Designing Social Equality

Architecture, Aesthetics, and the Perception of Democracy

Mark Foster Gage

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351249645
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

In Designing Social Equality, Mark Foster Gage proposes a dramatic realignment between aesthetic thought, politics, social equality, and the design of our physical world. By reconsidering historic concepts from aesthetic philosophy and weaving them with emerging intellectual positions from a variety of disciplines, he sets out to design a more encompassing social theory for how humanity perceives its very reality, and how it might begin to more justly define that reality through new ways of reconsidering the built environment.

1

The Aesthetic Turn

An aesthetic distance exists between you and this text. In order to comprehend these letters as they stand before you, a gorgeous biological calculus occurs that allows you to overcome such distance. Reflected light migrates from the world into your consciousness, passing through the cornea and pupil into the crystalline proteins of the lens. Refraction. Bending. Compression. Focus. The light passes through the aqueous gels of water and salt into the photosensitive rods and cones of the retina where flashes of light are converted into electrical pulses capable of being messengered by the optic nerve to the distant back-brain occipital cortex for reassembly and processing as images. It is Aristotle in De Anima who speaks to us of receiving into oneself, via such sense organs, the forms that produce our very definition of reality. Aristotle, however, could not have imagined the convoluted complexities, since revealed, regarding this particular process. The first image of reality you receive is, rather inelegantly, flipped upside down; an inverted opposite of what exists in your field of vision, that requires a complex neural calculus of reversal––a cellular-electric software patch for a human hardware glitch. To confuse matters further, the black ink in which these letters are printed, is, in fact, the parts of the page that absorb this reflected light, meaning you are not reading this text as much as reading the white space that it strategically obscures. These distances, from black to white, and from text to cornea to pupil, lens, gels, retina, nerve, and brain are, despite these complexities, overcome in periods of time so slight as to be undetectable by the human apparatus through which they are continually processed in quantities of overwhelming complexity.

If your eyesight is reasonably acute, if you understand the language is which this text is written, and accordingly if you recognize these organizations of symbols and recognize their meaning, some part of the text enters your consciousness where it is considered against a vault of your memories and experiences for its relevance, potential influence, permanent capture, or unforgiving dismissal. That you have made it this far into this text is a testament to the fitness of these procedures within your body. This is the miraculous result of millions of automatic actions that are entirely invisible to your consciousness in their attempts to make the world visible to your consciousness.

There are other distances associated with this text, however, that have nothing to do with you. The text on the page is composed of ink, which, while historically composed of ash, carbon black or natural pigment, is now more likely to include the super-syllabic presence of octaethyleneglycol, mingled with faint traces of zwitterionic surfactant. Humanity excels at understanding the relevance of things at a level most familiar to our consciousness––the shape of the text rather than its material composition. If asked about Greek gods, it is likely you could recite a handful from memory: Zeus, Apollo, Athena, or Hades; less likely you could retrieve the names of the Titans who preceded them, or those who, in turn, who preceded them––likely several levels removed from familiarity. Humanity works best at one level deep.

A single, often metaphorical, layer of surface information, rather than depth in a subject, is sufficient to trigger in us a form of understanding that alleviates the need for further inquiry. Should you take a break from reading this text and gaze out of the nearest window you may see a car, which registers in your mind as ‘car,’ and as it is rather unremarkable to see cars out of windows, the matching of contexts prompts no further questions. However, were you to look out of the nearest window and see a buffalo, you would not be satisfied with merely recognizing it as ‘buffalo,’ but would likely need to go deeper, to resolve the contextual disparity. Within humans, familiarity suppresses curiosity and therefore the need to investigate further. As it is with the earlier Protogenoi of Greek antiquity––Chaos, Gaia, Tartarus, Eros, Erebus, and Nyx, whose origin stories are lost to time and likely not cited by you when asked about Greek gods––humans are infrequently concerned with the depth of other things behind the things they see or already immediately know.

To return for a moment to the ink of our page, while you can read the text, and learn of the chemical composition, there are other aspects forever withdrawn from your reach. You cannot know the distant history of this exact ink resting right in front of your eyes. Such deep knowledge will forever be withheld from both you and humanity––if it was natural and pressed from the ashes of a 17-year-old Sunda tree in Laos or a century-old hawthorn in Saskatchewan. Or, if synthetic, you do not know of the corporate chemical cauldrons from which these ash-replacing reagents were congealed, their effects on paper, your skin, or the environment writ large when their surplus is secretly pumped into an unsuspecting river. You do not know the chemical relationships that govern the adhesion between the ink and the page, nor the qualities of magnetism in the printed word: magnetism. You likewise cannot at this moment know the molecular weight of the particles in the period about to occur at the end of the sentence. Heisenberg bestows upon us his ruling that for any fundamental particle that participates in the formation of this ink, you are either allowed to know its position or its velocity, but you cannot, ever, know both simultaneously. Such are the ironic absolute dictates of a principle named for uncertainty. You also cannot precisely know the adverse health effects that swallowing a cup of such ink would have on the buffalo outside your window. It is the case that this printed text contains minute traces of aluminum oxide, which, as with all matter in the universe of a heft greater than that of hydrogen, is only forged in the oppressive infernos of distant stars that have since violently exploded, whose locations and timelines you could, nor could any human, ever know. The ink of this text, the exact details of which will never be known to you or humanity, contains materials that are older than Alexander Hamilton, Charlemagne, Julius Caesar, Archimedes, Moses, Noah, Eve, the Earth itself and in all likelihood the birth of our Sun, solar system and galaxy. Historian Bill Bryson reminds us:

… we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.¹

The purpose of such observations in a discussion of aesthetics is to understand that while there is so much to know in this text, so much you can process and so many mysterious distances you and your systems of sight and intellect can overcome, there is also so much not to know, that is perhaps pointless to know, but there is also so much that is simply, and unfathomably, unknowable. While the silent goal of most writing is to transfer that which can be known to that which can know, very little attention is given to the not-knowledge that is lost, forgotten, or simply inaccessible to human perception or consciousness. Thomas Edison, himself no stranger to light and therefore also deeply intertwined in the illuminating calculus of our sight, reminds us, a century before Bryson, of these very limits of our humanity when he tells us “we do not know one millionth of one percent about anything.”² In fact, as science continually calls to our attention, for us to know even that much would likely be a fantastic exaggeration of human capability. As children of the Enlightenment raised in the cradle of modern science, we have been led to believe that every leaf on the tree of knowledge spoken of anonymously in Genesis and fertilized by thinkers such as Bacon and d’Alembert in the Enlightenment can be known by us. We tend to believe that humanity has absolute access to the truth of reality if only we are given enough time for the scientific study, reason, or the prized direct experience that subsequently, Newton, Descartes, and Locke, respectively, require of us to ‘understand.’ What these assumptions of the obtainability of knowledge, by definition, do not convey to us are reminders of the vastness of white that surrounds the black text that comprises the limits of our comprehension of reality––that which is inaccessible, withdrawn, unknown, and often unknowable.

This dance between such distances, how they frame comprehension and influence, and how this process leads to flickers of knowledge in a vaster unknown are the base ingredients for a contemporary definition of the aesthetic.³ While it is a burgeoning twenty-first-century cliché to assume all intellectual endeavors are the root of social engagement, it is the case that the aesthetic has a particularly strong claim to social relevance through the combination of the above ingredients with a final component: new forms of access not only to information, but also collectively to each other.

This book has been written as an exploration of the spatial aspects of social engagement as they are thus revealed to us, and largely determined through, aesthetic concepts as previously described. Through writing this book, it is my hope that the observations that follow offer no concrete claims as much as act as an invitation for us to reconsider the intertwined social and spatial relationships between individuals, their assumptions of truth and reality, and the unknown fields of potential that surround those assumptions. A positive case will be made that the pursuit of true social equality is largely contingent on these vaster spaces of inquiry rather than on the actions of elevated individuals who claim privileged access to truth and the knowledge to repair what is revealed in those truths.

Aesthetics as a contemporary means toward social and political engagement is unfortunately at odds with a tragically outdated, but continually popular, understanding of the subject, largely developed in the late nineteenth century by figures such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, as a seemingly frivolous and autonomous pursuit of beauty and pleasure. Instead the meaning of aesthetic discourse, today, suggests nearly the opposite; that it infiltrates every aspect of individual, community, and social life, and accordingly must be the basis for such considerations not only at the spatial and functional, but also at the social and political, levels. In this act of inquiry, we are asked to consider space in both physical and aesthetic terms, in particular through the aesthetic distances that govern what we individually and collectively see, hear, understand, transmit, and can access, but also the implications of what we cannot. It is in this divide of aesthetic access, between those with it and those without it, that contemporary inequality exists perhaps in even more complex formats beyond primary-level isolated observations of income, race, gender, and other forms of identity through which so many are so easily disempowered. The human equation of inequality is far more complex than instant identity-politics observations can capture and must be addressed as such through multiple theoretical trajectories, including, but not only limited to, aesthetics.

These more encompassing, aesthetic, questions regarding what is assumed as a basis for reality, its access, and therefore action within it, may soon have far-reaching implications for how we as a species coexist in a vastly more crowded and interconnected twenty-first century. While these concerns are spoken of in the abstract in politics, rhetoric, and sociology, they are rarely addressed as problems of space, issues of distance and access, or concerns of the aesthetic. This book, accordingly, speculates about how aesthetics may be the emerging primary discourse for social, and therefore ecological, spatial, and political engagement. In contrast to commonly held opinions that these issues are antithetical to the aesthetic, this book proposes that political and ontological problems may now be best addressed as aspects of aesthetic experience, in particular with regard to physical space and aesthetic distances. This is a speculation on how a reignited discourse of the aesthetic and the extended spaces of its understood influence can prompt new and more equitable relationships not only between objects, spaces, environments, and ecologies, but also with each other and the political systems into which we are all inexorably stitched.

While not a proponent of such aesthetic positions, we were nonetheless challenged by Michel Foucault with his statement:

I think that the central issue of philosophy and critical thought since the eighteenth century has always been, still is, and will, I hope, remain the question: What is this Reason that we use? What are its historical effects? What are its limits, and what are its dangers?⁴

For the aesthetic and spatial descendants of this question, this book tracks the development of our existing Critical Theory-based strategies of understanding socio-political engagement in architecture and calls for an acceleration of what might be referred to as the shift from the singularly observed “critical” to the collectively experienced “aesthetic.” This may be the latest in a long series of philosophical “turns”—an “Aesthetic Turn,” as the case may be, that includes a stunning array of vibrant new discourses in multiple disciplines. To adopt such a name is intentionally referential, if not yet slightly embarrassed regarding the term’s contemporary overuse, to the development of the “Linguistic Turn,” a name coined from the collected essays of Richard Rorty in 1967. While the Linguistic Turn referred to the perceived idealism-derived dominance of language in defining reality, preceded earlier in general sentiment by Wittgenstein in his 1921 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as “The limits of my language are the limits of my world,”⁵ or Derrida’s “there is nothing outside the text,”⁶ an “Aesthetic Turn” might, and perhaps ironically, revise the languages of the Linguistic Turn to propose instead an inversion, that states, “the limits of my aesthetic perception are the limits of my world,” or “everything is outside the text.” The “Aesthetic Turn” would not be a new theory in and of itself, but rather a new intellectual foundation on which new theories for multiple disciplines are being and may continue to be constructed or revised. Built on this new bedrock of aesthetically rather than critically foundational assumptions, a new generation of intellectual, spatial, and creative projects are beginning to emerge, including, but not by any means limited to, concepts of social equidistance, estrangement, dissensus, defamiliarization, Accelerationism, neo-Afrofuturism, Dark Ecology, Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), and Xenofeminism, that collectively promise to soon and radically reconfigure the intellectual, formal, and professional landscapes of tomorrow. While no singular theory, style, or manifesto seeks to monolithically dominate any of these endeavors, new questions can now be asked about the nature and role of how we design space, how we are collectively intertwined with each other and our physical world, and what the future of that coexistence might be, particularly in spatial registers. This speculation occurs through freshly understanding issues spanning the social, political, humanitarian, ecological, and ontological; through what philosopher Graham Harman describes as the new “first philosophy”––aesthetics.⁷ Philosopher Jacques Rancière, who features significantly in these discussions, describes what might be at stake in such an aesthetic turn when he writes: “An aesthetic revolution is not a revolution in the arts. It is a revolution in the distribution of the forms and capacities of experience that this or that social group can share”⁸ It is through this politically defined aesthetic framework that this book outlines how and why these changes are taking place, and how a recalibration of our understanding of space and use access through an aesthetic lens offers a promising avenue for a future of a just coexistence predicated on underlying assumptions of axiomatic equality.⁹

Notes

1 Bryson, Bill, A Short History of Nearly Everything (Black Swan, 2016).

2 Stevenson, Burton, Stevenson’s Book of Quotations (referring to the April 1931 Golden Book) (Cassell, 1938).

3 Philosopher Timothy Morton states this most succinctly in his observation that “…beings i...