Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Expanding Agency by Expanding Time

In How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built, inventor/designer Stewart Brand argues that buildings and architecture must be thought of in terms of time and not simply in terms of space. For Brand, buildings consist of six layers, each with its own temporal lifespan:
• SITE – This is the geographical setting, the urban location, and the legally defined lot, whose boundaries and context outlast generations of ephemeral buildings.
• STRUCTURE – The foundation and load-bearing elements are perilous and expensive to change, so people don’t. These are the building. Structural life ranges from 30 to 300 years (but few buildings make it past 60, for other reasons).
• SKIN – Exterior surfaces now change every 20 years or so, to keep up with fashion or technology, or for wholesale repair. Recent focus on energy costs has led to re-egineered Skins that are air-tight and better-insulated.
• SERVICES – These are the working guts of a building: communications wiring, electrical wiring, plumbing, sprinkler system, HVAC (heating, ventilating, and air conditioning), and moving parts like elevators and escalators. They wear out or obsolesce every 7 to 15 years. Many buildings are demolished early if their outdated systems are too deeply embedded to replace easily.
• SPACE PLAN – The interior layout – where walls, ceilings, floors, and doors go. Turbulent commercial space can change every 3 years or so; exceptionally quiet homes might wait 30 years.
• STUFF – Chairs, desks, phones, pictures; kitchen appliances, lamps, hair brushes; all the things that twitch around daily to monthly. Furniture is called mobilia in Italian for a good reason. (13)
Breaking a building up into these layers allows Brand to describe how these objects appear at once static things – “that church has always been there” – but at the same time, an object that is always “tearing itself apart” and becoming something new (13).

These layers are important for designers and architects, because humans interact with them at different levels:
The building interacts with individuals at the level of Stuff; with the tenant organization (or family) at the Space plan level; with the landlord via the Services (and slower levels) which must be maintained; with the public via the Skin and entry; and with the whole community through city or county decisions about the footprint and volume of the Structure and restrictions of the Site. The community does not tell you where to put your desk or your bed; you do not tell the community where the building will go on the Site (unless you’re way out in the country). (17)
Therefore, the Skin and Stuff of a building might undergo a quicker degree of change (every 3-30 years), while the Structure and the Site might change a lot slower (every 200+ years). Services, on the other hand, might undergo change depending upon the Skin and the Stuff – do I need a T1 connection if I do not own a computer? The point Brand is making is that buildings act much like an ecosystem, in that “the lethargic slow parts are in charge, not the dazzling rapid ones. Site dominates the Structure, which dominates the Skin, which dominates the Services, which dominate the Space plan, which dominates the Stuff. How a room is heated depends on how it relates to the heating and cooling Services, which depend on the constraints of the Structure. […] The quick processes provide originality and challenge, the slow provide continuity and constraint” (17). Each independent layer relies on and influences the other layers – though again, the results might not be immediate.

What reminded me of Brand’s evolutionary understanding of buildings was Jane Bennett’s position in Vibrant Matter - that the claim to vibrant matter (or a vital force located in all objects) becomes “more plausible if one takes a long view of time” (10). For Bennett, this type of evolutionary (temporal) view allows us to recognize the object specifically as an actant. So that, following De Landa, she finds that, “Mineralization names the creative agency by which bone was produced, and bones then ‘made new forms of movement control possible among animals, freeing them form many constraints and literally setting them into motion to conquer every available niche in the air, in the water, and on land” In the long and slow time of evolution, then, mineral material appears as the mover and shaker, the active power, and the human beings, with their much-lauded capacity for self-directed action, appear as its product" (11). By simply extending our view of time we find that agency is not necessarily a human property. This lesson seems to be similar to that found in Brand, that time becomes a hindrance to understanding an object’s agency when it is not allowed to regress (or progress?) beyond a certain point. Objects act, but only on their own time. A lesson needed for OOO.

18 comments:

  1. I apologize for being late to this conversation, and maybe being tone-deaf, I don’t see anyone in the physical sciences/engineering having a problem with the idea of matter/substances/energies/forces/etc as being in motion and producing effects (even having "life" cycles), and Darwin only could see evolution when he came to terms with geological time, but I don’t see what is gained by describing these aspects in anthropomorphic terms, whereas there seems to be a lot to lose on the human/justice side by seeing all activity as agency/response-ability.
    -dmf

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  2. Hey dmf,

    Now, I can't speak for the other areas of study, but I feel that rhetoric would have a lot to gain by expanding its notion (in some capacity) of agency to include nonhumans. This is not to take away from human agency, but to bring to the forefront the way objects influence other objects. So, for example, when Brand talks about buildings he points out that its Skin can affect its occupants and their Stuff. This is a form of agency typically located in the scene and does not originate in the agent. We are not instrumentalizing the human here, but are instead giving credence to the action and influence of the nonhuman. I think this is Bennett's point when she argues that the human should not lose any ethical standing when we begin to recognize this agency of things; instead, we need "to raise the status of the materiality of which we are composed. Each human is a heterogeneous compound of wonderfully vibrant, dangerously vibrant, matter" (12-13). What we do have to avoid, though, is reifying the superiority of the human over the world it is a part of. For a rhetoric that respects agency for all objects would be one that respected all organisms, human or nonhuman.

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  3. It's hard to see how generalizing these terms doesn't become either a kind of functionalist reduction of human-being(s) or a projection of aspects of being-human onto the non-human world. I think that one can understand human animals as having unique (but kluge(d)) emergent capacities (including that of wonder and gratitude, not to mention speech-acts) and therefore being more response-able for (more indebted/beholden to)the greater family tree/web rather than being superior to. Such that say global warming (or our other mechanized decimations of various populations/ecosystems) is ethically different than other historical shifts in these weather systems. So not thinking in terms of the Sublime, or sublation, but of something akin to sublimation.
    To lose sight of the particularities in the long histories of the subjugation and resistanc(i)es of peoples that has given rise to modern talk of "agency" makes me deeply uneasy. Working in psychiatry I know first hand what happens we start talking about peoples' being-in-the world (and our being-with-them) in terms of their brain functions/chemistry and it isn't pretty.
    I know that I had said that I wouldn't add to your reading list but if you get a chance there is a short but excellent article: Overviews: what are they of and what are they for? by Frank Cioffi in Seeing Wittgenstein Anew that you might find illuminating.
    -dmf
    http://schizosoph.wordpress.com/2010/06/26/third-dogma-and-sr/
    http://www.protevi.com/john/Deleuze_Wexler.pdf

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  4. Thanks, dmf. Perhaps you might be interested in this post I did quite some time ago (if you haven't read it):

    On Smuk is King

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  5. great post Nathan! I agree with the resonances between what Brand seems to be arguing and Bennett's vibrant materialism.

    The agency of structure indeed...

    cheers-

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  6. Thanks, Michael! glad you enjoyed it.

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  7. things that "think"
    http://ttt.media.mit.edu/research/research.html
    -dmf

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  8. http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article03221101.aspx
    -dmf

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  9. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/15/half-life-of-disaster?CMP=twt_gu
    -dmf

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  10. when everything is alien:
    http://www.npr.org/2011/04/18/135509114/jon-sarkin-when-brain-injuries-transform-into-art
    -dmf

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  11. fish vs lorax
    http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/25/dorothy-and-the-tree-a-lesson-in-epistemology/?hp
    -dmf

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  12. http://www.npr.org/2011/05/13/136240501/gary-shteyngart-a-love-story-in-a-sad-future

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  13. suspended animation?
    http://ag3.griffith.edu.au/node/223?offset=-120

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  14. null basis and the uncanny:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpJ7-ta-jWw

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  15. http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2011/jun/14/clockwork-miracle/

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  16. Sorry, I have an off-topic question. Didn't Deleuze write somewhere that "you should only write about what you love"? I am sure I remember reading this somewhere, but do not remember where, can anyone help? Thank you so much.

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  17. http://dietsoapcast.com/?p=67

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  18. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BjB6ox6CFY&feature=related

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