Interface Seminar: Architecture from the Outside

Andrew Janiak led an engaging discussion on one of my favorite theorists, Elizabeth Grosz, although I'm going to find it hard to justice to her in these brief notes, and I admit to knowing nothing of architecture whatsoever, perhaps ranking me as more of an outsider than Elizabeth Grosz. She's definitely doing interdisciplinary research at its best, drawing conclusions that have broad relevance not just to architecture but to all the humanities and cognitive sciences. Rachael Brady got us to get our hands on some fun haptic and VR devices at UNC as well, but that definitely can't be described well in words. Elizabeth Grosz, in her work Architecture from the Outside, is interested in how concepts like "virtual reality" and the "cyberspace" inherently presuppose some distinction between the mind and body, so that when we talk about technology we talk about overcoming the limits of our bodies, and this sort of thinking is just categorically flawed. She sums up her riposte to this sort of Cartesian thinking in the slogan: "We do not have bodies, we are bodies." In fact, she finds, in the tradition of Deleuze and Guattari's classic "What is philosophy?", that the first technology that let us outside of our bodies is simple architecture used to fulfill our most basic needs for shelter. What seems so alluring about the half-formed promse of VR technologies is the ideal of a world of ne's own that one can share with others through consensus but that one can enter or leave at will, over whose movements and processes one can exert a measure of control, and that brings a certain guarntee of pleasure without danger. In a sense, these are assumptions are not all that far from the conditions necessary to produce the discipline and practice of architecture itself" p 82 "Archtecture from the Outside" She's also very interested in the concept of "virtuality" - which is a technical philosophical word that signifies the space of possible futures within our grasp to make happen rather than simple "cyberspace." She believes these two traditionally considered non-related usages of the word "virtual" can be brought together So, when we use technology, we do not check in our bodies at the front door: "Can the computer screen act as a clear-cut barrier separating cyberspace from real space, the space of mental inhabitation from the physical space of corporeality?" She further makes this point in her next book, Time Travel. It is the ability of our organic body to assimilate inorganic things that is crucical to the very idea of intelligence. Grosz in particular finds that this technological impuluse is unique to human intelligence, as is technology per se, which she defines as:"meta-production, second order production, creating things to produce things" She believes that this allows us to reconcile the eternal division between the subject and the object as the difference between things and life "The thing is the provocation of the non-living, the half-living, or that which has no life, to the living, to the potential of and for life." This leads to thinking in terms of "things" as the precondition for life: "We cannot help but view the world int terms of solids, as things But we leve behind something untapped in the fluidity of the world (136)." But it is our ability to create technology that in turn creates things that gives us not only more control, but Grosz is worried about digital technology, that furthers this instinct to divide the world into things into its logical end since it "carries within it both the intellectual impluse to the division of relations into solids and entites, objects and things, one and zeros, and the living impuluse to render the world practically amendable" So this isn't all bad, since "is technology the inherently simplification and reduction of the real" or something more complex that might allow us to "invent machines, things, objects not for what we can do with them, but for ways in which they can transform us, ebeyond even our own control" p 144 To this end, she's interested in "prosthetics" since for her, as "for Bergson, life expands itself by generating new capacities in both the living being and the prosthetic object." I know we'll get more of this when Michael Chorost visits the Seminar! Such that it makes us really doubt our role as the superior partner in our relationship to the "non-living world" since it is open "whether the nonlving, the inhuman which functions as a prosthetic for living beings, or whter, on the contrary, living beings are the prosthetic augmentation of inert matter" (153). A possibly scary thought to end on. And I think she's right...sort of. I believe that we are in fact the augmentation of our ecosystem, which includes both organic and inorganic matter. However, that's another story for another time. -Harry Halpin