Claudia Westermann Figure 1: Photograph of video installation: Waiting, installation, Dallas, USA, 2005. CLAUDIA WESTERMANN LITRA :: Laboratory for Inhabitable Theories and Research in Architecture Myths of Complexity Abstract The following article takes up a dialogue that was initiated in the fi rst issue of Design Ecologies, evolving in relation to questions of design within a context of concepts of complexity. As the fi rst part of the article shows, this process of taking up a dialogue – through reading and writing – can be considered a question of design. This is elaborated alongside de Certeau's concepts of `tactics' and `strategies'. Further, in relation to questions emerging from the previous issue of the Design Ecologies journal, the article addresses the notion of complexity through the conceptual lens of poiēsis. It leads complexity to the borders of language. poiēsis, poetics, complexity, discourse As if s/he was a traveller, a person who reads moves though space, suggests Michel de Certeau (de Certeau, 1984: 174). The space that surrounds the reader is an Other. It is never fully accessible – if it is accessible at all. Non-Place calls de Certeau therefore that which confronts the inhabitants in their daily activities, and over which they have no control. These quotidian activities include reading, dwelling, cooking, shopping, as well as walking in the city and many others. The study Practices of Everyday Life is an homage to the unnoticed, which happens every day before our very eyes. We might assume that it corresponds to a fi lm, to which we refuse to pay attention because it has run already for too long, but it is not only a lack in attention that makes the everyday practices appear like the ground over which fi gures yet have to be articulated. Film and the practices of the everyday share the same fate to run mostly unnoticed, simply because pre-print version of the text 'Myths of Complexity,' written for and published in Design Ecologies, Volume 1 Issue 2, Intellect November 2011 // DOI: 10.1386/des.1.2.267_1 All text and images © Claudia Westermann. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed in whole or part without the express written permission of the author. Claudia Westermann Figure 2: Photograph and text fragment of video installation: Waiting, installation, Dallas, USA, 2005. "I am my own sacrifi ce, designed to be sacred", says the girl who is the product of scientifi c vision, and she continues: "I am the synthesis of holiness and pleasure. Innocence is immanent in me." Loneliness comes with the promise of effi ciency. Holiness is a pleasureless escape. "Waiting" depicts a female performer standing almost still in an obvious loop of 30 seconds duration, projected on a wall that displays the traces of its age. The performer's small movements appear in relationship to the structure of the wall, as if she wanted to synchronize herself with that world that knows the truly ephemeral – history – and with it, memory and dream. There is a place. The image is fl eeing. our capacities for conscious perception are limited (cf. Benjamin, 2010: 30-31). De Certeau's study attends to the practices, which appear from the bird's eye perspective as non-particular, and which can be reduced to pure dynamics from this point of view. It is not by accident that for the disciplines of urban planning and architectural design the bird's eye perspective is of great importance. It helps to ignore the particular. The practices of planning and design – according to de Certeau – emerge as strategies. They create what makes a unity and can be separated from an environment. They create what de Certeau calls place – 'that can be circumscribed as proper' (de Certeau, 1984: xix). In contrast to this, de Certeau considers the practices of everyday life as belonging to the realm of tactics. We can also compare these two different forms of creation to writing and reading. Writers are 'founders of their own place, heirs of the peasants of earlier ages now working on the soil of language, diggers of wells and builders of houses' (de Certeau, 1984: 174). Yet, reading is like 'poaching'. 'Poaching' is a form of creation whose principle is appropriation (de Certeau, 1984: 174). De Certeau's outline would be of little interest to this journal if strategies and tactics were, in fact, to be found in a bipolar relation. Yet, they are not subordinated to a dualistic principle. Rather, they can be understood as being 'contradictions', which are, however, closely connected to each other (Buchanan, 2000: 98). They might be described as in a state of constant tension and transition from one to the other. And in contemporary times, in which only few fi nd themselves as writers in the sense outlined above, i.e. possess the powers to make place, in which on the contrary most of us are confronted with the homogeneous powers of corporate places that appear to leave no powers to us at all, can we make the transition from reading to writing? And, is this writing then a form of creation that is different from the exertion of powers that de Certeau associates with the creation of places through processes of planning? De Certeau appears to confi rm the possibility for such a transition. However, his responses are given often only in the form of insinuations (Buchanan, 2000: 86). They tend to escape. They often appear as if they were the mirror images of the practices, which constitute the objects of his observation. Until the end of his life, de Certeau was engaged with the questions that relate to the processes of transition between reading and a form of writing, and between their analogies, such as walking the city and making places that exercise powers in a different manner – one could say, that give space. De Certeau, thus, was concerned with the creation of authorities and how they may be conceived and constructed (Buchanan, 2000: 86). Authorities are not inscriptions into the same old processes of production that can be theorised as machinic processes of suppression. As suggested above, one may conceive them as making places that give space, and are therefore intitiation, and not articulation and ever repetitive confi rmation of fi nitude. Figure 3: Photograph: Eastern Journey – Part I, China, 2004. Claudia Westermann Figure 4: Photograph: Eastern Journey – Part II, China, 2004. Figure 5: Photograph: Eastern Journey – Part III, China, 2004. Claudia Westermann To the ordinary man. To a common hero, an ubiquitous character, walking in countless thousands on the streets. [...] He is the murmuring voice of all societies. In all ages, he comes before texts. (de Certeau, 1984: v) Like a traveller I moved alongside the pages of the fi rst issue of Design Ecologies. I found within the texts notions that appear to correspond to the search by de Certeau that is described above. In the article of James Moore we fi nd an explicit analogy in which he expresses the desire to 'situate users as conscious compositors' (Moore, 2011). In other articles the analogies are not as explicit, however seem to allude to the same principle. Repeatedly, it is mentioned that there is a need to change the way questions of design are conceived – in relation to a concept of complexity (Murray, 2011). There seems to be a specifi c desire at the basis to acquire a kind of openness – an openness that is not achieved by the common discourses of architecture and design. In this context further on, terms such as post-logical, poetic and relativity are mentioned. All in all, the texts display a tendency to break out of the form of the common discourses of design theory in order to approximate the practice of design itself (Robbins, 2011) (Munro, 2011). We should not underestimate the consequences of this shift in thinking. As we know, theorising architecture has a long tradition with the oldest major treatise that has survived the turmoil of the centuries dating back to the fi rst century BC. The work is commonly known as The Ten Books of Architecture and was written by Vitruvius. We know also that writings on architecture had existed for a few centuries before, at least (Vitruvius, 1914: 11). Vitruvius mentions in his book the Commentaries by Pytheos, architect of the temple of Minerva at Priene, who lived in the 4th century BC – and in the introduction to Book VII the names of other architect writers (Vitruvius, 1914: 198-199). There was thus a long tradition, and consequently Vitruvius starts his treatise with the fi rst book on The Education of the Architect emphasising the importance of both theory and practice (Vitruvius, 1914: 5). For him, both scholarship and manual skills provide for the necessary basis to gain – as he says – authority. Vitruvius uses the term authority at the very beginning of his treatise, and gives an indication that acquiring authority might be the underlying aim of his writing. Yet, acquiring authority, in the Vitruvian sense, is essentially related to raising attention. This is understandable, if we consider that the survival of an architect is greatly contingent on this attention that ensures him a mandate to build. However, this also means that the theory of architecture is related to a form of writing that aims at the self-confi rmation of the author, praising his/her greatness. It is in this tradition that many texts that are considered theory of architecture are still written today. They constitute a legitimisation of the works built and to be built. They do not explicate what one could call perhaps thinking in design, and they are what one could possibly conceive as writing in architecture. The texts in the fi rst issue of the journal Design Ecologies seem to aim at processes that are born out of tactics. They are not to be conceived as strategic in the sense of Vitruvius' writings. In connection with the indications that have been given so far, I suggest to move a few more centuries further back in history. By means of the concept of poiēsis it may become clearer what could be meant when we speak of complexity. With view to the following passages, we should not forget, in any case, that reading is poaching. Thinking Poiēsis La Poésie ne s'impose pas elle s'expose. (Poetry does not impose itself, it exposes.) (Celan, 1983: 181) In the last decades, within the fi eld of architectural theory, we have seen a stronger interest in the ancient Greek texts. This interest did not emerge directly, but was initiated through projects that recognised the relevance of phenomenology, the philosophy of Heidegger, and hermeneutics for architectural theory. The works of Christian Norberg-Schulz were pioneering in this respect and have had a major impact especially also on the American theorists (Woessner, 2010: 249). Titles, such as 'Heidegger's Thinking on Architecture' and Genius Loci: towards a phenomenology of architecture by Christian Norberg-Schulz (Norberg-Schulz, 1983) (Norberg-Schulz, 1980), 'On Reading Heidegger', but also 'Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance' by Kenneth Frampton (Frampton, 1974) (Frampton, 1985), and also works by Alberto Pérez-Gómez (Pérez-Gómez, 1983), and Dalibor Vesely (Vesely, 2004), can be named as examples of a whole school of thought. Within the fi eld of architectural theory, two essays by Heidegger can be named as particularly infl uential in raising interest in a notion of the poetic. This is, on the one hand, the essay 'Poetically, Man Dwells' (Heidegger, 2003a), which cites a line of a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin in its title, and, on the other hand, the essay 'The Question Concerning Technology' (Heidegger, 2003b), which points out a passage in Plato's Symposium, to which I refer further below. As we know, Heidegger's philosophical project attends to the task of overcoming metaphysics, and with it the dualism of Western thought. Heidegger, as well as Nietzsche – who pursued in a very different manner principally a similar aim – saw in Plato and Socrates already the foundation of dualistic thought. Without going into details of Nietzsche's philosophy, it should be mentioned that Heidegger considered Nietzsche's project failed in this respect. Similar critique was later issued against Heidegger's philosophy as well (Günther, 1991: 69) (Derrida, 2004: 9-10). The interest that both Heidegger and Nietzsche took in the writings of the so called presocratic philosophers can be understood in this context. If it was possible to detect at the origin before the origin a different non-dualistic kind of thinking, this would mean a liberation. It could set the stage for an entirely new way of thinking. In the following passages, I do not attempt to return to the origins before the origin. Such a project cannot be discussed in this article. In referring to the writings of Plato and Aristotle, my aim is to emphasise a transition in Western thought that seems increasingly to lead to a fi xation, and respectively an affi rmation of already dominant understandings. The focus of the following passages is on a notion of the poetic as a principle of thinking in relations, and also on differences between Plato and Aristotle in the conception of poiēsis, as the texts can be read also as marking an early transition towards that which has become fi xed much later. It might be an illusion that a certain kind of distance – may it be spatial or in time – creates lucidity. However, the value of reading the ancient Greek texts lies in the encounter with concepts that allow for a new entry to our today's understandings – and this is not because they tell us about a historical truth that we can only speculate, but because they tell us about changes, transitions and differences. Questions posited by Plato and Aristotle concerned beauty, and related to it, the nature or essence of the arts and crafts. Essentially, for both philosophers beauty and truth were equivalent. The beautiful relates to the universal and eternal truth that forms the basis for the world that we live in (Plato, 1997a: 1358) (Aristotle, 1984b: 10). Yet, the approach of the two philosophers differs in some important and constituting points. While both philosophers saw the arts and crafts rooted in the concept of poiēsis, the relation between poiēsis and other ways of knowing was shifted. In the Symposium Plato describes the basic concept of poiēsis: You realise that the word 'poetry' (poiēsis) is a term of wide application. When something comes into existence which has not existed before, the whole cause of this is 'creation'. The products of every craft are creations and the craftsmen who make them are all creators. (Sheffi eld, 2008: 42) Thus, relating to poiēsis a poet is not necessarily someone who writes poems. With Plato and also with Aristotle the term refers to everyone who is engaged in creating. Although with Plato the artistic creation as cognition is not equal to the philosophical one, there is great value given to it as a way of knowing. It is therefore also that Plato considers art essential for the education of the people. However, artistic creation is not fully autonomous. Figure 6: Screenshot of video composition: btd x, 2000. The artist is always dependent on the muses. They take the function of intermediators between a world of 'shadow images' that is famously described in the Allegory of the Cave (Plato, 1997b: 409) and truth. Aristotle's world view – in contrast to Plato's – lies in a teleological understanding of the world that is based on a 'Philosophy of Practice', and not on a 'Mathematics of the Good' – on a 'Meta-Physics' in contrast to a 'Meta-Mathematics' (Gadamer, 1995: 238). In Aristotelean understanding we are not surrendered to 'shadow images'. It is principally possible to interpret the world. With this conception comes along a re-evaluation of the mimetic character in the arts as autonomous practice. Aristotle gives autonomy to poiēsis by linking it to technē as an art/skill that can be learnt and forgotten (Aristotle, 1984a: 90) (Gadamer, 1995: 7). At the same time however, there is a shift from art as cognition to art as primarily pleasurable. With the lack of the Platonic ideas outside our tangible world there is less of a necessity for art as cognition. In principle we can state that art is given value always in its cognitive function when at the same time the world is perceived as too complex for direct interpretation. While Plato considers the nature of art to be based in the spiritual, Aristotle emphasises the rationality of its basic principles (Aristotle, 1984a: 88). Still today in the realm of the theory of architecture we deal with understandings that often can be traced back to conceptions that have developed from Plato and/or Aristotle, and in the course of development sometimes radicalised. The basic difference between the systems of Plato and Aristotle is an offset that happens in the shift from the dialogic to the rational form of discourse (Gadamer, 1991: 378). With Plato the terms epistēmē (scientifi c insight) and technē (the art / skill of the craftsmen) are often exchangeable. Poiēsis is given the meaning of inspired. Yet, there is no clear hierarchy also because the meanings of the terms are very fl uid. Aristotle principally introduces clarity into the system. Three kinds of cognition are related to three virtues. The three kinds of cognition are: thēoria, poiēsis, and praxis. The related virtues, which we can understand as guiding principles, are: sophia (wisdom), technē (skill/art) and phronēsis (prudence). However, the three kinds of cognition are connected and cannot be separated. Every human being is understood through life as in praxis and therefore bound to phronēsis, which is the capacity to understand what is good. Phronēsis is an ethical principle (Aristotle, 1984a). Practical insight is put at the lowest rank of this order, above is 'the science of fabrication, episteme poietike, which immediately precedes and leads to theoria, the contemplation of truth' (Arendt, 1958: 301). The question of connections may be better understood if we consider an example that relates to contemporary languages. For example, in the English language there are two distinctly different terms for guest and host. In German the terms for guest and host are Gast and Gastgeber. The latter is a compound and can be literally translated as the one who gives to the guest. At last in French, there is only one term for both guest and host: hôte. With the dissolution of guest and host to only one term is also suggested an exchangeability. The one who is considered guest, may be Maybe it was the memory of the mirror, appearing as a fl uid image in one of the books that I once read, which led me to this forgotten place. The unity of one single person was depicted in the mirror as a symphony composed of present and past, and thus as well, of future personae; a symphony of life, which would never repeat itself and in which every chord would appear as a possibility for the myriad pluralities accruing from it – an almost impossible thought in this millennium, in which humanity is about to achieve its objective of tracking everything that is uncertain. Paradoxically, it was this unknown image of the plurality of refl ections that revealed the path to this place, which is not drawn on any map. I am one. I walk to be, always the last in my sequence. My memories are operators to my dreams. Figure 7: Fragment: Lecture manuscript, Prélude, 2005. considered host at another time, or host at the same time at another place – vice versa. Principally this does not mean that philosophically the relation between guest and host in English is different from the one in German or French. Yet, in contemporary times, the appearance of the terms as unrelated might foster an inclination towards the separation of the underlying concepts. For a better understanding of the complexity of the relations between guest and host Albert Camus' short story l'hôte may be considered. The narrative develops with a focus on questions of responsibility. The English translation of the novel is entitled The Guest (Camus, 1972). In Greek philosophy, there are strong connections between the conceptual elements that to us today appear as separate, most likely also because we fail to grasp the overarching concept. We tend to understand elements as unities, and not in their relations. Since thinking in relations was still present in Aristotelean thought introducing categories did not mean a categorisation as we understand it today. It is only during the course of the centuries, and with the rise of the scientifi c method that conceptual elements became understood primarily as unities, and separated. The transformation that occurred in the development from Platonic to Aristotelean thought consisted in a declaration of technē as a virtue of poiēsis, more generally in naming elements and in stabilising certain relations between them. Yet, the elements are not yet fi xed in all their relations, nor can they be considered unities. There is a notion of composition in the outline of Aristotelean thought. On the basis of a concept such as composition, we may also understand what it means when concepts cannot be separated from each other. In fact, in composition 'every element deforms its neighbour' (Stein, 1996: 74), and changing one element changes the meaning of the whole. The compositional approach is radically different from today's approach to scientifi c thinking. In the ancient science philosophies, poiēsis is directly related to other ways of knowing. Poetic Order The previous sections help us understand why the Greek term for site, place or space khora that is introduced by Plato in the Timaeus as a third kind – distinct from being and becoming – is problematic for us to conceive (Dmoir, 1993). It presupposes a thinking in relations that radically transcends a dualistic logic. In Plato we fi nd allusions to this knowledge also in the dialectic form of discourse, and in the myths he created. The philosopher Gotthard Günther therefore refers to Plato's dialectics as encompassing a 'reservatio mentalis' (Günther, 1991: 12). We look at it as in a dream when we say that everything that exists must of necessity be somewhere, in some place and occupying some space, and that that which doesn't exist somewhere, whether on earth or in heaven, doesn't Figure 8: Screenshot of video composition: btd x, 2000. exist at all. We prove unable to draw all these distinctions and others related to them – even in the case of that unsleeping, truly existing reality – because our dreaming state renders us incapable of waking up and stating the truth ... (Plato, 1997c: 1255) Khôra is the third kind (triton genos/third genus) that exceeds the logic of scientifi c discourse, and of which we know only in dream. The discourse of the philosophers that develops on the basis of a logic of non-contradiction is radically challenged in a notion that is named khôra (Derrida, 1993: 89). It gives place and takes place and is in constant transformation oscillating not between two poles but in a more complex confi guration that exceeds the binary mode of our thinking. Dream and memory refer to an innate knowledge that might be revealed but once revealed persists. As previously mentioned, the philosophy of Heidegger attempts to explore this knowledge that is Other to the binary thinking. It is for this reason that he compares in his essay 'Poetically, Man Dwells' the poetic with another way of measuring – a measuring against the unknown. That measure is the godhead against which man measures himself. (Heidegger, 2003a: 172) To which extent Heidegger attempted to transfer this knowledge to writing becomes clearer in the following passage from the Symposium that I have cited earlier in a different translation. We see in it how re-thinking may fi nd entry into philosophical language – a language that meets with us again also in architectural theory, in formulations such as drawing forth (Rendell, 2007: 6). Every occasion for whatever passes over and goes forward into presencing from that which is not presencing is poiēsis, is bringing-forth [Hervorbringen]. (Heidegger, 2003b: 284) We should, however, not forget that Heidegger's thought has never made the passage to poetic presence. If it was possible – for him – may be questioned. The following excerpt of a poem that Paul Celan wrote after a meeting with Heidegger marks perhaps an incapacity that does not solely allude to the impossibility of dialogue between a specifi c poet and a specifi c philosopher: Figure 9: Screenshot of video composition: btd x, 2000. ... the line inscribed in that book about a hope, today, of a thinking man's coming word in the heart, woodland sward, unlevelled, orchid and orchid, single ... (Celan, 1980) It is within the context of the above that we may re-think a concept of complexity as being in relation and radically transcending the dualistic mode of conceiving. For the theory of architecture this is particularly relevant when we assume that the way we speak might limit the way we practice. If discourse is constructive in this sense then we need, in fact, to re-conceive discourse and practice in a mutual dialogue to arrive at places that give space – that constitute an initiation. Within the gesture of the myth lies a beginning. The performative lecture that I presented at the launch symposium of Design Ecologies (Westermann, 2011) can be understood in the context of a range of works, some of which accompany this text. They encompass various forms of spatial practice including a recent study in search for a discourse of poetic (architectonic) order. References Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Aristotle (1984a). Nichomachean Ethics. In J. Barnes (Ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume 2. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Aristotle (1984b). Poetics. In J. Barnes (Ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume 2. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Benjamin, W. (2010). The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility [fi rst version]. Grey Room 39(Spring 2010, Special Issue: Walter Benjamin's Media Tactics: Optics, Perception, and the Work of Art), 11–37. Buchanan, I. (2000). 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Contributor Details Claudia Westermann is a licensed architect holding a postgraduate degree in Architecture from the University of Karlsruhe (Dipl. Ing.) and a second postgraduate degree in Media Fine Arts from the University of Art and Design (HfG) at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany. Her PhD thesis entitled An Experimental Research into Inhabitable Theories was supervised by Prof. Roy Ascott. Claudia Westermann's works have been exhibited internationally including at the Venice Biennale for Architecture, the Moscow International Film Festival, ISEA Symposium for the Electronic Arts in Japan, and the ZKM in Karlsruhe. Publications include 'The Architect's Circle, or The Geometrical Incline of Truth' in New Realities : Being Syncretic (Springer, 2008), and 'An Entry without Inscription, a Letter, and a Map' in Orientation _ Dis-/Orientation (Lars Müller, 2009). http://www.litra-design.com