What Is Cosmopolitical Design? Design, Nature and the Built Environment

Albena Yaneva, Alejandro Zaera-Polo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134809011
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

The scale of ecological crises made us realize that every kind of politics has always been cosmopolitics, politics of a cosmos. Cosmos embraces everything, including the multifarious natural and material entities that make humans act. The book examines cosmopolitics in its relation to design practice. Abandoning the modernist idea of nature as being external to the human experience - a nature that can be mastered by engineers and scientists from outside, the cosmpolitical thinking offers designers to embark in an active process of manipulating and reworking nature 'from within.' To engage in cosmopolitics, this book argues, means to redesign, create, instigate, and compose every single feature of our common experience. In the light of this new understanding of nature, we set the questions: What is the role of design if nature is no longer salient enough to provide a background for human activities? How can we foster designers' own force and make present what causes designers to think, feel, and act? How do designers make explicit the connection of humans to a variety of entities with different ontology: rivers, species, particles, materials and forces? How do they redefine political order by bringing together stars, prions and people? In effect, how should we understand design practice in its relation to the material and the living world? In this volume, anthropologists, science studies scholars, political scientists and sociologists rethink together the meaning of cosmopolitics for design. At the same time designers, architects and artists engage with the cosmopolitical question in trying to imagine the future of architectural and urban design. The book contains original empirical chapters and a number of revealing interviews with artists and designers whose practices set examples of 'cosmopolitically correct design'.

1

Waiting for Gaia: Composing the Common World through Arts and Politics¹

Bruno Latour

What are we supposed to do when faced with an ecological crisis that does not resemble any of the crises of war and economies, the scale of which is formidable, to be sure, but to which we are in a way habituated since it is of human, all too human, origin? What to do when told, day after day, and in increasingly strident ways, that our present civilization is doomed; that the Earth itself has been so tampered with that there is no way it will ever come back to any of the various steady states of the past? What do you do when reading, for instance, a book such as Clive Hamilton’s Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change – and that the species is not the dodo or the whale but us, that is, you and me? (Hamilton 2010) Or Harald Welzer’s Climate Wars: What People Will Be Killed For in the 21st Century, a book that is nicely divided into three parts: how to kill yesterday, how to kill today, and how to kill tomorrow! (Welzer 2012) In every chapter, to tally the dead, you have to add several orders of magnitude to your calculator!

The time of great narratives has past, I know, and it could seem ridiculous to tackle a question so big from so small a point of entry. But that is just the reason I wish to do so: what do we do when questions are too big for everybody, and especially when they are much too grand for the writer, that is, for myself?

One of the reasons why we feel so powerless when asked to be concerned by ecological crisis, the reason why I, to begin with, feel so powerless, is because of the total disconnect between the range, nature, and scale of the phenomena and the set of emotions, habits of thoughts, and feelings that would be necessary to handle those crises – not even to act in response to them, but simply to give them more than a passing ear. So this chapter will largely be about this disconnect and what to do about it.

Is there a way to bridge the distance between the scale of the phenomena we hear about and the tiny Umwelt inside which we witness, as if we were a fish inside its bowl, an ocean of catastrophes that are supposed to unfold? How are we to behave sensibly when there is no ground control station anywhere to which we could send the help message, “Houston, we have a problem”?

What is so strange about this abysmal distance between our little selfish human worries and the great questions of ecology is that it is exactly what has been so valorized for so long in so many poems, sermons, and edifying lectures about the wonders of nature. If those displays were so wonderful, it was just because of this disconnect: to feel powerless, overwhelmed, and totally dominated by the spectacle of “nature” is a large part of what we have come to appreciate, since at least the nineteenth century, as the sublime. Remember Shelley:

In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap forever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.

How we loved to feel small when encompassed by the magnificent forces of the Niagara Falls or the stunning immensity of the Arctic glaciers or the desolate and desiccated landscape of the Sahara. What a delicious thrill to set our size alongside that of galaxies! Small compared to Nature but, as far as morality is concerned, so much bigger than even Her grandest display of power! So many poems, so many meditations about the lack of commensurability between the everlasting forces of nature and the puny little humans claiming to know or to dominate Her.

So one could say, after all, that the disconnect has always been there and that it is the inner spring of the feeling for the sublime.

The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark – now glittering – now, reflecting gloom –
Now lending splendor, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings.

But what has become of the sublime lately, now that we are invited to consider another disconnect, this time between, on one side, our gigantic actions as humans, I mean as collected humans, and, on the other side, our complete lack of a grasp on what we have collectively done?

Let us ponder a minute what is meant by the notion of “anthropocene,” this amazing lexical invention proposed by geologists to put a label on our present period. We realize that the sublime has evaporated as soon as we are no longer taken as those puny humans overpowered by “nature” but, on the contrary, as a collective giant that, in terms of terawatts, has scaled up so much that it has become the main geological force shaping the Earth.

What is so ironic with this anthropocene argument is that it comes just when vanguard philosophers were speaking of our time as that of the “posthuman;” and just at the time when other thinkers were proposing to call this same moment the “end of history.” It seems that history as well as nature have more than one trick in their bag, since we are now witnessing the speeding up and scaling up of history not with a post-human but rather with what should be called a post-natural twist! If it is true that the “anthropos” is able to shape the Earth literally (and not only metaphorically through its symbols), what we are now witnessing is anthropo morphism on steroids.

In his magnificent book Eating the Sun Oliver Morton provides us with an interesting energy scale (Morton 2007). Our global civilization is powered by around 13 terawatts (TW) while the flux of energy from the centre of the Earth is around 40 TW. Yes, we now measure up with plate tectonics. Of course this energy expenditure is nothing compared to the 170,000 TW we receive from the sun, but it is already quite immense when compared with the primary production of the biosphere (130 TW). And if all humans were to be powered at the level of North Americans, we would operate at a hundred TW, that is, with twice the muscle of plate tectonics. That is quite a feat. “Is it a plane? Is it nature? No, it’s Superman!” We have become Superman without even noticing that inside the telephone booth we have not only changed clothes but grown enormously! Can we be proud of it? Well, not quite, and that is the problem.

The disconnect has shifted so completely that it no longer generates any feeling of the sublime any more since we are now summoned to feel responsible for the quick and irreversible changes of the Earth’s face occasioned in part as a result of the tremendous power we are expending: we are asked to look again at the same Niagara Falls but now with the nagging feeling that they might stop falling flowing (too bad for Shelley’s waterfalls around it leap forever); we are asked to look again at the same everlasting ice, except that we are led to the sinking feeling that they might not last long after all; we are mobilized to look again at the same parched desert, except that we come to feel that it expands inexorably because of our disastrous use of the soil! Only galaxies and the Milky Way might still be available for the old humbling game of wonder, because they are beyond the Earth (and thus beyond our reach since they reside in the part of nature that the Ancients called supralunar – more of this later).

How to feel the sublime when guilt is gnawing at your guts? And gnawing in a new unexpected way because of course I am not responsible, and neither are you, you, nor you. No one in isolation is responsible.

Everything happens as if the old balance between the contemplation of the moral law in us and that of the innocent forces of nature outside of us has been entirely subverted. It is as if all the feelings of wonder, together with morality, have changed sides. The real wonder today is how I could be accused of being so guilty without feeling any guilt, without having done anything bad? The human collective actor who is said to have committed the deed is not a character that can be thought, sized up, or measured. You never meet them. It is not even the human race taken in toto, since the perpetrator is only a part of the human race, the rich and the wealthy, a group that have no definite shape, nor limit and certainly no political representation. How could it be “us” who did “all this” since there is no political, no moral, no thinking, no feeling body able to say “we” – and no one to proudly say “the buck stops here?” Remember the rather pitiful meetings in Copenhagen 2009 of all the heads of state negotiating in secret a non-binding treaty, calling names and haggling like kids around a bag of marbles.

But the other reason why the sublime has disappeared, why we feel so guilty about having committed crimes for which we feel no responsibility, is the added complication brought about by the climate “sceptics” or rather, to avoid using this positive and venerable term, the climate deniers.

Should we give those characters equal time to balance the position of the climatologists – in which case we risk rejecting our responsibility and associating ourselves with creationists fighting Darwin and the whole of biology? Or do we take sides and refuse to offer to deniers a platform to pollute what is probably the best certainty we will ever have as to how we wreaked havoc on our own ecosystem – in which case we risk having been enlisted in an ideological crusade to once again moralize our connections with nature and to replay the Galileo trial as though we were ignoring the lone voice of reason fighting against the crowd of experts?

No wonder that, facing this new disconnect, so many of us move from admiration in front of the innocent forces of nature to complete despondency – and even lend an ear to the climate deniers.

As Clive Hamilton argued in Requiem for a Species, in a sense we are all climate deniers, since we have no grasp of the collective character – the anthropos of the anthropocene, the “human” of the “human made” catastrophe. It is through our own built-in indifference that we come to deny the knowledge of our science. Think of it: it would be so nice to return to the past when nature could be sublime and us, the puny little humans, simply irrelevant, delighting in the inner feeling of our moral superiority over the pure violence of nature. In a way, the disconnect is the real source of the denial itself.

What does it mean to be morally responsible in the time of the Anthropocene, when the Earth is shaped by us, by our lack of morality – except there is no acceptably recognizable “we” to be burdened by the weight of such a responsibility – and that even the loop connecting our collective action to its consequence is thrown into doubt?

To sum up my first point, how could you still want to feel the sublime while watching the “everlasting” waterfalls sung by Shelley when, one, you simultaneously feel that they might disappear; when, two, you might be responsible for their disappearance; while, three, you feel doubly guilty for not feeling responsible; and given that you sense a fourth level of responsibility for not having dug deeply enough into what is called the “climate controversy.” Not read enough, not thought enough, not felt enough.

Apparently, there is no solution except to explore the disconnect and expect that human consciousness will raise our sense of moral commitment to the level required by this globe of all globes, the Earth. But if we judge by recent news, to bet on consciousness-raising is a bit risky since the number of American and Chinese and even British citizens denying the anthropic origin of climate change is actually waxing instead of waning (even in “rationalistic” France, a former minister of research, with a nice uplifting name, Professor Cheerful, has managed to convince a large part of our most enlightened publics that there is so much controversy about the climate that we don’t have to worry about it after all) (Zaccai, Gemenne and Decroly 2012).

It seems that, as in Lars von Triers movie Melancholia, we might rather all be quietly enjoying the solitary spectacle of the planet crashing into our Earth from the derisory protection of a children’s hut made out of a few branches by Aunt Steelbreaker. As if the West, just when the cultural activity of giving a shape to the Earth is finally taking a literal and not a symbolic meaning, resorted to a totally outmoded idea of magic as a way to forget the world entirely. In the amazing final scene of a most amazing film the hyper-rational people fall back onto what old primitive rituals are supposed to do – protecting childish minds against the impact of reality. Von Triers might have grasped just what happens after the sublime has disappeared. Did you think Doomsday would bring the dead to life? Not at all. When the trumpets of judgment resonate in your ear, you fall into melancholia! No new ritual will save you. Let us just sit in a magic hut, and keep denying, denying, denying, until the bitter end.

So what do we do when we are tackling a question that is simply too big for us? If not denial, then what? One of the solutions is to become attentive to the techniques through which scale is obtained and to the instruments that make commensurability possible. After all, the very notion of the Anthropocene implies such a common measure. If it is true that “man is a measure of all things” it could work also at this juncture.

It is a tenet of science studies and actor network theory that one should never suppose that differences of scale already exist but instead always look for how scale is produced. Fortunately, this tenet is ideally suited to ecological crisis: there is nothing about the Earth as Earth that we don’t know through the disciplines, instruments, mediations, and expansion of scientific networks: its size, its composition, its long history, and so on. Even farmers depend on the special knowledge of agronomists, soil scientists, and others. And this is even truer of the global climate: the globe by definition is not global but is, quite literally, a scale model that is connected through reliably safe networks to stations where data points are collected and sent back to the modelers. This is not a relativist point that could throw doubt on such science, but a relationist tenet that explains the sturdiness of the disciplines that are to establish and multiply, and do the upkeep of those connections.

I am sorry to insist on what looks like splitting hairs, but there is no way to explore a way out of the disconnect if we don’t clarify the scaling instrument that generates the global locally. My argument (actually science studies’ argument) is that there is no zoom effect: things are not ordered by size as if they were boxes inside boxes. Rather they are ordered by connectedness as if they were nodes connected to other nodes.

Nobody has shown this better than Paul Edwards in his beautiful book on climate science, A Vast Machine (Edwards 2010). If meteorologists and later climate scientists have been able to obtain a “global” view, it is because they managed to build more and more powerful models able to recalibrate data points elicited from more and more stations or documents – satellites, tree rings, logbooks of navigators dead long ago, ice cores, and so on.

Interestingly enough, this is exactly what leads the climate-deniers to their denials: they find this knowledge too indirect, too mediated, too far from immediate access (yes, those epistemological doubting Thomases apparently believe only in unmediated knowledge). They are incensed to see that no data point in itself has any sense, that those data all need to be recalculated and reformatted. Exactly as the negationists do about the crimes of the past, climate deniers use, for future crimes, a positivistic touchstone to poke holes into what is an extraordinary puzzle of crisscrossing interpretations of data. Not a house of cards, but a tapestry, probably one of the most beautiful, sturdy, and complex ever assembled. Of course there are a lot of holes in it, having holes is what weaving knots and nodes is about. But this tapestry is amazingly resilient because of the way it is woven-allowing data to be recalibrated by models and vice versa. It appears that the history ...