2004-03-05 Manuel Delanda, Nature Space Society 1 http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/archive/naturespacesociety/delanda.htm * intro collab with dept of geography at open university [which reminds me, I've got some geography papers on my laptop I've not read yet] "constructivism has become the orthodoxy. in cultural theory, Nature, or whatever is on the _other side_ of Culture, tends to get left out of the picture" [nice terminology] culture theory is the main "theory" now This series is also an online event till Apr 2. it's also being weblog. [it'd be good if they distributed mp3s of these.] * delanda Materialist histories (eg Jared Diamond) look for interactions between culture & nature. William McNeil, Plagues & People (human history from the perspective of microbes) institutional history also shaped -- pushed by epidemics Measles needs 5000 people in constant contact. ie an urban environment Biological imperialism, Crosby. Showed colonialism wouldn't have worked (would've been like the Crusades) without: people + domesticated animals + "undeliberate" transport of weeks & animals. eg New York, non-local weeds have wiped out local weeds (local weeks not used to footsteps of cattle) "Altering the social ecology of the native americas. The horse is a war machine." Horses escaped Mexico & migrated into N America - became "neo wild" Disequilibrium even before caucasians were seen (this is a Crosby example) Topsoil & Civilization, civs bad a managing topsoil, tend to last 70 generations. Nondiscursive, nonlinguistic aspect of a space has always been part of his [delanda's] work. Battlefields as a social space, but a bullet rips your flesh or kills you regardless of the representation in your head. Morale on the battlefield: Semantics is much less important than passion. Foucault: types of practice discursive practices: argument, classification, categorisation, representation nondiscursive (brings the body in): tortue, monitoring, punishing, handcuffs Now we can look at representational behaviour acts on non-representational New science & nature: define nature: nomena, mind independent processes, phenomena, appearance to us humans. We should speak of natural process independent of our minds (nomena) - realism - to avoid being time-provincial (there have only been humans for max 7 million years] realism vs essentialism [I think the oddest thing is Delanda imitating a Spidergoat, baaing while shooting web from his wrists.] realist: that world is mind independent. historicise evolution, see that the zebra is contingent on the processes, where gene flow will go. But still contingent -- we can still make GMO. 3 ways of seeing the universe [of which I only captured 1]: 1. Kant. world of nomena may or may not exist. experience is conceptual. sensations have own logic. representations have another (they are social). they interact. this is empiricism: realist about stuff at a human scale: cats & columns. but not electrons. this is the position of science. positivism, ideology of physics. "Only objects that we can observe exist, everything else is a construct. Can't make a worldview out of it." Scientists cannot refer to things that cannot observe. So when they talk about "laws of nature" they take about the representation, the equations, and not the "imminent patterns of becoming," the reality, "what the laws capture." so they're not much better than social constructivists. atoms are produced in a star, *one by one*, in a "historical factory". Deleuze concentrates on the minor scientists, in touch with the material realities, & uses those as his source. "hylomorphic model" an idea about the genesis of form. commands form matter from the outside. alternative: matter is capable of self organising. craft discovers not laws, but imminent patterns of becoming. eg metallurgy understands quenching, annealing, etc. quote from ATP: "capacities to affect & be affected" not sanding against the grain is not a social construction. you can, but it'll look terrible. you're in a partnership with the microstructure of the wood. you don't want to be hylomorphic, like God, you don't want to treat material as insert. [the object/method does. object orientation, conduit metaphor, is *anti craft*] something that the designer does plus something that the material does. using soap film to find hyperbolic surfaces for roofs - high-tech computation, using soap film to follow its singularity. Deleuze's singularity: a remarkable, special point. A point for minimising energy (surface tension, bonding energy) Singularity inhabits matter & gives matter *tendencies*. no laws, matter is not inert. Euler invented this, we don't need laws. Laws can be expressed in terms of singularities, no god/legislator coming from outside. - Affects. Causality (capacities of materials). Traditional theory is what we observe. Constant conjunction: ball hits, ball moves. we never see a cause on its *own*. it's experience. we need a mind-independent, objective version of causality. world full of events; events that produce other events. problem with Hume is that cause/effect isn't generally proportionate or linear. eg response of rubber, or flesh. non linear. [so if you stretch a spring and suddenly it extends, what's the cause? the weight, or the context?] Replace laws with singularities and affects. We need to be in partnership with matter & energy instead of imposing our cognition on them like the hylomorphic model. * questions q. The constructivists would say Deleuze is inventing a new reality & not discovering it, which isn't very realist. a. Inventing this is okay for non-discovering practices. But if we label & classify with human beings, there's a feedback loop that changes the system (discurvive, discourse creates reality). We call "delinquency", people begin to see themselves as delinquents and feel this effect. That changes reality. [They react with the interface.] This feedback loop does not occur with nature. The Body Without Organs is inorganic life of pure intensities. The weather map of highs/lows, front, a number of creatures: hurricanes. This is as opposed to the static map of the each. BwO is plane of consistency is [other terms]. Delanda says we need to reduce Deleuze's work to concrete terms so we can understand things. [there's an ethical question here, says the chair.] [I wonder if the artist *expected* the play people have with the mirrors of The Weather Project, & isn't play example what they mean by craft, a non-inert material & people collaborating with material? (or really: what the relationship is between play & crat are as ways of discovering reality?)] [The artist is discussing with Delanda that people interact with the art *without* subjectifying it. They define the space by being here, and playing with it.] Artist: The Green River (Stockholm): to what extent are you able to affect the urban space, & to what extent can it affect you? [this is the spectacular city I read about. We *don't* have capacity to affect the city.] We pretend cities are static, for stability. In the paper they said the police said the Green River was "routine". But he was making it dynamic, the city as a mass of intersecting trajectories, as it *actually* is. So the Green River is hyper-real, to bring this dynamism really to the fore. A physical paradigm says that the knowledge of the object is coextensive with the function of it. A biological one doesn't. [One nugget from a long rambling question.] Delanda: Metallurgy has constructed reality to *domesticate* steel, to make it conform to the hylomorphic model. [ie the conduit metaphor] Replacing flexible skills with inflexible routines. This is military & factory. This isn't a linguistic process, but it's still social construction. We homogenise and standardise still, not change its meaning. book: Animal Perception. James Gibson. How animals perceive their material world. He came up with "affordances" [Tom S recommends]. A cliff affords a deer an obstacle, a risk of falling. [How does this tie into my ideas of the dog's smell-space, potential field?] Chair: We have a Delanda-of-the-19th-century thing going on here. [following a question asking where Deleuze goes further than Darwin, & one accusing him of having a Victorian-romantic view of science.] Evolution as a search algorithm of the fitness landscape. [don't like that, it subjectifies the landscape too much.] Parallels between current day Linux kernel prestige hackers and 19th century science as a collaborative enterprise, where no money changes hands. Feedback, complexity, *path dependence* -- all ignored if we pretend we work in a clockwork universe. q: Architecture dominated by thought: philosophy, history, social scientists, semiotics (that's now for the first one, and in 10yr chunks back). Geometry at some point too. Are architecture and urban things social phenomena or natural phenomena, or what? Intellectual fashion in architecture... but when it comes to building there's also gravity & lawsuits so you have to be an engineer too. Delanda tells his students to be half engineers otherwise they'll be glorified interior designers. Learn about nature & load bearing & all the rest. But if architecture is multidisciplinary, we don't know how to do that, because the Academy demands speciality. People are very protective of their domains. - "you don't paint from nature so you'll repeat yourself" - "I *am* nature" [Art, even spectacular art, is it more or less one-way than the city? Is it true play, like a dog that changes, or is it simulated play like a game that is reset at the end of each session? Cities aren't affected by us, but very slowly they are (in mass). But art can be played with (mirrors) but then it resets itself.] Geographer: there is no untouched, natural world. Spinoza - morality based on essences, good/evil, god/devil - ethics, environmental ethics, ethics of assemblages. Which become: more alive vs more degradate [wow. This is cyberethics. Information as bringing the object more alive.] The assemblage is soil + plant + ec => assemblage is your capacity to affect and be affected. This is being more alive. To be less alive, to lose your capacity to be affected, is unethical. q. Deleuzian romanticisation of the artisan artist. "Seeing ourselves sensing" -- perhaps this means the artist is *moving out* of the Deleuzian moment and bringing *representation* back into the centre of the art. [Interesting question] a. artist: Putting the art in an institution is a way of really pointing out that this is a representation. To evaluate the sensing as part of the sensing itself -- it isn't allowed usually. "The retinalisation of Oxford St", you could evaluate it when you get home, but not within the experience itself. - Delanda: difference: why do innut have 29 words for snow? linguistic realism: they have 29 works therefore they see 29 types. *or* are those 29 words synonyms for ways that bodily interact with the material? [which kind of reverses Sapir-Whorf.] q: orality, acoustic, non-rigid attempts to hold the cloud formations. We're moving away from visual culture, representation, retinal. Voice, smell, touch; the different ways of feeling. And she feels Delanda spoke to this shift very well. Delanda: goffman talks about conversations as dynamic things. embarrassment as an intensity. or social network theory as transmitting information through density. This is social sciences, middle level, which fits with his views. on ethics: Mixtures that are mutually nourishing (as opposed to mutually degrading assemblages). Phosphorous + soil. People are in couples that bring the best out of each other: the joy of daily life. This is ethical. So a factory that closes poisons a town. But a network of small businesses that produces talent and nourishes the town -- we can apply ethics there. artist: Interesting critique of Andy Goldworthy. Bringing out the inside of some oak patronises the viewer, & puts the artist in a position & the oak in a position -- and that's not a good view of nature. The senses & the commodification of our senses. Geographer: D&G are *biased* towards minor science, smooth space, de.t. -- a romanticisation of the margins. Assemblages/constellations/interconnections -- maybe ethics (political/social) arise from these.