CONCEPT 02 ENTANGLEMENT

After an all too long interruption to transmission, caused by the combination of a technical problem and an impossible workload, we are back. The following is a text  for AGENDA, the 2008 catalogue from the School of Architecture at the University of Technology Sydney.

Urbanism is a discipline in dire need of creativity and ambition. We live in the aftermath of the apparent failure of those projects that made claims for social transformation. We are told they present us with the only optimism left… the optimism of ruins. Thirty years of caution, of retreat into nostalgic notions of community, of hand wringing self effacement and false humility, thirty years of disavowed hope and inconsequential tinkering seems finally over. As urbanists new and old run home – humanist aspirations tucked between their legs –environmental crisis and explosive modernisation continue unabated.  Urbanism plays perpetual catch up to Shenzhen or New Orleans (or maybe Gaza).

How do we make urbanism more intellectually robust and muscular? How can we inoculate it against sentimentality and brace it for crisis?

The contemporary urban environment is a complex mixture of many heterogeneous systems. Infrastructure for moving waste, water and telecommunications lie under the city in a knitted web of canals and pathways; overhead, a broad spectrum of electromagnetic radiation carries data on everything from traffic movement to financial transactions; populations of migrants carry forms of speech and behaviour that will mutate and replicate in the host population; fuels are spent, laws are passed, businesses open and close, all in all a staggeringly complicated and only minimally choreographed sequence of events.

Cities operate according to both physical and virtual dynamics, they are subject to moments of fragility, are able to demonstrate resilience or weakness, generating cohesive networks for communication, repair damaged fabric and accelerate economies. This infrastructure intensifies the flow of people and goods, of labour power lured by commerce or desperation or the promise of warm weather. These global movements seem to simultaneously present cities with both their greatest threat and opportunity.

[Image: David Maisel "Oblivion" Nazraeli Press 2006]

Premium brand ‘Logo Cities’ compete with each other for attention, all trying to bite into the great currents of capital and skilled work that stream across the surface of the earth whilst shielding themselves ever more ruthlessly from the accumulation of ‘human waste’. This production of desire, connectivity and flow means threats can also be shared as quickly as benefits. In this permanent state of anxiety, punctuated by emergencies – both real and imagined – the decoupling of transmission from its traditional pathways and barriers reorganises space. This mutating tissue of connectivity simply means that material is distributed much more easily in ways we are less sure of. Memetic replicators, slang, viral marketing and deadly viruses mutate, reproduce and propagate across material (and sometimes immaterial) transmission pathways. Blackberries and Ebola can go global, all it takes is one infected businessman travelling Caligula class on Qantas.

Just as viruses can start to link up host bodies along travel routes, global warming links up seemingly disconnected cities and starts to tie their fates together. Suddenly the fate of Cairo and London, Kolkata and New Orleans become enmeshed with the fates of all the other great river delta cities. Bound by their shared vulnerability to changes in sea level, these linkages are supra-territorial, they are not based in the commonalities of the nation state such as language and citizenship, nor are they the commonalities of national regions, or of ex-colonies. No, what we are seeing is something quite distinct and novel, that is the binding of fates along the lines of processes which are now increasingly out of control, a collective experiment with unknown ingredients. The single biggest paradigm of urban life is not its complexity but its entanglement. We are knotted together in a complex experiment of which we cannot know the outcome.

“The problem is that while we know how to conduct a scientific experiment in the narrow confines of a laboratory, we have no idea how to pursue collective experiments in the confusing atmosphere of a whole culture.”

”Atmosphére, Atmosphére” Bruno Latour, ‘The Weather Project’ New Tate Gallery

We live in an era of categorical promiscuity, on September 11 and during hurricane Katrina the third world penetrated the first. Amidst images of smoke clouds and debris, stagnant flood waters and bloated corpses we have learnt that cities repeat in miniature the divisions that once demarcated national boundaries.

How does a discipline adapt to a situation in which the catastrophic or the disastrous inform the general condition even if they have not yet become it, in turn, how does the exception retain its status as exception once it has been applied to the general? These insistent and paradoxical questions about the nature of the generic and the singular should form a backdrop to any speculation about the relationship between urbanism and politics.

Urbanism is a constellation of practices involved in the spatial determination of the city. These practices are in conflict and antagonistic like an unconscious pulling in different directions. Urbanism demands divergent modes of practice because the scales at which it operates demand registers of decision making that are irreconcilable to each other. Scale is not measure; rather, it names the incommensurability that pertains between qualitatively different problems. Conflict, in this sense, is central to urbanism.

Within this charged environment we can discern an infinite number of potential conceptual personae and their attendant strategies and tactics. Appropriating different conceptual personae means embracing the often schizophrenic nature of contemporary work practice. Urbanism, which cuts across so many different spatial, technical, political and cultural domains, necessitates an ability to morph between and integrate diverse registers of thinking and practice. The list of conceptual personae is potentially endless, a cast of characters that one must opportunistically appropriate. Combinations of masks, ruses and costumes that deploy any available means to effect change. Each personae articulates quite distinct approaches to the nature of spatial agency in the city. The following dialectical stage play will introduce only a few of the most common types:

The Seismographer

The seismographer compiles evidence for uncommitted acts in a trial that never arrives.  A connoisseur of all things vibratory, for the seismographer no movement is too small to register, no nuance too subtle to record. Replete with modern day stethoscopes and sensors and other devices for listening in and accumulating information, the seismographer operates according to utterly non-discriminatory rules of engagement. Everything is equal-in-its-capacity-to-be-recorded.  Information can be deterritorialized or dematerialized without consequence.

In what we might call an ‘emergent’ view of urbanism, the city is capable of auto(poetic)production. It is self organized, able to spontaneously generate patterns of stable behaviour without the intervention of directed authority. Authority, if there is any here, consists in tuning the already existing signals that cross the urban field. Authorship is more like a material collaboration where the city becomes a co-conspirator.

Manipulating flows of information, reservoirs of energy and material in what Gilles Deleuze and Manuel De Landa call ‘non-organic life’, this conception accords to the city the properly creative capacity of an open material system in which pattern formation or metastability is the consequence of the regular interaction of lower level components. The seismographer knows that no single author is responsible for the towers that ring Hong Kong Bay, they are yet another algorithmically tumescent consequence of capital mobility and real estate speculation, their authorship is semi-anonymous and collective and belongs to the city itself.

Similarly for the complex geometries of old towns and villages, morphogenetic development occurs through the interaction of local agents operating in a constrained environment with little overall sense or strategy. An anonymous materiality with intrinsic tendencies and extrinsic constraints, morphology is the creative resolution of a fundamental resistance or conflict. These urban forms grow from the bottom up; their baroque complexity is the emergent result of a natural material interplay.

Central to this understanding of the city is a naturalisation of capital such that certain tendencies in the urban field are understood via ecological or evolutionary metaphors. The prevalence of ecological or evolutionary metaphors in this emergent view of urban development is worth noting. Cities are beginning to be understood as having self-regulatory mechanisms, there is competition for limited resources and battles for territory, genetic material mingles, behaviours evolve and adapt and life seems to take on the appearance of a Darwinian competition for survival in which the role of the urbanist is to record and study the complex choreography of this depoliticised ecology… like a seismographer listening out for vibrations.

The emergent urbanist is only a minimally self-reflexive figure. One no longer designs the object directly, now one produces a world in which the object exists as a possibility. Wanting badly to believe in Darwin but really believing in a form of creationism. This disavowal of direct authorship seems a necessary complement to its ultimate (if obscured) reassertion. Therefore, it is highly recommended that emergent processes are best combined with ruthlessly tyrannical attempts at domination and mastery.

The insurgent

‘An IRA man in a balaclava is at the gates of heaven when St. Peter comes to him and says, “I’m afraid I can’t let you in.” “Who wants to get in?” the IRA man retorts, “You’ve got twenty minutes to get the fuck out.”

Urbanism is not reducible to data analysis or even its modulation. It is in an act, a decision that is projective. Architecture and urbanism must reserve the right to a register of decision making that is literally unjustifiable within current paradigms.

According to contemporary theorists raging from Slavoj Zizek to Alain Badiou, the post-political defines a situation in which logics of management and systems of administration replace the role of politics-proper. According to this new regime of control; consensus replaces dissent and particularity replaces universality with regards to political demands.

The realm of proper-political action is the realm of the scaffold and the guillotine. The insurgent disrupts the logical machinery of post-political thinking by demanding the impossible. Where the seismographer is highly localised and concerned with the nuance of a specific context, the insurgent demands universality. The insurgent does not provide options for the careful deviation or thoughtful modulation of an already existing state of affairs; they simply propose a new world, complete with a new heaven and a new earth.  Intuition is here elevated to artful method, untroubled by inconsistencies and processual discontinuity design operates by leaps and hammer blows. The fundamental inscrutability of our decision making is retained and respected.

Whereas an emergent conception of urbanism privileges’ notions of continuity, the insurgent reserves the right to discontinuity and interruption. There are important political consequences to these different views of urbanism. An emergent conception of urban design understands that development is slow and occurs via the interaction of different agents; change rarely occurs suddenly and is usually only ever understood in retrospect. This would contrast with a winner takes all version of design where an entire politico-spatial conception of urban life is being proposed.

The insurgent takes on many varied forms, sometimes appearing as agitator sometimes appearing as court jester… but always appearing in opposition – power seems to dull revolutionary fervour.

The pragmatist

Pragmatism in urban design has come to represent nothing more than the abortion of those social ambitions described in the introduction. It is hard to think of a more debased concept. To adopt a pragmatic disposition, we are told, is to be concerned with that which is achievable to the exclusion of all else and to limit our thinking within commonly established parameters that clearly prescribe the extent of potential difference. A conservative profession imagines that the avant-garde needs more of it, the avant-garde assumes the profession has nothing else. Though both points of view use it to bludgeon the other, both positions are equally defeatist.

The definition of pragmatism says in part: “A concern for material or practical consequences”. No one is against material consequences, the question is rather; ‘what do we mean by consequence?’ For the conservative pragmatist, it is the reliability of the past as a model for the present that is consequential. For the avant-garde, it is the fantasy of the future that devalues the status of the present. One group is too obedient to tradition, the other is petrified that understanding tradition means being traditional and it goes without saying that no accusation could be worse.

Whether one chooses to unthinkingly lubricate the flow of capital or the flow of fantasy is irrelevant. Both positions are the same in that they are equally disentangled from the actual complications of the present, after all ‘the future’ is only the left wing version of the past. As with all such false ultimatums, the only response is to refuse both. The radicality of the insurgent position is haunted by the spectre of left wing political transformation that stretches all the way back to Karl Marx. It is a position that one could argue is diametrically constrained by totalitarian social mobilisation or embittered sideline commentary. Perhaps if the concept of pragmatism can be radicalised enough, it might just offer a mode of engagement that is always concerned with actualised outcomes without necessarily adhering to prefinished ideological categories.

How do we radicalise the notion of pragmatism?

…By staging the intersection of contemporary techniques and concrete realities.

The lab technician

Experimentation is a term taken from science. It is a procedure that sets out to explore a set of beliefs about the world. In science, experimentation is almost exclusively done in closed systems. Closed systems allow variables to be isolated from outside influence.  This initial distinction establishes the framework within which certain materials will be admitted or not.  By deciding on what is included in the experiment one makes a decision on what is important, what will be the subject focus of the experiment to the exclusion of other potential subjects? The methodology of the experiment then proceeds to produce a space in which only the minimum number of required variables are included. The experiment encloses these chosen variables in order to track their behaviour outside of the influence of that which is deemed unimportant to the experiment.

An open system is one in which the amount of material in a system is able to exchange with that systems environment. Whilst a closed system is contained with regards to its outside or environment, an open system is permeable, there is a flow or communication across the limits of the system through which material or energy may move.

As has been noted, it is the difference between swimming in a pool and swimming in an ocean.

Fundamental to thinking about any experiment in a closed space is the concept of repetition. In order for the results of an experiment in a closed system to be verifiable they must be able to be repeated. In order to transfer knowledge across different experimental domains, environmental and contextual information must be perfectly reproduced, only after the perfect repetition of the experimental space and the repetition of the results of the experiment can an outcome be considered to be verified.

The entire history of experimentation in closed system is a history of the exclusion of singularities in the name of discovering, identifying, and tracking regularities, that is repetitions.

Unfortunately for far too long we have confused the laboratory for the world. That is we have mistakenly thought that the closed laboratory can stand in for the open world. Closed laboratories operate as a buffer, preventing cascading effects outside of the experimental confines. Success was limited, but so was disaster.

Not so anymore. Globalisation means that the laboratory is now co-extensive with the planet. Just as there is no control to which we can refer or revert to, so there is no longer any outside to the experimental space, instead we are all located on the inside of the laboratory. (The messianic moment in contemporary architectural discourse would deploy the threat of impending catastrophe to simultaneously mobilize and legitimize action. One should instead propose a more sober disposition to hysterical rhetoric, simply that of experimental engagement.)

“In times past, a scientist or a philosopher of science worked in a closed site, the laboratory, where a small group of specialised experts scaled down (or scaled up) phenomena that they could repeat at will through simulations or modelling before presenting their results. Then, and only then, could they be diffused, applied, or tried out in the public sphere. We recognise here the ‘trickling down’ theory of scientific influence: from a confined centre of rational enlightenment, knowledge emerged and then slowly spread out to the rest of society. The public could choose to find out the results of the laboratory tests or remain indifferent to them, but it certainly could not add to them, dispute them, far less contribute to their elaboration. Science was an activity carried out inside the walls of the laboratory. Experiments were undergone by animals, materials, figures and software. Outside the laboratory was the realm of experience – not experiment.”

”Atmosphére, Atmosphére” Bruno Latour, ‘The Weather Project’ New Tate Gallery

When predictability is impossible and the very belief in predictability dangerous, then controlled experimentation is the only answer. To test, to propose, to study a response. Whether we like it or not we are all lab technicians, collectively experimenting on the conditions of contemporary life.