Founding Editor-in-Chief

Izabel Gass

Associate Editors

Nana Last

Tait Kaplan

Joseph Lim

Etien Santiago

MANIFOLD PUBLISHING GROUP

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First published in 2008

All work copyright the original author.

©2008 Manifold Publishing Group

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Manifold is a Rice University based publication,

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Professor and Dean at Rice School of Architecture.

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3. The Interview Issue

Letter to the ReaderIzabel Gass

Manuel De Landa on the Manifoldwith Tait Kaplan

Brian Massumi on the Virtualwith Jason Nguyen and Mark Davis

Jesse Reiser on the Intensivewith Ned Dodington

Sanford Kwinter on Science and Architecturewith Nicholas Risteen

Stan Allen on Rethinking Ecologywith David Dewane

Charles Waldheim on Landscape and Non-Anthropocentric Urbanismwith David Dewane and Lindsay Harkema

James Corner on Landscape Urbanism and Indeterminate Systemswith David Dewane

Chris Reed on Ecology as Analogy with David Dewane

Mark C. Taylor on Religion without a Godwith Lindsay Harkema

Catherine Keller on the Process of Becomingwith Lindsay Harkema

Philip Wood on ‘Life After the Subject’ the example of Aesthetic Ecstasy

with Izabel Gass

Nana Last on Theory and Political Justicewith Joseph Lim

Eric Lott on the on The Disappearing Liberal Intellectualwith Izabel Gass

K. Michael Hays on Post -Criticality with Izabel Gass

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Dear Reader,

This is the third issue of Manifold, but in many ways, it will serve as our first. Due to a generous grant from the Graham Foundation for the Fine Arts, Manifold will finally see greater distribution and a wider audience. Considering this our public debut, we chose to 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.

It is crucial that the un-initiated reader understand the general mission of Manifold, a Rice University based journal of architectural theory founded on the premise that philo-sophical inquiry in design has become increasingly marginalized in recent years. Manifold 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 analysis. The journal’s 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 archi-tecture today. Theorizing architectural design in 2008 does not imply rehashing the same rhetoric characteristic of Assemblage-era architectural criticism, but inventing the very tactics of criticism anew. Second, Manifold seeks a thorough investigation of the formal and philosophical assumptions underpinning contemporary design through studies of philosophical source material. In issue 2, for instance, this led us to revisit the original 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, 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 the current issue.

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While the interviewees of issue 3 require no introductions, something should be 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 much contemporary design thinking. We conducted interviews covering a range of topics 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 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 far from design discourse: theology and Continental Philosophy. These interviews aim to catalyze a philosophical interpretation of aesthetic production that could supplant both critical theory and the soft metaphysics of Phenomenology as the waning but still domi-nant paradigms of philosophical inquiry in design today. Finally, three interviews explore the current state of architectural theory; some of these were first published in our inau-gural issue and address the problems that a journal aspiring to a “theoretical” condition faces today.

We are very grateful to all of our contributors, both interviewers and interviewees, for 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 GassFounding Editor-in-Chief

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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 Deleuze’s work for thinking about current scientific and philosophical problems. DeLanda teaches at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in New York.

Kaplan: What is a manifold ?

DeLanda: The concept of a “manifold” as I use it is the mathematical concept: a space defined as a field of rapidities and slownesses, the rapidity or slowness with which curvature changes at a given point. Once Cartesian coordinates are eliminated, all information about these points is local-ized. Then, we can assign meaning to their dimensions (say, temperature, pressure, and volume, for a 3-D manifold) and use it to represent a space of possible states (instantaneous combinations of values for those three properties). This representa-tional use would be a mere convenience, a visualization tool, if, in addition, other properties of the manifold did not come into play. In particular, singularities in the manifold can act as attractors for a series of states. These singularities, therefore, give structure to a space of possibilities, and it is that structure that matters for the purpose of conceptualizing immanent order. For Deleuze, the very first move — eliminating the Cartesian coordinates — is crucial too: a 2D manifold must be embedded in a 3D Cartesian space, and the extra dimension always plays a

Manuel De Landa on the Manifold in conversation with Tait Kaplan

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transcendental role. In physics, of course, those coordinates represented absolute space, a transcendental reference frame that Einstein eliminated precisely by switching to differential manifolds. Kaplan: For decades, particle physicists have understood the benefits of pushing matter into states that are far from equilib-rium as a means of discovering the poten-tials in a material. You describe these potentials as being “virtual,” part of the real world, but not yet realized. Can you discuss what you mean by virtuality, and how the study of states that are far from equilibrium can help us to understand it ?

DeLanda: The key property of a mani-fold, when used as a space of possibilities (phase space), is the asymptotic nature of its singularities: the series of states or trajectories that are attracted to them approach them as closely as possible, but never, ever reach them. This means that, unlike the points on the trajectories that always represent actual states, the singularities are never actual. This is the clearest expression of a virtual, immanent entity that I can conceive. In addition, we must distinguish linear dynamical systems, possessing only a single singularity of the steady-state type (point attractor), from nonlinear ones with multiple singulari-ties of different types (point, periodic and chaotic attractors). Given that all attrac-tors are deterministic, with a single singu-larity, determinism is of the old-fashion

type — that is, so mechanical that only something transcendental (human free will or divine intervention) can break with it. But once you have multiple singulari-ties, the world itself becomes more open to different becomings even without some psychic agency intervening from the outside. But if you study a nonlinear system near equilibrium you effectively linearize it, so that it does not express the potential of the virtual anymore. This is the difference, for example, between ice crystals and snow flakes: both are deter-ministic and possess a fixed hexagonal symmetry, but ice crystals are boring and repetitive while snow flakes exist in continuous variation, better expressing the nature of the virtual. And, of course, the difference between the two is that the latter are far from equilibrium.

Kaplan: Traditional notions of symmetry understand it as an ideal state — for instance, in the writings of Greg Lynn, symmetry is read as an initial, ideal condition from which mutations occur as information is added to a formal system. Can you discuss how your understanding of symmetry differs from this essentialist position ?

DeLanda: Mathematically, the degree of symmetry of a space or a figure is always defined relative to a transformation or group of transformations. Thus, a cube whose properties remain invariant relative to the group of rotations (0, 90, 180, 270)

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has less symmetry than a sphere, because the latter’s group is much larger (0, 1, 2, 3, 4 . . . 359). The same idea can be applied not to figures but to spaces: Euclidean spaces remain invariant under a group containing all translations, rotations, and inversions. But projective geometry adds to those both projection and section. Topological spaces are invariant under all translations, rotations, inversions, projec-tions, sections, foldings and stretchings. In other words, projective geometry is more symmetrical than Euclidean geom-etry, but less so than topology. We can arrange all geometries in a sequence so that the more symmetrical give rise to the less symmetrical by a series of broken symmetries. Deleuze himself uses this image (borrowed from the mathematician Felix Klein) to picture the actualization of the virtual: the plane of immanence would be super-symmetrical and would acquire actuality as it became Euclidean or metric. This is not essentialist: the singularities and dimensions of a manifold are topo-logical invariants — that is, what remains unchanged under all those transforma-tions. Unlike essences, these invariants do not resemble their actualizations and indeed may become actual under all kinds of Euclidean forms. But, of course, if the singularities are thought of as eternal, then they do become a kind of topological essence. Hence it is crucial to give mani-folds (or more exactly, virtual multiplici-ties) their own temporality and history. This is not easy, since we must conceive

of a time that is not metric (Chronos) but truly non-metric (Aion). I explain how to do that in chapter 3 of Intensive Science

and Virtual Philosophy.

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Brian Massumi on the Virtualin conversation with Jason Nguyen and Mark Davis

Brian 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 User’s 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 Félix Guattari”s A Thousand Plateaus.Website: www.brianmassumi.com

Nguyen, Davis: Historically, a Western understanding of the material world has relied on a desire to understand things for what they “are.” But the work of Deleuze and Guattari proposes an ontology rooted in “becoming.” Paradoxically, this way of thinking debases the singular moment of instantiation, elevating instead the abstract collection of circumstances that intersect to produce it. What is the role of the “Virtual” in this ontology, and how does it differ from the Platonic “Ideal” ?

Massumi: An effort of thought is required to prevent the deleuzian “virtual” form slipping into the Platonic ideal. The concept automatically shifts in this direc-tion the instant it is separated from “the singular moment of instantiation,” or in deleuzian terms the “actual.” It is the virtual which is debased by being sepa-rated in thought from actuality — not the actual which is debased by its association with the virtual. The two are inseparable.They must be thought strictly together. From a deleuzian point of view they have no philosophical meaning apart from their dynamic embrace of each other. The movement of becoming is not on one side

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or the other: it the result of their coming together. “Dynamic” and “movement” are the key words. There would be neither dynamism nor movement were the virtual and actual in separate realms. There is one world, and it is they.

The virtual separated from the actual would be utterly “sterile” because it would have nothing through which to express itself. Unexpressed, it would not give itself to thought. The actual apart from the virtual would be absolute stasis, because a thing in change is like a doppler effect through the present of a just-past moving into the future. The past and future are precisely what are inactual, so they fall to the virtual. The moment you think change, you have actually appealed to the virtual. Think the actual without the virtual, and you have fixity.

Deleuze needs a concept of the virtual because of his project of thinking the actual. The starting point of that project is the heraclitean observation that the only constant is change. Conversely, Deleuze needs the actual to hold the reality of the virtual. Deleuze considers his thought, including the thought of the virtual, to be a variety of empiricism. He accepts the dictum that everything that can be considered real must in some way be experienced, with “experienced” mini-mally defined as having effects or taking effect. The actual is nothing other than the taking-effect of the virtual. A supernal

virtual could never get past the post of this effective philosophy.

This is just a first approximation. The virtual is a slippery concept. It is by nature elusive. I call it “recessive.” It does not expend itself in its effect. It withdraws back into itself, constituting in the same 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 nonlinear, recursive time of its own: just past – yet to come; future-past. When the virtual withdraws back into itself in the gaps in the actual, it has no “place” to go. 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. However: every change can be expressed as a change in an order of juxtaposition of actual elements. In other words, the virtual, by nature elusive in a time-like way, takes effect as a spacing. It does not take effect without its effects taking place.

This is where the paradox of Deleuze’s thinking lies: not in an alternative between the actual and the virtual, but in how they come together. The way in which they come together creates a space-time tension that is difficult to model conceptually because our habits of thought tend both to dichot-omize space and time (treating them as independent variables) and to erase their difference (for example, by construing time as a “line”). It is difficult to talk about the virtual without falling into one of these

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traps, or most often both at the same time. For example, the suspicion that the virtual is a Platonic ideal has already spatialized it as a realm apart, a higher plane or other world.

Deleuze has two base strategies to deal with this slipperiness of the virtual in its relation with the actual. First, he multi-plies models for it. A given model may tend toward spatializing the virtual. He will immediately undermine it with a tempo-ralizing counter-model. If you put the two together, you get a space-time tension, or even a paradox. You are making prog-ress. None of the models are meant to be adequate descriptions of the virtual. They are conceptual tools meant to assist in following the movement of the virtual into and out of the actual. This movement will be different in each case. And in each case, a particular set of models will have to be mobilized. The virtual is most adequately expressed in the interference patterns between them. The thought of the virtual is all about process, and must itself be a process. It can never come in one go.

For example, Deleuze often speaks of the virtual as being composed of sets of “pure singularities.” These are point-like, and taken together form “constellations.” Taken that way, the virtual begins to resemble a fixed space-like structure. So Deleuze will go on to say that the singularities “extend” toward one another. This undoes the fixity by adding a vector aspect carrying a time

connotation. The constellation is starting to feel like a projective geometry (in which points and lines are interchanged, and the plotting of space requires a time of trans-formation). Then just as you’re getting used to that he’ll say that each singularity “includes” all the others, in the dynamic form of its extensions toward them. The singularity is now sounding like a curve: an integration of singularities. We’re now in a calculus model, each singularity an integrable differential. If you try to put the models together, you get points stretching out into lines, lines curving, curves folding back into mutual inclusion — the whole bending into a topological model. Point, set, structure, vector, curve, differential, integral, topological transformation . . . All these are the virtual. And that is only a few of the mathematical models you might appeal to (there are others: Riemann space, Markov chains, fractals, and on and on). There are also physical models (the singularity as quantum of event). Biological models (rhizome, phylum). Geological models (strata, plateaus). Military models (war-machine, “fleet in being”). The models never end. Their multitude is only limited in the working out of a particular conceptual problem. Each problem approached will take its own selection of them. The materials and formations in question will simply not be able to bear the embarrassment of conceptual riches. The models will shake down, under pressure, into a restricted set. The movements into and out of the

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reduced plurality of models that are left will mimic the actual pattern under study. The problem will have been processed in thought. Thought will have mimicked its actual object in and as its own process – making that process analogical.

The thinking of the virtual is always analogical, in an irreducibly complex way. Simondon has an ugly name for this kind of analogical thinking of and with complexity. He call it “allagmatics.” Here it means you can never model the virtual once and for all. And that you can never simply apply the models of it that you produce. You have to put them to work. You have to work through them, and work them through, differently in each case, under problematic pressure. You have to enact them. It’s a real process.

Mistrust anyone who privileges any one model of the virtual. They are standing back from the process. It is a common tactic of critics of Deleuze to take one of his proliferation of models for the model, and then on that basis critique the concept of the virtual as inadequate. This is like amputing someone’s thumb and then criticizing them for not living up to the definition of the human by failing to display opposable digits. You can’t grasp the virtual without a full conceptual hand. You can’t actually grasp it at all. It’s more like prestidigitation. You make the moves that conjure it up performatively as a thought-effect.

Nguyen, Davis: As Deleuzian-Guattarian preoccupations seep in to architecture, practices are emerging which adopt the process of formation as a philosophical datum. But while Deleuze and Guattari have shifted emphasis from the static being of “form” to the infinite process of “formation,” the architectural expression of this philosophy must still confront the mostly static nature of the built environ-ment. Is it possible to re-conceive of the discipline of architecture entirely as an art of temporal, rather than spatial, organiza-tion? What are the implications of such an agenda ?

Massumi: Approached processually, there is no contradiction between form and formation, stasis and transformation, or even time and space. The most useful way of approaching these “oppositions” is to treat them as phase transitions. We do not say that ice “contradicts” water. Water becomes ice, and ice water. They are processual extensions of each other. Each contains the other as its own potential. They are in a state of “mutual inclusion” in the same line of variation. They belong to the same “phylum.” Their starkly different formal qualities, it is true, commit them to different destinies. Water enters priori-tarily into regimes of flow, ice into regimes of rigid accumulation. However, the formal differences do not belie their belonging to the same phylum. Quite the contrary, they express it – differentially. The transitions from one phase state to another give the

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process to which both forms belong the opportunity to express itself more fully. The potentials each phase state contains appear differentially, in a distribution bringing to expression at the same time what the process immanently includes, and its engagement with external condi-tions belonging to other processes. The ice-form expresses at the same time a potential of the material phylum to which it belongs, and an environing set of weather conditions. The expression of the potential of the water process is condi-tioned by another, more encompassing process. The second process takes the first up into itself. It sets the conditions under which a specific form belonging to the first process will present itself in it. This is what Deleuze and Guattari call “capture.”

Capture is always “double capture,” because as I noted the process taken up has something to say about what happens, and co-determines the more encompassing process determining what form it takes. Today’s weather conditions wouldn’t be what they are were water not part of the phylum it is. Weather condi-tions may determine which of water’s potentials will appear, but the weather is dependent on water’s offering up those potentials for it to be what it will have been on any given day. It’s the differ-ence between rain and snow. The point is: Even “static” or frozen forms belong to processual continuums populated by phase transitions between related forms

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

The design process, what the question calls “formation,” is architecture’s liquid phase. The “static” form that emerges from that phase is the built structure. The weather is the urban environment (including all its constituent dimensions or strata: zoning, circulatory patterns, commercial pressures, cultural preferences, trends in taste) providing the conditions for that building. Urbanism and architecture are in a relation of double capture. To be thought fully, neither can be thought apart. They are co-determining. The determina-tion doesn’t end at the erection of the builiding. The urban process that takes it up may continue to bring new architec-tural potentials contained in the building to expression. How a building takes effect, what architectural-urban effects it has, varies according to what passes through it, how it is inhabited, and what goes on around. A building may be repurposed, qualitatively changing what difference its formal qualities make in the life of the city – the architectural equivalent of snow or rain, a city chill or urban warming trend. An entire architectural genre might modu-late which potentials actually appear, even

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without explicit formal reconfiguration, in response to economic or cultural changes redefining the prevailing “weather” conditions of the urban environment. The building next door might be demol-ished and replaced, changing the local urban fabric in a way that modulates the remaining building’s lived qualities and perhaps, as a consequence of that, its program. The street in front might evolve into a pedestrian mall, changing patterns of circulation, those changes in their turn entraining others. The building may deteriorate, contributing through its very breakdown to the conditions for urban renewal. The possibilites are infinite. If you look at the larger picture of the double capture of the built form and the urban environment, over the long term the fixity of the “static” form reliquefies. All that is concrete melts into city.

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

formal modification (sometimes relation-ally, much the way one color modulates another by its proximity).

The question, then, is: how can the design process pre-adapt itself to the continuation of process, which is in any case inevitable? How can it build into its built result as-yet unexpressed architectural potentials, enriching or intensifying the way it lends itself to re-uptake and recursive reforming by other processes (double capture). How can it multiply its own co-determining contributions to the double captures it engages? As Lars Spuybroek argues, answering these questions requires shifting the vocabulary from, for example, “ambiguities” of code or meaning, to ontogenetic “vagueness.” Ontogenetic vagueness is not a lack of definition. It is a surplus of it: a mutual inclusion in the same actual form of potentially diver-gent takings-effect belonging to different phases of the same process. Greg Lynn also speaks of this surplus-determination when he calls the produced architectural form the dynamic “form of a multiplicity.” This question of the surplus-determining continuation of the architectural process is the problem my own work on architec-ture has focused on.

Surplus-determination has to do only marginally with what is most commonly taken to be the “content” of architec-ture: the typologies of constituted form defining styles which can be infused with

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new meaning through a recoding or cross-coding of their component formal units. It is less concerned with architecture’s formal disciplinary understanding of itself than with its living through the encounter with its outside. There is a particularly important “outside” of architecture that the built environment actually contains: the body. It cannot be forgotten that the living-through of the architectural process is always, and always variably, embodied.

There is a third “double capture” in close embrace with the two already discussed. The material phylum of the human body, with its immanent process of experience-formation and all the potential that process holds, enters into complex relations of co-determining continuation and recur-sive reforming with the built structure. The built form is to body as the built envi-ronment is to the building. The qualities of the built environment are the weather conditions for embodied experience.

A logic of perceptual emergence, of expe-riential ontogenesis, must be added to the larger picture. What experiential phase transitions does a passing or inhabiting body engage in double capture with the built form? How do these continuous transformations feed back into urbanism? Or back into architecture, at its interface with urbanism? What unexpressed poten-tials are capacitated, at what thresholds, and to what effect? How can architectural form surplus-determine perception and

qualities of experience? Arakawa and Gins answer that question by adapting the concept of “affordances” from J.J. Gibson’s “ecological” approach to perception theory. The unit of architecture, from this processual perspective, is not a formal unit of style. It is the “landing site”: the way in which an architectural element beckons the body to actualize one of its experiential potentials. Or many at once. When there are several, without one necessarily being privileged over another, the architectural element has become surplus-determining: the unitary form of an experiential multi-plicity whose conditions of emergence are an architectural encounter with the phylum of the body, that encounter itself enfolded in the urban encounter with architecture: triple articulation.

It cannot be emphasized enough that this foregrounding of perception and experi-ence is not a call for a phenomenolgy of architecture. Phenomenology returns experience to a form of interiority (the transcendental ego) or a closed loop (the “flesh” of the world as preflective of subjective expression). Experience is but an echo. In the ecological approach I am advocating experience is an emergence. It returns the body to a processual field of exteriority (encounter). The same goes for architecture itself. The model at all levels is what I have called “relational autonomy”: the emergent expression of a process’s singular potentials in a dynamic of encounter with its processual outside.

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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 archi-tecture itself were effectively a form of interiority defined by historical periods, a repertory of styles, or a set of characteris-tics procedures. All of these change. All are under continual variation. Architecture as a “discipline” is what passes through these ongoing phase-shifts. It is in the gaps 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 retool its interface with other processes. Architecture is the indiscipline flowing through its own complexly co-determined iterations. It is not an edifice itself. It is not a structure. It has no definitive content. It is a living process. As Deleuze and Guattari were fond of saying, escape is the life-blood of process. A creative discipline is defined by how it escapes its past content and internal constraints. It renews itself through the rigorous indiscipline of its effective couplings with processes other than its own.

Nguyen, Davis: The predominant archi-tectural (mis-)use of Deleuzian-Guattarian philosophy in architecture has been on form-making, often confusing digital tools for “abstract machines” for dynamic form generation. But isn’t architecture itself a socio-political abstract machine,

as Foucault showed time and again (Bentham’s Panopticon, the poor houses, the hospitals, the public registers, etc.)? If so, what consequences might this present for a “critical” architectural practice?

Massumi: By the logic I have been advancing, digital tools can indeed be considered “abstract machines” for dynamic form generation. And architec-ture itelf, in the “big picture,” would be a socio-political abstract machine. These are not mutually exclusive propositions.

The definition of an abstract machine would be: the generative principle by which a continuum of potentials belonging to the same phylum are vaguely determined to mutually include one another, and by which that mutual inclusion is iteratively expressed through the serial emergence of fully constituted actual forms punctuating phase transitions occuring at the interface with an outside process. There is not room to unpack this here, or to deal adequately with the complicated question of digital technology in architectural design. It will be sufficient to get a provisional idea of why I would defend digital design proce-dures as an abstract machine to replace “generative principle” in the definition I just gave with “algorithm”; continuum of potentials with “permutational iterations”; emergence with “stochastic operator”; and to construe any form at which the process of form-generation is stopped as the fully constituted actual form. What then are

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the outside processes with which this digital process interfaces? First: human perceptual processes, at the inter-process threshold of the literal interface of the screen. Second: the forces of the intended site and the larger environment, and the values of the architect and/or client. Third: both of these as they return to the process to modulate it.

What is unique about digital design process it that it allows any of its encoun-ters with outside processes to be folded back into itself, so as to become creative factors for its own iteration. It can turn outside contraints into internal factors of creation, simply by folding them back into its own process in the form of a tweaking of the generative parameters. This infolding of external contraints trans-formed into internal creative factors can be of many kinds. It might be a stylistic preference (curvilinearity, for example) or a zoning imperative. It may be a desire to pre-engineer a structural characteristic like load-bearing without dichotomizing aesthetic form and architectonic structure. It may be to enable computer milling or to experiment with modularity in response to cost constraints. One way in which outside “constraints” may be integrated as creative factors into digital design is to program basins of attraction or repul-sion and limits of divergence or fusion which inflect the forms generated so that a certain value, or lived quality, is embodied in the resulting building. Lynn was an early

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 abstract machine of the form-generating process itself.

I do not mean to privilege digital design techniques over others. The same transla-tion 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 to say that every technical or procedural innovation provides architecture as a living process with an opportunity to rene-gotiate its relation to its outsides, and in doing so to renew the relational autonomy it lives by. There is no reason not to call this process of disciplinary readjustment to constituent outsides a “critical” prac-tice. It is not critical in the sense of judging according to a preestablished standard (of taste, political ideology, etc.). It is creatively critical in operative encounter with the outside. It is critical in the sense that it benefits by these encounters to carry the process across thresholds and to effect phase shifts. These thresholds and phase shifts are “critical” points in the sense that what is at stake is the changing nature of the process, and as a consequence the very definition of the discipline claiming that process as its own. This bringing into question of the process occurs as a func-tion of its own ongoing operations. It is

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a form of what Deleuze calls “immanent critique.” You might also call it “operative” or “effective” critique.

An effective critique belongs to a gift economy, not an administration of judg-ment. By producing the effects that it does, the process gives of itself – and gives itself up. It gives itself up to selection. The way in which its takings-effect couple with outside process will have positive feedback effects or inhibiting effects. This will affect the process’s viability and self-expressive capacity. In short: it is the city that “judges” architecture. Except it is not a judgment. It is a living out.

Or is it real estate speculation that “judges” architecture? It could well be that the outside process of speculation is in a stronger position to select. Critical archi-tecture practice is more concerned with how the discipline gives itself to which outside, than in what content standards it sets for itself as a discipline. Critical practice is part of what Isabelle Stengers calls an ecology of practices where “judg-ment” is lived out processually, in outside encounter. Prime among the larger 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 practice must grapple with the forces of capital, which at the same time consti-tute the most powerfully enabling of the outside contraints that it has available to

translate into a creative factor for itself, and the most cruelly selective environ-ment. The same could actually be said of any practice today. Immanent critique of any kind has no choice but to be in some way, however humble, an operative critique of capitalism.

Originally published in Manifold 2, Spring 2008

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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 firm’s 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 Schönste BŸcher aus aller Welt/Best Book Design from all over the World 2007. The Japanese edition of the Atlas to be released with Shokokusha Publishing.

Dodington: In Atlas of Novel Tectonics, you discuss geometry as a regulator that delimits intensive things into extensive terms. Are these ideas at the forefront of your design ?

Reiser: I think they really are active in the project [the o-14 tower]. For example, in the design process, in developing this from the first drawings . . . there was a constant oscillation back and forth between defining the geometries and sending them to the engineer and having him evaluate them — there was a whole cascade of effects from one move, and a cascade of consequences down through the system. Then we would incorporate those, adjust them again, send the draw-ings back . . . It was actually a consequent oscillation between extensive limits set up by the geometry and the materiality of the whole thing. Dodington: Do you think there is a hyper-awareness of materiality in your work?

Reiser: I think so. Probably, though, the final judgment is based on a formal or geometrical desire and the other things

Jesse Reiser on the Intensivein conversation with Ned Dodington

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grow from that. There are constant solu-tions from the engineers. All of them work, but then what criteria do we bring to that? And it took a long time for me to realize that much of what we were desiring wasn’t purely engineering. The engineers were tearing their hair out . . .

Dodington: I think that’s really key, in that it’s not necessarily an optimized structure…

Reiser: I made the argument in the Atlas

about multiple optima and I’m beginning to have doubts whether any of those criteria are really about optima at all, or if they’re 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 and we tried to get the students to get into the idea of animism.

Dodington: By animism you mean…

Reiser: The visual energy of the object — it’s primitive, it’s a very pre-art notion of expression. I’m just trying to hone in on what exactly it is that we’re doing.

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

Reiser: Oh it’s still at play. It’s absolutely still at play — it’s not pure expressionism but it is about some kind of material expression that you’re managing. The issue of the intensive and extensive is played out not just as setting one exten-sive limit and then working against it, but as a process. And the other thing is that you can never really justify the product through the process. The narrative of the process can never stand in for the product. The other part is rhetoric that blinds you to what you’re looking at…

Dodington: Do you see a biological or biomorphic quality to your work?

Reiser: I think there is a kind of bio-logic to it, that there are multiple influences being balanced — it’s a kind of ecological system. I think in certain ways we’re 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.

Dodington: Have the intensive and exten-sive been long-term concepts in your work?

Reiser: They’ve more grown out of the work, though Jeff Kipnis got annoyed with me because he used those terms in the Folding in Architecture book as a way of beginning to categorize things very early

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on in a different way. Look at the Folding

article.

Dodington: One of the things that comes up in Henri Bergson’s writings is the difficulty of talking about intensive things in and of themselves. You can’t really talk about heat without applying an extensive measurement to it, like temperature. How do you discuss the intensive without limiting it to an extensive discourse?

Reiser: I think we actually are always using both. I wouldn’t divorce one from another and I think it relates to the smooth/striated arguments from Deleuze, that you are really fully working in one or the other, and that as soon your tension moves from one issue to another, then almost by default everything becomes extensive. That’s there as a limit of some-thing that’s not presently active. I don’t know if this is more of a mental thing, but I think that it is actually at work in the projects.

It is never at a point where everything is in flux and everything is somehow part of an intensive, completely changing milieu . . . You are actually, through design, making discrete modifications in areas that are probably bounded or unchanging at that moment, and then you have an artifact at the end which has change invested in it. A lot of it is also about how it works on the psyche. And all of the issues of affect

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 a uniform way of meaning one thing, but everybody agrees that something is going on. It’s very intense, but they’re emotional interpretations. Or all of the interpreta-tions could be completely at odds with one another. There’s a full spectrum of inter-pretations on the same phenomenon. The only agreement is that something intense is going on here. Some people are crying, some people are uplifted…

Dodington: And so in terms of the work . . . How do you get back into the architecture?

Reiser: Well we’re not doing architectural universal mood rings, you know, where you can stabilize the interpretation and they will say: this we know will universally be understood as “x”.

Dodington: And do you think it has some-thing to do with the visual emergence of accidental intensive patterns out of an apparently straight arch [in the Shenzhen Bao’an International Airport] ? Would that be an accidental intensive reading of one object?

Reiser: Yeah, well the argument that we were making [in that project] is a practical argument — we were calling this a cloud

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dapple like a camouflage, so that was…it would give a kind of artificial/natural effect in the space. And then there’s a change. Actually, a moment where you go down to the site lines where you look at airplanes and it becomes this pulse, so that you can see a plane as you’re moving on the little walkway. So, one is about controlled vision and the other is about ambient effects, and producing an ambient effect in the space.

Dodington: You have just referred to the dichotomy between the “artificial” and the “natural.” Can you talk more about that?

Reiser: I think we’re already sort of in the point where you’re not dividing the natural and the artificial. It’s really all a form of artifice.

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Sanford Kwinter on Science and Architecture

in conversation with Nicholas Risteen

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 University’s Graduate School of Design.

Risteen: As the dialogue between science and design continues, what are the lessons to be learned from emerging sciences? How do changing ideas in traditional sciences—like the rise of EvoDevo—filter into design?

Kwinter: There is already a form of intel-lectual naiveté 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 this naiveté—one might even use a harsher word: ‘dishonesty.’ Science, of course, has never been foreign to architecture, and of course it has never been foreign to thought. For example, when we say that Thales was the first (Western) philoso-pher we are recognizing that in his propo-sition “All is water” he achieved a scientific statement and attitude regarding the cosmos, regarding material reality. From that formal beginning, civilization has not ceased to organize the traits and proper-ties and elements found in the world in space, in time and in mind. Now there is no culture that does these tasks separately so it really is up to architects to either step up to the plate and become players

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in the game of shaping historical reality, or else to take a back seat and relegate themselves to the provincial backwaters as decorators of city walls. The idea that science is that part of culture that speaks about found reality—and is therefore somehow poorer than the disciplines that invent—is another unproductive form of narcissism to which architects often fall prey. Science is about model building, not facts. Every experiment is a model, a form imposed on a piece of world to produce an effect, isolate a behavior, generate a fact that can be transposed to another milieu. You can even say this about mathematics; even about Gedankenexperimenten. Today, possibly because of the demise of philosophy and philosophical modes of life and thought, the sciences have become the richest source of novelty and inven-tion in our world (decidedly more so than the often vaunted ‘popular culture’ and, sadly, more than art). And as you point out, for all of science’s legendary rigidity with respects to its own formalisms and quantitative criteria, it has of late shown a notable flexibility and capacity to adapt in order to formulate new questions. The field designated by ‘Evo-devo’ is but one of the new Gedankenexperimenten that we now recognize as an independent branch of inquiry with its own hypoth-eses, its own objects and concepts. Yes, today science takes risks, which is why we should be listening to it more closely than ever. . . Any practice that takes the material world as its place of work—and I would

even include sports in this category—and which approaches this place and world with something other than a supersti-tious and magical attitude, can probably legitimately be called science. All good architecture is model and cosmology, it tells a story of how things are made that goes well beyond the banalities of caprice. When architects stop telling stories and positing possible worlds they cease being scientific, but they also cease being inter-esting and most importantly, they cease being historical. I would even say that they cease being architects.

Risteen: In reading through literature on science and architecture from the past two decades, the preoccupation of archi-tecture tends to be with the recognizable ‘architectural’ models in science: topology, the fold, René Thom’s Catastrophe Theory, and scientific/mathematical advances in geometry. Are there avenues of science that you feel have been overlooked by architectural practice? How could/should they now be approached?

Kwinter: My feeling—and I am not feigning optimism here—is that one has not yet even begun. There are, for example, new developments in the neurosciences that will fundamentally change the way we understand experience and perception; they will change perhaps every notion we have inherited about how an organism, or nervous system, arrays itself in space. Just as scientific optics shaped the architecture

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of the Renaissance, and phenomenological psychology the building of the middle 20th century, so will concepts like ‘primary and secondary repertoires’, ’superposition’ and ‘reentrant signalling’ determine the organization of space in the era to come. Additionally, the mental habit of studying science for its formal insights teaches us to think of the brain as itself a material product of forces in the surrounding envi-ronment, a form called up and shaped by a changing world acting on a lump of spongy protoplasm for a certain period of time. In other words, the capacity of the brain to organize and design is itself a product of design. The environment designs the ‘machine’ that in turn designs it. There is no design philosophy more powerful or important to understand and harness today than the one that biologists call evolution. It is the great form producer, the great function producer, and its tenets, once timidly referred to as ‘a theory’ now form a full-fledged science that is affecting nearly every aspect of human inquiry including string theory, robotics, neurology, even economics and literature.

I think the interest that architecture has shown over the last 15 years in math-ematics and geometry has been more than interesting and altogether merited, even if most of the experimental applications ended in disappointment. From today’s perspective it is possible to say with confi-dence that this interest has changed the way architects think and it has changed

the way they select and formulate prob-lems. The oblique infiltration of scientific habits of mind has also raised the bar on the way in which architects talk about what they make. They must now connect their forms to systems of ideas, and they must be able to connect their efforts to efforts that precede them and that follow from their own. At this point in time, I do not think this form of forced historiciza-tion is at all a bad thing.

Another area that is certainly of value for architecture is the vast field of non-Western and pre-Modern knowledge systems. It is not just that these offer great riches to be mined in the architect’s endless quest for unexpected and chal-lenging forms, but the study of forms in non-habitual contexts develops in us a deep intuition of that which I spoke about earlier, the collective and integrated way in which a civilization generates all of its forms, musical, psychological, and epis-temological as well as physico-spatial. No other method instills in us the same understanding of the foundational logic of form in life. I believe strongly today in an anthropology of form as a remedy for the tired formulas that we have inherited from bourgeois art history.

Risteen: To what extent would you say science, as discussed by architecture, actually enters the design field in a scien-tific way? Does a pre-occupation with applying a scientific method to design

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deny other possibilities? Is science as a generator of form the only use for science in architecture?

Kwinter: Both excellent questions. . . The first is easy to answer, the second more difficult. It is clear that one is courting disaster (not to mention failure and ridi-cule) if one tries to adopt a ‘positivist’ attitude within architecture, to see it as a ‘science’ in the classical sense. It would be very misplaced to apply ‘scientific method’ to architecture. Part of what is required today is to rethink science as 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 Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific

Revolutions. Aside from his theory of ‘para-digms’ his work largely helped foreground a new understanding of science as being a generator of ideas and not only facts. It is this aspect of science that should interest us. The second question is tantalizing, but 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, but what lies on the other side of today’s regrettably utilitarian and opportunistic horizon is very unclear. But one thing is certain; architecture is a form of human knowledge, even a form of thought. This is a challenge that architects have not for the most part dared to meet explicitly. Even composers of music have applied

rigorous formal methods to the organiza-tion of sound in ways that yield concrete directions for further research. One of the reasons that this is possible is that the brain responds very precisely to designed sound, temporal structures. Architects for too long have wallowed in the sloppy permissiveness of effects produced in space, but much of this sloppiness is only a product of their own historical lack of discipline and clarity. Architecture may itself well be largely an art, but this does not absolve it of the seriousness and indus-triousness that we have seen in Western music. This may seem a bit confining to many of today’s architects, but it is truly bewildering to see contemporary youth and emerging architects rejecting the challenges laid down by their immediate predecessors (the ‘90s generation) as being too weighty to bear. My prediction is that these architects who are trying to put architecture back on a foundation of arbitrary “sensibility” will be eclipsed and forgotten even more quickly than they appeared.

Originally published in Manifold 1, Spring 2007

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Stan Allen is principal of Stan Allen Architects in New York. He is also Dean of the School of Architecture at Princeton University.

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

Allen: I would quibble just slightly with your wording here. One of the people who has influenced me a lot in thinking about these issues is Gregory Bateson. One of the things that Bateson says in his writings on ecology, which is for me very interesting and provocative, is that we need to move away from the notion of energy (which he sees as belonging to a ninetieth century notion of ecology when it was still tied up with physics) and rewrite ecology in terms of information. There is a fundamental insight of Bateson’s that I like very much, which is contained in his assertion that “ecological understanding must be ecolog-ical.” By this he means that if you are going to approach a subject like ecology, which is about complex systems interacting with 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 hammer’s blow, instead of seeing it in terms of forces, impact, and energy he

Stan Allen on Rethinking Ecology in conversation with David Dewane

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talks about it as “news of a difference” — information exchange, in other words. That also refers back to his definition of information as “any difference that makes a difference.” It’s a minor quibble, but rethinking ecology in terms of informa-tion exchange as Bateson does has been hugely important in the work that I’ve been doing.

The turn to ecology and landscape really reflects two things that reveal a larger shift within the discipline that I think are also important. The first is the embrace of complex systems. For me, ecology becomes a model for a complex interactive system. In other words, you could say my interest in ecology has less to do with questions of sustainability and environment (although it certainly figures in that) and more to do with the notion of ecology being a model for a way of working and thinking that is capable of dealing with complex, interac-tive systems - what Jane Jacobs, referring to formulations by Warren Weaver, calls “organized complexity.” The second point is that attention to ecology has to do with a shift in architecture and urbanism that would foreground questions of time and change over time, especially in thinking about urbanism.

In that sense the three categories proposed by Richard Foreman in his work on land-scape ecology are useful to refer back to, and use as a scaffolding to get back to the question of how this figures into our work.

Foreman talks about landscapes in terms of structure, function and change. These seem to me to be useful categories for architects and urban designers. I would say that traditionally, architects have paid a lot of attention to structure — that is to say, to organization and form. They have paid a fair amount of attention to func-tioning, which we have tended to define in terms of program. They have paid very little attention to change. Part of learning from ecology would be to give these three categories more or less equal weight in the work: attention to organization and structure, attention to program and event, and attention to change over time.

When I think about the work we’ve been doing I think it’s important to say that in the five years since I started a practice independent of Field Operations (which had been a collaboration with landscape architect Jim Corner) we’ve been putting equal amount of time into projects for buildings as into projects for cities and landscapes. Obviously, that equation is going to change a little bit whether you’re talking about buildings or cities and land-scapes. When you talk about cities and landscapes I would say that function and change become more important (although structure is still important) whereas when you’re dealing with conventional build-ings structure and function become more important and it’s change over time that is less easy to think about.

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

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 fairly high degree of control and precision. Then, over time, based on its own internal dynamic of development and investment which is outside of our control, the city will grow in, up to the edge of this void. The figure of the park will be defined over 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. That which belongs to the public realm and is paid for and controlled by the state is designed with a fairly high degree of precision; that which we can only steer and direct by more abstract means (such as codes, FARs, and urban design guide-lines) will give way to the natural dynamic of the city as it grows in over time. For us this is important for a number of reasons. In part, it’s pragmatic; we knew we couldn’t control the dynamics of develop-ment. On the other hand it’s important, both politically and ideologically, because we wouldn’t want to control the city to such a high degree. Cities that are vital and dynamic and have grown up over time are not the product of a single author or entity. In fact there are many different hands involved. Part of the logic behind this is that in order to create a vital, lively city you have to open yourself up to this

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kind of uncertainty and the participation of multiple agents and growth over time. Dewane: Would it be fair to say that, in ecological terms, the infrastructure acts as a corridor and remains constant, and the patches are then anchored to the corridor and allowed to fluctuate in their relation to the void ?

Allen: I think that’s fair. Again, to refer back to Foreman’s categories, structure to some degree will always determine both functioning and change over time. That is important, because it’s the primary agency that we as architects have to work with. As architects and designers, we have 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 series of initial conditions. And setting up those initial conditions precisely determines to a large degree (although not absolutely) the performance and the evolution of the system that follows. If you set them up in another way, you get different kind of performance. Another concept from ecology, which is useful here, is fitness landscapes. Here, as opposed to architectural thinking, there’s not a 1:1 relationship between program and form. Instead, there is kind of a loose relation-ship between a potential series of events, programs, and activities and the condi-tions and the structure of the landscape that might support them. That, for us, is

another useful concept that opens up the envelope a little bit.

Dewane: What is the role of public policy in Landscape Urbanism ?

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

Again, to speak to the Taichung example, we worked very closely with a local plan-ning firm and all of the officials within the city (i.e. transportation people, land-use people) and all that we did had to be

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translated into the language of policy. The end result of the master plan was new legislation for the site. On one level it makes working on these very large proj-ects slow and complicated. On the other hand, I think it’s valuable to the degree that it forces a level of public legibility and public communication into the process itself.

Just to speak very briefly to some of the larger issues beyond individual projects, I 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 of planning and to open up the planning procedures to begin to deal with some of the larger regional, ecological and land-scape issues that very often fall through the cracks when everything is divided up into local administrative units. One of the things that we know about ecological systems is that they don’t respect conven-tional boundaries, especially political boundaries. If you look at something like the watersheds of New York City, they cover a whole range of jurisdictions and can’t be encompassed in a single political or policy entity. The same is true for the harbor and the waterways. The river doesn’t care if it’s in New Jersey or New York. The ecological systems have their own identities, which very often cross and combine many different political and policy entities. Dewane: Could you compare public policy

in the West to public policy in the East ?

Allen: Well I can’t say I’m an expert here. It’s interesting that Landscape Urbanism has about a ten-year history now and it has tremendous promise. There is a body of practitioners, a catalogue of work, an extensive literature on Landscape Urbanism, and even a number of academic degree programs. So it has emerged as a fully fledged sun-discipline. But I think if you look at the work that’s being done in the U.S., one potential criticism is that a lot of it has tended to be the design of urban parks. It seems to me that only in 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 do with disciplinary boundaries. In the United States landscape architects tend to 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 we’d all agree would be a lot more produc-tive, is to think about the built fabric and open space in a much more integrated, synthetic way. There are still substantial policy boundaries towards realizing the more progressive visions of Landscape Urbanism.

Dewane: What can Landscape Urbanism

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do for the third world?

Allen: It’s a complicated question. We did host a conference here at Princeton two years ago on the African city, and, to be honest, it was a sobering prospect. We had not only architects and planners but people from the World Bank and the development community. The problems of rapid urbanization and the dynamics of cities developing in unplanned ways are multiplied countless times when you’re dealing with the third world. In this case, with the African city, one of the participants made a comment (I believe he was talking about Accra or Lagos) that you could put a billion dollars into the infrastructure of the city and it would simply disappear, partly because the need for infrastructure is so great and partly because of corruption and lack of over-sight. It’s 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 strat-egies and tools of Landscape Urbanism need to be tested, it would be in the developing countries of the third world. That having been said, I think that every condition is individual and specific and would require a high level of local exper-tise and study so as not to come in with preconceptions in any one condition. So it’s not a question of experts from the west coming in and imposing solutions – that has not worked in the past. Knowledge has to be shared. Mumbai is going to be

different than Accra which is going to be different than Sao Paulo which is going to be different from wherever. So, it’s a huge challenge and one would hope that some of this progressive thinking is beginning to filter down, but it’s also a situation where there are no easy solutions.

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Charles Waldheim on Landscape and Non-Anthropocentric Urbanism

in conversation with David Dewane and Lindsay Harkema

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.

Dewane, Harkema: Ecological design relies on the study of energy in various physical and biological manifestations combining to form interpenetrating rela-tionships. How does your work express this?

Waldheim: Most recently we’ve been describing a historical and genera-tional split between at least two ways of approaching that question. On the one hand, there is a longstanding tradi-tion of regionally informed ecological planning. Assuming we’re talking about design at the large scale — my work deals with cities and urban form — that work largely assumes that the challenge is one of sufficient data. If we had enough information about the natural world and the urban environment that comprises it, and if we could array that data sufficiently to make informed judgments about it, then we could make better choices and more rational plans about the future of the places in which we live and work. I think that was a laudable goal and largely successful in transforming the design disciplines, but I think it’s run into a bit of a dead end recently. Ironically, ecology has

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emerged more recently not out of rational, positivist science, but rather out of design culture — as a means through which we understand the environments we design and create and live and work in. So there are at least these two ways into that ques-tion: one associated with Modernism, positivism, scientific certainty, and the scientific process and method. It’s based very much on the idea that if you get infor-mation 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 a welfare state to implement these kinds of policy decisions. The difficulty became not so much that ecological design didn’t shed important light on these decisions that we face, but that we don’t live in a culture that executes plans – at least not in that way. The problem that we experi-ence today in the design fields has little to do with questions of quantity (it’s not so much needing more scientific information, nor is it a matter of getting that informa-tion in front of decision makers) but rather that we live in a culture that’s less and less driven by an empirical, rational planning process. Increasingly, decisions about the built environment are motivated not so much by the welfare state, but rather by private capital in relationship to donor culture and to the arts generally. The combination of neo-liberal capital, the recession of the welfare state, and the fact that we no longer do planning as such (at least in a North American context) means

that ecology is increasingly coming out of design culture. Therefore, the recent interest in landscape as a medium for urbanism has been informed by ecology from both of those trajectories in very interesting ways.

Dewane, Harkema: Do you feel that, when plans don’t get executed according to their original intention, we regress from providing “ecological design” to providing “designer ecology,” as Nina Miralist terms it ?

Waldheim: I appreciate Nina Miralist’s formulation of that opposition and I think it’s useful to hold onto that for a moment. On the face of it, “designer ecology” sounds pejorative. It sounds obvious that we would want the scientific probity of “ecological design” whereas “designer ecology” sounds like reality TV. But it more adequately describes the culture in which we live and work. It’s not so much that plans don’t get implemented, as the fact that we don’t plan anymore. The expec-tation of the welfare state (that we will elect political leadership and that they will appoint who will plan and then execute those plans) is a model we no longer hold in North America. Increasingly, we live in an environment in which we don’t collec-tively invest in much. The majority of the environments that we live and work in (with the exception of water systems and maybe highway systems) are generated by funding that comes through private

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dollars in a variety of formats, whether it’s airfare and private taxation on airfare, or a university campus and its private endow-ment. It strikes me that we live increas-ingly in environments that are shaped by private capital decisions and less and less in environments that are comprehensively planned. As a result, it’s not that ecological design is not important or interesting, it’s that we don’t live in a culture that’s inter-ested in implementing that policy.

Dewane, Harkema: How can architectural design address both the uncertain and unstable nature of ecological systems?

Waldheim: On the one hand I think the architecture world is buoyant with models taken from the natural world. Metaphors, models and analogues have been both productive in terms of architectural culture, but have also allowed for a reen-gagement between landscape architec-ture, urban design, and architecture. In part, this is because we are all looking at models from natural systems. In the first instance, what I would suggest is that it’s important for architects to be literate at both levels — that is, architects need to be trained and professionally literate in looking at models from nature that can inform the organization, structure and discourse of architectural culture. Let’s call that ecology as metaphor or model. They also need to be literate and have a program about operant ecologies at the scale of the building or the site. It is

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 that both of these things are happening simultaneously. They are both relevant to the architect and the training of the land-scape architect. In fact, the combination of them can produce a condition in which that knowledge is actually greater than the sum of its parts; they are not mutually exclusive. The best examples of this come not from within architecture, but from the training of landscape architects. Look at the generation of landscape architects that have essentially fueled landscape’s ascendancy over the last fifteen years. I’ll identify two examples. First, James Corner, a Mancusian-born landscape architect who trained with [Ian] McHarg in a program driven by ecology. Then, as a faculty member at Penn, Corner took the train up to Columbia to meet with Bernard Tschumi. He struck up a conversation with Stan Allen, who was a junior faculty member at the time, and basically Corner eventually got training in ecology as a natural science, but also an understanding of how architects like Tschumi and others began importing models from nature into architectural culture. The second example is this Dutch landscape architect, Adriaan Geuze. Adriaan was trained in van Groningen, an agricultural school in the Netherlands. He learned ecology first as a natural science. He then struck up a

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relationship with Rem Koolhaas at OMA, and through their collaboration, West 8’s work was informed both by operant ecologies on the ground, and, at the same moment, ecology as a model or metaphor. It strikes me as a platform moving forward — we can identify Chris Reed as the next generation. He is equally literate with design culture and how ecology signifies a model for architectural thought.

Dewane, Harkema: What is the role of public policy in Landscape Urbanism?

Waldheim: Unfortunately, the genera-tion of landscape architects who were late Modernists imagined their work (maybe quite rightly) as advocacy on two fronts: first, raising environmental awareness in the wake of the 1960s, and, second, advocating for a robust welfare state to make choices about — and then imple-ment — policy decisions based on science as they saw it. Their role was really to work as advocates for the natural environ-ment and advocates at the level of policy advice. Post ’68, at the moment when environmental awareness was increasing in western culture, we also saw the reces-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 more and more about the science of the ecology of these environments, we had less and less ability to actually intervene in their operation. So in that sense, while

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 realm from collective public dollars, an increasing fragmentation of that realm, and fewer and fewer things that we will agree to pay for collectively. While I don’t see any end in that trend, at the same moment I do see an increasing interest from the point of view of private capital to fund initiatives on behalf of natural systems, environmental issues, sustain-ability and the like. While not replacing the collective and public welfare state, this will probably supplant many of those projects.

Dewane, Harkema: What can Landscape Urbanism do for the third world?

Waldheim: There’s quite a lot of interest these days in landscape architecture as a discipline about informal settle-ment patterns, distributions of land, and informal economies. There was a recent exhibition at Harvard that dealt specifi-cally with the informal city and landscape architecture as the medium or discipline 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 it’s ready to really break open, and I think there is quite a lot that landscape architecture can afford. The discourse around landscape urbanism as it has been formed certainly can help

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contribute to that dialogue, and, also, since that discourse came out of a specific cultural and economic condition in the west, it may be that the conditions both in the so-called developing world as well as in the rapidly urbanizing first world will lead to new tools, new lenses, and new formulations. I know that most recently I hear many of my colleges calling for an ecological urbanism as much as anything else. Certainly an ecological urbanism would be a useful toolkit to have when looking at the kinds of informal settle-ments associated with urbanization in developing countries.

Dewane, Harkema: Could you describe “de-engineering” ?

Waldheim: There has been a very strong and quite lively debate around the rela-tionship between civil engineering proj-ects (largely public) and natural ecologies. Largely speaking, landscape architects trained in a certain generation have been working essentially to advocate for the selective removal of civil engineering devices and regimes, so as to allow ecolo-gies to operate more completely on their own terms, or at least deregulate several of them. The most obvious example of this has been the very successful campaign against the damming of rivers in North America (and in favor of the de-damming of many of them). This is the most obvious example, though I think there are prob-ably others. Essentially, in the wake of the

1960s, the rising environmental aware-ness combined with advocacy on behalf of landscape architects and others as stewards of the natural environment led them to back away from civil engineering projects that were perceived as being not entirely beneficial. One of the shadow sides of that, unfortunately, has been to misunderstand the question of scale — in the wake of Katrina and the bridge collapse of Minneapolis, for example, this has been very clearly illustrated. I think that, moving forward, there will be an increasing diffi-culty in imagining the North American condition, especially in the United States, where we collectively fund and maintain robust civil engineering projects. Even in the context of their failure we don’t yet see any political response. There’s no real political backlash to suggest there will be something different that will happen in terms of reconstructing these systems. So at one scale I see, particularly in rural envi-ronments, a desire to de-engineer projects to allow more freedom for ecologies, but, in urban environments, I also see a radical de-funding of public infrastructure, which is part of the political campaign of the right. Both of those things have been happening simultaneously, but it’s important not to mistake the two, though at certain strange moments they do have similar effects.

Dewane, Harkema: Could we ask you to go back for a moment and clarify the difference between Landscape Urbanism and Ecological Urbanism ?

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Waldheim: Landscape Urbanism emerged twelve years ago as a concept to try to best describe what we saw as an emergent condition in the field of the design disciplines. It was clear that there were people doing this kind of work and making these kinds of claims. The first people to make these claims were actu-ally European trained architects. As early as the 1980s, there were several European architects who were identifying, with respect to the city, landscape as the most important medium. It happens to be that there was a generation (of which I’m included) of American architect urbanists who picked up on that, and we held a conference in Chicago in 1996 at the Graham Foundation to try to frame this emerging condition. We called it “Landscape Urbanism,” for lack of a better term. We invited Jim Corner, Mohsen Mostafavi, Adriaan Geuze and a number of other international types who had been doing work in this area. So what I want to be clear about is that it’s not my work per se — my role has been to frame what I see is happening. Landscape urbanism, like many concepts, has a kind of utility within a certain arc, and at certain points I think it’s become clear that it’s particu-larly useful in a variety of contexts. At the same time I think part of the challenge is to continually refine the tools, the lenses that we use to describe the conditions that we see. And what I see right now is two things happening: A broad absorp-tion of landscape urbanism in the rubric

of the English language which I’m happy about — it’s very gratifying — but I’m also completely stunned because twelve years ago there were three of us who agreed this might be useful but weren’t sure what it would be. So it wasn’t clear there would be an audience at all. But, in the English language at least, from Israel to China, I’ve been to conferences where I’ve been able to talk to people for whom landscape urbanism has been particularly useful. As that topic has become useful in a variety of ways, it necessarily has lost a kind of critical focus or edge that made it initially quite provocative. As a result I see a desire for a more specific set of tools, and one of those more specific tools will be ecological urbanism — the idea that we have to talk specifically about the urban context and we need to talk about ecologies within these urban contexts. The even sharper point of the sword, not that you asked, is looking at a kind of non-anthropocentric urbanism. That’s still two years from bubbling up, but I think that two years from now you will see a slate of literature dealing with the non-anthropocentric. What would happen if you think about urban environ-ments and don’t just think about human beings, as a species? The advantage of this approach, in the context of ecological urbanism, would be that you could allow ecologies —the natural sciences that we have been describing for the last twenty five years — to be available, but at the same moment, the approach is not bogged down in the transcendental and ultimately

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metaphysical baggage of the environmen-talist movement. This is ultimately one of the difficulties with McCarg and the McCargian project: it was perceived to be anti-urban and anti-intellectual ultimately because it was transcendental, it was metaphysical, it was belief in Nature, with a capital N, as a kind of deity. Whereas, the non-anthropocentric position argues, “Well . . . no, it’s about decentralizing — it’s posthumanism.” So architectural culture can find this of interest while at the same moment we can still allow natural ecologies to play through from the sciences we’ve developed. I would look for ecological urbanism as a kind of subset within landscape urbanism, as landscape urbanism broadens horizontally. Within the ecological focus I would say, look for nonanthropocentric urbanism. Cary Wolfe, for instance, who is a professor of English literature at Rice University, and who is a foremost expert on animalia, has written a book called Zoontologies, about what happens to the patrician of humanism and humanist thought when you decentralize the human species in relation to other species. The impact of this thought on urbanism is just beginning to be evaluated.

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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.

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

Corner: In some ways I’m not sure that it does, directly — maybe indirectly. I would interpret the term energy quite broadly, not just in terms of power energy (such as solar power, wind power, biomass fuel, etc.) but also in terms of the energy of an ecosystem. There is also the cultural and social energy of a place. We’re all looking for a vibrancy, driver, or motor in design. For me energy works at several levels. At an urbanistic level, you’re trying to insti-tute a sense of energy and activity. You’re trying to activate spaces so that social life is more dynamic, interactive and interesting. In ecological or biological terms you’re trying to ensure that there is sufficient energy in the system to support a robust and diverse species range. You often talk in ecosystems about flows of matter and energy, and that’s important to be able to support and sustain diverse life forms and the “ecolution of life,” if you will. Thirdly, there is the more obvious aspect of energy

James Corner on Landscape Urbanism and Indeterminate Systems

in conversation with David Dewane

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as power — designing cities and land-scapes that have lower energy demands in terms of optimizing solar aspect, wind orientation, accessibility to transporta-tion, etc . . . And also, of course, looking to do things with wind power, solar power and biomass. It’s a bit of a general answer, but I think we approach it broadly. I don’t think we specifically focus on energy, per se.

Dewane: How can architectural design address both the uncertain and unstable nature of ecological systems?

Corner: Well that, I would say, is our forte. The whole basis of my practice, Field Operations, is indeterminacy and open-ended systems. This is largely done in an effort to come up with solutions where fixity and closure really fail to work in today’s social and economic climate. By that I mean in cities, landscapes, even small projects (small pocket parks, small plazas, small public spaces) there is more and more demand for flexibility, adapt-ability, and open-endedness. This means that an approach to design has to be a little bit less about design as fixed, formal composition and more about design as a methodology for propagating new forms. These forms are not just forms for form’s sake, but they’re forms that do something. They’re forms that actually channel water, or channel people, or channel air. They are forms that set up opportunities for interrelationship or interaction. They’re

forms themselves that are actually quite forgiving and adaptable as situations and circumstances might change. So your question is actually pretty central to what my own interests are.

Dewane: Do you find that change is some-thing that’s easier to address at a smaller scale as opposed to a larger scale?

Corner: I think another way to come at the research, both academically and in practice, has to do with more fluid, open-ended, adaptive systems of design that really came out as a reaction to the rigidity of modernism or, more broadly, of master planning. Master planning would impose a top-down scheme around which every-thing has to fit, and might be implemented over a five, ten, or fifteen year time period, and is pretty unforgiving if circumstances, needs, or desires change. Given the failure of that model, this work, going on for ten years at least now, has to do with the creation of more flexible forms of design and more adaptive forms of planning. The problem is that it’s getting to the point where we’re finding open-endedness for open-endedness’s sake, and you’re beginning to lose some of the benefits of physical fixity and physical design. What’s a little disappointing in recent years is that you see a lot of design that is really non-design. It is just using the rubric of open-endedness as an excuse, reason, or ratio-nale for what is being done. In our work we are actually trying to go back to some

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instruments or mechanisms in master planning that are quite fixed and set strict parameters between what you will allow and what you will not allow, and have certain precise formal and geometrical properties, in an effort to come up with something that is both formally precise and programmatically indeterminate.

Dewane: What is the role of public policy in Landscape Urbanism?

Corner: It’s huge because so much of the urban fabric is under public control. Even a private development, where the developer may buy a significant area of land in the city and develop multiple buildings and multiple open spaces, is under great public scrutiny and has to pass through a lot of approval processes. There are transportation processes, city planning processes, and even design and art commission processes, let alone how community involvement plays out. This is especially true in America, and is now becoming more pervasive in Europe, and it’s even beginning to show up in Asia. It means that we don’t design anymore for kings, presidents, or private devel-opers who are, in a sense, single-minded patrons. We now have to design in a very complicated milieu of multiple voices, multiple authorities, multiple interests, and it gets enormously complicated. This complexity is really one of the bases for putting forward a concept like Landscape Urbanism. It has certain thematics, ideas,

and practices that are better able to deal with a complex milieu, especially a public context, than the stereotypical attitude of design as merely a formal problem.

Dewane: What can Landscape Urbanism do for the third world?

Corner: Good question. Our generation, meaning the next ten, twenty, thirty years, is going to be faced with enormous popu-lation growth. Most of that population will be moving into cities and, in particular, cities in the developing world. This places enormous pressure on their transporta-tion and environmental infrastructure, and on the ability to ensure that cities will have sustainable water supplies and healthy air quality. Food production and food supply are also a concern, especially as cities expand, because they basically consume agricultural land that provides food. I think no one fully understands the scope and dimension of the pressure and the problem. It seems pretty obvious that the next few years will require a certain amount of expertise— Landscape Urbanist expertise, if you will— but also engi-neering expertise and planning expertise in order to help create new city formats, new city forms, and new city lifestyles that can better accommodate the popula-tion growth and at the same time create a system where we have a more sustain-able water, air, energy, and food situation. I would add that this is a global problem, as we’ve seen with the economy in the

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past few months. Whatever happens with water, food, air, money, capital, business, market demands is now global. It will really start to impact the developed world if we don’t start helping the developing world deal with some of its problems in a creative way.

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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.

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

Reed: In the past couple of decades, ecol-ogists have radically revamped our under-standing of how ecological systems work. No longer are they talking about systems that are trying to achieve equilibrium, or steady states; they are now talking about ecological systems as dynamic systems in time, systems that can respond and adapt to various influences and conditions as they may be introduced over time. It’s a much more dynamic sense of how natural systems work. I think for us, that new understanding is interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, wherever possible, we are interested in adapting the specific performance mechanisms of plant systems, plant species, and hydrologic systems and integrating those into the projects that we do. We’re adopting those mechanisms quite literally into the work. On the other hand, we’re also looking at ecology as an analogue as we begin to think about not only natural systems, but also the systems

Chris Reed on Ecology as Analogyin conversation with David Dewane

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that we construct in relationship to envi-ronmental systems; this includes strate-gies for thinking about projects socially, culturally, fiscally, and politically through time. And so we use the analogue of how systems behave dynamically and apply that as we begin to think through the various frameworks of systems that we may set up in a project. This may include things like public process, for example. It may include long-term maintenance and management strategies. I think in these two ways we’re trying to utilize the newer understanding of ecology in the work we do.

Dewane: How can architectural design address both the uncertain and unstable nature of ecological systems?

Reed: For instance, when we start to look at hydraulic systems on a site, either large scale or small scale, what we’re interested in doing is not suppressing those systems. Whether or not they’re environmental systems, with lake or river rise or fall, seasonally or over longer periods of time, or whether we’re dealing with storm water systems and temporary flooding that might occur in the urban environment—in each of these instances we’re trying to allow those systems to play themselves out within a project. We look at how each of these systems might work indepen-dently, and then begin to layer them into a project, hopefully bringing them into a set of relationships that might somehow be

made evident in the work of the project . . . evident to people, but more importantly in the way the projects are structured, and generated. Likewise with plant systems, we’re looking at how systems work in their natural environments and how we might plan for future uncertainties and future changes. For example, as we begin to think of landscapes and plant palettes, we think of ways to integrate a range of plant communities at the outset of the project in order that, as conditions change through time, the systems can adapt by drawing on the plant reserves we’ve established up front. In other words, circumstances that arise may favor one set of plant communi-ties or another. What we’ve done is set up conditions that allow each of those to exist so that they can therefore be tapped over time as conditions change. Those are two ways we engage environmental systems.

When we begin to think about the analogue of ecological systems on very large-scale projects, on the other hand, we look at administrative and management practices and dynamics. For example, typically these projects will have a public process component to them. In a few instances, we looked long term at how public process can be an inventive and responsive part of project development—not just staged at the outset or during the planning phase of the project, but how that process can be tapped again and utilized at multiple points along the way. Once phase one or phase two of a project is executed, we

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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 we’re constantly trying to set up these systems that allow for feedback, response, and flexibility to whatever set of physical, social, and economic conditions over time.

Dewane: Is your use of the term ‘public process’ similar to the term ‘public policy’?

Reed: It’s one component of it. Certainly public process has many different compo-nents to it. Some of it involves meetings and workshops with the public at large. Some of it involves meetings with agen-cies and stakeholder groups that are either responsible for the project or might somehow relate to the project, or watch over the project, or participate in the project. Some of it may also extend all the way up to politicians and top admin-istrators who are setting out the public policies for a particular place. I think that projects can strategically engage all those publics at multiple levels throughout the process and can tap into the energy and enthusiasm of the public at large. Projects need to tap into the various experience and expertise represented by the groups and agencies that are looking over or after projects. And they certainly need to lay the groundwork for political support that will allow for funding and favorable posi-tions to carry the work forward.

In some ways it’s 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 front, they can build public support and political support for projects over time. So, I think there are very key strategic ways to affect public policy at multiple levels.

Dewane: Would it be fair to think about the term ‘public process’ as describing the system from the bottom-up and ‘public policy’ as describing the same system from the top-down ?

Reed: I’m not sure I see it quite that distinctly. As I said, I think we engage in work on the ground that sets the stage for what public policy will be. I’m not so interested in the distinctions, I guess.

Dewane: What can Landscape Urbanism do for the third world ?

Reed: I think there are many opportuni-ties for Landscape Urbanist practices and strategies to play out in many environ-ments around the world and in many situ-ations. In particular, Landscape Urbanism can set up conditions and frameworks that allow for emergent ecologies and emergent economies. I think they can allow for provisional and temporary occu-pations that lay the groundwork for larger systems. So, if you begin to think about

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

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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).

Harkema: Trinitarian concepts proliferate throughout your discussion of religious schemata: God/self/world, monism/dualism/complexity. Even the duality of immanence and transcendence implies a third order, a ‘khora’ that encompasses the realm between the poles. What is the philosophical significance of the three-part schema ?

Taylor: There are two modalities of three-ness 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 Trinity did not come to conceptual clarity until Hegel’s speculative rendering of the doctrine. Though post-structuralists, most of whom have never read Hegel, frequently criticize him for collapsing difference in identity, his entire philosophical enter-prise is designed to avoid precisely that mistake. Through a rigorous analysis developed in the Science of Logic, Hegel demonstrates that identity and difference co-originate and are co-dependent. Each emerges in and through the other and neither can be apart from the other. Here, threeness is identity (Father), difference

Mark C. Taylor on Religion without a Godin conversation with Lindsay Harkema

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(Son), and their interrelation (Spirit or, in Hegel’s terms, Geist).

The second notion of threeness is, as you suggest by invoking the term khora, Derridean. It is a mistake to see Derrida and Hegel as opposites; indeed, such an argument actually reinscribes decon-struction within Hegelianism. Derrida always insisted that his philosophical position is an “infinitesimal displacement of Hegelianism.” Indeed, in his important essay “Differance,” Derrida admits that what Hegel labels “differentiating rela-tion” in his Jena Logic is very close to what he himself is trying to think. Differance is a non-oppositional difference that is the condition of the possibility of every identity and all differences. It is not so much that binary oppositions generate a third schema, as you suggest, but that differance is what makes every binary, as well as dialectical, difference possible. Where Derrida and Hegel differ is on the possibility of thinking this third. While for Hegel, the structure of the relation-ality from which differences emerge is reason itself, for Derrida the condition of 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.

Harkema: In your discussion of religion without God, the conversation shifts towards models of co-evolving opposites,

i.e. noise and form, and the transformative state between them. Through a process of construction, noise and form become one dynamic network in flux, perpetuated by ‘emergent creativity’. If “God” is removed from this system, what is the destabilizing force that perpetuates the fluctuation ?

Taylor: For the past few years, I have been reading and writing about complex systems and network theory. My interest in these subjects grew out of three inter-related developments. First, I started using digital technologies in my teaching. I quickly saw that these technologies not only transformed pedagogy, but had much wider implications. In 1998, I founded 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 conviction about the importance of infor-mation and network technologies. Second, I have grown increasingly concerned about the prospect of natural disaster as the result of climate change. Third, I became convinced that deconstruction and post-structuralism, more broadly conceived, could not not adequately address these problems. As I studied theories of complex adaptive systems, it became clear to me that they have a distinctive structure and operational logic. I have tried to describe that logic in The Moment of Complexity, Confidence Games and, most recently, After

God. I am convinced that the structure and operation of these systems are isomorphic

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

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

Harkema: What is a ‘religion without God’?

Taylor: I am tempted to respond to this question by simply saying “Buddhism.” When I write about a religion without God, I am pointing to the widespread tendency to understand God only in theistic terms. While this vision of God has been impor-tant particularly in the history of the West, it is quite limited. As I listen to the criti-cisms of religion today and the debates about secularism, I am astonished by the low level of thought. Both those who defend and those who attack religion all too often are ignorant of the theological tradition and have a simplistic under-standing of God. The only philosophers and theologians worth reading are, in my judgment, religious atheists. Many years ago, I coined the term “a/theology” to mark the space between theism and atheism, as commonly understood. The argument in After God updates this argu-ment by rereading Hegel through Derrida (and, of course, Kierkegaard) and then rewriting his speculative system in terms of information and network theory. In terms of today’s debate, Hegel would be regarded as an atheist. And yet, he remains one of the most important theological thinkers who ever wrote. I would also insist that Derrida was doing theology, or, more precisely, a/theology all along, but only realized it late in life. Part of what I have tried to do is to rethink what once was the creator God in terms

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of emergent creativity. There is creativity without creators all around us if we learn how to see it. But, you might ask, why is it important to engage in such theological speculation? Because what we think and how we act are inseparable. The way we see the world informs the way we act in the world and the way we act in the world implicitly or explicitly entails a vision of the world. The crisis we face is not only practical, it is also theoretical. We need different interpretive schemata to address the enormous problems we face. When the map doesn’t fit the territory, disaster is inevitable.

Harkema: Echoing Hegel, you explain the self-reflexive structure of the Trinity as isomorphic with the self-consciousness. A concept of self is formed in relation to an other. What is the other which corre-sponds to the self-construction of the Trinity?

Taylor: This is an enormously complex issue. Indeed, working it out fully would provide a genealogy of deconstruction, which, of course, is impossible in this context. In his Third Critique, Kant identi-fies the structure of “inner teleology” or “purposiveness without purpose,” which became the foundational structure for Hegel’s theory of self-consciousness – and, I might add, of the definition of fine or high art that is still current. This structure is the one I described in the above account of identity and difference. For Hegel, there

are multiple aspects of otherness, but I will focus on two in this context. First, Hegel always insists that subjectivity is inter-subjective. In his classic formulation 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 myself. But the self does not become itself unless it reflexively turns back on itself. This act of self-reflection involves self-representation. The self becomes itself by representing itself to itself. This aspect of other is, as it were, internal. Hegel thought that through such self-reflection, the self could become transparent to itself. Since self-consciousness is social, however, such transparency presupposes not only the self-reflection of other in self, but also the self-reflection of self in other.

Philosophers who came after Hegel were not persuaded by his argument. The first to recognize the problem was Fichte, who returned to Kant’s account of the imagina-tion in the Third Critique in an effort to expose an unthought other in Hegelian speculation. If the self is constituted in and through self-consciousness, which presupposes self-representation, then where does that which the self represents to itself come from in the first place? It cannot be posited by the self because the self is constituted by the relationship to this other. What follows is a very long story that does not reach completion until Heidegger and Hegel. The conclusion is that there is an other, other “within”

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

It should be clear that with this other other, we return to the question of the Trinity. I said that Derrida does not oppose Hegel but effects an infinitesimal displacement. That displacement is the discernment of an alternative third that is implicate within the Trinitarian structure of dialectical reflection. If we were able to think God differently, we might name this differance God.

In tracing the folds of these differences, we discover a manifold that is neither one nor many but a complex (com, with; plectere, to weave, braid or fold) medium that is not immediate but cannot be mediated.

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Catherine 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).

Harkema: What is a “tehomic” beginning?

Keller: A tehomic beginning, a begin-ning in tehom, invites another kind of beginning than the “in the beginning” that drones through the Western imagination. Christendom erected its empire upon a pure origin, forged of an appropriated Jewish narrative fused with Greco-roman ontotheology. The tendency to unify Power in the first merged with the identi-fication of being with immutable eternity in the second to create — if not from nothing — a new deification of change-less omnipotence. The creation from absolute nothingness assured a point of origin, from which the controlling unity of God could be derived. Yet the tehom, as the Hebrew ‘deep’ of a salt watery chaos, belies the purity of origin. Nowhere does the biblical narrative claim a creatio ex

nihilo, only a soggier and subtler begin-ning. This beginning — I called it a creatio

ex profundis — remains unrecognizable within the dominant theopolitics. Only recently, through a combination of biblical scholarship, Whiteheadian philosophical theology, and a bit of chaos theory, could the biblical metaphors be retrieved. Yet

Catherine Keller on the Process of Becoming

in conversation with Lindsay Harkema

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from the pre-Constantinian period of Christian theology stem other resources for questioning the notion of a beginning “in time” of the universe, or of a neat divi-sion between the divine and the creaturely. Negative theology with its 3rd century heritage of “brilliant darkness” hints at an alternative to the light supremacism that surrounds every myth of a pure creation. I am currently contemplating the early Renaissance cosmology of Nicholos of Cusa, whose docta ignorantia deconstructs the story of the pure power of light opposed to the dark nothingness. His panentheism of the infinite unfolded in the finite, the finite enfolded in the infinite, hints at another rhythm of creation, boundless, acentric, and manifold. It would not be a matter of negating beginning but of liberating each new beginning — hybrid, complicated, ambiguous — from the institutions of origin.

Harkema: Building upon Whitehead’s notion of the “primordial and consequent nature of God,” you discuss a simultaneous becoming in human and God. Traditional theology begins with a transcendental God, a priori to existence, and unchanging throughout time. How does the concept of “simultaneous becoming” subvert this theological assumption ?

Keller: Alfred North Whitehead’s bipolar concept of God translates the traditional eternity of divine reason into the abstract possibilities luring creatures to actualize

them, to embody them. That is the primor-dial nature: the “Eros of the Universe.” The consequent nature is the actuality of the divine, which is as much a multiplicity as it is a unity. For God only emerges, or ‘becomes’, as a feeling of all the feelings of the universe. God is a process — not a substance or an essence — a process of interactive becoming. Hence even Deleuze could wax enthusiastic about this God of pure process, who passes through the incompossibles. He may have derived his concept of a multiplicity as a rhythmic pattern of repetition from Whitehead’s version half a century earlier — sans God, of course.

Harkema: In your writing you use several paradoxical phrases: the “deep face”, the “bottomless chessboard,” “darkness as infi-nite light,” “knowing ignorance” etc. You also discuss the synonymity of God and the Word throughout theological history. Is the self-contradictory nature of these terms a result of an attempt to express an ontotheological paradox linguistically ?

Keller: I am enchanted by the entangling incapacity of language, so generative of lingusitic creation. These phrases — Derrida’s “bottomless chessboard,” Cusa’s docta ignorantia, and the apophatic theo-logical tradition of the brilliant darkness — are on the face of it, contradictions. But in the depth of their very surface, another logic is at work. This is the point of Cusa’s coincidentia oppositorum: it would be

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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 I’m writing now and Cusa’s 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 contradic-tions — 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 ?

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 alterna-tive 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 opposi-tionalisms — his immanence versus tran-cendence, rhizomatic versus arboreal, his

polemic against the face, and so forth.

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

Gass: In the American academy today, it is said and said again that we live in the phil-osophical 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 implica-tions 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 Post-Structuralism confront if it is to continue its work with the rigor and complexity embraced by its intellectual predecessors ? Moreover, what is the relevance of Post-Structuralism for architects ?

Philip Wood on Life ‘After the Subject’ — the Example of Aesthetic Ecstasy

in conversation with Izabel Gass

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Wood: The meaning of the “death of the subject” has been very widely misunder-stood — 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 adap-tation of a rather simplistic and modish expression — the “death of the author” —coined by Roland Barthes. Barthes was (an often brilliant) vulgarizer of other people’s 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 irreduc-ibly Rousseauist to Rousseau’s 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

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

What Derrida and Foucault were indeed announcing, however, was not some aboli-tion 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 “commu-nist” humanism) is the idea that humanity is the source (ultimate ground or founda-tion) 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

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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?

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 Heidegger’s 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 diffi-cult and onerous material, there is a very significant reward to be had at the end of it all. So, if you’ll 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 senten-tiously 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 contem-porary theoretical discourse for more than

thirty years.

How so?

For us today, and for the last two hundred years, subject generally means subjectivity: i.e. the attributes of a knowing or experi-encing consciousness — primarily human but, conceivably also, divine (as in an abso-

lute 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 Foucault’s 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, sub-

stratum (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

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of the grammatical or logical sub-iectum (that which underlies) — as in “The table [subject] is brown, heavy and resistant-to-shins” — as some indefinable something-or-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 unwit-tingly 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 alto-gether in Derridean différance, 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 Heidegger’s reminder of the real meaning of ousia suggests, sub-stance, like the gram-matical 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.

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 (that’s precisely the meaning that comes with the Kantian narrowing-down of the sense of the term,

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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.

Now this older meaning of subject, substance and the inextricably related term essence (both substantia and essentia were used to translate Aristotle’s 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. 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 compel-ling strategic reasons for it.

It was perhaps Nietzsche’s most impor-tant 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

attribute it to ourselves). In other words, Aristotle’s theory of sub-stance (ousia) and the inextricably related notions of sub-

iectum (hypokeimenon) and ground (hypo-

stasis) were describing what (borrowing Husserl’s 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 possi-bility “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 rela-tionship to the most ordinary entities of everyday life (tables, cigarette-boxes and so on), including, crucially, ourselves. A novel like Sartre’s Nausea is already begin-ning powerfully to dramatize aspects of

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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 “hand-maiden,” i.e. modern capitalism. With the exponential acceleration of history that the latter entails (massive accelera-tion in the turnover of the whole invest-ment cycle — from initial investment to sales and the instant reinvestment of the surplus value realized — and because of the need for constant technological inno-vation to reduce costs of production and, therefore, a massive acceleration in the transformation of social arrangements always attendant upon technological inno-vation), with a quite literal speeding up of history, the meaning of entities begins to change so swiftly (e.g. in “fashion” — but it’s 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 fundamental-isms — 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).

That’s 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 archi-tecture), I am at something of a loss. How would one provide an architectural expres-sion 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.

One approach, however, might be to assume that any organization of space tacitly postu-lates 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

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the palace complex afforded by the view from the king’s bedchamber at Versailles — markedly different in this regard from the humble abnegation of Philip II’s bedchamber at the Escorial etc. etc.). Perhaps architectural contrivances might be found in order to have this conception of self be confounded in some transforma-tive way for the individual at some later moment in the course of one’s interaction with the structure. In any event, there has been some inter-esting writing along these lines. I’m thinking of Fredric Jameson’s 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).

Jameson’s 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 rela-tionship of the protagonist to the castle in Kafka’s novel of the same name; and the sheer oneiric incomprehensibility of a global imperial enterprise (Belgium’s

involvement in the Congo) — is already a central theme of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of

Darkness: thus, the impossibility of estab-lishing 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 Marlowe’s journey into “darkest” Africa. The stupefaction constantly evoked is very much the failure to find a subject-po-sition from within which the individual can comprehend the dimensions of an operation that is globally dispersed (non-totalizable), profoundly irrational and horrific.

No matter. Here’s a more interesting possi-bility. 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 one’s “normal” “constructed subjectivity” (which tends to posit that that composite of pride and vanity that is one’s 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 Félix Ravaisson and others to

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Maine de Biran) and also through Spinoza (whose relationship to certain “Hebrew writers” he himself invokes and whose rela-tionship 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 tradi-tions 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 exempli-fied in aesthetic experience. Contrary to a myth of Anglo-American academic postmodernity, the French poststructural-ists 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” influ-ence turned into in cultural studies. Since Schiller and Kant (e.g. the notion in Kant of the “sublime”) and down to “postmo-dernity” (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 identi-fied (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 expe-rience, 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 unques-tionable 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 funda-mental 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 asso-ciated 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 move-ment 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 I’m grateful for it, as it provides me with the opportunity to address some-thing 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 don’t 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 couldn’t); 2) no will or thought or preparation was involved; 3) it felt abso-lutely 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 assur-edly 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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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.). It’s not a me I can ordinarily claim to be familiar with. Something more like Nietzsche’s “wise body” (Zarathustra).

Now, it is Spinoza’s 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 conscious-ness — he means thought or mental images — in order to act, that in fact we act more efficiently without it.)

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 judge-ment 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: Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, although he would qualify some of its positions later, is one of the four or five most important aesthetic documents of modernity. It is hard to exaggerate his 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 repre-sentations 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 Spinoza’s sense of the expression that, again, has nothing to do with what is ordi-narily [mis]understood by “rationalism”), I

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 Spinoza’s living “by reason” — Nietzsche’s “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!

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

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way, however, those deeply religious figures, Nietzsche, Bataille, Klossowski, Heidegger, are all radical atheists. Spinoza’s famous dictum, in other words, is a true statement of identity: yes, God is “just” Nature; but “Nature” is just God! In Spinoza’s 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.

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 sepa-rate 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”).

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? They’re 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 Joyce’s “History as the nightmare from which I am trying to awaken,” or Sartre’s “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.

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 “revo-lution” that only ever changes the personnel of power-elites in the usual way (changing the seating arrangements in Hell, while

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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 expe-rience. In Sartre’s 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 neces-sity, 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 state-ment, to be sure, is only borne out in a life that is not really being lived (on Spinoza’s or Nietzsche’s terms) — i.e. most people’s lives; but, with that proviso, it is true.

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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 Carnegie-Mellon 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: Wittgenstein’s 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.

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.

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, that’s 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 quali-ties come from? How do we decide what those additional qualities are that make up the politically just or conscious citizen?

Nana Last on Theory and Political Justice in conversation with Joseph Lim

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Last: Well, I don’t 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]Eagleton’s 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 Eagleton’s claim that theory is dead because it is not politically engaged and how to reconcile postmodernity’s cultural relativism with democracy’s claim to universal rights, and I thought “Oh, this is a very interesting combination,” and I don’t 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

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 imme-diately 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 it’s 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 it’s 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 that’s really the production of those rights. They set discourse into motion...they need to be regularly re-defended and redefined. It’s not that they are the only natural ones, we still argue...it’s that you need to state your reasons and your arguments.

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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 Eagleton’s claim because Eagleton always sounds so reasonable in some sense and it’s because he speaks from a posi-tion 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 that’s 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 under-stand 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 doesn’t always know what democracy is, and we don’t 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 wouldn’t 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 relation-ships are not always obvious, and cannot always be directly produced, and we can’t 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 disen-gaged, more concerned with theory about theory rather than with its practice.

Last: It’s true and he always wanted to look at what was going on to judge it, and he doesn’t do that. It doesn’t form the basis of his meta-theory as he discusses it.

Lim: What do you make of Eagleton’s 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

you do, in what capacity?

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 meta-theory, 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 distinc-tions 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 don’t need to all be united. He can’t see that as a success— that’s 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 democracy’s claim to universal rights is this production of “political justice” ?

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Last: Potentially, but I don’t 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 doesn’t always achieve certain ends it doesn’t suggest this is the best version we could have but certainly the idea that cultural relativism could exist with democracy’s rights that were augmented first as universal and now understood as ongoing isn’t at odds.

Lim: How do you feel about the current trend in thinking that a lot of what consti-tutes democracy right now is simply a plurality of opinion and that there really isn’t anything underlying it anymore.

Last: I don’t think a plurality of opinion is a substitute for democracy largely because it is offered as opinion and not as argu-ment, not as discussion, not put in some form that could be more largely addressed. I think it’s a comment upon citizens begin-ning 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 it’s very successful? Not necessarily. But I think you maintain an

involvement and I think that’s 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 aren’t the pace people might be after but that’s assuming that there’s 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 there’s no obvious answer for architecture’s 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?

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

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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 news-paper, and it sounds really terrible. So obviously something needs to change very early on or how can theory or anything else be successful? It’s that engagement . . . I think what you do is you don’t give up. Certainly, what would that achieve? It’s a little bit of a set up of a question . . . and one that theories like Eagleton’s 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

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Eric Lott on The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual

in conversation with Izabel Gass

Eric 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.

Gass: Your book, The Disappearing Liberal

Intellectual, decries the increasingly centrist politics of many liberal intel-lectuals today. If complacency character-izes the prevailing political attitude of the American academic Left, how does a younger generation begin a more produc-tive political engagement? Where do you think our best intellectual resources lie today ?

Lott: There really are resources every-where. The point of my book was to suggest that the highly visible liberal middle was not the place to go looking for fresh ideas. And I don’t think it’s always true that complacency characterizes the academic left. From theorists and critics such as Timothy Brennan, Michael Bérubé, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, to more activist collectives such as Midnight Notes, to emer-gent cultural polities such as the one(s) around the Experience Music Project in Seattle, there are great ideas and stances all over the place. One more: First of the

Month (online and in paper form), a great radical publication on politics and culture that doesn’t sink into either the easy “anti-imperialist” or hawkish liberal muddle.

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Gass: What relationship do you see between political justice and critical thought? In your book, you state that, “both policy commentary and political theory have their situational purposes, although they operate in different temporal frames, polemical dimensions, and rhetorical scales.” Can you expand on this?

Lott: I wrote that in order to rebut the sometimes overwhelming sense that “theory” is ivory tower and wholly removed from the tasks at hand. There’s plenty of valuable theoretical work going on, from David Harvey on neoliberalism to Pheng Cheah on international divisions of labor. The right has its theorists (e.g., Samuel Huntington); these people can only be battled in theoretical terms, what Louis Althusser once called the class struggle in theory.

Gass: How would you define political radi-cality? How does it differ from other forms of Leftism?

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

are key to the struggle.

Gass: How can a discipline like architec-ture, which is often in service of socio-eco-nomic power structures, delineate its own capacity for a constructive radicality? In short, what is any citizen’s political agency and how does that extend to the agency of the architect?

Lott: I think architecture is crucially important because of its intervention in the production and organization of space. As Henri Lefebvre always argued, “sover-eignty implies space” — there is no spatial production that isn’t politically organized and defined, and politics (conversely) only happens in space. Whether it is in a political “right” to the city, or in some idea of urban planning (such as the new urbanism), or even briefly laying claim to conquered space in some kind of spon-taneous action, the idea of built environ-ments and some notion of redirecting them is very powerful. For an entry-level synopsis of certain powerful notions in this area, check out Edward Soja’s book Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles

and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Blackwell, 1996).

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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.

Gass: “Post-Criticality” has, in the last five or so years, become a common term within architecture for a philosophical project that rejects the legacies of disci-plinary autonomy and economic resistance handed down from the 1970s, instead seeking an architecture that adapts to its socio-economic conditions, complies with capitalist logic (Michael Speaks), and produces ‘moods’ and ‘effects’ rather than formalist rigor (Robert E. Somol and Sarah Whiting). What do you make of the Post-Critical project, and what does it signify for the history of ideas in architecture ?

Hays: As soon as one recognizes that to think at all requires a medium—be that language or religious ritual, or architec-ture—one is already doing theory. As soon as one thinks about the boundaries and limits of a discipline or a practice, or about the ideologies necessary to engage that discipline or practice, one is thinking critically. So much of the anti-theory, post-criticality argument should be recognized as rhetorical flourish. No problem. Nothing against rhetorical flourishes.

Moreover, critical theory is distinctly

K. Michael Hays on Post-Criticalityin conversation with Izabel Gass

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designed in such a way that it must constantly update itself. In other words, the practice of critical theory must contin-ually think its own historicity as part of the very work which it purports. In contrast, thus far many ‘after-theory’ positions have ignored their own historical determina-tions. Alternatively, being post-critical in the sense of more-than-critical would mean working through and exceeding the critical, calling into question the very grounds of the critical — its conditions and contexts, its histories and forms of authority. The insistence on the historical contingency of any position is an impor-tant negative function of theory. On this, I think the projective intention wants to be cutting edge but it does not go far enough. In particular, the abandonment of the categories of ideology and resistance does nothing so much as to insure the perpetu-ation of an ideology that does not know itself as such. There has to be a provisional ground of ideology from which ‘to project’.

From a certain perspective, the projec-tive intention represents just the latest iconoclastic upsurge of the very neo-avant-garde impulse it wishes to squash, with its confounding of old hierarchies and categories, taboos and imperatives, its debunking of intellectualism and elitism in favor of the smooth, slick, and cool. Except that, unlike earlier avant-gardes, it is also consumerist and complicit in its abandon-ment of critique and commitment; it is also managerial and instrumentalist in its

blank and reified technologism.

This contradiction necessarily exists, I believe, because of an ambiguity in the economic and cultural structures of our time. I will give just a quick example. Though the rejection of theory was well underway before 9/11, that and subse-quent related events — the dire straights we find ourselves in perhaps especially in the United States — have made it much easier to denounce theory as slow and cumbersome, an old-fashion ornament to real-time technocracy. Moreover, it is difficult to continue to preach resistance when a critical social counter-imaginary seems absolutely unavailable, and when we seem to have no vocabulary to distin-guish between resistance and conformity. In some ways the projective intention is born out of such mauvais foi. From my perspective, its single biggest shortcoming is its lack of a theoretical mechanism for working through its own historicity and its own determination by the larger social ground.

Gass: In the editorial mission statement of the inaugural issue of Assemblage, architectural theory was characterized as “oppositional knowledge — knowledge that continually questions received ideas, that challenges entrenched institutions and values, that strays from possible terrain.” It seems that current archi-tectural discourse seeks to jettison the “critical,” or the “oppositional,” with the

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assumption that criticism is destructive, or at least unproductive. Examples of this anti-criticality would include Somol/Whiting’s preference for the “cool” (operative compliance) over the “hot” (analytic resistance); Michael Speaks’s disdain for anti-capitalist rhetoric; or John Rajchman’s Constructions, which is implicitly a “projective,” Deleuzian rebuff to Derridean Deconstruction. In the face of all this, critical theory is called upon to answer a question: what is the continuing value and productive potential of criti-cality, or “oppositional knowledge”?

Hays: Critical thinking—or theoretical negativity—is not just hand-wringing and nay-saying; it is just ignorant to think that. Critical thinking is thinking to a higher power; it is a slow step back from actual conditions to future possibilities. This productive power of negativity is well rendered by Adorno and Horkheimer’s famous comment, “Not Italy is offered, but evidence that it exists.” The post-critical critics want to simply offer architecture, unmediated. I am rather interested in all the complex conditions of its existence and its effects. Projective vocations are inseparable from negative practices; both are part of the critical project. The presumably new projective intention—which I refer to as an intention because I do not believe it is yet a project — as proposed by academic colleagues such as Stan Allen, Robert Somol, Sarah Whiting, and Michael Speaks, should not be pitted

against the critical, because the critical has always been projective. What seems to be at issue, rather, is what is perceived as a purely formal approach to architecture versus an alternative that pays attention to issues such as mood and sensibility. This one ‘versus’ the other stance in itself constitutes a false problem, for the critical was never about form only. Rather, what the neo-avant-garde recognized was this: Form is one side of architecture; the other side is the effects produced. One side is a structure; the other side is that which is structured, but its content is not formless or undifferentiated. The neo-avant-garde recognized that we had to move beyond form as one problem and its effects as another to the abstract machine from which both are unfolded.

Gass: That said, what is the continuing significance of the 1970s neo-avant-garde, or of “critical architecture,” today?

Hays: I believe that the moment of the neo-avant-garde — by which I mean the early works of Hejduk, Eisenman, Tschumi, and others — was the last moment when architecture had philosophical aspira-tions. It would seem important to try to figure out why architecture since has taken such an empiricist, realist turn. But more important, we should think through the implications of philosophical aspira-tions for present practice. For example, it allows us to account for the volatilization of the object in contemporary practice.

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Architecture should no longer be under-stood as an object but rather as a condition and construction. Architecture exists not as a practice of object making or even as a process of design in a conventional sense, but as a frame for thinking specific artistic problems such as authorship and produc-tion, the abstract calculations endemic to contemporary space versus the sensuous particularity of spatial experience, and sociological representation versus indi-vidual expression. The implication is that architecture is a particular kind of activity but also a particular frame of mind — an impulse, a conscious decision to think in this way rather than some other.

The only model we have so far of inter-preting the material of the neo-avant-garde is a linguists-based or analytical model. What I want to suggest is that we rewrite the analytic model of architecture into something that I have called architec-ture desire, or in a zone that we might call the architectural Imaginary and Symbolic, on a Lacanian model. An architecture modeled on desire marks the sharp edge of intellectual passion that opens up what you can’t control; it welcomes the risk of formlessness, the unpredictable conse-quences of ideas. That is what critical theory does too, at least when it is done well. It is analogic thinking, not digital thinking. Truisms are cut into, things come undone, and provisional generalizations make new contexts for knowledge. Maybe in considering again the neo-avant-garde,

we might stumble upon a genuinely new architecture.

Regarding the importance of the 1970s, I find it compelling that two of the period’s most important commentators take dialec-tically related positions on the architecture of the time. With a certain left-wing melan-choly, Manfredo Tafuri sees architecture as a very precise and efficient ideological agent of capitalist planification and the unwitting victim of capitalism’s historical closure. What he called ‘the return to language’ was proof of its inability to do anything more than reproduce in archi-tectural codes the very structure of late capitalist society. The more conservative Colin Rowe saw in the same architecture the inevitable uncoupling of the highly developed formal techniques of Cubism and Purism from the socialist ambitions of architecture between the wars. It’s just the flip-side of Tafuri. Both see a socially ineffective formalism, but with different valences. None of the post-critical critics have really gone beyond this model.

Gass: What can contemporary discourse learn from this?

Hays: We need to develop a more truly dialectical approach. The interpretations of Tafuri and Rowe encode the premise that the neo-avant-garde is symbolic of the torsions, contradictions, and closures of a certain historical and social moment; for this, we recognize that their

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interpretations are important. What is not sufficiently recognized by this received view, however, is the more dialectical fact that the architecture of the neo-avant-garde has already internalized the situation with which the critics intend to confront it — that is to say, architecture has already incorporated the annulment of its own social need and consequently recoded the object as the symbolic realiza-tion of just that situation. The neo-avant-garde introjections of loss and absence means not that the object is empty or lacking or freed of contact with the real, as Tafuri has it, but rather that the object renders its pathological content directly; the object is the very form in which a certain lack assumes existence, the form necessary to imagine a radical lack in the real itself. This second-level negativity, by the way, is also why we continue to think of this as a ‘critical’ architecture.

It seems to me that, while architecture in our own times has renounced the search for what makes architecture different from other cultural representational domains and has looked instead for how architecture can be more like the dominant consumer-based practices (a process I have discussed elsewhere as ‘ideological smoothing’), the question of representation and ideology is still what we scholars have to think about. I mean this in Althusserean terms: architecture as an imaginary solution to real contra-dictions in social life; architecture as a

socially symbolic domain and activity. And if current architecture expects to escape the ideological closures as analyzed by Tafuri, then it has to continue the search for its own differences and singularities, not just for identities and sameness.

Gass: Can you expand on your idea of “an architecture modeled on desire?” Hays: I have started to develop an alter-native model of the critical practices of the 1970’s that would take both sides into account — a model of architectural desire. Through desire, architecture is rendered eccentric to itself. And there are moments in the neo-avant-garde when an archi-tectural experience itself produces that conception of eccentricity — moments of becoming, affects, events. These events are nonrepresentational modes of thought, moments when a sensation just barely precedes a perception and we glimpse very basic, primitive architectural ideas. Event is particularly operative in the work of Hejduk and Tschumi (the term ‘event-space’ belongs to Tschumi); but many architects find ways to dislocate 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 characteristic. But the concept of desire more adequately signals the corollary attempt to escape the ideological closures of the situation through the portals of the libidinal and the collective, whereas

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‘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 of constantly connecting, unconnecting, and reconnecting architectural quanta, could make an important contribution to our understanding of contemporary archi-tecture practice.

Originally published in Manifold 1, Spring 2007