On Keller Easterling’s Medium Design: A Three Day Seminar in Venice, Italy
The following is a personalized compte rendu — an account — of Keller Easterling’s seminar entitled “Medium Design” that took place at the “Biennale Archittetura 2018”; and on Servolo Island in Venice, Italy, over a period of three days between July 29th and July 31st, 2018.
Medium design, urban configurations and sociopolitics:
Medium design refers primarily to the architectural — and sometimes theoretical space — between the visible and the invisible, the tangible and the intangible, the certain and the uncertain. Often perceived as background space, the medium also refers to a site “of multiple, overlapping, and nested forms of sovereignty, where domestic and transnational jurisdictions collide”.[1] It is a difficult notion to come to terms with because of its incommensurability:
“Picture the places where we live: the parking places, skyscrapers, turning radii, garages, street lights, driveways, airport lounges, highway exits, big boxes, strip malls, shopping malls, small boxes, free zones, casinos, retail outlets, fast food restaurants, hotels, cash machines, tract housing, container. ports, industrial parks, call centers, golf courses, suburbs, office buildings, business parks, resorts. In the retinal afterglow is a soupy matrix of details and repeatable formulas that generate most of the space in the world — what we might call infrastructure space.”[2]
The materiality of space influences people’s livelihoods in tangible ways. Is it possible to change sociopolitical narratives by reconfiguring infrastructural space? Can the materiality of space induce novel mindsets? What about the role of political activism? How is one to subvert the hidden powers at play in urban settings?
At San Servolo Island, Easterling’s seminar begins with a projection of an advert for “NEOM”, an economic urban zone (hereafter referred to as the zone), in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. The theme park, gated community, urban setting, is an ubiquitous, familiar, coveted and recognizable model around the world. It demands to be recognized as pivotal in upholding freedom, luxury and economic prosperity, and strives to transcend locality and attain globality. The colorful landscapes are advertised using a jargon infused with much sought-after emancipation and grandeur. The narrator in the ad emphasizes the worldliness of the zone, while dramatic music plays in the background. The camera zooms in from space, onto a virtuous city seeking to represent all that is good about design, technology and modern communities. Using a metalanguage of universal marketing appeal, the zone is advertised to suscitate desire.
What is amiss in this urban vision — as well as in other urban and economic projects around the world — is the way in which reality has been reduced to a mere caricature of itself. In spite of being permanently on the lookout for the latest redemptive technology that will increase its desirability factor, the zone remains essentially artificial, modeled after a utopic and often old-fashioned vision of the future that cannot escape its own extravagance. The space lacks authenticity as it does not espouse vernacular ways of being endorsed by local communities. Architectural semiology is therefore not in accordance with the intrinsic cultural habits found locally. While it purports to be information rich, the engendered system is intrinsically information poor, and incapable of processing or resolving the inconsistencies created along the way.
The linguistic apparatus (the marketing parlance used for advertising) distorts reality, leaving no other recourse than implementing pre-designed architectural master plans that are upheld against all odds. The design, itself, propagates the least useful mindsets found in the community — habits of thoughts that are in dire need of being revisited and reassessed. Operating in closed thinking loops, the intended community’s self righteousness is continuously reflected back onto itself. The echo chambers created, unabashedly amplify and replicate themselves, the way biological cells proliferate and invade. Inside those hermetic silos, contradiction is impossible to manage. Gradually, the urban space becomes spectacular in its intransigence and eventually exists in the remainder of the nation-state, as a parallel exoskeleton appearing with its own blueprint but never coinciding with it, endlessly suspended in a parallel standpoint.
Conceived to favor a gestalt of sequential and repetitive structures, the zone is not only iterative in its conceptual forms, but diligently programmed to replicate tired cultural tropes, projecting them unto an all too optimistic and serene future:
“Infrastructure space is not only an infrastructure of pipes and wires for utilities or transportation networks but also a rule set for reproducing — almost 3D printing — the mega-cities, free zones, refugee migrations, suburbs, or highways that look the same anywhere on the globe.”[3]
Although their aim is to produce utopic urban centers meant to produce jouissance, these urban zones secretly hide a slow movement of violence and suppression: when they are supposed to promote free trade for example, they end up bringing manufacturing labour back to their own side of the world. They espouse stringent economic measures when they had advocated for more emancipatory jurisdictions:
“While promoted as relaxed, open, and free from inefficient state bureaucracy, the politics written into the zone’s spaces and activities often diverges from the declared intent. It is usually an isomorphic exurban enclave that, exempt from law, can easily banish the circumstances and protections common in richer forms of urbanity. Labor and environmental abuse can proceed unchecked by political process. Moreover, given its popularity, the zone has become a self-perpetuating agent in the growth of extrastate urban space — space beyond the reach of state jurisdictions. Yet, at the same time, it has also become an essential partner for the state as it attempts to navigate and profit from the very same shadow economies. In this form of extrastatecraft, far from overwhelming state power, the zone is a new partner that strengthens the state by serving as its proxy or camouflage.” [4]
Things that don’t always happen and things that stop working:
Another interesting notion in Easterling’s thought, is her application of the concept of the Heideggerian hammer in architecture and urban planning. Although she does not refer to Heidegger as such, her discussion of things that stop working and structures that collapse, lends itself to this Heideggerian reading. The following analysis takes it cue from Heidegger to further discuss the occurrence of structural violence in architectural frameworks; additionally bringing in Alain Badiou’s notion of the event, and noting the extent to which Easterling’s stance differs from his.
Hegemonic spaces are not necessarily built to look like panopticons. Notwithstanding, they can be aesthetically pleasing and can even provoke desire. However, if you look closely, you will find hidden deep inside the buildings’ walls, matrices of structural violence that are looming in the dark. At first you will not notice them. Then, a crack will appear. The invisible structure will haunt your dwelling, neighborhood, school, shopping mall and hospital. Inconspicuously, like a perfect storm, the matrices will patiently sit there, waiting to trap you when the right conditions — or lack thereof — have been put into place. One day, the invisible will become visible and things will unravel. You will witness their presence, there, in front of you, in a pile of rubbish — scattered debris — a wreckage of what once was. It is then, that you will see them for the first time (if you survive the destruction). You will see them: broken pipes, demolished houses, a mountain of scrap.
Meanwhile, you can enjoy life in the city…
City planners design homes in these settings as if merely replicating models on a software, delineating space boundaries on Auto Cad, forgetting that the map is not the territory. The way their aestheticism works is by creating a mirage of the city itself; a doubling so to speak, occurring at the interstices of design. This spectralization — or augmented reality as it stands — might be invisible to the naked eye but is, nevertheless, phenomenologically felt. It radiates through the physicality of the stones and the grittiness of cement, and coalesces with the bureaucratic authorities to manufacture an illusory cityscape.
Identifying any built-in structural violence within architectural frameworks, necessitates the resurfacing of the hidden intractabilities from amidst the buildings’ bricks and tiles — to make the cracks visible again. Unfortunately, when the cracks become too apparent, it is always already too late. Catastrophic events mark the hidden violence from beneath the ground (collapse of buildings not meeting safety standards, the inopportune death of individuals in the community due to negligence and unwillingness of authorities to attend to potentially hazardous situations). This is the Heideggerian hammer operating at its best. Or at its worst.
This is how a tool, the hammer, can momentarily disappear from our consciousness, as ready-at-hand, in the process of being used. As soon as it stops working properly, it reappears as a present-at-hand physical object. The crack in the wall is an architectural event (to use Alain Badiou’s terminology).[5] For as long as the structure is performing its job of upholding the wall, the crack is not readily noticeable. We become aware of the impending instability of the structure, after it gives way and falls. It is not that the crack was not visible to the naked eye as such; rather, concerned authorities were not motivated enough to do something about it. It became invisible to them.
To contextualize: whether it is the collapse of the Rana Plaza Garment Factory in Bengladesh in 2015 — deemed to be the deadliest accidental structural collapse in human history — or whether it is the catastrophe in Shenzen, China that toppled thirty three buildings — the assumption is that the individuals inhabiting these shaky structures are, at the end of the day, expendable in the larger equation of things.
For Badiou, the dominant ideology works to cover the wall’s threatening foundations. When the event occurs, the excluded part — the hidden structure — violently appears, producing a rip in the fabric of being and in the social order associated with that being. Badiou sees a revolutionary act following that point. For him, there is no middle-ground to be arrived at, thus the necessity to create radical binaries on each side of the event/wall. In Easterling’s scheme of things, the preferred path of action would be one of avoidance of absolute social and political positions and antagonisms: “We expect the right story — an epic of binary tale of enemies and innocents”, she states. However, adopting oppositional activism is the surest way to generate closed echo chambers that will bring the system to a stale mate. Thus, she concludes, binaries are not efficient political positions to endorse. Moreover:
“Activism cast as resistance typically goes toe-to-toe with an oppressing power, identifying itself and pointing to an overlooked truth. Yet the success of circuitous and indirect action is a longstanding tactic of conflict and war from Sun Tzu to Machiavelli”. [6]
Badiou’s stance invites a radical opening to arise before, during and especially after the occurence of the event. The fracturing shows clearly what was amiss prior to the disintegration of the structure. It reveals weaknesses and fault lines in the geological and ideological space of the structure’s configuration. For Easterling, rhyzomatic thinking that manages to avoid polarizing ideological stances, is the way to go. Evoking Jacques Rancière, she proposes subverting the hegemonic powers at play within any such settings, by precisely not resisting but by dissenting instead. [8] What she is advocating is the adoption of a trickster ontology of sorts that requires the presence of a trickster figure. Through irony and hyperbole, the trickster exaggerates and inverts meaning and destabilizes the stasis the system is shrouded in; the trickster has the propensity to unsettle power. Through the figure of the trickster, boundaries will be crossed. The more one advances into that space, the more leeway there is to navigate the intricacies of the real. This allows for the advancement of novel positions, as intellectual grounds expand. No matter how temporary or small the territorial conquest, pushing further is essential and worthwhile.
The medium is the différance and the solution is the trickster:
More often than not, propagandist claims aim at distorting reality. In those instances where the marketing parlance does not coincide with the space’s performative stance, it is important to recognize the discrepancy between what these urban spaces are saying or promoting, and what they are doing. By recognizing this discrepancy -this différance- it becomes possible to create a spacemedium- whereby objects connect and are allowed to network to produce a non-binary urban space — physically, emotionally and intellectually (a binary space, for example, would be one that categorically opposes residents to governmental bureaucracies - and even residents against themselves). It is by thinking the agency of things, and speculating on the vitality of the non-human materiality of architecture, that a new vibrancy can emerge whereby the medium intersects with the instrumentalities of governance. Networks of human and non-human elements would thus expand and take root in the city, allowing for the creation of safety nets for the most vulnerable in society. Understanding the patterns of wiring behind these models and how they are embedded in particular habits of thoughts; untangling their sequences as they manifest into space and time, enables us to explore their limitations and trace their intentionalities as far back as their original configuration.
It is only by deciphering the différance between official statements made on behalf of the city, the urban project, the zone; and the operations and behaviors of those official institutions that one can locate the medium. The medium is in the différance.This is how it can become the platform where one finds the space to maneuver and to negotiate physical and existential space.
As for the ‘disposition’ of an organization and the way it behaves at any point, it would be useful to investigate its declarative utterances in that proposed sense, to understand its modus operandi. Easterling’s point is to avoid the idea of an architectural master plan, and to approach urban spaces with the intention to insert another kind of oikonomia; and a new type of desire, namely the desire of a city to exist against itself, to trick its own form and to attain sublime plasticity; a place where social emergence is plural, and where territoriality is essential and uncertainty is espoused as a way of pushing forward.
Sacha Baron Cohen as Donna Haraway’s trickster:
The metaphors of trickery have several advantages in this context. In reality, a trickster allows for knowledge to be processed in new ways. Evoking Bruno Latour’s ‘Actant Network theory’ (ANT), in this framework, would make the “actant” the trickster/activist who can afford to pull a number on the system, to disrupt the status quo. To subvert power, it is recommended to increasingly channel the spirit of activism found in public figures such as Trevor Noah and his colleagues, for example. The actant becomes literal actor and comedian. Sacha Baron Cohen interviewing Donald Trump provides a valuable illustration of turning the tables around on nonsense. The trickster disrupts the prevailing certainties of power and baffles in its ridiculousness. This is how, for a brief moment, the figure of the troll de-stabilizes the dominant powers of the moment.
Full frontal confrontation, “Samantha Bee” style, is what is required. This might not necessarily result in long lasting change - but this is what Easterling wants to arrive at when she aptly quotes Jacques Rancière [7]:
“ Chauncey Gardner, a character in Jerzy Kosinski’s novel Being There, is at once comedian, confidence man, and beautiful soul whose meaningless statements about the growth of the garden or the inevitability of the seasons allow him to circulate with the US president and other leaders of national prominence. Meaninglessness and a deliberate lack of association with the recognized dogma of political camps generates political instrumentality.” [8]
Finally, in facing today’s stark realities and dire political stuckness, it just may be that our best bet is a trickster ontology.[9]
Fake gnus #trickster #ontology
Notes and References
[1] See the “introduction” in Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. Verso. London, New York, 2014.
[2] Ibid.
[3]K. Easterling, “Histories of things That Don’t Happen and Shouldn’t Always Work”[3], in Social Research, Johns Hopkins University Press, vol. 83, Fall 2016, pp.625–644.
[4] K. Easterling, “Introduction” in Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. Verso. London, New York, 2014
[5] See A. Badiou, Being and Event, O. Feltham (tr.), Continuum, 2006.
[6] K. Easterling, “The Activist Entrepeneur” in Architecture from the Outside: selected essays by Robert Gutman, ed. D. Cuff and J. Wriedt, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2010, pp. 318.
[7] Easterling quotes Rancière in Artforum International, as saying: “I would rather talk about dissensus than resistance”, on p. 318 in “The Activist Entrepeneur” (see note above).
[8] Ibid. p. 318.
[9] D. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the late Twentieth Century”, in D. Haraway, ed., Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge, 2004.
[Neither Sacha Baron Cohen nor Samantha Bee were mentioned in the course of the seminar. Those references are my own.]
