Relational Architectural Ecologies

Architecture, Nature and Subjectivity

Peg Rawes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135037215
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Architettura generale

Examining the complex social and material relationships between architecture and ecology which constitute modern cultures, this collection responds to the need to extend architectural thinking about ecology beyond current design literatures. This book shows how the 'habitats', 'natural milieus', 'places' or 'shelters' that construct architectural ecologies are composed of complex and dynamic material, spatial, social, political, economic and ecological concerns.

With contributions from a range of leading international experts and academics in architecture, art, anthropology, philosophy, feminist theory, law, medicine and political science, this volume offers professionals and researchers engaged in the social and cultural biodiversity of built environments, new interdisciplinary perspectives on the relational and architectural ecologies which are required for dealing with the complex issues of sustainable human habitation and environmental action. The book provides:

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• 16 essays, including two visual essays, by leading international experts and academics from the UK, US, Australia, New Zealand and Europe; including Rosi Braidotti, Lorraine Code, Verena Andermatt Conley and Elizabeth Grosz

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• A clear structure: divided into 5 parts addressing bio-political ecologies and architectures; uncertain, anxious and damaged ecologies; economics, land and consumption; biological and medical architectural ecologies; relational ecological practices and architectures

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• An exploration of the relations between human and political life

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• An examination of issues such as climate change, social and environmental well-being, land and consumption, economically damaging global approaches to design, community ecologies and future architectural practice.

Part I

Biopolitical ecologies and architectures

Chapter 1

Posthuman relational subjectivity and the politics of affirmation

Rosi Braidotti

This chapter deals with the discursive and analytic conditions that frame contemporary subjectivity which, I will argue, is both posthuman and relational. At the core of new subject formations there is a double shift from the anti-humanism of the post-structuralist generation, to a post-anthropocentric approach. This shift takes place within globalized advanced capitalism that is marked by high levels of technological mediation, internally contradictory temporalities and necro-political governmentality, or governance by fear. The posthuman indicates the shifting locations of the human in the era that is also known as the anthropocene. Throughout the chapter I will take feminist theory and praxis as the main point of reference, stressing the transformative and affirmative character of feminist politics.

Posthumanism

The critique of humanism by post-structuralists, including the feminists, is a fundamental starting assumption. Their dynamic brand of social constructivism combines the analysis of techniques of subjectivation with the creation of empowering new ontologies of the self, and of self–other relations. Post-structuralists’ vital materialism emphasizes the sexualized nature of human embodiment and inscribes relationality as the ontological feature of the human. By the same token, it positions the radical immanence of power relations at the core of the debate. In a Foucauldian perspective, for instance, power is not only negative or confining (potestas), but also affirmative (potentia) or productive of alternative subject positions and social relations.

Theoretically, this embodied and embedded brand of materialist philosophy of the subject introduces a break from the pillars on which the classical Cartesian vision of the rationalist subject rested, namely: universalism and dualism. The generation of Foucault, Derrida, Irigaray and Deleuze rejected universalist claims to a subject position that allegedly transcends spatio-temporal and geopolitical specificities and therefore is abstract in the sense of disembodied and dis-embedded. For feminists, the mindset of universalism, best exemplified in the notion of ‘transcendent reason’ (Lloyd 1985), ‘abstract masculinity’ (Hartsock 1987) and ‘triumphant whiteness’ (Ware 1992), is objectionable not only on epistemological, but also on ethical grounds. Situated feminist perspectives lay the preconditions for ethical accountability for one’s own implications with the very structures one is analysing and opposing politically.

Post-structuralism marks the switch from Cartesian dualism to a Spinozist monistic philosophy that stresses the unity and self-organizing vitality of matter, and redefines the binary relationship between self and other. Post-structuralists point out that the notion of ‘otherness’ functions through dualistic oppositions that confirm the dominant vision of ‘sameness’ by positing subcategories of difference and distributing them along asymmetrical power relations. In other words, the dominant apparatus of subjectivity is organized along a hierarchical scale that rewards the sovereign subject as the zero-degree of difference. Deleuze and Guattari call it ‘the Majority subject’ or the Molar centre of being (1980). Irigaray calls it ‘the Same’, or the hyper-inflated, falsely universal ‘He’ (Irigaray 1974, 1977), whereas Hill Collins calls to account the white and Eurocentric bias of the subject of humanistic knowledge (Hill Collins 1991).

Furthermore, this insight counts not only for individuals, but also for their cultures. Thus, in European philosophy, this ‘difference’ has been predicated on relations of domination and exclusion: to be ‘different from’ came to mean to be ‘less than’. In the dualistic scheme of thought, difference or otherness is a constitutive axis which marks off the sexualized other (woman), the racialized other (the native) and the naturalized other (animals, the environment or earth). These others, however, are constitutive in that they are expected to confirm the same in His superior position and thus they are crucial to the assertion of the power of sameness.

To say that the structural Others of the modern subject re-emerge in postmodernity amounts to making them into a paradoxical and polyvalent site. They are simultaneously the symptom of the crisis of the subject, and for conservatives even its ‘cause’, but they also express positive, that is non-reactive, alternatives. It is a historical fact that the great emancipatory movements of postmodernity are driven and fuelled by the resurgent ‘others’: the women’s and gay rights movements; the anti-racism and decolonization movements; the anti-nuclear and pro-environment movements are the voices of the structural Others of modernity. They also inevitably mark the crisis of the former ‘centre’ or dominant subject-position. In the language of philosophical nomadology, they express both the crisis of the majority and the patterns of becoming of the minorities. The aim of critical theory consists in providing both the methodological navigational tools and an ethical compass to allow us to tell the difference between these different flows of mutation.

According to the deeply seated anti-humanism of these philosophies, the fact that the dominant axes of definition of the humanistic subject of knowledge contribute to fixing the axes of difference or of otherness, has another important implication. Post-structuralist anti-humanism undoes from within the unitary identities indexed on phallocentric, Eurocentric and normative standardized views of what constitutes the humanist ideal of ‘Man’. It engenders, simultaneously, the processes of sexualization, racialization and naturalization of those who are marginalized or excluded, but also the active production of half-truths, or forms of partial knowledge about these others. Power produces through exclusion: the others are included in this script as the necessary outside of the dominant vision of what it means to be human. Now, however, more specifically, we need normative distinctions between reactive, profit-oriented differences on the one hand and affirmative empowerment of alternative differences on the other. The criterion by which such difference can be established is ethical, and its implications, political.

Post-anthropocentrism

The insights of the posthumanist generations are currently developing in the direction of post-anthropocentrism. Spectacular developments, notably in neural sciences, the study of the earth and ecological systems and bio-genomics, as well as information digital technologies, have altered our shared understanding of what counts as the basic unit of reference for the human. The extent to which competing views about the human are central to contemporary scientific enquiry cannot fail to affect feminist practice, notably the terms and theoretical framework that shape our shared understanding of a feminist political subject. In the geological era that is already known as ‘anthropocene’ – that is to say a chronological time in which human activity is having a significant impact on the Earth’s ecosystem and on our collective capacity to survive – we have moved towards a more complex relationship to our planetary destiny. This shift also affects the status of theory: is the anthropocene the era in which critical theorists, including feminists, need to re-examine received ideas about the political subject? Doing this means taking some critical distance from the method of social constructivism, which has been endemic to European and North Atlantic feminist politics since Mary Wollstonecraft’s passionate refutation of J.J. Rousseau’s naturalization of inequalities between the sexes.

To advance the argument further, we need to consider the perverse multiple temporalities of globalized advanced capitalism. This system is a ‘difference engine’ that promotes the marketing of pluralistic differences and the commodification of the existence, the culture, the discourses of ‘others’, for the purpose of consumerism. As a consequence, the global system of the post-industrial world produces scattered and poly-centred, profit-oriented power relations. In our post-Cold War era, power functions not so much by binary oppositions, but in a fragmented and all-pervasive manner. This rhizomatic or web-like structure of contemporary power and its change of scale, however, do not alter fundamentally its terms of application. If anything, power relations in globalization are more ruthless than ever.

Late post-industrial societies have proved far more flexible and adaptable towards the proliferation of differences than the classical Left expected. These ‘differences’ have been however, turned into and constructed as marketable, consumable and often disposable ‘others’. Popular culture – from music to cinema, new media, fashion and gastronomy – is a reliable indicator of this trend, which sells ‘world music’, or a savvy mixture of the exotic and the domestic, often in the mode of neocolonial appropriation of multicultural others.

In other words, advanced capitalism functions as the great nomad, the organizer of the mobility of commodified products. A generalized practice of ‘free circulation’ pertains, however, almost exclusively to the domain of goods and commodities, regardless of their place of origin, provided they guarantee maximum profit. But people do not circulate nearly as freely (Virno 2004; Lazzarato 1996). It is therefore crucial to expose the perverse nomadism of a logic of economic exploitation that equates capitalist flows and flux with profit-minded circulation of commodities. Given that technologies – more specifically the convergence of information and bio-technologies – are intrinsic to the social and discursive structures of post-industrial societies, they deserve special attention. The most critical aspect of the technological apparatus is the issue of access and participation. Considering the inequalities in the availability of electricity supplies, let alone telephone lines and modems, well may one wonder about the ‘democratic’ or ‘revolutionary’ potential of the new electronic and biogenetic frontiers. Thus, access and participation to the new high-tech world is unevenly distributed worldwide, with gender, age and ethnicity acting as major axes of negative differentiation (Eisenstein 1998).

In his political analysis of the historical condition of postmodernity, Brian Massumi (1998) describes global capitalism as a profit-oriented mix-and-match system that vampirizes everything. His system rests on the paradox of the simultaneous occurrence of contradictory trends. On the one hand the globalization of the economic and cultural processes engenders increasing conformism in life-style, tele-communication and consumerism. On the other hand, the fragmentation of these processes, with the concomitant effects of increased structural injustices, the marginalization of large sections of the population, and the resurgence of regional, local, ethnic and cultural differences not only between the geo-political blocks, but also within them (Eisenstein 1998).

Given that the political economy of global capitalism consists in multiplying and distributing differences for the sake of profit, it produces ever-shifting waves of genderization and sexualization, racialization and naturalization of multiple ‘others’. It has thus effectively disrupted the traditional dialectical relationship between the empirical referents of Otherness – women, natives and animal or earth others – and the processes of discursive formation of genderization/racialization/naturalization.

The spasmodic concurrence of these phenomena is the distinctive trait of our age. The commodification of differences turned the ‘others’ into objects of consumption, granting them alternatively a familiar and a threatening quality that bypasses the doors of the dialectics. We have entered into a zigzagging pattern of dissonant nomadic subjects. How to overcome the dualistic mode that has become so entrenched to our way of thinking remains the main challenge.

The posthuman turn pushes this dislocation further. It can also be described as a sort of ‘anthropological exodus’ from the dominant configurations of the human (Hardt and Negri 2000: 215) – a massive hybridization of the species which topples the anthropocentric Human from the sovereign position it has enjoyed for so long. This sovereign position was represented in a universal mode as Man, but this pseudo-universal has been widely criticized (Lloyd 1985) precisely because of its partiality. Universal Man, in fact, is implicitly assumed to be masculine, white, urbanized, speaking a standard language, heterosexually inscribed in a reproductive unit and a full citizen of a recognized polity: hardly a universal position.

Massumi refers to the posthuman as ‘Ex-Man’, ‘a genetic matrix embedded in the materiality of the human’ and undergoing significant mutations: ‘species integrity is lost in a bio-chemical mode expressing the mutability of human matter’ – bodily materialism dis-gregating (Massumi 1998: 60). Haraway puts it like this: ‘this is Man the taxonomic type become Man the brand’ (1997: 74). What emerges from this is the vital politics of life, as non-human energy and self-organizing matter.

Feminist theory looks carefully at the dislocation of the dialectical relationships between the traditional axes of difference (sexualization/racialization/naturalization) and attempts to come to terms with this challenge. A methodological challenge arises as a result: the advanced, bio-genetic structure of capitalism as a schizophrenic global economy does not function in a linear manner, but is web-like, scattered and poly-centred. It is not monolithic, but an internally contradictory process, the effects of which are differentiated geopolitically and along gender and ethnicity lines, to name only the main ones. This creates a few methodological difficulties for the social critic, because it translates into a heteroglossia of data. We need to adopt non-linearity as a major principle and to develop cartographies of power that account for the paradoxes and contradictions of the era of globalization, and which do not take shortcuts through its complexities.

Considering the extent to which contemporary capitalist economies depend on the commodification of life itself, there is an opportunistic form of posthuman condition emerging from the very post-anthropocentric opportunism of advanced capitalism. The bio-genetic structure of advanced capitalism is such that it is not only geno-centric (Fausto-Sterling 2000: 235), but also ruthlessly and structurally unjust. The epistemological analysis intersects with the political one: because the self-replicating vitality of living matter is targeted for consumption and commercial exploitation of bio-genetic culture, environmentally based political struggles have evolved into a new global alliance for sustainable futures. Haraway recognizes this trend and pays tribute to the martyrized body of onco-mouse (Haraway 1997), as the farming ground for the new genetic revolution and manufacturer of spare parts for other species. Vandana Shiva (1997) also stresses the extent to which the bodies of the empirical subjects who signify difference (woman/native/earth or natural others) have become the disposable bodies of the global economy. Contemporary capitalism is ‘bio-political’ in that it aims at controlling all that lives: it has already turned into a form of biopiracy in that it aims at exploiting the generative powers of women, animals, plants, genes and cells. This means that human and anthropomorphic others are relocated in a continuum with non-anthropomorphic or ‘earth’ others. The cate...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Biopolitical ecologies and architectures
• Part II Uncertain, anxious and damaged ecologies
• Part III Economics, land and consumption
• Part IV Biological and medical architectural ecologies
• Part V Communal ecologies and architectures
• Illustration credits
• Index