SPACELAB

1. SPACELAB FIELD THINKING research laboratory for the contemporary city www.spacelab.tudelft.nl

2. 0. Field and configuration • Non-modernist / Post-modernist • Beyond the Matter / Mind, Nature / Culture distinctions • Non-objectivist / Process / ‘Constructivist’ • Systems thinking • Configuration / Field • New realism • The ‘virtual’

3. 0. Field and configuration • A new concept appears in physics, the most important invention since Newton’s time: the field. It needed great scientific imagination to realise that it is not the charges or the particles but the field in the space between the charges and particles which is essential for the description of physical phenomena. ... Could we not reject the concept of matter and build a pure field physics? • Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics

4. 1. Concept as structure • Hillier: • It is conventionally presumed that the result of environmental research is an increase in objective knowledge about the environment which then needs to be incorporated into the process of designing, replacing or reducing the intuitive component and thus supposedly improving the outcome of that process. • We need in fact to recognise that the intelligibility of the results of both scientific research and the design process are dependent on the preconceptions and pre-structurings of the problem in the minds of researchers and designers. The cognitive schemes by which we interpret the world and pre-structure our observations are in fact an integral part of the field of science and need to be seen as an essential part of the subject matter of science.

5. 1. Concept as structure • Concepts are not simply ideas or perceptions - neither facts nor representations; concepts are structurings within discursive formations. • Ideas or facts-as-things or as events of consciousness are replaced by a configuration; they are no longer centred in their essential internal natures, nor in the moment of subjectivity - they are distributed in a system. • It is not the things or events which are so important, rather their relations with other things or events. • Notice the objectivication - they are independent of human subjectivity.

6. 1. Concept as structure • Facts and ‘analytical decomposition’: • The idea of a science which produces factual knowledge or information which can be assimilated into design, along with a view of design which proceeds by decomposing a problem into its elements, adding the information derived from scientific work, and then synthesising a solution by means of a set of logical or procedural rules, needs to be questioned. • Research doesn’t produce facts - it produces concepts: structuringsor alterations in the structurings of problems.

7. 2. The construction of the world • Scientific progress: • “Hypothoses (concepts+) arise ... by processes that form part of the subject-matter of psychology and certainly not of logic... It is a vulgar error, to speak of ‘deducing’ hypotheses. Indeed one does not deduce hypotheses: hypotheses are what one deduces things from.” Peter Medawar - The threat and the glory, pp. 231-2 • We inhabit a world of structured ideas rather than in one of things: • The ontological priority of the relation: positions are empty - are given meaning (filled) by their ‘internal relations’.

8. 2. The construction of the world • The purpose of research: • The question of what the purpose is of research may be is simply answered: it is to affect the preconceptions and pre-structurings of the shape and nature of the built environment in the minds of the designers themselves. These pre-structurings are in the form of more or less general ‘concepts’ that can structure an understanding of real world relations and dynamics and an approach to particular cases. • The purpose of research is to generate concepts (concepts+).

9. 2. The construction of the world • Multiplicity, worlds (universes): • “There are no simple concepts. Every concept has components and is defined by them... It is a multiplicity, ... even so-called universals as ultimate concepts must escape the chaos by circumscribing a universe that explains them.” Deleuze and Guattari - What is Philosophy, p. 15

10. 2. The construction of the world • “All concepts are connected to problems without which they would have no meaning and which can themselves only be isolated or understood as their solution emerges.” Deleuze and Guattari - What is Philosophy, p. 16 • “[The concept] is the condition of all perception... It is [also] the condition for our passing from one world to another.” Deleuze and Guattari - What is Philosophy, p. 16

11. 3. Perspective • Paradigms / discourses are not different ways of seeing the same thing - they are different worlds • “Paradigm changes ... cause scientists to see the world of the research-engagement differently. In so far as their only recourse to that world is through what they see and do, we may want to say that after a [scientific] revolution scientists are responding to a different world.” Thomas Kuhn - The structure of scientific revolutions, p.110

12. 3. Perspective • There is a resemblance between Kuhn’s notion of ‘paradigm’ and Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘language-game’. Neither paradigms or language-games can be described in terms of a set of explicit rules. • “... to imagine a language-game is to imagine a form of life.” Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p.19 • Wittgenstein argues that language creates reality. Nothing exists outside of our language and actions which can be used to justify a statement’s truth or falsity. The only possible justification lies in the linguistic practices which embody them.

13. 3. Perspective • “Instead of producing something common to all that we call ‘language’, I am saying that these [language-games] have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word - but that they are related to one another in many different ways. And it is because of these relationships, that we call them all together ‘language’.” Wittgenstein - Philosophical investigations, p.65 • A truth-statement is supported in a web of other truth-statements. • And as the object-subject distinction disappears, we have no need of a distinction between the referencing activity of language and the ‘being-in-itself’ of the world.

14. 3. Perspective • Sciences, disciplines and paradigms must be seen for what they are: artificial constructed languages which create ‘possible’ worlds. But there are limits to what is possible. Wittgenstein’s account of language is NOT a relativist account. • The possible is multiply constrained by the field which in fact constitutes it. The field is “laws of possibility, rules of existence”.

15. 4. The field as shifting ‘ground’ • “A new concept appears in physics, the most important invention since Newton’s time: the field. It needed great scientific imagination to realise that it is not the charges or the particles but the field in the space between the charges and particles which is essential for the description of physical phenomena. ... Could we not reject the concept of matter and build a pure field physics?” • Einstein and Infeld, The Evolution of Physics • Einstein was able to equate matter and energy and to formulate laws describing matter-energy fields.

16. 4. The field as shifting ‘ground’ • These descriptions of physical reality however: • revealed a fundamental discontinuity - matter-energy fields change by a series of quantum jumps. • were not constant but varied with the spatio-temporal position of the observer (subject). The constant (essential) subject becomes problematic. • Shifted attention from things (particles) and forces acting at a distance (charges and gravity) onto the structure of space itself.

17. 4. The field as shifting ‘ground’ • Electro-magnetism: • By shifting attention from the charged particles to the field between the particles it became possible to relate electrical fields to magnetic fields because they have the same structure. • In Maxwell’s theory there are no material actors. There are no forces connecting widely separated events; the field here and now depends on the field in the immediate neighbourhood at a time just past. We can deduce what happens from that which happened far away by a summation of small (local, contingent) steps. • Replaced substance and continuous change with matter-energy and space-time

18. 4. The field as shifting ‘ground’ • The world which Relativity presents to our imaginations is not so much a world of ‘things’ in ‘motion’ as a world of events. • “Geometry (discrete actuality) reflects the condition of matter in a certain region. Geometry is ‘local’ - and if a universal geometry exists which underlies all the local geometries, it must reflect the condition of matter on the scale of the universe (continuous virtuality).” J. Merleau-Ponty & Bruno Morando, The rebirth of cosmology, p. 176 • The new models (electro-magnetism, relativity, quantum mechanics) are self-contradictory within the conceptual limits of waves or particles and can only be expressed in terms of fields (relationships).

19. 4. The field as shifting ‘ground’ • “Perhaps we are approaching a merger of the description of events and the description of things ... perhaps there is being because there is happening. A more radical departure from the classical view of the material basis of the world is hard to imagine.” Kenneth Ford, The world of elementary particles, pp. 213-215 • Action is neither continuous nor at a distance. In classical terms it is not action at all - it is rather a discontinuous ‘event’ of space-time.

20. 4. The field as shifting ‘ground’ • Reality appears to vary not merely with the position of the observer (the ‘empty’ location) but with the act of observation itself: • “Natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves; it describes nature as exposed to our method of questioning. This is a possibility of which Descartes could not have thought, but it makes the sharp separation between the world and the I impossible.” Werner Heisenberg, in Physics and philosophy, p. 81 • The reconciliation of contradiction by complementary relations (in which differences remain intact) rather than through dialectical syntheses (in which differences are obliterated). (Simmel)

21. 4. The field as shifting ‘ground’ • Classical laws are ‘laws of permission’ - they define what can and must happen in natural phenomena. • Quantum laws are more generally ‘laws of prohibition’ - they define what cannot happen. • Classical science: order beneath chaos. • The new science: chaos beneath order.

22. 5. Archaeology • Foucault: • “[Facts] may not, in the last resort, be what they seem at first sight. In short, they require a theory, and this theory cannot be constructed unless the field of the facts of discourse on the basis of which those facts are built up appears in its non-synthetic purity.” Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge

23. 5. Archaeology • Archaeology: • treats history as discontinuous change • Is concerned with description rather than interpretation • Rejects ‘forces’ (Reason, History, Economics etc.) • Suspicious of objects • Seeks to examine the space in which objects emerge and are transformed • Seeks to describe ‘systems of dispersion’

24. 5. Archaeology • Foucault dispenses with things (and facts as things) • Examines the systematic space in which things emerge. • Foucault aims to dispense with the subject: • The subject becomes one of the “vacant places [in the field] that may in fact be filled by different individuals” (or a variable individual) as the place varies. • Shifts attention from objects (and facts treated as objects) to facts constructed on the basis of their ‘positioning’ in a systematic and spatial ‘field of discourse’ (language games of Wittgenstein) (‘Constructivism’)

25. 5. Archaeology • Foucault: • Has reduced the role of the subject to a variable function in space and time. • Has introduced fundamental discontinuities into the mechanics of change. • Like Einstein’s ideas, these are difficult to think - we have gone beyond the limits of Cartesian/Kantian thinking patterns. • Has side-stepped the Mind-Matter duality - which has defined western thinking since the Enlightenment (the ‘modernist’ episteme).

26. 5. Archaeology • Foucault; • Has set up a means for studying the “formal conditions of the appearance of meaning” - without reference to subjectivity (or consciousness or intentionality). • “We have discovered ... another passion: the passion for concepts and for what I will call ‘system’. ... By system it is necessary to understand an ensemble of relations which maintain themselves and transform themselves independently of the things they connect ... an anonymous system without subjects. ... The I has exploded - look at modern literature.” Entretien: Michel Foucault, pp. 14-15 • (What about perception then? - is it unconscious and determined?)

27. 5. Archaeology • Foucault has eliminated modernist requirements for: • an exterior, objective ‘truth’. • a privileged right to objectivist thought to adjudicate on ‘truth’. • an interior meaningful subject. • a subject-object distinction. • on the basis of a thinking he borrowed from physics... • >>Georges Canguilhem (Thomas Kuhn), Gaston Bachelard • >>A.N. Whitehead, Henri Bergson, C.S. Pierce

28. 5. Archaeology • “... the frontiers of a book [work, world] are never clear-cut ... beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books [works, worlds] ... it is a node within a network ... its unity is variable and relative. ... As soon as one questions that unity, it loses its self-evidence; it indicates itself, constructs itself, only on the basis of a complex field of discourse.” Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 23

29. 6. ‘Objects’/statements • The active unit is the ‘statement’; this is neither object nor force nor subject - it is a ‘function’. • Functions/statements do not exist in isolation and cannot be identified in isolation. They do not exist and do not have a meaning independent of the field (or syntax) in which they are embedded. (Einstein / Wittgenstein / Saussure) • Their existence is determined by rules of formation and transformation.

30. 6. ‘Objects’/statements • Statements: • Statements (or other units emergent from a discourse or field) are neither pure form nor buried meaning - they are simultaneously form and substance. • Statements are not ‘signs’ or ‘symbols’; they do not refer to something, nor do they require interpretation, they are - and mean themselves! (Merleau-Ponty’s form) • They are simultaneously real and immaterial; real and possible (virtual). • Like electrons, which appear as both waves and particles, statements do not indicate ‘things’ or ‘facts’ or ‘beings’ but “laws of possibility, rules of existence”.

31. 6. ‘Objects’/statements • ‘Laws’ of threshold, displacement, redistribution, transformation - connected to the structure of a field and with the process of restructuring which produces discontinuous change. • Change marked by sudden shifts and jumps, by ruptures and systematic rearrangements. It refers to processes familiar from quantum mechanics, mutation and development in biology and large scale geological structures. • Against the reductionist tradition with its interest in the analytical decomposition of the whole into parts - which decomposition is then supposed to say something about wholes in terms of their coterminous spatio-temporal relationships with those parts.

32. 6. ‘Objects’/statements • Change is marked by a shift in the fields and the formation of discourses - occupying the same ground (space) as previous ones but different in their internal configurations in their choice of objects.

33. 7. Society as field • Pierre Bourdieu replaces the concept of "society" with that of "field". • ‘Society’ refers to an undifferentiated unity integrated by systemic functions, a common culture, or all-encompassing authority structures. • A ‘differentiated society’ is, "an ensemble of relatively autonomous spheres of ‘play’ that cannot be collapsed under an overall societal logic, be it that of capitalism, modernity, or postmodernity" (Wacquant 1992: 16f-17). • ‘Spheres of play’ prescribe their particular values and possess their own regulative principles on the basis of field principles.

34. 7. Society as field • Different forms of capital (cultural, social, economic) are activated as material resources in struggles in the social space. • The volume and composition of an actor’s overall capital defines the actor’s positionin the social space. • Struggles are struggles for position. • What also matters is his dispositions; that is, thoughts, feelings and judgments, ways of being, strategies of mobility (habitus)

35. 7. Society as field • “We (should) view social life not in statistical terms, as the outcome of a large number of interactions among discrete individuals, but in topological terms as the unfolding of a total generative field. I have used the term ‘sociality’ to refer to the dynamic properties of this field. …cultural variation may be expected to induce evolutionary modulations of the social field, but this is not to say that social forms are in any sense genetically or culturally determined. ... • “Thus it is [normally] supposed that human individuals endowed with bundles of cultural traits, have all they need to assemble organised social life. Nothing could be further from the truth.” Tim Ingold,

36. 8. The visible and the invisible • The field adds a new dimension to materiality: • The ‘Matter-Mind’ or ‘Matter-God’ paradigm accounted for the creative force of the world through the ‘active’ part of the duality. • Within the non-dualistic paradigm, we develop an account of creative power (negentropy) by way of relational systematics - which constitute a version of the ‘possible’: • Matter is not the other side of Mind - Matter itself is both material and ‘form’ (organisation).

37. 8. The visible and the invisible • Matter is simultaneously discrete and continuous: • “Geometry (discrete actuality) reflects the condition of matter in a certain region. Geometry is ‘local’ - and if a universal geometry exists which underlies all the local geometries, it must reflect the condition of matter on the scale of the universe (continuous virtuality).” J. Merleau-Ponty & Bruno Morando, The rebirth of cosmology, p. 176

38. 8. The visible and the invisible • Matter is simultaneously ‘real’ and ‘ideal’: • “Philosophy made a great step forward on the day when Berkeley proved, as against the ‘mechanical philosophers’, that the secondary qualities of matter have at least as much reality as the primary qualities. His mistake lay in believing that, for this, it was necessary to place matter within the mind and to make it into a pure idea.” Henri Bergson, Matter and memory, pp. 10-11

39. 8. The visible and the invisible • The dual nature of matter is captured in the idea of continuous and discontinuous multiplicities: • “While in its contact with matter, life is comparable to an impulsion or an impetus, regarded in itself it is an immensity of virtuality, a mutual encroachment of thousands and thousands of tendencies whic nevertheless are ‘thousands and thousands’ only when regarded as outside each other, that is when spatialised. Contact with matter is what determines this dissociation. Matter divides actually what was but a virtual multiplicity; and, in this sense, individuation is in part the work of matter, in part the work of life’s own inclination. Henri Bergson, Creative evolution, p. 258

40. 8. The visible and the invisible • “... a conception of the evolution of life as involving an actualisation of the virtual in contrast to the less inventive or creative realisation of the possible.” Keith Ansell Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual, p. 1

41. 8. The visible and the invisible • “That the present moment is not a moment of being or of present ‘in the strict sense’, that it is the passing moment, forces us to think of becoming, but to think of it precisely as what could not have started and cannot finish, becoming.” Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 48

42. A different kind of spatiality The first move is a definition of an alternative spatiality - representing a deeper urban reality of permeability and connection supporting an obvious surface reality of bordering and enclosure

43. The shape of the performative field - relations > flow • The shapes of the • performative field • become urban • ‘forms’ - the stuff we • deal with • and the way • social space is • stabilised and • ‘identified’.

44. The urban image • is a product of urban space; of this socially indeterminate space of flows - a secondary unintended product of the performance of social space • Ferdinand Bolstraat Ceintuurbaan • The paradigm shift allows us to understand something we did not understand before...

45. The urban image

46. Further reading: • Manuel De Landa, Intensive science and virtual philosophy • Foucault, The archaeology of knowledge • Deleuze & Guattari, What is philosophy • Bruno Latour, We have never been modern