Published: Cary Siress, Of All Things: Assemblies Staged in Place of The Global Theater, Infrastructure as Architecture, (Berlin: Jovis

Verlag, 2010), pp. 6-12. ISBN 978-3868590913

Of All Things Reassemblies Staged in Place of the Global Theater

Back Inside with Bruno Latour and Peter Sloterdijk Cary Siress

how should we open up in order to look ahead of ourselves where nothing is visible, with our eyes guided by two terms the sense of which escapes us creation (until now reserved for theological mysteries), mondialisation (until now reserved for technical and economic matters, otherwise called globalization)?
Jean-Luc Nancy, La cration du monde ou la mondialisation, 2002

The factory worker leans forward facing the table before her. She stares intently at the globe; perhaps she is pondering the act of creation, though it is also possible that her thoughts are elsewhere. The arm is bent slightly to the right toward the connecting seam; she is motionless, for a moment, paused between a job accomplished and an interminable task. The hand rests on the curved surface to hold the globe in place, the touch arrested in routine concentration on the womans work; and the globe in return dutifully exerts its share of the return. Other rank and file workers repeat the procedure down the line, predictably, invariably. Between the globe, palm of the hand, and fixed stare, the scene is about to yield up its content. Standing behind the globe on which she is now working, the woman has turned the globe on its side, rotating its north-south axis horizontally to inspect the equatorial junction. That is, for the spectators at present observing her she is situated to the west of our view relative to the globe, with part of North America and the eastern tip of Asia clearly visible from our vantage. But the globe has its other half turned away from those spectators. We can see nothing of the reverse hemisphere. The factory worker, on the other hand, is perfectly visible in mid-height; or at any rate, she is not masked by the numerous globes surrounding her, which may soon absorb her when she proceeds with
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the next step in the fabrication process. She is no doubt in the middle of a work shift, before the eyes of the spectator, captured by camera within the vast cage of the manufacturing plant projecting backwards behind her. Now she is seen, caught for an instant at a commonplace center of assembling. From our vantage, both globe and worker are halfway between the visible and the invisible: wrested from the background, they have both come into view temporarily as co-object and co-subject, but when she finishes her shift, removing herself and the globe from our gaze, they will again enter a nether region of reticence and shadow, to that globalized world frozen in place, if only because its assembly, at last, it would appear, is near completion. The woman is looking with her eyes cast downward, avoiding the camera while remaining intently focused on the work at hand. It is as if we as spectators should not, or cannot be observed while observing her, even though the space from which we are viewing and that which is viewed must presumably, and in principle, be the same. Yet, there where she is staring is removed from our view and remains doubly invisible: first, because it is not seen within the space of the photograph, and, second, because it is the space and time of assembly itself, that perilous flash of translation by which we are gathered and by which we are dispersed at the moment of our actual looking. Nevertheless, we can, in effect, guess what the woman is looking at, if only through idle deduction, as we never tire of enforcing insights already won. For even though it is in-visible, we, the spectators, still find it easy to assign something there where she stares and thus fill in the blank, since it is ourselves, after all, who serve to complete the image.1 Taking stock of this image, how far we seem to have come, by most accounts, from the remote time and place of that image with God portrayed as consummate Architect of the World industriously administering the primal cause of creation. A golden compass is balanced in the hand that has just circumscribed an ideal circle for the heavens; the other hand is lowered to prop up the formation before work begins on the unformed matter that will become the earth. How amused we are now at the very notion that
1

For this introductory passage, see Michel Foucaults analysis of Las Meninas in the preface to The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, (New York: Random House, Inc., 1970).

there were once two separate orders held in chaste isolation, one otherworldly, another earthbound. Indeed, how dismissively we laugh at the utter contrivance of some miraculous stratum underlying our universe. A pre-established harmony of the cosmos beyond, or a uniquely durable blueprint governing our world here below? Are you serious? But, is delegating the design of the world to a deity any worse (or better) than outsourcing ourselves wholesale to the caprice of globalization? Is it no less bizarre to posit a divine outside as warrant for the price of redemption than to posit a global one at the expense of the world? Never mind all those well-rehearsed pros or cons, for it appears that we cannot help but going around in circles, inevitably ending up in the same place again in spite of how taken aback we may be, or how astute our ability to persuade otherwise. Gone are the gods; gone are the grand designs; gone are those cosmological sagas of a sinful material world opposed to one deemed holy and divine. Yet, we remain beholden to that shallow antagonism between two, and only two, realms by holding up the global, without pause, as our great facilitator, the secular outside free of that array of pious local circumstances (t)here. As veritable outside, the global has become synonymous for detached superiority, progress, freedom, culture, prosperity, and any other liberating state that might help mobilize us from our emplacement as situated mortals. The world is plotted as an outer frontier from which those provincial serfdoms blotting the planet are expatriated outright, or toward which they, like we, must all aspire. And as for that bygone heavenly blueprint of the world, capitalism more than suffices as both infrastructural plan and purpose. As such, globally distended capital doubles as proxy script for the scenography of an outside that, by definition, eliminates any opposing term, and thus likewise annuls in advance any real alternative or conceivable means of resistance. Consequently it defines, as universal axiom, all relations of the world. Try to imagine anything today self, city, environment without the directive of management, marketing, corporate branding, and so on. In its sheer scope and sway, globalized capital is transcendental, having become so absolute that it tends to withdraw as decisive vanishing point of that beyond reserved solely for conditions of possibility and matters of indisputable fact.

The habitual side effect of a transcendental outside is not only its isolation of visibility to an end whose means are, paradoxically, invisible. By correlation, said outside must remain unrivaled in its efficiency to monopolize political relevance around a principle so removed, so impervious, as to appear natural and thus, inalienable. So it goes, the globally capitalized world, excepting some limited corrections, is the best we can do. In addition to all other functions, the existing limit condition served by globalization consolidates all operations of the social (and material) world into a circular economy of inevitability, one serviced exclusively by distributed control channels of capital. We are, of course, reminded that the mature phase of globalization we now experience is just that, a phase, distinguished from those preceding it only in degree, not in kind. We might also recall that capitalism is historically devised. Or, are we privy to such insights only when the so-called system itself ceases to perform as designed? In other words, does our globally capitalized world finally show itself for what it really is, so to speak, precisely when its operations threaten to break down? When an offshore oilrig explodes, the seemingly sound pretext for a way of life is also called into question. When a pipeline is cut off, accepted licenses of fortune are opened to debate. When a financial institution is liquidated, so is the alleged privilege of (our) cultural destiny. Lifestyle suddenly becomes a matter of everyones concern. Strictly speaking, our most defended founding premises are hotwired to infrastructure. If the infrastructure malfunctions, all those second nature givens likewise begin to falter and re-surface as so many vulnerable dependencies and presumptions. In due course, their countless, oft-neglected consequences literally wash ashore, are blocked or clogged, and leave us hard up, incredulously standing in the breadline. Is it any different with our appeal to the outside of globalization or of capitalism? As with any system on the blink, our outside comes into view, if not existence per se, as infrastructural conjecture, as nothing more (or less) than material, ideological, even spiritual support if only when it is either jeopardized or fails altogether. And, do we not collectively ourselves and our world confront global-ized jeopardy at this very moment? For, despite all reputable talk of fluxes and flows, who can deny the increasingly rigid duality of the world (yet again!)? Human/world, people/objects,
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local/global, inside/outside, artificial/natural, technical infrastructure/socio-political superstructure, us/them, you name it; the symbolic currency of terms may have shifted with time, but a thoroughly divided world still exists. The perseverance of this impulse to divide ad infinitum despite the promised coming of a global village, compounded by the closely-related buckling of the world financial market and the aggravated divisions continuing to crop up everywhere in its wake, raises the obvious question of whether the separation of worlds has ever really worked. Our latest global predicament served as opportune occasion for bringing together Peter Sloterdijk and Bruno Latour at Harvards GSD in February 2009. Their joint appearance was entitled Spheres and Networks: Two Ways to Reinterpret Globalization.2 Each in their respective way Sloterdijk with Spherology; Latour with Actor-Network-Theory instigates a timely infra-structural turn by considering what is at stake in the composition of the world. Instead of appealing to divine intervention or withdrawing to a globalized elsewhere, they find their mediators here, locally. Such a turn broadly aims at escorting the global outside back inside to the situated (and situating) venues of its laborious, expensively maintenanced, and sometimes ill-fated implementation, be it a warm natural womb or well-heated artificial one, air-conditioned laboratory, or any other mediated setting, whether a globe-making factory in Illinois, a monks cell where a Medieval religious manuscript is painstakingly inscribed, if not a boardroom in Davos. In their attempt to re-assemble the world, as it were, reality is engaged in its explicit, concrete presence minus the baggage of a mystical province lurking behind or beyond present-at-hand configurations. No eternal, pre-established harmony here; harmony, if there is to be such a condition, will only come, if at all, after the immense work required for assembling it takes place in real time and space. No external latency or hidden reserve slumbering there in potentia waiting to be expressed; making possibilities are as
2

See Harvard Design Magazine 30, (Cambridge: Harvard Graduate School of Design, Spring/Summer 2009). For an online transcript of Bruno Latour lecture, see http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/115-SPACE-HARVARD09.pdf. For an online transcript of Peter Sloterdijks lecture, see http://beyondentropy.aaschool.ac.uk/?p=689. This transcription is more extensive than the lecture Sloterdijk delivered at Harvard. For the online video stream of both lectures, see http://sorcerer.design.harvard.edu/gsdlectures/s2009/sloterdijk.mov. 2 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, Inc., 1962).

local, costly, and down to earth as are oilrigs, pipelines, or financial institutions. No privileged outside to which a chosen few can retreat and remain immune from the repercussions of their actions; the world is round once again, and for good! And, as we know all too well by now, what goes around, comes around. In effect, the great outside, call it God, Capital, Globalization, or what you will, is siphoned back into specific places, vocations, tools, techniques, equipment, protocols, and all other mediating actors involved. Returned from transcendental exile, the global for Sloterdijk and Latour is repatriated as part of our world, as transitive actor itself, constituting no more or less than the degree of circulation and transactions within and between located sites, rather than standing apart as something different in kind that contains them. Up first to the lectern was Sloterdijk. An implicit thread running through his lecture on situated and situating places of space making is a protracted re-staging of Dasein being in the world.3 With examples ranging from the uterus to apartment buildings to biotechnology, he engages Heideggers sanction on the modern being question as already too removed from the locus of reality, too abstracted when considered separate from all the life supports, immune systems, or any other controlled environments that give being in the world a tolerable form. You say thrown into the world? By what means, and where exactly? What is the air quality and temperature? Where is the energy source? Is there water, an emergency exit, handicap access, a toilet? Far from smug derision, Sloterdijk, with strictly literalist conviction, reanimates a grand ontological query concerning the nature of Being as a matter of design. And what better place to do so than in an architecture school! If Dasein qualifies Being as naked, thrown into the world (geworfen zu werden), then design qualifies as necessary counter measure for arbitrating this thrown, arbitrary condition of being (ent-werfen, um zu sein).4 To become un-thrown, design, literally, to be! Cast in venues as diverse as they are obvious, what it means to be in the world is literally re-placed by its localization here, in those fragile and carefully designed
4

For the link made between Dasein and design, see Henk Oosterling, Dasein as Design Or: Must Design Save the World?, Premsela Lecture, April 2009. Published by Premsela.org/, a Dutch online platform for design and fashion.

envelopes spheres to use Sloterdijks expression on which collective existence and survival depend. Being is brought back to earth, in a manner of speaking, embodied in another idiom than that of modernism by making being matter in terms of real matters, their real elaboration, and their real fabricated, material support, not by repeated interrogation about its exalted essence or truth. Is it not the very premise of a naked individual a being, separate from that marks the Enlightened inception of an outside? If so, then we are modern by being allergic to the world from birth (and by right). And does this peculiarly exposed individual not also serve to authenticate a progressive inside that can, by its very self-authorization, be expanded against ever larger outsides whether community, city, nation, or world region? By making explicit not only the politics of our emplacement, but moreover, how this condition is machined and maintained, spherology, in effect, re-incorporates us as dividuals in the world. We are always someone situated, with someone who is likewise here, and with something else that also takes place in the world, all of which are conditions that are mutually reinforcing and co-affective. We are reminded by Sloterdijk that we move from sphere to sphere, from one engineered envelope to another, and never from a strictly private sphere to an irreducible outside beyond. The modern isolation principle and its view from a distance are confronted with a view from somewhere. What is clear from this now-localizable view is that the present-day constitution our way of being becomes more and more questionable to the same extent that the means of life become more tangible as a matter of concern for all. And with no outside of Dasein or design, there is not much room left for the modernist hubris of radical breaks, a utopian no-place devoid of any resources to sustain it, or the mastery of expert systems, and so on. Nor is there any reserve promise out there floating in the virtual realm of electronic ether. Instead, design becomes a situated ontology that hinges on sustaining being and being sustained by warding off the outside, a wager now more than ever a collective concern of ever more suitable modes of artificial attachment and emplacement, skillfully managed dependence and coupling, as well as discriminate innovation when assembling the world. With his foregrounding of the fragility and interdependence of all those micro- and macro-life supports that serve

as our world, Sloterdijk responds to the deep question who are we? by returning to how we are, suggesting in the process that in-frastructure is the profound secret of existence. Perhaps out of courtesy to the previous speaker, Latour opened his lecture with the flattering claim to have been born a Sloterdijkian by virtue of his persistent questioning of the absence of things from social thought. Latour considers material and social entities according to a radical symmetry. That is, he considers both as manifesting the same kind; both are together on the same plane of now-present reality, on the same footing, with no entity privileged over another whether human or not, no discrimination made against any part of their relational ecologies, no variable deemed too big to fail or too small to make a difference. All belong to the task of assembling our world. The routinely ignored significance of relations between people and any-thing else populating the planet is thereby emphasized. Of course people matter, but so do things! We are thereby asked to rethink anew the role of non-human actors, of all things, in the construction of collectives, and also to rethink the operative terms and idioms used to compose the world we live in. For example, the term social, to name only one of too many, is by now so over laden with assumptions, is already so assembled as explanatory mold, that it presupposes the nature of what is assembled and thus tends to foreclose that which remains to be explained, namely, how things are assembled, dis-assembled, and reassembled beneath that umbrella we call Society. It is the social, if not the World itself, that must be reassembled.5 With the composition of the world at stake, it is no longer a matter of anything goes. Anything does not go. According to Latour, relations are not equivalent because an ally or mediating argument is enlisted precisely so that one association will gain advantage over another.6 Although he considers people and things symmetrically in their concrete states as mutually affective actors, their defining relations are understood as asymmetrical. No actor trumps another a priori; all actors must push and shove to earn
5

See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 6 See Graham Harmen, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics, (Melbourne: re.press, 2009).

their reality in the world arena, however brief it may be. Moreover, there is no fundamental beginning to associations and no natural end to negotiations made to sustain them, nor is any final victory or loss guaranteed in advance. The ongoing relational realities of the world are forged by clash and accommodation at indefinite levels. A hard bargain is struck for any person or any thing to enter an association, remain as is, or become signifiable as something else in yet another alliance. Resistance is as vital as making way when affecting and being affected are rendered as interdependent requirements for any actor involved in any association made, that is, when agency becomes a public affair of all things rather than being privatized long beforehand as sovereign (human or divine) cause. If all actors vie for a hold in the world, then space and time are comprised as much by the unremarked successes as by the missed opportunities of network-building, rather than simply manifesting a still-life of select, celebrated landmark deeds or achievements memorializing forward development. This is to say that our world undergoes constant re-structuring in trials of affective strength and weakness between fully deployed actors with nothing held in reserve. If successful, the association goes, when not, it does not go, unless another is made, thereby changing the terms of what goes or not. In place of detached emancipation or lines of flight to an idyllic elsewhere, Latours associology foregrounds a dynamic midfield of requisite relational attachments as well as fortuitous associations made in the shared production necessary for being in the world, without the prescribed poles of progress or decline. Associations either work or do not work. In resonance with Sloterdijk, Latour re-materializes the neglected condition of inter-esse a relational being between of every affective actor. All things and all humans now stand as something to be reckoned with, something so utterly concrete that they cannot be dismissed as immaterial or superfluous in comparison to an essence or underlying condition of possibility. All things and all humans are always in an absolutely specific place in the world, with completely specific alliances at any given moment. Everything is immanent in the world; nothing transcends its actuality.7 Again, not much room is left here for some external natural law or authentic virtue that would pre-exist the
7

Ibid., pp. 16-17.

interaction of those actors beneath or beyond the false appearances of their productive activity, for this only returns us to the dual world principle once again, which, as always, serves solely private interests (Interessen). Given the insights of Latour, our global theater hardly seems plausible in its spin as a pre-ordained cast of characters standing before the inanimate backdrop of mute artifacts, all the while heeding the cue calls of a supernatural power in the wings. Who would really sit through (or stand for) this? Rather, we enroll actors and are likewise enrolled as actors in pliable, but fragile, momentary triumphs and breakdowns in ever-shifting networks of association that serve as the means for assembling our world. This again suggests that infrastructure might not only condition being in the world as Sloterdijk intimates, but also, as Latour puts forth, that all things of the world serve the condition for its infrastructure. In place of the bland human-world correlate according to which our place is rationed in advance for us here, and another for the world and its surplus of objects out there, Sloterdijk and Latour metastasize human-world relations and extend them indefinitely to sketch out a possible collective that has yet to be collected or assembled as a world of all things. Such a prospect is, of course, meaningless, if not absurd, for those one-world power gamers who maintain that there is an original World already in place as home to all people, or at least One they all desire. But side-taking aside, the fact that both speakers were invited together to lecture at an architecture school as outsiders certainly testifies to what by now should be more than clear: the stakes in collecting, composing, and assembling the world are hardly architectural alone. To compose the world as shared inside for every one and every thing requires the reflective, interrogative infrastructure of philosophy and sociology just as much as it does the imaginative, physical, technical, material, rhetorical, even ideological infrastructure of those entrusted with design. Indeed, it would be hard to identify a faculty or vocation that is not called upon by Sloterdijk and Latour in their efforts to reassemble the world. But, in light of the hallowed stage to which they were jointly invited, both do enlist the input of architecture design practices directly with the urgent challenge: with which attachments and dependencies, in which atmospheres, with which equipment and instruments, with
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which media, with which tools, in which languages, through which alliances and associations can we make the world a habitable place not only for every human, but as well for the innumerable other creatures and things that have yet to be included in our tally of items that must be addressed to sustain life. Furthermore, of what mixtures should this collective be assembled, how should it be assembled, and should it even be composed as a single entity?8 A two-hour joint lecture and all too brief discussion afterward may allow the time to raise only a few such pertinent questions, but better late than never. Yet, with no outside, and design now at large in the world, the collective task of reassembling the world is urgently at hand whether taken up by architects or not. So dont count on Sloterdijk and Latour showing up at another architecture school soon. Who knows, they are more likely to turn up in venues like that globe-making factory back in Broadview, Illinois, where the global theater is shown for what it really is.

IMAGE CAPTIONS: Image 1: Woman assembling world globes in factory, Broadview, Illinois USA, photograph by Andy Sacks, 2007, Getty Images 200014212-001 Image 2: 'God as Architect of the World,' folio 1, verso of a moralized Bible, Paris France, ca. 1220-1230, sterrreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna Image 3: Mark Lombardi, 'George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and Jackson Stevens. 197990,' 1999. Diagram from the artists sociological research on political figures that documents links between people and related institutions.

See especially op. cit., Latours lecture transcript where he raises these and other related questions.
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