Laboratory of Architecture : Spatial Practices MA, UCA Canterbury.

Methodologies : Speculative/Diffractive Modes of Inquiry and Making

Derrida (Glas, University of Nabraska Press, 1986):

‘The art of this text is the air it causes to circulate between its screens. The chainings are invisible, everything seems improvised or juxtaposed. This text induces by agglutinating rather than demonstrating, by coupling and decoupling, gluing and ungluing, rather than exhibiting the continuous, and analogical, instructive, suffocating necessity of a discursive rhetoric.’

Marcus Doel (‘Meanwhile - Cats, Glunks, werewolves and other poststructuralists’ in Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift, eds., Thinking Space, Routledge, London, 2000):

‘... .to approach the text as a map, a tool kit, a record: there are entrances and exits everywhere; fold it however you want; follow whatever trajectory you fancy. It’s still philosophy. A book, a work, an event: they all vary in and of themselves.. ..hence the setting off of the variable ‘and’ in place of the constant to-ing and fro-ing of the sedentary ‘is’ and ‘is not’; identity-difference; self-other; being-nothingness. Every ‘one’, every ‘each’ every ‘a’ is packed with innumerable others that are bursting to get out for a breath of fresh air, a taste of the outside, a stroll in the open.’

Luce Irigaray, The Irigaray Reader, Margaret Whitford, ed. (Blackwell, Oxford, 

1991):

‘Everything then should be thought of as volume(s), helix(es), diagonal(s), spiral(s), curl(s), tum(s), revolution(s), pirouette(s)....An increasingly dizzying speculation which pierces, drills, bores a volume still assumed to be solid. And therefore violated in its shell, fractured, trepanned, burst, sounded even unto its centre. Or belly. Caught up in faster and faster whirlings, swirlings, until matter shatters and falls into (its) dust.... Fluid must remain that secret, sacred remainder of the one’.

Jean Francois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 

1993):

‘The adversary and accomplice of writing.... is language... One writes against language but necessarily with it. To say what one already knows how to say is not writing. One wants to say what it does not know how to say.. .one violates it, one seduces it, one introduces into it an unknown.’

The Laboratory , Canterbury 2009,  Russell Moreton on Flickr.

Cyanotype image from pinhole camera with sound intervention/device within the apparatus of the camera, performative material gathered from the Canterbury School of Architecture.

UCA Spatial Practices MA under Oren Lieberman.

MA Fine Art / Spatial Practices Introduction to Theory

Dr Judith Rugg 

Consider the following:

‘A metaphor speaks indirectly - it implies. To be theoretical, one has to explicate - to open the folds.’ Yve Lomax, Writing the Image (2000).

‘Time is multi-dimensional, an uneven bundle of swerves (not linear). The idea of the self as a self-conscious presence in the now, must be abandoned.’ Jacques Derrida, On Grammatology (1976).

‘To go off writing, I must escape from the broad daylight which takes me by the eyes, which takes my eyes and fills them with broad raw visions. I do not want to see what is shown. I want to see what is secret. What is hidden amongst the visible. I want to se the skein of the light.’ Helene Cixous, ‘Writing Blind. Conversation with the donkey’ in Stigmata (1998).

‘Cultures do not relate to the “reality” of the world but to the world as narrative and illusion. These are subtle and vital for human existence. We live in the Golden Age of the alienation and the dissolution between real and fake, true and false in the triumph of consumer capitalism.’ Jean Baudrillard, Radical Uncertainty

'Seeing red is a matter of reading. And reading is properly symbolic. ’ Trinh T Minh- ha, All Owning Spectatorship.

‘Gender reality is performative which means, quite simply, that it is real only to the extent to that it is performed. Certain kinds of acts are usually interpreted as expressive of gender core or identity... which either confirm or contest that expectation in some way.’ Judith Butler, Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.

‘A space exists when one takes into account vectors of direction, velocities and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of moving elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it... that orient it, situate it. In short, space is a practiced place.’ Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life.

‘When it has totally disappeared, we will logically be under the total hallucination of power - a haunting memory that is already in evidence everywhere, expressing at once the compulsion to get rid of it... and the panicked nostalgia over its loss. The melancholy of societies without power: that has already stirred up fascism, that overdose of a strong referential in a society that can’t terminate its mourning.’ Baudrillard, ‘The Procession of Simulacra’ in Simulacra and Simulation.

‘...a Chinese encyclopedia in which is it written that “animals are divided into: a) belonging to the Emperor; b) embalmed; c) tame; d) sucking pigs; e) sirens; f) fabulous; g) stray dogs; h) frenzied; i) innumerable; j) drawn with a fine camel hair brush.” Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Introduction) 1991.

‘The walls will never be really cast down. Hence, the melancholia of all landscapes. We owe them a debt. They immediately demand the deflagration of the mind, and then obtain it immediately. Without it, they would be places not landscapes. And yet the mind never burns enough.’ Lyotard, ‘Scapeland’ in The Lyotard Reader, A. Benjamin, ed.

‘Now more than ever, nature cannot be separated from culture, just as monstrous and mutant algae invade the lagoon of Venice, so our television screens are populated - saturated, by ‘degenerate’ images and statements. In the field of social ecology, men like Donald Trump are permitted to proliferate freely, like another species of algae, taking over entire districts of New York and Atlantic City; he ‘redevelops’, driving out poor families...’ Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (1989).

‘To think about the geography of the female subject of feminism is not to be able to name a specific kind of spatiality which she would produce; rather, it is to be vigilant about the consequences of different kinds of spatiality; and to keep dreaming of a space and a subject which we cannot yet imagine.’ Gillian Rose, ‘Making space for the female subject of feminism.’ In Steve Pile and M. Keith, eds, Mapping the Subject (1995)

In this age of motor cars and aeroplanes, only slight atavistic terrors still lurk beneath the blackened halls, and that comedy of farewell and reunion played out against the background of Pullman cars transforms the platform into a provincial stage.’ Walter Benjamin (see Graeme Gilloch, Myths and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City, 1996).

‘It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think in the first place. In that case, it either “expresses” some deeper irrepressible historical impulse (in however distorted a fashion), or effectively “represses” and diverts it, depending on the side of ambiguity you happen to favour.’ Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991).

Tim Ingold
MAKING 2013
Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture.

Practical Geometry

The Architect and The Carpenter

The Cathedral and The Laboratory

Templates and Geometry

The Return to Alchemy

Collage Workings : UCA Interior Design MA, UCA Farnham

Material Discursive Practices : The Edge its borders and boundaries : Richard Sennett

Diffraction, as a physical phenomena and a tool for analysis that attunes us to ongoing differences of the worlds continous becoming.

A Diffractive Methodology/Performativity

Knowledge Making Processes

The Agency of/and Cutting Together/Apart

Agency is doing/being in its intra-activity

Performing phenomena entails investigations of the material-discursive boundary-making practices that produce 'objects' and 'subjects', and other differences out of, and in terms of, a changing relationality.

A phenomena is a specific intra-action of an 'object'; and the 'measuring agencies'; the objectand the measuring agencies emerge from, rather than precede, the intra-action that produces them.

Karen Barad

The central idea is that 'the thing' 'we' research, is enacted in entantanglement with 'the way' we research it.

Agencies emerge with specific qualities, this means that we might recognize agency in different forms as relations, movements, repetitions, silences, distances, architecture, structures, feelings, things, us/them/it, words 

Sofie Sauzet, Phenomena-Agential Realism

Spatial Assemblage : Apparatus/Diffraction

 Assemblage : Apparatus/Diffraction

"There are no simple concepts. Every concept has components and is defined by them.

It therefore has a combination [chiffre]. It is a multiplicity, although not every multiplicity

is conceptual...

Not only do Descartes, Hegel, and Feuerbach not begin

with the same concept,

they do not have the same concept of beginning...

Every concept has an irregular

contour defined by the sum of its components,

which is why,

from Plato to Bergson,

we find

the idea of the concept being a

matter of articulation,

of cutting and

cross-cutting.

The concept is a whole because it totalizes

its components, but it is

a fragmentary whole.

Only on this condition can it escape the

mental chaos

constantly threatening it, stalking it, trying to reabsorb it."

-- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, pp. 15-16.

Assemblage (Wilcox)

As opposed to concepts like structure, culture, science, objectivity, production, agency, technology, and nature, the idea of assemblage emphasizes the material-discursive heterogeneity of which the cosmos is constituted. As Deleuze explains:

In assemblages you find states of things, bodies, various combinations of bodies, hodgepodges; but you also find utterances, modes of expression, and whole regimes of signs. The relations between the two are pretty complex. For example, a society is defined not by productive forces and ideology, but by ‘hodgepodges’ and ‘verdicts.’ [i]

Fortun and Bernstein (1998) use the term “realitty” to describe the complex, messy world made up of assemblages and trace the genealogy of the concept throughout the twentieth century’s continental philosophical traditions. Beginning with Frankfurt School critical theorists like Walker Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, who coined the term “constellation,” and moving through Foucault and Deleuze, Fortun and Bernstein characterize the concept of the assemblage thus:

In an assemblage, nothing explains it all: not the sciences, not the social sciences, not the human sciences. There isn’t anything that is first or fundamental in an assemblage—nature, language, culture, institutions, whatever—it’s all at once, and we with our questions come after it. Meaning that we are both assembled by it, and in pursuit of it. Even though we’re consigned to come after the assemblage has been assembled, both with and without our intentionality, that doesn’t stop us from going after it, too.[ii]

https://conceptsinsts.wikispaces.com/Assemblage+%28Wilcox%29

Assemblage (Weiss)

(Disambiguation: Assemblage (Wilcox))

The assemblage is introduced as a heuristic tool to map out the realitty of an idea: the conceptual connections surrounding and contributing to the formation of a topic, such as Darwin's theory of evolution. The primary source text for this idea is Muddling Through by Fortun and Bernstein.

There are four general characteristics of assemblages:

1) Assemblages are a kind of infrastructure (1, 2) - "a complex, crazily reticulated transportation system" (105) - that, like roadways, facilitate (conceptual) movement in certain directions while constraining movement in other ways.

2) Despite the constraining nature of assemblages, they still allow for some elements of power and agency to be exercised. If you have the ability, granted by some modes of thinking, to go "off-road" or to start a new chain of self-organizing "roadwork", then you are able to recoup more agency in choosing which direction to think in. (105)

3) An assemblage is always in some type of restricted motion as various nodes are afforded slight shifting within the constraints of their linkages. "The lobster form is not entirely whimsical, but a deliberate reminder that the sciences are in motion and, indeed, composed of linked motions." (106) Stabilization is possible in small regions of an assemblage through stronger interconnections made between nodes of institutions, concepts, and activities, such as those found in the sciences. It is important to recognize that this stabilization effect comes not from reality, but from realitty, the social elements that contribute to a sense of fact or truth. This movement also emphasizes that visual representations are "diagrams of contingency" - the elements are all interdependent upon connections to other elements and that shifts in force or direction will transfer across the diagram, sometimes in indirect ways. (107)

4) The representation of an assemblage is itself a kludged tool to aid our understanding of and inquiry into scientific activities. Rather than providing answers or hard-and-fast explanations, assemblages are meant to provoke questions and to open up possibilities in thinking about events and topics in new ways.

https://conceptsinsts.wikispaces.com/Assemblage+(Weiss)

Agential Realism

A theory coined by Karen Barad, agential realism reconceptualizes the process by which objects are examined and knowledge created in scientific activities. Barad emphasizes that agential realism is not just an epistemological theory, but an ontological one, as it describes how reality is actually shaped. 

" [Agential realism] is an epistemological and ontological framework that extends Bohr's insights and takes as its central concerns the nature of materiality, the relationship between the material and the discursive, the nature of "nature" and of "culture" and the relationship between them, the nature of agency, and the effects of boundary, including the nature of exclusions that accompany boundary projects.

Agential realism entails a reformulation of both of its terms - "agency" and "realism" - and provides an understanding of the role of human and nonhuman factors in the production of knowledge, thereby moving considerations of epistemic practices beyond the traditional realism versus social constructivism debates." (89)

Agency, according to Barad, “is a matter of intra-acting; it is an enactment, not something that someone or something has.” (112) 

Niels Bohr's Quantum Physics

“Bohr’s epistemology calls into question several foundationalist assumptions that Western epistemology generally takes as essential to its project; among these are an inherent subject/object distinction and the representational status of language.” (89) 

Influential in the development of agential realism was Niels Bohr, a quantum physicist who asserted that observing apparatuses are not merely passive instruments, but things that participate in the formulation of scientific observation. He also resolved the "wave-particle" duality paradox (97) by positing that the paradox existed because the methods used by scientists to measure light as a wave versus as a particle were mutually exclusive.

By granting apparatuses a more active role in the production of knowledge, Bohr challenged the separateness of observer and object by referring to “objects of observation” and “agencies of observation”.

“[T]his interaction between object and apparatus thus forms an inseparable part of the phenomenon.” (95)

Apparatus

“[A]pparatuses are specific material reconfigurings of the world that do not merely emerge in time but iteratively reconfigure space-timematter as part of the ongoing dynamism of becoming." 

“...apparatuses are not mere instruments or devices that can be deployed as neutral probes of the natural world, or determining structures of a social nature, but neither are they merely laboratory instruments or social forces that function in a performative mode." 

Barad uses the example of the transducer in a sonogram machine that is used to "view" a fetus: 

"the transducer does not allow us to peer innocently at the fetus, nor does it simply offer constraints on what we can see; rather, it helps produce and is "part of" the body it images.” (101)

A transducer in a sonogram is not merely a passive instrument; it actively participates in the production of an image of a fetus, both in how it transforms auditory input (sound waves) into visual outputs on a screen, but also in how it makes the fetus seem to be more real and existent than it would have been without. 

Diffraction

Another key idea behind agential realism is Barad's emphasis on a transformative and transgressive diffraction, not just reproducing reflection:

"In this regard, it is important not to confuse the fact that I am drawing on an optical phenomenon for my inspiration in developing certain aspects of my methodological approach ... with the nature of the method itself. In particular, calling a method 'diffractive' in analogy with the physical phenomenon of diffraction does not imply that the method itself is analogical. On the contrary, my aim is to disrupt the widespread reliance on an existing optical metaphor - namely, reflection - that is set up to look for homologies and analogies between separate entities. By contrast, diffraction, as I argue, does not concern homologies but attends to specific material entanglements." (87)

Again, Barad's posthumanist expansion of performativity to include nonhumans comes into play:

"I propose a posthumanist performative approach to understanding technoscientific and other naturalcultural practices that specifically acknowledges and takes account of matter’s dynamism. The move toward performative alternatives to representationalism shifts the focus from questions of correspondence between descriptions and reality to matters of practices, doings, and actions." (135) 

Barad clarifies that her posthumanism is not celebrating "after humans", but more challenging the prima facie segregation and privileging of humans over and from other beings:

"Posthumanism, as I intend it here, is not calibrated to the human; on the contrary, it is about taking issue with human exceptionalism while being accountable for the role we play in the differential constitution and differential positioning of the human among other creatures (both living and nonliving)" (136) 

Hearkening back to her physics roots, Barad compares the conceptual diffraction to optical diffraction versus reflection, explaining that diffraction allows for more insight because it transforms (conceptual) images:

"Such an approach also brings to the forefront important questions of ontology, materiality, and agency, which social constructivist and traditional realist approaches get caught up in the geometrical optics of reflection where, much like the infinite play of images between two facing mirrors, the epistemological gets bounced back and forth, but nothing more is seen.

Moving away from the representationalist trap of geometrical optics, I shift the focus to physical optics, to questions of diffraction rather than reflection. Diffractively reading the insights of poststructuralist theory, science studies, and physics through one another entails thinking the cultural and the natural together in illuminating ways." (135) 

This diffraction challenges the singularity and solidity of boundaries, making what was sharply delineated a zone of fuzzy regions that have questionable divisions held in place by iterative performativity:

https://conceptsinsts.wikispaces.com/Agential+Realism+%28Weiss%29