Space

Reservoir of Support / Luminous Clearing / Incessant Murmur

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Minecraft image by Djohaal

This is a very beautiful passage from Alphonso Lingis’s ‘The Elemental Imperative’, regarding Levinas’s separation of sensing from perception:

“The ground, reservoir of support, the light, the luminous clearing, the silence or the incessant murmur of the city, the heat and the damp of the monsoon, the night in which all the contours of the things are engulfed and which is not nothingness but darkness—these surfaceless phenomena, without contours, inobservable from different viewpoints, without boundaries, but also without horizons, are not simply conditions fot the possibility of things, as Husserl defined the field, nor simply the dimensions in which objects are extended, like the infinite space-time dimensions of Kantian pure sensibility, nor are they levels generating things. One comes upon things in light, distributed over the supporting earth; one hears a sound in the slience; one takes hold of a tool in the dark, moves it in the light. But what get apprehended as things also revert to the elemental. As a tool a hammer is a surface of resistance and an axis of force determinate in its involvement with other surfaces, implements and obstacles. But the tool, in being used, reverts to a rhythm in the vigor of the carpenter bathed in the morning sun. The house is a tool-chest, in which implements are arranged in the order most suitable to the specific uses of the inhabitant, a machine for living, as Le Corbusier said, but in being inhabited, it and all its contents sink into the elemental density of a zone of intimacy and retreat from the open roads of the world.”

It’s the first point in Lingis’s paper to hold my attention, although I’m still processing it. There is something very attractive in the idea of conditions that are not simply backgrounds, or conditions of possibility, or conditions of generation, but elemental conditions.

Bridges and Doors

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"Highway damaged by the Northridge earthquake, California, January 1994", from Bruce Mau, Massive Change; (2004)

Georg Simmel, in a short text called ‘Bridge and Door’, writes of the dual nature of reality: as simultaneous fully connected and entirely disconnected.

“The image of external things possesses for us the ambiguous dimension that in exernal nature everything can be considered to be connected, but also as separated. The uninterrupted transformations of materials as well as energies brings everything into relationship with everything else and make one cosmos out of all the individual elements. On the other hand, however, the objects remain banished in the merciless separation of space; no particle of matter can share its space with another and a real unity of the diverse does not exist in spatial terms.” (1997: 170-71)

Clearly, Simmel is thinking here of disconnection in Cartesian space. For him, space is the medium of connection and disconnection. His assertion that things cannot occupy the same space relies on the assumption that the things in question are made of exclusive lumps of matter. If we make allowances for this, however, permitting a broader conception of ‘things’ that doesn’t presume a spatial medium, there’s a nice resonance here with Graham Harman and Bruno Latour’s perspectives on the separation of objects, and the concept of a total referential contexture (Harman’s term).

I’ve been reading Timothy Morton‘s Ecological Thought (2010) and discussing it with students. It’s a nice way into speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, because right at the very outset it presents a simple, intuitive concept with deep rabbit-hole potential:

“The ecological crisis we face is so obvious that it becomes easy – for some, strangely or frighteningly easy – to join the dots and see that everything is interconnected. This is the ecological thought. And the more we consider it, the more our world opens up.” (Morton, 2010: 1)

I’m really enjoying my conversations with students about this. Some students (perhaps a slight majority), saw this as an intimidating proposition. One conceded that it might be a possible way of thinking, but asked if it’s a useful one from a human perspective, and others commented that it gave them a sense of placelessness (how do I position myself in this infinite tangle?) and disempowerment (because the lack of grounding in concepts like Nature or Society gave little to push against). Against this, one student suggested that in fact, this was an empowering understanding, because it meant that things were actually connected and we could therefore have actual effects on the world. Because everything is connected, everything can possibly be affected.

It’s important to balance the idea of connectedness, I think, with the observation that things are only connected because a connection is established. Connections are made. While interconnectedness is a matter of fact, it is a contingent fact: things that are connected, could possibly be disconnected as well (I like Meillassoux’s idea that contingency is the only necessity – that the only thing that is certain is that things could be different to how they are). Simmel presents this dual condition nicely. He refers to the way that bridges and doors are both connectors and separators, revealing decisively, “how separation and connecting are only two sides of precisely the same act” (172):

“Precisely because it can also be opened, [the door’s] closure provides the feeling of a stronger isolation against everything outside this space than the mere unstructured wall. The latter is mute, but the door speaks.” (172)

Simmel clearly can’t remotely be considered as an object-oriented-ontologist avant la lettre. His essay goes on to argue that it is an essentially human ability to connect things, and allied to this is the observation that it is only humans who separate things: “Only for us are the banks of a river not just apart but ‘separated’… Because the human being is the connecting creature who must always seaprate and cannot connect without separating – that is why we myst first conceive intellectually of the merely indifferent existance of two river banks as something separated in order to connect them by means of a bridge.” (171-74)

One of the most subversive and powerful strategies in the object-oriented toolkit is to ask the question, ‘but why only humans?’. Simmel is wrong about the privileged role of humans in separation and connection, but he’s not wrong about the importance of recognising their simultaneity. If we substitue the more general ‘objects’ for humans in Simmel’s text (mad-libs style), we have a fascinating picture of their efficacy. Objects stand in the doorway, as it were:

“Life on the earthly plane, however, as at every moment it throws a bridge between the unconnectedness of things, likewise stands in every moment inside or outside the door through which it will lead from its separate existence into the world, or from the world into its separate existence.” (174)

Harman, G. (2006). Tool-Being. (Chicago, IL: Open Court).

Meillassoux, Q. (2008). After Finitude. An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. (London, UK: Continuum).

Morton, T. (2010). The Ecological Thought. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

Simmel, G. (1997). Simmel on Culture. (London, UK: Sage).

Infrastructural Space

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I’m at the planning stages for a paper on infrastructural space aimed at undergraduate students. I intend the paper to serve as a springboard for further inquiry: a substantial theoretical background, lots of examples, and raising the question of designing in and alongside, infrastructural systems. This is the abstract I’ve written so far:

In the 21st century, one of the major determiners of our space is infrastructure. We are plugged into motorways, railways, telecommunications networks, wireless data transmitters, air-conditioning systems, financial networks, electricity lines, sewers. Infrastructure is not only an urban condition, either: entire regions of NZ have been harnessed for power-generating, dairy-farming depends on a milk-collecting infrastructure, and irrigation is one of the oldest of human infrastructures. This paper explores the spatiality of infrastructure. It describes how infrastructural space differs from contained space, and outlines some of the implications and opportunities for spatial designers in an infrastructural world.

Networks are a precondition for many of the characteristics of the 21st century world: rapid mobility, instantaneous data transfer, information processing. Many of the things we do that used to require lots of material constructions and artefacts can now be carried out remotely from nearly anywhere. This is commonly seen as a dematerialising effect of networks, but it is more accurate to see it as a rematerialisation. Infrastructure lessens the importance of service spaces to which you go (like banks, bookshops), and increases the importance of spaces through which things pass: hubs, distribution centres, passages.

Manuel Castells argued in 1996 that a new form of society had emerged, which he called ‘network society’. Networks, systems of interconnected nodes, had become a dominant form, not only of the things we make, but of our societies as well. Network society, Castells argued, was characterised by a new kind of space, the space of flows. A number of other writers near the turn of the twenty-first century picked up on this thought: Mark C. Taylor in The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (2001); Negri and Hardt in Empire (2001) followed up by their Multitudes: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004), and Kazys Varnelis in The Infrastructural City (2007) and Networked Publics (2008). Infrastructure operates in network space. It is based on connectivity. In network space, my presence is not determined by the physical location of my body, but by my connectedness.

The 2009 recession has brought infrastructure to the fore. Many of the governmental stimulus packages initiated globally emphasise infrastructure projects, because they are labour-intensive, providing jobs; because they are too difficult for private capital to undertake; and because by generating new connections, greater flows of people, goods, information, and crucially, capital, can be anticipated in future. In particular, ‘green’ infrastructure is prominent: low-environmental-impact energy generation, and public transport especially. Infrastructure can be environmentally disruptive, and there has been a great deal of concern for how infrastructure might act to integrate natural flows.

This paper will progress through a series of propositions, illustrated with examples: infrastructure indicates a spatiality of connectedness rather than containment; in the present, our space is infrastructurally defined; the concept of nature is being transformed infrastructurally; the position of being off-the-grid is an important critical opportunity.

There are a number of open issues, particularly differences between networks and an infrastructures (can we really conflate the two as synonyms?), and shifts and developments since the turn-of-the-century thinking about them. It’s a major defect in this abstract that no specific examples are addressed yet. There’s probably also a little historical material that needs to get in: the modernist fascination with infrastructure as an abstract assertion of human potency (Corb’s Algiers project, etc.), and some of the 70s oil-shock-triggered sense of a global environment (Fuller), and the 60s displacement of architecture into infrastructure by Archigram. This alone could fill hundreds of papers so I may be limited in what I include. Another open question is the relation between infrastructure and globalism – although current infrastructural practices and discourses incorporate the concepts of a finite environment and the facilitation of global circulation of flows, I don’t believe infrastructure is necessarily derived from a global view. However, it does seem that infrastructural development is increasingly promoted as a fundamental premise for engagement with a global community.

Any thoughts or suggestions from people more expert in this area would be welcomed.