process. As materials or objects become more mechanically and aesthetically identical their observable object-ness, their vibrancy, recedes. To return to that all-purpose machine, the steam engine, harbinger of the human produced Hyperobject, its inception the defining point of a new geological age. In 1784 the first layers of carbon from coal, burnt in steam engines, were settling across the globe, this global-geological act is the first decisive marker of the Anthropocene and the age of Hyperobjects. The advent of mechanised manufacturing has in time lead to mass consumerism and the dislocation of craft from many trades and objects. A sublime mass-produced immateriality threatens to subsume all.
Following his conversation with ‘Brick‘, Kahn goes on to state that it is the duty of the practitioner to “honour the brick and glorify the brick, instead of short-changing it.”3 and I believe Kahn intended that we extrapolate this to cover all material. I would argue that current design/ materiality suffers from a perceived limitless availability, engendering little or no individual objective value, enraptured by the mass production and growing mass ubiquity. This ubiquity, consciously or by reflex, has been recognised and reacted to by some. The trend of using panelised brick on tall buildings, for instance, is an (in my opinion misguided) example of architects attempting to distance their work from the smooth materiality of the ‘modern’ and to recapture an ‘authentic’ and ‘real’ materiality. Brick offers an unassailable texture “of softness-hardness, permanence-temporariness.”, they are a human scale intuitively obvious object4. But the modern system for high-rise brick facades not only short-changes the brick but undermines its fundamental, iconic, identity. Brick has a socio-historical association with longevity, robustness, and a sense of invested time and effort. Bricks speak of a time of little material complexity, structure, interior and exterior finish, bricks were the core of a building worn proudly on the outside. Contemporary practice, on the other hand, sees sticker-brick wafers, glued to an aluminium frame, bolted to a steel superstructure, which in turn is affixed to a hidden concrete core. Far from celebratory, this ‘technology’ represents an ontological devolution to that of caricature.
â&#x20AC;&#x153;The future can no longer be a colony of the presentâ&#x20AC;?5, nor the past. When modern materials are unfit or undesirable the practitioner must resist the exploitation of established materiality in an attempt to shroud contemporary experiential inadequacies. If we continue to rely on the haecceity of the established we risk it drying out, we need to innovate and respect materials otherwise risk the built environment of the future being little more than an ontological salt flat, littered with banners referencing a past that no longer holds value.
Nathaniel Kahn, My Architect, a Son´s Journey (Louis Kahn Project Inc., Mediaworks, 2004) <https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Mvxzb3FHws> [accessed 12 April 2017]. 2 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (Duke University Press), p. 23. 3 Kahn. 4 Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built, Reprint edition (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2010), p. 123. 5 Kiel Moe, Convergence: An Architectural Agenda for Energy (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013), p. 11. 1
HOW WE PERCEIVE
OBJECTS
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“Junkspace is the sum total of our current achievement; we have built more than all previous generations put together, but somehow we do not register on the same scales. We do not leave pyramids”1 On but one point do I disagree with Koolhaas, we do indeed leave pyramids, and we are collectively engaging in the erection of new ones daily. These pyramids can grow to monstrous proportions, dwarfing the best efforts of the pharaohs, some are inverted cutting into the earth whilst others tower over communities and the natural landscape. Thousands of tonnes of landfill, rubble, earth and slag are produced, buried, or piled up daily across the globe. Ironically these are some of the most permanent ‘structures’ that we will ever build, them and their causalities outliving us by tens of thousands of years. Much like Italo Calvino’s imagined city of Leonia2, humanity cannot continue to build on top of and create new man-made strata indefinitely. Something has to give. The archaeosphere, like all Hyperobjects (as it must be considered), is not simply a passive presence, though an “effect and imprint of human action, it produces effects and imprints of its own.”3. (Matt Edgeworth here concisely, albeit unintentionally, defined the properties of a Hyperobject) Architecture and objects are increasingly regarded as supportive of lifestyle. Luxury has never before been presented as something so attainable, packaged as a sort of over-the-counter lifestyle vitamin. Modern, fast-paced consumeristic life is a celebration of and a slave to instant gratification and thus consumption, rapidly replacing the ‘old’ with the new.
Given continued acceleration, will the propensity for consumer society to create fleeting, whimsical things bring about the ontological death of the object, to be replaced with an army of bedazzled and heavily branded thing-jects? In 1991 Bruno Latour posited that “things do not exist without being full of people”4, but to the contemporary consumer things increasingly do not exist, or to put it more accurately are not worth noticing if they are not full of the latest aspirational ideas of luxury. This preoccupation obscures a physical objects material “circulation, transference, translation, and displacement”5. There is not so much a subject-object dialectic as a complete indifference to the physical, instead, it is the immaterially iconic and aspirational value that has come to define objects. This reveals a double taxonomy that places hyper value on objects that are dependent on a realm of promised ‘experience’, which represents the ultimate goal. Though requiring some physical manifestation, the overall result is the transcendence of objects. Today you don’t buy a phone to take photos and message your friends, you buy a phone because that group of young attractive people running through the surf on some idealistic beach, you saw on TV have that lifestyle because they own this new phone. Adverts have developed to show little of the actual product, instead focusing on aspirations of lifestyle, travel, beauty, romance, etc. Prescribed to the consumer by media and advertising executives.
As objects are produced in bigger numbers and the incremental improvements promised with each new generation are reduced, the codes through which we assess and value such becomes increasingly abstract. The adage ‘form follows function’ seems all but forgotten, as in many instances seemingly has the basic necessity of function. In the vast blur of contemporary consumerism, physicality is supplanted by buzzwords like authentic, genuine, and original. Quality is not a prerequisite in junk space, superseded by that of volume and promise. The resultant Hyperobject, what I have come to think of as ‘congealed consumerism’, represents a too vast and uncanny entity to be comfortably considered. Think floating islands of plastic in the Pacific and vast seas of detritus being packed into the Earth. Whilst we have indeed started to react to such threats it is rare that one attempts to conceive of the whole, Hyperobject, that a plastic bottle on the pavement is a component of in confederation with. Focusing on such individual manifestations is little better as they too cannot be truly grasped or engaged with, as they are increasingly just a collage of physical and aspirational things, not objects in their own right. “Junk space is beyond measure, beyond code… it cannot be grasped”6 Brown said of objects “there are codes by which our interpretive attention makes them meaningful”7, through this framework an understanding of function and physicality allows us to perceive things as actualities and thus objects with their own determinants and consequences.
Thus, a greater level of clarity and specificity would allow the subject to engage more wholly with the object in question. Perhaps then, it should be the goal of the practitioner to reconnect with the consumer, not as an enabler, purveyor, or brand but as a co-inhabitant. To break out of the role of implicit enabler, to question material and form, to reject the proliferation of uniform ‘luxury’ and the undermining of material vibrancy. As “junk space thrives on design…design dies in junk space”8, practitioners of design should seek to break out of this narrowing ontological plane, driven by technological and cultural inertia. Rejecting the ideology implicit within the luxury handbag and for that matter the ideology of the faux luxury handbag, or risk being consumed by Jean Baudrillard’s hyperreality.
Rem Koolhaas, ‘Junkspace’, October, 100 (2002), 175–90 (p. 175). 2 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. by William Weaver, New Ed edition (London: Vintage Classics, 1997), pp. 102–3. 3 Matt Edgeworth and others, ‘Diachronous Beginnings of the Anthropocene: The Lower Bounding Surface of Anthropogenic Deposits’, The Anthropocene Review, 2015, 2053019614565394 <https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019614565394>. 4 Paul Graves-Brown, Matter, Materiality, and Modern Culture (Psychology Press, 2000), p. 10,20. 5 Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 28.1 (2001), 1–22 (p. 12). 6 Koolhaas, p. 177. 7 Brown, p. 4. 8 Koolhaas, p. 177. 1
HOW WE PERCEIVE
BUILDINGS
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Alongside agriculture, the built environment is the most prominent physical signifier of mankind and in turn the Anthropocene. In How Buildings Learn, Stuart Brand suggests that “Nearly everything about [contemporary] real estate estranges buildings from the users”. Ingrained short-termism and profiteering of the sector abstracts daily life from the building, operating at a maintained distance from the real. Realty has developed in many ways to become the opposite of reality. Stewart Brand highlights the implicit etymological binary of the ‘real(ty)’ in ‘real estate’, re-al being delivered from ‘Royal’, and the res – ‘thing’ – which is the root of ‘reality’1. Though, these days they seldom wear crowns the owners of elite brands and real estate still profit from the ownership of the real (objects, brands, and land) and the selling of the image of realty to the everyday consumer. In areas of high density, this is especially true, where only the top few percent can afford to own land or home, the vast majority are left at the mercy of rental agreements. Every homeowner is a Royal king in their own castle, irrespective of whether down payments or due rent threatens to bring this reality crumbling to the ground. As with the industry’s catering to mass consumption of product, real estate has become “a viscous parody of ambition”2, systematically corroding the credibility of the home even as its commodified. An ontological wedge driving between the user and that of the home, the built environment, and architecture. Nowadays it is possible to buy, sell, and be bankrupted by little more than the idea of a home.
Of course, buildings have always represented massive financial investment. Philanthropists and sponsors have long flocked to invest in the brick and mortar of new institutes and public works, enraptured by the “lustre of a lasting monument”3 and to be party to such an enduring symbol of status. But the classic image of a house as a home, a universally identifiable and relatable concept, is still in danger. The domination of the fiscal has become more and more apparent, as urbanisation increases available land becomes rarefied and exponentially costlier. The reality of renting is fast overriding the idea of ownership with more and more architectural work being specifically designed for the rental sector. Designing houses that by their very nature will not become someone’s home. Brand highlights a trend in contemporary architecture to “strenuously avoid any relationship whatever with time”4, to protect investment from such a potentially degradational anchoring. If we are generating an architecture that is intentionally not of this time or anytime, how can we produce architecture that is relatable? By denying any original grounding such work pushes a post-modern built environment (and society) first to, then deeper, into hyperreality. Propagating an Interobjectivity of malign ubiquity. The abridged modern material palette of glass and steel increasingly lends itself to austere immaterial edifices, often choosing to reflect the buildings around it rather than declaring its own character. Coupled with price tags and promises of lavish lifestyles that verge on implausible all contribute to a feeling that the built environment has ‘taken off’, overshooting the tangible real-world. Though not completely co-dependent, the rapid advancement of such material systems perhaps highlights a revealing
industry preference for a certain clean ubiquity in fascia and cladding technology. The growing frequency of the starchitect (totemic leaders of populist consumer culture) designed landmark building further underscores this growing issue. Perhaps most succinctly summarised by Professor of design Thomas Michelle’s indictment of contemporary architecture; suggesting that the “field may be bankrupt”5. Having traded tactile physicality and relatability for the timeless hyperreality of contemporary aspirational consumerism. Furthering the move from reality, Stuart Brand charges architecture with placing too much focus on the council of “architecture schools and…magazines – both of which deliberately isolate themselves from real sources of feedback on building performance”6. Though some progress has been made to address this industry bias, for the most part, the discussion within architecture remains focused on the project at a theoretical, ‘academic’ stage. The built environment is undeniably a physical reality and for the vast majority of inhabitants, not an academic experiment in ‘the process of living’, thus the experiential and the physical should take precedence in the designer’s mind. Practitioners of design are not only the potential managers of vast formations of matter and energy7, they are the voice and ambassador of this materiality to the masses. Such power might be leverage by the practitioner to develop a (much needed) new zeitgeist of greater social solidarity, in terms of living arrangements, affordability, and the experiential.
To combat, what Stewart Brand labels the current “pathologically ahistorical”8 age the practitioners must seek to establish cohesion within the contemporary “range of shifting realities that will [come to] characterise this century.”9. Striving for a vital physicality and a re-engagement with design at a human scale, engendering a more tangible relationship between man, object, place, and time.
Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built, Reprint edition (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2010), p. 87. 2 Rem Koolhaas, ‘Junkspace’, October, 100 (2002), 175–90 (p. 176). 3 Brand, p. 2. 4 Brand, p. 52. 5 C. Thomas Mitchell, Redefining Designing: From Form to Experience (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1993), p. 30. 6 Brand, pp. 69–70. 7 Kiel Moe, Convergence: An Architectural Agenda for Energy (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013), p. 11. 8 Brand, p. 221. 9 Moe, p. 11. 1
HYPEROBJECTS AND THEIR PLACE
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In Thing Theory Bill Brown posits the question, do we actually need such theory? Is it just another fetishisation of the conceptual? An indulgent over complication on the part of the academic? If things are tangible and, as one would hope, understood on a physical level by maker and user, do they require an existential level of theory to embalm them, as such enquiry brings with it instability, uncertainty, and ambiguity. The idea of longing for a metaphysical respite through the experiential observation, of the sublimely simple at hand world, is aptly depicted by A.S.Byatt (as pointed to by Brown) in his The Biographer’s tale. Tired of Lacan, a doctoral student throws down pen and paper, looking up at a ‘filthy window‘ exclaiming “I must have things” momentarily relinquishing the theoretical, he bathed in the light of a physical world. “A real, very dirty window, shutting out the sun. A thing.”1. Upon first reading, this my initial, perhaps somewhat perverse, thought was that he was ironically looking at the manifestation of a new ontological theory, that of the Hyperobject. The dirt on the window is most probably an accumulation of carbon and other pollutants. Understanding this the image of a dirty window and its obstruction of light becomes a metaphor for the Hyperobject of pollution made visible. To further supplant this theoretical students’ escapism, we must examine his use of the word ‘thing’, for in the Heideggerian sense a window in of itself cannot be perceived as a thing. It is, in fact, the dirt, corrupting the window’s purpose, that prompts a perception of it as thing.
The build-up of seemingly extraneous material changes the perception of the whole, a breaking down of functionality, disrupting the established subject-object relationship, confronting us with the thing-ness of the object. Moving from a ready-at-hand object to a present-at-hand thing2. Many writers and theorists engaging with the subject of ontology have alluded to a gradual yet systematic retraction of thing-value, an ontological flattening. Steven Shaviro fears that the contemporary obsession with information (‘informatics’) and data “has gotten in the way of a proper understanding of the importance of energetics.”3. As discussed elsewhere within this work, mass consumerism and the trajectory of the built environment can be seen to simultaneously illustrate and quicken the decline of the material. The wider theoretical study that is speculative realism, of which Hyperobjects, thing theory, and object-oriented ontology are but elements, stands to contradict the generally prevailing human centric philosophy of correlationism. The prevalence of such can perhaps be seen as symptomatic of wider issue in society today, a lack of visibility, even understanding of determinants and causalities that sit outside the immediate experiential bubble of the ready-at-hand world. Hyperobjects have, either started to show us or have been revealed as (depending on where you rank science and philosophy respectively) a causal mesh connecting the action of humanity too, and the generation of, massive entities (global warming for example) that are now exerting pressure not only back on us but the world as a whole. More of this mesh, a concept akin to what Heidegger described as ‘contexture of equipment’4, is
revealed as we learn and become more conscious of the world around us. The age of Asymmetry (as set out by Timothy Morton) renders our technological advances somewhat self-defeating, “knowledge is no longer able to achieve escape velocity”5, violently pulled back down to earth by a continually growing gravity well of environmental reality. Even as such realities are proven (climate reports, shifting seasons, freak weather, etc.) the capitalist machine we have constructed around ourselves calls for more while simultaneously painting over the growing cracks with shiny but majoritively ineffective green paint. A practice that cannot endure indefinitely. Continuing the technological arc of development and proliferation, technology and objects will become increasingly entwined within our lives, our interactions with others, and how we see and interpret the world around us. Prof Morton predicts nonhuman entities will be “responsible for the next moment of human history and thinking”6. Objects and things will increasingly manifest within our social, psychic, and philosophical space. The subject-object relationship is changing; thus it is the responsibility of the designer to engage with, understand, and to some extent direct the trajectory of this paradigm shift.
Though a theoretical construct I feel I owe an apology to the doctoral student, for in the creation of this work I to have felt the desire to return to a simpler time where things were seemingly just the sum total of their physicality. The halcyon days where â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;ontologyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; might have been a category of specific medical study for all I knew. The time of such luxurious philistinism, however, is fast running out, a philosophical amelioration of the process of greening is required not just to avoid a preponderantly ready-at-hand future but to ensure there is one.
A. S. Byatt, The Biographerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Tale, New Ed edition (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 2. 2 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, New Ed edition (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 1978). 3 Steven Shaviro, Discognition (Repeater, 2016), p. 220. 4 Heidegger. 5 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), p. 160. 6 Morton, p. 201. 1
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ASSEMBLAGES
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In a world that is growing ever more interconnected and the objects within it are increasingly developing new agency, autonomously and through aggregation, the discussion of Hyperobjects and thing power are becoming increasingly relevant in this age of the hyper networked. The modern world is built on assemblages of assemblages, inconceivably vast and massively distributed but majoritively hidden from the everyday view. In his book, Discognition, Steven Shapiro voices the fear that the current ages fascination with immaterial “informatics” has gotten in the way of an appreciation for material and its vibrancy (to use his term ‘energetics‘)1. As the internet of things and the immaterial network grow, so must the underlying infrastructural architecture (here not referring to that of buildings but of deeply buried rigid infrastructural subsystems) equally extend. The modern obsession with clean unbroken uniformity highlighted by Rem Koolhaas in Junkspace perhaps goes some way to explaining the lack of visibility, even comprehension, for this fundamental assemblage on which so much of modern life is dependent. Modernity (here used in place of junk space) exploits “any invention that enables expansion, [and] deploys the infrastructure of seamlessness”2. In an age of instant gratification, one does not question where the power comes from or the path a message is routed through to reach its destination, it just happens, the quicker the better. “The modern period of intense techno-scientific transformation has degraded both the interpersonal environment and our socio-psychic networks”3
Thus revealed is a strange willful duality, as the realm of the immaterial becomes increasingly incorporated into daily life we facilitate, fund, and engage with the continued assembly of the underlying substructure of physical equipment, networks and infrastructure even as we ignore, whitewash, and deny its existence. In his ‘sociological opera’, Paris: Invisible City, Bruno Latour attempts to explore and bring to the forefront the invisible architecture that allows society to operate and questions if an overall understanding of such systems is even possible. Citing Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities as an insightful image of reality, showing cities to be a “congested, saturated and asphyxiated”4 layering of assemblages that as of yet are not accommodated within our current social theory, remaining uncanny and majoritively un-confronted in day-to-day life. Hyperobjects in inception are assemblages of seemingly passive things that through aggregation, vast scale, and distribution in time and space “exert downwards causal pressure on shorter–lived entities”5. The technological, informatic future embodied by products such as the Cloud, the internet of things, virtual reality (VR), and the eerie advent of conversational avatars like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa. All promise a benevolent world populated by complicit omnipresent things that understand human needs, whilst simultaneously distancing if not denying the ontological aspect to society. Contrary to the outward facing image, as such technologies and services grow so does the prerequisite for more fundamentally physical infrastructure. Such infrastructure thickens as it expands, little is removed as cables, pipes, and machines are superseded, extraction is prohibited by cost and the impatience of a society growing used to
instantaneous access and connection. This stratigraphic assemblage of old and new sits within and on top of the Anthropocene and can be conceived as the roots of the modern archaeosphere. Humanity has crossed a threshold and is moving into a new era, not only a “historical age but also a geological one”6. The shifting archaeosphere represents a more permanent presence than all that is built on it, a growing assemblage of things that has surpassed some critical mass and now is starting to resist and exert its own forces. Thing power “the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle.”7 As with Hyperobjects, the scope of concepts and causalities here engaged means that the assembled thing power is necessarily uncanny. Thus, it seems clear that the archaeosphere as of the assembled networks that we are so reliant on today have an undeniable ‘thing-power’. Or perhaps more fittingly represent a contemporary ‘magical object’8. With every pile piled, shaft dug, conduit sunk, and tunnel bored humanity is extending its influence downwards, expanding its borders, pushing out and infilling with the archaeosphere, driving the Anthropocene before it. Though by no means is such a vast assemblage of things and causalities truly appreciable by a single entity, some level of understanding as with the invisible Paris will help ”us to grasp the importance of ordinary objects”9 and give us a basis on which to develop a more ontologically engaged social theory.
In this new geological, technological age of constant growth, daily life is ever more dependent and affected by the unseen quasi-ethereal forces an assembled grid of causality and agency constantly growing and changing. A hyper state?
Steven Shaviro, Discognition (Repeater, 2016), p. 220. Rem Koolhaas, ‘Junkspace’, October, 100 (2002), 175–90 (p. 175). 3 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (Duke University Press), p. 113. 4 Bruno Latour, Emilie Hermant, and Susanna Shannon, Paris Ville Invisible, Les Empêcheurs de Penser En Rond (Paris : Le Plessis-Robinson: La Découverte ; Institut Synthélabo pour le progrès de la connaissance, 1998). 5 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), p. 67. 6 Morton, p. 5. 7 Bennett, p. 6. 8 Professor Steven Connor, Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things (London: Profile Books, 2011). 9 Latour, Hermant, and Shannon. 1 2
THE
VITALITY
#/7
OF MATTER
IN SEARCH OF THE
HYPOKEIMENON
Hylomorphism, an Aristotelian concept, describes the creation of a thing as the combination of matter and form. The French philosopher Gilbert Simondon demonstrates that such a “hylomorphic model leaves many things, active and affective, by the wayside”1, by attempting to wrestle materiality into a state of heterogeneous monism. Denying ‘energetic materiality’ any movement, variation, or haecceities. As highlighted elsewhere within this work, contemporary material culture has a tendency to impose (or at least pursue) this monistic materiality. The French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, by contrast, describe the creation of a thing as being a combination of ‘material and force’ recognising inherent energetic materiality and acknowledging the involved process of forming things to human will. Though still a significant distance from Jane Barnett’s conception of vibrant matter this understanding of material things does not attempt to deny matter a role in its formation and perception. Jane Barnett’s goal in Vibrant Matter is “to theorise a materiality that is as much force as an entity, as much energy as matter, as much intensity as extension.”2 Barnett’s vibrant materialism attempts to incorporate nonhuman entities both physical and of affect, recognising assemblages and confederacies and locating all within an enmeshing grid of causality. In applying this theory Barnett notes that our ‘fantasies of human mastery’ are chastened and a common materiality is highlighted, revealing a far wider distribution of agency. Though we have assembled the infrastructure of the modern world and our intentions participate “they are not the sole or always the most profound actant in the assemblage.”3.
We are not in complete control of all that we have created and the assembled vastness in some cases seems to act as an amplifier for specific material haecceities. Let us adjust course slightly and consider Hyperobjects in light of vital materiality, similar in concept, one engaging the macro whilst the other looks to the micro. Consider Rain, as an individual, you may only experience drops of rain, you are not experiencing all of Rain, consequently, it can be considered a Hyperobject4, the personified hole of innumerable things. These things are of course the droplets which individually have little or no effect but as an aggregated collective impact on much; flooding, agriculture, famine, and which month you choose to go on holiday. Rain is massively distributed in time, space, manifestation, and its long reaching causal effect. Such vast entities and, by confederation small, individual things are in their perception inherently tied to their effect or purpose. Rain to a farmer is as much a fundamental tool as a chisel is to a carpenter. When the ready-at-hand chisel breaks the carpenter is presently confronted with the thing-ness of the object, when drought strikes and the farmer is similarly (though admittedly somewhat less tangibly) made aware of the entity of which he had taken for granted. The Hyperobjects of climate change, desertification, or water poverty may not become instantaneously visible, as the undeniably rough materiality of shattered metal might, but their presence is felt.
Graham Harman touches on this whilst discussing Heidegger’s theories on equipment, “equipment is most equipment, in its concealment from view as something silently relied upon”5. It is the withdrawing of function that turns ‘invisible actant’ into ‘obtrusive presence’. This being so that if one can break through the phenomenological epidermis of present-at-hand nullity, one may access the vibrancy of things and their assembled agency. Thus, the quiddity of a material is subconsciously withdrawn, reflexively obscured by superficial function or simply the mundane. A process augmented by a contemporary preoccupation with informatics, the widening gap between subject and object, and the impinging whitewash of junk space. Practitioners of design, for the most part, today inhabit two levels of reality. That of cyberspace and the ready-athand world. An understanding of vibrant materiality, seeing all as perhaps Heidegger might see a present-athand damaged tool, could add a third dimension and act as a tool to aid the designer in engaging with materiality. To simply use an object (or tool) and ‘assembled‘ premade elements to form larger things does not create the necessary ontological friction required to expose vibrant haecceities. Designers need to physically, or at the very least vicariously, engage in the base creation of objects and tools. The process of making a handmade brick, forcing material into a desired form, reveals more of the vibrant properties of said material than handling a pre-made brick could possibly.
The design practitioner should then be aware of this triality and equipped to engage with it. To be cognisant of the mass, makeup, embodied energy, feeling, texture, afterlife, effect, connection, and vibrancy that each line drawn or dragged and clicked could potentially summon into physical being.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), p. 408. 2 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (Duke University Press), p. 20. 3 Bennett, p. 37. 4 Although the theory was born of Prof Mortonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s conception of man-made Hyperobjects, those of the archaeosphere, ecological degradation and global warming, for example, it is still here applicable. 5 Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures (Winchester: Zero Books, 2010), p. 96. 1
SUMMATION - POSTSCRIPT - GLOSSARY - BIBLIOGRAPHY
IN SEARCH OF THE
END
HYPOKEIMENON
Heidegger is right in his observation that our principal existence is being ‘in the world’, not abstractly viewing it from afar. The primary intent of this work was to edge outside the ready-at-hand world and look back, observing it and where the designer practitioner stands within it. How successful I have been at engendering this perspective I am unsure, but personally, this discussion has made me feel aware enough to be uncomfortable. We are indeed caught up, completely enmeshed, within an ontological field even as we enlarge and push it further from view. Such unease chiefly stems from two fronts. The reality and growing agency of Hyperobjects and vital assemblages, and the idea of the causal grid in which we are invisibly enmeshed every action pulling and deforming all. Latour’s observation that humanity is much better at admitting it infects nature than at admitting that non-human objects can infect culture, “for that blasphemous idea implies nonhumans are actors as much as objects.”1, highlight the first barrier that must be overcome in distinguishing the hypokeimenon of material. The uncomfortable truth that we have all been complicit in the creation of entities that now sit outside us is not necessarily new or a surprise. The uncanniness arises from the apparent ease that such issues can be abstracted and removed from the realm of material things and daily life. By entities, I am course talking about Hyperobjects such as global warming and the immense volumes of landfill created across the globe. Though not the intended focal point of this work the topic of sustainability has been ever present throughout this discussion. Which, when put in perspective is not surprising, we have seen how
technological advances and the advent of mass consumerism have “degraded both the interpersonal environment and our socio-psychic networks”2, undermining the accessible value and increasing the turnover of objects. This ontological distancing is only intensified as more is consumed and squandered. Hyperobjects and their impact are becoming increasingly visible. In proactively recognising them, and with that the necessary vibrant nature of matter, perhaps we can prescribe a much-needed “course of anthropomorphisation”3. This, Bennett suggests, may “chasten our fantasies of human mastery, highlight the common materiality of all that is, expose a wider distribution of agency, and reshape the self and its interests”4. As for the second question, ‘how can one engage with such metaphysical constructs’, I am sure of two things, there is no definitive answer, but the direction that practitioners should pursue is clear. To push (consumer and practitioner alike) towards a greater understanding and ability to access the present-at-hand world, and for such an understanding to be integrated into all elements of design practice and education. Architecture, and wider design, perhaps needs to take a step back, focusing less on the abstract needs and aspirations of future consumers and more on the establishment of an enduring subject object relationship. Such a shift could help prompt a much-needed transformation in societal engagement with material things5. It seems that design practitioners sit at the intersection of massively complicated networks of physical and sociological determinants and causalities.
Some are barely perceptible, others all but obscuring the rest, some seemingly banal as others scream out for attention. If one chooses to engage with such, as I now feel I must, how can a practitioner navigate this dense mesh that oscillates between the physical and conceptual with no fixed horizons. Furtively connected to all via a superficially conceptual net, that humanity has cast out and is now enfolding all. To engage with every theory glimpsed within this work and still produce things that keep client and bank account happy is at this moment perhaps an impossibly demanding agenda. But a refocusing on vibrant matter with all its heterogeneous haecceity is a good place to start.
POSTSCRIPT
“ideas… give me a queasy feeling, nausea, whereas objects in the external world, on the other hand, delight me.”6 I feel that this work is but an interim report, a kind of provisional conclusion. The process of exploring researching and writing this piece has opened an entire world of intellectual theory, concepts, and questions. The deceptively simple sounding task of attempting to locate where a practitioner of design sits within this has swelled grossly beyond my initial comprehension. I fully admit that I have in only the briefest sense touched upon many theories and philosophers within this work, flitting quickly from one to the next as the eventual scope of this work demanded. Perhaps this piece represents more of a roadmap for my future reading and exploration. This engagement will continue for the foreseeable future, impacting greatly on my practice and how I navigate the theoretical and physical world ahead. Thank you for sticking along for the ride. Now put down this assemblage of paper and go do something tactile.
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (Duke University Press), p. 115. 2 Bennett, p. 113. 3 Bennett, p. 122. 4 Bennett, p. 122. 5 C. Thomas Mitchell, Redefining Designing: From Form to Experience (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1993), p. 210. 6 Francis Ponge and Beth Archer Brombert, The Voice of Things (McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1972), p. 93. 1
GLOSSARY
Age of Asymmetry
Defined by Timothy Morton as a new era of aesthetics and ecology, unpredicted, and unpredictable.
CAM
Computer-Aided Manufacturing
Conspicuous consumption
the purchase of goods or services for the specific purpose of displaying one’s wealth or status.
Greening
The process of becoming more aware of environmental issues and at least superficially responding with the adoption of green practices.
Grip coefficient
Measurable tractive force of a flooring material, used to test if surfaces are safe to walk on.
Haecceity
That essence of an individual that distinguishes it from all other similar individuals, the “here-and-nowness” of a thing.
Hyperreality
The inability to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality.
Hypokeimenon
An Aristotelian term in metaphysics meaning the “underlying thing” (Latin: subiectum).
Interobjective
Defined by Bruno Latour as the common world of experience and meaning which is shared by groups of people and object.
OOO
The study of Object Oriented Ontology
Partition of the sensible
French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s phrase to describe partitioning the world into what is visible and what is not.
Present-at-hand
A Heideggerian term, in essence describing an attitude/mode of experience that is confronted by generally unobserved properties of objects/things.
Ready-at-hand
A Heideggerian term, in essence describing an attitude/mode of experience that overlooks the inherent withdrawn properties of objects/things.
Technological momentum
A theory developed by the historian of technology Thomas P. Hughes, taking the relationship between technology and society and adding time as the unifying factor.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter (Duke University Press) Brand, Stewart, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built, Reprint edition (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2010) Brown, Bill, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 28 (2001), 1–22 Byatt, A. S., The Biographer’s Tale, New Ed edition (London: Vintage, 2001) Calvino, Italo, Invisible Cities, trans. by William Weaver, New Ed edition (London: Vintage Classics, 1997) Connor, Professor Steven, Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things (London: Profile Books, 2011) Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013) Edgeworth, Matt, Dan deB Richter, Colin Waters, Peter Haff, Cath Neal, and Simon James Price, ‘Diachronous Beginnings of the Anthropocene: The Lower Bounding Surface of Anthropogenic Deposits’, The Anthropocene Review, 2015, 2053019614565394 <https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019614565394>
Graves-Brown, Paul, Matter, Materiality, and Modern Culture (Psychology Press, 2000) Harman, Graham, Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures (Winchester: Zero Books, 2010) Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, New Ed edition (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 1978) Koolhaas, Rem, ‘Junkspace’, October, 100 (2002), 175–90 Latour, Bruno, Emilie Hermant, and Susanna Shannon, Paris Ville Invisible, Les Empêcheurs de Penser En Rond (Paris : Le PlessisRobinson: La Découverte ; Institut Synthélabo pour le progrès de la connaissance, 1998) Mitchell, C. Thomas, Redefining Designing: From Form to Experience (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1993) Moe, Kiel, Convergence: An Architectural Agenda for Energy (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013) Morton, Timothy, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013) Ponge, Francis, and Beth Archer Brombert, The Voice of Things (McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1972) Ranciere, Jacques, Davide Panagia, and Rachel Bowlby, ‘Ten Theses on Politics’, Theory &amp; Event, 5 (2001) <https://doi. org/10.1353/tae.2001.0028> Shaviro, Steven, Discognition (Repeater, 2016)
EXTENDED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Easterling, Keller, Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2005) ‘Emissions from the Cement Industry’ <http://blogs.ei.columbia. edu/2012/05/09/emissions-from-the-cement-industry/> [accessed 24 March 2017] Engelke, Matthew, ed., The Objects of Evidence: Anthropological Approaches to the Production of Knowledge, 1 edition (Chichester, U.K. ; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) Graham, Stephen, Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers (London ; New York: Verso, 2016) Ingold, T., ‘The Textility of Making’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 34 (2010), 91–102 <https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/ bep042> Jacobs, Jane, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Vintage Books ed edition (New York: Vintage Books, 1993) Kahn, Nathaniel, My Architect, a Son´s Journey (Louis Kahn Project Inc., Mediaworks, 2004) <https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=3Mvxzb3FHws> [accessed 12 April 2017]
Latour, Bruno, ‘On Interobjectivity’, Mind, Culture, and Activity, 3 (1996),228–45<https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327884mca0304_2> ‘Making Up Ground’, 99% Invisible <http://99percentinvisible. org/episode/making-up-ground/> [accessed 17 November 2016] Nitta, K., and M. Yoneyama, ‘Polymer Concentration Dependence of the Helix to Random Coil Transition of a Charged Polypeptide in Aqueous Salt Solution’, Biophysical Chemistry, 3 (1975), 323–29 Sullivan, Robert, The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures at the Edge of a City (New York: Anchor, 1999) Viney, William, Waste: A Philosophy of Things (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015)