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Culture Call: An Interview with Bruce Mau

by Nader Vossoughian

Designer Bruce Mau's career has been wide-ranging. In 1995, he collaborated with Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture on S,M,L,XL. In 2000, he published Life Style, an investigation into contemporary image culture. This year, he returns with Massive Change. What's new about this project? The scale, for one. Massive Change is not just a book. It is also a major exhibition, a radio show, a website, a lecture series, and a poster project. As our twenty-minute interview reveals, it was the product of an extensive collaboration between Bruce Mau Design and the Institute without Boundaries, a post-graduate research laboratory that Mau launched in partnership with George Brown-Toronto City College.

To start the interview, click here. If you have trouble opening the link, you probably need to install Macromedia's free Flash Player plug-in.

Interview with Bruno Latour: Decoding the Collective Experiment

by María J. Prieto and Elise S. Youn

Bruno Latour is a social scientist whose writings and collaborative work mediate between the fields of sociology, anthropology, science, technology, art and architecture. He emphasizes experimentation as a tool for decoding the connections between the human and non-human world. In his latest book, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (2004), he argues for a rethinking of political language around what he terms “attachment” and "critical proximity," that is, the notion that people and things are intimately connected through politics.

On a recent visit to Columbia University, Latour spoke to us about an exhibition he is curating at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany (Figure 1). Entitled “Making Things Public,” this project was inspired by Pragmatism, which stresses experimental testing and trusting in the world. As Latour puts it, “we want to make an exhibition where politics, science and technology explore a new future based on a diagnosis of present practices illuminated through the perspective of material history.”

Q: What is the goal of the “Making Things Public” exhibition? What are the intentions behind it?

BL: The aim of the “Making Things Public” exhibition is to try to assemble different ways of assembling. The show explores the idea of an “assembly of assemblies,” or more exactly, an “assemblage of assembling,” different ways of gathering things together.

There is no overarching party line in the show, even though what we are trying to do is very clear. The exhibition is more or less an opportunity to share my views about modernism. The different accumulations of things that are assembled are connected not by the top, as if they were all part of a huge, overall scheme, but by the bottom. They are connected by the fact that they are all techniques of representation. These techniques are necessary if you want to approach representation in the triple sense of science, politics and art. As techniques of representation, there is something that they all have in common. Indeed, we are just as interested in the structure of financial markets as we are in listening to religious sermons, creating “post-political” spaces in the classical sense of the word, or even learning how to build architectural models (we have a small part in the exhibition on this by OMA).

The aim of the show is to open up the repertoire of political attitudes and affairs. We are trying to steer the debate in a slightly different direction, one that is very inspired by the American tradition of Pragmatism. The main work of art – apart from the architectural installation done by the Graduate School of Architecture at Columbia – is an invisible work of art called the phantom Body Politic. It is a sort of materialization of Walter Lippmann’s argument concerning the notion of the “phantom public.” It is actually a virtual work of art that will surround the whole exhibition, like political bodies surrounding us. We cannot see it, but we feel its effects. We want to try to do a visual, artistic re-presentation of what the body politic is in this Pragmatist tradition.

To answer the second part of your question, our intention is basically to regain confidence in mediation after the time of critique. My argument is that critique as a repertoire is over. It has run out of steam entirely, and now the whole question is, “how can we be critical not by distance but by proximity?”

The exhibition includes examples of many different techniques of representation – most of which seem to have very few connections to each other – in the 2500-meter-square space of the ZKM. It will push us to ask why all of these techniques of representation are connected to one another. The visitor is supposed to see the connections between these techniques.

When we usually think of politics, we think only of a very small series of attitudes that suppose a gathering of people around the question of the representation of people. These perspectives have little to do with things , nor are they related to other ways of gathering. The only thing we want from the visitors is for them to recognize that there are many other ways of assembling, and that most of this assembling – this politics – is about things. If you turn the things around, you get a different type of gathering and agreement, or dissent, which you don’t have in the classical definition of political philosophy.

Q: In your proposal for the “Making Things Public” exhibition, entitled, “’A Parliament of Parliaments,’ How to Overcome the Crisis of Representation,” you write, “we want to make an exhibition where politics, science and technology explore a new future based on a diagnosis of present practices illuminated through the perspective of material history.” How can individual architects and artists take part in the process of producing assemblies to “explore a new future,” while facing the modern duality that you describe in your book, We Have Never Been Modern? This duality is defined as the separation between nature and society.

BL: It is not a show about modernism per se. Although it is inspired by my argument that modernism is not the future of humanity, it is not specifically about that question. It is actually about a much simpler question: if we are dealing with matters of concern – and my argument tries to decode the shift between matters of fact and matters of concern – if we are moving in this direction, which seems to be obvious, although we don’t have to buy the whole argument from the anthropology of science about matters of fact and matters of concern – what are the aesthetics of this shift? What are the politics of it? In stylistic, artistic terms, these are the questions I want to raise in the show.

Now, why are architects involved? Architects have always been involved with these sorts of questions. We have a very nice sub-exhibit in the show that is a small reconstruction of Otto Neurath’s “Isotype” work in Vienna (1924-1934), from the time of the great modernist moment of logical positivism and the Bauhaus. I want to show the “Isotype” work as the perfect example of the link between the philosophy of science, logical positivism, architecture, the Bauhaus, aesthetics and social politics. I want to take the “Isotype” argument not to criticize it, but to say that it was an interesting event – a great, important moment for architecture and the philosophy of science, stylistically. However, it is not the moment in which we are right now. Now, we still see the connection between architecture, the philosophy of science, politics, statistics, social responsibility and so on, except there are no matters of fact as a bedrock on which to construct a perfectly pure style, a perfectly pure philosophy of science, a perfectly pure socialist politics, etc.

So I want this small exhibit on Neurath to ask everyone in the show, “can you do better than Neurath?” This is really a stylistic question: “can you do better than the Bauhaus, the logical positivists, the socialists, and those who were interested in the statistical-aesthetic connection?” Of course it’s a grand question, and it’s just an exhibition; it’s just 2500 meters square, and the budget is very small, but that is the question I’m interested in tackling.

Architects are also in the show in many other places. There is one exhibit on the architecture of parliaments themselves, as well as another on scale models. This exhibit on scale models is by OMA and tries to answer the question, “how do people utilize scale models to understand architecture?” So architecture is present in many areas. In terms of art history, the transformation of churches into temples is also featured in a sub-exhibit. However, architecture is significant because it is the constant metaphor about what it is to live in a common space. For instance, the dome is an architectural metaphor. This stylistic question can only be approached from a multidisciplinary point of view with philosophy, politics, sociology, design and of course architecture.

In the way it deploys these objects, the exhibition itself has to represent this multidisciplinary question. It won’t resolve it, but it will re-present the question. That is why it’s a very integrated exhibition. Everything that is in the show resonates with everything else. No one is allowed just to put something there and then isolate it from everything else. All of the projects are connected to each other, and because of this, they are also all in flux.

We are imagining a very fluid show because we are assembling things that have never been assembled together. These assemblies do not yet exist for the most part. It’s not like a normal show where you present things that already exist, and you bring them together for display in a museum. Here nothing exists yet. Apart from Cranach’s painting, which is already painted, everything else is being made expressly for the show on a shoestring budget, and mostly by people like me – complete amateurs – who have never done this sort of thing before.

Q: You write that one of your goals for the ZKM exhibition is to invent “new procedures, forms, shapes, and sites to dramatize the public space to literally, re-present them anew.” In what way can the architect create “new procedures” that encourage public interaction and criticism? How can the architect serve effectively as a mediator to engage the public in the creation process as co-designers?

BL: I cannot speak for the architect, but I can see why, metaphorically, architecture is important for building a common world. Practically speaking, I can also see that people should be enjoying the different parts of the show, no matter if they prefer the piece by OMA, the exhibit on the models of different parliaments, or the architectural intervention that the Columbia students are proposing (Figure 2). All of these projects are about the obvious interactions between space, things and common assemblies. Literally all architecture is about this question of the common world.

Then the question is, “which type, which style of architecture is adjusted to the task?” We have a whole style of architecture designed around the notion of matters of fact and the notion of objects: modernist architecture. What is the successor to this style of modernist architecture? I am interested in pushing the designer into asking, “if you have to imagine that the world does not consist of matters of fact, but instead of matters of concern, what happens with the concepts of function, sobriety, public space, etc.?” I am interested in trying to push the architect towards thinking about these issues.

Q: What is the responsibility of the architect in the process of “making things?” There seems to be a trend in architecture right now in which there is less interest in the architect engaging the public in a socio-political sense than relying on computer-generated systems and imagery. We see the emphasis you place on the thing, the end product (rather than on the individual and his choices) as a potential method of escape, as an excuse for the architect to avoid involving the public or dealing with socio-political considerations. Is there a way that you could clarify your concept of “making things” to ensure that the architect remains a critical agent?

BL: It is not just about making things; rather, it is about making things public. At the same time, if people want to escape their social responsibility, they are going to find a way. The question is not actually to insist on social responsibility at all – not because the exhibition is “apolitical,” but because the classical definition of “politics” is very narrow. The whole idea of the show is actually to say that there will be very little involved about politics in the sense of a conventional repertoire of demonstration, indignation, order and power.

Of course, all of these things are very important, but politics in the sense of assemblies of things and attachments to things is a much larger set. My understanding is that the crisis of representation is largely due to the fact that people define politics in too narrow of a sense; that is, it is always defined in terms of race, gender, power and class relations – a very limited repertoire. These relationships are important of course, but they are somewhat restrictive and carry too little of what the thing in its attachment really is. In fact, this position, which is the reiteration of political responsibility and social discourse, is actually apolitical. It is critical and can help someone feel good, but it does not necessarily propose an entry into the construction of the collective.

I have indeed done a lot of research in this area in the past, but I think the crisis of representation today occurs because it is very difficult to speak about the production of things with this limited repertoire. This repertoire blocks you at the entry of science and technology, and architecture is part of science and technology.

If I understand the question, you are worried that the interest in things will “demobilize the masses,” so to speak. Is that right?

Q: Well not the masses generally, but architects specifically, if they are so focused on producing things, which seems to be the case.

BL: Things are not objects. In fact, things are precisely the opposite of objects. When we are focused on things, we are actually also focused on ourselves. When I am focusing on the attachment of this coffee cup, I am actually getting back to myself quite fast, as well as to the entire history of Italian coffee-making, the people who are harvesting the coffee, etc. This cup of coffee is an assembly. In the exhibition, for example, we have shopping carts that are made from different products, so these shopping carts are in fact political assemblies as well.

If you are interested in things, you are precisely not being limited to objects – that is the difference. To arrive at the thing, you are proliferating in all sorts of places that do not of course look “political” in the traditional sense of the word, but they certainly do not look like objects either, in the same sort of isolated, bounded ways that have so often fascinated modernists. That is exactly the point of style. There is something in the object that is detached from the background and foreground and that has a much narrower definition of what it is to be connected to the world.

Q: There is another trend in architecture towards using the self-organizing system to generate a formal language. Software programs such as Maya allow the architect to plug in a set of coordinates in order to generate instantly a form that is then placed onto the site. What is your opinion of the use of artificial self-organizing systems both in architecture as well as in the social sciences?

BL: I don’t know enough about this software, although I am very interested in it. Actually, for the exhibition I am looking to understand what the visual display of things is, instead of what the visual display of objects is. First, all of these methods are very old from what I understand. The idea of self-organizing systems was invented in the 16th century. It is nothing new.

I am from Beaune in Burgundy, which is the birthplace of Gaspar Monge, the inventor of descriptive geometry. All of these computer-based visualizations are basically faster versions of descriptive geometry. The world in which the object is made to move is a modernist world from beginning to end.

So it is not as if you are talking about a new world with self-organizing systems, on the one hand, and CAD-based designs on the other. You are actually still in an old world – the very old world of modernity – where objects move without being transformed. They are instead geometrically manipulated or projected. With this kind of projection, you do not move an inch out of the modernism framework. You are still focused on the object rather than the thing.

A new beginning would be – in contrast to the world of objects we’re imagining now – about how the architect displays a thing, which in an architectural project would mean to draw connections between where you would simultaneously see the people of the neighborhood criticizing the project, where you would see the costs, the pollution, the asbestos removal in the building, etc. As an architect, using this kind of visualizing software, you would be able help people figure out this non-modern space on your computer.

Q: With Maya, there are many different approaches to design, many different factors you can input. For instance, you can design a weather system.

BL: Is this what you call “non-standard architectures?”

Q: Yes, it is related to that exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. It has to do with artificially creating natural systems such as weather, and with expecting unexpected things to happen based on the self-generating systems created by the computer program. There is also an interest in trying to build formal chimeras using this kind of computer-generated design.

BL: What you are describing seems to be the same as 16th-century Baroque design. This kind of architecture is based on anamorphosis, on the whole imagination of the modernists. The “Non-Standard Architectures” exhibition that took place in Paris is completely modernist. It is about formalism, mastery, self-organization, and anamorphosis. In addition to that, I found the architecture exhibited in the show terribly ugly. Non-standard architecture represents a monstrous kind of formalism. It seems to me to be much more related to some sort of late Archimboldo anamorphosist invention than anything that is related to matters of concern.

However, I want to return to this issue of matters of concern. Why am I interested in the work you do at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture? Precisely because I am hoping that you can deliver to me at the ZKM in Karlsruhe a space that begins to resemble the spatial requirement of this new non-modernist language. That is really what I am interested in.

And since there has been this discussion about Manhattan post-September 11th, can you retranslate this discussion in a visual vocabulary and grammar that can then serve to teach us a lesson – independent from the final result – which will allow us to understand that we are really entering another world, not the Baroque world of anamorphosis, mastery, formalism, and matters of fact? The world is not made of these categories. Nevertheless, we still need the visual tools; we need CAD to design; we need these methods. But why should we limit ourselves by leaving modernism to amorphism? Amorphism is the post-modern version of a crisis. It tells us, “let’s have no shape.” No, the collective has to have a shape – a very strong one – but this shape has to be invented.

Q: Rem Koolhaas is considered one of the most “political” figures in architecture today. Yet, he seems to be a strategist who adapts himself and his work according to the global market, rather than acting as a critical mediator. What do you think of the way Koolhaas has defined the role of the contemporary architect, both as a master architect and as a role-model for the younger generation?

BL: I cannot answer that last part because I am not an architect. It so happens that I know Koolhaas fairly well because I have two students – one of whom has studied with him and the other who is working with him – and so I have met him several times. I think that one of his important aspects is that he is – like me – said to be cynical, because he is not politically correct, in the sense of simply articulating the critical idiom. So he is often accused of being complacent and conniving with market forces, as if he were sort of enjoying this kind of power in architecture.

I think this is a very silly critique of him because more importantly, Koolhaas is a perfect example of the difference between having a political stance and being interested politically. Of course he does not have a political stance in the sense that he does not say what he is supposed to say or what makes people feel good – which is that market forces are dominated by late capitalism. Compared to people who do say these things, he looks conniving and complacent.

However, his way of handling the question of “non-modernism,” “second modernism” or “hypermodernism,” as he may call it, is highly political because it produces architecture (such as the CCTV Headquarters Building in China) and books (such as Mutations, which I find very interesting as a sociologist, and The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping) that recognize the presence of politics. These works are ten times more interesting, for instance, than dozens of other works done by sociologists of the city and of markets.

Take The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping; there are hundreds of books (by Walter Benjamin, etc.) lamenting the consumption and the Americanization of the world. But what Koolhaas has produced is much more interesting, even in terms of science and data than all of these lamentations over the power of the market, because he is interested in attachment.

It is something like a “new realism” that is part of an engagement with the future. Of course it does not look “politically correct” because it does not pay respect to the very small number of categories you already have.

Now since I am not an architect, I cannot offer a critical opinion about his architecture. I find that Koolhaas’ buildings are often ugly, but I know he likes them to be like that. I am not an architect, but as a social scientist, I can tell you that the series of books he did are masterpieces.

Q: Like Koolhaas, you are said to be somewhat of a cynic. Yet there is also a tone of idealism in your work, in terms of how recognizing the politics in things can open up new ways of thinking and being critical. Also, your ideas are clearly related to Pragmatist theory and the interest in trusting in the world, in testing out your ideas through doing and making things. However, as you mentioned earlier, there is a difference between simply “making things” and “making things public,” or actually engaging people to create something public and constructive. How does your work try to negotiate this difference? What is the goal of your work?

BL: What is common between Koolhaas and me, if I dare say so, is experimentalism. The political sphere is not yet composed; it has to be composed. The common world is not made; it has to be made. There is no authority that has the definition of the common good; it has to be experimented upon. Where are the experimental tools? What is the public demonstration? How do we prove these positions?

I think that is where the Pragmatist outlook in politics is just starting. Intellectually, the current interest in Pragmatism raises an important point: why did Lippmann and Dewey create such an interesting definition of politics in 1930, and then we waited 70-80 years to recover it? What happened in between? What happened in between was the introduction of a completely authoritarian definition of politics from the right – with economic cybernetic systems theory – and also from the left – with the whole rise and demise of Marxism. Now back to Pragmatism, if you read Lippmann’s book, The Phantom Public (Library of Conservative Thought), it is as fresh as if it were just off the press. If you read Dewey, it is amazing how contemporary it seems.

I think we have become interested in Pragmatism again because “the public” continues to be a problem. “The public” is not what is meant simply by a certain definition of the common good. If you speak about it in terms of a common good, then you have to find the experiment that makes it work. Where is the experiment that proves that you are right? If you decide you can define what is good for Americans or good for architects, for instance, where is the proof? Prove it! Find the protocol of the demonstration. Decode this protocol. Engage politics, not in the sense of feeling good and having the right set of political positions and so on, but around the protocol of debriefing the collective experiment.

In that sense, to come back to Koolhaas, I find a great resonance in what Koolhaas has done in his book on the development of China’s Pearl River Delta, Great Leap Forward. It is a monstrous experiment, but this experiment is decoded in a book that is much more interesting than all the whining and criticizing about the modernization of China. In that sense, Koolhaas is involved in debriefing the collective experiment. This is also precisely what I am trying to do in my own work and in the “Making Things Public” exhibition.

Bruno Latour is author of Laboratory Life (1979), Science in Action (1987), We Have Never Been Modern (1993), Paris: Invisible City (2004), and Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (2004). He has taught at the Centre de sociologie de l'Innovation at the École nationale supérieure des mines in Paris since 1982. Together with Peter Weibel, he was the curator of “Iconoclash” (2002).

"Making Things Public" will open at the ZKM Karlsruhe in March 2005. For this event, Columbia University's Center on Organizational Innovation and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation have been working together with Latour to design an installation that deals with the reconstruction of Lower Manhattan.

7 Factorial: An Experiment in Writing and Research (Part II)

[for Part I, click here]

VII.

Seminar readings include Otto Neurath’s “Museum of the Future” (1933), Empiricism and Sociology (1973), International Picture Language (1936), and Nader’s “The Language of the World Museum: Otto Neurath, Paul Otlet and Le Corbusier” (2003). Nicola presents two visions of the modern museum; that of Schinkel’s Altes Museum as compared to Neurath’s "museums of the future."

Nicola: In my presentation for last week's class, I wanted to highlight the differences between a “traditional” museum (the Altes Museum by Schinkel) and Neurath's conception of the social museum. (Figures 34, 35)

The Altes Museum (1823) in Berlin is an emblematic example of Europe's new political equilibrium that followed the Congress of Vienna of 1815 (the Restoration of the Monarchies previously defeated by Napoleon). Schinkel's client was the Prussian monarchy, which wanted to represent its restored power through the modern museum.

Without any intention of increasing the knowledge of the visitor, the Altes Museum was like a cabinet de curiosité where the works of art were treated as details subordinated to an architectonic whole. Thus, the relationship between painting and museum was reverse: it was not the museum that contained the paintings, but the paintings that were part of the decoration of the building.

This element of celebration still exists in contemporary museums, although the attention towards cultural information has increased exponentially (thanks to people like Neurath). For between Neurath and Schinkel there are 100 years of radical changes: the idea of the proletariat has changed from that of “servant” to the “self-aware” mass. Neurath wanted to update the museum, and to do so he focused on improving the accessibility of information. Although his analyses were exact, however, he wasn't able to replace “the museum” with another medium: in the end, his proposal for a new museum is not convincing, because it didn’t distinguish enough from traditional precedents like the Altes Museum.

In class, I also questioned whether Neurath's idea for a museum of the future was not simply a vehicle for exhibiting information. Thus, I drew a distinction between the museum and the exhibition: the first is an institution that hosts information (in a preexistent, circumscribed space); the second is a technique for displaying information (which creates an interstitial space as sub-product). The museum has the power to celebrate and elevate any single work exhibited; the exhibition doesn't celebrate but informs. This is a vague but important difference. In the end, the museum is a sacred, albeit temporal, space. Neurath's new museum should be reproduced in a series: but the result would not be comparable to an automobile (as he said), but rather to a church. What is Neurath's attitude toward the existing museum? What is his attitude toward existing masterpieces? Should they be preserved or destroyed (treated “iconoclastically,” to borrow Latour’s language)? And what about art (art that produces unique objects)? Should it not exist anymore?

I think that people who appeal exclusively to a scientific conception of the world (e.g., Neurath) elevate scientific knowledge to a metaphysical level. This blind faith in science goes against what Neurath writes in the Unified Science as Encyclopedic Integration: "An empiricist must permit himself, if necessary, a certain vagueness. Scientism does not depend upon exactness but only upon the permanence of scientific criticism" (Neurath 1955, 21). I understand ”vagueness” as the agnostic refusal of any totalizing explanation of all natural and social phenomena.

Mike: Nicola, maybe Neurath's use of the word "museum" is an instance of his society’s inability to make an association with something that already exists. What I find interesting about the Altes Museum is that it functions as an architectural version of Neurath's mistake. Just as Neurath used the preconceived language of the ISOTYPE to describe his new "archive," Schinkel created a new museum type, the public museum, with a neo-Classical vocabulary. In the Museum of Society and Economy, the performance of the modern museum changed, but this did not influence the design. Indeed, how long does it take for a museum design to reclad itself in the image of a radically different program?

The only real problem I see with Neurath's strategies, from his ISOTYPEs to the world museum, is that they are too reductive. They seem to rely on a system of variance and change, but in their effort to unify everything, they seem to combat or compromise that variation (Figure 36). It seems sometimes counterintuitive to accommodate economic, population, manufacturing flows, etc. through a relatively finite language of symbols.

Malini: I think that Nicola’s comparison of the Altes Museum and Neurath’s “museum of the future” is apt. I would have liked to have seen the two images in Nicola’s presentation merged. What would Neurath’s exhibition look like had it been displayed at the Altes Museum? Maybe Neurath’s intention was to create an exhibition that could be displayed in a grand setting. I pose this as a possible explanation for the neutrality and blandness of the exhibition space of the Museum of Society and Economy.

Google is a wonderful thing, Surfing on it, I found the following in the website of a graphic design firm called 2X4 . I think it is very relevant to our discussion and probably describes in a contemporary context the significance of a Museum of Society and Economy:

Museum of the Ordinary, a proposal: The museum holds a unique position in the collective consciousness of the design profession. Inclusion in a permanent collection seems to verify the value of a designed object, as the museum is, after all, charged with the eternal protection of significant artifacts and masterworks. The imprimatur of inclusion is a potent marketing device in itself: the tag line "included in the collection of the XYZ museum" promotes everything from wristwatches to laptops. The museum-sanctified design object may be the only masterpiece – albeit a mass-produced one – available to the average consumer. Grafting the concept of permanence to the ephemeral activity of design, the museum provides an institutionalized constancy and inoculates the object against the anxiety of fashion.

Neurath’s “museumization” of ordinary data, using a graphic language with “a new clarity and purposefulness,” gives its exhibits a level of uniqueness. Maybe this uniqueness made a visit to Neurath’s exhibition/museum more worthwhile for the visitor.

Brian: In the process of researching international art biennials for my Kinne grant proposal, I came across an interesting quote that was related to last weeks' discussion:

Big expositions are artificial environments, somewhere between carnivals and museums. They are dependent, of course, on the mobility of works of art, as they are taken from original sites and permanent repositories with a freedom equal to that with which a critic selects photographs for reproduction. In this respect, a recurring exhibition like the Biennale is more like the drive-in movie theatre than the museum from which some of its exhibitions may be borrowed. It is originals that are being spun around the world, and so to speak, inserted, into a core of permanent services at the exhibition ground. (Alloway, 1968, 39)

The reference to the movie theater was a startling coincidence. Reading this made me wonder if in fact the art biennial is perhaps not so far from Neurath's ideas for a "manufactured museum". The format of the art biennial has recently proliferated to the point that at any given moment in a two-year cycle, some country is hosting an international art exhibition. In the 1950’s the international art exhibition circuit was limited to three locations: Venice, Kassel and Sao Paulo; today there are more than 45 such venues. Within this system, the exhibition hall (occasionally an actual museum) becomes a form of standardized infrastructure that mobile art "plugs into."

Unlike Neurath's museum, the art biennial exposition is composed of originals, not mass produced artifacts. One could say that it is mass-transport rather than mass production that makes this new form of museum possible. It is the relative ease of global travel that has prolonged the life of the original artwork and has created an alternative to Neurath’s “museum of the future”. It is not the contents that have become mass-produced, but perhaps the space itself, increasingly becoming a standardized, neutral container.

Does the biennial address any of the social agenda behind Neurath's “museum of the future”? At first glance, it would seem to be exactly counter to his goals, essentially catering to an aristocratic art elite who jet-set from place to place. Though this is inarguably the case, the art biennial has an interesting side effect of allowing local museums otherwise marginalized by the art world access to contemporary collections. Under the guise of a mobile feast is perhaps a social benefit not far from Neurath's democratic goals. The biennial is not a mass-produced publication, but nor is it very different from a lending library. (Figure 37)

Giorgos: In opposition to Nicola’s position, I would argue that Schinkel’s Altes Museum and Neurath’s Museum of Society and Economy were not at odds as greatly as we originally thought. For both projects suffer from an inability to reconcile facts and artifacts, meanings and essences. Stated differently, Neurath’s scientific world conception is Plato’s metaphysics turned inside out. What did Plato believe? Plato believed that matter is a manifestation of eternal and ideal forms. For Plato, everything we do, everything we see around us, is nothing more than a reference to something superior. For Neurath, by contrast, the fact seems to be the generator of the artifact; the information precedes the object. This is a crucial difference: in Plato’s case, the fact is imposed upon the artifact; in Neurath’s case, it generates it. Neurath tries to explain reality from within; he tries to break it up into rational facts. For Neurath, everything can be reduced to information. His diagrams try to reach beyond the superficial materiality of the world, not towards an exterior that would imply Plato’s transcendental Forms, but towards an interior structure that supports it. For Neurath, information is the DNA of the real.

Naturally, there is a problem here: to assume that everything is information (as Neurath or even Karl Chu suggest) is to leave out material reality. Neurath relied on strategies of seriality and quantification in coming up with his graphics (the ISOTYPEs). But at the same time, he was reductive and could hardly give any sense about how to deal with the artifact in any factual way. Afraid that any formal approach would be considered metaphysical, Neurath mistook simplicity for factuality, ignoring the fact that whatever he did, in the end he would have to face the problem of the artifact, that is to say, the aesthetics of the information being presented.

Brian: Giorgos, you actually made an interesting point in class about "types" as a means of mediating between artifactual facts and factual artifacts. You suggested that the architectural “type” resides precisely on the edge between the fact and the artifact. I think this is true not only in architectural typology, but very much the agenda of Neurath's "ISOTYPEs". It is interesting to think about the relationship between typography, “[t]he act or art of expressing by means of types or symbols,” typology. To what extent was the Siedlung planning a typographic process? Looked at in this context, the difference between the flat-roof and the vernacular gable becomes a decision of font (sans-serif versus serif).

I was recently reading about Herbert Beyer's design of the universal font, which in a way seems related to the scientific world conception both in name and agenda (Figure 38). The idea of typeface might also be an interesting angle on Arvin's question about the "clear, simple architectural form" that he raised in class. A technological solution like Loos' one-wall house is completely independent of stylistic articulation (medieval cottage vs. modernist box). By analogy, one could say that the content or technology of this sentence is identical whether I use Arial or Times New Roman. In either case, the "fact" remains intact, though the artifact is perhaps articulated differently (is there a relationship between the words “articulate” and “artifact”?). It is only the modernist goal of "truth" that demands expression of technology in a new "clear, simple architectural form," though we have all seen that this true expression of fact is by and large stylistic (i.e. Mies' use of the I-beam at the Seagram building) (Figure 39). David Turnbull recently described Bruce Mau's work as creating a "typographic urbanism". Mau’s willingness to push the conventions of graphic design, and to look at the page as a site in the architectural sense, are characteristic of this mentality. The various collaborations between Mau and Koolhaas (both in typography and urbanism) are perhaps the clearest examples of the urbanism Turnbull alludes to. To what extent could the various studies in Seidlung plan configurations, and disagreements about stylistic expression, fall under the same heading?

Nader: I'm very intrigued by Nicola's most recent email, which in many respects is an elaboration of the position he took in class last week. Characterizing Schinkel's Altes Museum as an agent of the "curiosity" - this seems like a rather curious position to take, especially in the light of the remarks you made a couple of months ago. Wasn't it you, Nicola, who had been arguing that works of art like those by Raphael were steadfastly NOT curiosities? Doesn't the stance you've taken vis-à-vis the Altes Museum suggest that you've retreated from your previous statements, that you now "buy into" Neurath's remarks about the history of the museum? How tenable is Neurath's historicization of the museum?

I agree with Giorgos' comments that "to assume that everything is information leaves out material reality." But I would qualify Giorgos' comments about the Museum of Society and Economy and how it resembles, conceptually speaking, a “white box.” Indeed, I would argue that the for him the museum represented something quite the opposite: what was important for Neurath was the fabrication of the "black box;" not the black boxes you find in airplane flight recorders, though that would also be an interesting analogy. But the black box of the cinema - the black box of the "mass transport" exhibition space, as Brian might characterize it. Neurath, in other words, wasn't so much interested in making geometry real - merging Platonic forms with material reality - but in rendering the physical totally unreal, that is to say, as a pure medium, a vehicle for transmitting information.

Mike: Obviously, Neurath's work seeks to reduce complex information and associations into a simple form, but he also reduces it to a two-dimensional plane. The ISOTYPEs usually don't even have shading to produce a perspectival image. Even in Neurath's diagrams of the museum, the images on the wall are described as posters or charts. They lend themselves to the "offsite" interfaces (computer screens) we use today.

As we begin finally to understand Neurath and the projects like the Museum of Society and Economy, it would be interesting to see what projects like that are happening today, even if they are not necessarily by architects or designers. There are a lot of interesting projects that may deal with these issues: the virtual Guggenheim by Asymptote, which was commissioned by the Guggenheim enterprise to establish a museum on the internet (Figures 40); Superstudio's “Supersurface,” which attempted to package all infrastructure into a monolithic surface that provides equal access of resources to everyone (Figures 41). The Museum of Society and Economy could also be compared to Neal Stephenson's Metaverse in Snow Crash, a virtual world that only correlates with the real world through users interaction and perception of virtual space. People may have many avatars (or personalities), and you may have a valuable Internet address, but in the real world you live in a cargo container. The internet is equivalent to the “Supersurface,” but rather than housing all infrastructure, it houses information.

Brian: Clearly, it is not white walls (Giorgos’ point), but mirrors that Neurath envisions enclosing his museum. The mirror has a few properties which might aid in Neurath's endeavors: first it dematerializes the wall - whether it is the Altes Museum or the Biennial Exhibition Hall matters not. Secondly, in it's ultimate state the only content would be the museum-goer him or herself; third, the actual space of the museum becomes infinite through reflection of reflection ad infinitum. At the current Whitney Biennial, Yayoi Kusama has an installation that actually creates this condition of visual infinity within the museum (Figure 42). Interestingly, due to the multiplication of visual space and the absence of boundaries, the end result is that of disorientation, not clarity.

For Neurath, it was information that acted as a mirror. The question then becomes one of optics - how clear is the reflective surface? Wittgenstein's statement, “something that can be said can be said clearly," echoes this sentiment. Paradoxically, the clarity of reflection (as in the case of Kusama's installation) leads not to clarity of reception, but instead to disorientation. Neurath's desire to reduce information is perhaps his attempt to avoid disorientation (fact overload), but in essence he is reducing one form of clarity to provide another. One is unable to see the whole picture (with all of its vagueness), but the portion that one sees is undeniably clear. Neurath's criticism of the museum that shows hundreds of species of birds is symptomatic of his mindset. The ultimate question is, which model is more clear?

Just to be of the moment (the UES strike has forced the seminar to meet not on campus, but at St. John the Divine), I am wondering if a Columbia seminar held in a cathedral is different than a Columbia seminar held in 412 Avery (at Columbia). It almost seems like something that should have been tried during Bernard's tenure (if you can't ice skate in the cathedral, maybe you can hold Vienna Circle seminar there). I am curious if our discussion will tend towards the metaphysical. :)

VIII.

Empire and e-publication. Work has begun compiling the semester’s newsgroup postings: editing, referencing, and illustrating. Readings, completed in the spare moments between design studio renderings, were from Michael Hardt and Anthony Negri’s Empire (2000). Due to the Teaching Assistant Strike, class is held off-campus in Cathedral Hall, a neo-Gothic side building to St. John the Divine.

Brian: The information revolution described by Hardt and Negri (Hardt and Negri, 2000) reminds me of our discussion of Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopedie. The proliferation of encyclopedias in the 18th century corresponded to a historical moment where knowledge itself proliferated to the point where one could no longer grasp the world around them, thus generating the need for a container of knowledge—a way to quantify and possess it. The rise of the information economy in this century can be seen as a direct development of this same desire; the encyclopedia was perhaps the first commodification of information. Within this commodity mindset, the use-value of knowledge becomes dominant. In an odd way, one could argue that the Vienna Circle fed directly into this system; metaphysical thinking is perhaps the type of knowledge that is least justifiable in terms of use-value. By purging metaphysics, one assures the marketability of information.

The proliferation of facts brings about the increased need for the editorial. It is not enough to have an encyclopedia that contains knowledge; one needs a means through which to filter that knowledge. In the absence of a singular truth, editorializing (bringing opinion to fact) is perhaps the only way to begin to handle multiple, conflicting facts. The rise of internet blogs is symptomatic of this. As Steven Johnson writes in his article “Blog Space: Public Storage for Wisdom, Ignorance and Everything in Between” (Johnson, 2003), “Networks based on trust become an essential tool. You start evaluating the relevance of data not on search query results but on personal testimonies. (‘This page is useful because six minds I admire have found it useful’)”. The merging of fact and editorial (factorial) is perhaps the only response to the endless proliferation of fact.

Is an artifact a factorial? I would argue yes, and in fact yes in two ways. First, the artifact as a constructed thing represents an editorial process: decisions were made, information was edited, and facts no longer exist in their atomic state but are merged with the intention of the maker. Secondly, an artifact has the potential to be factorial in the mathematical sense, meaning the product of all integers contained within it. The artifact has the promise of multiplying the meanings of the facts contained.

Perhaps more than a traditional research paper, the newsgroup format we have all been utilizing for our writing process lends itself to the creation of a factorial project. Each fact presented is editorialized from seven viewpoints. Research is offset by conversation that elucidates rather than presents a singular argument. Connections (products) are made which exceed the individual contributions. In a way the newsgroup was the extension of the seminar beyond the classroom walls, allowing for discussion to continue in another media. The newsgroup succeeded in archiving (making artifacts of) our thought process.

Giorgos: The artifact as factorial, or else as a product of editing: this is something we never doubted. The production of artifacts is the result of an intuitive or rational decision-making process. What we have taken for granted, however, is the almost subliminal objectivity of the fact. By that I mean that acting like “Neurathian” prophets, we have been seduced by reason and have promoted the fact as something with a given value. In contrast to this is the artifact, which to our eyes lacks coherence and inherent meaning. Thus, I am glad that Brian drew our attention to the editorial identity of the fact, which somehow reverses the previous position: the fact as factorial is not that different from the artifact. One could even say, that the fluid, immaterial state of the fact makes it more susceptible to editing. On the other hand, the artifact lends itself less to the powers of subjective editing, because it is constrained by its inherent materiality.

So, which is the fact (=given) and which is the artifact (=created) today? In a world dominated by facts and continually producing even more facts, information becomes metaphysical. It is deprived of its ability to provide true meaning. Maybe today we depend more on the artifacts (even curiosities) to speak about the world than we do on pure information. This tendency has even surfaced in architectural discourse. I will cite here a short quote from the 2002 Venice Architectural Biennale, that I believe shows such a move towards the artifact:

“Architecture recently has often been presented as if it were a form of installation art, or dominated by cyber space or video. This biennale will concentrate instead on the physical, the material and the tactile. Architects have been invited to submit large-scale models, and where appropriate full size material prototypes. Toyo Ito's work with aluminum and with glass-reinforced cement for example will be represented not only by drawings, but by actual materials. Future System’s innovative department store for Selfridges in Birmingham will be shown in model form, but also feature a full size representation of its strikingly inventive cladding.” (Sudjic, Deyan)

In other words, after architecture had been exhausted on a diagrammatic, informational level, the Venice Biennale of 2002 attempted to return our attention to the physical, the material and the tactile in architecture: to the artifacts themselves.

In this light, what is the role of theory in a school of architecture? What is the relevance of a seminar, and this seminar in particular to the production of architectural or other artifacts? We have to admit that this was a “Neurathian” seminar, one that was preoccupied with facts and their associations or their editing. The role of the artifact during the course was reduced to a collection of black and white reproductions of writings and images. Should I add to the list of artifacts the screen/computer/keyboard combination that served as a dominant interface between us and the newsgroup? And what about the final e-publication? Regardless of how much we trust in the fact (that is, the content of the e-text), in the end we are producing an artifact. The “e-“ in the front does not spare us from our obligation to deal with its “artifactness”. Indeed, the ease with which it can be printed means that we are most of all disseminating artifacts and secondly facts (=knowledge), if the content is ever read (hopefully it will be!!). I am afraid our artifact will be similar to the ones Neurath came up with; it will be a service platform for the disseminated facts and therefore wasting its “artifactual” privilege in a world of facts. Regardless of this, however, I believe that the problem of the fact and the artifact could only have been brought about by a ”paperless” seminar on the Vienna Circle!

Mike: The newsgroup format utilized this semester has extended the structure of the class beyond the three-hour time slot. The attitude of the conversation is obviously less formal and I would say less restricted by dead structures (institutionalized structures which have been produced for previous forms of research). On the other hand, the newsgroup is not the same as a conversation. Response is never immediate and you have more time to think about what one say when you write. The newsgroup moves toward a new direction, which is to say away from a formal (and ultimately limiting) way of producing research.

The logic of the factorial mentioned earlier is completely appropriate. Similar to the newsgroup, I think the factorial is a move toward the appropriate direction. That direction may in fact be the same as Neurath’s. The factorial is a description of the amount of combinations that can be attained through a given set. The ideal version of this way of working would be a factorial of an infinite set. Much like the internet, it would resemble a network structure (Figure 43).

I understand everyone's concern about too much information, but the editor or curator may not necessarily be someone who converts opinion into facts, but instead someone who sets up a structure. I think this is what Neurath was trying to do. He was showing trends. It wasn't necessarily the specifics of an individual ISOTYPE, but the way it was combined with other such ISOTYPEs. This is why numbers were not important, but rather the ratios of size representing information. In this way, Neurath became a partial editor, or perhaps one of many editors. He definitely forced the public to view certain information in a certain way, but unfortunately he did this like someone guiding a herd of animals or an assembled mob. You can coerce them in a certain direction, but the edge is always unclear. Each member affects the others and in turn they all become partial editors as well, interpreting the information, communicating among one another and even back to the main editor (there is no question Neurath’s approach to the ISOTYPE changed during his career).

Through the ISOTYPE, Neurath tried to produce a finite set of symbols that could proliferate in new combinations much like the idea of a factorial. The seminar itself does this by eliminating all superfluous structures of organizing material, and utilizing only those which serve the information/research. The promise of this strategy is to allow everyone, even the public (through the posting of the work), to act as editor.

Nader: Giorgos, your point about the "factualization" of knowledge is very much on point. In seminar, we've mostly looked at reproductions - and in many cases, reproductions of reproductions: photocopies of photographs; digital projections of photographs of drawings; citations of transcriptions of archival manuscripts; so on and so forth. In a way, we have yet to encounter anything "auratic" or authentic. The fact that we spent our time outside seminar writing and thinking (as opposed to traveling) only further underscores this point: we are archaeologists of facts, not artifacts, which is not to say, however, that we renounce truth and objectivity. On the contrary, the "artifactuality" of the fact constitutes the very core of what we've been seeking to uncover. Indeed, we've been "showing and telling" a great deal these last months, only not in the sense with which one might ordinarily be familiar: as Brian points out, producing "factorials" doesn't just give us knowledge and information; it also provides us with a means of reconfiguring and rethinking the physical.

Arvin: I disagree with the notion that Neurath acted as a “partial editor,” as Brian says. I think he is better described as the Editor-in-Chief of the Vienna Circle (with capital letters). This leads me to my evaluation of the newsgroup format of the seminar and its effectiveness. Although my participation was reduced (due to both editing and my own laxity,) I must say it was a good and effective way of disseminating and debating ideas. I liked the writing more in its "pure" edition, in the newsgroup itself rather than in the e-book formatted edition. As Giorgos mentioned on his posting, the "e" on it doesn't spare us from responsibility. In a way, the newsgroup version of the seminar, with the changing dynamics of each posting, the title of each posting, its chronology, history of the discussion and even all its mistakes, is still the primary source and the end in and of itself. The crystallized version of it (in the e-book), with all its merits and pros, becomes somehow an artifact, unidirectional, command line-based and "routinized" by the conventions of language.

Knowledge for knowledge’s sake doesn't exist. We may live in an era where "informatization" is the rule, but that gives no one guarantee of being knowledgeable. At times, too much information has the opposite effect. We should see knowledge as something subject always to power. This brings me to the notions of the fact versus the artifact. Somehow we could say there is no subjective fact, and that all facts are artifacts. Have we been dealing with facts or have we created another artifact?

Nicola: It is a pity that the confrontation between Neurath and Negri/Hardt’s theory came at the very end of the seminar. It is here that the course wants to link the “informationization” aspirations of the 1920s with the one happening in our contemporary world. Unfortunately, now that we can grasp the connection we don't have time to go deeper.

But is this comparison really possible? Are we giving Neurath's effort a retroactive meaning? This doubt came to my mind apropos Josef Frank's criticism of the modern movement. In our discussion Frank was celebrated as a pre-post-modernist, before the modernism had even been properly defined. As you can see this is something that I haven't digested yet!

Though Neurath's recognized the importance of information and information dissemination, I have to disagree when Nader says that Neurath anticipated Hardt/Negri’s position. In the 20s, no country in the world had begun the transition to the third paradigm of economy (informationization). To say otherwise is to project Neurath's ideas into a future, and ultimately this is just our own speculation.

I wanted to comment further on Brian’s point regarding the connection between Diderot and D’Alembert’s encyclopedia and the contemporary “informatization” described by Hardt/Negri. I want to argue that the scientific mindset around the need/desire of the systematic handling of knowledge is pure metaphysics. The “container” (encyclopedia) as well as the “filter” (editor) are both external entities that decide what is to be included in the realm facts. The figure of the “filter” is still really generic: I enlist under this category Neurath's “agents of the museum-goers.” Filter and agent remind me of the demiurge of the gnostic, a figure almost as metaphysical as god. I like Mike’s image if the editor as “goat-herder of information” – facts are like sheep that defy both containers and filters.

Even if the demiurges were actual persons, how would Neurath be sure of their impartiality? A powerful caste (of mandarins!) and its degeneration has been the theme of several movies from the neo-post-gothic scenario, mainly Brazil and Blade Runner. A similar theme arises in the post-neo-classicism of 2001: A Space Odyssey. In Kubrick's movie information is a sleek, black monolith deployed from another world at the dawn of civilization. Information is then filtered and controlled by the self-aware computer HAL9000. Thus, as soon as facts are contained or displayed, they become metaphysical. That's my conclusion.

"Since science has begun to distrust general explanations and solutions that are not... specialized, the grand challenge for literature is to be capable of weaving together the various branches of knowledge, the various 'codes', into a manifold and multifaceted vision of the world….

What tends to emerge from the great novels of the XXth century is the idea of an open encyclopedia, an adjective that certainly contradicts the noun “encyclopedia,” which etymologically implies an attempt to exhaust knowledge of the world by enclosing it in a circle….

Medieval literature tended to produce works expressing the sum of human knowledge in an order and form of stable compactness, as in the Commedia….

In contrast the modern books are the outcome of a confluence and a clash of multiplicity of interpretative methods, modes of thought and styles of expression." (Italo Calvino on Multiplicity, 117-124)

Calvino ends this apologia for the novel affirming that each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles. The story of each life is the story of the universe (otherwise not graspable). The complexity is generated by the reordering in any possible way of the simplicity of any single event (the works of Perrec, Borges, Queneau are perfect examples of this polyphonic multiplicity).

I personally don't think that science is the means to achieve the control of knowledge. Alternatively, I think that the arts (literature, painting, architecture, sculpture, etc.) has the potentiality to conceive in non-systematic thought the whole human experience.

Neurath was wrong! But thank you to Neurath and Nader for letting me challenge my innately positivistic view of the world.

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7 Factorial: An Experiment in Writing and Research (Part I)

by Arvin Garay-Cruz, Malini Kochupillai, Giorgos Mitroulias, Nicola Mongelli, Brian Ripel, Mike Szivos and Nader Vossoughian

Over the spring semester, I had the pleasure of giving a seminar in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University. Titled “Facts and Artifacts: Science, Language, Culture,” the course attempted to address globalization and the rise of the information age. I wanted to examine early twentieth-century antecedents to what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have termed “postmodernization,” which meant looking outside the traditional canon of architectural modernism in search of figures who paved the way for what one might loosely term the “architecture of information;” everyone from the Viennese modernist and logical positivist Josef Frank to Austria’s “first woman architect” Margerete Lihotzky; from the sociologist Otto Neurath to the philosopher of history Ferdinand Tönnies.

A second and perhaps more important objective of the course was to reflect upon how the proliferation of new media technologies have reshaped the very means by which research and knowledge are produced. How is email affecting the relationship between research and writing? How are the conventions of scholarly discourse being challenged by the internet? In order to investigate these questions, my students and I wrote semi-monthly "reaction emails” that attempted to engage the concerns that we were addressing simultaneously in class. We distributed these emails among ourselves, which allowed us to read and respond to one another’s work. Toward the end of the semester, we compiled our exchanges, edited them, and generated the text you find below.

The goals behind this exercise were threefold: to deformalize and demystify the act of writing; to decentralize the production and proliferation of knowledge; to explore new forms and techniques of intellectual exchange. Brian Ripel, one the seminar participants, probably put the goals of the seminar best:

Perhaps more than a traditional research paper, the newsgroup format we have all been utilizing lends itself to the creation of a factorial project. Each fact presented is editorialized from seven viewpoints. Research is offset by conversation that elucidates rather than presents a singular argument. Connections (products) are made which exceed the individual contributions. In a way, the newsgroup was the extension of the seminar beyond the classroom walls, allowing for discussion to continue in another media. The newsgroup succeeded in archiving (making artifacts of) our thought process.

Whether we succeeded in this project of “archiving… thought” still remains to be seen. One of the most important things is to bear in mind, however, is that this project will always remain, by definition, a work in progress. We assume from our readers some familiarity with the history of twentieth-century architecture and philosophy, probably more than could reasonably be expected. Nonetheless, in sharing the dialogue that follows we hope to stimulate further discussion about the future of scholarship, discourse, and knowledge.

I wish to thank Kenneth Frampton and Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation for sponsoring this seminar. I also wish to thank my students and co-authors Arvin Garay-Cruz, Malini Kochupillai, Giorgos Mitroulias, Nicola Mongelli, Brian Ripel, and Mike Szivos. This project would not have been possible without their exceptional efforts and insights.

-Nader Vossoughian

I.

Instructor sets up the goals of the course...

Nader: What is the project of this seminar? On the one hand, our field of interest will be historically circumscribed: we will be dealing with ideas about science, language, and culture in early twentieth-century Vienna, tracing the resonance of these concepts in organizations as varied as CIAM (Congres Internationaux d’Architecture Modern), the German Werkbund, the Bauhaus , and the Unity of Science movement. On the other hand, we will also try to think about the production of knowledge as such: I would argue that how we communicate, whether as writers of words, speakers of language, or as designers of buildings, radically informs what it is that we can and cannot say say. Stated simply, “the medium is the message,” as Marshall McLuhan once put it.

Needless to say, there is an agenda behind this interest of mine in "knowledge production,” and it might be summarized as follows: in contemporary architecture, we often judge the quality a given design by how the thing looks. Most every signature architect has a signature aesthetic, and institutions often reward that tendency. But is innovation in design only a formal thing? That is, can we not think about innovation in social, even organizational, terms? Clearly, the answer seems to be “yes.” My contention is that by rethinking process, the manner by which we organize and manage knowledge and information, we can challenge more basic assumptions about authorship and agency.

More generally, I think that by utilizing the new technologies that we have at our disposal (this newsgroup medium for example), we can find ways of rethinking some of the commonly-held assumptions about academic scholarship. I do not think that writing ten-page papers is outdated. I do think, however, that we as theorists, historians, and researchers of culture be more imaginative about the formal assumptions we bring to bear upon our work.

Brian: The notion of "process" has come up in a number of class discussions recently, particularly in reference to so called "process studios". I suspect, Nader, that you are using the word differently from how we might use it in a studio setting, but thought it might be interesting nonetheless to throw this other usage into the conversation.

The criticism of "process" in studio seems to be the way in which it provides a buffer or defense for "product" decisions. I used process "x," and magically it created object "y." There is a certain apolitical agenda lurking behind this kind of argument - the system is closed and is judged internally ("yes, you followed the process, therefore the product is good..."). This scenario is played out to the 'nth degree when a processor, literally a CPU, begins to do the processing for you. Again, I suspect this is exactly the opposite direction intended for the group writing process, but I thought it was an interesting intersection.

Nader: You make an excellent point. "Process" has been recycled so many times; perhaps it's not even a meaningful description of what I’m trying to talk about. In the way it is conceived classically in studio, process is very much about creating a narrative that somehow "determines" or "necessities" a given design outcome. What I am talking about, by contrast, concerns taking a closer look at what we are doing while we are designing: what are the conventions we rely on in thinking about a given problem? Why? How does the very means by which we attempt to address a design (or writing) problem condition the kind of knowledge we come away with?

My critique of "process" as it is often conceived in studio in an extremely instrumental manner: there are assumptions about "right" and "wrong" methods of design that are aren't scrutinized very closely.

Brian: Nader, thanks for your response. I absolutely hear what you are getting at regarding being self-critical about our own "process" - this is clearly something that is lacking in the process studios, or perhaps even in all studio production.

To elaborate on the issue of politics and process, I suppose I am alluding to the way in which products or objects of process are presented as scientific facts without any self-critical reflection. This internalizes two questionable positions: first, that facts are "natural" and are thus are beyond questioning, criticism or even politics; second, that the actual process involved is held to the same standards of precision that one would expect of a lab experiment. Rarely are “process studios” held to this standard of precision, however. Often, the actual processes are more like fuzzy math. But like fuzzy math, they generate a genuine product that has a value and can perhaps challenge architectural conventions.

Within this logic, product is the ultimate criteria for judgment, not how you got there. In this regard, Mark Wigley put forth an interesting argument last semester regarding "bad theory." Though I am sure that I am simplifying his argument, his main point was that if an architect incorrectly applies a concept of Deleuze to an architectural project, or conducts a fuzzy scientific experiment, having done so is of no importance so long as the misunderstanding was useful--in as much as it generated something that otherwise would not have been produced.

In this "bad theory" scenario, it seems to me that process becomes a "back of house" function that remains unseen in the final product (Enrique Walker's notion of process as a “scaffolding” that should be invisible within the final product might be creeping in here). I know this view of product runs contrary to the seminar goals previously discussed, though I also wonder if an e- publication that is meticulously edited and reformatted is any different then a “final review.”

II.

Over the following weeks, seminar reads Community and Civil Society (1887) by Ferdinand Tönnies; Fritz Ringer’s Decline of the German Mandarins (1969); portions of Eve Blau’s The Architecture of Red Vienna (1999). Texts are discussed in the context of Vienna’s settlement movement [Siedlungsbewegung], which took root in the aftermath of the First World War. Instructor suggests that Tönnies’ theorization of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft anticipates the sociologist and planner Otto Neurath’s efforts to centralize production and management of settlement housing and development. Grass-roots cooperatives play a crucial role in this process, he adds. While public housing movements in Frankfurt and Germany were organized largely like giant corporations, early engagements with settlement development in Austria were by contrast education-based; that is to say, public participation in housing projects was assumed. Facts, not artifacts, drove the growth of regional settlements.

Nader: Following up on our class discussion, one of the points I would like to underscore is the degree to which organizational concerns – questions about how you manage and organize people – drove the architectural and urbanistic strategies of the cooperative housing movement in Red Vienna between the years 1919 and 1923. Why was it governed in this way? As I suggested in class, one reason was because Vienna was already dealing with a population of 100,000 squatters who were occupying public lands outside the city (Figures 1, 2). From the standpoint of Vienna’s municipal socialists government, the challenge was to find a way of harnessing these energies - to take the "wild" settlement movement and transform it into a well-ordered, industrially rationalized movement. Unlike housing movements in other parts of Europe - Berlin, for example – the city sought to teach settlers to build for themselves. It wanted to be able to take an unskilled laborer - a teacher, a factory worker, etc. - and teach him or her basic construction, farming, and home maintenance skills. In other words, Red Vienna sought to treat urbanism and architecture as pedagogical, rather than strictly formal, problems.

Moreover, it created an institutional infrastructure to help achieve these ends: as we discussed in class, the Austrian Settlement and Allotment Garden Association was created in 1921 to advise settlers on matters concerning settlement design and development, home building, farming, husbandry, domestic furnishing, personal hygiene, so on and so forth; in a way, it attempted to militarize and rationalize settlement movement along Fordist and Taylorist lines. Meanwhile, the Austrian Settlement, Dwelling and Building Guild was started in 1922 to organize and harmonize relations between professionalized labor unions, tenant’s associations, and cooperative workers (Figure 3). As Eve Blau has observed (1999), the Building Guild boasted 400,000 members before disbanding in 1923.

Why is this information important? One reason, I would argue, is that Vienna’s cooperative movement anticipated the informationization of the architectural field. If a Secessionist designer like Henri van de Velde subscribed to a notion of architect as "visionary" - if he believed that architects and artists should dictate what the masses should and should not consume – Vienna’s settlement advocates c. 1921-1923, and Otto Neurath in particular, attempted to think about reform as an exercise in information dissemination. In a manner not dissimilar from MVRDV, they insisted that the architect or urbanist ought to attend actively and aggressively to the “margins” of design – information gathering and distribution, regional zoning laws, and public education.

On what basis could one critique an organization like the Settlement and Allotment Garden Association? What kinds of hierarchies are implied? How is power distributed and managed? How might it reflect or play upon the dualistic character of modernity that Tönnies explored in his Community and Civil Society? These are questions I want to leave you with

Nicola: Nader, I will address your last question about Tönnies and settlement planning in Vienna by way of a definition of the term “mandarin.” As you know, the word appears in the title of Fritz Ringer’s book, The Decline of the German Mandarins:

Main Entry: man•da•rin
Pronunciation: 'man-d(&-)r&n
Function: noun
Etymology: Portuguese mandarim, from Malay menteri, from Sanskrit mantrin counselor, from mantra counsel -- more at MANTRA 1 a : a public official in the Chinese Empire of any of nine superior grades b (1) : a pedantic official (2) : BUREAUCRAT c : a person of position and influence often in intellectual or literary circles; especially : an elder and often traditionalist or reactionary member of such a circle.
Ringer’s usage: "[M]andarins… spoke for themselves."… "No social connection with the landed aristocracy, no roots in the capitalist middle-class either, no commitment to proletarian socialism." (Ringer 1969, 162-180)

”Wesenwille,” the natural will through which the members of a community are unified, and “Kurwille,” the arbitrary will that underlies societal relationships, are the forces at play in postwar Vienna. The attempt by the Social Democrat (SPD) intelligentsia to institutionalize the spontaneous housing and food movement can be understood as the passage from a natural and wild will to a rational and organized one (in this sense, I agree with you, Nader). Although this development was driven with the best of intentions, it gave rise to a sub-culture of bureaucrats: mandarins whose main goal was not to build and harvest, but to extend its own life.

Brian: My apologies for not being able to attend last week's class - as you can all imagine, Spain was just miserable, and I just couldn't wait to get back.

I share with Nicola the disappointment in how the "emergent" quality of the "wild settlements" in Vienna became formalized within a hierarchical structure. It strikes me that Neurath's flow diagrams are the product of his investigations into "war economy", where efficiency necessarily trumps traditional concerns like community. Rather than reflecting a community in Tönnies' sense, the flow diagram (Figure 3) seems to be a proposition for the creation of a society.

If I understand the chart correctly (Figure 3), it is interesting that the Vienna Municipality and Austrian Government sit low in the hierarchy. The Settlement and Allotment Garden Association seems to form a parallel government, working above the existing political structure. The fundamental flaw within the flow diagram (perhaps indicative of the form) is the single direction of flow - the absence of a feedback mechanism informing the top of the hierarchy. Perhaps if the flow charts sought to document the existing structure of the settlements, then it might begin to describe community, though I imagine the chart would look very different.

Giorgos: What is Gemeinschaft? What is Gesellschaft? As Nicola suggests, Gesellschaft corresponds to a society organized like a tree diagram, one in which members are subordinated to a strict hierarchy. Any relationship that the individual forms are external and always filtered through the larger group. If we take a look at the diagram of the Settlement and Allotment Garden Association (Figure 3), we will see that being part of a group in the lower ranks means that one may relate to subsequent ranks, but not with higher or parallel ones, except if this happens through the group as a whole. From the micro-scale of the nuclear family to the macro-scale of the state, people are always seen through the lens of the institution to which they belong. The theory of Gemeinschaft, by contrast, implies a more organic, direct, unmediated, and internal relationship between part and whole, individual and society. The subject is part of a group by connecting directly to everybody else, as in a network. To use Tönnies’ example, in a neighborhood people do not strict boundaries so as to understand how they relate to one another. Actually, people in a Gemeinschaft don't even need to understand their relationship to one other, as this is something naturally given.

Arvin: I agree with the point Nicola made above. In a way, Vienna’s settlement housing strategies suffered from the same excess of planned process that makes the whole Red Vienna experiment "more real than reality". This over-processing is perhaps due to the fact that Neurath and other allotment garden settlement planners in 1920s Vienna attempted to use command-driven war experiences in the design of the new society. In principle, this entirely contradicts the definition of a self-organizing system. For according to Manuel Delanda, self-organized systems are based on know-how rather than know-that principles (e.g., you know that a bicycle is red, but you need to know-how to ride the bike in order to use it). Naturally, Vienna’s settlement movement exemplifies the know-that principle.

III.

Seminar explores Otto Neurath’s Museum of Society and Economy (1925-1934). The museum is interpreted as an example of modernity trying to come to terms with the cultural and social consequences of informationization and industrialization.

The week’s readings include Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park’s Wonders of the Order of Nature (1998), Otto Neurath’s “The Museum of Society and Economy in Vienna” (1925), “Visual Education and the social and Economic Museum in Vienna” (1931), and Nader’s “Signification as observation: Otto Neurath and the Museum of Society and Economy” (2004).

In class, Malini and Giorgos present images ranging from the Elephant Man to Marchel Duchamp’s Ready-mades. Theirs was a presentation that tried to tackle the endless subject of the museum. In the process, they stimulated a lively debate over whether Raphael’s paintings were curiosities.

Brian: I have been thinking more about Neurath's use of the museum as venue (Figure 4). In one respect, I feel that his notion of a mass-produced museum is quite radical, yet the persistence of the museum-as-place is oddly reminiscent of the "aura” of the original that Walter Benjamin speculated would “wither in the age of mechanical reproduction” (Benjamin 1988, 221). The contents of the museum may now become mass-produced, but the museum itself is still a one-of-a-kind. I can imagine that it was the very aura of the museum as a place of culture, intellect, and learning that influenced Neurath. Rather than creating public billboards or subway advertisements, the museum would provide societal validation for the data. To a certain extent, this pattern mirrors the struggle of internet-based data, that is to say, the relative newness of the web (and ironically, the democratic process of information production) makes it difficult to judge the value of information found. The museum as an institution legitimates Neurath's data.

One other thought I had resulted from Nader's comment in class regarding the actual space used for the Museum of Society and Economy, which after 1927 was located in Vienna’s New City Hall (Figure 5). To what extent was locating the museum in this public building a statement about socializing public institutions in Red Vienna? The museum-as-place is significant as a territorial act – literally taking a public place and turning it over to the masses. I can think of one particular example of this that happened in Shanghai; a 19th century pleasure palace (Great World Exposition Hall, Shanghai China) was rededicated during the height of the communist era as a communist youth hall - the significance of the place had to do with the act of re-programming it (Figure 6).

Last, I wanted to revisit this idea of the mass producible museum. Malini and Giorgos' image of Duchamp's Boîte-en-valise comes immediately to mind (Figure 7). Duchamp’s efforts to reproduce (in miniature) his major works and package them for travel seem akin to Neurath’s mass produced museum. To what extent would the production and distribution of Neurath's museum have the paradoxical effect of calling greater attention to place? In connection with this question, I am reminded of the famous experiment by Lev Kuleshov (Tschumi, 1994, 131), where the identical image of the Russian movie actor Ivan Mozhukhin (Figure 8) was placed in various contexts, causing viewers to interpret differing emotions within the actor. The contemporary notion of the traveling show is a funny twist on Neurath's idea - the myth of the original is perpetuated and even extended through mass transportation. The museum stays put, but the curiosities travel.

Mike: Brian's example of the youth hall in Shanghai is a very a good illustrations of how difficult it is to erase history. We exist in a spatial condition – not necessarily a three-dimensional condition, but rather one of connections, associations, crossovers, nodes, bridges, and bypasses (Figure 9). Experience is not based strictly on empirical data, but contains a networked structure. You cannot simply erase information without changing other information.

I think this point brings up important issues concerning the creation of a “scientific world conception,” which we talked about in class, and the rise of the Museum of Society and Economy. In order to create a unified view in the terms suggested by the Vienna Circle, you would have to strip objects of their history or contextuality. How long would it take people to forget that the youth hall in Shanghai used to be a pleasure palace? Is it possible to forget history, or is it imbedded in the morphology of the building (architecturally as well as perceptually)? How would you describe or make "universal" the meaning or symbol of a constantly changing museum? How do you account for things that are in a constant state of flux or flows?

In many respects, the museums of today defy the logic of a unified world perspective, premised as they are on the unity of all knowledge. For projects like Koolhaas' two museum in Las Vegas and Gehry's Experience Museum Project resemble an amusement ride more than they do a static assemblage of objects, facts, and exhibits. Gehry’s EMP actually has a monorail flowing in and out of it (Figures 10, 11). Even older things like the EPCOT, the Center for the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, exemplify this (Figure 12).

Nicola: First of all, Brian's comment about the museum as a medium "that provides societal validation for the data" is brilliant, and I would like to add just an observation. Nowadays, we have available to us a wide range of different media (TV, internet, magazines and newspapers), and the weight of a museum (the building, not the institution) as a container of information has become quite relative. I have the feeling that in the 1920s the museum had a more relevant position in the spreading of information, as the mass media was still in its infancy.

Second, I have concerns about Neurath’s definition of the curiosity. Although I don't have any problem with Neurath’s aim to make information accessible to the masses, I do have a problem when he consider a Flemish painting a form of information.

In order to understand this issue more thoroughly, perhaps we should look closer at the definition of a curiosity and a work of art. Example: "The goldsmith H. Lencker turned the Seychelles nut into a luxurious goblet" (cited in Daston and Park 1998, 255). First, a goldsmith is not an artist, and there is a big difference between craftsmanship and art. Second, are we nowadays still amazed by a coconut shell? I don't think so. But a Flemish painting enchants us. Third, luxurious doesn't mean that an object is a masterpiece. But luxury can be traced with charts and diagrams where costs, quantities and work-hours can be detailed (Figure 13, 14, 15).

If a curious object surprises, one work of art can multiply indefinitely that surprise! And I don't think there is any system of charts that can represent successfully the complexity of a masterpiece. By the way, I think that the cabinet for the King of Sweden is a piece of crap (Figure 16)! The themes of classic art where mythology, war and religion are at play: we can find subtlety embedded in these iconographies, the representation of communities and societies. Neurath’s call for a more explicit representation of sociological values is correct but doesn't exhaust the need for the other means of representation!

Malini: I love Nicola’s expletives! Trust an Italian to speak with such “passione”! I agree that to compare Flemish Painting, The Pieta, and any number of works of art to Neurath’s pictograms is a stretch of the imagination! Where one is a model of artistic genius that few understand and even fewer possess, the other is a diagrammatic “breakdown” of facts and figures – designed with the sole intention of being “crystal clear” to one and all. However, I am not completely convinced that an object of luxury and an object of functional and resourceful design are very different. Frank Gehry’s “Easy Edges’”(Figure 17) cardboard furniture is not only a curiosity (Cardboard furniture exhibited at the Vitra furniture museum, a curiosity in itself!); it is also a very functional (low production cost!) piece of design sold at an exorbitant price (over $950 per piece). The pure functionality of Mies’ Barcelona chair is highly coveted but barely affordable at $1500 (sale!). (Figure 18). In other words, resourceful design is often fetishized to an extent where it starts to lose its value as a well-designed chair or table or (insert any everyday object); where it might be compared to “fact” and becomes an artifact.

Brian: Both Nicola and Mike key into something that I was also thinking about regarding Neurath and Wittgenstein. The atomization of the fact (I am assuming that "atomic fact" refers to the reduction of information to the smallest basic unit of fact), which was a goal for Wittgenstein's philosophy and Neurath's designs, seeks to say only one thing. On a micro scale, the scale of the atom, it is a simple, absolute fact. The very goal of the ISOTYPE was to achieve clarity of communication through the reduction of language to a limited set of graphic images. Combined together, these images sought to produce a "world picture," but ultimately this image was still a unitary image, which was still a drastically edited view of the world.

Contrary to the notion of a singular, absolute fact, something like Flemish painting is ambiguous, subject to multiple readings. In his book Ways of Seeing (1973), John Berger explores this very idea by analyzing the work of Frans Hals. Berger looks at Hals' painting Regents of the Old Men's Alms House, 1664 (Figure 19) , which the destitute artist was obligated to paint for the benefactors of the alms house whom he relied upon for his sustenance. Within the painting, Hals is able both to fulfill his obligation and embed a critique of the Regents by presenting one of the men in a disheveled state, suggesting drunkenness. Within the format of this formal portrait, a critical subtext is played out. The same portrait could simultaneously be interpreted as glorifying and ridiculing its subject. The painting allows for multiple, even conflicting interpretations. Simply put, there is a subtlety of communication that is perhaps lost in when one attempts a reduction for the sake of absolute clarity.

Malini: Following up on Brian’s point, Neurath’s diagrams and depictions allude to a particular “place” and “time” even though they are meant to be reproducible and publishable (Figure 20). On this basis, one could argue that his exhibits are one-off pieces. Take, for instance, his diagram representing automobiles produced in 1929 in America and Europe. While this data may have had relevance when published, such “facts” hold meaning and value for a limited period after which they become obsolete and “collectible”! If exhibited today, Neurath’s diagrams would be curiosities – maybe not so much in the form of representation, but definitely in their content (Figures 20, 21). Today’s interpretation of Neurath’s diagrams could be any number of banal traffic rule charts, graphic representations of populations and economies; you name it (Figures 22, 23). After all, they use simple, easy to understand, and universal “pictograms” to bring basic knowledge and information to the “average Joe”!

Brian’s comment about Neurath’s chosen medium of a “museum” as a means of “societal validation” makes perfect sense, but doesn’t the fact that the first answer to any question today is, “did you Google it?” also provide societal validation to information? Isn’t the internet search engine today’s Museum of Society and Economy? If Neurath’s museum was to provide information to the Viennese, isn’t this what Google does for us today?

Giorgos: I would like to start with the questions that Nader posted. The first one was why Neurath chose the museum as an institutional framework for his exhibition designs. This strikes me as contradictory because Neurath attempted to introduce change by using means that belonged to the era that he wanted to leave behind. I will give a very simple example that could be seen as an analogy: looking back at the invention of the automobile, we realize how much the first car designs resembled carriages. Even if the automobile was radically different in its conception, designers based their vision for this technology on an established and obsolete shape. I would say that in the beginning of a new era, it is common for change to occur using means that are already at hand. The museum as a foundation might be of a “conservative” nature in comparison with Neurath’s approach, but nevertheless it was an established one. It could act as a vehicle for initiating change.

IV.

Seminar explores the philosophy of the Vienna Circle in connection with Otto Neurath’s Vienna Method of Pictoral Statistics, a universal system of signs and symbols. Weekly seminar readings include passages from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922); Otto Neurath, Rudolph Carnap and Hans Hahn’s “The Scientific World Conception of the Vienna Circle” Empiricism and Sociology (1973); and W.J.T. Mitchell’s Picture Theory (1994).

Mike compares Ludwig Wittgenstein’s House for his Sister (1926-1928) with Neurath’s ISOTYPE diagrams; conversation focuses on possible parallels between Wittgenstein’s architecture and philosophy (1922); seminar contrasts Wittgenstein’s engagements with modernism with Neurath’s.

Nader: I just wanted to recap for you some of the themes and issues we dealt with in the last class; the first is regarding the nature of the “scientific world conception,” which Mike alluded to in a prior email. What is it, exactly? As I mentioned, there are at least two scientific world conceptions, and they might be divided (roughly) into the Wittgenstian variation and the Neurathian variation.

The Wittgensteinian understanding of the scientific world conception goes something like this: philosophically speaking, the only things worth talking about are those statements that can be expressed clearly and that can be confirmed or denied through empirical observation or logical scrutiny. Those claims that transcend science – those which assume metaphysical presuppositions at their base – ought to be dismissed out of hand.

That said, Wittgenstein also argues that there are limits to science despite the fact that these limits cannot be known (or even talked about). As he writes in the conclusion of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." (Wittgenstein 1999, 108). What does this enigmatic expression mean? My take is that here Wittgenstein is trying to distinguish between those statements that can be stated in language and those that can only be shown. I can show what statement “x” means, but I can't illustrate how it means what it means. Take the following example: consider the sentence, "There is a grammatical convention known as a period at the end of this sentence." Now, I can describe the convention that comes at the end of the statement I just cited, but I cannot "speak" what this convention does. The pausing that happens as soon as I use a period cannot, by definition, be "spoken." For to "speak" a pause in language would be tantamount to not being silent, which, by definition, undermines what it is I'm trying to express (the "silence" of the pause).

In broader terms, Wittgenstein's contention is that the absence of language is not the same thing as the negation of words. While factual expressions can be judged true or false – while scientific knowledge can be accepted or refuted logically -- knowledge about language, the structure of language, must simply be taken as "given". It constitutes both the limit and possibility of scientific understanding.

Neurath's reaction to this position – which was harbored not just by Wittgenstein, but also countless members of the Vienna Circle (i.e., Moritz Schlick, Friedrich Waissmann, et. al.) – was that it was metaphysically inspired. Neurath's belief was that knowledge was always socially circumscribed and that there was no such thing as an "ideal" language over and above empirical experience. He argued that metaphysics could be overcome – a physicalist language of science could be had – but if and only if we abandoned the quest for a "universal language." That is to say, while Neurath believed that science could make our lives better, he did not believe it was worthwhile to pursue philosophical or mathematical questions in an formal vacuum. Rather, for him the very point of "doing science" was to engage (and ultimately improve) society.

This brings me to the two “diagrams” of modernity, which Mike spoke about in class: the Wittgenstein House (1926-1928) on the one hand, which Ludwig Wittgenstein co-designed with Paul Engelmann for his sister Margarete (Figure 24), and the Vienna Method of Pictoral Statistics, which Otto Neurath invented as a means of disseminating scientific information. (Figures 25, 26, 27, 28, 29)

As Mike suggested, one salient different between these two projects is the fact that the one constitutes "an object" while the other, a "method." Neurath utilized "artifacts" in order to communicate facts; Wittgenstein took "facts" in order to explain a artifacts. That is to say, Wittgenstein was eager to bridge the gap between the real and the ideal, language and representation. He utilized the paired-down language of architectural modernism in order to achieve the "logical clarity" that he associated with his own philosophy. Technically speaking, he felt completely disillusioned with "ideas" as such – he abandoned philosophy for architecture precisely because of the inadequacies of verbal communication. But nevertheless! Wittgenstein could not help but to treat of the world as a philosophical problem. The physical detailing of the Wittgenstein House sought to mirror the logical rigor and austerity of the Tracatatus. Neurath, by contrast, was anti-object, anti-form, and anti-“Gesamtkunstwerk” from the beginning. His statistical diagrams reveal someone who was eager to appropriate pictures of things – houses , people and so forth – in order to draw attention to quantitative (rather than spatial) relationships. He used the visible in order to express the invisible, the pictoral in order to express the social.

Mike: We had a seminar for studio last Friday with John Rajchman on Pragmatism. He said something that I thought was interesting. He described a "relativist" approach to knowledge. It would be the opposite of Wittgenstein's approach. A relativist believes that facts are constructed through culture; they are embedded in and deeply associated with that culture. As culture changes, so also do the facts. The facts cannot be detached from culture.

Maybe this is closer to Neurath's approach, especially in the light of what Nader brought up about Neurath's position towards the "ideal." Wittgenstein’s views about language are interesting (i.e., if you can say it clearly, then it can be translated into empirical fact; otherwise, it is metaphysical and not worth talking about). But I think this standpoint is still limited. We tend to think of language as pure thought, but it is actually a prosthetic for our consciousness. Language is socially constructed. As Nikolas Luhmann's states in "How Can the Mind Participate in Communication?," the mind infiltrates whatever technology you are using to express thought (i.e. speech, writing, architecture, sign language, etc.). But the mind can never truly express itself in an unmediated fashion, because it is contaminated by cultural convention.

I remember once Nader gave the example of how deaf people have a hard time understanding what Wittengenstain would call metaphysical presuppositions. Language makes these ideas easier to explain, but I guess our experience is what defines them. And stating something simply is too easy – and not comprehensive enough to encapsulate our experiences.

The only problem I see with Neurath's approach is that he thinks of the scientific world conception as something existing outside of the system (culture), which one simply “drops in,” when in fact science should be understood (and maybe posited) as something created within the system. In this latter regard, I identify with the argument made by George Lakoff in his Metaphors We Live By (2003). The book describes a way of understanding the world through associations The individual does not transcend what he or she knows in creating something new, Lakoff suggests, but rather exists as part of a collective intelligence (i.e. culture) that participates in the production new things (facts).

Many contemporary architects – Rem Koolhaas, Ben van Berkel, and MVRDV -- exemplify this new attitude toward culture. Their work is per-formative in that it is driven by the associations between programs, allowing for adaptation and unintended future uses (Figures 30). It is not, however, necessarily in-formative (i.e., a factual artifact or a symbol) in that it is not a finished product, aesthetically and compositionally.

Brian: I was intrigued by Nader's description of Neurath's work as being quantitative as opposed to spatial (which is perhaps more indicative of Wittgenstein). In the simplest way, this was revealed in Neurath's description of what makes a "good" ISOTYPE, where having multiple icons for a truck was better than having a larger truck. As indicated in this example, space, while being quantifiable, is ultimately ambiguous in that it is difficult to distinguish between a box with half the volume from one with two-thirds the volume.

It seems that increasingly, modernism's obsession with spatiality has been the subject of criticism. Venturi was the first to do this in Complexity and Contradiction, but perhaps the whole introduction of the data-scape into architecture is an attempt to substitute quantity for spatiality. Alternately, I would propose that this might be an attempt to justify spatiality through quantitative means, falling back to science as a means of defending spatial conceptions.

Nader: I just wanted to respond to two points that Mike raised in his very interesting statement. The first is concerning Rajchman's comments. Yes, it does sound like his Pragmatist position resembles Neurath's much more closely than Wittgenstein’s. In fact, in a couple of weeks when we get to the Unity of Science movement (the successor to the Vienna Circle), we'll encounter a decidedly more Neurathian (and less Wittgensteinian) conception of knowledge, one rooted more in social and cultural practices rather than in mathematics or logic. What were the architectural ramifications for this? How would they affect/influence design? If on the one hand we regard Wittgentein's house for his sister as emblematic of the philosophy of the scientific world conception, on the other hand we might be able to see Neurath's collaborations with the CIAM (c. 1933) as more reflective of the outlook of the Unity of Science, which was a movement started in 1934 to help democratize the language of science. The former privileges the artifactual, the latter the factual. The former is about form; the latter, about formation, communication, and negotiation.

Concerning contemporary architecture: I would probably disagree with Mike and draw a distinction between first-generation pragmatists (like Koolhaas) and second-generation pragmatists (like van Berkel, MVRDV). The reason is to do with their respective views about the connection between theory and practice. While Koolhaas has been careful to separate his design work from his conceptual research – while he sees design and "analysis" as mutually exclusive – MVRDV, it seems to me, has over and again used theory in an instrumental way. They seem to believe that facts in a funny way can actually "give" us artifacts.

Nicola: I think that the distinction between the two generations of pragmatists works really well as analytical tools for highlighting the differences in the architecture of Koolhaas and MVRDV. Koolhaas’s architecture plays with the traditional elements of architectural language and is not a direct, three-dimensional representation of information. But if we consider the whole Koolhaas/OMA/AMO’s production, and the range of media involved (from books to buildings, from lectures to flags - the barcode for the European Union), it becomes more difficult to apply this distinction. A building is just one of the media involved. And it is in comparison with the book that architecture acquires its own autonomy.

Basically, Koolhaas uses a traditional approach to communication, as Le Corbusier did, where the theory in the book bears a connection with the theory in the building without the one overlapping the other. MVRDV, by contrast, take a more artistic approach to the relationship between the book and the building. They use the building as a vehicle for communication in the same way that the painter uses the painting as a vehicle for expressing his or her thoughts. Koolhaas’s architecture can be metaphorical (i.e., the elements from the architectural tradition refer to other fields), while MVRDV’s buildings are purely representational.

V.

Seminar reads Otto Neurath’s “Encyclopedia and Unified Science” (1938) and Bruno Latour’s Pandora’s Hope: Essay on the Reality of Science Studies (1999). Brian presented images from Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie, which Neurath cited as being pivotal to his Encyclopedia of Unified Science project. Seminar conversation draws attention to the image of the onion as being central to Neurath’s concept of the encyclopedia – a many-layered thing with a central core that continues to grow. The onion is contrasted with Carnap’s concept of a “system” as a means of containing knowledge.

Nader: Fascinating discussion today. Brian's contextualization of the Unity of Science movement was very useful, especially the description of Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie and its seminal importance in framing the ambitions of the Institute for the Unity of Science: both wanted to offer general education; both advocated collaboration; both sought to conceptualize knowledge as an open rather than closed system.

Nicola, your critique of the practice of the Unity of Science in class was very much on point. Strictly speaking, an encyclopedia cannot be "talked" about in any universal sense since it's constantly a work in progress, constantly being modified and changed; always subject to modification.

Just to recap your position, however -- Nicola, you seem to see promise in Neurath's call for "vagueness" as an antidote to the totalizing ambitions of Cartesian rationalism. You spoke favorably of Neurath's advocacy of Da Vinci’s project, whose work, you observe, bridged the fields of engineering, science, and art.

As a group, it sounds like we were pretty divided about whether the Unity of Science constituted a fact or a fetish or both (c.f., Latour). Latour, I think, would argue that there are elements of both impulses in Neurath’s work -- that the Unity of Science represents a "factish" in the sense that it assumes a concept of mastery that resembles both the fetishists' obsession with ownership and collecting and the "factoid's" fervor for gathering knowledge and information. I myself would probably agree with Latour's diagnosis, though I don't quite see how his position gets him out of the postmodernist quandary.

Brian: Latour is a difficult one. I wonder if his frequent invocation of the “Heideggerian ‘Thing’” is another way of describing an artifact. As he states, “[w]hat would happen, I wonder, if we tried to talk about the object of science and technology, the Gegenstand, as if it had the rich and complicated qualities of the celebrated Thing?” It seems like Latour is arguing that “matters of fact” once assembled, become Things, or in our terminology, artifacts. The etymology here is way beyond me, but there clearly are connections.

It is interesting to note that Otto Neurath’s ISOTYPEs will be featured in Bruno Latour’s upcoming exhibition “Making Things Public” at the Zentrum für Kunst- und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany. John Dewey, another member of the International Committee for the Unity of Sciences, will similarly hold a prominent place within the exhibition. Latour describes in one of his “progress reports” for the exhibition that the goal of the show is “to relink, but through very different resources, the same domains that Neurath had connected so efficiently just before the War. The question is to know if we can do better than what has been achieved in the heyday of Modernism.” From what I understand of the full show, technology is the primary “resource” that will be explored – a chance to try and upgrade Neurath to current electronic media.

Is Latour’s notion of “relinking” just a new version of the Unity of Science? Though I suspect he would argue otherwise, I think that there are some parallel agendas. In his article “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam” (Latour, 2004), Latour states that it should be the goal of a “new critical attitude” to conduct “a multifarious inquiry launched with the tools of anthropology, philosophy, metaphysics, history, sociology…”. The inclusion of metaphysics would make Neurath cringe (“Metaphysics!!!!”), but the cross-disciplinary, multifaceted attack is definitely akin Neurath’s desire for an “integration of science” (Neurath, 1935, 23). In the same article, Latour further states, “The question was never to get away from facts but closer to them, not fighting empiricism but, on the contrary, renewing empiricism.” Relinking is perhaps a renewal of empiricism, using the tools of the day to construct “sturdier” facts.

VI.

It was the controversial figure of Josef Frank who was undoubtedly central in this week’s readings and discussions. The assigned readings were Long’s Josef Frank: Life and Work (2002) and Neurath’s Personal Life and Class Struggle (1928). In his class presentation, Giorgos showed some colorful samples of Frank’s works that raised the issue of the role of aesthetics in science. Moreover, the class discussed Frank’s troubled relations to the modernist avant-garde.

Nicola: I think that last class has raised a dangerous ambiguity: the modern movement as the establishment to be fought. The position taken by Joseph Frank towards his colleagues who participated in the Weissenhofsiedlung and CIAM I and II raises reasonable criticisms about the excesses of functionalist formalism (the kind that a few short years later would be celebrated as a new style by the Museum of Modern Art). As Christopher Long pointed out in his Josef Frank: Life and Work, Frank’s criticisms concern the blind faith of the radical left in the equation “machine aesthetic=functionalism,” which did not respond to most people's psychological needs (Long 2002, 109).

But hidden in these remarks by Frank are beliefs that can easily stray into conservatism or even worse, the autarchic dreams of National Socialism. Frank uses moralistic visions, like sketches of the authentic and honest county house (with the man committing suicide…), which appeals to the masses (Figure 31).

Question: Are technology and psychology two sides of the same coin? Are they two sides of the same scientific world conception? (My) Answer: Yes.

While the modern movement was celebrated by the intellectuals in the 1920s and 30s, it was repeatedly defeated in all the major competitions: starting in 1922 with the Chicago Tribune, then the Palace for the League of Nations in Geneva (1927) and the Palace for the Soviets in Moscow (1931), the political establishment directed capital towards traditional proposals, from the neo-Gothic tower by Hood and Howell to the neo-Classical pastiche by Iofan. Albert Speer in Germany and Giovanni Piacentini in Italy: their public projects represented the “will to power” of authoritarian regimes (Figure 32).

Far from being the establishment fought by the Don Chichote/Josef Frank, in the 20s the modern movement was under attack by the same conservatives who were destabilizing the world. The Modern Movement was the real Don Quixote, not Frank!

Viva the modern movement!

Giorgos: I cannot say that I disagree with Nicola’s post about Josef Frank’s position vis-à-vis the modernist avant-garde. It is true that nobody can dismiss something as influential as the modern movement. But suggesting that an architect is either conservative or avant-garde is very similar to his excellency G.W. Bush stating, “You are either with us or against us.” Nicola’s is a fundamentalist view that risks reducing the world to a black-and-white playing field. Frank recognized this tendency toward dogmatism, and that is why he was very careful with words like “system” or “machine.” Systems tend to totalize and enclose everything, allowing for no difference, no real complexity, and in the end, no meaning. When everything belongs to a closed system, then meaning becomes relative, everything is a sign for something else.

Nader: Nicola, you make a provocative point. Frank did risk conservatism - or rather, I would call it resignation. In abandoning the idea that form and function could be reconciled, that the flat roof was of necessity rational, he committed himself to the opposite view, that design was ultimately an arbitrary affair – that its choices were driven by caprice, artifice and power. By the same token, I think Giorgos' critique of your argument is a devastating one. Nicola, may indeed be assuming an either/or scenario (Gropius=left, Frank=right) that isn't really warranted. You are probably overstating your case when you say that the modern movement rejected Frank's ideas wholesale. For after the publication of "What is modern?" (1930), many architects expressed relief at the fact that someone had called into question the functionalist pretenses of the Neue Sachlichkeit.

Malini: Some coffee table thoughts… Was Frank confused? He definitely confused me last week! Modernism – pure functionalism versus the aesthetics of “functionalism.” I loved Franks little sketch of the house.

At the risk of sounding overly simplistic, I would venture to say that Frank tried to bring modernism down from its “Miesian” pedestal. To me, the sketch of the “honest county house” is Frank’s rendition of Le Corbusier’s Dom-ino House, only this one is lived in (Figure 33). Frank’s project is different in the way that a real estate developers’ catalog of an apartment buildings is different from a collection of architectural works by Mies. Where a catalog is hand-rendered and include images of moms and dads and kids and dogs, glossy editions of architectural books that adorn the coffee tables of design aficionados show architecture that is “untouched by humanity.” While such pristine representations appeal aesthetically to architects and artists, I can see how they might be totally lost on the people that Frank drew in his sketch.

I would say that Frank was a “modernist” in concept. The use of innovative, albeit expensive, materials and technology in his Double House is consistent with his “plea for a new scientific rationalism.” For him, this was the logical next step in architecture.

Mike: I agree with Malini. Sure, maybe Frank was biased, but just like Neurath’s facts let loose in the cultural machine, Frank was a product of the Bauhaus and CIAM. He was obviously participating in their discussions and then responding to them. His criticisms are valid as "facts". They predicted the public’s response to modernism. Indeed, how does he know that people will use a flat roof as a symbol rather than an element that is directly responsive to the performance of a building?

(You can go to Part II of "7 Factorial" by clicking here)

Time, Technology, and Art: Interview with Pamela M. Lee

by Nader Vossoughian

In her recently published Chronophobia (2004), Pamela M. Lee argues that time represents a seminal, if neglected, preoccupation of post-war modern art. This concern, she says, has everything to do with the rise of automation technologies during the post-World War II era. The work of Andy Warhol and others like him anticipated growing anxieties about the past and its relationship to the present, she argues, suggesting that we have yet to come out from under the shadow of the ‘60s. Indeed, in her estimation modernity might be seen more generally as a process of convergence between innovation and obsolescence, one in which questions of temporality play an increasingly important, if indeterminate, role.

Q. My first question to you is to do with the theme of chronophobia. Why was it such a uniquely ‘60s phenomena? How might it be contrasted with perceptions of time during the 1970s? Can Gordon Matta-Clark also be said to have been a chronophobic artist?

A. The anxiety about (as well as fetish for) time is not a new phenomenon; nor is the twining of the temporal and the technological I outline in the sixties historical record. As I point out at several places in the text, modernity is itself a confrontation with the temporal, and we can certainly go back much further in mining this genealogy. But the '60s offer a very particular case study in this narrative: you could say it registers a decisive acceleration of this question. The historical emergence of the information age and the ideologies of control underwriting the rise of systems theory suggests something that comes close to a paradigm shift in the way in which time is both organized and projected.

The perception of time in the sixties (or rather, its projection) does not so much contrast with the '70s as it instantiates it, sets it into motion. And you are right to see a connection between this project and Matta-Clark's enterprise, although I would hesitate to call Matta-Clark a chronophobic artist. Certainly his work addressed questions of the timely and untimely as a function of the built environment: his work was an architecture of time (to borrow an expression of his father's).

Q. I was fascinated by your discussion about automation and mechanization. Mechanization, you observe, was born of the machine – the urge to rationalize the factory and workplace. Automation, by contrast, had more to do with communication and control. While both developments attempted to foster efficiency, they did so by radically different means: mechanization regulated the production of things, while automation affected the production of thoughts; not just what we see, but how we see. Am I correct in characterizing your account of the rise of automation technologies in this way? If so, how and why did the rise of technologies like cybernetics affect our perceptions of time?

A. You are right to characterize the distinction in these terms, although I do hope my writing preserves the contemporary problems of periodization around machine-age and automation technology in the early 1960s. In the chapter that deals most explicitly with this issue - on the kinetic artist Jean Tinguely - I suggest that parsing mechanization and automation along the lines of prewar and postwar technology - to lay a claim for a decisive historical break between the two - is to repress the enormous controversies attending the introduction of automation in the public sphere: indeed, it is precisely the seeming indivisibility of mechanization and automation that produces that anxiety.

John F. Kennedy’s quote about automation is to the point here. He states, “The major domestic challenge of the Sixties… is to maintain full employment at a time when automation is replacing men.” Because, of course, no one knew just to what extent processes of automation would alter the character of production, it remained indivisible during the Sixties from the discourses of labor typically associated with the machine age.

As for the rise of automation technologies and the art of the 1960s: many artists working under the rubric of "art and technology" in this period embraced the structural possibilities that were a function of automation (as in, for example, early CGs, video and its internalization of feedback) but the artists and critics that interest me respond mostly to its temporal implications, such as repetition, seriality, autopoesis, recursiveness, etc.

Q. To what extent does the fear of time thaIt you trace throughout your book still resonate with us today? Do you think that the rise of the internet and the cell phone have further dislocated our sense of time?

A. The fear of time - or the problematic of time - is one of the great hangovers we still suffer from the sixties. I write about this in the conclusion when I take up millennial anxieties around Y2K. What also bears repeating is the quasi-site-specific dimension of this book: the fact that a large part of it was conceptualized in the Silicon Valley where I teach; and where a certain resistance to, or ignorance of, recent history is endemic to large sectors of the student populace. I would hardly say this condition is exclusive to undergraduates, but is rather emblematic of the culture's ideology of presentism. To wit: consider the White House's absolute repression of the recent past; in particular, the "other" forgotten war in Afghanistan, the declarations about the end of major combat in Iraq last May, and, of course, the first Gulf War, which many people seem resistant to thinking has anything to do with our present situation (if they think about it all). This is not to forget, either, the inconvenient historical detail of Saddam Hussein's support from certain higher-ups in the U.S. government not too long ago.

Indeed, much of the book was written in the shadow of the dot-com bubble economy and its immediate aftermath. I was implicitly responding to the rhetoric of acceleration, endless technological progress and institutionally enforced obsolescence that repeatedly accompanies these economies.

As I write you now during my daily commute - on my laptop - and plan to send this off to you via wireless airport technology - I can only say the rise of the internet plays an enormous share in the current iteration of this chronophobic scenario. Let's just say the economy of time is one that academics struggle with constantly; and it is both marked and facilitated by our relationship to these quotidian forms of communications media.

Q. Agglutinations did an interview with Krzysztof Wodiczko recently. Wodiczko is an artist who uses video projects in public spaces to foster dialogue and "testimony." Like Tinguely, he appears to want to use technology as a tool for automating - and animating – artistic production. But if Tinguely's attitude toward time is an apocalyptic one, suffused with Cold War anxieties about nuclear destruction, Wodiczko's seems rather optimistic, utopian even, as though technology will help us "get through," even transcend, both the present and the past.

A. I am very interested in Wodiczko's work, although I wouldn't class him in the same art historical genealogy as Tinguely. And while I agree with you that testimony - especially the question of what is historically repressed within social discourse – is critical to what he does, I'm not sure I see his project as utopian. I've always thought of Wodiczko's work relative to critical strategies of montage; in this way, he's much more like a Matta-Clark in his projection of multiple and contradictory perspectives on contemporaneity. One can make a strong case for a socially therapeutic element in his work (as one could for Matta-Clark as well), but what compels me about Wodiczko's practice is its confrontation with anachronism: the way those images and voices return, uncannily, to haunt the appearance of immediacy that is the present. In that sense, Wodiczko certainly has a great deal to say about temporality, if not at all in the same register as the artists I consider in my book.

Q. In the conclusion to your book you make a case for "slowness and the ability to parse one's own present." Could you elaborate this point? Do you see any escape - artistic or otherwise - from the 60s “predicament”? What role do the arts have to play in this regard?

A. Slowing down, at least the way I discuss it in a Warhol or an On Kawara, represents the antithesis of returning to a mythic past. Slowing down implicitly problematizes our relationship to contemporaneity without imagining one can escape its very conditions or achieve distance from our own historical embeddedness: it's a means to think through the opacity (or transparency) of the present. The brilliance of Warhol and Kawara is that they exploit the structural mechanisms of technological acceleration - and the narratives of futuristic prognostication - in the service of slowness.

My larger point is that we can't, nor would we want to believe that we could, escape this predicament. We can, however, become more entrenched, "dig in our heels" in a manner of speaking, which is the possibility that slowness offers as a mode of critical intervention. I find it very interesting that Stewart Brand, who was so instrumental in thinking through the liberatory consequences of systems theory in the 1960s, is now engaged in this very problematic with his Clock of the Long Now Foundation.

As for the question of recent art: contemporary art is absolutely obsessed with the 1960s (just take a glance at the Whitney Biennial) and the issue of time is explicit for many practitioners. Some of this, I suspect, has to do with the proliferation of time-based media in the galleries, but I think it goes further than that: there's an encounter with duration that suggests that time has dethroned space in contemporary artistic production. I confess I have doubts that art "fosters productive change in our daily lives" at the level of social work or strategy. There are, of course, exceptions. But I hasten to add that this takes nothing anything away from the formative, projective and even phantasmatic capacities of works of art. Works of art are their own proposals or propositions, their own speculative gambits; and that is more than enough for me. (Good art, also, finds its audience anywhere, regardless of media or institutional context.)

Pamela M. Lee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. She is also the author of Object to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark (1999).

For a Justice to Come: An Interview with Jacques Derrida

by Lieven De Cauter (interviewer), Ortwin de Graef (translator), and Maïwenn Furic (transcriber)

In 1997, conservative commentator and journalist William Kristol formed the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a Washington-based think tank whose stated goal is the bolstering of American “military strength and moral clarity” in the global arena. THE PNAC's most prominent exponents include US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz, and vice president Dick Cheney. It is credited with spawning the ideology of pre-emption, the unilateral foreign policy approach that George W. Bush adopted in the wake of September 11th.

In the interview that follows, Lieven De Cauter explores with Jacques Derrida the dangerous precedents set by the PNAC. He also introduces the policy goals of the BRussells Tribunal, which convened for the first time last weekend to discuss possible war crimes committed by the Bush administration since the outbreak of the war in Iraq.

Lieven De Cauter: While thanking you for your generosity—why have you decided to grant us this interview on our initiative, the “BRussels Tribunal”?

Jacques Derrida: First of all, I wanted to salute your initiative in its principle: to resuscitate the tradition of a Russell Tribunal is symbolically an important and necessary thing to do today. I believe that, in its principle, it is a good thing for the world, even if only in that it feeds the geopolitical reflection of all citizens of the world. I am even more convinced of this necessity in light of the fact that, for a number of years now, we have witnessed an increased interest in the working, in the constitution of international institutions, institutions of international law which, beyond the sovereignty of States, judge heads of State, generals. Not yet States as such, precisely, but persons responsible for, or suspected of being responsible for, war crimes, crimes against humanity—one could mention the case of Pinochet, despite its ambiguity, or of Milosevic. At any rate, heads of State have to appear as such before an International Criminal Court, for instance, which has a recognized status in international law, despite all the difficulties you know: the American, French, Israeli reservations. Nonetheless, this tribunal exists, and even if it is still faltering, weak and problematic in the execution of its sanctions, it exists as a recognized phenomenon of international law.

Your project, if I understand it correctly, is not of the same type, even if it is inspired by the same spirit. It does not have a juridical or judicial status recognized by any State, and it consequently remains a private initiative. Citizens of different countries have agreed among each other to conduct, as honestly as possible, an inquiry into a policy, into a political project and its execution. The point is not to reach a verdict resulting in sanctions but to raise or to sharpen the vigilance of the citizens of the world, in the first place that of the responsible parties you propose to judge. That can have an exemplary symbolic weight.

That is why, even though I do not feel involved in the actual experience you intend to set up, I think it is very important to underscore that the case you are about to examine—which is evidently a massive and extremely serious case—is only one case among many. In the logic of your project, other policies, other political or military staff, other countries, other statesmen can also be brought to be judged in the same manner, or to be associated with this case. Personally, I have a critical attitude towards the Bush administration and its project, its attack on Iraq, and the conditions in which this has come about in a unilateral fashion, in spite of official protestations from European countries including France, in violation of the rules of the United Nations and the Security Council... But notwithstanding this criticism — which I have expressed in public, by the way — I would not wish for the United States in general to have to appear before such a tribunal. I would want to distinguish a number of forces within the United States that have opposed the policy on Iraq as firmly as in Europe. This policy does not involve the American people in general, nor even the American State, but a phase in American politics which, for that matter, is about to be questioned again in the run-up to the presidential elections. Perhaps there will be a change, at least partially, in the United States itself, so I would encourage you to be prudent as regards the target of the accusation.

LDC: That is why we have directed our attention not to the government in general but more particularly to the Project for the New American Century, the think tank which has issued all these extreme ideas of unilateralism, hegemony, militarization of the world, etc.

JD: Where there is an explicit political project which declares its hegemonic intent and proposes to put everything into place to accomplish this, there one can, in effect, level accusations, protest in the name of international law and existing institutions, in their spirit and in their letter. I am thinking as much of the United Nations as of the Security Council, which are respectable institutions, but whose structure, charter, procedures need to be reformed, especially the Security Council. The crisis that has been unfolding confirms this: these international institutions really need to be reformed. And here I would naturally plead for a radical transformation — I don’t know whether this will come about in the short-run — which would call into question even the Charter, that is to say, the respect for the sovereignties of the nation-states and the non-divisibility of sovereignties. There is a contradiction between the respect for human rights in general, also part of the Charter, and the respect for the sovereignty of the nation-state. The States are in effect represented as States in the United Nations and a fortiori in the Security Council, which gathers together the victors of the last war. All this calls for a profound transformation. I would insist that it should be a transformation and not a destruction, for I believe in the spirit of the United Nations.

LDC: So you still remain within the vision of Kant…

JD: At least in the spirit of Kant, for I also have some questions concerning the Kantian concept of cosmopolitanism.1 It is in this perspective that I believe initiatives such as yours (or analogous initiatives) are symbolically very important to raise consciousness about these necessary transformations. This will have — at least that is what I hope — the symbolic value of a call to reflection we are in need of, and which the States are not taking care of, which not even institutions like the International Criminal Court are taking care of.

LDC: If I may allow myself one specification: we are part of a whole network called “World Tribunal on Iraq”. There will be sessions in Hiroshima, Tokyo, Mexico, New York, London, and Istanbul. In London, and there the link between the International Criminal Court and the moral tribunal is very strong, those in charge of the Tribunal on Iraq have, together with specialists, assembled a dossier to investigate whether Blair (who has recognized the International Criminal Court) has broken international law. By all evidence, there is a considerable consensus among specialists to say that this war is a transgression, it is an “aggressive war” in the technical sense of the term as used in the charter of the UN, since there was no imminent threat to the territory of the countries involved. The upshot of this inquiry is that they have submitted a dossier to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Similarly in Copenhagen, since Denmark is part of the coalition. So it’s possible that our moral initiative may be transformed, in some of its components, into a juridical procedure strictly speaking.

JD: That would be desirable, evidently! But the probability that this would come about seems low, for there would be too many States who would oppose your initiative becoming institutional and generally judicial, and not just the United States. Yet if this doesn’t come about, that does not mean your project is destined to ineffectiveness. On the contrary. I believe in its considerable symbolic effectiveness in the public domain. The fact that it is said, published, even if it isn’t followed by a judgment in the strictly judicial sense, let alone actual sanctions, can have considerable symbolical impact on the political consciousness of the citizens, a relayed, deferred effect, but one that raises high expectations. I would hope that you would treat those you accuse justly, that yours would be an undertaking of true integrity, devoid of preliminary positioning, without preconditions, that everything would be done in serenity and justice, that the responsible parties would be accurately identified, that you would not go over the top and that you would not exclude other procedures of the same type in the future. I would not want this procedure to serve as an excuse for not conducting other procedures that are just as necessary concerning other countries, other policies, whether they be European or not. I would even wish that the exemplary character of your initiative would lead to a lasting, if not a permanent instance.

I believe that it would be perceived as being more just if you didn’t commit yourself to this target as if it were the only possible target, notably because, as you are aware, in this aggression against Iraq, American responsibility was naturally decisive but it didn’t come about without complex complicities from many other quarters. We are dealing with a knot of nearly inextricable co-responsibilities. I would hope that this would be clearly taken into account and that it wouldn’t be the accusation of one man only. Even if he is an ideologue, someone who has given the hegemony project a particularly readable form, he has not done it on his own, he cannot have imposed it on non-consenting people. So the contours of the accused, of the suspect or the suspects, are very hard to determine.

LDC: Yes, that is one of the reasons why we have abandoned the strictly juridical format. One of the disadvantages of the juridical format is that you can only target persons. Whereas we want to take aim at a system, a systemic logic. We name the accused (Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld) to show people we’re not talking about phantoms, but we take aim at the PNAC as a set of performative discourses, that is to say plans to achieve something, intentions to be translated into action. Our difficulty is also one of communication: communicating to people that PNAC exists and that it is important to spread this knowledge, is already a job in itself.

JD: Of course. And for that reason, it is important that matters are partly personalized and partly developed at the level of the system, of the principles, the concept, where this system, these principles, these concepts violate international laws which must be both respected and perhaps also changed. This is where you will not be able to avoid talking about sovereignty, about the crisis of sovereignty, about the necessary division or delimitation of sovereignty. Personally, when I have to take a position on this vast issue of sovereignty, of what I call its necessary deconstruction, I am very cautious. I believe it is necessary, by way of a philosophical, historical analysis, to deconstruct the political theology of sovereignty. It’s an enormous philosophical task, requiring the re-reading of everything, from Kant to Bodin, from Hobbes to Schmitt. But at the same time you shouldn’t think that you must fight for the dissolution pure and simple of all sovereignty: that is neither realistic nor desirable. There are effects of sovereignty which in my view are still politically useful in the fight against certain forces or international concentrations of forces that sneer at sovereignty.

In the present case, we have precisely the convergence of the arrogant and hegemonic assertion of a sovereign Nation-State with a gathering of global economic forces, involving all kinds of transactions and complications in which China, Russia and many countries of the Middle East are equally mixed up. This is where matters become very hard to disentangle. I believe that sometimes the reclamation of sovereignty should not necessarily be denounced or criticized, it depends on the situation.

LDC: As you have clearly demonstrated in Voyous [Rogues], in deconstructing the term, there is no democracy without “cracy”: a certain power, and even force, is required.

JD: Absolutely. You can also talk of the sovereignty of the citizen, who votes in a sovereign fashion, so you need to be very cautious. In my view, the interesting thing about your project is in taking up or pursuing this reflection starting from an actual case which takes a specific form: military, strategic, economic, etc. It is very important to develop such reflection on a case, but this reflection requires considerable time and must accompany the entire geopolitical process in decades to come. It is not just as a Frenchman, European or citizen of the world but also as a philosopher concerned to see these questions developed that I find your attempt interesting and necessary. It will provide an opportunity for others, many others I hope, to adopt a position with regard to your efforts, to reflect, possibly to oppose you, or to join you, but this can only be beneficial for the political reflection we are in need of.

LDC: I was amazed by the definition you give in The Concept of September 11: a philosopher, you say, is someone who deals with this transition towards political and international institutions to come. That is a very political definition of the philosopher.

JD: What I wanted to convey is that it won’t necessarily be the professional philosophers who will deal with this. The lawyer or the politician who takes charge of these questions will be the philosopher of tomorrow. Sometimes, politicians or lawyers are more able to philosophically think these questions through than professional academic philosophers, even though there are a few within the University dealing with this. At any rate, philosophy today, or the duty of philosophy, is to think this in action, by doing something.

LDC: I would like to return to this notion of sovereignty. Is not the New Imperial Order which names “Rogue States” a State of exception? You speak in Voyous about the concept of the auto-immunity of democracy: democracy, at certain critical moments, believes it must suspend itself to defend democracy. This is what is happening in the United States now, both in its domestic policy and in its foreign policy. The ideology of the PNAC, and therefore of the Bush administration, is exactly that.

JD: The exception is the translation, the criterion of sovereignty, as was noted by Carl Schmitt (whom I have also criticized, one must be very cautious when one talks about Carl Schmitt, I have written some chapters on Carl Schmitt in The Politics of Friendship where I take him seriously and where I criticize him and I would not want my reflection on Schmitt to be seen as an endorsement of either his theses or his history). Sovereign is he who decides on the exception. Exception and sovereignty go hand in hand here. In the same way that democracy, at times, threatens or suspends itself, so sovereignty consists in giving oneself the right to suspend the law. That is the definition of the sovereign: he makes the law, he is above the law, he can suspend the law. That is what the United States has done, on the one hand when they trespassed against their own commitments with regard to the UN and the Security Council, and on the other hand, within the country itself, by threatening American democracy to a certain extent, that is to say by introducing exceptional police and judicial procedures. I am not only thinking of the Guantanamo prisoners but also of the Patriot Act: from its introduction, the FBI has carried out inquisitorial procedures of intimidation which have been denounced by the Americans themselves, notably by lawyers, as being in breach of the Constitution and of democracy.

Having said that, to be fair, we must recall that the United States is after all a democracy. Bush, who was elected with the narrowest of margins, risks losing the next elections: he is only sovereign for four years. It is a very legalistic country rich in displays of political liberty which would not be tolerated in a good many other countries. I am not only thinking of countries known to be non-democratic but also of our own Western European democracies. In the United States, when I saw those massive marches against the imminent war in Iraq, in front of the White House, right by Bush’s offices, I said to myself that if in France protesters assembled in their thousands and marched in front of the Elysée in a similar situation, that would not be tolerated. To be fair, we must take into account this contradiction within American democracy — on the one hand, auto-immunity: democracy destroys itself in protecting itself; but on the other hand, we must take into account the fact that this hegemonic tendency is also a crisis of hegemony. The United States, to my mind, convulses upon its hegemony at a time when it is in crisis, precarious. There is no contradiction between the hegemonic drive and crisis. The United States realizes all too well that within the next few years, both China and Russia will have begun to weigh in. The oil stories which have naturally determined the Iraq episode are linked to long-term forecasts notably concerning China: China’s oil supply, control over oil in the Middle East… all of this indicates that hegemony is as much under threat as it is manifest and arrogant.

It is an extremely complex situation, which is why I am bound to say it should not be a matter of blanket accusations or denunciations leveled against the United States, but that we should take stock of all that is critical in American political life. There are forces in the United States that fight the Bush administration, alliances should be formed with these forces, their existence recognized. At times they express their criticism in ways much more radical than in Europe. But there is evidently — and I suppose you will discuss this in your commission of inquiry —the enormous problem of the media, of control of the media, of the media power which has accompanied this entire history in a decisive manner, from September 11 to the invasion of Iraq, an invasion which, by the way, in my opinion was already scheduled well before September 11.

LDC: Yes, as a matter of fact that is one of the things that need to be proven. The PNAC, in 2000, writes: “the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” They write this in September 2000: it was already decided, all the rest was just an alibi.

JD: I have had this debate in public with Baudrillard, who said that the aggression against Iraq — which was then being prepared— was a direct consequence of September 11. I opposed that thesis, I said that I thought it would take place anyway, that the premises had been in place for a long time already, and that the two sequences can be dissociated, to a certain extent. The day when this history will be written, when the documents are made public, it will become clear that September 11 was preceded by highly complicated, underhanded negotiations, often in Europe, on the subject of petrol pipeline passage, at a time when the petrol clan was in power. There were intrigues and threats, and it is not impossible to think that one day it will be discovered that it was really the Bush clan that was targeted rather than the country, the America of Clinton. But we shouldn’t stop at petrol: there are numerous other strategic geopolitical stakes, among them the tensions with China, Europe, Russia. Alliances with the United States, variable as ever, since it has attacked those whom they have supported for a very long time. Iraq was an ally of the United States as of France: all of this is part of diplomatic inconstancy, hypocritical from end to end, and not only on the part of the United States. There are many more stakes than petrol alone, especially since petrol is a matter of only a few more decades: there won’t be any oil left in 50 years! We must take the petrol question into account, but we shouldn’t devote all our attention and analysis to it. There are military questions, passing through territorial questions of occupation and control. But military power is not only a territorial power, we know that now, it also passes through non-territorialized controls, techno-communicational channels etc. All of this has to be taken into account.

LDC: And Israel?

JD: Many have said that the American-Israeli alliance or the support the United States give to Israel is not unrelated to this intervention in Iraq. I believe this is true to some extent. But here too matters are very complicated, because even if the current Israeli government—and here I would take the same precautions as for the United States: there are Israelis in Israel who fight Sharon — has indeed congratulated itself officially and in public on the aggression against Iraq, the freedom this may have apparently given Israel in its offensive initiatives of colonization and repression is very ambiguous. Here too we could speak of auto-immunity: it’s very contradictory, because at the same time this has aggravated Palestinian terrorism, intensified or reawakened symptoms of anti-Semitism across Europe…

It’s very complicated, for if it is true that the Americans support Israel — just like the majority of European countries, with different political modulations - the best American allies of Sharon’s policy, that is to say the most offensive policy of all Israeli governments, are not only the American Jewish community but also the Christian fundamentalists. These are often the most pro-Israeli of all Americans, at times even more so than certain American Jews. I’m not sure it will turn out to have been in Israel’s best interest that this form of aggression against Iraq has come about. The future will tell. Even Sharon meets with opposition in his own government nowadays, in his own majority, because he claims to withdraw from the Gaza colonies. The difficulty of a project such as yours, however just and magnificent it may be in its principle, is that it must cautiously take this complexity into account, that it must try not to be unfair to any of the parties. That is one of the reasons why I insist in confirming my solidarity in principle. Unable to participate effectively in the inquiry and in the development of the judgment because of my illness, I prefer to restrict myself for now to this agreement in principle, but I will not hesitate to applaud you afterwards, if I find you have conducted matters well!

LDC: Your statements are limpid and will serve as drink for many who are thirsty (for justice, for instance). Thank you very much. By way of post-script: let us speak of messianism for a minute or so. That is to say of “the weak force”, which refers to Benjamin and which you evoke in the “Prière d’insérer”, the preface to Voyous. Allow me to quote from it: “This vulnerable force, this force without power exposes to what or who is coming, and coming to affect it (…) What affirms itself here would be a messianic act of faith—irreligious and without messianism. (…) This site is neither soil nor foundation. It is nonetheless there that the call for a thought of the event to come will take root: of democracy to come, of reason to come. All hopes will put their trust in this call, certainly, but the call will remain, in itself, without hope. Not desperate but alien to teleology, to the expectancy and the benefit [salut] of salvation. Not alien to the salavation [salut] of the other, nor alien to the farewell or to justice, but still rebellious towards the economy of redemption.”… I thought this very beautiful. Almost a prayer to insert — into the everyday, into our project. What is it, this messianism without religion?

JD: The weak force indeed refers to the interpretation of Benjamin, but it is not exactly mine. It is what I call “messianicity without messianism”: I would say that today, one of the incarnations, one of the implementations of this messianicity, of this messianism without religion, may be found in the alter-globalization movements. Movements that are still heterogeneous, still somewhat unformed, full of contradictions, but that gather together the weak of the earth, all those who feel themselves crushed by the economic hegemonies, by the liberal market, by sovereignism, etc. I believe it is these weak who will prove to be strongest in the end and who represent the future. Even though I am not a militant involved in these movements, I place my bet on the weak force of those alter-globalization movements, who will have to explain themselves, to unravel their contradictions, but who march against all the hegemonic organizations of the world. Not just the United States, also the International Monetary Fund, the G8, all those organized hegemonies of the rich countries, the strong and powerful countries, of which Europe is part. It is these alter-globalization movements that offer one of the best figures of what I would call messianicity without messianism, that is to say a messianicity that does not belong to any determined religion. The conflict with Iraq involved numerous religious elements, from all sides—from the Christian side as well as from the Muslim side. What I call messianicity without messianism is a call, a promise of an independent future for what is to come, and which comes like every messiah in the shape of peace and justice, a promise independent of religion, that is to say universal. A promise independent of the three religions when they oppose each other, since in fact it is a war between three Abrahamic religions. A promise beyond the Abrahamic religions, universal, without relation to revelations or to the history of religions. My intent here is not anti-religious, it is not a matter of waging war on the religious messianisms properly speaking, that is to say Judaic, Christian, Islamic. But it is a matter of marking a place where these messianisms are exceeded by messianicity, that is to say by that waiting without waiting, without horizon for the event to come, the democracy to come with all its contradictions. And I believe we must seek today, very cautiously, to give force and form to this messianicity, without giving in to the old concepts of politics (sovereignism, territorialized nation-state), without giving in to the Churches or to the religious powers, theologico-political or theocratic of all orders, whether they be the theocracies of the Islamic Middle East, or whether they be, disguised, the theocracies of the West. (In spite of everything, Europe, France especially, but also the United States are secular in principle in their Constiutions. I recently heard a journalist say to an American: “how do you explain that Bush always says ‘God bless America’, that the President swears on the Bible, etc.” and the American replied: “don’t lecture us on secularity for we put the separation of Church and State into our Constitution long before you did”, that the State was not under the control of any religion whatsoever, which does not stop Christian domination from exerting itself, but there too it is imperative to be very cautious). Messianicity without messianism, that is: independence in respect of religion in general. A faith without religion in some sort.

Editor's note: We wish to thank Lieven De Cauter and the BRussells Tribunal for generously allowing us permission to reprint this interview. Copies of it can also be found at the website of the Al-Ahram Weekly. It originally appeared in the March 18, 2004 issue of De Standaard Letteren.

Jacques Derrida is Director of Studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is also Global Distinguished Professor of English, French, and German at New York University.

Lieven De Cauter teaches the philosophy of culture at the Catholic University of Leuven. He has authored several books and is initiator of the BRussells Tribunal on PNAC and the New Imperial World Order.

Interview with Krzysztof Wodiczko: Making Critical Public Space

By Elise S. Youn and María J. Prieto

The projects of public artist Krzysztof Wodiczko give participants the opportunity to speak about their traumatic experiences. Through the animation of historic public buildings and monuments in cities such as Krakow, Boston, Hiroshima, Tijuana, St. Louis and Barcelona, his video projections create spaces for individual therapy and public reflection. In the conversation that follows, Wodiczko discusses his process of testing ideas and expressions (as speech-acts) in order to initiate a critical dialogue both within a specific marginalized culture, as well as with the greater community. In a concluding discussion about September 11th, Wodiczko also extends this critical consciousness to other fields, emphasizing the active role of architecture in questioning and engaging society.

Stills from Wodiczko's Tijuana Projection (2001) (right) and Hiroshima Projection (2001) (below, right) are featured here courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong of New York.

Q: How do different theories of democracy affect your work, and specifically, how do your projects interpret Chantal Mouffe’s idea of the agonistic democracy, in which all members of society have an equal voice?

KW: In the process of doing my own work, I obviously reflect on the theories of Mouffe and others, or at the very least, they help me understand aspects of what I am dealing with. The paradox is that I do not learn from theory what to do, but at the same time, I do not stay away from it. This is because theorists and artists work simultaneously with similar issues.

That said, I think that the many fragments of theory concerning public space, democracy and public art are not necessarily all connected in one unified theory. Through my work, I can see these connections, but they are not systematically organized in my head because I am not a theorist.

When you refer to Chantal Mouffe, yes, I am extremely open to and inspired by some of the things she has said. But there are also many things to which she does not and cannot refer, because she is a theorist rather than a practitioner. Her approach belongs to the domain of political theory, or more specifically, to the theory of democracy. There could also be, I suppose, an ethical-political, as well as a psycho-political approach to democratic theory, although neither one is her primary focus.

I believe that the democratic process and public space cannot even for a moment be created if we do not include all potential speakers and actors in the discourse. We must be inclusive towards the participants – those who are perhaps the most important for agonistic discourse, but who are incapable of contributing to it. Their ability to speak and share their “passions” is incapacitated by the very experiences that they should be communicating. Before they can add their voice to the democratic agon, these actors must again develop their shattered abilities to communicate. They must do so for the sake of their own health and for the health of democracy. The process of unlocking their post-traumatic silence requires not only critical, but also clinical, approaches and attention. Thus, I must risk here injecting (even into Mouffe’s own theory) other concepts and ideas.

In my practical, artistic mind, I try to infuse (hopefully not confuse) the concepts of the agonistic democracy with ethical-political concepts from Foucault and psycho-political ideas from Judith Herman, a trauma theorist and therapist. Calls for “dissensus,” disagreement, passion and an inclusive adversarial discourse that acknowledges and exposes social exclusions (Mouffe) must be injected with a call for an ethics of the self and the Other in “fearless speaking” (Foucault). This would be combined with a call for psychotherapeutic recovery through “reconnection” that emphasizes the role of public truth-telling and testimony (Herman).

When you move into artistic practice, it is all about responding to what each project demands and then going further. In a sense, it is not about making or following theory; it is about creating a continuing practical work that asks new theoretical questions – a certain constellation of questions which may not have necessarily been brought together yet by philosophers and theorists.

Q: In the post-World War II “societies of control” described by Deleuze, power is said to exert itself internally rather than overtly, making it difficult to counter the deluge of information. We are relentlessly bombarded by media and images, so that it seems like the only way to engage people, or to raise awareness, is to shock people. Your strategy seems to involve using large-scale monuments and projections as a means of making a meaningful impact. How does your work intend to provoke people to think critically in this kind of society, to dialogue with each other, or to find solutions to what they are reflecting on? We are referring not only to the process of the psychological awakening, but also to the more practical notions of building a community or inciting people towards more direct action.

KW: Those who are speaking in and through my work are at the same time helping themselves move from private confession, through critical public testimony, and into action. Through this process, they begin to understand that what they have to say will change something. The very fact that they are speaking of something of which no one else wants to speak, and that they are using the authority and the phenomenological power of the architectural body, allows them to refer to the historical significance of these monuments as silent witnesses to previous and present events. The participants make a link between their present life and past events, hoping that these events will not repeat themselves in the future; they end up activating the concept of monitus, which means “warning”. They actualize monuments (monumentus), and they also become living memorials themselves, in the sense of moneo, or remembering. They testify and protest (from testis, “witness”). The testimonial is submerged in the life of the city, so there is a new and powerful presence of someone that both denounces and announces something, in an organic connection to a symbolic structure of some importance.

It becomes clear that if those people can say something, if the monument can speak, then perhaps the public in turn can also do something. There is some possibility of spreading the contagious process of unnerving, irritating, and interrupting the passivity and total silence of the city.

The silence of the city is the speech of the city, but no one hears that speech. Thus, the participants speak of that silence, while also questioning it. They themselves use it, some more than others, as a vehicle to reconnect with society, since they – during the long process of recording, rerecording, editing, and actually putting words to unspeakable experiences – use it as a therapeutic vehicle. Because they must also be animators of a monument, they create a comical and strange aspect for it, like a new dramatic therapy. The participants need a certain distance from themselves because they each become monuments and buildings. They see others in the same situation; they are not alone. They are unique, but also part of a larger picture.

This is a process of “reconnection” that artists, or an art of the animation of the monument, can provide.

There are other ways and techniques of reconnection that occur through therapy and in cultural work. One instrumental factor is that the projection is not only practiced and prerecorded over a long period of time, which is very important, but that it also has a live component: real time. In real time, there is the possibility of feedback, meaning that the public (whoever chooses to do so) might have the chance to speak back to the building through the projected person animating that building. That is what I am trying to test today. In the Tijuana Projection (2001), the speakers were able to add life – speech – once they realized that people were listening and looking at their faces and façades seriously. They put on the instruments and told the truth in open and “fearless” speech. They were able to face the listeners directly, and the listeners were also able to face them – both the actual faces of speakers, and the façade of the monument.

Today, in my projects for St. Louis and Barcelona, I am thinking about using a microphone so that when a person speaks back to the huge body of the building, the person animating the building or monument will be able to see the listeners through some kind of wireless or wired feedback transmission. An argument might therefore be able to take place, a wrestling with the monument.

Q: In your writings, you have referred to the ancient Greek concept of parrhesia, revisited by Foucault. Parrhesia is the idea of having a responsibility to tell the truth, to confess. You use this concept in your work to encourage those who have been traumatized to speak fearlessly. You have also talked about the importance of “fearless listeners” among those who do not necessarily have the obligation to speak, but who provide the forum within which dialogue can take place. In your experience, when a dialogue is established, is there something greater that gets created?

KW: Since all of the projections have been through monuments, in the context of cultural or art events, there is always something greater there. Even if it is not such a big event, anything that brings people to a monument will be recorded by the media, because somehow television, the press, the radio, and the internet cannot live without these historic, monumental public places. As long as there are a number of people outside looking at a monument, creating a spectacle, the media will be there, guaranteed. This means that maybe I can also use the presence of the media event as an opportunity.

Q: Jacques Rancière says that dissensus or disagreement in public assemblages is important for collaboration and dialogue to occur. He says that by appealing to a shared sensation or emotion, society can succeed at being both united and divided. In a similar way, it seems that your projects support both collaborative unity and social diversity with the intention of creating a new kind of critical public. We also know that you have previously drawn inspiration from Habermas’ notion of consensus, as well as from Mouffe’s theories of dissensus and agonism. So it seems like all of these concepts have at some point influenced your work.

KW: Yes, I am very interested in all of these concepts, although coming from Poland, a country that suffered from an authoritarian and Catholic pedagogy, I still don’t know how to deal with one concept which you have not mentioned - the idea of “conversion.” Chantal Mouffe took the idea from Kuhn, looking to the possibility of “conversion” rather than compromise as the result of agonistic discourse. At some point, she suggests, the adversary accepts a different kind of framework of understanding, rather than finding a middle-ground solution (the word “solution” in fact suggests dissolving discourse, as if democracy were a solvent for difference). Nevertheless, I think conversion can indeed happen. I can create the conditions for it, but I do not think it is possible for me to guarantee that my work will reach that point.

Q: What exactly do you mean by accepting a new framework?

KW: Accepting a new framework means that you suddenly realize that you are gaining access to a reality that has its own life. Part of this reality is that there are initial positions there, from the rest of the world. But in accepting a new framework you might suddenly start to see the world from the point of view of the Other. This is perhaps what Benjamin was hoping for, seeing the world through the experience and tradition of the vanquished, rather than through the history of the victors. Maybe it would be too simple now to think like Benjamin, but it is an interesting idea to see the city from the point of view of the wound, from the point of view of the real trouble, rather than looking at the trouble from above. One hopes this kind of conversion is possible, although it may be a stretch.

Q: John Rajchman defines Pragmatism as trusting in the world while also being critical of it, realizing that the truth is in the world. Bruno Latour, meanwhile, uses the concept of “things in the making,” or things in process – something to think about or to use as criticism – to describe the concept of Pragmatism. Do you see your work as connecting with any of these ideas?

KW: I think that the process of constructing a story or testimony, through the entire procedure of recording, rerecording and editing linked to the projections I do now, is definitely something beyond what participants can usually hope for – as long as there are no preconceptions. I do not want to know what a projection is about before it is over. Even afterwards, I may still not want to know what it is about, and would rather leave it in the hands and minds of the people who stay behind. At the same time, I have to take responsibility for my work. I don’t know if this connects with Pragmatist theories, but for me my work is a way of creating a “transitional” phenomenon and a kind of “potential space,” the “third zone” of which D. W. Winnicott speaks in his work on the “transitional object.” I consider this approach a very important step, quite beyond the Modernist approach, to protect the process, so that people start playing with and discovering why they entered the process in the first place. This is a more creative way of thinking about art, one in which the participants become artists themselves through use. And at that moment, the questions of who the artist is here – they or I – or whether the participants received this project from the outside world or created it themselves, need not even be formulated. Now, to what degree this psychological idea of development, “things in the making,” or the process of creating a situation for things to make themselves, or to “become,” fits Pragmatism, you are in a better position to answer than I.

Q: We see a real connection between your work and Pragmatism. For instance, you have said that when you start working on a project, you want to test it, even for as long as a year, to see how it can work in the most effective way.

KW: In these projects, it is really the participants who are doing the testing. What I am trying to say is that the participants are co-artists who test the degree to which the projects can be useful for them, and how they can further be useful for others. They use the project for themselves: they are both doctors and patients, which is the nature of the clinic. It is a kind of public clinic, all of this. Here we move into another link between the critical and the clinical, the proposition of Deleuze. This is a very elegant relationship in which the clinical can be critical in the sense that it detects and investigates symptoms. In the case of my work, the analogy might go even further, from the diagnosis to the actual healing. It could be that in my projects, as the participant-speakers examine the ill social body through their own problems, they may also want to change things.

It is interesting that Pragmatism is being reactualized here. I am not seeking to revisit it, but perhaps to look at it in a new way.

Q: Your work seems to be about locating philosophy as a practical and critical method of acting and experiencing. It is always about discussing the individual as a self-critic, with his or her thoughts and actions, and trying to make public spaces that engage this process.

KW: The approach you are referring to is more of an artistic rather than an aesthetic one, if I were to use that distinction from Nietzsche, because it is the doing, the making, and the announcing of something that is the vision. For artists, it is very significant to understand that there is much hope in art, in such a framework of thinking. It is not just about depiction or representation, but about passion, action, intervention and transformation – this is what art can do. It is good for the discussion of public art to recognize this idea of hope.

Q: Do you think this same kind of critical consciousness applies to architecture today as well – despite the current direction of architecture towards a reliance on the image, on designing with the computer, and on the absence of social responsibility on the part of the architect?

KW: Yes, today there seems to be too much of an emphasis on translating theoretical ideas into architectural forms as if they were sculptures. This kind of formal architecture is not about creating a situation for people to discover something new about themselves, nor is it about transforming the world around them or their own inner worlds. This is the connection I see among Winnicott’s theory of the transitional object, phenomena in design and architecture, and the Pragmatist tradition you are focusing on. The questions, “What is architecture?” and “What is design?” become newly formulated; they are no longer old questions. It has been a long time since I heard these discussions, but for example, fifteen years ago, everyone was interested in the idea of “nomadic” architecture. But the architecture did not move, nor did anyone really move thanks to that architecture, which was more a picture or sculpture of a movement.

This kind of questioning even gave rise to the idea of “nomadology,” written up during the late 1970s. Nomadology was part of a major psychoanalytical and political metaphor – a major critique of form – and an understanding of form and life as something very complex. And here it was being translated into buildings that were somewhat grotesque attempts to show themselves to be moving, repeating themselves in various places, or spreading. However, what these buildings actually did was barricade the space, contributing to the production of striated space against smooth space, and discouraging the possibility for people to somehow move through the striated space as if it were smooth. (The only exception to this was Lucien Kroll, with his “architecture of complexity.”)

It is important to preserve all of these crossings, to somehow create an alternative way for people to relate and communicate to each other – to move on with their daily lives. We have come to realize that these “new” structures were actually reproducing old ways in new forms.

Q: How do you feel about the symbolic content of this sort of formalist architecture, especially about the way an arbitrary form can be used to symbolize the collective, for example in the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan with the Twin Towers competition?

KW: This kind of architecture is a replacement – a substitute for many discourses that did not occur. As a “memorial” project, it could be seen as exemplifying the danger of closure, pre-empting the possibility of undergoing real mourning and preserving melancholia. If mourning is the process of thinking and of working through something – analytically reconstructing all of the conditions that fueled such a merciless, bloody act – all of this work is not being done. Instead, we are creating the conditions for sorrow, for a sense of loss, and for commemoration; but this is not really the conscious work of memory that is required.

In general, I think that closure in any memorial that does not invite us to do anything, but instead does something for us – or has already done something for us, completed our work, so to speak – is extremely dangerous, especially in our age, because the history of memorials is the history of the machines that only help bad things happen again.

Now, if a memorial could do something, it should probably create the conditions for the engagement of younger people, for new generations to deal with what has happened – or what is still happening – so that the same tragedy does not occur again. This is one issue, but the memorial of course still needs to gather people together and commemorate the event. I am not saying that one program should replace the other, but the complexity of the discourse around the question of how to commemorate is not there in the case of the rebuilding after September 11th. There were beginnings of all sorts of discussions, but somehow the architecture abruptly arrived and proposed something else instead: it became the substitute for the “working-through” process of mourning. This is not only a problem with September 11th and the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan; it is happening in other places as well. So the question becomes: if not this, what could a memorial architecture be instead?

Krzysztof Wodiczko is Director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies as well as head of the Interrogative Design Group at MIT. He has developed a series of public intervention and speech-act equipment, such as Homeless Vehicle (1988-1989), Alien Staff (1992), and Dis-Armor (1999-2000), as well as created over seventy projections on public buildings and monuments around the world.