SPACELAB

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SPACELAB
FIELD THINKING
research laboratory for the contemporary city
www.spacelab.tudelft.nl
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0. Field and configuration

• Non-modernist / Post-modernist
• Beyond the Matter / Mind, Nature / Culture
  distinctions
• Non-objectivist / Process / Constructivist
• Systems thinking
• Configuration / Field
• New realism
• The virtual

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0. Field and configuration

• A new concept appears in physics, the most
  important invention since Newtons time the
  field. It needed great scientific imagination to
  realise that it is not the charges or the
  particles but the field in the space between the
  charges and particles which is essential for the
  description of physical phenomena. ... Could we
  not reject the concept of matter and build a pure
  field physics?
• Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution
  of Physics

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1. Concept as structure

• Hillier
• It is conventionally presumed that the result of
  environmental research is an increase in
  objective knowledge about the environment which
  then needs to be incorporated into the process of
  designing, replacing or reducing the intuitive
  component and thus supposedly improving the
  outcome of that process.
• We need in fact to recognise that the
  intelligibility of the results of both scientific
  research and the design process are dependent on
  the preconceptions and pre-structurings of the
  problem in the minds of researchers and
  designers. The cognitive schemes by which we
  interpret the world and pre-structure our
  observations are in fact an integral part of the
  field of science and need to be seen as an
  essential part of the subject matter of science.

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1. Concept as structure

• Concepts are not simply ideas or perceptions -
  neither facts nor representations concepts are
  structurings within discursive formations.
• Ideas or facts-as-things or as events of
  consciousness are replaced by a configuration
  they are no longer centred in their essential
  internal natures, nor in the moment of
  subjectivity - they are distributed in a system.
• It is not the things or events which are so
  important, rather their relations with other
  things or events.
• Notice the objectivication - they are independent
  of human subjectivity.

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1. Concept as structure

• Facts and analytical decomposition
• The idea of a science which produces factual
  knowledge or information which can be assimilated
  into design, along with a view of design which
  proceeds by decomposing a problem into its
  elements, adding the information derived from
  scientific work, and then synthesising a solution
  by means of a set of logical or procedural rules,
  needs to be questioned.
• Research doesnt produce facts - it produces
  concepts structurings or alterations in the
  structurings of problems.

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2. The construction of the world

• Scientific progress
• Hypothoses (concepts) arise ... by processes
  that form part of the subject-matter of
  psychology and certainly not of logic... It is a
  vulgar error, to speak of deducing hypotheses.
  Indeed one does not deduce hypotheses hypotheses
  are what one deduces things from. Peter Medawar
  - The threat and the glory, pp. 231-2
• We inhabit a world of structured ideas rather
  than in one of things
• The ontological priority of the relation
  positions are empty - are given meaning (filled)
  by their internal relations.

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2. The construction of the world

• The purpose of research
• The question of what the purpose is of research
  may be is simply answered it is to affect the
  preconceptions and pre-structurings of the shape
  and nature of the built environment in the minds
  of the designers themselves. These
  pre-structurings are in the form of more or less
  general concepts that can structure an
  understanding of real world relations and
  dynamics and an approach to particular cases.
• The purpose of research is to generate concepts
  (concepts).

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2. The construction of the world

• Multiplicity, worlds (universes)
• There are no simple concepts. Every concept has
  components and is defined by them... It is a
  multiplicity, ... even so-called universals as
  ultimate concepts must escape the chaos by
  circumscribing a universe that explains them.
  Deleuze and Guattari - What is Philosophy, p. 15

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2. The construction of the world

• All concepts are connected to problems without
  which they would have no meaning and which can
  themselves only be isolated or understood as
  their solution emerges. Deleuze and Guattari -
  What is Philosophy, p. 16
• The concept is the condition of all
  perception... It is also the condition for our
  passing from one world to another. Deleuze and
  Guattari - What is Philosophy, p. 16

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3. Perspective

• Paradigms / discourses are not different ways of
  seeing the same thing - they are different worlds
• Paradigm changes ... cause scientists to see the
  world of the research-engagement differently. In
  so far as their only recourse to that world is
  through what they see and do, we may want to say
  that after a scientific revolution scientists
  are responding to a different world. Thomas Kuhn
  - The structure of scientific revolutions, p.110

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3. Perspective

• There is a resemblance between Kuhns notion of
  paradigm and Wittgensteins concept of
  language-game. Neither paradigms or
  language-games can be described in terms of a set
  of explicit rules.
• ... to imagine a language-game is to imagine a
  form of life. Wittgenstein, Philosophical
  Investigations, p.19
• Wittgenstein argues that language creates
  reality. Nothing exists outside of our language
  and actions which can be used to justify a
  statements truth or falsity. The only possible
  justification lies in the linguistic practices
  which embody them.

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3. Perspective

• Instead of producing something common to all
  that we call language, I am saying that these
  language-games have no one thing in common
  which makes us use the same word - but that they
  are related to one another in many different
  ways. And it is because of these relationships,
  that we call them all together language.
  Wittgenstein - Philosophical investigations, p.65
• A truth-statement is supported in a web of other
  truth-statements.
• And as the object-subject distinction disappears,
  we have no need of a distinction between the
  referencing activity of language and the
  being-in-itself of the world.

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3. Perspective

• Sciences, disciplines and paradigms must be seen
  for what they are artificial constructed
  languages which create possible worlds. But
  there are limits to what is possible.
  Wittgensteins account of language is NOT a
  relativist account.
• The possible is multiply constrained by the field
  which in fact constitutes it. The field is laws
  of possibility, rules of existence.

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4. The field as shifting ground

• A new concept appears in physics, the most
  important invention since Newtons time the
  field. It needed great scientific imagination to
  realise that it is not the charges or the
  particles but the field in the space between the
  charges and particles which is essential for the
  description of physical phenomena. ... Could we
  not reject the concept of matter and build a pure
  field physics?
• Einstein and Infeld, The Evolution of Physics
• Einstein was able to equate matter and energy and
  to formulate laws describing matter-energy
  fields.

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4. The field as shifting ground

• These descriptions of physical reality however
• revealed a fundamental discontinuity -
  matter-energy fields change by a series of
  quantum jumps.
• were not constant but varied with the
  spatio-temporal position of the observer
  (subject). The constant (essential) subject
  becomes problematic.
• Shifted attention from things (particles) and
  forces acting at a distance (charges and gravity)
  onto the structure of space itself.

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4. The field as shifting ground

• Electro-magnetism
• By shifting attention from the charged particles
  to the field between the particles it became
  possible to relate electrical fields to magnetic
  fields because they have the same structure.
• In Maxwells theory there are no material actors.
  There are no forces connecting widely separated
  events the field here and now depends on the
  field in the immediate neighbourhood at a time
  just past. We can deduce what happens from that
  which happened far away by a summation of small
  (local, contingent) steps.
• Replaced substance and continuous change with
  matter-energy and space-time

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4. The field as shifting ground

• The world which Relativity presents to our
  imaginations is not so much a world of things
  in motion as a world of events.
• Geometry (discrete actuality) reflects the
  condition of matter in a certain region. Geometry
  is local - and if a universal geometry exists
  which underlies all the local geometries, it must
  reflect the condition of matter on the scale of
  the universe (continuous virtuality). J.
  Merleau-Ponty Bruno Morando, The rebirth of
  cosmology, p. 176
• The new models (electro-magnetism, relativity,
  quantum mechanics) are self-contradictory within
  the conceptual limits of waves or particles and
  can only be expressed in terms of fields
  (relationships).

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4. The field as shifting ground

• Perhaps we are approaching a merger of the
  description of events and the description of
  things ... perhaps there is being because there
  is happening. A more radical departure from the
  classical view of the material basis of the world
  is hard to imagine. Kenneth Ford, The world of
  elementary particles, pp. 213-215
• Action is neither continuous nor at a distance.
  In classical terms it is not action at all - it
  is rather a discontinuous event of space-time.

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4. The field as shifting ground

• Reality appears to vary not merely with the
  position of the observer (the empty location)
  but with the act of observation itself
• Natural science does not simply describe and
  explain nature it is part of the interplay
  between nature and ourselves it describes nature
  as exposed to our method of questioning. This is
  a possibility of which Descartes could not have
  thought, but it makes the sharp separation
  between the world and the I impossible. Werner
  Heisenberg, in Physics and philosophy, p. 81
• The reconciliation of contradiction by
  complementary relations (in which differences
  remain intact) rather than through dialectical
  syntheses (in which differences are obliterated).
  (Simmel)

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4. The field as shifting ground

• Classical laws are laws of permission - they
  define what can and must happen in natural
  phenomena.
• Quantum laws are more generally laws of
  prohibition - they define what cannot happen.
• Classical science order beneath chaos.
• The new science chaos beneath order.

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5. Archaeology

• Foucault
• Facts may not, in the last resort, be what
  they seem at first sight. In short, they require
  a theory, and this theory cannot be constructed
  unless the field of the facts of discourse on the
  basis of which those facts are built up appears
  in its non-synthetic purity. Foucault, The
  Archaeology of Knowledge

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5. Archaeology

• Archaeology
• treats history as discontinuous change
• Is concerned with description rather than
  interpretation
• Rejects forces (Reason, History, Economics
  etc.)
• Suspicious of objects
• Seeks to examine the space in which objects
  emerge and are transformed
• Seeks to describe systems of dispersion

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5. Archaeology

• Foucault dispenses with things (and facts as
  things)
• Examines the systematic space in which things
  emerge.
• Foucault aims to dispense with the subject
• The subject becomes one of the vacant places in
  the field that may in fact be filled by
  different individuals (or a variable individual)
  as the place varies.
• Shifts attention from objects (and facts treated
  as objects) to facts constructed on the basis of
  their positioning in a systematic and spatial
  field of discourse (language games of
  Wittgenstein) (Constructivism)

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5. Archaeology

• Foucault
• Has reduced the role of the subject to a variable
  function in space and time.
• Has introduced fundamental discontinuities into
  the mechanics of change.
• Like Einsteins ideas, these are difficult to
  think - we have gone beyond the limits of
  Cartesian/Kantian thinking patterns.
• Has side-stepped the Mind-Matter duality - which
  has defined western thinking since the
  Enlightenment (the modernist episteme).

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5. Archaeology

• Foucault
• Has set up a means for studying the formal
  conditions of the appearance of meaning -
  without reference to subjectivity (or
  consciousness or intentionality).
• We have discovered ... another passion the
  passion for concepts and for what I will call
  system. ... By system it is necessary to
  understand an ensemble of relations which
  maintain themselves and transform themselves
  independently of the things they connect ... an
  anonymous system without subjects. ... The I has
  exploded - look at modern literature. Entretien
  Michel Foucault, pp. 14-15
• (What about perception then? - is it unconscious
  and determined?)

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5. Archaeology

• Foucault has eliminated modernist requirements
  for
• an exterior, objective truth.
• a privileged right to objectivist thought to
  adjudicate on truth.
• an interior meaningful subject.
• a subject-object distinction.
• on the basis of a thinking he borrowed from
  physics...
• gtgtGeorges Canguilhem (Thomas Kuhn), Gaston
  Bachelard
• gtgtA.N. Whitehead, Henri Bergson, C.S. Pierce

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5. Archaeology

• ... the frontiers of a book work, world are
  never clear-cut ... beyond its internal
  configuration and its autonomous form, it is
  caught up in a system of references to other
  books works, worlds ... it is a node within a
  network ... its unity is variable and relative.
  ... As soon as one questions that unity, it loses
  its self-evidence it indicates itself,
  constructs itself, only on the basis of a complex
  field of discourse. Foucault, Archaeology of
  Knowledge, p. 23

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6. Objects/statements

• The active unit is the statement this is
  neither object nor force nor subject - it is a
  function.
• Functions/statements do not exist in isolation
  and cannot be identified in isolation. They do
  not exist and do not have a meaning independent
  of the field (or syntax) in which they are
  embedded. (Einstein / Wittgenstein / Saussure)
• Their existence is determined by rules of
  formation and transformation.

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6. Objects/statements

• Statements
• Statements (or other units emergent from a
  discourse or field) are neither pure form nor
  buried meaning - they are simultaneously form and
  substance.
• Statements are not signs or symbols they do
  not refer to something, nor do they require
  interpretation, they are - and mean themselves!
  (Merleau-Pontys form)
• They are simultaneously real and immaterial
  real and possible (virtual).
• Like electrons, which appear as both waves and
  particles, statements do not indicate things or
  facts or beings but laws of possibility,
  rules of existence.

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6. Objects/statements

• Laws of threshold, displacement,
  redistribution, transformation - connected to the
  structure of a field and with the process of
  restructuring which produces discontinuous
  change.
• Change marked by sudden shifts and jumps, by
  ruptures and systematic rearrangements. It refers
  to processes familiar from quantum mechanics,
  mutation and development in biology and large
  scale geological structures.
• Against the reductionist tradition with its
  interest in the analytical decomposition of the
  whole into parts - which decomposition is then
  supposed to say something about wholes in terms
  of their coterminous spatio-temporal
  relationships with those parts.

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6. Objects/statements

• Change is marked by a shift in the fields and the
  formation of discourses - occupying the same
  ground (space) as previous ones but different in
  their internal configurations in their choice of
  objects.

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7. Society as field

• Pierre Bourdieu replaces the concept of "society"
  with that of "field".
• Society refers to an undifferentiated unity
  integrated by systemic functions, a common
  culture, or all-encompassing authority
  structures.
• A differentiated society is, "an ensemble of
  relatively autonomous spheres of play that
  cannot be collapsed under an overall societal
  logic, be it that of capitalism, modernity, or
  postmodernity" (Wacquant 1992 16f-17).
• Spheres of play prescribe their particular
  values and possess their own regulative
  principles on the basis of field principles.

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7. Society as field

• Different forms of capital (cultural, social,
  economic) are activated as material resources in
  struggles in the social space.
• The volume and composition of an actors overall
  capital defines the actors position in the
  social space.
• Struggles are struggles for position.
• What also matters is his dispositions that is,
  thoughts, feelings and judgments, ways of being,
  strategies of mobility (habitus)

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7. Society as field

• We (should) view social life not in statistical
  terms, as the outcome of a large number of
  interactions among discrete individuals, but in
  topological terms as the unfolding of a total
  generative field. I have used the term
  sociality to refer to the dynamic properties of
  this field. cultural variation may be expected
  to induce evolutionary modulations of the social
  field, but this is not to say that social forms
  are in any sense genetically or culturally
  determined. ...
• Thus it is normally supposed that human
  individuals endowed with bundles of cultural
  traits, have all they need to assemble organised
  social life. Nothing could be further from the
  truth. Tim Ingold,

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8. The visible and the invisible

• The field adds a new dimension to materiality
• The Matter-Mind or Matter-God paradigm
  accounted for the creative force of the world
  through the active part of the duality.
• Within the non-dualistic paradigm, we develop an
  account of creative power (negentropy) by way of
  relational systematics - which constitute a
  version of the possible
• Matter is not the other side of Mind - Matter
  itself is both material and form
  (organisation).

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8. The visible and the invisible

• Matter is simultaneously discrete and continuous
• Geometry (discrete actuality) reflects the
  condition of matter in a certain region. Geometry
  is local - and if a universal geometry exists
  which underlies all the local geometries, it must
  reflect the condition of matter on the scale of
  the universe (continuous virtuality). J.
  Merleau-Ponty Bruno Morando, The rebirth of
  cosmology, p. 176

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8. The visible and the invisible

• Matter is simultaneously real and ideal
• Philosophy made a great step forward on the day
  when Berkeley proved, as against the mechanical
  philosophers, that the secondary qualities of
  matter have at least as much reality as the
  primary qualities. His mistake lay in believing
  that, for this, it was necessary to place matter
  within the mind and to make it into a pure idea.
  Henri Bergson, Matter and memory, pp. 10-11

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8. The visible and the invisible

• The dual nature of matter is captured in the idea
  of continuous and discontinuous multiplicities
• While in its contact with matter, life is
  comparable to an impulsion or an impetus,
  regarded in itself it is an immensity of
  virtuality, a mutual encroachment of thousands
  and thousands of tendencies whic nevertheless are
  thousands and thousands only when regarded as
  outside each other, that is when spatialised.
  Contact with matter is what determines this
  dissociation. Matter divides actually what was
  but a virtual multiplicity and, in this sense,
  individuation is in part the work of matter, in
  part the work of lifes own inclination. Henri
  Bergson, Creative evolution, p. 258

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8. The visible and the invisible

• ... a conception of the evolution of life as
  involving an actualisation of the virtual in
  contrast to the less inventive or creative
  realisation of the possible. Keith Ansell
  Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of the
  Virtual, p. 1

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8. The visible and the invisible

• That the present moment is not a moment of being
  or of present in the strict sense, that it is
  the passing moment, forces us to think of
  becoming, but to think of it precisely as what
  could not have started and cannot finish,
  becoming. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 48

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A different kind of spatiality
The first move is a definition of an alternative
spatiality - representing a deeper urban reality
of permeability and connection supporting an
obvious surface reality of bordering and enclosure
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The shape of the performative field - relations gt
flow

• The shapes of the
• performative field
• become urban
• forms - the stuff we
• deal with
• and the way
• social space is
• stabilised and
• identified.

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The urban image

• is a product of urban space of this socially
  indeterminate space of flows - a secondary
  unintended product of the performance of social
  space
• Ferdinand Bolstraat Ceintuurbaan
• The paradigm shift allows us to understand
  something we did not understand before...

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The urban image

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Further reading

• Manuel De Landa, Intensive science and virtual
  philosophy
• Foucault, The archaeology of knowledge
• Deleuze Guattari, What is philosophy
• Bruno Latour, We have never been modern