Shift Happens: A Prologue to Gestaltungsgesellschaften

Robert Alexander Gorny Dipl.-Ing. Architecture & Design, MSc (hons.)

The Berlage, Delft University of Technology mail@relationalthought.com

Keywords: Ecology, Design, Planning, Modernity, Subjectivity, Societies of Control Until now, architecture has always been concerned with stability, or it has always been employed to produce stable things. But that is over. At least, instability presents a problem on a much larger scale, a fact which forces us to question static constructs. Walking a theoretical tightrope linking a number of ecological, philosophical and architectural considerations, this essay takes up a synthetic perspective of the built environment. Introducing and conceptualizing the German notion of Gestaltungs-gesellschaften allows us to reopen discussions about our agency in our transforming environments, and to push beyond the defensive attitude and scary morality with which our societies of control have burdened “ecological thinking”. From Societies of Control to Gestaltungsgesellschaften Twenty-five years ago, Deleuze clarified in his “Postscript on the Societies of Control” how we no longer lived in the modern disciplinary societies that Foucault’s work had described. Instead, he argued, we had generated new societies, ones he calls societies of control. No longer needing to contain movement but shaped by the live-monitoring of open flows, societies of control are characterized by “a generalized crisis in relation to environments of enclosure”.1 The virtual dissolution of the private sphere, the live-monitoring of free movement, the employment of passwords to access information, the accumulation of credit and debt, etc, gave “control” its increasingly negative connotation. Deleuze’s bias against these negative corrective forms of control and, more importantly, the one-sided reception of it are remarkable considering the philosopher’s life-long endeavour to critique repressive powers by differentiating them from and deriving fresh potential from new arrangements. This negativity, however, has characterized much of our recent past, perhaps most blatantly in the context of environmental change and the call to protect some “state of nature” that no longer exists. But the problem is there is nothing to fix, no perfect state to which we can return. “Nature” is an idea that belongs to the past! The concept of the Anthropocene era2 theorizes the notion that since the industrial revolution human action became a geological force, terraforming our environment on planetary and aeonic scales. In other words, it suggests that humans are purposefully redesigning the entire globe. It was in this context that I first encountered the idea of Gestaltungsgesellschaften. The word popped up3 as a counter-model to the prevalent perception of our socio-political environment as what Ulrich Beck has called that of a “risk society”.4

The compound German word is difficult to translate. First, and perhaps surprisingly for a German concept, the term has an incredibly positive connotation and promises many wonderful possibilities. Gesellschaft is the German term for “society”, and gestalt has become a technical term in psychology and aesthetics related to the perception of form. But more than the perception of form, Gestaltung nominalizes the creative activity of designing, arranging or shaping. The concept invokes a sort of “design agency” – some design firms use it to describe themselves – but Gestaltung is not necessarily the same thing as “design”.5 The English usage of the word “design” conflates an immanent search for an ensemble (gestalten, as in mise-en-forme) and a more hylomorphic imposition of form (entwerfen, as in drafting or projection), whereby the latter is more related to the modern idea of planning, as I will discuss later. The idea of Gestaltung might offer a means of breaking away from the negative attitude and superstructural ideas of control and its repressive function in order to embrace its transitive potential. The message here is simple: “shift happens” regardless; all we (as a society) can do is try to deal with it creatively! Gestaltungsgesellschaften might thus be understood as the German version of “Yes we can!” This call for self-transformation results from the empowerment that new personal rights and freedoms, the myriad of new ways in which to transform the body, and prognostic and prosthetic technologies have provided for one’s own becoming. In this context, Gestaltungsgesell-schaften name collective agencies and their creative potential to open unitary environ-ments up to a multiplicity of possible trajectories we might explore. Seeing control not only as a system of defense, Gestaltungsgesellschaften transgress control societies and their corrective organization through their ability to instrumentalize control in order to do things differently. The Design of Actual Reality At a time when design represents a major component of contemporary cultural produc-tion, is it not strange that architecture – dedicated to the production and signification of our built environment – has come to seem outmoded, or at least edged out by other forms of practice? The postmodern organization of work and the virtualization of the social sphere have rendered production immaterial. Recent considerations about the actuality of our physical environment6 have triggered a strange resurfacing of early modernist questions that scholars like Christa Kamleithner have recently outlined. The title of her essay “Was Architektur Macht”7 is a triple entendre melding the questions “what does it do?” and “who makes it?” with an implication of formal powers. The uppercase M in “Macht” turns the German verb “it does” into the noun “power” – a material difference that effectively brings the debate on architectural form more on an “agential” level. Her discussion returns to Adolf Behne, the avant-garde critic of 1920s Weimar Germany, and his call for a shift in the self-conception of architects. No longer con-cerned with the form of spatial containers, he mandated that modernist architecture be “gestaltete Wirklichkeit” (the design of actual reality). Being influenced by Jacob von Uexküll’s biosemiotic concept of Umwelt, the perceptual environment-world in which organisms exist and act as subjects, Behne promoted conceiving of architecture as a whole (“als Ganzes”) and from the perspective of society: “Form is nothing else, then the consequence of putting into relation people and people. There exists no problem of form for the unit (das Einzelne), unique in nature. The problem of form arises, where an ensemble (Zusammen) is required. Form becomes the condition under which an ensemble is possible. Form is an eminently social affair.”8 Voicing nothing more than the need to find a new formal language (not a style) in the international world taking shape in the early 20th century, Behne called for a transversal (“functional”) expression of the built environment. What this should remind us of today is this: the post-Foucauldian project to understand the impact of the configuration of the built environment on the production of subjectivity

must not forget the ecological foundations from which it is derived.9 I would now like to bring these two things together again, for I believe that this is what will allow us to push past the paralyzing form/power impasse. Ecology The term ecology was coined by the German thinker Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) to mean “the whole science of the relations of the organism to the environment including, in a broad sense, all the ‘conditions of existence’”.10 The young field of ecology provided the language and concepts that would allow Western rationality to rethink the notion of nature and to reexamine its entanglement with culture in terms of how it arranges the conditions for specific forms of life, which in return shape their environment. After Uexküll’s biosemiotic Umwelt, Bateson proposed Steps to an Ecology of Mind propelled by Guattari’s inclusion of social relations and subjectivity in his Three Ecologies. In archi-tecture, Doxiadis developed his ekistics as the global study of human settlements, and Banham proposed an ecological definition of Los Angeles as an assemblage of social realities. In disentangling matter from the notion of nature, Morton recently provoked us to imagine Ecology without Nature. But even a century after Haeckel initially declared that “nothing is constant but change”,11 ecologists still need to contest the tenacious remnant of the idea of nature and its unalterable permanence. Opposed to nature, ecology has nothing to do with stability – and especially not with “balance”. Sustainability, understood as an esoteric search for balance, is an idiot’s rhetoric. The rate of disturbances that is evident in eco-systems makes stable states unattainable. In the end, their dynamic adjustment must be understood in terms of non-equilibrium. Ecosystemic thinking theorizes transient dynamics of material assemblages. For example, walking is a state in which a body repeatedly oscillates between a metastable state and being fully thrown out of balance. To take a step requires a series of adjustments to generate a non-destructive state in motion. It is no metaphor to say that everything that “goes on” possesses the same metastable dynamics between the resolution of tensions, temporary misbalances, impact of external forces and internal drives as walking does. Even when seemingly “standing still”, stasis needs to be actively held. Ecologies of Modernity In the light of such reflections, the following discussion will postulate an ecosystemic understanding of the built environment. In doing so, it is useful to consult sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s elaboration of how the architecture of modern institutions developed as a powerful homeostatic mechanism for compensating for disturbing influences in the reproduction of social reality.12 The pre-modern self-reproduction of the city13 was challenged by new political and architectural species and new behaviours and patterns of interaction – what came to be called modern life. Foucault – although he remains focused on abstractions such as power, knowledge and subjectivity – describes how these new dispositifs actualized new biotopes (institutions like schools, hospitals, etc.) and habitats (the city, bourgeois apartments, workers’ settlements). My question is, would it be so difficult to understand modernity and its spaces as a consolidating ecosystem? Here Sven-Olof Wallenstein’s mediological theory of “biopolitics and the emergence of modern architecture” in the eponymous book is of the utmost importance. For Wallen-stein, architecture’s becoming-modern is directly related to its realization of a new potential: “Architecture . . . started to withdraw from the . . . representation of order, so as to itself become a tool for the ordering, regimentation and administering of space in its totality.”14 However, this initially power-driven instrumentalization (pouvoir) has developed into one of potential empowerment (puissance). From Ledoux to Howard,

from Fourier to Le Corbusier and from Haussmann to Hilberseimer, a new potential of the built environment was explored as a means for designing new social realities. As something more than a mediological question of ordering, we must extend Behne’s programme of “gestaltete Wirklichkeit” and develop it into an ecosystemic theory of the built environ-ment! Architecture’s becoming ecological will depend on us understanding that change does not happen “in” an environment. In line with claims of many new materialists, including DeLanda, Massumi, Bennett and Barad, ecological thinking means no longer segregating entities coexisting “in” a given environment “from” that environment. Instead, we ought to theorize the concept of morphogenesis and study the phenomena that emerge from the material configuration of environment. The modern landscape, its industrial and urban forms of life and its capitalist household represent an ecosystem of growth, especially that of the city, whose economy develops together with population increases and densified human activity – more inter-action and exchange, the growth of knowledge, the accumulation of goods and the extraction of surplus value. At its most abstract, Western modernity arranged a milieu of autonomous units – objects, classes, nations and other discrete entities, including the self-conception of the individual – according to the Cartesian project to understand the nature of our existence bit by bit, and so as to manage and stabilize the technological, demographic and environ-mental transformations that this knowledge caused. The subjectivity – the self-relation of individuals – in this period of constant growth attempted to stabilize the latent instabilities and alienation caused by these transformations. A compensating search for larger unities becomes evident from the Romantic quest for aesthetic experience to the ideal city models proposed by utopian socialism. To be sure, this characterization is highly reductive, but my aim here is to redraw some relations within the broader picture. In opposition to the modernist tendency to think in terms of bits and pieces, we must dare to problematize the whole and to consider how to arrange differing interests therein in spatial sense. And if the notion of “arrange-ment” remains problematic here – for it still evokes the idea of separable parts – it is notions of ecology and Gestaltung that pose the problem when it comes to the develop-ment of a new holism. For what comports gestalt if not the inflection that occurs when the individual parts disappear and the whole is seen?15 Ecological Modernization Here I will briefly digress – in an anticlimax similar in feeling to the development we have been talking about here – about the end of growth. With the breakdown of the industrial organization of work at the peak of global urbanization, an increasing awareness that growth could prove self-destructive emerged. In the 1980s the relationship between environments and political economy started to be reconsidered, and the notion of ecological modernization, a “normative idea in pressing for a far-reaching environ- mental reform”,16 was developed into a neo-liberal theory of the state. Aiming to achieve environmental re-adaptation for economic growth,17 ecological modernization theorists combine economy and ecology in the service of enlightened self-interest. Claiming that “while the most challenging environmental problems of this century and the next have (or will have) been caused by modernization and industrialization, their solution must necessarily lie in more – rather than less – modernization”.18 Please, let us leave modernity behind! A proper theory of ecology is incommen-surable with and actually contradicts the mindset of modernity. Beneath the recent greenwash and “ecological” brand production, modernization still lurks, attempting to integrate resources and media into contemporary forms of production and value creation (totalitarianism). But this is a cynical and completely ignorant position to take in response to the actual problem. Instead, we must re-integrate production (our anthropic ecosystems) back into the whole of our planet’s cycles!

Designing a Whole At one point, the world became a finite whole. But through globalization, urbanization and the colonialization of capitalism, the modern world grew together into one in which there is “no more outside”.19 In such an environment – and with an economy of growth on auto-pilot – accretion continues through the intensification of internal differences.20 To conclude this essay, I would like to share my hypothesis that we have birthed a new scheme of ecosystemic production. Modernization is based on an integrative calculus that – from an ecological understanding – is related to the material processes feeding modern growth. This calculus becomes most evident in modern planning, which emerged over the last centuries as an attempt to understand and compute the infinite sum of infinitesimal quantities. Whereas the 20th century was a period of planning growth, today there is no longer any necessary integration of new forms of life or containment of alternative organizations. It appears that recent forms of valorization depend no longer on an excess of surplus value, but on an incessant intensification of what we could call potential value.21 Dealing with a changing whole requires a derivative form of production. Our survival depends on the maintenance of difference and its even further differen-tiation. Today’s sensitivity to change depends on the differentiation of functions and the analysis of functional limits. And isn’t this precisely the function of design? Doesn’t design present the derivation of new qualities? However, it is precisely this potential disregarded by the prevalent building practices, as well as its staging of the endless possibilities of neo-liberal frameworks, that lies at the core of today’s generic architecture. Gestaltungsgesellschaften will need to experiment with new life configurations, testing out spatial arrangements and their ethical, environ-mental, economic and other implications. Because as any Deleuzean would insist, we cannot yet know what a new assemblage can do or what new configurations of matter might be capable of! We simply need to experiment with them. To produce architecture thus means to focus on the humble task of arranging new force fields in concrete projects that make a difference and that – as Deleuze has always requested – figure out why things remain stable at all. Notes: 1. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”, October (Winter 1992), 3–7.

2. The term was coined by atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen. Recent public exhibitions on this topic include The Anthropocene Project at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin in 2012 and the International Architecture Biennale in Rotterdam in 2014 entitled “Urban by Nature”.

3. The term was mentioned in a roundtable discussion held during the opening of the exhibition entitled The Anthropocene Project at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin in 2012. Although I do not precisely recall who employed the term, I believe it is Ursula K. Heise’s. However, in her eco-critical writing she neither uses the term nor seems to have elaborated further on the idea.

4. Risk societies describe a specific systematic organization of modern societies in relation to increasing environmental and technological concerns, “hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernization itself”; Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage Publications, 1992), 21. Coined in the 1980s, which witnessed a growth of insurance sales and risk management, and a general preoccupation with security of all kinds, the term underscores the notion that we are somehow living in an endangered future; cf. Antony Giddens, “Risk and Responsibility”, Modern Law Review 62, no. 1 (1999), 1–10, esp. 3.

5. A translation as “design societies” is misleading due to its connotations of consumerism and luxury. It must especially not be understood as “designed societies” due to recent German history, with its eugenic practices, eradication of minorities and other means of “designing” a society.

6. The German phrase I have in my mind as I write this is “die Wirklichkeit unserer Umwelt”.

7. Christa Kamleithner, “Was Architektur Macht / What Architecture Does”, ARCH+ 217 (Fall 2014), 156–69.

8. Adolf Behne, Der moderne Zweckbau (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1998), 62; the translation is the author’s.

9. This ecosystemic aspect of Foucault’s work is not coincidental; rather, it derives from a long, influential genealogy of vitalist theories he was exposed to via his mentor, Georges Canguilhem. Cf. the work of Matteo Pasquinelli; see, for

example, his “The Politics of Abstraction: Beyond the Opposition of Knowledge and Life”, consulted online at http://matteopasquinelli.com/politics-of-abstraction (accessed 25 August 2014); and idem, “The Biomorphic: Kurt Goldstein and the Genealogy of the Notion of Biopolitics”, consulted online at http://rizomatika.blogspot.nl/2012/03/matteo-pasquinelli-biomorphic-kurt.html (accessed 25 August 2014).

10. Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen: Allgemeine Grundzüge der organischen Formen-Wissenschaft, mechanisch begründet durch die von Charles Darwin reformirte Descendenztheorie, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1866), 2: 140.

11. Ernst Haeckel, The Wonders of Life: A Popular Study of Biological Philosophy, trans. Joseph McCabe New York: Harper and Brothers, 1905), 197.

12. See, for example, Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000); and idem and Mark Haugaard, “Liquid Modernity and Power: A Dialogue with Zygmunt Bauman”, Journal of Power 1, no. 2 (2008), 111–30.

13. Bauman dwells here on Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1961).

14. Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Biopolitics and the Emergence of Modern Architecture (New York: Buell Center / FORuM Project and Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), 20.

15. I owe this precise formulation to my dear friend Anna Kostreva.

16. Arthur P.J. Mol and Martin Jänicke, “The Origins and Theoretical Foundations of Ecological Modernization Theory”, in Arthur P.J. Mol, David A. Sonnenfeld and Gert Spaaargaren, eds., The Ecological Modernisation Reader (London: Routledge, 2009), 18.

17. Ecological modernization theorists assume that environmental productivity (the productive use of resources and environmental media) presents the main source for future growth and development in the same way that labour productivity and capital productivity did in the past.

18. F.H. Buttel, “Ecological Modernization as Social Theory”, Geoforum 31 (2000), 61.

19. Michael Hardt, “The Global Society of Control”, Discourse 20, no. 3 (Fall 1998), 140.

20. Ibid., 141: “The modern dialectic of inside and outside has been replaced by a play of degrees and intensity.”

21. The current accumulation of diversity is probably a weird in-between phase, and outdated economization of options within the experimentation that Gestaltungsgesellschaften will engender.