from symbiosis towards symb(i/o)sis

from symbiosis towards symb(i/o)sis... a need to become machinic in order to re-engineer the systemic regime of world's metabolic processes. 

"Long Live the Multiple!"

"In truth, it is not enough to say, "Long live the multiple", difficult as it is to raise that cry. No typographical, lexical, or even syntactical cleverness is enough to make it heard. The multiple must be made, nit by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest if ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available - always n-1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted). Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted: write at n-1 dimensions. A system of this kind could be called a rhizome. A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes." Deleuze and Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus p.6

the voracious appetite of Kronos

"Kronos was eating away all that was archaic and irrational in his own progeny, sparing only those predestined for a radiant future. Suddenly, he lost his voracious appetite. Now he needs to ask himself if he is able to cohabit with his own sons who unlike their father they need to learn to live with him. They can get rid of nothing and of no one."


Rephrasing, paraphrasing, metaphrasing Latour, following his Greek Mythological adventure.

Painting by Peter Paul Rubens of Kronos devouring one of his children, Poseidon
image source: wikipedia

lost-in-space workshop

A one and a half day interdisciplinary workshop, to be held on 2nd and 3rd December 2010,

in which participants will debate and cross-fertilise ideas and notions of space. The purpose is to provide a platform from which typically disparate disciplines considering spatial issues may ‘find’ one another in order to discuss, debate and develop ideas on space.

The event is aimed towards research and PhD students studying in the UK, focusing on how they think about space, how space influences their work and on what properties of space they draw to shape their work.

It is organised by a PhD student group spanning departments in UCL from the Bartlett School of Architecture, the Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience and the University of East London.

Participants will be PhD candidates from across the UK and a panel of invited guests.

for more details please visit:

http://www.lostinspaceworkshop.co.uk/

Cyb-org-s

"...you need a cybernetic feedback system to maintain homeostasis unconsciously. These systems need to become a part of the organism. A cybernetic organism. A Cyborg.

The key notion here is non-hereditary adaptation. Technological interventions that change the course of biological existence."

extract:: What's a Cyborg | Quiet Babylon

"For the exogenously extended organizational complex functioning as an integrated homeostatic system unconsciously, we propose the term “cyborg”".

This is where it starts "Cyborg and Space"

symb(i/o)sis

In 1980, at their symbiotic volume called A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia Deleuze and Guattari argued that "transversal communications between different lines scramble the genealogical trees. Always look for the molecular, or even sub-molecular , particle with which we are allied. We evolve and die more from our polymorphous and rhizomatic flus than from hereditary diseases, or diseases that have their own line of descent. The rhizome is an anti-genealogy". An argument based on the science by a minor - minor as opposed to Royal in a Deleuzoguattarian sense- scientist called Lynn Marguilis. It is in 2010 that this polyphonic, melodic and democratic approach to evolution attempts to re-emerge by avoiding the reductionism of Gene Centric approaches like Evo-Devo. Seedmagazine has an excellent article on the latest scientific developments on the science of meta-genomics, that places the notion of symbiosis, not at the center, but on a flat plane to able express, still partially though, the complexity of life.

"Symbiosis goes a step further by showing us how species are linked by more than history; they are living together in a continuous. interconnected now."

David Relman says "we put a lot of weight on a life form's ability to think independently" but microbes have achieved fantastic evolutionary success by operating on a very different principle. Microbial communities are filled with examples of self-sacrifice for the benefit of the larger colony. They form physically close communities in which some cells exist solely to provide structural support or protection for others. "This Intertwining of fate" is maybe a lesson of how human could potentially start to think and work with the dynamics of their own societies. The century of the self might be coming to a critical point of transformation where a new century might arise. The century of the assemblages, the multitudes the collectives. It is about time to focus on cooperative and collaborative practices, practices of the common. It is about time to abolish the identity thinking of success and wealth.

rap off!

"I like DeLanda’s basic argument: which is to insist on the exteriority of relations. Traditionally, positivist, atomistic thought has pretty much denied the importance of relations between entities: the entities themselves are the absolutes, and all relations between them are merely accidental. Thus neoclassical economics adopts a “methodological individualism” according to which “all that matters are rational decisions made by individual persons in isolation from one another” . On the other hand, what DeLanda calls the “organismic metaphor” asserts that entities are entirely defined by the totality to which they belong, entirely constituted by their relations: “the basic concept in this theory is what we may call relations of interiority: the component parts are constituted by the very relations they have to other parts in the whole”. Hegelian thought is the most powerful example of this tendency, thought Saussurean linguistics and the “structuralism” influenced by it could also be mentioned."

extracted from Shaviro's Post on: DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society

I would like to focus on two rather interesting points of this short quote:

the relations of exteriority and methodological individualism

The concept of relations of exteriority is what gives to an assemblage its machinic character. Those relations are coming to repose Autopoiesis as a machinic autopoiesis that is open both organizational and informational.

At the same time this short quote raises another issue that has to do with "methodological individualism" and Hayek's opposition on collectivism. Delanda's attempt to move obliquely from Hayek's individualism and Keynes' collectivism with a very insightful way will be extended to a project that he will call A New Philosophy of Society. it is not annoying for my understanding the use of the world new, since the last 50 years we tend to believe that nothing new and novel can be produced.

thinking the impossible

Chrysanthi Nigianni from UEL poses a crucial question - on the premise that our society conceives actions like experimentation and risk as signs of stupidity, idiocy and irrationality and additionally it is built on the premises of "reality principle" that distinguishes, through rigid boundary articulations, the life and death, the real and the illusion, the organic and inorganic and that declares 'safety' and 'stability' as the highest social and moral ideals. - "Is our society willing to encourage the experimental, irrational, risky and dangerous thinking?"

Are we ready to abolish this pathogenic fear for the new and the unprecedented?

Are we ready to confront "a life" or a life that is not stable with the illusion of safety?

Are we ready to think the impossible and occupy the unforeseen?

Did we learn anything from the economic crisis from an economy that was built on such presuppositions?

These are the questions that architects have to answer.

These unexplored domains of the social organization of the post-Fordist society need to be rethought in order to renovate our understanding of heterogeneous spatial constructs.

And from my point of view stochastic computational models like swarms and neural nets can unleash this required creativity... are we prepared to risk?

building as a thing

the dinstinction between "object and thing" was at the core of the lecture hosted at the Sociology deperatment of Goldsmith's college where a diverse audience of architects, designers and Social Scientists where gathered to follow an ANT methodological approach to Rem Koolhaas' design process. I didn't get exactly the arguments cause all of them where so obvious... I suppose for the social scientists and the ethnographers to understand the process of an architectural project was some kind of revealing... Yes, I will agree with the distinction between the object and the thing, between a symbolic understanding of a build project and its understanding as a multiplicity but however as an Architect I would expect to see such a distinction in the way occupants inhabit spaces. I had my conclusions and I have to admit this kind of "synergies" between different fileds could only be constructive.

oh! and it is something else... the really annoying fascination of Architects with the trendiness... they feel guilty if they use words that somehow have been used before and mark a theoretical exploration in architectural design... and this is happening due to the fact that architects approach theory in a fragmented fashion and not as a continuous transformation of concepts and ideas...

create a new domain

“The goal-orientated approach that the management books advocate is to find a need and fill it. We don’t get many new ideas out of that because if you ask most people what they want, they want just what they have now, 10 percent faster, 10 percent cheaper, with 10 percent more features. It’s kind of a boring way to predict the future. But if we look at the big hitters in the 20th century, like the Xerox machine, like the personal computer, like the pocket calculator, all of these things did something else. They weren’t contaminations of existing things. They weren’t finding a need and filling it. They created a need that only they could fill.”

Alan Kay in Predicting The Future, Stanford Engineering, Vol. 1, No. 1, Autumn 1989

Beyond Autopoiesis II

"the key innovation effected by autopoiesis is to grant to living systems a dynamical capacity for change through self-maintenance, which means, at least in part, that such systems must function as open systems (only relatively). the functioning of the autopoietic organism or machine is not reducible to its particular genetic structure or composition. In other words, what are inportant are not the component of the system but the dynamic relations between them. Autopoietic entities engender and specify their own organization and limits/boundaries, functioning as unitary, individuated, and closed to relations input and out put. Such entities are understood as being 'organizationaly closed', which does not mean that they do not interact with an environment but rather that such interaction is always informed and determined by the organization of the particula autopoietic entity. An autopoietic organism evolves by engaging in an endless turnover of components under conditions of continuous petrubations and compesation of these petrubations. Any inference with their operation outside their domain of compensations will result in disintegration ( see Maturana and Varela in Autopoiesis and Cognition: the Realization of the Living, 1980).

We see here that the theory of autopoiesis equates change that does not conform to the internal and self-directed organization of the entity in question with destruction, dissolution, and abolition.

For a machinic thinking autopoiesis fails to appreciate the extent to which all living systems and their boundaries are caught up in machinic assemblages that involve modes of transversal becoming."

Germinal life: the difference and repetition of Deleuze

By Keith Ansell-Pearson

territory and deterritorialization

we shouldn't think in an abstract and strong opposition between the 'territiory' and deterritorialization'. It is clear that for Deleuze and Guattari any given territory, enclosure of things or closed systems enjoy vectors of deterritorialization which in fact they constitute a territory.

so inhabitants are protectors of the territory and vectors of deterritorialization of the system in-formation.

>/."in ATP detteritorialization is said to become 'absolute' when it enhances 'lines of flights' to the power of germinal or vital line of life and draws a plane of consistency (the non dialectical synthesis of heterogeneous and disparate elements)."

>/."it is a world of intensities where 'all forms come undone' "

>/."the absolute doesn't denote a quantity but a certain mode of movement that is held to be neither transcendent nor undifferentiated."

in Germinal Life by Keith Ansell Pearson

Co-existence

it's been couple of days now that I wanted to write few things about the installation at the Welcome Trust here in london entitled "CO-EXISTENCE" which has been designed by Julia Lohman.

The installation rediscovers the boundarys of the human body.

"Only one in ten of our cells is human - the rest are microbes. The human body can therefore be considered as an ecosystem that supports and is supported by millions of 'other' living things" .

that brings again into the forefront that whole discussion about the constituion of the organism, the subject, the self. it reveals a rhizomatic understanding that moves the autopoietic theory towards machinic heterogenesis and the theory of assemblage.

anyway it is worth passing by the Wellcome Trust center at Euston road to see the installation and to realise that you are everywhere not only informationaly but also structuraly... you form a rhizome within a braoder ecosystem.

this whole discussion resonates with my research about the symbiosis of a meshwork of systems in the build environment... you will argue that this is not so novel however I will state the opposite... more soon hopefully!

since then, few things on the installation here

"the important thing is to understand life, each living individuality, not as a form, or a development of form, but as a complex relation between different velocities, between deceleration and acceleration of particles"

Deleuze, G.(1988) Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley. City lights Books, San Francisco, p.123

here is another article from wired

Beyond Autopoiesis

updated 03/08/2009

"In Deleuze and Guattari's model there is no center which is formally contolling the behaviour: that is, there is not a top-down subject or agent of evolution (whethere a CNS or a homunculus), but only a distributed intelligence that encompasses brains, bodies , molecules and worlds, all of which exist in terms of overlapping territories. It is on this point that they can be seen to depart from the figuration of autocatalysis in the theory of autopoiesis or self-organization."

Keith Ansell Pearson Germinal Life p.176

while autopoiesis has done some imprtant theoretical work, it is unsuitable for modeling 'real systems' because its emphasis on closed, stable systems provides an adequate understanding of virtual change, in which an autogenetic cycle components can get closed out, new components can enter, certain components can mutate, and so on"

Csnyi, V.(1996) Organization, Function and Creativity in bilogical and Social Systems. In Evolution, Order and Complexity, London and New York, Routledge, 146-81,