Founding Editor-in-Chief Izabel Gass Associate Editors Nana Last Tait Kaplan Joseph Lim Etien Santiago MANIFOLD

PUBLISHING GROUP info@manifoldmagazine.com www.manifoldmagazine.com First published in 2008

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3. The Interview Issue

Charles Waldheim on Landscape and Non-Anthropocentric Urbanism with David Dewane and Lindsay Harkema James Corner on Landscape Urbanism and Indeterminate Systems with David Dewane Chris Reed on Ecology as Analogy with David Dewane

Sanford Kwinter on Science and Architecture with Nicholas Risteen Stan Allen on Rethinking Ecology with David Dewane

Brian Massumi on the Virtual with Jason Nguyen and Mark Davis

Manuel De Landa on the Manifold with Tait Kaplan

Letter to the Reader Izabel Gass

04 06 09 19 22 27 33 40 44 48 53 56 70 76 78

Jesse Reiser on the Intensive with Ned Dodington

Catherine Keller on the Process of Becoming with Lindsay Harkema Nana Last on Theory and Political Justice with Joseph Lim Philip Wood on Life After the Subject the example of Aesthetic Ecstasy with Izabel Gass

Mark C. Taylor on Religion without a God with Lindsay Harkema

Eric Lott on the on The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual with Izabel Gass K. Michael Hays on Post -Criticality with Izabel Gass

a generous grant from the Graham Foundation for the Fine Arts, Manifold will finally see break from our usual format and make our third issue The Interview Issue in an effort to allow a wide range of contributors to make their voices heard through the framework of questions that Manifold posed to them. Rice University based journal of architectural theory founded on the premise that philoIt is crucial that the un-initiated reader understand the general mission of Manifold, a

Dear Reader,

greater distribution and a wider audience. Considering this our public debut, we chose to

This is the third issue of Manifold, but in many ways, it will serve as our first. Due to

responds to the current wave of Post-Criticality in architecture by searching for new grounds for theoretical inquiry that supersede the traditional constructions of critical thought while still providing a forum for philosophical discussion and socio-political tactics of criticism anew. Second, Manifold seeks a thorough investigation of the formal analysis. The journals mission is three-fold: First, to question what theory is, what its ever-shifting value is, and how it can be reconstituted to maintain its relevance to archiand philosophical assumptions underpinning contemporary design through studies of philosophical source material. In issue 2, for instance, this led us to revisit the original the current issue. Manifold seeks to develop, among its contributors and readers, a plurality of new voices and positions in the discussion of architecture, an emphasis that is particularly evident in tecture today. Theorizing architectural design in 2008 does not imply rehashing the same rhetoric characteristic of Assemblage-era architectural criticism, but inventing the very

sophical inquiry in design has become increasingly marginalized in recent years. Manifold

writings of Albert Einstein, Gilles Deleuze, and Henri Bergson, to supply a more accurate and rigorous notion of the construction of the material subject, space, and time. Third,

said of the general framework of the issue. Our approach was simple: to put questions regarding the most difficult issues confronting design today to critics and architects alike, with the aim of generating a conversation that pushed through the platitudes prevalent in

While the interviewees of issue 3 require no introductions, something should be

much contemporary design thinking. We conducted interviews covering a range of topics more for architecture today. Four interviews probe the theories of Landscape Urbanism to explain how a new paradigm of ecological design is erasing the age-old, fallacious distinction between the built environment and its so-called ecological context. Several interviews explore two domains of knowledge that, in recent years, have remained quite catalyze a philosophical interpretation of aesthetic production that could supplant both faces today.

germane to the formation of contemporary architectural discourse. Some interviews

question the effect of scientific paradigms that have infiltrated architectural thinking since

the 1990s, projecting ways that science (in its processes, methods, and tropes) can do far from design discourse: theology and Continental Philosophy. These interviews aim to critical theory and the soft metaphysics of Phenomenology as the waning but still domithe current state of architectural theory; some of these were first published in our inaugural issue and address the problems that a journal aspiring to a theoretical condition the engaging conversations they have together developed in these pages, and we hope the reader enjoys eavesdropping on these provocations and ruminations about design in the 21st century. We thank you for reading, and we invite your future contributions and feedback as Manifold continues. Sincerely, Izabel Gass Founding Editor-in-Chief We are very grateful to all of our contributors, both interviewers and interviewees, for nant paradigms of philosophical inquiry in design today. Finally, three interviews explore

Manuel De Landa on the Manifold

in conversation with Tait Kaplan

Kaplan: What is a manifold ?

DeLanda: The concept of a manifold space defined as a field of rapidities and slownesses, the rapidity or slowness with

as I use it is the mathematical concept: a

which curvature changes at a given point. Once Cartesian coordinates are eliminated, all information about these points is localdimensions (say, temperature, pressure, and volume, for a 3-D manifold) and use it to represent a space of possible states those three properties). This representational use would be a mere convenience,
Contemporary Mexican philosopher Manuel DeLanda addresses a broad range of scientific and cultural concerns, and has written on topics as diverse as warfare, linguistics, economics, evolution, chaos theory, self-organizing matter, nonlinear dynamics, artificial life and intelligence, the internet and architecture, amongst many others. He draws especially on the work of the late French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, and many of his essays explicitly seek to demonstrate the utility of Deleuzes work for thinking about current scientific and philosophical problems. DeLanda teaches at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in New York. 6

ized. Then, we can assign meaning to their (instantaneous combinations of values for properties of the manifold did not come into play. In particular, singularities in the

a visualization tool, if, in addition, other manifold can act as attractors for a series give structure to a space of possibilities, the purpose of conceptualizing immanent eliminating the Cartesian coordinates is crucial too: a 2D manifold must be embedded in a 3D Cartesian space, order. For Deleuze, the very first move and the extra dimension always plays a of states. These singularities, therefore, and it is that structure that matters for

transcendental role. In physics, of course, those coordinates represented absolute space, a transcendental reference frame switching to differential manifolds. Kaplan: For decades, particle physicists matter into states that are far from equilibrium as a means of discovering the potentials in a material. potentials as being virtual, part of the real world, but not yet realized. Can you equilibrium can help us to understand it ? that Einstein eliminated precisely by have understood the benefits of pushing

type that is, so mechanical that only will or divine intervention) can break with it. But once you have multiple singulari-

something transcendental (human free ties, the world itself becomes more open the outside. But if you study a nonlinear to different becomings even without some psychic agency intervening from system near equilibrium you effectively the difference, for example, between ice symmetry, but ice crystals are boring continuous variation, better expressing latter are far from equilibrium. linearize it, so that it does not express the crystals and snow flakes: both are deterministic and possess a fixed hexagonal potential of the virtual anymore. This is and repetitive while snow flakes exist in

discuss what you mean by virtuality, and how the study of states that are far from DeLanda: The key property of a mani-

You describe these

fold, when used as a space of possibilities approach them as closely as possible, but never, ever reach them. This means clearest expression of a virtual, immanent

(phase space), is the asymptotic nature of its singularities: the series of states or trajectories that are attracted to them that always represent actual states, the entity that I can conceive. In addition, we nonlinear ones with multiple singularitors are deterministic, with a single singupossessing only a single singularity of the singularities are never actual. This is the that, unlike the points on the trajectories must distinguish linear dynamical systems, steady-state type (point attractor), from ties of different types (point, periodic and chaotic attractors). Given that all attraclarity, determinism is of the old-fashion
7

the nature of the virtual. And, of course, Kaplan: Traditional notions of symmetry instance, in the writings of Greg Lynn, symmetry is read as an initial, ideal information is added to a formal system. position ? understand it as an ideal state for Can you discuss how your understanding of symmetry differs from this essentialist symmetry of a space or a figure is always

the difference between the two is that the

condition from which mutations occur as

DeLanda: Mathematically, the degree of group of transformations. Thus, a cube whose properties remain invariant relative

defined relative to a transformation or to the group of rotations (0, 90, 180, 270)

has less symmetry than a sphere, because the latters group is much larger (0, 1, 2, 3,

4 . . . 359). The same idea can be applied spaces remain invariant under a group Topological spaces are invariant under all inversions. But projective geometry adds to those both projection and section. more symmetrical than Euclidean geomarrange all geometries in a sequence so the less symmetrical by a series of broken

not to figures but to spaces: Euclidean containing all translations, rotations, and translations, rotations, inversions, projec-

of a time that is not metric (Chronos) but and Virtual Philosophy.

truly non-metric (Aion). I explain how to do that in chapter 3 of Intensive Science

tions, sections, foldings and stretchings. In other words, projective geometry is that the more symmetrical give rise to symmetries. Deleuze himself uses this the virtual: the plane of immanence would etry, but less so than topology. We can image (borrowed from the mathematician Felix Klein) to picture the actualization of and dimensions of a manifold are topological invariants that is, what remains indeed may become actual under all kinds be super-symmetrical and would acquire actuality as it became Euclidean or metric. unchanged under all those transformations. Unlike essences, these invariants do not resemble their actualizations and singularities are thought of as eternal, ties) their own temporality and history. This is not easy, since we must conceive essence. Hence it is crucial to give maniThis is not essentialist: the singularities

of Euclidean forms. But, of course, if the then they do become a kind of topological folds (or more exactly, virtual multiplici8

Brian Massumi on the Virtual

in conversation with Jason Nguyen and Mark Davis

Nguyen, Davis: Historically, a Western understanding of the material world has in becoming. Paradoxically, this way of thinking debases the singular moment does it differ from the Platonic Ideal ? of instantiation, elevating instead the abstract collection of circumstances that of the Virtual in this ontology, and how what they are. But the work of Deleuze

relied on a desire to understand things for and Guattari proposes an ontology rooted intersect to produce it. What is the role Massumi: An effort of thought is required to prevent the deleuzian virtual form concept automatically shifts in this direcBrian Massumi specializes in the philosophy of experience, art and media theory, and political philosophy. He is the author of Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Duke University Press, 2002), A Users Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (MIT Press, 1992), and First and Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot (with Kenneth Dean; Autonomedia, 1993). He is editor of The Politics of Everyday Fear (University of Minnesota Press, 1993) and A Shock to Thought: Expression After Deleuze and Guattari (Routledge, 2002). His translations from the French include Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattaris A Thousand Plateaus. Website: www.brianmassumi.com 9

slipping into the Platonic ideal. The tion the instant it is separated from the singular moment of instantiation, or with the virtual. The two are inseparable. virtual which is debased by being sepaThey must be thought strictly together. From a deleuzian point of view they have

in deleuzian terms the actual. It is the rated in thought from actuality not the

actual which is debased by its association no philosophical meaning apart from movement of becoming is not on one side their dynamic embrace of each other. The

or the other: it the result of their coming together. Dynamic and movement are world, and it is they. dynamism nor movement were the virtual and actual in separate realms. There is one The virtual separated from the actual virtual would be absolute stasis, because into the future. The past and future are you have fixity. would be utterly sterile because it would itself. Unexpressed, it would not give itself have nothing through which to express through the present of a just-past moving the virtual. The moment you think change, you have actually appealed to the virtual. Deleuze needs a concept of the virtual Think the actual without the virtual, and

the key words. There would be neither

virtual could never get past the post of this effective philosophy. elusive. I call it recessive. It does not

This is just a first approximation. The back into itself, constituting in the same nonlinear, recursive time of its own: just

virtual is a slippery concept. It is by nature expend itself in its effect. It withdraws stroke the just-past of that effect, and the to-come of the next. It is always in the gaps between chronological moments, in a past yet to come; future-past. When the virtual withdraws back into itself in the It goes only into its own return. You can only think it across its iterations, and the mark of each iteration is an actual change.

to thought. The actual apart from the a thing in change is like a doppler effect precisely what are inactual, so they fall to

gaps in the actual, it has no place to go. However: every change can be expressed as a change in an order of juxtaposition take effect without its effects taking place. way, takes effect as a spacing. It does not

because of his project of thinking the the heraclitean observation that the only constant is change. Conversely, Deleuze be a variety of empiricism. He accepts the dictum that everything that can be mally defined as having effects or taking virtual. Deleuze considers his thought, considered real must in some way be effect. The actual is nothing other than the taking-effect of the virtual. A supernal

of actual elements. In other words, the

actual. The starting point of that project is including the thought of the virtual, to

virtual, by nature elusive in a time-like This is where the paradox of Deleuzes thinking lies: not in an alternative between together creates a space-time tension that is difficult to model conceptually because time as a line). It is difficult to talk about our habits of thought tend both to dichotthe actual and the virtual, but in how they omize space and time (treating them as independent variables) and to erase their

needs the actual to hold the reality of the

come together. The way in which they come

experienced, with experienced mini-

difference (for example, by construing

10

the virtual without falling into one of these

traps, or most often both at the same time. For example, the suspicion that the virtual it as a realm apart, a higher plane or other world. is a Platonic ideal has already spatialized Deleuze has two base strategies to deal toward spatializing the virtual. He will ralizing counter-model. If you put the two or even a paradox. You are making prog-

connotation. The constellation is starting points and lines are interchanged, and the formation). Then just as youre getting used to that hell say that each singularity

to feel like a projective geometry (in which plotting of space requires a time of transincludes all the others, in the dynamic form of its extensions toward them. The models together, you get points stretching out into lines, lines curving, curves folding set, structure, vector, curve, differential, All these are the virtual. And that is only a (the singularity as quantum of event). Geological models (strata,

with this slipperiness of the virtual in its relation with the actual. First, he multiplies models for it. A given model may tend together, you get a space-time tension, following the movement of the virtual into and out of the actual. This movement will a particular set of models will have to be between them. The thought of the virtual process. It can never come in one go. mobilized. The virtual is most adequately expressed in the interference patterns immediately undermine it with a temporess. None of the models are meant to be adequate descriptions of the virtual. They be different in each case. And in each case,

singularity is now sounding like a curve: an integration of singularities. Were now in a calculus model, each singularity an bending into a topological model. Point, integrable differential. If you try to put the back into mutual inclusion the whole integral, topological transformation . . . few of the mathematical models you might and on). There are also physical models Biological models (rhizome, phylum). space, Markov chains, fractals, and on plateaus).

are conceptual tools meant to assist in

appeal to (there are others: Riemann

is all about process, and must itself be a virtual as being composed of sets of pure fixed space-like structure. So Deleuze will go on to say that the singularities extend singularities. These are point-like, and

For example, Deleuze often speaks of the that way, the virtual begins to resemble a

Military models (war-machine, fleet in multitude is only limited in the working formations in question will simply not set. The movements into and out of the out of a particular conceptual problem.

being). The models never end. Their Each problem approached will take its be able to bear the embarrassment of down, under pressure, into a restricted conceptual riches. The models will shake
11

taken together form constellations. Taken toward one another. This undoes the fixity by adding a vector aspect carrying a time

own selection of them. The materials and

reduced plurality of models that are left The problem will have been processed in making that process analogical. thought. Thought will have mimicked its analogical, in an irreducibly complex complexity. He call it allagmatics. Here You have to work through them, and work enact them. Its a real process. it means you can never model the virtual simply apply the models of it that you

will mimic the actual pattern under study.

Nguyen, Davis: As Deleuzian-Guattarian

actual object in and as its own process The thinking of the virtual is always way. Simondon has an ugly name for this kind of analogical thinking of and with produce. You have to put them to work. once and for all. And that you can never them through, differently in each case, under problematic pressure. You have to model of the virtual. They are standing Mistrust anyone who privileges any one back from the process. It is a common tactic of critics of Deleuze to take one of his proliferation of models for the concept of the virtual as inadequate. This is like amputing someones thumb and then criticizing them for not living up to display opposable digits. You cant grasp the virtual without a full conceptual hand. thought-effect. You cant actually grasp it at all. Its more like prestidigitation. You make the moves model, and then on that basis critique the the definition of the human by failing to that conjure it up performatively as a

preoccupations seep in to architecture, process of formation as a philosophical datum. But while Deleuze and Guattari have shifted emphasis from the static ment. Is it possible to re-conceive of the discipline of architecture entirely as an art of temporal, rather than spatial, organizaagenda ? Approached tion? What are the implications of such an Massumi: being of form to the infinite process of of this philosophy must still confront the

practices are emerging which adopt the formation, the architectural expression mostly static nature of the built environ-

there is no contradiction between form or even time and space. The most useful

and formation, stasis and transformation, way of approaching these oppositions is becomes ice, and ice water. They are They are in a state of mutual inclusion in the same line of variation. They belong to formal qualities, it is true, commit them to different destinies. Water enters prioritarily into regimes of flow, ice into regimes of rigid accumulation. However, the formal differences do not belie their belonging to from one phase state to another give the to treat them as phase transitions. We do not say that ice contradicts water. Water processual extensions of each other. Each contains the other as its own potential.

processually,

the same phylum. Their starkly different

the same phylum. Quite the contrary, they

12

express it differentially. The transitions

process to which both forms belong the The potentials each phase state contains appear differentially, in a distribution ice-form expresses at the same time bringing to expression at the same time and its engagement with external condia potential of the material phylum to process. The second process takes the first what Deleuze and Guattari call capture. weather conditions. The expression of the potential of the water process is conditioned by another, more encompassing up into itself. It sets the conditions under which a specific form belonging to the

opportunity to express itself more fully. what the process immanently includes, which it belongs, and an environing set of

which express the same process in starkly different formal qualities. Which form presents itself with what precise qualities, a relation of co-determination. that is more encompassing than the first The design process, what the question calls The static form that emerges from that but with which the first is nevertheless in when, where and how, is determined in dynamic encounter with another process

tions belonging to other processes. The

formation, is architectures liquid phase. is the urban environment (including all its constituent dimensions or strata: zoning, circulatory patterns, commercial building. Urbanism and architecture are in fully, neither can be thought apart. They are co-determining. The tural potentials contained in the building tion doesnt end at the erection of the pressures, cultural preferences, trends in a relation of double capture. To be thought

phase is the built structure. The weather taste) providing the conditions for that determina-

first process will present itself in it. This is Capture is always double capture, up has something to say about what encompassing process determining what form it takes. Todays weather conditions because as I noted the process taken

happens, and co-determines the more part of the phylum it is. Weather condidependent on waters offering up those potentials for it to be what it will have is: Even static or frozen forms belong been on any given day. Its the difference between rain and snow. The point phase transitions between related forms

wouldnt be what they are were water not potentials will appear, but the weather is

builiding. The urban process that takes it varies according to what passes through the architectural equivalent of snow or An entire architectural genre might modulate which potentials actually appear, even

up may continue to bring new architecto expression. How a building takes effect, what architectural-urban effects it has, it, how it is inhabited, and what goes on rain, a city chill or urban warming trend.
13

tions may determine which of waters

around. A building may be repurposed, formal qualities make in the life of the city

qualitatively changing what difference its

to processual continuums populated by

without explicit formal reconfiguration, in redefining conditions of the urban environment. ished and replaced, changing the local remaining buildings lived qualities and urban fabric in a way that modulates the perhaps, as a consequence of that, its into a pedestrian mall, changing patterns breakdown to the conditions for urban the prevailing weather

response to economic or cultural changes The building next door might be demolprogram. The street in front might evolve turn entraining others. The building may renewal. The possibilites are infinite. If you look at the larger picture of the double capture of the built form and the urban concrete melts into city. The static form is only a provisional stop environment, over the long term the fixity

formal modification (sometimes relationanother by its proximity).

ally, much the way one color modulates of process, which is in any case inevitable? unexpressed architectural

The question, then, is: how can the design process pre-adapt itself to the continuation How can it build into its built result as-yet potentials, enriching or intensifying the way it lends

of circulation, those changes in their deteriorate, contributing through its very

itself to re-uptake and recursive reforming by other processes (double capture). How it engages? As Lars Spuybroek argues, answering ontogenetic these vagueness. questions contributions to the double captures shifting the vocabulary from, for example, ambiguities of code or meaning, to same actual form of potentially diverphases of the same process. Greg Lynn when he calls the produced architectural form the dynamic form of a multiplicity. ture has focused on. also speaks of this surplus-determination vagueness is not a lack of definition. It is Ontogenetic requires

can it multiply its own co-determining

of the static form reliquefies. All that is in the architectural process. It is better that continues past it, and sweeps it up in a co-determined movement of continuing is ongoing for two reasons: 1) following form (or phase) virtually contains, in processual potential, all others belonging to the architectural continuum; 2) through the encounter with the encompassing, sets of these architectural potentials are serially expressed, with or without actual to the principle of mutual inclusion, each conditioning process of the city, different conceived of as a threshold in a process

a surplus of it: a mutual inclusion in the gent takings-effect belonging to different This question of the surplus-determining is the problem my own work on architecmarginally with what is most commonly taken to be the content of architec14

transformation. The architectural process

continuation of the architectural process Surplus-determination has to do only ture: the typologies of constituted form defining styles which can be infused with

new meaning through a recoding or crosscoding of their component formal units. It is less concerned with architectures formal disciplinary understanding of itself with its outside. There is a particularly important outside of architecture that is always, and always variably, embodied. than with its living through the encounter

qualities of experience? Arakawa and ecological approach to

Gins answer that question by adapting the processual perspective, is not a formal unit potentials. Or many at once. When there privileged over another, the architectural

concept of affordances from J.J. Gibsons of style. It is the landing site: the way in

the built environment actually contains: living-through of the architectural process The material phylum of the human body, with its immanent process of experiencesive reforming with the built structure. ronment is to the building. The qualities conditions for embodied experience. A logic of perceptual emergence, of expelarger picture. What experiential phase transformations feed back into urbanism? transitions does a passing or inhabiting The built form is to body as the built enviThere is a third double capture in close

theory. The unit of architecture, from this which an architectural element beckons are several, without one necessarily being element has become surplus-determining: the unitary form of an experiential multiarchitecture: triple articulation. architecture. plicity whose conditions of emergence the body to actualize one of its experiential

perception

the body. It cannot be forgotten that the embrace with the two already discussed. holds, enters into complex relations of co-determining continuation and recurof the built environment are the weather riential ontogenesis, must be added to the

formation and all the potential that process

are an architectural encounter with the enfolded in the urban encounter with It cannot be emphasized enough that this foregrounding of perception and experi(the flesh of the world as preflective of subjective expression). Experience is but goes for architecture itself. The model at all levels is what I have called relational Phenomenology experience to a form of interiority (the an echo. In the ecological approach I am of exteriority (encounter). The same autonomy: the emergent expression of a processs singular potentials in a dynamic returns

phylum of the body, that encounter itself

ence is not a call for a phenomenolgy of transcendental ego) or a closed loop advocating experience is an emergence. It returns the body to a processual field

body engage in double capture with the built form? How do these continuous Or back into architecture, at its interface with urbanism? What unexpressed potentials are capacitated, at what thresholds, and to what effect? How can architectural form surplus-determine perception and
15

of encounter with its processual outside.

Applied to architecture, this undermines the explanatory power of any approach that begins by separating the inside of the discipline from its outside, as if archirepertory of styles, or a set of characteristics procedures. All of these change. All are under continual variation. Architecture as between chronological moments. It is in the surplus-determination of elements of style in virtue of which they carry an in-built, or immanent, potential for modulation. It is in the invention of new procedures which Architecture is the indiscipline flowing iterations. It is not an edifice itself. It is not is a living process. As Deleuze and Guattari retool its interface with other processes. a structure. It has no definitive content. It and internal constraints. It renews itself than its own. tecture itself were effectively a form of interiority defined by historical periods, a ongoing phase-shifts. It is in the gaps a discipline is what passes through these

as Foucault showed time and again (Benthams Panopticon, the poor houses, the hospitals, the public registers, etc.)? If for a critical architectural practice? considered abstract machines so, what consequences might this present advancing, digital tools can indeed be ture itelf, in the big picture, would be a not mutually exclusive propositions. Massumi: By the logic I have been

dynamic form generation. And architecsocio-political abstract machine. These are The definition of an abstract machine a continuum of potentials belonging to to mutually include one another, and by which that mutual inclusion is iteratively

for

through its own complexly co-determined were fond of saying, escape is the lifeblood of process. A creative discipline is through the rigorous indiscipline of its Nguyen, Davis: The predominant architectural (mis-)use of Deleuzian-Guattarian philosophy in architecture has been on form-making, tools for abstract machines for dynamic form generation. But isnt architecture often confusing digital effective couplings with processes other

would be: the generative principle by which expressed through the serial emergence of fully constituted actual forms punctuating with an outside process. There is not room technology in architectural design. It will generative principle in the definition I potentials with permutational iterations;

the same phylum are vaguely determined phase transitions occuring at the interface to unpack this here, or to deal adequately with the complicated question of digital why I would defend digital design procedures as an abstract machine to replace emergence with stochastic operator; and be sufficient to get a provisional idea of just gave with algorithm; continuum of of form-generation is stopped as the fully constituted actual form. What then are

defined by how it escapes its past content

itself a socio-political abstract machine,

to construe any form at which the process

16

the outside processes with which this digital process interfaces? First: human perceptual processes, at the inter-process threshold of the literal interface of the to modulate it. screen. Second: the forces of the intended site and the larger environment, and the values of the architect and/or client. Third: process it that it allows any of its encounfactors for its own iteration. It can turn into its own process in the form of a both of these as they return to the process

pioneer in this approach, for example in

his Long Island House prototype which translated the constraint placed on the design by the client for a certain view into a generative factor internal to the digital process itself. abstract machine of the form-generating I do not mean to privilege digital design techniques over others. The same translation of external limits or constraints into creative factors can be achieved by other means (as the current interest in analogue computing clearly illustrates). I just mean innovation provides architecture as a it lives by. There is no reason not to call living process with an opportunity to renethis process of disciplinary readjustment critical in operative encounter with the to say that every technical or procedural

What is unique about digital design ters with outside processes to be folded outside contraints into internal factors of creation, simply by folding them back tweaking of the generative parameters. or a zoning imperative. It may be a desire aesthetic form and architectonic structure. as creative factors into digital design is in the resulting building. Lynn was an early This infolding of external contraints transbe of many kinds. It might be a stylistic preference (curvilinearity, for example) formed into internal creative factors can

back into itself, so as to become creative

gotiate its relation to its outsides, and in doing so to renew the relational autonomy to constituent outsides a critical practice. It is not critical in the sense of judging outside. It is critical in the sense that it according to a preestablished standard (of taste, political ideology, etc.). It is creatively process across thresholds and to effect of the process, and as a consequence the very definition of the discipline claiming phase shifts. These thresholds and phase benefits by these encounters to carry the

to pre-engineer a structural characteristic like load-bearing without dichotomizing experiment with modularity in response sion and limits of divergence or fusion outside constraints may be integrated to program basins of attraction or repulIt may be to enable computer milling or to to cost constraints. One way in which which inflect the forms generated so that a certain value, or lived quality, is embodied
17

shifts are critical points in the sense that that process as its own. This bringing into question of the process occurs as a function of its own ongoing operations. It is

what is at stake is the changing nature

a form of what Deleuze calls immanent or effective critique.

critique. You might also call it operative An effective critique belongs to a gift economy, not an administration of judgwith outside process will have positive a judgment. It is a living out. ment. By producing the effects that it way in which its takings-effect couple will affect the processs viability and selfexpressive capacity. In short: it is the city judges architecture? It could well be that the outside process of speculation is in a it sets for itself as a discipline. Critical encounter. Prime among the that judges architecture. Except it is not Or is it real estate speculation that stronger position to select. Critical archioutside, than in what content standards calls an ecology of practices where judgment is lived out processually, in outside processes with which architecture couples is the process of capital itself, with its fearsome global powers of capture. It goes without saying that every architectural capital, which at the same time constilarger tecture practice is more concerned with practice is part of what Isabelle Stengers how the discipline gives itself to which

translate into a creative factor for itself,

and the most cruelly selective environment. The same could actually be said of critique of capitalism. of any kind has no choice but to be in

any practice today. Immanent critique some way, however humble, an operative

does, the process gives of itself and gives itself up. It gives itself up to selection. The feedback effects or inhibiting effects. This

practice must grapple with the forces of

tute the most powerfully enabling of the

outside contraints that it has available to

Originally published in Manifold 2, Spring 2008 18

Jesse Reiser on the Intensive

in conversation with Ned Dodington

Dodington: In Atlas of Novel Tectonics, delimits intensive things into extensive your design ?

you discuss geometry as a regulator that Reiser: I think they really are active in

terms. Are these ideas at the forefront of the project [the o-14 tower]. For example,
Jesse Reiser established the office Reiser + Umemoto in 1986 with Nanako Umemoto. In 1986 the office became RUR Architecture PC and has received awards such as the Chrysler Award for Excellence in Design in 1999, and in 2000, the Academy Award in Architecture by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The firms 1990 study of the New York State water supply and Croton Aqueduct corridor, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, established the firm as specialists in large-scale, infrastructural urban developments. In 1998 and 1999, the firm developed a proposal for the East River front of Manhattan, and was selected as one of the five participants in a competition focusing on the West Side of Manhattan sponsored by the International Foundation for the Canadian Center for Architecture. The firm has been involved in many international invited competitions and has recently won first prize in the competition for the design of the Alishan Tourist Infrastructure in Taiwan, which is currently under construction, Their project for 0-14, a 22-story office tower in Dubai, is also under construction. He and partner Nanako Umemoto published the Atlas of Novel Tectonics in 2006. It was awarded Schnste Bcher aus aller Welt/Best Book Design from all over the World 2007. The Japanese edition of the Atlas to be released with Shokokusha Publishing. 19

in the design process, in developing this from the first drawings . . . there was cascade of effects from one move, and a the system. Then we would incorporate whole thing. oscillation between extensive limits set up awareness of materiality in your work?

a constant oscillation back and forth between defining the geometries and him evaluate them there was a whole sending them to the engineer and having

cascade of consequences down through those, adjust them again, send the drawings back . . . It was actually a consequent by the geometry and the materiality of the Dodington: Do you think there is a hyperReiser: I think so. Probably, though, the final judgment is based on a formal or

geometrical desire and the other things

grow from that. There are constant solutions from the engineers. All of them work, tearing their hair out . . . structure

but then what criteria do we bring to that?

And it took a long time for me to realize

Reiser: Oh its still at play. Its absolutely still at play its not pure expressionism sive limit and then working against it, but

that much of what we were desiring wasnt purely engineering. The engineers were Dodington: I think thats really key, in Reiser: I made the argument in the Atlas about multiple optima and Im beginning that its not necessarily an optimized to have doubts whether any of those criteria are really about optima at all, or if theyre other interests. I just did a studio with [Jeff] Kipnis and we tried to do a kind of problem that was set up in the airport the idea of animism. Dodington: By animism you mean what exactly it is that were doing. and we tried to get the students to get into Reiser: The visual energy of the object

but it is about some kind of material issue of the intensive and extensive is as a process. And the other thing is that to what youre looking at you can never really justify the product through the process. The narrative of the played out not just as setting one extenprocess can never stand in for the product. The other part is rhetoric that blinds you biomorphic quality to your work?

expression that youre managing. The

Dodington: Do you see a biological or to it, that there are multiple influences being balanced its a kind of ecological system. I think in certain ways were still very much tied to modernism, in that the final achievement is sought in some sort of balance in the work proportion is very important. Simply classical issues are really important in terms of the criteria we bring to the design. work? Dodington: Have the intensive and extensive been long-term concepts in your Reiser: I think there is a kind of bio-logic

its primitive, its a very pre-art notion of

expression. Im just trying to hone in on

Dodington: This is something similar to a project I had worked on with Sanford networks, and something that I had picked energistic forms . . . Is it an understanding of the materiality that drives the work? up on the Atlas was a phrase away from animism, not shooting for biological or

Kwinter, a project about bone and bone

Reiser: Theyve more grown out of the work, though Jeff Kipnis got annoyed with me because he used those terms in the
20

Folding in Architecture book as a way of

beginning to categorize things very early

on in a different way. Look at the Folding article. up in Henri Bergsons writings is the difficulty of talking about intensive things in and of themselves. You cant really talk How do you discuss the intensive without limiting it to an extensive discourse? about heat without applying an extensive measurement to it, like temperature. Reiser: I think we actually are always using both. I wouldnt divorce one from that you are really fully working in one or thing thats not presently active. I dont know if this is more of a mental thing, but projects. the other, and that as soon your tension almost by default everything becomes extensive. Thats there as a limit of some-

Dodington: One of the things that comes

are states that people are put into. There was a quote that I found in Kafka and also

from a Rabbi, which deals with this idea of the intensive: that the signs and images of the burning bush are never stabilized in on. Its very intense, but theyre emotional interpretations. Or all of the interpretaa uniform way of meaning one thing, but everybody agrees that something is going

tions could be completely at odds with one another. Theres a full spectrum of intersome people are uplifted architecture?

another and I think it relates to the moves from one issue to another, then

pretations on the same phenomenon. The

smooth/striated arguments from Deleuze,

only agreement is that something intense is going on here. Some people are crying, work . . . How do you get back into the Dodington: And so in terms of the Reiser: Well were not doing architectural universal mood rings, you know, where they will say: this we know will universally be understood as x. you can stabilize the interpretation and

I think that it is actually at work in the It is never at a point where everything is in flux and everything is somehow part of discrete modifications in areas that are the end which has change invested in it. probably bounded or unchanging at that an intensive, completely changing milieu .

. . You are actually, through design, making

Dodington: And do you think it has someaccidental intensive patterns out of an Baoan International Airport] ? one object? that be an accidental intensive reading of Reiser: Yeah, well the argument that we
21

thing to do with the visual emergence of apparently straight arch [in the Shenzhen Would

moment, and then you have an artifact at A lot of it is also about how it works on the psyche. And all of the issues of affect

were making [in that project] is a practical

argument we were calling this a cloud

dapple like a camouflage, so that was it would give a kind of artificial/natural effect in the space. And then theres a go down to the site lines where you look ambient effects, and producing an ambient effect in the space. Dodington: You have just referred to the natural. Can you talk more about that? form of artifice. that you can see a plane as youre moving

change. Actually, a moment where you at airplanes and it becomes this pulse, so on the little walkway. So, one is about controlled vision and the other is about

dichotomy between the artificial and the Reiser: I think were already sort of in the point where youre not dividing the natural and the artificial. Its really all a

22

Sanford Kwinter on Science and Architecture

in conversation with Nicholas Risteen
Risteen: As the dialogue between science and design continues, what are the lessons How do changing ideas in traditional into design? scienceslike the rise of EvoDevofilter

to be learned from emerging sciences? Kwinter: There is already a form of intellectual naivet expressed in the way the word science is used today in humanities milieus, and though architecture is not the worst culprit, it continues to be a victim of never been foreign to architecture, and thought. For example, when we say that pher we are recognizing that in his propoof course it has never been foreign to sition All is water he achieved a scientific that formal beginning, civilization has not ties and elements found in the world in step up to the plate and become players this naivetone might even use a harsher Thales was the first (Western) philoso-

word: dishonesty. Science, of course, has

statement and attitude regarding the cosmos, regarding material reality. From
Sanford Kwinter is a theorist who writes on science, technology and design. He is author of Architectures of Time, Far From Equilibrium, and most recently of Requiem: For the Metropolis at the Turn of the Millennium. He is Associate Professor at Rice University and currently co-directs the Master of Design Program at Harvard Universitys Graduate School of Design. 23

ceased to organize the traits and properno culture that does these tasks separately

space, in time and in mind. Now there is

so it really is up to architects to either

in the game of shaping historical reality,

or else to take a back seat and relegate as decorators of city walls. The idea that inventis another unproductive form of about found realityand is therefore facts. Every experiment is a model, a form You can even say this about mathematics; even about Gedankenexperimenten.

themselves to the provincial backwaters science is that part of culture that speaks somehow poorer than the disciplines that narcissism to which architects often fall prey. Science is about model building, not effect, isolate a behavior, generate a fact that can be transposed to another milieu. life and thought, the sciences have become the richest source of novelty and inventhe often vaunted popular culture and, a notable flexibility and capacity to adapt of the new Gedankenexperimenten that imposed on a piece of world to produce an Today, possibly because of the demise of tion in our world (decidedly more so than out, for all of sciences legendary rigidity quantitative criteria, it has of late shown field designated by Evo-devo is but one branch of inquiry with its own hypothshould be listening to it more closely than world as its place of workand I would we now recognize as an independent eses, its own objects and concepts. Yes,

even include sports in this categoryand which approaches this place and world architecture is model and cosmology, it positing possible worlds they cease being cease being architects. tells a story of how things are made that with something other than a superstigoes well beyond the banalities of caprice.

tious and magical attitude, can probably legitimately be called science. All good When architects stop telling stories and scientific, but they also cease being interbeing historical. I would even say that they Risteen: In reading through literature on science and architecture from the past

esting and most importantly, they cease

philosophy and philosophical modes of sadly, more than art). And as you point

two decades, the preoccupation of archithe fold, Ren Thoms Catastrophe Theory, and scientific/mathematical advances in that you feel have been overlooked by they now be approached? Kwinter:

tecture tends to be with the recognizable architectural models in science: topology, geometry. Are there avenues of science architectural practice? How could/should feigning optimism hereis that one has not yet even begun. There are, for example, have inherited about how an organism, or
24

with respects to its own formalisms and

in order to formulate new questions. The

today science takes risks, which is why we

new developments in the neurosciences that will fundamentally change the way we understand experience and perception; nervous system, arrays itself in space. Just they will change perhaps every notion we as scientific optics shaped the architecture

My feelingand I am not

ever. . . Any practice that takes the material

of the Renaissance, and phenomenological psychology the building of the middle 20th secondary organization of space in the era to come. science for its formal insights teaches us repertoires, superposition

century, so will concepts like primary and and reentrant signalling determine the product of forces in the surrounding environment, a form called up and shaped by a protoplasm for a certain period of time. of design. The environment designs the today than the one that biologists call evolution. It is the great form producer, Additionally, the mental habit of studying changing world acting on a lump of spongy machine that in turn designs it. There

the way they select and formulate probhabits of mind has also raised the bar on their forms to systems of ideas, and they tion is at all a bad thing. Western and

lems. The oblique infiltration of scientific the way in which architects talk about efforts that precede them and that follow

what they make. They must now connect must be able to connect their efforts to from their own. At this point in time, I do not think this form of forced historicizaAnother area that is certainly of value for architecture is the vast field of nonpre-Modern lenging forms, but the study of forms in knowledge

to think of the brain as itself a material In other words, the capacity of the brain to organize and design is itself a product is no design philosophy more powerful or important to understand and harness the great function producer, and its tenets, now form a full-fledged science that is affecting nearly every aspect of human inquiry including string theory, robotics, neurology, even economics and literature. shown over the last 15 years in mathematics and geometry has been more than interesting and altogether merited, even if most of the experimental applications once timidly referred to as a theory

systems. It is not just that these offer

great riches to be mined in the architects endless quest for unexpected and chalnon-habitual contexts develops in us a forms, musical, psychological, and episof form in life. I believe strongly today in from bourgeois art history. tific way? Risteen: To what extent would you say deep intuition of that which I spoke about temological as well as physico-spatial. an anthropology of form as a remedy for the tired formulas that we have inherited science, as discussed by architecture, Does a pre-occupation with earlier, the collective and integrated way No other method instills in us the same understanding of the foundational logic

in which a civilization generates all of its

I think the interest that architecture has ended in disappointment. From todays

perspective it is possible to say with confi-

dence that this interest has changed the way architects think and it has changed

actually enters the design field in a scien25

applying a scientific method to design

deny other possibilities? Is science as a in architecture?

generator of form the only use for science

rigorous formal methods to the organization of sound in ways that yield concrete directions for further research. One of the reasons that this is possible is that the for too long have wallowed in the sloppy space, but much of this sloppiness is only brain responds very precisely to designed sound, temporal structures. Architects permissiveness of effects produced in a product of their own historical lack of discipline and clarity. Architecture may music. This may seem a bit confining to not absolve it of the seriousness and indusand emerging architects rejecting the challenges laid down by their immediate

Kwinter: Both excellent questions. . . The difficult. It is clear that one is courting disaster (not to mention failure and ridiattitude within architecture, to see it as be very misplaced to apply scientific well, to bring its spectacularly inventive side to the foreground. In many ways this turn of mind began 40 years ago in the Anglo-Saxon world with the publication of Thomas Kuhns Structure of Scientific a science in the classical sense. It would method to architecture. Part of what is cule) if one tries to adopt a positivist

first is easy to answer, the second more

required today is to rethink science as

itself well be largely an art, but this does many of todays architects, but it is truly bewildering to see contemporary youth predecessors (the 90s generation) as arbitrary sensibility will be eclipsed and appeared.

triousness that we have seen in Western

Revolutions. Aside from his theory of paragenerator of ideas and not only facts. It is this aspect of science that should interest us. The second question is tantalizing, but

digms his work largely helped foreground

a new understanding of science as being a probably 5 to 15 years ahead of its time. We know the answer, without being fully able to answer it: no, generating form is not the sole use of science in architecture, horizon is very unclear. But one thing is certain; architecture is a form of human the most part dared to meet explicitly. Even composers of music have applied but what lies on the other side of todays regrettably utilitarian and opportunistic

being too weighty to bear. My prediction is that these architects who are trying to put architecture back on a foundation of forgotten even more quickly than they

knowledge, even a form of thought. This is a challenge that architects have not for
Originally published in Manifold 1, Spring 2007 26

Stan Allen on Rethinking Ecology

in conversation with David Dewane

Dewane: Ecological design relies on the study of energy in various physical and does your work express this? form interpenetrating relationships. How has influenced me a lot in thinking about things that Bateson says in his writings on

biological manifestations combining to Allen: I would quibble just slightly with these issues is Gregory Bateson. One of the ecology, which is for me very interesting away from the notion of energy (which he of information. There is a fundamental with physics) and rewrite ecology in terms which is contained in his assertion that ical. By this he means that if you are going ecological understanding must be ecologis about complex systems interacting with
Stan Allen is principal of Stan Allen Architects in New York. He is also Dean of the School of Architecture at Princeton University. 27

your wording here. One of the people who and provocative, is that we need to move

sees as belonging to a ninetieth century insight of Batesons that I like very much,

notion of ecology when it was still tied up

to approach a subject like ecology, which shifting variables, you have to adopt a kind of perspective that is equally fluid. So, for example, when he is describing the effect of a hammers blow, instead of seeing it

in terms of forces, impact, and energy he

talks about it as news of a difference information exchange, in other words. tion exchange as Bateson does has been been doing. That also refers back to his definition of rethinking ecology in terms of informahugely important in the work that Ive The turn to ecology and landscape really a model for a complex interactive system.

information as any difference that makes

Foreman talks about landscapes in terms of structure, function and change. These a lot of attention to structure that is to say, to organization and form. They have paid a fair amount of attention to funcin terms of program. They have paid very little attention to change. Part of learning structure, attention to program and event, and attention to change over time. architects and urban designers. I would say that traditionally, architects have paid

a difference. Its a minor quibble, but

seem to me to be useful categories for

reflects two things that reveal a larger shift within the discipline that I think are complex systems. For me, ecology becomes In other words, you could say my interest sustainability and environment (although with the notion of ecology being a model for a way of working and thinking that is capable of dealing with complex, interactive systems - what Jane Jacobs, referring to formulations by Warren Weaver, calls a shift in architecture and urbanism that change over time, especially in thinking about urbanism. would foreground questions of time and

tioning, which we have tended to define from ecology would be to give these three categories more or less equal weight in the work: attention to organization and doing I think its important to say that in the five years since I started a practice architect Jim Corner) weve been putting landscapes. buildings as into projects for cities and scapes. When you talk about cities and When I think about the work weve been

also important. The first is the embrace of in ecology has less to do with questions of it certainly figures in that) and more to do

independent of Field Operations (which

had been a collaboration with landscape equal amount of time into projects for going to change a little bit whether youre talking about buildings or cities and landyoure dealing with conventional buildings structure and function become more important and its change over time that is less easy to think about.
28

organized complexity. The second point

is that attention to ecology has to do with

Obviously, that equation is

In that sense the three categories proposed by Richard Foreman in his work on landand use as a scaffolding to get back to the question of how this figures into our work.

landscapes I would say that function and change become more important (although structure is still important) whereas when

scape ecology are useful to refer back to,

Dewane: How can architectural design address both the uncertain and unstable nature of ecological systems? Allen: Here it might be useful to talk about some recent projects. We recently

different agents, and another mechanism of control. The initial scaffolding of the project was the roadway and the park system and those are designed with a Then, over time, based on its own internal time as a void through the normal growth process of the city. In that project you could say there were two very explicit degrees of control or approaches to change and uncertainty. dynamic of development and investment fairly high degree of control and precision. will grow in, up to the edge of this void. The figure of the park will be defined over

completed a major urban design project for the city of Taichung, Taiwan. The task the site of the former municipal airport.

that was given to us was the replanning of In other words, we had basically an empty had basically grown up around this empty range of issues, one of which was the fact no identity because it had been a blank spot in the citizens understanding of the site but to move people around within the site. Our starting point was a famous site of close to 600 acres. This was a site site. We were faced with a huge empty that this site had been completely cut off city. We had to not only get people to the phrase, probably 20 years old now, by Rem architects can no longer control the built, the advantage of concentrating our design control open space, roadways, and movement systems, where as buildings and the fabric of the city necessarily involves many only the void. So we started with a kind of void strategy. We carved out the figure of a efforts on that which we knew the city could control: in other words, they could park in the center of the project. This had created when they moved the new airport to a site outside of town because the city site and we had to think about a whole from the rest of the city. It had absolutely

which is outside of our control, the city

That which belongs to the public realm and is paid for and controlled by the state as codes, FARs, and urban design guidelines) will give way to the natural dynamic

is designed with a fairly high degree of of the city as it grows in over time. For us

precision; that which we can only steer

and direct by more abstract means (such this is important for a number of reasons. In part, its pragmatic; we knew we ment. On the other hand its important, both politically and ideologically, because we wouldnt want to control the city to such a high degree. Cities that are vital and dynamic and have grown up over time couldnt control the dynamics of develop-

Koolhaas in which he states that today,

are not the product of a single author or entity. In fact there are many different hands involved. Part of the logic behind
29

this is that in order to create a vital, lively city you have to open yourself up to this

kind of uncertainty and the participation of multiple agents and growth over time. a corridor and remains constant, and the to the void ?

Dewane: Would it be fair to say that, in ecological terms, the infrastructure acts as and allowed to fluctuate in their relation

another useful concept that opens up the in Landscape Urbanism ? envelope a little bit.

patches are then anchored to the corridor Allen: I think thats fair. Again, to refer functioning and change over time. That agency that we as architects have to work back to Foremans categories, structure to some degree will always determine both is important, because its the primary with. As architects and designers, we have series of initial conditions. And setting up those initial conditions precisely not absolutely) the performance and the you set them up in another way, you get evolution of the system that follows. If

Allen: This is a very important question. One of the things that needs to be mentioned here (and is implicit in the by definition multi-disciplinary. vision. Again, term) is that Landscape Urbanism is theres a sense that none of these projects are authored by a single master planning product of collaborative teams involving not as much designed as they are negotiThey almost all happen as the ated. In these cases you are working at a scale that is beyond that of an individual decision makers, generally at a city level, tions about a larger scale public policy. It private finance, and above all you have to language they understand. many different fields. Over time they are building and necessarily touches on though there are a whole series of quesmeans that in order to be effective in the questions of policy and legislation. This

Dewane: What is the role of public policy

a whole series of design tools to specify questions like the width of a roadway or the topography of an open space all of those things have to do with setting up a determines to a large degree (although different kind of performance. Another concept from ecology, which is useful here, is fitness landscapes. Here, as opposed to Instead, there is kind of a loose relationship between a potential series of events, programs, and activities and the conditions and the structure of the landscape that might support them. That, for us, is

depends on the cooperation of various public realm, you have to know something about policy, something about public and

architectural thinking, theres not a 1:1 relationship between program and form.

communicate with all those people, in a we worked very closely with a local plancity (i.e. transportation people, land-use people) and all that we did had to be

Again, to speak to the Taichung example,

ning firm and all of the officials within the

30

translated into the language of policy. new legislation for the site. On one level it makes working on these very large projhand, I think its valuable to the degree itself.

The end result of the master plan was ects slow and complicated. On the other that it forces a level of public legibility and larger issues beyond individual projects, I

in the West to public policy in the East ?

Allen: Well I cant say Im an expert here. it has tremendous promise. There is a degree programs. So it has emerged as a fully fledged sun-discipline. But I think in the U.S., one potential criticism is that if you look at the work thats being done body of practitioners, a catalogue of work,

Its interesting that Landscape Urbanism has about a ten-year history now and Urbanism, and even a number of academic an extensive literature on Landscape

public communication into the process Just to speak very briefly to some of the think that, especially in this country, there is a lot of work that has to be done at the level of policy to recognize the importance scape issues that very often fall through into local administrative units. systems is that they dont respect conventional boundaries, especially political of planning and to open up the planning the cracks when everything is divided up

procedures to begin to deal with some of the larger regional, ecological and landthe things that we know about ecological the watersheds of New York City, they cover a whole range of jurisdictions and cant be encompassed in a single political or policy entity. The same is true for the harbor and the waterways. policy entities. York. The ecological systems have their One of

a lot of it has tended to be the design of Asia (and in Europe to some degree) the full potential of Landscape Urbanism to deal not only with open park spaces but also with the built fabric in an integrated way seems to be on the table. There are a lot of reasons for that. Some of it has to United States landscape architects tend to do with disciplinary boundaries. In the

urban parks. It seems to me that only in

boundaries. If you look at something like The river

deal with open space and urban designers or city planners tend to work with the built fabric. Whereas the promise with Landscape Urbanism, and I think what wed all agree would be a lot more productive, is to think about the built fabric and synthetic way. There are still substantial Urbanism. open space in a much more integrated, policy boundaries towards realizing the Dewane: What can Landscape Urbanism more progressive visions of Landscape

doesnt care if its in New Jersey or New and combine many different political and

own identities, which very often cross Dewane: Could you compare public policy

31

do for the third world?

Allen: Its a complicated question.

did host a conference here at Princeton be honest, it was a sobering prospect. We had not only architects and planners development community. The problems

two years ago on the African city, and, to

We

different than Accra which is going to be different than Sao Paulo which is going to of this progressive thinking is beginning to there are no easy solutions.

be different from wherever. So, its a huge filter down, but its also a situation where

challenge and one would hope that some

but people from the World Bank and the of rapid urbanization and the dynamics of cities developing in unplanned ways youre dealing with the third world. In participants made a comment (I believe he was talking about Accra or Lagos) that are multiplied countless times when this case, with the African city, one of the simply disappear, partly because the need you could put a billion dollars into the

infrastructure of the city and it would for infrastructure is so great and partly because of corruption and lack of oversight. Its a daunting question. I would say basically two things. One the one hand new challenges need new tools, and if ever there was a territory where the new stratneed to be tested, it would be in the That having been said, I think that every condition is individual and specific and would require a high level of local expercoming in and imposing solutions that tise and study so as not to come in with has not worked in the past. Knowledge preconceptions in any one condition. So its not a question of experts from the west

egies and tools of Landscape Urbanism

developing countries of the third world.

has to be shared. Mumbai is going to be

32

Charles Waldheim on Landscape and Non-Anthropocentric Urbanism

in conversation with David Dewane and Lindsay Harkema
Dewane, Harkema: Ecological design relies on the study of energy in various combining to form interpenetrating relationships. How does your work express this? describing a historical and generaphysical and biological manifestations Waldheim: Most recently weve been of approaching that question. tion of regionally informed ecological planning. Assuming were talking about design at the large scale my work deals with cities and urban form that work one of sufficient data. If we had enough information about the natural world and largely assumes that the challenge is On the

tional split between at least two ways one hand, there is a longstanding tradi-

the urban environment that comprises it, more rational plans about the future of the places in which we live and work. think that was a laudable goal and largely successful in transforming the design
33

and if we could array that data sufficiently

Charles Waldheim is Associate Dean and Director of the Landscape Architecture program at the University of Toronto. He has taught at Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, the Swiss Federal Institute (ETH) Zurich, the Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm, and the Technical University (TU) Vienna.

to make informed judgments about it, then we could make better choices and disciplines, but I think its run into a bit of a dead end recently. Ironically, ecology has I

emerged more recently not out of rational,

positivist science, but rather out of design and create and live and work in. So there are at least these two ways into that quesmation in front of decision makers they will make better informed choices, and it also builds necessarily upon a robust welfare state because you have to have not so much that ecological design didnt culture that executes plans at least not nor is it a matter of getting that informaand less driven by an empirical, rational not so much by the welfare state, but rather by private capital in relationship

culture as a means through which we positivism, scientific certainty, and the

understand the environments we design tion: one associated with Modernism, very much on the idea that if you get infora welfare state to implement these kinds that we face, but that we dont live in a much needing more scientific information, scientific process and method. Its based

that ecology is increasingly coming out of design culture. Therefore, the recent urbanism has been informed by ecology interesting ways.

interest in landscape as a medium for Do you feel that,

from both of those trajectories in very when plans dont get executed according Dewane, Harkema: to their original intention, we regress from providing ecological design to providing it ? Waldheim: I appreciate Nina Miralists On the face of it, designer ecology sounds pejorative. formulation of that opposition and I think its useful to hold onto that for a moment. It sounds obvious that we would want the scientific probity of ecological design whereas designer we live and work. Its not so much that elect political leadership and that they will plans dont get implemented, as the fact those plans) is a model we no longer hold in North America. Increasingly, we live in environments that we live and work in tively invest in much. The majority of the ecology sounds like reality TV. But it more adequately describes the culture in which that we dont plan anymore. The expecappoint who will plan and then execute tation of the welfare state (that we will an environment in which we dont collec(with the exception of water systems and
34

designer ecology, as Nina Miralist terms

of policy decisions. The difficulty became in that way. The problem that we experition in front of decision makers) but

shed important light on these decisions ence today in the design fields has little to do with questions of quantity (its not so rather that we live in a culture thats less about the built environment are motivated The combination of neo-liberal capital, the least in a North American context) means

planning process. Increasingly, decisions to donor culture and to the arts generally. recession of the welfare state, and the fact that we no longer do planning as such (at

maybe highway systems) are generated

by funding that comes through private

dollars in a variety of formats, whether its

airfare and private taxation on airfare, or a ingly in environments that are shaped by design is not important or interesting, its ested in implementing that policy. design address both the uncertain and unstable nature of ecological systems?

university campus and its private endowprivate capital decisions and less and less in environments that are comprehensively planned. As a result, its not that ecological Dewane, Harkema: How can architectural

ment. It strikes me that we live increas-

that confusion, the mistaking of one for the other, or a sense that one precludes the other, that I am spending most of my time focusing on these days. In fact, my message is that we have to understand scape architect. In fact, the combination the architect and the training of the landexclusive. The best examples of this come training of landscape architects. Look at that have essentially fueled landscapes Ill identify two examples. Corner, a Mancusian-born that both of these things are happening that knowledge is actually greater than the generation of landscape architects simultaneously. They are both relevant to

that we dont live in a culture thats inter-

of them can produce a condition in which the sum of its parts; they are not mutually not from within architecture, but from the ascendancy over the last fifteen years. architect who trained with [Ian] McHarg in a program driven by ecology. Then, as landscape First, James

Waldheim: On the one hand I think the models and analogues have been both culture, but have also allowed for a reenproductive in terms of architectural gagement between landscape architecture, urban design, and architecture. In both levels that is, architects need to be trained and professionally literate in looking at models from nature that can a program about operant ecologies at inform the organization, structure and

architecture world is buoyant with models

taken from the natural world. Metaphors,

part, this is because we are all looking at models from natural systems. In the first

a faculty member at Penn, Corner took the Tschumi. He struck up a conversation with Stan Allen, who was a junior faculty natural science, but also an understanding into architectural culture. example is this Dutch landscape architect, Adriaan Geuze. Adriaan was trained in eventually got training in ecology as a

instance, what I would suggest is that its important for architects to be literate at discourse of architectural culture. Lets

train up to Columbia to meet with Bernard member at the time, and basically Corner of how architects like Tschumi and others

call that ecology as metaphor or model. They also need to be literate and have

began importing models from nature the Netherlands. He learned ecology first as a natural science. He then struck up a

the scale of the building or the site. It is

van Groningen, an agricultural school in

35

The second

relationship with Rem Koolhaas at OMA, 8s work was informed both by operant ecologies on the ground, and, at the same we can identify Chris Reed as the next model for architectural thought.

and through their collaboration, West moment, ecology as a model or metaphor. It strikes me as a platform moving forward generation. He is equally literate with design culture and how ecology signifies a public policy in Landscape Urbanism? Waldheim:

we may still lament the loss of the robust

public sector, I think the reality for us in most North American environments will be a decreasing investment in the public and fewer and fewer things that we will agree to pay for collectively. While I dont to fund initiatives on behalf of natural projects.

realm from collective public dollars, an increasing fragmentation of that realm, from the point of view of private capital systems, environmental issues, sustainsee any end in that trend, at the same moment I do see an increasing interest ability and the like. While not replacing the collective and public welfare state, Urbanism do for the third world? this will probably supplant many of those Dewane, Harkema: What can Landscape Waldheim: Theres quite a lot of interest these days in landscape architecture as a discipline about informal settlement patterns, distributions of land, and informal economies. There was a recent architecture as the medium or discipline exhibition at Harvard that dealt specifically with the informal city and landscape

Dewane, Harkema: What is the role of tion of landscape architects who were late Modernists imagined their work (maybe advocating for a robust welfare state to work as advocates for the natural environadvice. ment and advocates at the level of policy make choices about and then implequite rightly) as advocacy on two fronts: first, raising environmental awareness ment policy decisions based on science as they saw it. Their role was really to environmental awareness was increasing sion of the welfare state beginning, and the advent of increasingly neo-liberal private capital as the prime mover in most urban environments. In that context, as we knew in the wake of the 1960s, and, second, Unfortunately, the genera-

in western culture, we also saw the reces-

Post 68, at the moment when

best equipped to respond to that type of condition. I think this is a topic that has been percolating quietly for the last couple of years, but its ready to really break open, and I think there is quite a lot that landscape architecture can afford.
36

more and more about the science of the ecology of these environments, we had in their operation. So in that sense, while less and less ability to actually intervene

The discourse around landscape urbanism as it has been formed certainly can help

contribute to that dialogue, and, also, cultural and economic condition in the formulations. I know that most recently else. in the rapidly urbanizing first world will

since that discourse came out of a specific west, it may be that the conditions both in lead to new tools, new lenses, and new I hear many of my colleges calling for an ecological urbanism as much as anything looking at the kinds of informal settledeveloping countries. de-engineering ? ments associated with urbanization in Certainly an ecological urbanism the so-called developing world as well as

1960s, the rising environmental awareness combined with advocacy on behalf stewards of the natural environment led entirely beneficial. One of the shadow projects that were perceived as being not of Minneapolis, for example, this has been condition, especially in the United States,

of landscape architects and others as sides of that, unfortunately, has been to misunderstand the question of scale in very clearly illustrated. I think that, moving forward, there will be an increasing diffithe context of their failure we dont yet see any political response. Theres no real at one scale I see, particularly in rural enviin urban environments, I also see a radical Both of those things have been happening mistake the two, though at certain strange moments they do have similar effects. and Ecological Urbanism ?

them to back away from civil engineering the wake of Katrina and the bridge collapse culty in imagining the North American where we collectively fund and maintain robust civil engineering projects. Even in terms of reconstructing these systems. So ronments, a desire to de-engineer projects is part of the political campaign of the right. to allow more freedom for ecologies, but,

would be a useful toolkit to have when Dewane, Harkema: Could you describe Waldheim: There has been a very strong tionship between civil engineering projtrained in a certain generation have been own terms, or at least deregulate several and quite lively debate around the relaworking essentially to advocate for the

ects (largely public) and natural ecologies. Largely speaking, landscape architects devices and regimes, so as to allow ecolohas been the very successful campaign America (and in favor of the de-damming against the damming of rivers in North gies to operate more completely on their of them. The most obvious example of this of many of them). This is the most obvious example, though I think there are probably others. Essentially, in the wake of the
37

political backlash to suggest there will be something different that will happen in

selective removal of civil engineering

de-funding of public infrastructure, which

simultaneously, but its important not to Dewane, Harkema: Could we ask you to go back for a moment and clarify the difference between Landscape Urbanism

emerged twelve years ago as a concept Waldheim:

to try to best describe what we saw as an emergent condition in the field of the were people doing this kind of work and ally European trained architects. early as the 1980s, there were several be that there was a generation (of which this emerging condition. term. As people to make these claims were actudesign disciplines. It was clear that there making these kinds of claims. The first European architects who were identifying, with respect to the city, landscape as the most important medium. It happens to Im included) of American architect Landscape Urbanism, for lack of a better Mostafavi, Adriaan Geuze and a number doing work in this area. So what I want like many concepts, has a kind of utility larly useful in a variety of contexts. At the held a conference in Chicago in 1996 at the Graham Foundation to try to frame of other international types who had been per se my role has been to frame what urbanists who picked up on that, and we We invited Jim Corner, Mohsen We called it

Landscape

Urbanism

of the English language which Im happy about its very gratifying but Im also completely stunned because twelve years

ago there were three of us who agreed this might be useful but werent sure what it would be. So it wasnt clear there would be an audience at all. But, in the English language at least, from Israel to China, Ive been to conferences where Ive been able to talk to people for whom landscape urbanism has been particularly useful. As quite provocative. As a result I see a desire urbanism the idea that we have to talk critical focus or edge that made it initially for a more specific set of tools, and one of urban contexts. The even sharper point of Thats still two years from bubbling up, but I think that two years from now you the non-anthropocentric. happen if you think about urban environments and dont just think about human urbanism, would be that you could allow that topic has become useful in a variety of ways, it necessarily has lost a kind of those more specific tools will be ecological specifically about the urban context and we the sword, not that you asked, is looking will see a slate of literature dealing with What would

need to talk about ecologies within these at a kind of non-anthropocentric urbanism.

to be clear about is that its not my work within a certain arc, and at certain points I think its become clear that its particusame time I think part of the challenge is that we use to describe the conditions two things happening: A broad absorption of landscape urbanism in the rubric

I see is happening. Landscape urbanism,

to continually refine the tools, the lenses that we see. And what I see right now is

beings, as a species? The advantage of this approach, in the context of ecological ecologies the natural sciences that we have been describing for the last twenty same moment, the approach is not bogged five years to be available, but at the
38

down in the transcendental and ultimately

metaphysical baggage of the environmentalist movement. This is ultimately one of the difficulties with McCarg and the a capital N, as a kind of deity. Whereas,

McCargian project: it was perceived to be because it was transcendental, it was the non-anthropocentric position argues, Well . . . no, its about decentralizing natural ecologies to play through from the its posthumanism. So architectural at the same moment we can still allow urbanism broadens horizontally. Within English literature at Rice University, and you decentralize the human species in this thought on urbanism is just beginning to be evaluated. sciences weve developed. I would look for ecological urbanism as a kind of subset within landscape urbanism, as landscape for nonanthropocentric urbanism. Cary who is a foremost expert on animalia,

anti-urban and anti-intellectual ultimately metaphysical, it was belief in Nature, with

culture can find this of interest while

the ecological focus I would say, look has written a book called Zoontologies,

Wolfe, for instance, who is a professor of about what happens to the patrician of humanism and humanist thought when

relation to other species. The impact of

39

James Corner on Landscape Urbanism and Indeterminate Systems

in conversation with David Dewane
Dewane: Ecological design relies on the study of energy in various physical and does your work express this? form interpenetrating relationships. How Corner: In some ways Im not sure that it does, directly maybe indirectly. I would etc.) but also in terms of the energy of an ecosystem. There is also the cultural and For me energy works at several levels. At an urbanistic level, youre trying to insti-

biological manifestations combining to

interpret the term energy quite broadly, as solar power, wind power, biomass fuel, social energy of a place. Were all looking

not just in terms of power energy (such for a vibrancy, driver, or motor in design. tute a sense of energy and activity. Youre more dynamic, interactive and interesting. energy in the system to support a robust and diverse species range. You often talk
James Corner is founder and director of Field Operations in New York. He also chair and professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, School of Design. 40

trying to activate spaces so that social life is In ecological or biological terms youre in ecosystems about flows of matter and support and sustain diverse life forms and there is the more obvious aspect of energy energy, and thats important to be able to

trying to ensure that there is sufficient

the ecolution of life, if you will. Thirdly,

as power designing cities and landscapes that have lower energy demands in terms of optimizing solar aspect, wind orientation, accessibility to transportation, etc . . . And also, of course, looking to se. and biomass. Its a bit of a general answer, but I think we approach it broadly. I dont address both the uncertain and unstable nature of ecological systems? forte. do things with wind power, solar power

forms themselves that are actually quite circumstances might change. my own interests are.

forgiving and adaptable as situations and Dewane: Do you find that change is somescale as opposed to a larger scale? Corner: I think another way to come at the research, both academically and in ended, adaptive systems of design that

question is actually pretty central to what thing thats easier to address at a smaller practice, has to do with more fluid, openplanning. Master planning would impose over a five, ten, or fifteen year time period, and is pretty unforgiving if circumstances, and more adaptive forms of planning. The for open-endednesss sake, and youre physical fixity and physical design. Whats a little disappointing in recent years is that a top-down scheme around which everyof that model, this work, going on for creation of more flexible forms of design problem is that its getting to the point

So your

think we specifically focus on energy, per Dewane: How can architectural design The whole basis of my practice,

Corner: Well that, I would say, is our Field Operations, is indeterminacy and where fixity and closure really fail to work open-ended systems. This is largely done in an effort to come up with solutions By that I mean in cities, landscapes, even small projects (small pocket parks, small ability, and open-endedness. This means that an approach to design has to be a plazas, small public spaces) there is more composition and more about design as a and more demand for flexibility, adaptlittle bit less about design as fixed, formal methodology for propagating new forms. sake, but theyre forms that do something. or channel people, or channel air. They interrelationship or interaction. Theyre Theyre forms that actually channel water,

really came out as a reaction to the rigidity of modernism or, more broadly, of master thing has to fit, and might be implemented ten years at least now, has to do with the

in todays social and economic climate.

needs, or desires change. Given the failure

where were finding open-endedness beginning to lose some of the benefits of you see a lot of design that is really nondesign. It is just using the rubric of openendedness as an excuse, reason, or ratio41

These forms are not just forms for forms are forms that set up opportunities for

nale for what is being done. In our work we are actually trying to go back to some

instruments or mechanisms in master parameters between what you will allow certain precise formal and geometrical and programmatically indeterminate. in Landscape Urbanism?

planning that are quite fixed and set strict and what you will not allow, and have something that is both formally precise Dewane: What is the role of public policy the urban fabric is under public control. Even a private development, where the pass through a lot of approval processes. is especially true in America, and is now properties, in an effort to come up with

and practices that are better able to deal with a complex milieu, especially a public design as merely a formal problem. do for the third world? context, than the stereotypical attitude of Dewane: What can Landscape Urbanism Corner: Good question. Our generation, lation growth. Most of that population will meaning the next ten, twenty, thirty years, cities in the developing world. This places will have sustainable water supplies and is going to be faced with enormous popube moving into cities and, in particular, enormous pressure on their transportafood supply are also a concern, especially scope and dimension of the pressure and the problem. It seems pretty obvious that tion and environmental infrastructure, as cities expand, because they basically

Corner: Its huge because so much of developer may buy a significant area of land in the city and develop multiple buildings and multiple open spaces, is There are transportation processes, city planning processes, and even design and community involvement plays out. This becoming more pervasive in Europe, and its even beginning to show up in Asia. patrons. We now have to design in a very for kings, presidents, or private develart commission processes, let alone how It means that we dont design anymore

under great public scrutiny and has to

and on the ability to ensure that cities

healthy air quality. Food production and food. I think no one fully understands the amount of expertise Landscape Urbanist new city forms, and new city lifestyles expertise, if you will but also engi-

consume agricultural land that provides the next few years will require a certain in order to help create new city formats, a system where we have a more sustainable water, air, energy, and food situation. I would add that this is a global problem, as weve seen with the economy in the

opers who are, in a sense, single-minded and it gets enormously complicated. This putting forward a concept like Landscape Urbanism. It has certain thematics, ideas,

complicated milieu of multiple voices, multiple authorities, multiple interests, complexity is really one of the bases for

neering expertise and planning expertise that can better accommodate the population growth and at the same time create

42

past few months. Whatever happens with market demands is now global. It will creative way.

water, food, air, money, capital, business, really start to impact the developed world if we dont start helping the developing world deal with some of its problems in a

43

Chris Reed on Ecology as Analogy

in conversation with David Dewane

Dewane: Ecological design relies on the study of energy in various physical and does your work express this ? form interpenetrating relationships. How

biological manifestations combining to Reed: In the past couple of decades, ecolstanding of how ecological systems work. ecological systems as dynamic systems in time, systems that can respond and adapt systems work. I think for us, that new plant species, and hydrologic systems and
Chris Reed is the founding principal of StoSS. Reed has taught courses on contemporary landscape urbanism and landform at the University of Pennsylvania and at the Rhode Island School of Design. 44

ogists have radically revamped our underthat are trying to achieve equilibrium, or steady states; they are now talking about to various influences and conditions as they may be introduced over time. Its a much more dynamic sense of how natural On the one hand, wherever possible, we

No longer are they talking about systems

understanding is interpreted in two ways. performance mechanisms of plant systems, integrating those into the projects that

are interested in adapting the specific we do. Were adopting those mechanisms quite literally into the work. On the other only natural systems, but also the systems hand, were also looking at ecology as an analogue as we begin to think about not

that we construct in relationship to environmental systems; this includes strateculturally, fiscally, and politically through systems behave dynamically and apply things like public process, for example. It do.

gies for thinking about projects socially, various frameworks of systems that we may set up in a project. This may include management strategies. I think in these

made evident in the work of the project . . in the way the projects are structured, and plan for future uncertainties and future changes.

time. And so we use the analogue of how

. evident to people, but more importantly generated. Likewise with plant systems, think of landscapes and plant palettes, we natural environments and how we might think of ways to integrate a range of plant time, the systems can adapt by drawing communities at the outset of the project in

that as we begin to think through the may include long-term maintenance and two ways were trying to utilize the newer understanding of ecology in the work we Dewane: How can architectural design address both the uncertain and unstable nature of ecological systems? at hydraulic systems on a site, either large systems, with lake or river rise or fall,

were looking at how systems work in their

For example, as we begin to

order that, as conditions change through on the plant reserves weve established up ties or another. What weve done is set up ways we engage environmental systems.

front. In other words, circumstances that arise may favor one set of plant communiso that they can therefore be tapped over When we begin to think about the analogue of ecological systems on very large-scale projects, on the other hand, we look at and dynamics. these projects will have a public process can be an inventive and responsive part of points along the way. time as conditions change. Those are two

Reed: For instance, when we start to look scale or small scale, what were interested in doing is not suppressing those systems. Whether or not theyre environmental systems and temporary flooding that might occur in the urban environmentin dently, and then begin to layer them into a seasonally or over longer periods of time, allow those systems to play themselves

conditions that allow each of those to exist

or whether were dealing with storm water each of these instances were trying to out within a project. We look at how each of these systems might work indepenproject, hopefully bringing them into a set of relationships that might somehow be

administrative and management practices component to them. In a few instances, project developmentnot just staged at be tapped again and utilized at multiple
45

we looked long term at how public process the outset or during the planning phase of the project, but how that process can or phase two of a project is executed, we

For example, typically

Once phase one

can allow for additional rounds of public process that feed back into the system (and into the evolving design) based on the new conditions on the ground. So social, and economic conditions over time. policy? were constantly trying to set up these Dewane: Is your use of the term public systems that allow for feedback, response, and flexibility to whatever set of physical, process similar to the term public Reed: Its one component of it. Certainly nents to it. Some of it involves meetings Some of it involves meetings with ageneither responsible for the project or might public process has many different compocies and stakeholder groups that are over the project, or participate in the policies for a particular place. I think that process and can tap into the energy and project. Some of it may also extend all publics at multiple levels throughout the and agencies that are looking over or after the groundwork for political support that tions to carry the work forward.

In some ways its not just a top-down

process, it can be a bottom-up process as well. Where you get various groups and

individuals moving on the ground with a set of interim or provisional initiatives up political support for projects over time. ways to affect public policy at multiple levels. Dewane: Would it be fair to think about the term public process as describing the the top-down ? system from the bottom-up and public policy as describing the same system from Reed: Im not sure I see it quite that interested in the distinctions, I guess. do for the third world ?

front, they can build public support and So, I think there are very key strategic

and workshops with the public at large. somehow relate to the project, or watch the way up to politicians and top administrators who are setting out the public enthusiasm of the public at large. Projects projects can strategically engage all those need to tap into the various experience will allow for funding and favorable posiand expertise represented by the groups projects. And they certainly need to lay

distinctly. As I said, I think we engage in work on the ground that sets the stage Dewane: What can Landscape Urbanism

for what public policy will be. Im not so

Reed: I think there are many opportunities for Landscape Urbanist practices and ations. In particular, Landscape Urbanism emergent economies. pations that lay the groundwork for larger systems. So, if you begin to think about I think they can can set up conditions and frameworks that allow for emergent ecologies and

strategies to play out in many environments around the world and in many situallow for provisional and temporary occu46

these types of strategies playing out in countries where even clean water is a dayto-day struggle, I think there are ways that for instance, that allow for the cleansing these strategies might be able to work in efficient and inventive ways on the ground of water, that allow for open space, that of the rougher conditions on the ground, at least as the systems might emerge over Whether ecological systems or economic systems, theyre functional could allow for the gradual development systems, so that youre setting up opportunities for elaboration: more dynamic water systems, allow for the regeneration of vegetation systems and strategies can play off of some of provisional or hybridized systems. which characterize these systems can be might develop thereafter. in certain communities. I think that these time. In simple terms, these strategies they can be wrapped into one set of rela-

tionships. I think the various efficiencies brought to bear in many parts of the world in ways that are low-cost yet effective in helping to re-lay the ground for what

47

Mark C. Taylor on Religion without a God

in conversation with Lindsay Harkema

Harkema: Trinitarian concepts proliferate throughout your discussion of religious schemata: dualism/complexity. Even the duality of part schema ? God/self/world, immanence and transcendence implies a third order, a khora that encompasses the realm between the poles. What is the Taylor: There are two modalities of threemonism/

philosophical significance of the threeness at work in After God. The first is, as you suggest, Trinitarian. While initially formulated by church councils in the fourth and fifth centuries, the notion of the until Hegels speculative rendering of the of whom have never read Hegel, frequently prise is designed to avoid precisely that mistake. developed in the Science of Logic, Hegel Through a rigorous analysis Trinity did not come to conceptual clarity criticize him for collapsing difference in identity, his entire philosophical enterco-originate and are co-dependent. Each emerges in and through the other and
48

doctrine. Though post-structuralists, most

Mark C. Taylor is the Chair of the Department of Religion at Columbia University and a leading figure in postmodern theory and criticism. He has written on topics of philosophy, religion, literature, art and architecture, incorporating themes of modern science, technology, media and popular culture. Of several titles Taylor has published over his career are: Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology (1984), Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion (1994), Hiding (1997), About Religion: Economies of Faith in Virtual Culture (1999), The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (2001), Mystic Bones (2007), After God (2007).

demonstrates that identity and difference

neither can be apart from the other. Here,

threeness is identity (Father), difference

(Son), and their interrelation (Spirit or, in Hegels terms, Geist). The second notion of threeness is, as struction within Hegelianism. you suggest by invoking the term khora, and Hegel as opposites; indeed, such an position is an infinitesimal displacement of Hegelianism. Indeed, in his important argument actually reinscribes deconessay Differance, Derrida admits that Derridean. It is a mistake to see Derrida always insisted that his philosophical what Hegel labels differentiating relahe himself is trying to think. Differance a third schema, as you suggest, but that possibility of thinking this third. While all thought is an unthinkable third that is neither present nor absent. The point is not that one of these positions is religious or theological and the other is not; rather, each points to a different type of theology. tion in his Jena Logic is very close to what identity and all differences. It is not so differance is what makes every binary, for Hegel, the structure of the relationDerrida

i.e. noise and form, and the transformative construction, noise and form become one force that perpetuates the fluctuation ? dynamic network in flux, perpetuated by emergent creativity. If God is removed Taylor: For the past few years, I have related developments. been reading and writing about complex systems and network theory. My interest First, I started from this system, what is the destabilizing

state between them. Through a process of

in these subjects grew out of three inter-

is a non-oppositional difference that is

using digital technologies in my teaching. I quickly saw that these technologies not Global Education Network with a leading New York investment banker. This was a major undertaking, which failed, but what I learned from this failure reinforced my I have grown increasingly concerned about conviction about the importance of inforresult of climate change. Third, I became problems. As I studied theories of complex convinced that deconstruction and postonly transformed pedagogy, but had much wider implications. In 1998, I founded

the condition of the possibility of every much that binary oppositions generate as well as dialectical, difference possible. reason itself, for Derrida the condition of Where Derrida and Hegel differ is on the

mation and network technologies. Second, the prospect of natural disaster as the could not not adequately address these adaptive systems, it became clear to me Confidence Games and, most recently, After
49

ality from which differences emerge is

structuralism, more broadly conceived, that they have a distinctive structure and God. I am convinced that the structure and operational logic. I have tried to describe that logic in The Moment of Complexity, operation of these systems are isomorphic

Harkema: In your discussion of religion

without God, the conversation shifts

towards models of co-evolving opposites,

across media; that is to say, they operate formally in the same way in cultural, social, systems conforms to the same logic. political, economic and biological systems.

Moreover, the interrelation of all of these You ask, If God is removed from this system, what is the destabilizing force depends what the meaning of God is. As function either to render life meaningful and order, or it can disrupt every structure into the structure of complex systems. These systems are self-organizing As for the source of instability, it is built and purposeful by establishing structure and order that seems secure and thereby I try to make clear in the book, religion can subvert secure meaning and clear purpose. though they are not teleological, they have a trajectory that emerges through the interaction of particular agents, which organisms to self-conscious actors. Even not escape the aleatory. the science of surprise. That phrase is, of One systemstheorist describes complexity theory as course, an oxymoron, and that is precisely the point. Chance is folded into structure as its necessary condition. The aleatory across media. The structure of emergent to the intellectual level. creativity is the same from the molecular can range from neurons to molecules, to when intentional, these interactions do that perpetuates the fluctuation? Well, it

Harkema: What is a religion without God? When I write about a religion without God, tant particularly in the history of the West, the low level of thought. Both those who

Taylor: I am tempted to respond to this question by simply saying Buddhism. While this vision of God has been imporit is quite limited. As I listen to the critidefend and those who attack religion all my judgment, religious atheists. Many too often are ignorant of the theological years ago, I coined the term a/theology cisms of religion today and the debates I am pointing to the widespread tendency to understand God only in theistic terms. about secularism, I am astonished by tradition and have a simplistic understanding of God. The only philosophers and theologians worth reading are, in to mark the space between theism and atheism, as commonly understood. The argument in After God updates this argu(and, of course, Kierkegaard) and then of information and network theory. be regarded as an atheist. And yet, he theological thinkers who ever wrote. I In rewriting his speculative system in terms

ment by rereading Hegel through Derrida terms of todays debate, Hegel would remains one of the most important all along, but only realized it late in life.
50

creates the space, as it were, for creativity

to emerge. Again, there is an isomorphism

would also insist that Derrida was doing theology, or, more precisely, a/theology Part of what I have tried to do is to rethink what once was the creator God in terms

of emergent creativity. There is creativity it important to engage in such theological the world and the way we act in the world

without creators all around us if we learn see the world informs the way we act in

how to see it. But, you might ask, why is

are multiple aspects of otherness, but I will focus on two in this context. First,

speculation? Because what we think and implicitly or explicitly entails a vision of the enormous problems we face. When inevitable. Harkema: Echoing Hegel, you explain the the map doesnt fit the territory, disaster is the world. The crisis we face is not only

how we act are inseparable. The way we practical, it is also theoretical. We need

Hegel always insists that subjectivity is inter-subjective. In his classic formulation myself. But the self does not become itself This act of self-reflection involves selfother is, as it were, internal. Hegel thought

in the Phenomenology, The I is a we and

the we is an I. Here, the other is an other subject in relation to whom I become unless it reflexively turns back on itself. representation. The self becomes itself by could become transparent to itself. Since self-reflection of other in self, but also the self-reflection of self in other. that through such self-reflection, the self self-consciousness is social, however, such transparency presupposes not only the not persuaded by his argument. The first returned to Kants account of the imaginaexpose an unthought other in Hegelian speculation. If the self is constituted in presupposes to itself come from in the first place? It Heidegger and Hegel. self-representation, Philosophers who came after Hegel were

different interpretive schemata to address

representing itself to itself. This aspect of

self-reflexive structure of the Trinity as A concept of self is formed in relation to Trinity? Taylor: This is an enormously complex which, of course, is impossible in this context. In his Third Critique, Kant identian other. What is the other which corresponds to the self-construction of the

isomorphic with the self-consciousness.

issue. Indeed, working it out fully would purposiveness without purpose, which Hegels theory of self-consciousness and, is the one I described in the above account I might add, of the definition of fine or high art that is still current. This structure

to recognize the problem was Fichte, who tion in the Third Critique in an effort to and through self-consciousness, which cannot be posited by the self because the this other. What follows is a very long story that does not reach completion until
51

provide a genealogy of deconstruction, became the foundational structure for

fies the structure of inner teleology or

where does that which the self represents self is constituted by the relationship to is that there is an other, other within The conclusion

then

of identity and difference. For Hegel, there

the subject, as an exteriority that can be neither assimilated nor sublated. condition of thought. endlessly. Trinity. other is the unrepresentable condition of representation and, thus, unthinkable does nothing more than repeat this point

Deconstruction

This

It should be clear that with this other oppose Hegel but effects an infinitesimal displacement. That displacement is the differance God. discernment of an alternative third that is of dialectical reflection. If we were able to discover a manifold that is neither one nor many but a complex (com, with; plectere, immediate but cannot be mediated. to weave, braid or fold) medium that is not I said that Derrida does not

other, we return to the question of the implicate within the Trinitarian structure

think God differently, we might name this

In tracing the folds of these differences, we

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Catherine Keller on the Process of Becoming

in conversation with Lindsay Harkema
Harkema: What is a tehomic beginning? Keller:

ning in tehom, invites another kind of beginning than the in the beginning that Jewish narrative fused with Greco-roman drones through the Western imagination. pure origin, forged of an appropriated Christendom erected its empire upon a fication of being with immutable eternity

A tehomic beginning, a begin-

ontotheology. The tendency to unify Power in the first merged with the identiin the second to create if not from God could be derived. Yet the tehom, as nothing a new deification of changeCatherine Keller is Professor of Constructive Theology at the Theological School of Drew University, and the author of several books about religion, feminism, deconstruction, and process theology. She is currently writing on issues of incertitude and interrelatedness as they enfold at once a tradition of Christian mysticism and recent physical cosmology. The thread of radical relationalism that runs through her work here engages the heritage of negative theology, with its deconstructive edge. The robust contemporary affirmations of embodiment characteristic of ecofeminist and Whiteheadian thought tangle with the indeterminacy of postmodern pluralism. Titles include: From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self (1986), Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (2003), Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World (2004), and On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process (2008). 53

less omnipotence. The creation from absolute nothingness assured a point of belies the purity of origin. Nowhere does nihilo, only a soggier and subtler beginning. This beginning I called it a creatio ex profundis remains unrecognizable recently, through a combination of biblical

origin, from which the controlling unity of the Hebrew deep of a salt watery chaos, the biblical narrative claim a creatio ex within the dominant theopolitics. Only scholarship, Whiteheadian philosophical theology, and a bit of chaos theory, could the biblical metaphors be retrieved. Yet

from the pre-Constantinian period of for questioning the notion of a beginning in time of the universe, or of a neat division between the divine and the creaturely. surrounds every myth of a pure creation. alternative to the light supremacism that Renaissance cosmology of Nicholos of Cusa, Negative theology with its 3rd century

Christian theology stem other resources heritage of brilliant darkness hints at an I am currently contemplating the early whose docta ignorantia deconstructs the the infinite unfolded in the finite, the finite story of the pure power of light opposed to the dark nothingness. His panentheism of enfolded in the infinite, hints at another rhythm of creation, boundless, acentric, new beginning hybrid, complicated, origin. ambiguous from the institutions of notion of the primordial and consequent nature of God, you discuss a simultaneous becoming in human and God. Traditional theological assumption ? theology begins with a transcendental throughout time. How does the concept God, a priori to existence, and unchanging of simultaneous becoming subvert this Keller: Alfred North Whiteheads bipolar eternity of divine reason into the abstract concept of God translates the traditional and manifold. It would not be a matter of negating beginning but of liberating each

them, to embody them. That is the primordial nature: the Eros of the Universe. the divine, which is as much a multiplicity as it is a unity. For God only emerges, or interactive becoming. Hence even Deleuze of the universe. God is a process not a

The consequent nature is the actuality of becomes, as a feeling of all the feelings substance or an essence a process of of pure process, who passes through the of course.

could wax enthusiastic about this God incompossibles. He may have derived his concept of a multiplicity as a rhythmic Harkema: In your writing you use several pattern of repetition from Whiteheads version half a century earlier sans God, paradoxical phrases: the deep face, the nite light, knowing ignorance etc. You also discuss the synonymity of God and terms a result of an attempt to express an ontotheological paradox linguistically ? lingusitic creation. bottomless chessboard, darkness as infiIs the self-contradictory nature of these

Harkema: Building upon Whiteheads

the Word throughout theological history. Keller: I am enchanted by the entangling incapacity of language, so generative of Derridas bottomless chessboard, Cusas docta ignorantia, and the apophatic theological tradition of the brilliant darkness in the depth of their very surface, another
54

These phrases

possibilities luring creatures to actualize

are on the face of it, contradictions. But logic is at work. This is the point of Cusas

coincidentia oppositorum: it would be

according to a particular Aristotelian logic of noncontradiction, and a particular Reason it deploys, that these polarities contradict each other. In the cloud of the impossible the title of the book Im writing now and Cusas phrase one perceives the limits of that Reason. One perceives it, we would say now, as constructed rather than eternal. Where an opposition had ruled, which means usually that one pole rules the other in order to prevent the chaos of contradictions male versus female, light versus darkness, actual versus possible, etc complexity now becomes possible: the folding-together from which something unexpected may unfold. The becoming divinity sensed in the cloud does not mean a Dionysian celebration of the chaos but a self-organizing complicity of the multiple. Harkema: Would you discuss the deep face and/or bottomless chessboard in relationship to the Deleuzian idea of the plane of immanence? What are the spatial/temporal implications of these concepts ?

polemic against the face, and so forth.

Keller: Yes, the dense fractal surface of the Deleuzian plane of immanence unfurls a sensibility resonant with the tehomophilic depth of face. He is thinking an alternative order scooped from the chaos and unfurled with iterative consistency. But of course one must always then contend, or at least laugh with, the Deleuzian oppositionalisms his immanence versus trancendence, rhizomatic versus arboreal, his

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Philip Wood on Life After the Subject the Example of Aesthetic Ecstasy
in conversation with Izabel Gass
Gass: In the American academy today, it is said and said again that we live in the philosophical era of the death of the subject, or the episteme that has obliterated the notion of a transcendent sub-iectum that grounds being. The ontological implications of being without a ground were rigorously explored by a set of French Post Structural thinkers in the era from the 1960s to the late 80s, most prominent among them, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. Among American students today, however, there is a widespread and increasing dissatisfaction with ensuing academic practices which continue to go by the name of Post-Structuralism, particularly in literary and architectural theory. In architecture particularly, we find Derridian philosophy cheapened to simple wordplay or Deleuze pillaged for nothing but the vibrancy of his spatial metaphors. Can you illuminate, with more clarity, the ontological premise and meaning of the phrase, the death of the subject? What problem must contemporary PostStructuralism confront if it is to continue its work with the rigor and complexity embraced by its intellectual predecessors ? Moreover, what is the relevance of PostStructuralism for architects ?

Philip Wood teaches in the Department of French Studies at Rice University in Houston, Texas. 56

Wood: The meaning of the death of the subject has been very widely misunderstood i.e. as the death of personhood, consciousness, agency, freedom, intention, artistic creativity etc. Not surprisingly, this has caused reactions ranging from perplexity to angry dismissals. In fact, the expression death of the subject was one used principally by American and British commentators rather than by major French figures. The phrase emerged as an adaptation of a rather simplistic and modish expression the death of the author coined by Roland Barthes. Barthes was (an often brilliant) vulgarizer of other peoples sometimes very difficult ideas; and he was articulating a new and, in its most cogent forms among his betters (like Derrida, or the Sartre of The Family Idiot), wholly valid conception of literary creation (a healthy corrective to the exaggerated role given to genius in the past). Barthes version, however, in which all creative capacity is denied the author entirely, is as simple-minded as what it replaced. (Derrida, by contrast, in Grammatology, concedes that there is something irreducibly Rousseauist to Rousseaus writings they are not just a minor eddy in a general text.) Things were not helped by the fact that Foucault speaks of the death of man at the end of The Order of Things, and Derrida wrote an essay entitled The Ends of Man. Because it has been received opinion since Kant that the subject is and can only be a human subjectivity (i.e. experience, freedom etc.), it was believed that the end of man

What Derrida and Foucault were indeed announcing, however, was not some abolition of humanity, but the end of nineteenth and twentieth century humanism (which is not the humanism of the Renaissance or that of antiquity): i.e. the role of Man as ground or foundation (sub-iectum, that which underlies). What did this mean? This is made quite clear by Foucault in the final part of The Order of Things: bourgeois humanism (it is also socialist or communist humanism) is the idea that humanity is the source (ultimate ground or foundation) of all meaning, social and cultural order and so forth, and that therefore a systematic investigation of our own role in all of this should finally give us a complete cultural and historical self-understanding (and therefore the power to change it all for the better). The principal target, in this regard, of course, in France at the time, was Marxism (and Hegel). This can look like a reactionary move to make, but there were compelling reasons (like the fact that an ostensibly secularist humanism was in fact a concealed form of theism), of which more below. The confusion in this area is still almost universal. For example, how many people remember let alone address

must mean the death of the subject (in the sense of the attributes of human consciousness). More on this score in a moment.

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the difficulties to which it gives rise that Derrida presented an extended, and impassioned, defense of the Cartesian and Husserlian cogitos (against Foucault) as early as 1963, and again in 1967?

thirty years. For us today, and for the last two hundred years, subject generally means subjectivity: i.e. the attributes of a knowing or experiencing consciousness primarily human but, conceivably also, divine (as in an absolute subject), angelic, animal and so forth. This seems to us the only natural meaning for the term there could be. This dominant contemporary meaning (and attendant ones like Foucaults subjection) is, however, the result of a decisive change in the meaning of subject brought about by Kant. Before Kant, in a tradition originating with Aristotle, it had meant, as its etymology suggests, that which underlies (Gr. hypokeimenon). This was, at one level, a matter of what we today call logic or grammar: i.e. the subject of a proposition (Socrates is old, The horse is fleet of foot), and therefore something that could not be predicated of something precisely because it was the thing that underlay or supported any qualification or predication (old, white-haired, fleet of foot etc.). This allowed an easy shading, however, into a closely related notion in Aristotle (because it is also suggestive of that which underlies) i.e., ground, foundation, substratum (Gr. hypo-stasis). This can be made more vivid if you look at Aristotelian ontology. For Aristotle (at least, in the Categories), there was a sense How so?

All this said, the expression death of the subject can be usefully applied, as long as the confusion around the phrase is dispelled. The misunderstandings arose because the French poststructuralists (particularly Derrida) were following Heideggers historical-revisionist meaning of the term sub-iectum (most especially in the Nietzsche study). Heidegger had very good reasons for reminding us of the rather obscure history of the meaning of the term, starting with Aristotle. If we can be bothered to grind through this rather difficult and onerous material, there is a very significant reward to be had at the end of it all. So, if youll bear with me (this will have to be rather long, and may seem initially remote from our contemporary concerns, although it is actually vitally relevant) here goes. Perhaps the main contemporary reason for rehearsing all this hideously tangled stuff is that, as Nietzsche first pointed out and Derrida and company insisted, we continue to be unwitting theists (all the while sententiously proclaiming our academically accredited atheism). For example, culture (as in cultural constructionism) has played the unconscious role of sub-iectum, or ground (i.e. God or absolutum) in contemporary theoretical discourse for more than

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of the grammatical or logical sub-iectum (that which underlies) as in The table [subject] is brown, heavy and resistant-toshins as some indefinable somethingor-other onto which the various qualities of a table (brown, heavy etc.) were, so to speak, stuck some irreducible but indefinable thingness, if you will in which qualities cohered. In other words, the table was not reducible to its predicates or qualities (accidents as the tradition called them). In this regard, of course, modernity would come to have a very different view of the matter. Now, very importantly, what this unwittingly implied was that the entity (table) was self-subsistent (i.e. the ground of its own being) and did not have, as Kant famously put it, its conditions of possibility for its existence (that it is) and its essence (what it is) either outside of itself (in, for example, a creator, or a chain of prior causes, or in the concepts mobilized by an observing subject or a cultural code), or thanks to its own internal differentiation and composite constitution, or thanks to something beyond these distinctions altogether in Derridean diffrance, for example. (These kinds of considerations, of course, by contrast with the Aristotelian tradition, preside at modern conceptions of an entity as an emergent construction, as we say today, rather than something inherently existing as an unassailable identity in its own right.) In this sense, subject also gets assimilated inextricably, in the tradition launched by

Aristotle, to what will be translated into Latin as sub-stance (again, that which stands under). Heidegger points out, in his Introduction to Metaphysics, that this is an unthinking rendering of the Greek ousia (literally, beingness or isness). Initially, therefore, sub-stance did not mean what it became in the modern period i.e. some kind of inherently existing stuff or matter. (Thus, Aristotle rejected the assimilation of substance to mere matter, without form, as did the subsequent tradition for most of its history.) Originally, in Aristotle, as Heideggers reminder of the real meaning of ousia suggests, sub-stance, like the grammatical and logical sub-iectum, was some kind of self-subsistent (because it was also its own ground or hypo-stasis) thingness that underlay all the attributes of any entity. In other words, the meaning of substance as stuff is a recent development (just like the transformation of subject into person or subjectivity), as one can see in someone like Berkeley, in whom both the older and more recent senses alternate rather startlingly.

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That our present understanding of subject as subjectivity (the attributes commonly associated with a knowing subject) is historically provincial, is made clear by Heidegger in the Nietzsche study, where he reminds us that before the modern period, everything was held to be a subject (not just Socrates but stones and stars too). Obviously, this did not mean that they were animate or conscious (thats precisely the meaning that comes with the Kantian narrowing-down of the sense of the term,

Now this older meaning of subject, substance and the inextricably related term essence (both substantia and essentia were used to translate Aristotles ousia, or beingness), start to become problematic even before Kant. With someone like Locke, for example, the idea arises that when you subtract all the qualities that characterize something (heavy, fat, red etc.) there is nothing left, and so the Aristotelian notions of substance and essence are now unjustifiable.

and is now our unshakeable prejudice). What this did mean, however, was that every entity was considered to be its own ground or sub-stance. In other words, even if created originally by God, the entity, once it did exist, was henceforth not dependent on something else to exist and to be what it was in its identity, its meaning, its difference from everything else.

attribute it to ourselves). In other words, Aristotles theory of sub-stance (ousia) and the inextricably related notions of subiectum (hypokeimenon) and ground (hypostasis) were describing what (borrowing Husserls notion from another context) we can call the natural attitude a kind of pre-critical folk ontology, if you will, to which we are all preternaturally disposed. Finally, because, crucially, as first Descartes and then Spinoza would point out, only God can really be self-subsistent (i.e. only the metaphysical notion of God can fulfill the tacit metaphysical criteria for really being a sub-iectum, a sub-stance) i.e. something wholly self-subsistent, its own ground without its conditions of possibility outside of itself, in other words an absolute (absolutum: released from conditions or conditioning) the death of the subject also means (indeed, primarily means) the death of God (Foucault, following Klossowski, underscores this in one of his interviews (and at the end of The Order of Things); and Deleuze also insists on this equivalence in Difference and Repetition). So, in this sense, the death of God was not so much the passing of a doctrinal belief in the God of dogmatic theology as it was the passing of a certain unconscious relationship to the most ordinary entities of everyday life (tables, cigarette-boxes and so on), including, crucially, ourselves. A novel like Sartres Nausea is already beginning powerfully to dramatize aspects of

It is our historical memory of this older Aristotelian sense of subject (not, of course, the, for us, rather strange, essentialist ontology underpinning it) that Heidegger wants to revive, and which will be taken over by the French poststructuralists. This may seem like a weird and obscure thing to want to do, but there were rather compelling strategic reasons for it. It was perhaps Nietzsches most important single contribution to point out that we constantly attribute self-subsistence to all kinds of things on a regular basis (basically, because it enables us tacitly to

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this shift as early as 1938.

The most visible reason for this shift in everyday habitus is not so much modern science, although it is that too (i.e. the entity conceived as emergent from an infinite concatenation of extrinsic and intrinsic causes and effects) as the much broader historical phenomenon to which the latter is merely the handmaiden, i.e. modern capitalism. With the exponential acceleration of history that the latter entails (massive acceleration in the turnover of the whole investment cycle from initial investment to sales and the instant reinvestment of the surplus value realized and because of the need for constant technological innovation to reduce costs of production and, therefore, a massive acceleration in the transformation of social arrangements always attendant upon technological innovation), with a quite literal speeding up of history, the meaning of entities begins to change so swiftly (e.g. in fashion but its everywhere) that eventually the commodity-fetishism that Marx talks about becomes visible to all participants. In other words, the fact that meaning identity and difference is systemic rather than intrinsic to each entity (qua sub-stance) becomes a tacit component of everyday awareness for all peoples everywhere. Everything, now, in sum, is, if only subliminally (and often with much concomitant resistance and anxiety hence all our fundamentalisms) a construction. Simulacrum is actually the

better term, as all constructionisms tend eventually to end up being fundamentalisms i.e. identifying some fundamental cause or sub-iectum to the constructive process culture, the mode of production etc.. (contrary to appearances, I have not just done that myself in this paragraph). Thats the real meaning of the death of the subject. And, of course, this does also apply to subjects in the sense, now, of human subjectivities. But the wider sense of the phrase is actually much more threatening to settled verities.

Now, in relation to the specifics of your question (poststructuralism and architecture), I am at something of a loss. How would one provide an architectural expression of the death of the subject? I know, by hearsay and from casual observation of my own, that there have been many attempts over the last 30 years to do, for example, the equivalent of Derridean deconstruction in architecture. Perhaps there are interesting gestures to be made in this domain, but I must admit the question is not one that greatly exercises me.

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One approach, however, might be to assume that any organization of space tacitly postulates a certain subject-position (Foucault): i.e. the carefully crafted organization of space and volume etc. presents a normally functioning human neurophysiology with an implicit conception of itself i.e. a suggested sense of self to identify with (e.g. the sense of centrality and domination of

the palace complex afforded by the view from the kings bedchamber at Versailles markedly different in this regard from the humble abnegation of Philip IIs bedchamber at the Escorial etc. etc.). Perhaps architectural contrivances might be found in order to have this conception of self be confounded in some transformative way for the individual at some later moment in the course of ones interaction with the structure. In any event, there has been some interesting writing along these lines. Im thinking of Fredric Jamesons fertile account of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles in which he suggests that postmodern hyperspace. . . has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself. . . in a mappable external world. . . . to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects (Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, [Durham: Duke University Press, 1991], 44). Jamesons reading of poststructuralism and postmodernism, however, is problematic. Thus, none of the above is new or specific to postmodernism. To stick with my own field, literature, these elements are arguably all already present in modernism. Think, for example, of the enigmatic spatial relationship of the protagonist to the castle in Kafkas novel of the same name; and the sheer oneiric incomprehensibility of a global imperial enterprise (Belgiums

involvement in the Congo) is already a central theme of Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness: thus, the impossibility of establishing a meaningful relationship between corporate offices in Brussels, the apparent fatuity of a gunboat seemingly attempting to shell the entire continent of Africa into submission, and all the other way-stations of European barbarism encountered in the course of Marlowes journey into darkest Africa. The stupefaction constantly evoked is very much the failure to find a subject-position from within which the individual can comprehend the dimensions of an operation that is globally dispersed (non-totalizable), profoundly irrational and horrific.

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No matter. Heres a more interesting possibility. Poststructuralism and its principal forebears are all connected to the death of the subject in that profound sense of the expression that must be its terminus ad quem: namely, ek-stasis (standing outside [of oneself]), being in a state of freedom in relation to central components of ones normal constructed subjectivity (which tends to posit that that composite of pride and vanity that is ones habitual sense of self inherently exists, is sub-stance, precisely a self-subsistent sub-iectum). This is the connection of these writers with what is generally called mysticism (the meaning of which is generally misunderstood to mean the irrational or weird religiosity). In Deleuze, this connection is through Bergson (see the last few pages of his book on the latter, and the tradition that leads back through Flix Ravaisson and others to

Maine de Biran) and also through Spinoza (whose relationship to certain Hebrew writers he himself invokes and whose relationship to Kabbalah was mooted by Hegel following Waechter, and earlier by Leibniz). In both Derrida and Deleuze the connection is also through Nietzsche to Schopenhauer and Emerson (and through both the latter to Asian mysticism). In the case of Heidegger, the connection to mystical traditions is through Nietzsche, the great Rhenan mystics (Meister Eckhardt et al.), and several Japanese philosophers studying in Germany in the 1920s who introduced him to Taoism and Buddhism (see the remarkable work in this area by Graham Parkes and Reinhard May). For us today, the death of the subject and ek-stasis are perhaps most easily exemplified in aesthetic experience. Contrary to a myth of Anglo-American academic postmodernity, the French poststructuralists all took the aesthetic experience very seriously indeed, and had no interest in the overturning of canons of great works, for example that an allegedly French influence turned into in cultural studies. Since Schiller and Kant (e.g. the notion in Kant of the sublime) and down to postmodernity (e.g. Lyotard in The Postmodern Explained), the aesthetic experience has been associated with what, today, we would call a suspension of large swathes of a constructed subjectivity (a sense of self with which I am normally identified but that is delusory and that is not always in my best interests). There is, in other words, life, or experience,

after the subject.

When I experience aesthetic ecstasy, I forget, temporarily, to be the conditioned personality with which I am usually identified (i.e. which I think is me). One clue to what provides the rush here, is the fact that I find the work in question perfect: if you reach out to change a single detail, I will cry out at the desecration. To the extent that, for the duration of the aesthetic experience, the latter is my life, the aesthetic experience is one of life itself as perfect not as an intellectual belief or theory about life (my contemporary intellectual/political conditioning would instantly reject such an offensive notion, if it were to be consciously articulated, as the sententious blather of what Hegel derided as a beautiful soul!) but as a truth directly perceived and unquestionable as something lived (intellectually, emotionally, physically and existentially), if only briefly, now. The corollary of this must be that my constructed subjectivity, or my conditioned personality, is constituted primarily by the uniquely configured version it presents of a resistance to life the sentence I habitually pass on life (from one second to the next) as imperfect. This is an old notion of course that you find in figures as diverse as Lacan and the Buddha, who suggest that the fundamental basis of personhood (and, therefore, for the Buddha, the basis of all suffering) is conditioned desire (this moment is not good enough because I need something else to make it so) and its correlative, fear or

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aversion (this moment, or the one looming on the horizon, is bad).

This is what I transcend in the aesthetic experience. This is the life that awaits us on the other side of the death of the subject. Again, you might call it mysticism were it not for the fact that the term has been associated for so long with the irrational. Far from being a minor (and effete or etiolated) version of life, accordingly, the aesthetic experience is a clue to how life can be lived when it is lived to the full (living by love and inspiration, instead of by desire and conscience, as Krishnamurti puts it in To Be Human). And, actually, the phrase, death of the subject, is simply a contemporary renewal of something much older even than the written record, something properly trans-historical and trans-cultural. It is, accordingly, the only point of departure for achieving freedom in relation to history and culture that cannot be recuperated by the latter (as has happened with every movement for political change we have seen). This has been a very long answer, but the question is a huge one. Gass: As I understand it, it is in light of this that Spinoza assumes such an important place in the writings of Gilles Deleuze, inasmuch as Spinoza posits that all is substance, or all is God: Whatever exists exists in God, and nothing can exist or be conceived without God (Ethics, Proposition 15); God is the immanent but not the transitive cause of all things

(Ethics, Proposition 18). And yet, if God is, in a sense, the totalizing manifold of all that is, then the individuated subject loses its free will; only the whole, the everything-all-at-once, is free: Proposition 32 : Will cannot be called a free cause, but can only be called a necessary cause. (Spinoza, Ethics)

What is the meaning of freedom in an immanentist onto-theology ?

Wood: This is even worse than your preceding question in terms of difficulty and import, but Im grateful for it, as it provides me with the opportunity to address something left hanging above.

Yes, Spinoza is adamant that the will is never free, but caused instead by forms of necessity (causal chains) which exceed it; and, yes, his great book is ostensibly deeply contradictory as he also says, for example, that the man who is led by reason [as opposed to affect or opinion]. . . . does the will of no one but himself, and does those things only which he knows are of greatest importance in life, and which he desires above all things. I call the former [the man led by affect or opinion], therefore, a slave, and the latter free (Ethic, part IV, prop. LXVI, schol.). How is one to square these positions with each other? The ostensible paradox here is resolvable when one recalls that divine

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causality for Spinoza is not transitive but immanent. We dont have room here for me to pick my way through the numerous passages, with accompanying explanations of technical terms, that would provide a proper scholarly answer on such a central crux of Spinoza interpretation. But here, I believe, is the nub, and which we can explain by what only looks like an analogy. (This answer will only be fully completed in the response to your third question below.)

I think most of us have had the experience, even when perhaps especially when we were utterly hopeless at sports in high school, of, at least once, performing the requisite athletic motions perfectly producing an absolutely astounding shot or catch, or whatever, that was unanswerable by the opposition. Most people who have had this experience (including by the way top athletes, for whom, contrary to what one might suppose, it is equally rare) attest that: 1) they have no idea how they did this (the proof is they immediately tried to repeat it and couldnt); 2) no will or thought or preparation was involved; 3) it felt absolutely fantastic not so much because of the glorious outcome, but because the movement of the body was so effortless, so spontaneous and fluent. There was a direct sense, in other words, of the body performing perfectly and blissfully. Interestingly, I never notice the following implication (because I dismiss the event as a fluke): this body, puny though it may well be in relation to all its competitors (perhaps

even universally derided) does have the indubitable capacity (just demonstrated!) to wipe the playing-field or tennis-court with all of them. Now, it is fairly clear, I think, that this not only has nothing to do with will but that the latter is prejudicial to the spontaneous expression of the body involved. It is only when the will is not mobilized that I can do this kind of thing. In other words, not only do I not need will to be a supremely competent agent, but I do much better without it!

After all, one of the essential elements of the experience is that I take myself by surprise. This may be made more vivid by taking another example, like that of playing a musical instrument in the case where I suddenly discover a whole new dimension of the music. In other words, I am being wholly creative. I come up with something radically new and inimitably fresh, lively. Was there a choice involved in these instances? Or did I simply perform (without having to think about it) the act perfectly adapted to the situation for a certain result? To the very exent that a radical novelty is involved, choice cannot be said to be present (although there is assuredly the expression of a radical freedom in the sense of a sovereign spontaneity). Is choice, as we normally conceive of it, even necessary? I think we can sense in these examples why freedom (our usual understanding of

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Now, it is Spinozas contention that to perceive adequately, as he puts it, is to be led by reason alone (E. Part IV, Prop. 68). Reason here (and this is true for most of the great rationalist tradition in philosophy a tradition which has been hopelessly misunderstood and perverted) is not what it has become by the time it is denounced by the lineage that runs from Nietzsche to the Frankfurt School (most especially in its acme, or nadir, namely Hegel, to say nothing of positivism). It really means seeing with the eye of a pure impersonal awareness (he calls it scientia intuitiva [in-tueri: to look at]), as opposed to thought (mental images, sub-vocal verbalization) thought, which is always limited because it is conditioned and therefore a function of a constructed subjectivity. So this is a pure awareness which sees directly without mediation. (This is what Nietzsche is referring to when he asserts that we do not need consciousness he means thought or mental images in order to act, that in fact we act more efficiently without it.)

the notion, which is precisely the notion of a mobilization of will) is perhaps out of place here. All the more so, insofar as I am never so free as when spontaneous and creative. And this is precisely because something other than me (ego) is acting. It may well still be me, just not the one I am usually identified with (precisely, will, freedom a sense of self etc.). Its not a me I can ordinarily claim to be familiar with. Something more like Nietzsches wise body (Zarathustra).

We can restrict ourselves to just one of the consequences of adequate perception: one has no conception of evil and consequently. . . no conception of good (ibid.) Spinoza goes on, in the same passage, to make the connection with the biblical Fall: to perceive adequately, to be led by reason, is to inhabit the Edenic state that humanity can enjoy when it does not make the fatal mistake of imagining it knows enough to sit in judgement upon life (i.e., living by desire and fear, dividing life into good and bad on the basis of conditioned notions of pleasure and pain, of getting and avoiding). It is to live by the Tree of Life (the other tree in Eden, that everyone forgets in the story), rather than the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil that leads to death.

I am going to continue this argument in my answer to your next question, because it is possible to address the questions raised by Nietzsche at the same time (as well as the issue common to both questions regarding freedom). Gass: In The Birth of Tragedy , Nietzsche defines Greek tragedy as the dramatization of the removal of the veil of maya, the moment at which a character is sundered from the illusion that he is individuated, and suddenly confronts his fundamental unity with the whole of the world, his insignificance within it, and his full susceptibility to agony, and to death. This collapse of the principium individuationis is the ultimate horror and the ultimate ecstasy; above all else, it is the ultimate

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freedom. Why ?

Wood: Nietzsches modernity.

although he would qualify some of its positions later, is one of the four or five most important aesthetic documents of Birth of Tragedy,

contribution. The aesthetic experience is, similarly to what we have just seen in Spinoza, often described as beyond good and evil. Thus, the sense of perfection I invoked earlier at the heart of the aesthetic experience includes the exquisite agony of the highest forms of tragedy, or, in other words, the portrayal of the most complete human defeat (Oedipus, Lear) i.e. we are in the presence of a blissful contemplation of what normally passes for the ultimate evil (Nietzsche speaks of joy as deeper than agony in Zarathustra). (Which is, of course, why the aesthetic experience is so often considered very dubious as a degenerate and irresponsible or amoral aestheticism by a blinkered version of Leftism and by many people on the Right as well.) This is the famous paradox of tragedy that Hume, Hegel and so many others have struggled with: why do we venerate representations of something that we ordinarily find deeply threatening and repellant? Nietzsche and Spinoza are very close in this regard. When I live by reason (in Spinozas sense of the expression that, again, has nothing to do with what is ordinarily [mis]understood by rationalism), I

It is hard to exaggerate his

am free in relation to the conditioned limits of a constructed subjectivity that is based on desire (the pursuit of pleasure or good) and fear or the avoidance of pain (evil). These limits are the most important (limiting and destructive) components of any constructed subjectivity, as can perhaps be made vivid from within aesthetic experience. It is within the very unusual space of Spinozas living by reason Nietzsches beyond good and evil that I am able to pull off extraordinary athletic feats discussed earlier, or come up with brilliant scientific and artistic discoveries, to perform music in such a way as to leave the hearers hearts so full, so brimming, as to be painful. Effortlessly!

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How so? Spinoza tells us that Our mind, in so far as it knows itself and the body under the form of eternity, necessarily has a knowledge of God, and knows that it is in God and is conceived through Him (E. Part V, Prop. XXX). This kind of religious talk is something contemporary academic culture has trouble with (and for excellent reasons we are all familiar with). Remember, however, that, for Spinoza, God is Nature (Deus sive Natura God or [in other words] Nature). This does not mean something along the lines of That silly old-fashioned notion of God is really just Nature: i.e. the simplistic reading of Spinoza as atheist or materialist. Spinoza is indeed an atheist the same

way, however, those deeply religious figures, Nietzsche, Bataille, Klossowski, Heidegger, are all radical atheists. Spinozas famous dictum, in other words, is a true statement of identity: yes, God is just Nature; but Nature is just God! In Spinozas scheme of things, there is only God. If it will make us more comfortable, we can substitute Life for both God and Nature (as Deleuze does). Many of the difficulties associated with this line of thinking then evaporate.

This is immanent rather than transitive causality. Accordingly, the spontaneous intelligence of the body and mind (which always know better than I do what to do and what is best for me) can now express themselves effortlessly. This is pure freedom, and pure bliss. So, what happens to all those causes Spinoza talks about, and that seem to contradict the possibility of freedom? Theyre all still there! Now, however, because I am no longer fighting them, I am no longer constrained by them: the entire history of the universe with all its causes and forces as well, of course, as a more narrowly human history of (Marxist) alienation, like Joyces History as the nightmare from which I am trying to awaken, or Sartres practico-inert from the Critique of Dialectical Reason is now like a gigantic tsunami wave the leading edge of which I surf, as it were, perfectly poised, born by its immense, terrifying and exhilarating power, utterly vulnerable to inconceivably destructive forces and yet inviolable.

In other words, in ecstasy, when you forget to be you no longer trying earnestly and desperately to win a tennis match, or trying manipulatively to seduce an object of sexual desire, but just allowing it all to unfold spontaneously (because you are free to experience whatever outcome, however disappointing) you accede to what Spinoza calls, above, eternity. This is not permanence, or an infinite extension of time, but life in the now without being beholden to either the past or the future (neither of which really obtain as actually existing separate dimensions of time, being constructions projected out of the only time there ever is, the present). I am now in perfect phase with what is, with Life. Principally because I place no conditions on it for it to be perfect. I now experience directly the fact that I am Life (God, Nature), as opposed to a subject standing over and against the latter as an object (that I dominate and control or that threatens me), and as opposed to my being the object of Life (God or Nature).

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I am also now, for the first time, in a position to change things in a positive and creative direction (if I so choose). Only now can I be an effective agent, as opposed to a clumsy and greedy one who will simply reproduce the violence of the past in a so-called revolution that only ever changes the personnel of power-elites in the usual way (changing the seating arrangements in Hell, while

pretending that the new seating plan is Heaven).

The assessment that Life is perfect does not mean, in other words, that I am resigned to some reactionary quietism. Again, this can be clarified by aesthetic experience. In Sartres A Plea for Intellectuals, he talks about the work of art positing the world as though it were an act of my freedom, as though it were saturated by freedom rather than a structure of necessity, of constraint (which is how I normally experience it). That is precisely the reason for the rush I feel in aesthetic experience (it is actually an expression of love for Life on my part) feeling truly alive for the first time in ages. Art (the arts) is simply a pointer to, a glimpse of, how life can be lived at its highest. The aesthetic experience, in other words, is more real than so-called real life (as the latter is mostly lived, in a state of impoverishment). This was also expressed very beautifully by Proust, in the final volume of his great novel, when he said, True life, life finally discovered and illuminated, consequently the only life really lived, is literature. This statement, to be sure, is only borne out in a life that is not really being lived (on Spinozas or Nietzsches terms) i.e. most peoples lives; but, with that proviso, it is true.

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Nana Last on Theory and Political Justice

in conversation with Joseph Lim

Lim: How would you describe political justice? Is it a condition? A maxim for action? Regulative or constitutive? How do you view it?

Last: Political justice particularly as it engages architectural theory or in just the widest way? Lim: In the wide way and how it engages architecture specifically, if you view it in different ways.
Nana Last is Associate Professor in Practice at Rice University, School of Architecture, where she teaches graduate courses in Architecture Theory and Design. She received a Ph. D. in Architecture and Art: History, Theory and Criticism from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Masters degree in Architecture from Harvard University, and a BA in Philosophy and Art Criticism from CarnegieMellon University. She has published essays in journals including: Any, Assemblage, Harvard Design Magazine, Thresholds, Praxis and Art Journal. Her work is published in anthologies including Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985. Her books include: Wittgensteins House: Language, Space and Architecture (Fordham University Press, 2008) and the co-written/co-curated exhibition catalog: Paradox and Practice: Architecture in the Wake of Conceptualism (University of California, Irvine, 2007). She has received a Getty Library Research Grant, and an Arthur W. Wheelwright Fellowship. She is currently completing a manuscript entitled: When Art Meets Architecture. 70

Last: Well I guess political justice takes a lot of different forms but I see it mostly as a process, and to that end being constitutive of a state of society, and a set of relations that the society produces that are going to have huge repercussions all over. So, thats just a starting point . . . but definitely constitutive because I do think it produces types of citizens and what we expect of citizens and what we see as central to being a good citizen as compared to extra, what is additional. Lim: So, where do these additional qualities come from? How do we decide what those additional qualities are that make up the politically just or conscious citizen?

Last: Well, I dont know that they get decided to begin with, but I do think that they get tried and enacted as the system sets up and therefore are subject to change.

Can I go a little to something you sent me in an e-mail, because I do have a thought about that . . . it talked about [Terry] Eagletons claim that theory is dead because it is not politically engaged . . . and I would like to connect these things. The point is, I read this, and it said how you wanted opinions on Eagletons claim that theory is dead because it is not politically engaged and how to reconcile postmodernitys cultural relativism with democracys claim to universal rights, and I thought Oh, this is a very interesting combination, and I dont know how much you deliberately wanted to associate . . . to bring up Eagleton in relation to the idea of some sort of universal rights, but I thought that there is a type of answer which certainly goes to what political justice is that I think goes very much to the heart of what associates those. So, I was interested in their association because . . . I think what Eagleton expects of theory and how he sees it functioning, the system in which he understands it to exist, is very much related to how you reconcile or how you support the idea of a universal rights under democracy. So what I wanted to go to was something that does emerge under the writings of someone like Claude LeFort, who looks very much at democracy

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and political justice and is certainly a theorist himself. He talks about when democracy first emerges, at the moment of its first inception; I think he uses the phrase the democratic invention. There is this moment in the late 1800s when there arises this thing called the Rights of Man, and when they are first spoken they [are] presented as natural. So, here are a list of rights, there is no defense of them as such when they are first stated, and that certainly goes against a lot of things he would find problematic, that they are stated as natural or universal, but immediately what begins to transform that process, and I think this is a big role where political justice and theory both play parts, is the understanding that the stating of those rights the claiming of those rights is an act, and its an act that sets into motion a bunch of things. So whereas you have this moment where you are stating things that sound, and almost necessarily have to be . . . claimed in this position, as if natural, what it sets in motion is a process where those rights need to be constantly defended and argued for. I think its not even in the act of arguing but in the need, when things are considered unsettled, when they are considered not absolute, for people to offer their arguments for it that they become important. I think thats really the production of those rights. They set discourse into motion...they need to be regularly re-defended and redefined. Its not that they are the only natural ones, we still argue...its that you need to state your reasons and your arguments.

Making those arguments public under the system is where I think the democracy really emerges and really rises and I think clearly where theory is going to step in and play a very important and ongoing role. Now this very much does relate to Eagletons claim because Eagleton always sounds so reasonable in some sense and its because he speaks from a position where he has naturalized the role of theory. He presents theory very much in a sort of Marxist framework where there is an end to theory. It has a goal, and part of its goal involves its self-dissolution. When it achieves its political ends, when it sets in motion other processes, when it sets in motion other changes, when it becomes involved, when it is successful, it no longer has an existence. It no longer is needed because this new just society or whatever version this is supports itself. And he also speaks from the point of view as if the subjects under such a society would have no thoughts of theory because theory is about this goal of change or bringing about these other sorts of conceptions. And of course thats where the problem is, because why would you envision a world without the need to continually defend, and change, and develop, and argue as the good just world? Why would you understand that to be the summation of political justice? Lim: Well, it is interesting that you bring that up because there is a sort of paradox where Eagleton shuns first principles and Truths and still it seems he is envisioning

a society where we will reveal those things, truths and principles that will never need to be questioned. Last: In the form of history and real events... Lim: I am also interested in you describing democracy and the just democracy as the one that can constantly change, almost defining political justice as the state that allows this free change... Last: . . . That requires it as part of its process. And of course, you can see it as something that doesnt always know what democracy is, and we dont know what democracy is around a lot of issues. I always think technology is so interesting because it is always forcing us to define, what is the value? Cloning came out a few years ago and people wrote about it in different ways, certainly people writing about theory and justice because it challenges what is a citizen, a fundamental aspect of democracy. What are we producing, what is allowed? So that whole idea that there are other bases of subjectivity and that it is being challenged in such an obvious way is, I think, really important. And Eagleton is interesting in the sense that he seems to be propounding the importance of theory as long as it has this role. But how can he, given that, understand it as dead? Because then it wouldnt be theory for him. And he is so clearly torn between the importance of theory and its non-importance. And it is because he is justifying it that it has

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to have a one to one correlation, and we have to see its goals. And I am certainly in no way saying that theory is always successful, but those goals and relationships are not always obvious, and cannot always be directly produced, and we cant always gauge the success of it at any given moment. Lim: Certainly. And I think it is interesting that the whole cultural studies project that Eagleton proposes as the replacement for theory is curiously absent from After Theory. We are missing that kind of direct incisive study and look at what culture is really doing. So it is interesting in relation to what you are saying because it becomes apparent that Eagleton is somewhat disengaged, more concerned with theory about theory rather than with its practice.

you do, in what capacity?

Last: Its true and he always wanted to look at what was going on to judge it, and he doesnt do that. It doesnt form the basis of his meta-theory as he discusses it.

Lim: What do you make of Eagletons argument that postmodernity got it wrong when it comes to fundamental truths? He seems to suggest that postmodernity rallied against these things because it defined them incorrectly. Eagleton thinks about truth as not necessarily coming from some transcendent place, but only that it means A and B cannot both be true AND mutually exclusive. So, do you think it is still possible to talk about truth and objectivity and justice in theory? And if

Last: Just going for a second to Eagleton again, his particular version of theory and his ability to critically assess it, which is what he does in the position of metatheory, goes to his understanding of a unified subjectivity or body of people who will all have related or similar desires. The success of the theory he is interested in is based on the need to have as few distinctions between the public as possible, either class distinctions or other things that would make a unified aim. So the minute that there is multiplicity, and you look at the different origins of people and understand any group, and within any group, to be subdivided it goes against any possibility where he can see theory as successful. For instance he cannot judge that as a successive theory, that we have a far more complex subjectivity and there are true differences between sets of people, and their goals, and that they dont need to all be united. He cant see that as a success thats one of the signs of failures for him. His theory basically needs for that to be unsuccessful in order for it to work. He has canceled out those possibilities and anything that comes out of that is necessarily a failure. He is going to see it as something that fragments, and he needs something that unifies. Lim: And really just the productive way of reconciling postmodern cultural relativism and democracys claim to universal rights is this production of political justice ?

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Last: Potentially, but I dont know that they need to be reconciled or that so much goes under either. And certainly under the idea of a postmodern cultural relativism, a relativism that . . . as that phrase suggests . . . The possibilities for understanding that diversity produces more diversity than is apparent even when we point at it and that we cant speak for everybody and that the ongoing conflict is itself a sign of success even if it doesnt always achieve certain ends it doesnt suggest this is the best version we could have but certainly the idea that cultural relativism could exist with democracys rights that were augmented first as universal and now understood as ongoing isnt at odds. Lim: How do you feel about the current trend in thinking that a lot of what constitutes democracy right now is simply a plurality of opinion and that there really isnt anything underlying it anymore. Last: I dont think a plurality of opinion is a substitute for democracy largely because it is offered as opinion and not as argument, not as discussion, not put in some form that could be more largely addressed. I think its a comment upon citizens beginning to be engaged; any failures are much broader than the theory base, those few thousand people who we always talk about being involved in theory. You might say that that theory is more successful than lots of other things in that endeavor. Does that mean its very successful? Not necessarily. But I think you maintain an

involvement and I think thats what it asks for and I think theory helps engender that possibility of involvement. In terms of theory I think of After Theory and related things . . . that I understand really as backlash to the possibility of theory just beginning to be more successful and more known and more widespread. Certainly I think there are lots of changes in the world that arent the pace people might be after but thats assuming that theres one set of people after that set of things. Lim: And, in the vein of engagement, can you speculate how architects and designers can participate materially and critically in the production of just society?

Last: Well I do think first that they are also citizens and so they have a wider range of action. I think that people should, against those things, really weigh what they do and examine things critically. I think theres no obvious answer for architectures role other than to be continually involved. This question always seems to demand a set of answers, and you say you do them, and those actions are always judged in relation to some immediate result... Lim: And so really what you are suggesting is that the best way is to remain open and critical of practice?

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Last: I think one needs to be involved, and I think putting together journals like this and trying to get them into schools . . . Schools are interesting places because

people go out into the broader and diverse parts of the world. Sometimes you hear those discussions about what people are interested in, you know, polls in the newspaper, and it sounds really terrible. So obviously something needs to change very early on or how can theory or anything else be successful? Its that engagement . . . I think what you do is you dont give up. Certainly, what would that achieve? Its a little bit of a set up of a question . . . and one that theories like Eagletons suggest we ask. Perhaps we need to compare it to other questions that resituate architecture in and around other practices and start to see them as combined.

Originally published in Manifold 1, Spring 2007 75

Eric Lott on The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual

in conversation with Izabel Gass
Gass: Your book, The Disappearing Liberal centrist politics of many liberal intelIntellectual, izes the prevailing political attitude of tive political engagement? Where do you today ? where. decries the

lectuals today. If complacency characterthink our best intellectual resources lie The point of my book was to

increasingly

the American academic Left, how does a younger generation begin a more producLott: There really are resources everyfresh ideas. And I dont think its always academic left. From theorists and critics such as Timothy Brennan, Michael Brub, around the Experience Music Project in all over the place. One more: First of the Month (online and in paper form), a great that doesnt sink into either the easy anti76

suggest that the highly visible liberal true that complacency characterizes the and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, to more activist collectives such as Midnight Notes, to emerEric Lott teaches American Studies at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford University Press, 1993) and The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual (Basic Books, 2006), and his work has appeared in American Quarterly, American Literary History, Representations, The Village Voice, The Nation, and many others.

middle was not the place to go looking for

gent cultural polities such as the one(s) Seattle, there are great ideas and stances radical publication on politics and culture imperialist or hawkish liberal muddle.

Gass: What relationship do you see between political justice and critical thought? In your book, you state that, both scales. Can you expand on this? sometimes overwhelming policy commentary and political theory have their situational purposes, although Lott: I wrote that in order to rebut the sense that polemical dimensions, and rhetorical they operate in different temporal frames,

are key to the struggle.

Gass: How can a discipline like architeccapacity for a constructive radicality? In the architect? short, what is any citizens political agency

ture, which is often in service of socio-ecoand how does that extend to the agency of Lott: I think architecture is crucially

nomic power structures, delineate its own

theory is ivory tower and wholly removed from the tasks at hand. Theres plenty of valuable theoretical work going Samuel Huntington); these people can only theory. Gass: How would you define political radiof Leftism? on, from David Harvey on neoliberalism be battled in theoretical terms, what Louis Althusser once called the class struggle in to Pheng Cheah on international divisions of labor. The right has its theorists (e.g.,

important because of its intervention in As Henri Lefebvre always argued, sovereignty implies space there is no spatial and defined, and politics (conversely) only happens in space. Whether it is in idea of urban planning (such as the new them is very powerful. For an entry-level (Blackwell, 1996). and Other

the production and organization of space. production that isnt politically organized a political right to the city, or in some urbanism), or even briefly laying claim to conquered space in some kind of sponments and some notion of redirecting book Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles Real-and-Imagined taneous action, the idea of built environsynopsis of certain powerful notions in this area, check out Edward Sojas Places

cality? How does it differ from other forms Lott: I would direct readers to an interview that the journal Minnesota Review titled The Wages of Liberalism. I expand did with me a few years back, which they at length there on the politics I find most politics. I am very sympathetic to a C.L.R. I am also of the mind that organized local interventions like living-wage campaigns inspiring and the cultural forms and movements that tend to correspond with such Jamesian anarcho-syndicalist politics, but

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K. Michael Hays on Post-Criticality

in conversation with Izabel Gass

five or so years, become a common term Gass: project that rejects the legacies of discihanded down from the 1970s, instead seeking an architecture that adapts to formalist rigor (Robert E. Somol and Sarah for the history of ideas in architecture ? with capitalist logic (Michael Speaks), and produces moods and effects rather than

within architecture for a philosophical

Post-Criticality has, in the last

plinary autonomy and economic resistance its socio-economic conditions, complies Whiting). What do you make of the Post-

Critical project, and what does it signify Hays: As soon as one recognizes that to
Michael Hays is the Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and was also the founder of the scholarly journal Assemblage, which was a leading forum for discussion of architectural theory in North America and Europe. His research and scholarship have, to date, focused on the areas of European modernism and critical theory and theoretical issues in contemporary architectural practice. His publications include analyses of the work of modern architects such as Hannes Meyer, Ludwig Hilberseimer, and Mies van der Rohe, as well as contemporary figures such as Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk and Bernard Tschumi. In 2000 he was appointed the first Adjunct Curator of Architecture at the Whitney Museum of American Art. 78

think at all requires a mediumbe that tureone is already doing theory. As soon as one thinks about the boundaries about the ideologies necessary to engage critically. So much of the anti-theory, postagainst rhetorical flourishes. Moreover, critical theory is distinctly that discipline or practice, one is thinking

language or religious ritual, or architec-

and limits of a discipline or a practice, or criticality argument should be recognized as rhetorical flourish. No problem. Nothing

designed in such a way that it must the practice of critical theory must continually think its own historicity as part of the tions. Alternatively, being post-critical

constantly update itself. In other words, very work which it purports. In contrast, thus far many after-theory positions have in the sense of more-than-critical would mean working through and exceeding the critical, calling into question the very authority. The insistence on the historical contingency of any position is an important negative function of theory. On this, I think the projective intention wants to be cutting edge but it does not go far enough. itself as such. There has to be a provisional ground of ideology from which to project. From a certain perspective, the projective intention represents just the latest In particular, the abandonment of the ation of an ideology that does not know ignored their own historical determinagrounds of the critical its conditions

blank and reified technologism.

This contradiction necessarily exists, I time. I will give just a quick example. quent related events the dire straights

believe, because of an ambiguity in the

economic and cultural structures of our Though the rejection of theory was well the United States have made it much easier to denounce theory as slow and seems absolutely unavailable, and when In some ways the projective intention is perspective, its single biggest shortcoming its own determination by the larger social ground. Gass: In the editorial mission statement

underway before 9/11, that and subsewe find ourselves in perhaps especially in cumbersome, an old-fashion ornament we seem to have no vocabulary to distinguish between resistance and conformity. born out of such mauvais foi. From my to real-time technocracy. Moreover, it is difficult to continue to preach resistance when a critical social counter-imaginary

and contexts, its histories and forms of

categories of ideology and resistance does nothing so much as to insure the perpetu-

is its lack of a theoretical mechanism for working through its own historicity and of the inaugural issue of Assemblage,

iconoclastic upsurge of the very neoand categories, taboos and imperatives, its debunking of intellectualism and elitism in that, unlike earlier avant-gardes, it is also

avant-garde impulse it wishes to squash, with its confounding of old hierarchies favor of the smooth, slick, and cool. Except consumerist and complicit in its abandonalso managerial and instrumentalist in its

architectural theory was characterized as oppositional knowledge knowledge that challenges entrenched institutions and values, that strays from possible terrain. It seems that current archi79

that continually questions received ideas, tectural discourse seeks to jettison the critical, or the oppositional, with the

ment of critique and commitment; it is

assumption that criticism is destructive, this anti-criticality would include Somol/ Whitings (operative compliance) over the hot preference for the cool

or at least unproductive. Examples of (analytic resistance); Michael Speakss disdain for anti-capitalist rhetoric; or John Rajchmans Constructions, which is

against the critical, because the critical has always been projective. What seems to be at issue, rather, is what is perceived as to issues such as mood and sensibility. was never about form only. Rather, what constitutes a false problem, for the critical side is the effects produced. One side is a a purely formal approach to architecture versus an alternative that pays attention

implicitly a projective, Deleuzian rebuff to Derridean Deconstruction. In the face value and productive potential of criticality, or oppositional knowledge? answer a question: what is the continuing negativityis not just hand-wringing and

This one versus the other stance in itself the neo-avant-garde recognized was this: structured, but its content is not formless or undifferentiated. The neo-avant-garde which both are unfolded. recognized that we had to move beyond Gass: That said, what is the continuing or of critical architecture, today? neo-avant-garde by which I mean the form as one problem and its effects as significance of the 1970s neo-avant-garde, early works of Hejduk, Eisenman, Tschumi, architecture had philosophical aspirataken such an empiricist, realist turn. But Form is one side of architecture; the other

of all this, critical theory is called upon to Hays: Critical thinkingor theoretical power; it is a slow step back from actual

structure; the other side is that which is another to the abstract machine from

nay-saying; it is just ignorant to think that. productive power of negativity is well famous comment, Not Italy is offered, but unmediated. I am rather interested in all inseparable from negative evidence that it exists. The post-critical rendered by Adorno and Horkheimers critics want to simply offer architecture, and its effects. Projective vocations are both are part of the critical project. The presumably new projective intention I do not believe it is yet a project as which I refer to as an intention because Stan Allen, Robert Somol, Sarah Whiting, and Michael Speaks, should not be pitted

Critical thinking is thinking to a higher conditions to future possibilities. This

the complex conditions of its existence

Hays: I believe that the moment of the

practices;

and others was the last moment when tions. It would seem important to try to figure out why architecture since has the implications of philosophical aspirations for present practice. For example, it
80

proposed by academic colleagues such as

more important, we should think through allows us to account for the volatilization of the object in contemporary practice.

Architecture should no longer be underand construction. Architecture exists not as a practice of object making or even as a process of design in a conventional sense, particularity of spatial experience, and

stood as an object but rather as a condition but as a frame for thinking specific artistic problems such as authorship and producvidual expression. The implication is that architecture is a particular kind of activity this way rather than some other. but also a particular frame of mind an preting the material of the neo-avantgarde is a linguists-based or analytical rewrite the analytic model of architecture ture desire, or in a zone that we might call on a Lacanian model. An architecture sociological representation versus indi-

we might stumble upon a genuinely new architecture. Regarding the importance of the 1970s, I find it compelling that two of the periods tically related positions on the architecture choly, Manfredo Tafuri sees architecture of the time. With a certain left-wing melanas a very precise and efficient ideological unwitting victim of capitalisms historical anything more than reproduce in archicapitalist society. The more conservative Colin Rowe saw in the same architecture of architecture between the wars. Its just have really gone beyond this model. learn from this? most important commentators take dialecagent of capitalist planification and the

tion, the abstract calculations endemic to

contemporary space versus the sensuous

impulse, a conscious decision to think in The only model we have so far of interinto something that I have called architecthe architectural Imaginary and Symbolic,

closure. What he called the return to tectural codes the very structure of late the inevitable uncoupling of the highly developed formal techniques of Cubism and Purism from the socialist ambitions the flip-side of Tafuri. Both see a socially valences. None of the post-critical critics ineffective formalism, but with different

language was proof of its inability to do

model. What I want to suggest is that we

modeled on desire marks the sharp edge quences of ideas. That is what critical well. It is analogic thinking, not digital undone, and provisional generalizations make new contexts for knowledge. Maybe

of intellectual passion that opens up what formlessness, the unpredictable consetheory does too, at least when it is done thinking. Truisms are cut into, things come in considering again the neo-avant-garde,

you cant control; it welcomes the risk of

Gass: What can contemporary discourse dialectical approach. The interpretations that the neo-avant-garde is symbolic of
81

Hays: We need to develop a more truly closures of a certain historical and social moment; for this, we recognize that their the torsions, contradictions, and

of Tafuri and Rowe encode the premise

interpretations are important. What is not

sufficiently recognized by this received view, however, is the more dialectical confront it that is to say, architecture tion of just that situation. The neo-avantgarde introjections of loss and absence lacking or freed of contact with the real, has already incorporated the annulment of its own social need and consequently recoded the object as the symbolic realizafact that the architecture of the neoavant-garde has already internalized the situation with which the critics intend to

socially symbolic domain and activity. And not just for identities and sameness. architecture modeled on desire?

if current architecture expects to escape for its own differences and singularities, Gass: Can you expand on your idea of an

the ideological closures as analyzed by

Tafuri, then it has to continue the search

means not that the object is empty or as Tafuri has it, but rather that the object renders its pathological content directly; the object is the very form in which a of this as a critical architecture. from other cultural certain lack assumes existence, the form necessary to imagine a radical lack in the It seems to me that, while architecture in for what makes architecture different process I have discussed elsewhere as real itself. This second-level negativity, by our own times has renounced the search

Hays: I have started to develop an alterthe 1970s that would take both sides into account a model of architectural desire. Through desire, architecture is rendered of becoming, affects, events.

native model of the critical practices of eccentric to itself. And there are moments in the neo-avant-garde when an architectural experience itself produces that conception of eccentricity moments glimpse very basic, primitive architectural ideas. Event is particularly operative in events are nonrepresentational modes just barely precedes a perception and we the work of Hejduk and Tschumi (the but many architects find ways to dislocate characteristic. But the concept of desire more adequately signals the corollary These

the way, is also why we continue to think

of thought, moments when a sensation term event-space belongs to Tschumi); architectural experience, opening it up to the fact that all perception is partial and ideological. Critical is the label normally used for this work in recognition of this attempt to escape the ideological closures
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domains and has looked instead for how architecture can be more like the dominant consumer-based practices (a this in Althusserean terms: architecture as an imaginary solution to real contradictions in social life; architecture as a ideological smoothing), the question of representation and ideology is still what

representational

we scholars have to think about. I mean

of the situation through the portals of the libidinal and the collective, whereas

critical has come to imply a perhaps too cerebral asceticism of specialized elites. A more full account of architecture desire as a kind of energy field or, indeed, the Real tecture practice. of constantly connecting, unconnecting, and reconnecting architectural quanta, could make an important contribution to our understanding of contemporary archi-

Originally published in Manifold 1, Spring 2007 83