Technology and the Body Public

Stephen Read

Abstract:

Arakawa and Gins are concerned with the configuration of life in intentional-attentional frames that locate the subject. But the procedures and technologies of this construction of an ‘Architectural Body’ involve us in a collective interrelationality and co-construction that takes us beyond cognition and the subjectivity of points of view and requires we account for the order and sense already built into our surroundings and the way this is part of our practical action and inhabitation. This demands we take account of both the historical dimension and the public ‘objectivity’ of this co-construction. A key to this publicness and objectivity are the historical technologies that penetrate deep into our lifeworlds and are even the means to our seeing and knowing things. The ‘procedures’ and ‘technologies’ of this space are not just means to control the body but also, as Foucault discovered, means to freeing it, but the space established is not only one of being and action but also one of appearance and politics (Arendt). We live immersed in collective and historical constructions that are power regulating architectures that gather and coordinate different scales of being and action. We find ourselves in need of a theory which accounts for the way we live between things and other people. Such a theory will however not transcend the historicity and contingency of procedures already performed, actions already taken and the coherencies and rationalities already embedded in the built surround. This paper explores these issues of a public order that binds and enables in order to begin to outline such a theory and fill in some necessary background for further work on the Architectural Body.

Seeking the ‘Architectural Body’

Arakawa and Gins speak not of people but of the bio-tech creatures we have become. Or, rather, the bio-tech creatures we have always been since we have had technique – because the most basic forms of technique are of course architecture and speech. They speak of an ‘architectural body’ that is located, and a constitutive factor of its own existence. To be human is to be “an organism that persons” in situ. We have moved on here from imagining ourselves as Cartesian ‘thinking subjects’, free to focus on other things from outside our emplacement and embodiment in a real world. This leaves us as ‘knowing bodies’, without the certainty of absolutes, and makes the ‘biotopological’ space this uncertain body occupies the subject we need to unfold. Where we are matters as much as or more than who or what we are, and it is on this ‘where’ that I want to focus. What is this ‘biotopology’ Arakawa and Gins speak of? What is it made up of and where does it come from? These questions don’t join seamlessly with Arakawa and Gins’ research however, so much as add some problems and questions, along with the warning we need to understand something more about the spaces of our

inhabitation before we can manipulate them or use them as architects and urbanists. While sympathising and joining with their aims, therefore, I want to try to open up some more of the substance and difficulty of this problem, to expose more about what it is, really that we are dealing with?

What Arakawa and Gins attempt to do is extend our powers as architects and urbanists by finding the procedures which facilitate the knowing body. It is through procedures that we gain possession of our worlds. It is through procedures, which is also to say techniques, that we inhabit the world and make it our own. But this possession stands on no absolute ground; there is, from the perspective of this possession, no absolute space or time as a foundation for possession. Possession is an attainment and an activity in time. At the same time it is an attainment outside of our own individual times; it belongs at this foundational or grounding level to the time of cultures and of ‘mankind’. This possession of the world is essentially public: a common sense of the world. And it is a common sense that we have in common because it depends on the historical-material trace and residue of processes of inhabitation that go back to the beginnings of our cultural being. We are not just thrown into a world; we are wrapped into the folds of a world which is not perceived because it is the ground of our perceiving.

I will be dealing therefore with history and convention, knowing full well the words do not often appear in Arakawa and Gins’ writings. Nevertheless, to become the beings Arakawa and Gins’ address in Architectural Body; to become the beings we might become; we need to pass through this essential historicity of our own experience. Arakawa and Gins attempt it seems, like Helen Keller, to awake each day to make the world anew. They attempt to escape history. What we cannot escape is the fact we do this environed in history, and where, like it or not, possibilities for escape may emerge only from this historical background. We are bound not just by the chains of constraint but also by the supporting threads of enablement in locations and situations which are a constitutive factor of our perceptions and existence. I see what I am doing here therefore as necessary background to a search for procedures for making environments which enable – and for a theory of action we can operationalise in architectural and urban practice. By being clearer about the procedures which have formed existing built environments we come closer to being able to see what are the ones we need to invent.

Living in technologies

The basic form of my argument is phenomenological: that we exist corporeally in coevolving states of knowledge and states of affairs, within perceptual and empirical horizons that integrate these two dimensions in situ. Situation and perception are primary and the world discloses itself to us within horizons that are conditional on our situation and which condition what we may know and do from such a situation. Versions of this argument also emphasise the idea that we simultaneously build out from and ‘stabilise’ or ‘objectify’ those states of knowledge/affairs in our surroundings. Here the principle of homo faber (Arendt) emerges. Our building of a meaning-sphere or semiosphere

(Lotman) is artifice, architecture and technique. It is also a process in time rather than a monument in space. And there is a basic publicness about this which is not about our subsumption to any essence of ‘Mankind’ but rather about a historical and contingent condition of this being and building between others, and between the things and their meanings we construct and share with others. The freedom of movement and of action we experience is conditioned and constrained by public and material cultures: objective but historically and contingently produced constructions beyond our individual seeing, doing or making. These constructions both enable and constrain, determining what we can and cannot do, but also what we see and cannot see and even what we see and cannot see as being possible.

It is necessarily difficult to see clearly the conditions of our own seeing. Such conditions though are central to any real understanding of environing or of the nature and shape of a material culture. In these circumstances, the ‘architectural body’ we construct and inhabit in our individual techniques and procedures cannot be taken as being open without some qualification. It will itself be conditioned by these public and objective constructions: it will incorporate a shape of the world into which we as bodies are thrown and which will be the necessary starting point for any procedure for changing that shape. We move beyond ‘points of view’ and into conventionalisms and normativities which are the result of the workings of social history on the spaces of our activities and possibilities. Structures of experience are linked to the material structures of our ‘exterior’ world rather than to any subjective ‘interiority’. Fields of perception are shaped by public techniques and artefacts rather than by private perceptions or interpretations, or even by the singular ‘points of view’ given by the geometries of classical optics. And rather than there being different points of view on the world from simple singular places – or from universal and displaced points of view for that matter – there are different technically supported optics on the world (or on different worlds!).

The difficulties of thinking architecture and the urban through simultaneously human and technical-relational lenses are for the most part due to our own discomfort with the mixing of categories implied. Technology has been associated with alienation and the distancing of ourselves from authentic experience.1 Architecture seems at first to sit in an ambivalent mid-way position in this argument over authenticity: on the one hand we accept certain architectures as being part of the authenticity of human experience – witness Heidegger’s hut – while other, mostly hi-tech or large-scale, architectures and infrastructures occupy the other pole of alienation from a world becoming increasingly technical. Peter Sloterdijk hints though at an intrinsically human nested techno-relational order of the environment in artificial niches or ‘spheres’. We live, according to Sloterdijk, in self-made enclosed ‘spheres’, these ‘spheres’ referring to the “inner spaces” (Innenräume) we inhabit at all scales (Sloterdijk).2 In the philosophy of technology also, Don Ihde, and the

1 Heidegger, Jaspers, Ellul and Mumford, all propounded a variant of what can be called the 'thesis of alienation' More recently Borgmann has done the same. 2 see Lemmens

rest of the philosophers he calls ‘instrumental realists’3 also acknowledge the central role of technology in human life. What I am suggesting here is that technology is integral with the practices and normativities of experience and of being human.

We don’t just use technologies to access an environment already known or directly perceived – we rather become environed in the technologies themselves! We feel a sense of subjection to technology in the London Underground, where we in a sense inhabit a working diagram of the city with gates and moving parts which engineer access to any specified place. But this suggests also we are not just payload here in a technology of conveyance, but integrated into a rationale and an optic that defines and reveals the city as perceptual field. There is something bounded and limited but at the same time complete in the way the system is organised and set up, and in the way we see and do things through a system like this. This suggests the architectures and infrastructures we build do more than ‘overcome’ an already constituted space; they are themselves spaces. But they are immersive spaces and they also incorporate the places where the shapes and horizons of those spaces reveal themselves to us. These places are not arbitrary and usually also have a history both as real places and in terms of their normative relations to other places. I am thinking here of the way, for example, a stop on the London Underground relates to another in the same terms that an urban place or neighbourhood relates to another place or neighbourhood in a larger construction where all these places together relate to the thing we call London. We get a sense of these built structures as fundamentally spatial organisation (rather than subsidiary to and acting on space) and medium, structured to a rationale and pattern that is historical, normative, and that supports and is background to specific practices or sets of practices. The work that is going to be needed to build an idea of a techno-relational environment out further will prioritise the historical, the contingent and the empirical over the abstract and theoretical.

To be clearer: the abstractions and the ‘theory’ that are likely to be relevant are those which have already been embedded in historical-empirical constructions by way of the purposes and practices they embed and embody. We will need to understand techno-relationality in its spatial and historical specificity, in order to understand how we have constructed the worlds we inhabit, ground and all, and how it may be possible to construct it further to support practices and mediate experience in the future.

We may attempt, as Soren Riis has for example (Riis, 2010), to look at architectural technologies one by one for the ways they mediate the human-world relation. He identifies the ‘transparency’ and ‘natural’ and ‘atmospheric’ qualities of some of these relations, but there is a clear problem if, as I am going to argue, technologies, architectures and other material infrastructures may themselves constitute human worlds structured for perception and action. In this case we clearly cannot start with a ‘world’ as already given. In fact, a feature of technologies in the human world is that they precisely, and with 3 Ihde mentions Robert Ackermann, Robert Crease, Hubert Dreyfus, Peter Galison, Ian Hacking, Patrick Heelan, Don Ihde, and Bruno Latour.

intent and purpose, constitute and integrate our worlds at the same time they enable our practical actions. They seldom if ever act alone, and some may be foregrounded while others are backgrounded while they are necessary parts of the human activity being described or investigated. This is particularly true of architecture where different systems are coordinated precisely so they don’t appear to us in practice. Arakawa and Gins make a point of subverting some of this coordination (in the Bioscleve House for example) but this only really highlights the point that we depend most of the time on a profoundly integrated – and for the most part invisible and background – organisation to support our everyday practices. How many times a day do we think of the floor or pavement we walk on, or the door we may close, or the equipment that serves to maintain an ambient temperature. A feature of this background is maintenance and upkeep, and occasional renewal.

An example Riis uses, the Panopticon, is exemplary however of the ‘spheropoietic’ process, realising a world with its own operational logic and within which parts and wholes make sense in relation to one another. An engineered spatial organisation and bounding sustains this interior world with its own internally embodied reason; the guard and the prisoner are parts of the Panopticon, needed there to complete the circuit of seeing and being seen. This particular example reinforces the idea we are imprisoned in these materialised logics – but this is only part of the story, the other side of which is that it is these sorts of materialised and situated logics which allow us to do the things we would otherwise be quite incapable of doing – or even perhaps see the possibility of doing. These bounded inner spaces and architectures may in fact be the condition of our doing anything human at all.

Joining subjects with objects

The question of boundaries has also exercised minds in thinking about scientific experimentation and measurement in a hermeneutical philosophy of science. According to this viewpoint science is a practical affair that includes the apparatus and instruments that explicate and measure and the body that knows and does. What is embodied is not just the object of the experiment but also the seeing, knowing and doing. The observer is part of the machinery of experiment, needed there to complete the circuit of knowing and being known. I will look at scientific experimentation as a specialised account of human practice to show eventually how ‘context’ or ‘environment’ is structured around that practice, and then generalise that account by looking at a city at three moments in its history.

Patrick Heelan, physicist, hermeneutical phenomenologist and philosopher of science, has argued that experimental science as it is practised is essentially hermeneutical, incorporating, as he puts it, a “hermeneutical shift”, or the displacement of the cut between the subject and the object as part of its practical method (Heelan 1977: 11). Heelan rejects objectivism – the belief that objectivated knowledge represents its object, without any participation of the knowing subject or human intentionality-structures. The practice of science needs to be understood first, according to Heelan, from a point of

view given in the subject’s lifeworld4 and Heelan proceeds to search for the conditions that make the particular subjective structures and modes of givenness of experimental settings possible (Heelan 1977: 25). Heelan adopts what Ihde has called an “expanded hermeneutics” which practices a ‘material hermeneutics’ and questions strong distinctions between human and natural sciences (Ihde undated). All science is about interpretation: all knowledge, scientific and cultural, must be derived from a human ontology. In Husserl this meant referring knowledge practices back to the lifeworld; in Heidegger the objects of science derive from praxis – and what science produces is practically, hermeneutically, and crucially technologically constructed (Ihde undated). Scientific (or more generally, regularised) observation and practice involves firstly the setting up of the context of action or practice. This prepared setting sets the horizon of what is both possible and expected, and it is within this horizon that regularised and repeatable observational acts will be made and interpretations drawn. The prepared setting is both physical, including all the apparatus necessary to prepare the object for observation, and intentional, embodying the intention of the subject in the equipment.

It extends the intention, perception and practice of the subject outwards beyond what is conventionally understood as the limit of the subject. Scientific experimentation involves the human subject therefore in a technically maintained relation with the scientific object, through equipment set up to a particular purpose. The purpose embedded in the equipment is in a sense diagrammatic, even explanatory, in its material embodiment because the observer-scientist understands the set-up and can manipulate and adjust the appearance of phenomena through adjustments to the equipment. The setting is an artifice: as Heelan characterises it, nature is not present in the experimental setup, what we have is a humanly-contrived phenomenon in a well-prepared setting Heelan 1977: 34). And it is this artifice that is the condition of possibility for the scientific object to reveal itself to the scientist-observer. It constitutes an optic on the matter at hand. Heelan shows us how objects, and our knowledge of them come about together: the experimental equipment is a machine for objectification; this objectification has a peculiarly ‘optical’ character, and things come to be the way we see them in the apparatus.

Scientific seeing (observation) is not achieved by passively receiving an impression, it is something prepared and learned. It involves framing a horizon of expectations of outcomes and the way these may vary under the control of the apparatus. With trial and error and with training, the scientist builds an expertise with instruments that transforms his relationship to them, so that with their help, scientific objects can manifest themselves to him in the doing of experiment – and he can stabilise this manifestation in a finely-tuned 4 The notion of Lebenswelt or lifeworld was introduced by Husserl (1970: 48). The lifeworld is identified as “the only real world, the one that is actually given through perception, that is ever experienced and experienceable.” He opposes it to the ideal world of Galilean science where there is a “surreptitious substitution of the mathematically substructed world of idealities for the only real world.” Heelan argues that the observable scientific entities of experimental science do belong to the lifeworld.

set-up so that the object may reappear at will. This practical observability of scientific states of affairs means the relation between language, observation and things is being negotiated and interpreted in practice and that there is in fact no hard distinction to be made between observational and theoretical entities. “[T]heory says what observation can see” (Heelan 1977: 30) and abstractions, including models and theories that embed those abstractions, are for making those states of affairs that science speaks about observable. What this suggests is that physics is not trying to attain a model of the world so much as construct models for the purposes of seeing and knowing (observation) and measurement!

Apparatus incorporate and embody theory and models in action and are used hermeneutically as equipment for framing and manipulating data. The active perception and intention of the scientist is mediated by the use of instruments and this use involves both manipulation and interpretation. So that, Heelan concludes, the subject side of the subject-object divide includes the instrument and its practiced use, and the instrument becomes an active means of the manipulation of the scientific object from the subject side. The boundary between subject and object is displaced outwards and we are no longer looking at theory as an abstract disembodied component of science, but as a materialised interaction between an intentional subject-equipment complex and a scientific object that is disclosed or produced in that interaction. Scientific observation involves therefore the use of equipment in which the intention of the scientist and the horizon of what he or she may see is embodied. This is what Heelan means by the displacement of the cut between subject and object and this practical and material hermeneutics involves successive displacements, embodying an expanding sphere of theory and meaning in material arrangements and apparatus.

Heelan begins to explicitly relate the lifeworld of the observer or experimenter with a practical, historical and collective process of meaning construction and with the embedding and embodying of that meaning in an evolving praxis and technology. This interpretative character of experimental science shows itself historically in two ways: firstly in the way the meaning-field of the lifeworld is being refined and transformed by theorising – an exercise whose practical nature is easily misconstrued if the role of interpretation is misunderstood; and secondly in the way meanings change in the lifeworld as it is transformed by new technological praxes (including instrumentation) embodying new theories (Heelan 1998: 176-7).

Science is therefore not an accumulation of and systematization of factual information about the world, but involves the successive construction of causal frames capable of being operationalised (literally, by being embodied in models and equipment), that transform our view of the world, constructing new realities. This is not about models substituting for reality, but about reality interpreted through the use of models. There is a full interdependence of the notions of theory and observation – reminding us of the etymological root of theoria (seeing) – as observation itself comes to depend on the way things are ‘seen’ theoretically, as well as on the apparatus and instrumentation in which a particular theoretical ‘optic’ is maintained. And what Kuhn tells us is that the continuity in the relation between successive theories or models is not

to be found in the comparable syntaxes of successive models, but in their empirical horizons (Kuhn).

Science is ‘dialectical’ according to Heelan, since any anomaly that persistently frustrates the intentional act of observation calls for adjustment or renewal of the causal frame (and its embodiment in equipment) that articulates subject and object sides of the problem. Science progresses by hermeneutical steps, and reality, as it is articulated in different theories and models, is therefore also historical. But as Kuhn also emphasises, the hermeneutical movements which comprise these efforts exist not within the lifeworlds of individual scientists but in those of scientific communities – who maintain theoretical, equipmental and other standards and hold knowledge and practices in common.

The publicness of knowing and doing

The body of the scientist as object may be maintained within a definite contour delineated by the skin; but the body as intentional subject starts to ‘leak’ into the observation equipment. The instrumentation and other technical means become co-active and enabling as part of the practice of experimentation. At the same time though the technical means is also part of the organisational and institutional structures of the laboratory, research institute and discipline – part therefore of public and organisational bodies which decide on matters of the scope and content of research programmes, the relevance or otherwise of theory, and the equipment of the laboratory. The scientist is not autonomous: he or she is not simply personally responsible for any of this. Equipment and organisational context – eventually the laboratory, the institute and the community of scientists – remain conditions of knowledge. But we begin to see also that the boundaries of a ‘spheropoietic’ logic have nothing to do with the boundaries between our established categories of subject and object, or the biological and the technological, or theory and practice. We see instead the subject merge with the object, bio with tech, theory with practice, in practical settings that nevertheless establish boundings crucial to the success of the operation.

Bounds are constructed that shield particular practices, like experimentation, within controlled settings and behind closed doors. I have begun here with the highly specialised place of the laboratory, equipped for the specialised knowings of objects like magnetic fields, or chemical clocks, or morphological heredity. But the door shielding the laboratory from the rest of the institute and from interference that may contaminate data or otherwise disrupt the experiment, also plays a role in the experiment. As does the rest of the institute, the university and so on, as other factors like academic and institutional bureaucracy, supply, maintenance and administration, are accounted for. The laboratory and university are themselves situated in structures of familiar places in our built environment that make them part of an urban and regional division of labour, and places for certain practices and actions and not for others. Many who don’t participate directly in these practices know nonetheless where they are carried out.

The situation can be broken down into active and passive components: the active part is embodied in practices and procedures; the passive context comprises all those equipmental conditions that are necessary but are not foregrounded in the search for, or recognition of an object. There is an alignment of practices, procedures, organisation and equipment that is constructed and maintained in situ. But both active and passive components incorporate ‘cause’ or ‘intention’ or ‘power’. It is simply that some of the factors supporting particular practices have been shifted so far into the technology and material and organisational settings, we no longer see them as intentional or power-related. What a phenomenology filtered through Heidegger and Heelan gives us in the end is a practical-equipmental and techno-relational inhabitation of the world by way of prepared or synthetic situations (Knorr Cetina 2009), implying as well an historical and accumulative expansion of a public lifeworld through hermeneutical shifts of intentional structures outwards into (variably) shared equipment or technology.

There is a creeping spread of order and organisation in our environment. It is shifted, a bit like the biosphere in the evolutionary theory of Stuart Kauffman, to support orders or ways of life or of regularised activity. Things belong somewhere precisely because we construct and adapt our environment to have things in place. And objects are not objects by virtue of what they are so much as by how they are oriented and available to us in practical action and in relation to other objects. These relationships cross-reference and support each other. We are, in Heidegger’s terms, “thrown” into a world already prepared by us and for us and already expectant of certain ways of knowing and doing things. There is a corporeality of the world therefore that is human and ours in a more historical and public sense than we often see. In Hannah Arendt’s words we live in a world “between men”, but also between the things that are human in this more historical sense, so that, as she emphasises, the most constraining objectivity we know is based on the unspoken agreements we have about the world between us (Arendt). In acting, in interacting, in using tools or equipment Dasein (being there or existence) becomes Mitsein (being with or coexistence), even when other people are not immediately present and when actions do not immediately involve other people. The publicness I refer to is a dense web of ties to ‘indeterminate others’ that references a common world of equipped situations which make objects coherently to-hand and available – and even coherently perceptible as what they are. The problem of a ‘relation of minds’ does not arise because a world common to us all, understood and built as present-at-hand, intervenes. We become public between things and others in a realm de Certeau characterizes as “the oceanic rumble of the ordinary … the place from which discourse is produced” (de Certeau 1984: 5).

The technological paradigm

There are for me two interesting notions in Albert Borgmann’s philosophy of technology – that of the ‘device paradigm’ and that of ‘focal things and practices’. Borgmann is interested in how technology affects and shapes the interactions people have with the world. But rather than going along with

Borgmann’s rather nostalgic view that technology alienates us from the authenticity and reality of things and practices, I want to use these two ideas of his to stretch the instrumental reality of Heelan’s view into our built environment to say something more about its structure. I also want to think of technology beyond the emphasis on the hi-tech that is so familiar today. Today technology is equated with ICTs and cyberspace and with the hi-tech mobility and communications technologies we associate with globalisation. We forget that globalisation began with wind and even oar power and that triremes, cogs and fluits have all been the technological state of the art in other times.

In the same spirit I have taken before the notion of the ‘technological paradigm’ from Manuel Castells (Castells 1989), but have not used it in the way he uses it as a generic condition arising out of microelectronic communication technologies or for the way it divides our world and our cities into ‘spaces of flows’ on the one hand and ‘spaces of places’ on the other. What I have suggested instead is that individual technologies and infrastructures are installed for particular and strategic reasons in order to create spaces that are themselves particular and strategic. Concrete cases are constructive attempts to mould worlds as perceptual fields and fields of practice and should be approached empirically if we wish to understand their purposes or effects (Read 2009). This is also closer to Kuhn who showed that there was no ‘scientific paradigm’ or continuous scientific tradition, but a multiplicity of different traditions, each with its own paradigmatic assumptions and standards of truth. Technologies embody reasons and logics, produce objects (and subjects) and establish ‘synthetic situations’ which are places in practical terms. What’s more I suggested that this ‘place-producing’ property is not restricted to the hi-tech of our time but seems to be a normal outcome of the hi-tech of any time, and has been the driving force in establishing a historically accumulated structure of places.

Borgmann’s ‘device paradigm’ emphasises the ways in which technology creates social patterns. According to Borgmann, technologies create pattern by shaping the way people live their lives. They do this by easing people’s efforts to do things and inviting new ways of doing things. Central heating for example relieved people of the effort of chopping wood, filling and cleaning the hearth, etc. It also relieved them, less positively, of the ‘focal thing’ of the hearth centring the ‘focal practice’ of caring for it and sitting around it together. For Borgmann also, technology needs to be understood empirically and in discrete ‘devices’ which form and give pattern to the fabric of our lives. But then for Borgmann devices deliver what we previously had to obtain with things, and he sees technologies as alienating and as breaking our involvement with real things. He sees things themselves as being contextual and demanding our involvement.

This is completely at odds with Heelan who saw technologies as a productive means to things. But what Borgmann adds is a space. The shaping of life by technology creates a space: a whole world of things and ways of doing things are centred around focal things and practices. And these things and ways of doing things depend on each other and make sense together. They co-contextualise each other within the space. Here we approach the ‘paradigm’

idea where a bounded set of elements depend on and co-contextualise, even co-constitute, one another. The ‘technological paradigm’ I propose is a whole arrangement of objects, subjects and practices that make sense in drawing their significance from each other. These arrangements are assembled and maintained in order that their meanings come to be and remain stable.

Ordering things in space

In these days of hi-tech and cyberspace we can forget the amazement that must have been felt by new arrivals to a city like Amsterdam around the turn of the 17th century. Because what they would have encountered in this booming and bustling place was a level of urban organisation, engineering and purpose with few equals at the time. They would have encountered a singularity; a city hauled out of the water by the accumulated industry of still remembered generations. Amsterdammers had turned the building of fishing craft into state of the art skills and technologies which took their city to the forefront of Baltic trade and equipped it to position itself as the entrepôt of Europe. A (surprisingly sophisticated) fishing boat of the 11th century morphed over time to become craft adapted to not one but two specialised tasks: the first plying the North and Baltic Seas, and the second transporting goods on the urban canals of Amsterdam. The city coevolved with and was shaped by these technologies as a system of canals was built inland from the harbour-front to convey goods from the harbour to markets and the houses of merchants.

Within this system, the city and its elements were positioned and defined. Roland Barthes, referring to paintings by Berckheyde, wrote of the "itemizing power" of the Dutch canals and compared them to the French Civil Code with its "list of real estate and chattels. ... Every definition and every manipulation of property produce an art of the catalogue, in other words, of the concrete itself, divided, countable, mobile.”

Amsterdam, the Nieuwezijds near the Bloemmarkt, 1670-75: Gerrit Adriaensz. Berckheyde. Historisch Museum, Amsterdam.

“Add to the vehicular movement of the water the vertical plane of the houses which retain, absorb, interpose, or restore the merchandise: that whole concert of pulleys, chutes and docks effects a permanent mobilisation of the most shapeless substances. ... [O]bjects interrupt each horizon, glide along the water and along the walls. It is objects which articulate space. The object is by and large constituted by this mobility, Hence the defining power of all these Dutch canals. What we have clearly is a water-merchandise complex; it is water which makes the object, giving all the nuances of a calm planar mobility, collecting supplies, shifting them without perceptible transition from one exchange to the other, making the entire city into a census of agile goods.” ... “[E]verything is, for the object, a means of procession; this bit of wharf is a cynosure of kegs, logs, tarpaulins; man has only to overturn or to hoist; space, obedient creature, does the rest – carries backward and forth, selects, distributes, recovers, seems to have no other goal than to complete the projected movement of all these things, separated from matter by the sleek, firm film of use; here all objects are prepared for manipulation, all have the detachment and the density of Dutch cheeses: round, waxed prehensible (Barthes 1972: 6-7) .

La Ville d'Amsterdam, 1690: Jacques Harrewijn.

The water-merchandise complex Barthes identified was a space centred on the focal place of the harbour – drawing the harbour via the network of canals into the city – and centring the focal practices of goods movement, hoisting and storage. This may not have been all there was to Amsterdam, but it was crucial for the city’s everyday functionality and it formed the city to a structure simultaneously material and meaningful. The canals were an equipment that formed and centred an everyday society, economy and geography as a bounded and centred place. But this was just one of two worlds the inhabitants of Amsterdam had contrived in their accumulated skills and industry. Because the network of urban canals, markets and storehouses was complimented by another network – of cities, without which the first would have been pointless. This other network was of the suppliers, markets, and particularly other cities, with which Amsterdam’s merchants traded. And these two worlds were hinged together in the harbour. The changing shape of this other network was the reason for the enormous gain in the fortunes of the city in the course of the seventeenth century – but the internal organisational structure of the city was also crucial to this development.

The harbour was where most of the activity was – at the interface and articulation between the intra-city infrastructure of goods transport and an inter-city system of trade and exploitation. It is this articulation of spaces that established a valued place around which further developments would be accumulated. Exactly the same place at the beginning of the 21st century is an interface and articulation between a late 20th-century regional

infrastructure of exurban centres and suburbs built around motorway and rail systems, and an early 20th century urban infrastructure of residential neighbourhoods and public transportation.

This early 20th century city had been built on a belated industrialisation which began in the second half of the 19th century and which saw new industrial, harbour and housing areas being built for the first time beyond the walls that had contained the city since the 17th century. A city oriented via the canals on its harbour began reorienting as it expanded on the land side. A number of significant street grid adjustments were made as the street pattern was adapted to new patterns of use and movement on the land side (Wagenaar 220-21). The wall itself was demolished to build new housing and factories as well as take traffic around the edge of the centre. Around the turn of the century the municipality took over of the tram, gas, water, electricity and telephone services and this marked the beginnings of a different kind of modern social contract between citizen and government (van der Woud 2001: 194). The reorientation of the city was centred on a tram system which became a critical component of a project of city building of the post first world war years. This created a modern, social-democratic city in the place of the faded trading port Amsterdam had been just a few years earlier. Infrastructure projects were tied not just to a logic of accessibility but involved a political project of the re-formation of the city. Van der Woud stresses the ‘normality’ and ‘common interest’ instituted in these modern technical, institutional and organisational conditions which along with their technological underpinnings become part of a collective field of perception, feeling and action (van der Woud 2006: ch 8, 166).

A public transportation system became a strategy for realising a municipal vision of a modern city, and a different urban territorial unit became established as the city was concretely realised and “identified in different spheres of social action and social consciousness” (Paasi 1986: 121). The result was a different ‘place’, and a different materialisation of a functional and perceptual structure within which people would communicate, interact and coordinate their activities. It is not simply the plan of the city that was realised around public transportation; all the components of the modern city were realised at the same time in an ongoing work of organisation, and maintained in their order for the sense they made by being in place. The agency of this maintenance was not so much an organic society as a civic tidiness and a commitment to the maintenance of an embodied discourse and particular vision of civitas.

We establish, in the technical infrastructure, a material semiotics of things in place which we maintain and do things in, as if these ways of doing things were perfectly normal – which of course they are. The construction of a place is in a very fundamental way about the realisation and objectification of the thing and its components in an embodied political-intentional structure. It is also about the synthesis of a network of situations which are commensurable and connect with each other. In the simple case I am highlighting it means that a transport means and its associated schedules, routes, stops, and relations with local facilities, enable one to act in the network. There is a technological rationality about this that is inescapable. But this rationality is

not universal: it is of this particular technical system, its objects, subjects, places, intentions and practices – and it ends where they end.

At the beginning of the 21st century regimes of movement, practice and place-identity, for a large proportion of the urban population, are tied not to inner-city places and neighbourhoods but to networks of places beyond the bounds of the modern city. Reyner Banham wrote more than 30 years ago of Los Angeles that “[t]he freeway system in its totality is now a single comprehensible place, a coherent state of mind, a complete way of life” (Banham 2001: 195). Business, commerce and industry exist today in production, supply, and customer networks as part of this infrastructure, and urban people and functions have relocated here. While the process of the making of the metropolitan city has not been as politically explicit a matter as was the making of the modern city, we nevertheless see a specific technological rationality set up as transportation planning and highway engineering have worked to systematise it and give it form. A regional space has been constructed, quite distinct from that of the modern city, which maintains the rationale of a way of life which integrates the objects, subjects, places and practices of a late-capitalist consumer society. There is nothing abstract or mysterious about this; it is a purposeful construction that institutes and maintains a given social order in situ.

But the objects and practices that gather to this new infrastructure don’t exist on their own. Many of the metropolitan places metropolitan people travel to are strongly articulated with other already established infrastructures. And the metropolitan infrastructure, as it has grown, has always been articulated with historical infrastructures and places. So the growth of a new infrastructure is always and necessarily constrained by and articulated with what was built before, while it incorporates older places and transforms them to the new order.

Where to locate the ‘Architectural Body’?

There is a lot more to say about the scenarios I have sketched here – especially about the submerged politics of technocracy in the intentional city-building practices of the post-modern, post-industrial city. But for the project of the Architectural Body this account serves to situate us and focus our minds on the strategy that will be necessary to even get the project off the ground – and in a way that does not reduce it to another consumable event in the post-modern landscape. I don’t think it overstates the case to say we are desperate for ideas about how to build places we can inhabit; I hope we can do this by seeing clearly where we are, what the potential obstacles are, and where the strategic procedures and potentials may be found to build a city which will sustain us in future technological settings which will and must be the ground of our being and being with others.

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