rheomode

I will be giving a paper at next year’s Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) conference, which will be in Detroit. My paper abstract is as follows:

 

Andrew Pickering has noted that “the ontology of cybernetics is a strange and unfamiliar one, very different from that of the modern sciences”. He argues that the modern ideology and practice of science is fundamentally representational, but that within post-war cybernetics there was a radical and marginalised research interest, which staged a non-representational approach, based upon a “hylozoic wonder”, and a “reciprocal coupling of people and things”, and which tried to develop a new philosophy and science of material process. Across an ecology of practices – art, architecture, psychiatry, robotics, biological computing, cognitive science and even management theory – we find in this research the beginnings of a reformulation of the project of western knowledge, and a different way of thinking about what “things” are, and what we can know about them. Binary oppositions that continue to structure much thought, such as matter and pattern, nature and culture, subject and object, were profoundly re-imagined here, not just conceptually, but through real experimental projects.

In this paper I focus on Gregory Bateson’s conceptions of an ecological aesthetics and an ecology of mind, and Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask’s ideas around biological computing. All of these thinkers engaged in architectural or urban issues in various ways. Bateson tried to make available the insights of complex systems theory to NY planners, Pask famously collaborated with Cedric Price, and worked at the AA, whilst Beer fantasised about designing factories that were managed by complex systems in the local environment!

I review these more obvious engagements with architectural and ecological knowledge, but will also ask what kinds of questions and possibilities this neocybernetic research – which staged a very novel conception of time and agency – poses for the practice and knowledge of architectural historiography, an eco-materialist aesthetics and critical-political urban ecology.

David Harvey at the World Social Forum in 2010:

 

Contemporary attempts to revive the communist hypothesis typically abjure state control and look to other forms of collective social organisation to displace market forces and capital accumulation as the basis for organising production and distribution. Horizontally networked as opposed to hierarchically commanded systems of co-ordination between autonomously organised and self-governing collectives of producers and consumers are envisaged as lying at the core of a new form of communism.  Contemporary technologies of communication make such a system seem feasible. All manner of small-scale experiments around the world can be found in which such economic and political forms are being constructed. In this there is a convergence of some sort between the Marxist and anarchist traditions that harks back to the broadly collaborative situation between them in the 1860s in Europe.

I will be giving a paper at the forthcoming Towards a Science of Consciousness conference to be held in Stockholm in May. My paper is titled: Rheomode and Aesthetics: Towards An Ecological Cybernetics Of Mind. These conferences are legendary (this is the eighteenth), and they bring together an exceptionally wide group of disciplines, beliefs and practices. I attended my first last April in Tucson, and was delayed there with many others by the Iceland volcano. I meet neurologists and philosophers, quantum physicists and psychologists, AI researchers and Buddhists, artists and synaesthetes, including quantum consciousness theorist Stuart Hammeroff, artists Robert Pepperell and John Jupe, roboticist Riccardo Manzotti, neuropsychologist Henrik Ehrsson.

I am looking forward to the coming event, notably Henrik Ehrsson (of Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, producing fascinating work on how we have a sense of owning a body), Roger Penrose (mathematician and theoretical physicist), Paavo Pylkkanen (philosopher and leading scholar on physicist David Bohm) and Stuart Hameroff (quantum consciousness theorist) among others.

My paper proposal:

Rheomode and Aesthetics: Towards An Ecological Cybernetics Of Mind

The quantum physicist David Bohm suggested that many of the contradictions and paradoxes that arise when we try to formulate accurate descriptions of both matter and mind, arise from the structures of everyday western language, and the ideology of modern reductive scientific method. For Bohm, western languages privilege nouns, and construct for us a perceived world of discrete subjects and objects. Our language obscures the fundamentally dynamic and interconnected process based nature of reality.

Bohm imagined a new verb-based form of language, which he called the rheomode (from the Greek flow). He hoped this might make it easier for us to see and conceive of a dynamic unfolding wholeness. In this thinking, Bohm was influenced by two philosophical schools: Whiteheadian process thought, and Hegelian-Marxist dialectics. Bohm suggested that if it were possible to reformulate quantum theory in rheomodic terms, it might move beyond the paradoxes that characterised the standard interpretation: indeterminacy, non-locality, wave-particle duality, the role of the conscious observer etc.

Describing the internal relations of an unfolding dynamic system does not just re-imagine matter. Bohm insisted that rheomodic thought necessarily redefines the other half of that old dualism: mind, or consciousness. He described his holistic account as “more quantum organism than quantum mechanics”, and in his process based concepts such as “active information”, “implicate ordering” and “holomovement”, mind and matter are radically and mutually enfolded; this thinking resonates with panpsychic, hylozoic and radical externalist approaches.

Bohm’s joint work with David Peat developed new conceptions of order and creativity that had as much to do with aesthetics as they did with science. In this paper I will extend this line of thinking, and suggest that new rheomodic approaches can be found within some art and design based research, specifically a series of experimental projects associated with the work of neocyberneticians Gregory Bateson, Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask. In his recent The Cybernetic Brain, Andrew Pickering argues that in their work “cybernetics drew back the veil the modern sciences cast over the performative aspects of the world, including our own being” and through “hylozoic wonder” and “nomadic science” staged a “a vision of a world.. in which reality is always ‘in the making’.”

Although most contemporary neurological research tries to reduce correlates of consciousness to ever smaller elements, as Alva Nöe has noted, “the phenomenon of consciousness, like that of life itself, is a world-involving dynamic process,” which must have “external correlates” too. As Bateson argued, cognition is a radically ecological “system whose boundaries do not at all coincide with the boundaries either of the body or of what is popularly called the ‘self’ or ‘consciousness’.”

At TSC Tucson 2010, several speakers proposed to explore new unification models, to bring together insights from recent neurological, psychological and philosophical research. I suggest that without a renewed (and necessarily political) appreciation of Bohm’s rheomode, and the development of a language of dynamic ecological aesthetics, such a task is impossible. Indeed, in an important sense, the project of a ‘science of consciousness’ is impossible without a dialectical aesthetics and politics of mind (and matter).

I have a paper in the new issue of the excellent Field Journal on Ecology, which can be downloaded online. My paper is titled “Gregory Bateson, Critical Cybernetics and Ecological Aesthetics of Dwelling”. The synopsis follows, and other papers are also listed below. It looks like a great issue, though I have yet to read the other contributions thoroughly. Other issues of the journal are also well worth downloading. Field is an important  young online peer reviewed architectural theory space … one  of the few.

Gregory Bateson, Critical Cybernetics and Ecological Aesthetics of Dwelling: Synopsis

In the last decade there has been a shift in our understanding and awareness of the scale and profundity of the global environmental crisis that industrial capitalism, combined with a certain cultural hubris regarding our ‘relation to nature’ (see below), has instantiated. Ecology, a term that emerged into popular consciousness in the 60’s as a byword for radical ‘holistic’ and ‘systemic’ thinking, has returned to prominence in recent years across all kinds of fields – once again as a way of signalling an attempt to engage with broader environmental questions.

Within the natural sciences, ecology is above all characterised by a non-reductive holistic approach that focuses on the organisation and internal/external relational dynamics of ‘wholes’ or ‘assemblages’ (such as ecosystems). This is in contradistinction to the orthodox ideology of modern scientific practice, which is based upon a reductivist analysis of phenomenal wholes into ‘fundamental’ parts. Through the twentieth century ecology co-evolved with associated disciplines such as cybernetics and systems theory, and many important theorists – including for example Ludwig von Bertallanfy, Gregory Bateson and James Lovelock – migrated between these different areas, making contributions to all. Outside of the biological sciences, ecology has come to signify something closer to a paradigm rather than a specific discipline, as a culture and holistic science of systemic interconnection in general.

As a discourse, ecology brings together many contradictory roots. It exists as a hard scientific discipline, yet it also has allegiances with the environmental movement and ecocentric theory in a wider sense that gives it an irreducible complexity; combining many of the insights of modern science but mixed together with intellectual, religious and romantic legacies, ideas and practices that are from beyond the enlightenment (either predating it, and/or from remote cultures). For example, ecocentric thinkers might typically assert that the western scientific method and ideology promotes views of the natural world as something to be exploited and experimented upon. They then go on to cite scientific evidence collected as proof of this damage!

Today, ecology as a suffix is frequently used to signify a general systems theory (often combined with environmental awareness) based approach to any complex area. Think for example of the growing plethora of disciplines such as human ecology, social ecology, deep ecology, industrial ecology and political ecology, to name but a few. In architectural theory and in design teaching especially, there have been proposed an ever-expanding series of ecology-based concepts: cybernetic ecologies; machine ecologies; stealth ecologies; performance ecologies and so on. Clearly, the role of ecological analysis in articulating the stresses that contemporary industrial systems are placing upon the biosphere has been a particularly important area of development. Below I focus on two such strands within ecological theory.

Understanding socio-economic-ecological systems in relation to social justice has become a key task of urban political ecology – perhaps the most important extension to ecological theory to emerge in recent years. In this paper I will explore some of the precursors of contemporary urban political ecology (UPE) in the basic relations between ecology, economics and the architectural-urban. In particular, I will turn to consider the thinking of the British post-war anthropologist, cybernetician and ecologist Gregory Bateson. In Bateson’s work we can find one the most innovative and important re-conceptions of the overall project of ecology – and I suggest that the work of this maverick thinker might have some important contributions to make to the development of urban political ecology today.

Ecology

field: volume 4, issue 1 (December 2010)

Editorial:

Ecology Renata Tyszczuk and Stephen Walker

Articles:

The perfect worlds of ecology Irénée Scalbert

Ecology and the Art of Sustainable Living David Haley

Gregory Bateson, Critical Cybernetics and Ecological Aesthetics of Dwelling Jon Goodbun

Ethics VS Aesthetics Architectural Design 1965-1972 Steve Parnell

Ecology without the Oikos: Banham, Dallegret and the Morphological Context of Environmental Architecture Amy Kulper

Learning from Ecosystems: The Deployment of Soft Systems in the

Canadian Arctic Neeraj Bhatia and Maya Przybylski

Cultural Ecology in the New New Orleans Benjamin Morris

The Lost Decade? Lisa Tilder

Bonjour Tristesse: Study for an art project. Cerdagne, France 2010 David Cross

The Edible City: Envisioning the Continuous Productive Urban Landscape (CPUL) Katrin Bohn and Andre Viljoen

Squatting My Mind – Towards an Architectural Ecosophy

Catharina Gabrielsson

Review Articles:

ECOLOGY Theory Forum Judith Sakyi Ansah and Robert Sharples

RHYZOM Doina Petrescu

SPATIAL AGENCY Tatjana Schneider

ATLAS of Interdependence Joe Smith and Renata Tyszczuk

I will be giving a paper at the Design Ecologies Symposium at the Architectural Association, London, on February 4th. The line up for the day is as follows:

Design Ecologies: The Unprimed Canvas

1030  Ideation

Kate Davies and Shaun Murray

1100  Ecological Design Visions

Visionary thinking on methodologies of communicating an architecture along with new models and ecological contribution.

Shaun Murray (Eniatype, London)

Jon Goodbun (University of Westminster, London)

Timothy Morton (UC Davies, California)

1200  Notational Design Visions

Notational systems within architectural education used as a communication tool have made the composition of architecture an activity like the composition of fiction: the activity of communication.

Mathew Emmett

Kate Davies/ Emmanuel Vercruysse (Liquid Factory)

Bastian Glaessner (Lynn Fox, Blink productions)

Coffee Break

1330  Instructional Design Visions

There are many kinds of relationships between participant and environment within context, design and communication. An extremely important one is who communicates with whom and who instructs whom.

Benedict Singleton

Kjell Yngve Petersen (IT Copenhagen)

Felix Robbins (Make Architects, London)

1430  Aesthetical Design Visions

Aesthetic experience is one of the most common ways to value our environment. Whether it is having a walk in the park, cycling through a country lane, or just sitting in your garden, we can appreciate the aesthetic qualities. We could go on to say that we should be developing environmental sensitivity through aesthetic experience.

Claudia Westermann

James Moore (University of Falmouth)

Bruce McLean (Bruce Mclean, London)

1530  Discussion

Through original design exploration, this symposium proffers a critical vision towards the built environment. These conceptions challenge the everyday education of architectural design by offering a transdisciplinary framework for design production.

1700  Book launch and drinks

To subscribe to the peer-reviewed Design Ecologies Journal, please go to the following link: http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=197/

For more information please contact: info@eniatype.com

I have a new article in the new issue of Radical Philosophy, a double book review of Bruce Clarke and Mark B.N. Hansen (eds.), Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays in Second-Order Systems Theory (Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2009), and Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2010).

Both books are of interest. The Clarke and Hansen collection contains important pieces by the two editors, together with a mix of works from contemporary and canonic thinkers in the field, including Francisco Varela, Niklas Luhmann, Heinz von Foerster, Evan Thompson, and John Protevi, amongst others. The broad drive of the collection, for the editors, is that:

“it is only by theorising the operational closure of cognizing systems that cultural theory can rescue agency – albeit agency of a far more complex variety than that of traditional humanism – from being overrun by the technoscientific processes that are everywhere transforming the material world in which we live today.. Better late than never, second-order cybernetics can now perhaps finally come through on its promise to provide the ecology of mind best fitted to the demands of our intellectual, institutional, and global crises.”

I am particularly fond of Andrew Pickering’s new work. I first met him in February last year, when we were both speaking at a symposium at the University of Nottingham, organised by their Science Technology Culture Research Group, and was not aware of his work before then (although I probably should have been). Pickering shares an interest in the same collection of cyberneticians that have animated sections of my PhD research, although he has been able to articulate better than I could, why they were interesting. His move is simple. He basically rejects, or perhaps just ignores, the first-order/second-order distinction that characterises most accounts of cybernetics, and instead describes a radical tendency within cybernetics of ‘anti-control’, almost exclusively composed of British researchers. This would be as opposed, I guess, to a more mainstream and American/German systems theory of ‘control’. Pickering – a former quantum physicist turned historian/theorist of science – has written about the social forms of scientific practice, and the effect of these forms upon the knowledge claims made by science. Importantly for Pickering, “the ontology of cybernetics is a strange and unfamiliar one, very different from that of the modern sciences”. He argues that the modern ideology of science is fundamentally representational, and claims that the experimental work of British cybernetics (in which he includes Gregory Bateson, R.D. Laing, Stafford Beer, Gordon Pask, Ross Ashby, and Grey Walter) stages a non-representational approach, a “hylozoic wonder”, and a “reciprocal coupling of people and things” and “an understanding of science as a mode of performative engagement with the world.” Pickering describes how radical cybernetics stages what he calls “ontological theatre”. In Pickering’s account, we find a distinctive and radical outline for a new “nomadic science”, a “forward-looking search … [for] a vision not of a world characterised by graspable causes, but rather of one in which reality is always ‘in the making’.”

In the review, I argue that both books move beyond the dominant critique of cybernetics that emerged in recent decades, perhaps most energetically found in the French group Tiqqun’s Cybernetic Hypothesis. I conclude (all too briefly – but see my forthcoming PhD and elsewhere for a more extended argument), that in these accounts of radical/neo-cybernetics, there can be found an important critical contribution to the renewed interest in the concept of metabolism, that has developed in recent Marxian theories of  Urban Political Ecology and Landscape Urbanism.

I have recently found this interview with Andrew Pickering on the University of Nottingham’s Science Technology Culture Research Group website, which gives an accessible introduction to his thinking:

 

NB I have another article where I consider Pickering’s work and the question of interactive design, on the Creative Applications Network.

I am very happy to announce that I have recently been given approval to guest edit (with Jeremy Till and Deljana Iossifova) an edition of the Wiley journal Architectural Design (AD), by commissioning editor Helen Castle. The issue has the working title ‘The Scarcity Report’.

I have attached below the main sections of the book proposal, which may be of interest – both for the actual proposal, but also as information for other potential guest editors, regarding the proposal process. There were sections concerning my previous publications and biography, which I have removed (as they are located elsewhere on this site). I have also removed some details regarding indicative contributors, as I am now in the process of approaching likely suspects. The proposal was ‘anonymously’ refereed and reviewed by Neil Spiller, Susannah Hagan and Anne Thorpe, all of whom made very useful suggestions, and were generally positive.

AD: The Scarcity Report

Guest Editor: Jon Goodbun with Jeremy Till and Deljana Iossifova

1. Proposed Title:

The preferred title is The Scarcity Report. The word ‘report’ is intended to indicate that the publication is a direct summary of a pressing issue and, in the manner of an official report, will provide pointers as to how address the global condition of scarcity. It also refers to the seminal publication “Limits of Growth” which was conceived of as a report to the Club of Rome.

2. Full name of guest-editor and affiliations:

Jon Goodbun

University of Westminster Senior Lecturer

EU HERA funded SCIBE (Scarcity and Creativity in the Built Environment) researcher

Jon Goodbun will be supported by an editorial advisory group led by Professor Jeremy Till and Dr Deljana Iossifova, also at the University of Westminster, who are the lead researchers in a major EU research project based around issues of scarcity and creativity in the built environment.

3. Outline of definition of theme:

We are today in the midst of a ‘perfect storm’ of social, political, economic and ecological dimensions. The full extent and severity of our current conditions are yet to be determined, but one thing seems certain – our foreseeable futures will not be like our recent pasts. Leading analysts of all the major resource domains – water, food, material, energy and finance – all tell us that our global industrial growth models driven by the irrationality of financial market speculation are taking the planet to the brink of a series of chronic scarcities. Some of these are determined by real natural limits in terms of diminishing quantities of mineral resources. Other scarcities are based upon our problematic mis-management of natural flows of resources such as water, timber and food (both animals and agriculture). Many others still are simply based upon the socially and geographically uneven  development and distribution of these flows, with a transfer of real metabolic value from the poor to the rich areas of the globe. In parallel to these metabolic inputs, industrial economies are also externalising – in a generally catastrophic manner – all kinds of waste sinks. Again this is characterised by an uneven development, typified by flows of waste from rich to poor regions. In all of these cases, existing systemic stresses are expected to transform and intensify in unpredictable ways as a result of climate change and ecosystem shifts. Scarcity, both actual or constructed, has been largely suppressed as topic in recent debates, which have centred around the more emollient term ‘sustainability’. However, there is a rising interest in scarcity as potentially the central feature of societal change in the coming decade.

Architectural, urban, planning and design research has multiple forms of engagement with these issues, from developing new forms of analysis of global flows and scarcities, to specific local and global design based responses. In all cases, a full engagement with these issues has the capacity to completely reconfigure design practices in new, radically post-sustainable, directions The Scarcity Report will make a major contribution to these developments, and will be welcomed by architectural and design practitioners and theorists, and by activists and entrepreneurs more broadly.

4. Outline of treatment:

The Scarcity Report will be organised according to three axes: design research, concepts of scarcity, and ecological scale. Overall there will be an equal weighting between the brute ecological and economic facts, design theory, and practical design case studies.

The three sections will in turn be broken into three categories, as follows:

Design Research:

This section will explore the way that designers have employed various strategies to analyse, document or design under conditions of scarcity:

a: design theory and future scenario planning

b: design research as analysis and explanation of existing conditions, promoting ecological literacy.

c: design research as proposing and testing solutions: design strategies, activism, case studies

Concepts of Scarcity:

This section will look at the ways in which scarcity presents itself:

d: natural scarcity

e: social scarcity

g: architectural/design scarcities

Ecological Scale:

This section will show how scarcity is addressed at three different scales:

h: local

i: regional

j: global

5. Selling Points:

1: The Scarcity Report discusses a topic that is too pressing to overlook, but which has been very under-theorised. It will be the first major publication to address the issue.

2: The Scarcity Report transforms the contemporary discourse around ecological design, defining a distinctly post-sustainable position. This will mark the publication as a new direction for theoretical and practical debate.

3: The Scarcity Report will be the first time a collection of leading theorists, designers, researchers, projects and activists have been brought together in one publication (for example John Thackara, Ezio Manzini, Michael Braungart, Erik Swyngedouw, Jeremy Till). This will be significant and referred to.

4. The Scarcity Report extends a new strand of ADs that are addressing important global issues.

5. The Scarcity Report will make explicit connections between the background theory and design action

6. Typical profile of readership:

The Scarcity Report will be read across architecture, planning, landscape, product and systems design, by educators and students, activists, young practitioners and small practices within and beyond design, The Scarcity Report will also provide an importance reference within the ‘sustainability’ discourse, for community groups, policy makers and thought leaders.

9. Description of reason for publishing:

Whilst there has been work done on systems design, by contributors such as John Thackara, Ezio Manzini, and Michael Braungart, this thinking has been focused more at product design, and is not at all well disseminated in architecture. Students are however now demanding it. Equally, new forms of design activism that are starting to emerge in architecture schools, and new forms of systems analysis that can only come out of a basis in urban and landscape theory (Jon Goodbun), is of increasing interest to designers at large. The new forms of critical geography based on concepts such as urban metabolism, and urban political ecology (Erik Swyngedouw, David Harvey etc) are of great and growing interest to students and researchers across architecture, planning and design. This publication is the first time that these three areas have been brought together, together with a set out of the basic facts concerning global resource flows.

The  material will also provoke a self-reflexive consideration of the forms of practice and professional organisation in architecture and design (Jeremy Till), and so will provide the means for young practitioners to position themselves in new ways as activists, researchers and entrepreneurs.

10. Indicative Table of Contents:

Editorial/Introduction: Jon Goodbun

Ecological and Economic facts: including The Socio-Ecological Production of Scarcities, Supply Systems, Metabolism, Resilience and (Urban and Regional) Planning

Post-Sustainable Design Theory: including Design Activism, Rethinking forms of design practice and education, Peak Resources and Strategic Design, Future Scenario Planning as design research, Ecological Literacy

Case Studies: various global examples across scales