Architecture and Feminisms

Ecologies, Economies, Technologies

Hélène Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson, Helen Runting, Hélène Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson, Helen Runting

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351396202
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Set against the background of a 'general crisis' that is environmental, political and social, this book examines a series of specific intersections between architecture and feminisms, understood in the plural. The collected essays and projects that make up the book follow transversal trajectories that criss-cross between ecologies, economies and technologies, exploring specific cases and positions in relation to the themes of the archive, control, work and milieu. This collective intellectual labour can be located amidst a worldwide depletion of material resources, a hollowing out of political power and the degradation of constructed and natural environments. Feminist positions suggest ways of ethically coping with a world that is becoming increasingly unstable and contested. The many voices gathered here are united by the task of putting critical concepts and feminist design tools to use in order to offer experimental approaches to the creation of a more habitable world. Drawing inspiration from the active archives of feminist precursors, existing and re-imagined, and by way of a re-engagement in the histories, theories and projected futures of critical feminist projects, the book presents a collection of twenty-three essays and eight projects, with the aim of taking stock of our current condition and re-engaging in our precarious environment-worlds.

Milieu

Chapter 12
Material and rational feminisms

A contribution to humane architectures

Peg Rawes and Douglas Spencer

Opening Remarks

The following dialogue was stimulated by the 13th International AHRA (Architectural Humanities Research Association) conference invitation to explore the relationship between feminist architectural practices, economics and technologies. In response, we chose to question the roles and current usage of two key terms associated with the formation of positive and negative subjectivities under economic and technological modes of production. These two terms, ‘affect’ and ‘rationalism’, are often seen as necessarily conceptually and politically antithetical to each other. On the one hand, while feminism tends to see affect as an agent of leftist and radical critique of normative society, the ‘affective turn’ in architectural design and authorship has become an uncritical and essentialist form within neoliberal markets. On the other hand, rationalist modes of critique are aligned with normative techno-scientific thinking and consequently seen as necessarily opposed to materialist feminist politics. In order to examine these positions, we have attempted to draw attention to the way in which ‘affect’ and ‘rationalism’ are structured in contemporary political philosophy and critical theory. Drawing from our work on philosophical and feminist critiques of subjectivity, architecture and power, we question the continuing opposition between affect and rationalism as principal means for resisting neoliberal practices and cultures. Instead, with reference to the ‘radical’ rationalism of Baruch Spinoza and Theodore Adorno’s philosophies we have attempted to rethink this opposition as a meaningful contribution to developing humane feminist architectural practices in the 21st century. For example, we consider how architectural affect produces and also conceals neoliberal interests, and argue that when affect is located in essentialist forms of matter, it divorces us from other histories of rationalism that may helpfully mobilise critical feminist practices.

Peg Rawes: The current political situation in the UK and the US highlights that feminisms, including feminist forms of rationality, are even more societally necessary. Might reasoning or rational thinking be tactics, modes or strategies that feminism can take up in its practices? I ask this as someone trained in feminist philosophy, where reason and rational thinking have been considered the ‘opposition’ or ‘the problem’: normally associated with universal, transcendental and male forms of Enlightenment philosophy, and therefore very actively critiqued by significant feminist continental philosophers.¹ However, given the strong denigration of reasoning in the public sphere by ‘charismatic’ politicians who claim power through an abandonment of rational thinking, perhaps we need to rethink this. Also, in the UK, expertise and experts are being discredited in ideological attacks on the Higher Education sector by populist, anti-institutional ideologies from both sides of the political spectrum. There is a very real sense that knowledges derived from engaged, rational or technical practices – which I take to also include specific feminist histories, knowledges and practices – are not being promoted or defended in the public political sphere.²

Douglas Spencer: Our discussions have also been prompted by my recent critique of the discourse of affect in architecture.³ I’ve been arguing that the so-called ‘affective turn’ is complicit with processes of subjectification within and for neoliberalism, especially with respect to how we are fashioned as essentially emotive and affective beings, and in terms of the denigration of our reasoning capacities accompanying this process. I would want to note that these same affirmations of affect can also be found within certain currents of feminist thinking, such as its ‘new materialist’ forms.

My argument is not that we should recover reason at the expense of affect, but that we need to find ways of thinking the two things together, especially if we are to overcome conceiving of them as essentially opposed terms. To this end I find especially pertinent the thought of Theodor Adorno, particularly as expressed within his and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.⁴

Materialisms and ecologies

PR: Feminist thinking and materiality are intimately linked. Very important and creative work has been done on this, which has produced pre-histories – e.g., Judith Butler’s matrixial etymologies⁵ and significant feminist architectural histories, theories and design practices, including many colleagues who are participating in this conference.⁶ Two modes of feminist materialist thinking are, in particular, important for architecture. Both are related to Marxist critiques of capital, and an affirmation of affect. First, Luce Irigaray and Silvia Frederici’s work on reproductive labour and difference is in sympathy with colleagues who have discussed women, work and architecture.⁷ These have a renewed value in relation to the detrimental impact of unpaid labour that affects significant numbers of female and male academics and practitioners. Over the past few years, unpaid labour and poor reproductive rights and caring provision (and, by extension, ‘care of the self’) in the academic and architectural professional environments, have come to be defined as ‘affective’ forms of labour; for example, the precarious job security of young lecturers is reflected in The Guardian’s recent report on an academic who earns a salary of £6,000 from three different institutions.⁸ These critiques are also relevant in relation to tendencies amongst leading UK universities to now use zero-hour contracts for part-time lecturing positions: this is a situation very familiar to part-time architectural lecturers, especially those who teach in the architectural humanities.

The second reason to advocate materialist feminism is because of the techno-scientific formation of architecture and the built environment.⁹ Very good examples of feminist thinkers who have shown the ethical and societal significance of this kind of critique includes Donna Haraway’s work on ‘companion species’, Isabelle Stengers’ ‘ethics of practice’ and Karen Barad’s ‘agential realism’.¹⁰ These writers present critical and creative analyses of science and technology within humanities and aesthetic research, revising rationalism so that it can then be used to tackle pressing issues about the techno-scientific formation of society. As a consequence, feminisms may critically engage with techno-science, rather than oppose narratives of reasoning, in order to question biological and political definitions of ‘society’, ‘self’ and ‘care’, which the sciences produce and reproduce. For example, very powerful forms of normative representation used in neuro-cognitive science are often taken as dominant material and social ‘truths’, but without any reconstruction of subjectivity or of politics. Such ‘proof’ lies in some of the most universal (and, for feminists, obsolete) concepts of subjectivity that reconfirm normativity. Despite all the ‘brilliance’ of these sciences, their positivist origins are also used to undermine understandings of reciprocity or responsibility with the societal and political forces within which we live and work. Beyond the rise of the neuro-sciences, commercial architecture and our cities are also being substantially transformed by other large-scale techno-scientific systems – especially the drive towards automated and industrialised forms of computational design, including BIM. Architectural feminists (men, women and ‘other’) need to directly engage in these discussions. If feminist architectural critique fails to debate science, technology and rationalism, is it in danger of being permanently consigned to an irrelevant ‘anti-rationalist’ margin that is deemed viable only at the small scale rather than at the public and private infrastructural large scale? Of course, I also say this as someone who shares in the responsibility to develop new ways to engage, to learn and to challenge pedagogies which reproduce the ‘same’ instrumental forms of practice and standard models of power and control (and which exclude feminine forms of reasoning).

DS: Thinking of the relationship between materialism and feminism, it strikes me that we have, on the one hand, an older ‘materialism’, a ‘dialectical’ or historical ‘materialism’ with which Simone de Beauvoir was, of course, very much engaged.¹¹ This was critical to her understanding of how ‘woman’ was produced as a historical category, and of how ‘woman’ was produced as the ‘other’ to man through a range of material, political, cultural and technological means. On the other hand, we have a so-called ‘new materialism’ which has in some sense presented itself as an advance over all those older and critical practices that have been invested in the study of the linguistic, the semiotic, the textual.¹² The progressive promise of this new materialism is that in bypassing such forms of mediation we will somehow bypass systems of power; that we will achieve some more immediate engagement with the material world. But this is a false immediacy. Within our field, it implies that we can study and understand architecture simply in terms of its apparently obvious presence, in terms of its immediate materiality. Any properly critical theorisation of architecture, though, would want to stress that architecture is not immediate but mediated and mediating. Think, for, instance, of Fredric Jameson’s statement that architecture is ‘that constitutive seam between the economic organization of society and the aesthetic production of its (spatial) art’.¹³ Architecture is also mediated by, and mediating of, the environmental, the political, the cultural the technological and, perhaps most of all, conditions and practices of labour. An exclusive focus on matter will tend to obscure the nature and work of those mediations.

The promises and problematics of affect

PR: My interest in affect concerns its efficacy for biopolitical thinking and practices. Feminist philosophies of affect, particularly through Rosi Braidotti’s writing,¹⁴ take affect to be a necessary counter-argument to the negative forms of oppositional debate in contemporary politics: for example, the kind of d...