45/ Sensibility is Ground Zero

Dear Andrej,

I hope everything went well in your remaining days in Venice. I had a lot of fun for my part, and enjoyed the presentations. I am now writing a short piece on the workshop and had a some questions.

1. What is speculative pragmatism, and how does your workshop invigorate it? 

2. What do you mean with cartography being able to explore extrinsic capacities? 

3. What did you hope to achieve with the workshop, and do you you feel it has been achieved? 

I hope to speak to you soon at the faculty anyway!

Ivan

Dear Ivan, Thank you for this opportunity. Please find my first response below:

1. Speculative pragmatism is a near synonym to radical empiricism. It works on the premise that there is more to experience than can be communicated, that the intelligible is an occlusion of the sensible and not the other way around. Our take on the overarching (and overcoding) theme of the Biennale is to propose that the common ground, if any, is sensibility. Hence, “sensibility is ground zero”. However, if classical (naïve) empiricism is limited to the actual, as the realm of metric properties, then the superior or radical empiricism is transcendental, yet not transcendent, in its going beyond the given. It also points to the inseparability of action and perception, hence pragmatism.

The workshop was meant to exploit the porosity of the boundary between the actual and the virtual, where the virtual is as real, even if it is incorporeal. The distinction allows us to mark the excess of potentiality hidden within any assemblage over any of its actualised features or local manifestations. The rule of thumb was “ask not what is inside your head, rather what your head is inside of.” In this sense we try to overcome the fallacy of misplaced concreteness or the error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete. As far as we are concerned, Chipperfield ’s conception of the “common ground” may or may not work only in retrospect. Not that it is too abstract, rather that it may not be abstract enough.

2. By contrast to the practice of tracing merely “what happens”, cartography or mapping is attuned to the higher order of invariance, namely, “what is going on in what happens.“ It is a theory of singularity and as such demands experiencing/experimenting scrutiny best exemplified in the Spinozian line “we do not know what a body can do.” Our not knowing is not down to a lack of sophistication, technical or otherwise. To presume that we will eventually have a priori knowledge is to commit a category error. Such dogmatism has returned with a vengeance in the parametricist wet dream of conflating the virtual with the actual.

For us, there is no representation, only action – theoretical and practical. Cognition is always embodied, embedded, extended, enacted and affective, that is, non-generic.

3. What the workshop tried to vehemently oppose are common reductionist tendencies and fatalist overtones exhibited in the contemporary architectural discourse. The ten radically different presentations demonstrated – to our delight – that the stable regularities we see in actuality do not have specific causes that can be demarcated and isolated. Rather, they can only be understood as a dynamic cascade of many processes operating over time. In their cartography the students successfully navigated between the Scylla of totalisation and Charybdis of essentialism.

What we really hope to have achieved belongs to the ethico-political register and can be boiled down to the following lesson: “Everything is contingently obligatory and not logically necessary.” It is this non-anthropocentric and thus posthuman attitude that makes the current affective turn timely and the logic of transdisciplinarity indispensable. In order to unlock the emancipatory potential one needs to circumvent the messianic promises of utopias and discursive claims to rights. The designer simply starts by understanding that it could have been otherwise. This is what makes them a designer in the first place, and we mean it in the most literal sense. It is not a matter of plan (to be executed) but rather of the plane (of immanence). The metadesign (design of design) that we are trying to propagate is thus problem-oriented and not solution-fixated.

The undeniable success of the workshop is unfortunately overshadowed by the faculty’s decision to discontinue the services of our media guru Marc Boumeester. Virtue indeed seems to be its own punishment.

Andrej, with best wishes