Lately I am having difficulty to talk about writing. After reading highly structured, properly sequenced academic essays, it is difficult to brave it and write your own staff. Anything I write feels underdeveloped. Thus under extreme grief, I am proceeding to write a couple of underdeveloped thoughts about the dual relationship between the sensible (the world of objects) and discourse (pertaining the world of ideas).
This I find a complicated topic since I have a disbelief in dualistic and oppositional ideas. I should then, aim at creating some sense of blurring between these well defined-by discourse-concepts. The reason I am thinking about this, it's because I have been long thinking about the implications of the built environment in human's subjectivity. Here I'd like to apologise since I am still grasping this idea. I am also going to quote something it's been quoted to death:
We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.- Winston Churchill
The reason for this, is than in the design of our built environment is a combination of both: the fusion of ideas pertaining how things should be-the magic of discourse and conceptual thinking- and how things are-a tint of pragmatism if you wish when heavily prioritised. Weighing both might be well called Art. But for now, completely ignoring the idea of Art (I am by no means developing this here) I would like to explain this expanded idea of the built environment, which I find massively of help when used against the term architecture (the art of putting constructive elements together with their ensuing "aura"), which I find really reductionist. I should also say that I find my definition of architecture to be mediocre, but that its the one I have for now.
An expanded built environment is the consideration of the built to be all that has been designed by humans, and that has implications stemming from social relations imbued both in their conception and design as well as in their post-occupation or use. The built is then, physically, the agglomeration of objects surrounding us which are tangible such as traffic lights, cars, clothes, cookery, curtains, barns, houses, pavements, office towers, rail infrastructure, town halls, sewage systems, data storage rooms, cemeteries, military bases, aircraft, and a long et cetera. In our prevalent dualistic conception of our worlds-for there is no one world exempt of a political aim-it is clear that the virtual and the physical are indeed different, and therefore excluded. Churchill's assertion, its of importance for it blurs this conceptual boundary line between the physical and the virtual. Furthermore he seems to imply that buildings then, after having been designed, they have some sort of agency over us (they shape us actively through our inhabitation of them). I believe in the idea that buildings affect our behavior. Not that they change our lives, but that they have some subtle and sometimes no so subtle implications in the way we conduct our lives. From the extreme example of confinement rooms in estate managed and privately managed prisons, to the more subtle shaping of privatised public space in England, which although open has a visual set of rules regulating our behavior. Thus, we can talk of legislation-in this last case-as the software of these public architectures. Conversely, it is worth making a remark about our belief of the things we deem to be natural, and the things we believe to be man-made: namely the distinction of the artificial, theatrical nature of the feminine persona-to sip from the queer theory cup-, to the ingrained, natural, (non)performative, character of the male persona. This idea that authenticity pertains to men, and that women are the carriers of the creative, artificial power. Here there is again a blurring, and surely, a mixing of ideas of the natural and the man-made. Here many times the discourse-mostly perpetuating relationships of power: subjugating and subjugated forms-are confused, like the assumption that gender is natural to men and women, and that religion is embedded in the very nature of things-to mention a couple of examples. This is my current conception, that our sense of control of the world is based on the illusion that discourse equates nature and hence the world. I apologise to the readers to who might think I am addressing them as underdeveloped thinkers. I am nevertheless, writing to clarify myself and let out some thoughts, as opposed to writing an explication piece, which to some extent it is, but for me. Audience-if any- I guess its a collateral of my chosen format.
Coming back I wanted to talk both about the violence of discourse-which intedently and non-intendedly-instates certain forms of thought, and design, which deals with the very matter of the earth. With the soil of life. At this point it is in my head that an image of a man emerges: with strong hands, dips his arms elbow dip in a puddle of mud, and absorbed in a cloud of awe, he tries to understand the physics of flow in the running streams of cloudy water that run down his arms. Avoiding explanation of my attempt to eroticise male physique, and the romantic portrayal of a farm-land scenery, it is key to grasp here that thought and reality don't necessarily correlate, and therefore nature has-if commensurable-its very own politics of violence (say an earthquake in an urban epicenter). This is something religion has long struggled with and that becomes evident in reading the plaques of deceased, but still remembered people:
We miss you dearly. We hoped for your recovery. We prayed and prayed to no avail. We have lost you. God decided for you to part.
I was recently walking around graveyards in London. And what struck me the most, and what I found deeply moving was this sense of not understanding why this relative had passed away, what was the reason behind the inexplicable event. This moment when someone leaves, dies, perishes. It is common practice tor restore to religion to explain the inexplicable. To find relieve, to make a locus for this suffering. It is there, safeguarded by the walls of God. As an agnostic in a strange relationship with atheism, I find it most difficult to find any sense of this from partaking in the Real, apart from being a self-defense mechanism. This, is then, the violence of the real, or the contingent, inexplicable material world, to which to our surprise we have emerged in full consciousness. It is this emergence that also brings us together to this realm-and our very physical existence-of the physical, natural, inexplicable nature of things. Science in this respect has a lot to say, and I would enjoy looking into writings of science couple with religion and atheist attitudes. These I think should be underlined. More complex in nature, is the role of corporations and institutions in the production of this scientific practice and language (lets not forget the role of medical institutions in consolidating relationships of power, knowledge and identity amongst others).
I am concluding with my reason behind writing this, which is the idea of approaching my desire to design from either a theoretical standpoint, being critical or my own practice, and the frustration which carries all this work, which is that no work is being produced, i.e. If only I could just make. It is inevitable to think that this is necessarily of a dual, complex and mixed nature. I was also hoping to undermine the role of discourse in everyday practice (which I am sure there are strong academic accounts against this). It is easier to break a stone, than it is to generate a theory on the appearance of rocky conglomerations and its relationship to breakup points. All in all, I think there is a frustration in this sense of being devoid of a continuous practice. I am here then, writing out loud to, once more, my none existing audience.
Besties.
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