Alan

 

Hi Alan

Didn’t you say it? You said we have have to separate the agent from the “entities that act on all the agents”. Not exactly in absence of the agent, but that agency may become part of the world of objects rather than subjects through the way systems and technology are built into the world. Bateson was concerned with where purpose or teleology came from and saw it as being the ‘observer in the system’ or the ‘subject in the system’ - the reflexive factor. I think this is quite close to ‘intentionality’ in phenomenology – but I know the philosophers don’t like this free movement between different systems of thought.

Stephen


On 8/12/06 11:48, "Alan Penn" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Stephen
 
are you suggesting ‘purposes’ exist (in some sense) in the absence of the agent? That would worry me.
 

Alan



Nice to have a good thread going - Alan, systems may be something other than what the agent acts on or what acts on the agent – they may already be action. Gregory Bateson’s argument with the other cyberneticians was about this point. A system according to Bateson was a choice, a selection with end or purpose added, made from a background cybernetic which had no end or purpose. If we add a little anthropology to this we can see how these purposeful systems might begin to be built out into the world so that the world starts to take on a teleological character. Heidegger and technology (McLuhan even) come to mind here. This is more or less what Latour and others are talking about when they talk of actor-networks.

Stephen


On 8/12/06 00:18, "Alan Penn" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
David,
 
Thanks – that seems clear. For me then the nature of ‘patterns’ such as the deformed grid might best be understood, to use a Heideggerian concept, as a kind of social ‘equipment’ – they work constitutively through the way they are lived by people, and through the way that produces the patterns of encounter and co-presence which become part of the experience of those people. We don’t need to think consciously about them or speak about them for them to work and they are exactly phenomenological in that sense. However, if we are to try to understand them then we are forced first to become conscious of them and next analytic about them – an essentially dualist status. In this we tend to separate the physical/spatial from the human/lived for the purposes of understanding. I think there is a good reason for this kind of analytic dualism when it comes to investigating the social world (as distinct to a philosophical dualism which seems to me generally problematic). One of the phenomena to be understood in the social world is the way in which it is emergent – it changes and evolves over time both to conserve structures and to generate new forms. Emergence seems to me to require feedback, and feedback requires different strata to feed between – eg. the agent and the spatial environment; the agent and institutions or laws, etc. This is not to say that what we are aiming to understand is any less the constitutive ‘lived whole’, it just that in order to understand it we must separate the agent from entities that act on all agents, or which are composed of groups of agents acting together – the embedding of the agent in other words.  This is particularly the case when we confront equipment which is broken – think for example of problematic social housing – in these cases it is not only scientists for whom the built world comes to the front of the mind, it happens for the everyday users who say things like “string up the architect”.  What tenants say about the problem estate seems to me the most compelling evidence for the reality of entities at a level above the agent.
 
This raises one of the problems of practice for architectural design. Architects must do two things simultaneously, or at least alternate between them iteratively. They must consciously – front of mind – propose new spatial and material forms, and then they must intuitively inhabit these as ‘lived worlds’ in their imagination in order to assess what they would be like and to see whether the physical/spatial proposition might result in the constitutive lived whole that they anticipate. This requires the good architect to be able to switch smoothly between front of mind conscious awareness and back of mind subconscious ‘inhabiting of an imagined world ‘as it might be’ ’. This must be related to Donald Schon’s ‘reflective practice’, but I am not really clear how – perhaps the physical bodily nature of working with graphic media helps the switching between front of mind and back of mind to happen? In any case this is a difficult trick to accomplish and training people in it is one of the reasons that architectural education takes the form it does and takes so long. It is also the reason why so many architects never manage it for anything much larger or more complex than a house. Faced with something larger they seem to revert to the (front of mind) normative ‘pattern’ approach and lose the intuitive back of mind critique of that as a lived whole. This seems to me to be where space syntax comes into its own in the design process. By helping bring aspects of the emergent lived whole in a graphic form to the front of mind activity it can help designers to be intuitive (back of mind) about larger and more complex systems. Since what syntax has done in research mode is to internalise the lived experience – say patterns of human co-presence – into the spatial analysis, then in design mode it can be used as a proxy (graphics that talk back to you) in the design conversation between the architect and the sketch, so making it easier to be intuitive about larger and more complex designs. It seems to me to be syntax’s graphic medium that allows it to be complementary to the primarily linguistic form of critical theory’s commentaries on lived worlds.
 
Anyway, that’s as far as I have got in thinking about these things at the moment.
 
Alan
 
 


Alan,
 
Our different trainings lead us to think differently, so let me start off by saying that I can only answer what I think you’re asking by responding in a way of phrasing that is mine—as a phenomenologist—rather than yours—as an analytical scientist (and if that’s an inaccurate description, I apologize; I don’t know you or your work well enough to say precisely but assume…)
 
 -  I can hear someone choking on their natas J

You say for you the relation between the lifeworld and spatial morphology is an “analytic thing.” I agree in the sense that space syntax provides an analytic means to reveal this relation, which had never been seen clearly before. However, existentially and phenomenologically, this relation is not analytic but lived, though “lived” in an embedded, tacit, practically-impossible-to-see-through-experience kind of way.
 
For me, one of the most striking phenomenological recognitions is the lived fact that much of the lifeworld—the everyday world of taken-for-grantedness—happens beneath and out of sight of our world of conscious experience. A primary phenomenological concept here is Merleau-Ponty’s body-subject—the unselfconscious. Largely habitual, awareness and intelligence of the lived body that allows for and sustains so much of our everyday actions and behaviors over time and over space.
 
In my earlier work (A GEOGRAPHY OF THE LIFEWORLD, 1979), I explored how extended time-space routines of individual body-subjects in a supportive physical space could lead to what I called place ballet—a space and environment becoming a place through a foundation of the bodily regularity of individual participants. At that time, I tried to lay out some of the ways that a supportive physical environment (and thus environmental design & policy) could help generate and sustain place ballets, but it was only when I learned about space syntax in the early 1990s that I began to realize the richness of conceptual and applied possibilities.
 
>From my perspective, what space syntax provides is a “revealing” of the sort of spatial-environmental structure that contributes to one kind of place ballet—e.g., “encounter places” in a building where users are drawn together bodily just in the course of their movements through the building, or lively street neighborhoods where regular users may come to know each other simply because of co-presence and, potentially, co-awareness and encounter.
 
Bill Hillier, in his 2005 Proceedings keynote paper, argues that space syntax concepts like natural movement and the deformed-grid structure are beyond the realm of phenomenological investigation, but I disagree. Clearly, a detailed phenomenological explication of the kind of place facilitating lots of co-presence and informal encounter (or the opposite) could be conducted. (As an aside, I so wish some of your space syntax students there would take on such a project so that the frequent opacity of space syntax findings could be grounded in graspable lifeworld and place portraits.)
 
But I also think that a detailed phenomenological explication of the lifeworld marked out by the  “integrated tissue” (and “segregated tissue”) of  deformed-grid structures (and their equivalent inside buildings) might eventually facilitate a sensitivity for seeing qualitatively the potential degree of life for a particular place, whether outside or in.
 
In other words, after a considerable amount of exposure to what space syntax structures are according to analytic analysis, I wonder if one wouldn’t become more and more sensitive and eventually be able to “intuit” the living spatial structure in a qualitative way? Certainly, there should be all sorts of lived-world indicators that one could become sensitive to.
 
But getting back to your question, I don’t believe that the deformed-grid structure (maybe we need a better term for this lived-spatial-structure-pattern-dynamism?) is analytic in the sense that it is a pattern/structure/concept invented by human minds. No, I believe this structure is one central aspect of being-in-the-world—i.e., of being human beings who always and already are emplaced.
 
Emplacement is a remarkable gift of being human and, as we all know, we have made a mess of our current emplacement if we agree that one of its integral aspects is belonging to the world in which we find ourselves. The deformed-grid structure appears to be such an important means for facilitating belong.
 
Space syntax’s most extraordinary contribution is pointing conceptually and practically toward ways to restart, revitalize, and extend human emplacement through the recognition that how we move is very much who we are. In other words, how do we shape the physical world in such a way that our routine bodily actions will sustain and be sustained by a larger place whole of which we feel a part (rather than apart)?
 
This perspective is hard to express because we are stuck with a dualistic language and style of thinking that always wants to break what is one—i.e., human-immersion-in-world, being-in-world, emplacement—into some two—whether person/world, people/space, individual/group etc. Unfortunately, so-called “analytic thinking” holds on to the division (and this is another remarkable aspect of space syntax—that out of an analytic perspective and method, the oneness of person-in-world still remains! Amazing!).
 
Phenomenological thinking seeks to find legitimate expressions for holding on to and understanding the oneness, intimacy, immersion, commingling of people/world. This is why I keep emphasizing that the other half of space syntax work that must be generated sooner or later is its phenomenology.

 
Dr. David Seamon

Architecture Department, Kansas State University

211 Seaton Hall

Manhattan, KS 66506-2901

785-532-1121

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