What is phenomenology again?

When Edmund Husserl first established phenomenology as a philosophic school, he defined it as the science of the essence of things. He didn’t mean by this an investigation of some ideal dimension, as one might presume. Rather, to use Merleau-Ponty’s formulation, phenomenology is “a philosophy which puts essences back into existence, and does not expect to arrive at an understanding of man and the world from any starting point other than that of their ‘facticity’.” [1] Or, as he put it elsewhere, phenomenology takes as its baseline the assertion that “there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.”[2] The phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty rode a line between the mediated ‘ultimate’ truth of science and the abstract truth of idealist philosophy. To them it was the content of our experience that was true. When looking down a microscope at some bacteria, for instance, the student of natural science will describe the bacteria while a student of phenomenology would describe what looking down a microscope at bacteria is like. As Christian Norberg-Schulz has pointed out, to our everyday experience it actually appears as if “the world is flat and that the sky is a dome, spangled with stars.”[3] While the scientific description is different, neither description is ultimately more ‘true’. They just serve different purposes.

Phenomenology assumes that the process of ontogenesis, becoming, is a constant fact of life. We are always engaged in making ourselves, giving ourselves definition, whether inter-subjectively, in communication with others, or on our own, in reflection or engaged in a task. The implication for architecture here is that as part of the ‘world’ in which we know ourselves, architecture is involved in this becoming, a territory of engagement that I have elsewhere characterized as the ‘poetics of architecture’.

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[1] Merleau-Ponty, vii

[2] Merleau-Ponty, x

[3] Norberg-Schulz, 20

Electro-nomadic cyborgs

Reviewing the trajectory of contemporary technology, I think the trends are obvious: technology gets closer and closer to us, eventually crossing our epidermal boundary to become part of the body. Wires disappear. Eventually interfaces will even disappear. The distance between our will and the world erodes to the extent that we can control objects [be they cupboard doors or systems of communication] with our minds directly. We gain an increasingly telepathic connection with a vast network of similar minds and bodies of knowledge. The virtual and the real become indistinguishable. The distinction between bits and atoms dissolves. To use the term of William J. Mitchell of the MIT Medialab, we become electro-nomadic cyborgs.[1]

Mitchell, in such books as City of Bits [1995] and Me++ [2003], has been instrumental in popularizing the story of our progressive cyborg-becoming amongst architects. Our technology, he argues, has fundamentally changed certain things about us. As it changes, so do we. Which has always been true. So what’s the difference? As technology has become more and more available, and become more and more powerful, it has become more and more integrated with our selves. The increasing co-dependency is really making us into ‘cybernetic organisms’.

Mitchell’s primary contribution to the discussion has been to highlight the effects of wirelessness and networks on the new cyborg condition that Donna Haraway had foreseen. We are transformed by our new level of connectedness, through our cellular phones, our electronic organizers, our pagers, and our laptops. As Haraway had predicted, we have been translated into codal representations of ourselves for the purposes of interfacing with larger networks[2]. Biology has been working hard at breaking the code of our genetics as well as finding various other ways to categorize our individuality – such as fingerprints, retinal scans, etc. Radio frequency identification [RFID] as well as IP addresses allow us to consciously don a codal representation of ourselves for engagement in the networks that surround us. Because of the influence and pervasiveness of these networks the cyborg image sketched by Haraway is not quite complete. No image of us that ignores our vast expanded networks can be accurate. As Mitchell ruminates: “I am inscribed not by a single Vitruvian Circle, but within radiating electro-magnetic wavefronts … I am inseparable from my ever-expanding, ever changing networks, but they do not tie me down. Not only are these networks essential to my physical survival, they also constitute and structure my channels of perception and agency – my means of knowing and acting upon the world.”[3] In this new electronic era, our networks are becoming more immediate and constantly engaged with our cognition. Our image of ourselves must begin to include these networks.

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[1] Mitchell, ME++, p. 62

[2] Haraway, 163

[3] Mitchell, ME++, p58-61

architectural cyborgs?

The descriptive approach to defining humanity by both the ‘natural’ and ‘social’ sciences is highly reductive. This is of course not news. Reduction is a chief lever in the usefulness of these sciences after all. But every once and awhile it is useful to remind ourselves that we are more than our bodies and we are more than our minds. We exist not in isolation but in relation to things. We create ourselves as we act and as we react – as we play out our lives in the world.

Since architecture structures these actions and reactions, this intricate play of intersubjective life, it is not much of a stretch to agree with the architectural theorist Juhani Pallasmaa that we actually “exist through architecture.[1]” When we see a friend, framed by a hallway, we don’t just see them, we see them in relation to the architecture and we understand them in relation to the architecture. We have spent all of our lives in and around architecture – it is the shape of our world. As children we played in buildings; we daydreamed in buildings; we learned to walk and how to think and how to talk in buildings. Architecture from the very outset has been deeply etched in the very structure of our consciousness. “We cannot understand ourselves without it,” philosopher Mark Kingwell has written about architecture, “for it is where we eat and sleep and raise our children.[2]” Architecture, even in its most banal forms, is essential to how we understand ourselves, how we understand others, how we structure our image of the world.

As I’ve said before, we have a reciprocal relationship with our architecture. Architecture is a cultural element – like language, narrative, and technology – that is both formed by our ‘ways of living’ and simultaneously informs and structures the same. To quote Pallasmaa again: “architecture reflects, materializes, and eternalizes ideas and images of ideal life. Buildings and towns enable us to structure, understand, and remember the shapeless flow of reality, and, ultimately, to recognize and remember who we are.” [3] Our collective consciousness breathes through our buildings and our towns, spreading ideas and assumptions silently from one person to the next.

Since a person is never really an isolatable thing, then architecture, along with all of its implied meaning, is always a necessary part of our perpetual becoming. In a house, as Andrew Ballantyne puts it, we aren’t just a ‘person in a house’, but actually together we become ‘house-plus-person’[4], a sort of an architectural cyborg. We form a sort of assemblage with our architecture. Even living in the simplest of huts we are sort of architectural cyborgs.

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[1] Pallasmaa, AAES, 6

[2] Kingwell, p.223

[3] Pallasmaa, EOTS,p. 50

[4] Ballantyne, p.114

Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto

In 1985, Donna Haraway’s now famous essay ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, popularized the idea of the cyborg amongst intellectuals.[1] In her ironic ‘manifesto’, Haraway forged a ground-breaking argument in favour of our increasingly ‘cyborgian’ condition, an argument that continues to have a pervasive influence on the imaginations of writers about technology. What attracted Haraway to the image of the cyborg was its implied blurring of boundaries. A radical Marxist and feminist, Haraway pointed to the way that Western logos had a tendency to construct dichotomies that she saw as being “systemic to the logics and practices of domination.”[2] This includes such central and problematic dualities as self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/appearance and whole/part. All of these constructed dualities stand in the way of the free, truly egalitarian world that she wanted to believe possible. Emancipation, therefore, lay in the destruction of these dualities. Thus, the cyborg.

Haraway already perceived the blurring of the person / animal divide in the natural sciences, and hoped to see it blurred even further. Her dream - a “monstrous”, “blasphemous”, “ironic political myth” - was that the distinction between the emerging man-animal and the machine, which she saw as being increasingly leaky, would disintegrate entirely. In the resulting monster, the cyborg, she saw hope for us. In the image of the cyborg, the opposite of purity, an ironic merger of dualities devoid of the hope of resolution, Haraway saw “bases for new kinds of unity across race, gender, and class.”[3] According to Haraway, great riches are to be found in the erosion of traditional distinctions as it destabilizes the dominant narrative, making room for new networks of meaning.

image taken from here

Haraway’s image is thus far removed from images of cyborgs such as the ‘borg’ from the Star Trek franchise [who I always saw as being basically a metaphor for the dangers of communism]. No, far from this, Haraway’s figure actually stands for openness and flexibility, its radicalness a tool for escaping the hegemonies of the status quo which she saw, paranoically or not, as fundamentally oppressive.

Given this, who wouldn’t want to usher in the Cyborg Era?

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[1] Haraway, p. 181

[2] Haraway, p. 177

[3] Haraway, p. 173

Current Trends in Augmentation

The nature of the technology that we are currently living with (and I’m thinking here of everything from implanted cardiac defibrillators to Kindles to cell phones) is vastly different from the technology that has preceded it, even if it has seemed to follow from a natural progression. Technology seems inevitably to push forward, endlesslessly, as if in fulfillment of unwritten but accepted common desires.

The possibilities of combining your body with mechanical elements, for instance, are proliferating. Artificial organs and mechanisms for supporting your existing organs are being developed all over the world. While internal prosthetics like pacemakers have become increasingly mainstream, as have implanted cardiac defibrillators, at the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation in the US, for instance, they have developed an artificial pancreas which turns out to be far more reliable than a real one.[1] Meanwhile a company called ARGO Medical Technologies recently developed a lower-body exoskeleton that you can strap onto the outside of your legs and will help you to walk even if you’ve been confined to a wheelchair for the last 20 years of your life.[2] Robotic hands that are triggered by the tendons in your forearm[3], the aforementioned spring-blade feet[4], etc, etc, and the list goes on. In the name of science, countless researchers are devoting their lives to working on ways of augmenting the potential of the human body.

Photo taken from here

Researchers are also hard at work devising new ways for people to seamlessly interface with their machines. At NTT DoCoMo, for instance, researchers have developed a prototype device that monitors your eye movement in order to flip from track to track on a portable music device[5]. The same company is also working on cellular phones with biochips that will be able to detect “excitement, emotion, stress, or disease” from your skin and transmit this information to the person you are speaking with.[6] One of the more exciting areas of interface design which has picked up a lot of steam recently is a type of feedback mechanism dubbed ‘haptics’, which allows a machine to give tactile responses to the person using it, rather than the standard visual feedback. Imagine for instance an onscreen button that you can feel when you press it, or a dry, flat screen that simulates the feel of fur or wetness[7]. But, beyond haptics, the most interesting [and invasive] advances in interfaces between people and machines tap directly into our neural activity using EEG [electroencephalogram] signals. Take for instance the ‘mental typewriter’ developed by the Fraunhoffer Institute in Berlin that allows people to move a cursor around on a screen by only using their brainwaves[8]. Or, as another example, think of the baseball cap recently developed by researchers in Taiwan that uses EEG signals to detect drowsiness in drivers and then sends a Bluetooth signal to an onboard computer, a technology that the researchers claim could someday be used to control “household electronics devices”[9]!

picture of EEG ballcap from here

Now isn’t that a surreal idea. The North House research project here at the University of Waterloo, in collaboration with a team at Simon Fraser is working on software for your peripheral device with which to control the systems of your house. I guess the next obvious step would be to make it literally telepathic.

And it shouldn’t be too hard either, I presume. Current BMI (brain machine interface) systems using EEG can recognize focused stimuli from 20 different regions of your brain. As the IPod has taught us, it is actually quite easy to perform a pretty complicated set of operations using only seven types of input, and presumably if necessary it would be possible to run a well designed interface with less. Imagine: you stimulate one part of your brain to turn on the program, another two parts of your brain to scroll through the different functions that you would like to adjust (like moisture control, temperature, amount of light entering the house through southern glazing), another part to select the function, and then the previous two again to adjust the settings. Stimulating a fifth part of the brain would allow you to escape back to the main menu.

Science fiction? Yes. Impossible. No.

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[1] MIT Technology Review, August 8^th, 2008

[2] Israel 21c, July 21^st, 2008

[3] [www.projectaiko.com]

[4] [www.ossur.com]

[5] Dailymail, July 22^nd, 2008

[6] [www.nttdocomo.com]

[7] Nature 455, 8-9 [2008]

[8] New Scientist March 9^th, 2006

[9] Physorg.com May 16^th, 2008

Alone on the bus?

Sitting on the bus, commuting, I look around at my fellow travelers. Four out of the eleven of us have headphones on, plugged into some sort of personal electronic device that we carry on our persons. Three of the eleven are looking at their cellphones, or at some similar handheld device. Five of us are reading [either a book, a magazine or newspaper]. Where are these people? Can they really be said to be on the bus?

I know that their bodies are on the bus - I can see them - but does that define where someone is? We are more than just our bodies. While the body as such is indeed a thing amongst things, as Merleau-Ponty says, we “certainly do not exist in the way in which things exist.”[1] Our minds exist outside of objective time and space, as do our virtual selves and our virtual acts. A person writing a text message is able to make that message appear somewhere far away [it could be the other side of the city, or the country, or the world]. How can a human have such reach if what makes them ‘them’ is only confined to their physical location? A person checking the news on their Blackberry, or a person reading a newspaper is able to discover information about something which is happening or has happened a long distance away. If the person has a GPS device, they can observe their location from the perspective of a bird, a perspective very different from their natural one – a perspective of far greater range and scope. When a person listens to music on headphones, they are effectively blocking off one of their physical connections with the world in order to use it for something that they consider to be of higher priority - likewise with someone staring intently at their book. It seems that simultaneously as we expand ourselves outwards with regards to our ability to sense and to affect change, our ‘presence’ in the physical world around us shrinks.

Our perception of space and time, in which we are situated, are fundamentally altered by these phenomena. How will we learn to navigate these new parameters to our reality?

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[1] Merleau-Ponty, pg. xiii

As prosthetics become normalized, the cyborg olympics?

image taken from http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/tags/cheetah+blades/

On the 16^th of May, 2008, the Court for Arbitration of Sport, an international body overseeing fairness in athletics, effectively granted a runner with two mechanical feet the right to compete in the Olympics, should he qualify. In the past this has never been much of an issue, but it looks like it increasingly will be. At what point do the mechanisms designed to compensate for an athlete’s disadvantages start to actually give them an advantage over regular athletes? Up until now, no one with mechanical feet - in this case consisting of two bent, spring-like carbon-fibre blades – had ever been able to compete on par with regular track athletes. Suddenly it is no longer a disadvantage to depend on prosthetics; it’s possible that it might even be an advantage. In such an environment, sport has the potential to become less about the capacity of the physical body to perform tasks, as much as it is about engineering. Maybe it won’t happen at the regular Olympics - the committee is still pretty concerned about what they deem to be ‘unfair advantages’ - but maybe at the Paralympics soon: the winner will be the cyborg with the best parts[1].

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[1] New York Times, May 17^th, 2008