Week IV - V: Planetary Environment & Map of Operations
Soala Ajienka
Week IV - Planetary Environment
“…to suddenly become aware of one’s own putrescence, to be forced to live intimately with one’s own death, contemplating it as a real possibility”
“…if you eat corn and it’s a lot, you will sneeze. If you walk in the rain and it beats you, you will sneeze. If it gets into your body, you will sneeze. So forget about sneezing. There is no place we can’t stand, there is nothing like covid-19. As a person, I don’t know what covid-19 is, I have never seen it.”
‘suddenly’ in the first assertion by Mbembe jumps out as peculiar. Seemingly, the world has forgotten the possibility of death. Perhaps some cannot. The second quote is from a ‘man on the street’ interview of a hawker carried out by a Nigerian news station looking to question why a significant proportion of the Nigerian population did not believe that covid-19 existed in its early days and why the concept of lockdowns were so foreign that you’ll be laughed out of a room if you vehemently made a case for them with graphs and statistics at your fingertips. A place where the daily sustenance of over 60% of the population is predicated on their ability to leave their homes and engage their corpus with the ‘outside’ socioeconomically - an ‘inside’ for some not existing, to draw from the duality painted by Barber (Barber D., p.47). When the extended ‘footprint’ - to borrow from Graham et al - of those ‘suddenly becoming aware of their putrescence’ is laid out to the fullest extent, it implicates the people for whom ‘outside’ is a necessity. My aim here, which I will explain further, is not to contrast the implications of wealth and a lack thereof or to entangle myself with the politics of Covid-19 in the US, but to present a parallel to Barber’s bid for an after comfort, in societies where discomfort is daily life.
‘Rising sea levels’ & ‘global warming’ are terms that form part of the vocabulary adopted to fathom our ‘footprint in the expenditure of the carbon-based energy so central to our lives and patterns of inhabitation” (Graham et al, p.9) They are our reality and as narratives of our collective present as well as calls to action, they evoke a sense of impending danger in the process of making landfall. They conjure images of power plants with billowing smoke (or automobiles with billowing smoke depending on the level of self-flagellation with varying degrees in all of us) juxtaposed against whole towns submerged by floods and heat syncope overtaking swathes of a population seemingly detached from our reality. Perhaps our buildings can save us, with foundations laid on reclaimed/sand filled sites kitted with robust HVAC systems (most likely not). Our preoccupation with the environment should not only stem from a confrontation with our own mortality as a ‘matter of fact’, but should become a ‘matter of concern’, where the whole ‘scenography’ of entanglements is laid bare and confronted (Ghosn R. Jazairy, E. p.21). Suddenly, the pressure placed on oil companies for more sustainable practices is not merely about CO2 emissions causing the ‘melting of Antarctica because rising sea levels pose a threat to coastal urban centres’ - to borrow an example used by Ghosn and Jazairy – but is also about the CO2 emissions from gas flares that lead to the warming of entire towns in Southern Nigeria, the ecology of which is (ir)reversibly polluted, the vicinity of which is populated by traders, subjected and exposed to toxins and sweltering conditions, risking comfort to be able to sustain their livelihood.
(PS.. My use of Nigeria as a spatial context for both ‘globalisation’ and ‘planetary environment’ should be seen as a reality yes but should also be seen as a stand in for the framework of pockets around the world in which these carbon entanglements play out. There is also a subtext here for the revival of momento mo...).
George Osodi, 2001.
‘Man on the Street’ Interview (3:04) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnnUo0CAwQ
Mbembe, Achille. “The Universal Right to Breathe.” 2020.
Barber, Daniel A. “After Comfort,” Log 47: Overcoming Carbon Form. 2019.
Ghosn, Rania, El Hadi Jazairy. “Introduction,” Geostories. Actar, 2018.
Graham, James, et al. “Climactic Imaginaries,” Introduction to Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary. Lars Muller, 2016.
harris c
Week IV - Planetary Environment
I find Daniel's fiction of 'comfort' very weak. As much as I agree with his sentiment, I find his logic a bit dangerous.
Comfort and discomfort are constructed/mediated/encountered/diffracted through various apparatuses - physical, social, ideological for example. Daniels understands this, what he perhaps doesn’t acknowledge is the relativity of comfort and discomfort, their mutual contingency. I want to find a way out of this traip, to understand more contextually the moral economy of the restorative climate justice he gestures to. This quality of the argument left me wondering what a way forward would be of understanding the moral economy of the sort of restorative climate justice he gestures to.
To explain my frustration we can look to plastic straws. Plastic straws have become a sort of icon (totem? avatar? sacrificial lamb) - graspable, representable, aesthetic, physical, stable, and material object - of the foes of green revolution. They’re demonized, their users are demonized, and their removal is made to be an important political imperative of the project of environmental justice. This is framed by an argument that symbolic gestures precede ‘macro’ political action because they are useful at awakening citizens to their role and agency in political projects at larger scales - it’s implied that these symbolic gestures will contribute to the snowballing of public opinion that will lead to macro political shifts. Symbolic gestures of this order - paper straw, bake sale, livestrong bracelet - are placating mechanisms. They satiate the attention deficit citizen’s limited capacity for selflessness and allow the citizen to reward themselves for ‘moral’ action. The symbolic gesture quiets a deep human desire for justice, misleading it with scraps.
Back to comfort: When the single-use plastic straw is replaced not by a biodegradable single-use or reusable metal, bamboo, or glass straw but by a paper one or a sippy lid, we understand how comfort participates in contemporary politics. The paper straw is bad. The sippy cup lid is worse. Both appear actually engineered for misfunction - leaking, sagging, infantilizing allegories for our diseased political order. Their disfunction, the discomfort they produce for the user, here functions as a sort of hazing for your choice to comply with the order of the paper straw. Not to mention the fantasies of self-harm and glamorization of suffering as purifying experience that transmute experiences of 'discomfort' into those of extreme self-pleasure. I suffer so I must be doing good.
The political gesture of the straw (masquerading as positive) which is in fact useless, distracting, exhausting and negative transmutes into a radical rejection (for a moment) of your seat in the order of comfort. Comfort is a commodity, a gift, a promise, implied in the structure of life in the ‘developed’ world. For the citizen of the developed world to reject their own comfort, for them to choose discomfort (choice requires agency), means they’ve traded a commodity - comfort - but for what? For the moral ease that comes with being able to repent for overuse - for the fiction of ‘comfort reparations’. These questions are essential to understanding our place in the totality Sarkis describes (via Latour’s panorama) - in the world as a project, hopefully a collective one. As long as we lack imaginations of our world as a whole beyond those handed down to us by the chain retailers that populate junkspace's infinite corridors or the political idealogues,
In reading about this worlding vision from the perspective of a different generation writing in 2010 I was reminded of how embedded my worldview is within imaginations of the world as a totality - in particular via an early 2000's PBS Kids program.
Cyberchase, PBS Kids, 2002-2004.
In Cyberchase, a trio of human children travel into a 3-D world where an epic conflict wages on between "Motherboard" and "Hacker". They travel to various minor planets in this virtual universe to complete puzzles of math, logic, and physics on their weekly mission to save motherboard. The world of cyberchase - or rather space in cyberchase - is embodied, not described and occupies a 3-dimensional media, aqueous, porous, non planar. Views of planets from far off represent them graphically, their spatial qualities obscured until the user arrives at the planet (cybersites). To travel through the tower of babel stylized library (the cybrary) is to understand and know the library. To see the library from the exterior is to know nothing. To find rational forms of knowledge in the world - through organic puzzles, riddles, and filters - is to learn. This rejection of 'seeing as knowing' and acknowledgement of the deeply incomprehensible limit of the world we have entered allows for ambiguity - allows for not knowing as a form of 'knowing'. Ambiguity is a weighty proposition for a generation stewed in the political fallout of all-seeing information technology. This ambiguity is a much more interesting and potent political project than a rejection of "comfort" and has very far reaching implications for the imagination of a project for the world.
Barber, Daniel A. “After Comfort,” Log 47: Overcoming Carbon Form. 2019.
Sarkis, Hashim. “The World According to Architecture,” New Geographies: Scales of the Earth. 2011.
Courage Dzidula Kpodo
Week V - Map of Operations
The advent of the railroads was wont to create certain futures - it was a messianic song of development and prosperity. These veins that connected landscapes however created different stories elsewhere in the world. In colonized West Africa the rails were created mainly for the extraction of mineral deposits from the hinterlands to the coasts, usually in a process of drawing and cutting lines through the dense ‘pestilential’ rainforest. This gave rise to trade but ultimately became the main vessel pushing the colonial project – a systemic claiming and reshuffling of territories that culminated in the Berlin Conference and still reverberates today.
Sekondi, the coastal starting point of the first railway line into the interior, Tarkwa, for the extraction of gold. Gold Coast. 1901. https://www.railwaywondersoftheworld.com/
I find myself writing and agreeing (albeit with some reluctance) with Foucault’s view on liberty as a practice and journey and not as an end goal. This is in connection with the nature of the architecture profession in relation to world powers and forces (which Foucault further describes as outside the control but still within the awareness of the architect) and implies that we (should) practice the change we want to see. He further speaks on postmodernism and connects it with the tendency to glorify the past and how this can be very problematic. Personally, this is something I have come to identify and criticize amongst modern afro-centric movements and their wide (superficial) glorification and commodification of an African past which when examined closely plays into a Eurocentric view of the world. In Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe, we are taken through the world of colonial Nigeria through the eyes of Okonkwo the main character, yet the writing nevertheless assumes a very objective view (or tries to be objective), examining issues across the two very opposite worlds of the colonial settler and colonized native.
“The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others” - Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe.
It does not direct us to pick a side, but to merely lay down detailed facts for information building. I am of the view that current discourses in the design world should adopt a similar approach of thorough examination beyond popular images that tend to gloss over and romanticize problems.
Tschumi describes the period of the 70s as one of a realization of the complicity of architecture in the trajectory of the socio-economic zeitgeist. He described a group of architects that “injects meaning artificially” into buildings by borrowing and stitching elements from the past in a superficial (collage-like) way – and this raises urgent questions about the glorification and consumption of the past discussed in my previous paragraph. The word “artificially” makes me think, “Is there possibly a 'natural’ way of adding meaning to architecture?”. Would this natural form of meaning arise out of the actions of the architects? Or the users? Or would it be a matter of the materiality in construction? in a literal and contemporary sense.
Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. 1958.
Foucault, Michel. "Space, Knowledge and Power," Paul Rabinow edition, The Foucault Reader (Pantheon Books), pp. 239–56.
Nikita Klimenko
Week V - Map of Operations
Diagram by author.
The urban theater is an ever-unfolding performance project, a soap opera, a drama, a role-play, and a stand-up, a narrative and a game at once, where the rules, character lines, and motivations are continuously drafted, thrown out, and readapted. Yet being a performance space, it implies a curtain between the orchestra, the spectators, critics, prompters, scriptwriters and the other side – actors, comedians, crowd scene support. The largest crowd is the audience – each of us reading the lines are surely in this group, looking down judgmentally at the actors, the marionettes, and throwing a condemning gaze at those in charge. Yet as the play unfolds, we clap, shout out a line, grow irritated of the pathetic play and jump onto the stage to fix the broken play – and find ourselves dancing, directing, and acting out at once. Are we on stage acting or merely debating with a peer critic? We stand up, look around, and take notice of the unfolding picturesque scene of the crowd behind us. We are standing at the center, at the focal node of the spectacle – is it a panopticon or a circus, or a Schrodingers’ circus-panopticon?
De Certeau discretizes this relationship down to a single node of production-consumption, a neuron where the act of image projection turns into the process of re-appropriation, re-adaptation, re-narration. For a very brief second (think of an architectural action in Tschumi sense), the transition from production to consumption projects a binary world. On the first side, there is the space of the urban planner, the politician, the scriptwriter, the TV host, the Police (in our traditional sense), the topographical system and a fixed street sign. On the other side of the curtain, there is a vast, sprawling mass of marginality, anonymity, the space of pedestrians looking at traffic signs, family couples trying to cook (acting out a recipe), folklore readers, app users, architecture students… Yet this binary relationship quickly breaks down – there is no ‘us’ and ‘them’, the utopian Concept City is long dead with its master-planners, and the ‘marginality crowds’ are, in fact, no longer marginal. The sign/name/title/message passed through the curtain had already been corrupt and reinterpreted. The floorplan is not equally rigid and absolute, and the ether is suddenly dense. The photograph handed over behind the curtain had already been redrawn and spit upon from receiver to transmitter in a Russian doll manner. The producer-consumer analogy portrayed by De Certeau is not the ultimate model but rather a building neuron in an urban network. The city is not an adversarial game between the bourgeois and the proletariat, the master programmer and the app user, the police and the criminal, the surveillance camera and the prisoner. It is a multilayered continuum of the observer and observant, a sprawling space of semiocracy – where the signifier and the signified blend into one. This system is harder to model, to make sense of, to describe. Stan Allen employs various mathematical tools, from geometric/algebraic combinations to cluster algorithms, systems theory, perhaps, the butterfly effect (the infamous butterfly in Moscow that triggers a hurricane in China).
One may think of the control-liberation duality in Schrodinger terms, that is, the existence of plentiful control and resistance relationships across the political, social, spatial, and historical spectrum, each of them being driven by mechanisms of various level of ambition, social status, and perceived social relevance. Each mechanism of such discipline has a different wavelength that corresponds to its frequency of existence in the everyday life. The lowest frequency is taken by a ruler or a visionary, or a religious figure, a planetary scale designer drafting utopian cities, unimaginable housing schemes or the ‘Planetary game’ projects (think of week 4 discussions). The utopian urban plans are fairly ambitious, yet rarely (low frequency) do they propagate to the urban space, or take a significant amount of time to do so (think of Metropolis, the tower of Babylon, Corbusier’s plan of Paris that eventually are visible in the modern urban profiles yet did not instantly change the order of ordinary life at the time of their conception). Further to the right, at higher frequency lies the police in the non-foucauldian sense – a certain military/political structure that guards the established socioeconomic order, seemingly sets the boundaries and the rules for its citizens. Yet this structure also has to withstand public protest, the political game, and the human weaknesses of the people driving this structure, which suggests its potential for change. Further to the right lies the space of mass media, advertisement, broadcasting that projects certain desires, tastes, behaviors to urban citizens and sets the pace for human activity, trajectories, motivations – and is also self-morphed by the responsive tweets, TikToks and alike. The spectrum of media, broadcasting, and show scene is followed by similar projections of authority locally – in the neighborhoods, community scenes, and family life. This links back to the idea of the discipline and police, where the concept of the police attains the foucauldian quality of the micro-politics, micro-power propagating through the society and embraced by it within a set of norms and patterns – akin to Jane Jacobs’ safe sidewalks that are the scene of the ‘self-policing’. The continuum of media, surveillance, community and policing is the most relevant driver of urban morphology and metabolism, which is why those factors acquire the brightest intensity, visibility in the frequency diagram. Finally, the high-pitch section of the frequency spectrum is occupied by the most frequent, fundamental nano-drivers of metabolism that vary from physical needs, Maslow pyramid necessities (go run to the store to buy some bread) to atomic-scale mathematical speculations on chaos theory and clustering logic. The more detailed those speculations become, the less visible they are to the naked observer in the urban performance (hiding from heavy rain or peeing in the street hardly transforms the profile of a city/society).
Those driving forces are, first and foremost, do not exist as discrete nodes in a particular order – they are in constant tension and reaction between each other, and each driving that exerts control is counteracted by the other one exerting rebellion (think of TV news broadcast versus personal tweets).
This multispectral composition of the urban forces of production/consumption, control/rebellion project the main reason between the pre-18th century city and post-18th century city and explain why the urban space transitioned to a political space. It simply grew more complex from the agglomeration of feudal properties (a castle, where the will of the landlord was the sole factor of control) to centers of industry, education, poverty, transportation that accommodated more diverse urban actors, more driving force factors. The increasing complexity of modern cities aligns with the complication of various production-consumption relationships, and the frequency spectrum is becoming increasingly more versatile, and the proto-relations between the power and service split into more complex factors. The idea of concepts like surveillance transgresses from linear relationships dictated by the prison, the monastery, the panopticon to a significantly more multilayered space of surveillance, privacy & media, and social participation.
Frederic Jameson’s observation of the ‘death of the subject’ (as discussed a few weeks ago) artfully illustrates the transition of the concepts of ‘surveillance’, ‘privacy’ and ‘authorship’. There is a certain sense of alarmism attributed to the contagious nature of social networks, the storage and tracking of data, the global visibility and access of everyone to everyone, considered an ominous power node. The fears of the omni-visibility ties to the frustration over the loss of individuality in the face of the culture of mass consumption – that is, the subjects of the late capitalist model acquire a false sense of individuality yet are tied to ‘consume’ the choices provided by the ‘scriptwriters’, the master planners: you may prefer a grey or a black shirt, yet you source it from the same department store. It is thus tempting to resort to the certain nostalgia about the past, the pre-media space and consider the contemporary socio-spatial organization solely as an ill of the economic and political system. This, to Foucault, is the false notion of historicism, where the ills of the present are erased from the rendering of the past. By framing the death of the ‘subject’, not of ‘individual’, Jameson signifies that the concepts of privacy and authorship did not die with postmodernism. In similar Schrodinger terms, they either did not exist at all (think of the zombified, same-styled pedestrians from The Evening on Karl Johan’s Street by Edvard Munch, or medieval Potato Eaters and their cuisine, lifestyle and fashion, or the various cast, slavery and serfdom systems, sleeping in one bed and public baths) or they remained the same but shattered, disintegrated into novel modalities, where we are both recording and being recorded as long as we are plugged into the media space. The current wavelength diagrams demonstrates this shattering – the decomposition of the control/liberation system into more complex modalities.
A city dweller, whether a pedestrian, a traveler, or an architect occupies a certain social role and location on the urban spectrum yet keeps changing between the various spectra and roles either as a producer or a consumer. As Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Farshid Moussavi publish a new formal vocabulary, they are consuming and appropriating a system of classical order and structural elements passed down from the past yet also creating their own product that sprawls to design projects across the world. As Tschumi mixes programs and functions at the AA, he prepares a novel architectural vocabulary by re-appropriating the existing types of programs. As we dismantle the infamous ‘old canon’, we find ourselves re-appropriating and further propagating the vocabulary of assemblage and resistance that becomes a canon itself. The socio-spatial subject, the urban network, thus is in a constant series of phoenix-like rebirth cycles. In its grand performance, the narratives coexist in different locations, frequencies, and temporal dimensions, the ‘fragmentary’, ‘dispersing’ and ‘personal’ memories that quilt up the spatial fabric.
De Certeau, Michel. “Spatial Practices: Walking in the City,” The Practice of Everyday Life. The University of California Press, 1984.
Munch, Edvard. The Evening on Karl Johan Street. 1892.