Towards a Soft Architecture: Some Thoughts on Lisa Robertson

For the past year or so, I've become quite taken with the poet — I think that's the right word — Lisa Roberston. Her writing articulates a certain phenomenology — not what phenomenology is, as Merleau-Ponty does, but how a phenomenological perspective speaks.

Yes, this seems absurd, as everything spoken, by definition, is a phenomenon. So what I mean to say is that her writing bends language to flow with the chiasm of the visible and invisible, relentlessly performing the intertwining of concept, affect, and thing. So while a philosopher operates mostly with concepts (and affects and things, too, but less so) and an artist tends to work with affects and things (and concepts, too, but less so), Robertson's writing moves amongst all more or less equally.

The effect, not to mention the affect, is astounding.

My purpose here is to advance into
the sense of the weather, the lesson of
the weather. Forever I'm the age 37
to calm my mind. I'm writing sentences here
of an unborrowed kind. The sky is
mauve lucite. The light lies intact and
folded. You can anticipate the wind.
(from "The Weather," p. 24)

It's hard to pull a quote from her. The prose is ceaseless, even when staccato (especially when staccoto), because the world is ceaseless. Being can't be summed up because it's always becoming. You find a hint of this in Merleau-Ponty's prose, in sentences that wind, relentlessly qualifying themselves. But in Robertson, this winding is of another nature — it has no need to wind back on itself because it's not trying to explain anything (as Merleau-Ponty does). Her writing keeps moving with the world, along its curves and undulations, its planes and plains.

Here is a passage I pull, beginning mid-stride and ending mid-stride — watch how it moves from conceptual pronunciations (that are never universal, always local: "flow implicates us") to statements of physical fact ("the hill slopes up") to statements of affective fact ("we accept the dispersal"):

..The hill slopes up. Our pearls broke. We are watching ourselves being torn. It's gorgeous; we accept the dispersal. It's just beginning; we establish an obsolescence. It's petal-caked; flow implicates us. It's so still; ease of movement is possible. It's very hot and fine; where does this success come from? It's wild; culture will fit now. It's chilly; we try to shape culminations.... ("The Weather," 33-34).

In another book, she writes on behalf of the Office for Soft Architecture. I am in love with this phrase and have written about it before. It begins with a manifesto that, like all her writing, is particular and hence it's hard to pull a passage:

Under the pavement, pavement. Hoaxes, failures, porches, archaeological strata spread out on a continuous thin plane; softness and speed, echoes, spores, tropes, fonts; not identity but incident and the accumulation of air miles; unmarked solitude absorbing time, bloating to become an environment, indexical euphorias, the unraveling of laughter; a brief history of escalators; memory manifest, brindled, loosening; a crumpling of automotive glass; the pornographic, the wrapped; Helvetica's black dust: All doctrine is foreign to us.

Now that's a sentence! Space is infused with things, with time, its bears its past and its now, it is stuff and affect and ideas grand and small, little moments, streaks of thought. There is no space that is not shaped, that is not affective. For Robertson, the world is not a stage. The world is always happening. It is not a hard stage upon which the softness of human lives and dreams and incidents and affect take place. No, the architecture is soft from the get go.

After the Soft Architecture Manifesto, there are a few essays and then the book is structured by a series of seven walks. The walk: in motion, interacting with the world, perceiving the world. This is not Descartes locked in his room. This is philosophy in motion and art in practice and something else entirely — life, perhaps. The walker — not Baudelaire's flaneur (but akin), not the middle aged mother doing as her doctor ordered, not the geologist taking up specimens of ground but some combination of all three and more.

Lisa Robertson's writing is a lesson in language and becoming and teaches us, or teaches me, how to walk with the world.

Individuals, Systems, Principles, Work, Life

Is there any difference between these corporations? Is one cool and the other not? Really?

Let's imagine, for a moment, that I work for some egregiously morally corrupt corporation — Philip Morris or Halliburton or some such entity that the liberal community agrees is repulsive. (More on this in a moment.) Buy my job, day to day, is amazing: I only have to work 25 hours a week; I can usually work from home; my duties entail imagining anything that the future might bring and then writing it up in fanciful prose; and there's no asshole manager leaning over my shoulder.

(Personally, I'd take that job in a flash.)

Now imagine that I work for some non-profit that builds schools for the poor in developing countries. But my day to day job involves cleaning the toilets, getting coffee for the boss, and writing extensive PowerPoint presentations that sum up someone else's work.

Which job is better?

Principles are great but they have a tendency to coerce, to dictate, to imprison the believer — not to mention making one a sanctimonious prick. On the other hand, aren't we all actors in a collective system, cogs in an engine that does all sorts of things but, mostly, pillages the planet and subjugates the individual in a number of painful, cruel ways.

What do we do? What does one do? What do you do?

Now let's complicate things. The liberal community — which, frankly, is anything but liberal in its beliefs as it adheres to a party line, an ideology, and what's less liberal than an ideology? — condemns certain corporations, Big Oil, Big Tobacco, and the like. But while those corporations are no doubt morally bankrupt, the fact is all corporations — by definition — are morally bankrupt. All corporations, by the mere fact of being corporations, contribute to the pillaging of the planet and the relentless subjugation of the individual. After all, a corporation — by definition — subjugates the individual to the corporate demands: you work for the good of the company in order to drive its bottom line — increased profits.

So does it really matter, from the perspective of principle, if you work for Halliburton or Whole Foods?

Now add this creepy dimension: corporations are so good at branding — who does all this branding, anyway? — that we actually think it's cool to work at Google, at Apple, at Whole Foods but not cool to work for Halliburton, Costco, Walmart.

But the question, for me, remains the same: What is your day to day life like?

Screen Life: Becoming Image

This image is perfect: an image of image makers imaging a screen projecting images of a live event — which, of course, joins the chorus of images as another image.....

(This is an excerpt from something I've been working on, on and off, for a bit....)

Look at professional sporting events. Players and audience alike shift their attentions from the players on the field to the players on the screen and back. Stadiums are hence building larger and larger screens. In fact, these screens are so big, they literally protrude into the playing field. To wit, in Dallas, a high punt may very well hit the massive screen that hangs overhead.

Watching the same event on TV, we are privy to endless views of every play. We presumably see the live event followed by the same event seen from different angles and at different speeds. Sometimes, the commentators becomes artistes, the image their canvas, as they write over the play, adding their own contribution to what we see.

Of course, for both the live viewing audience and the TV viewing audience, all there ever was was an image. All there ever was was something to be seen. And yet something is different. Something has changed. Just as there’s a difference between being in the stadium and watching the game on one’s TV, there is a difference between watching sports today and watching sports before the digital and its explosive proliferation of image making, distribution, and viewing.

Now look at the players between plays. They’re not looking at the screens overhead; they’re looking down at photographs of the previous plays. And what do they do before a game as a way of preparing? They watch tapes — hour upon hour of videotapes of the other team, of their own team, of themselves. When commentators want to compliment a player’s work ethic, they’ll say, “He spends a lot of time looking at tape.”

Instant replay is a peculiar use of the image. The assumption is that what we see live is, in fact, false: it is the image that gives us the reality. But it’s not just the image but the image manipulated, slowed down to an excruciating speed, to a near halt. In this case, then, it is the pure artifice of the image that guarantees the truth.

Now consider how the military sees the world. Radar supplanted eyes so we scan the skies and seas by looking at a screen. Unmanned probes roam over enemy territory sending back images of the terrain. Meanwhile, satellites circle the stratosphere 24/7, photographing anything and everything. Our military intelligence is a slide show, a picture book, a movie.

In the modern era, medicine has always had an intimate relationship with the image. Doctors make sense of patients with X-rays and MRIs. But today this has extended to the consultation itself as doctors visit with patients via webcams. This is called telemedicine and it is radically changing how we deliver and experience healthcare.

Cameras abound. They are part of our mobile phones, always tucked in our pockets, close to our groins and hearts. Cameras come built into our computers (I’m looking at the eye of the camera as I type this). Cameras are on street corners, in stores, poised at traffic lights.

But these cameras are not just cameras. In the old days — 15 years ago — we had to put film in a camera. When the film was done, we took it somewhere to be developed. Later that day, perhaps, we’d have prints of our photographs — not an easy thing to distribute quickly en masse: “Hey, you, wanna see my pictures of my house?”

Cameras today provide development even faster than the image itself: we see the picture in the screen, know what it looks like, then click. We screen the picture before we take the picture. Our cameras are screens that wind themselves into the image making process itself. When we take digital images, we don't look through a lens; we look at a screen. The image has always already been taken.

But these camera-screens are distribution agents, as well. One click, and our images — still or moving — can be broadcast to the world. We carry an entire movie studio — and theater — in our pockets.

The distance, the literal space, that separates the original from the copy, the live from the recording, is being effaced. This is not to say that the two are the same. Clearly there is a difference between you and I talking face-to-face with each other and talking via Skype. But this distance is no longer so far as to be able to maintain the illusion of the real and to secure the place of the image as a monument, as something outside the everyday, as something artificial.

The image is no longer something out there, projected on the big screen, something that happens after the fact. With the rise of digital technology, the image has infiltrated every aspect of our lives, the so-called original and the so-called replica literally touching each other, inflecting each other, sharing the space of the real: the punter’s football gracing the screen that shows the punter’s football hitting the screen. The time of the image has changed as technology has changed: the movement from image making to broadcast has become immediate. The image is no longer (solely) a record; it has become a companion.

We don't see images. We go with images. We become image.

Be generous. Speak to the smartest.

When I was teaching, I generally geared my lectures towards the smartest students and beyond. Indeed, I was often accused of speaking over the heads of my students. This, alas, was thoroughly intentional and stems from my ethics of generosity: contribute the best possible discourse to the world. Speak to the smartest and most interested. Speak to the vitality of spirit and thought.

This may sound obvious but, needless to say, many in the pedagogic community believe just the opposite: aim for the lowest common denominator, for the stupid and least interested. This, alas, is what guides so many of the precious few dollars we have for public education. We don't use these dollars to spur the smartest and brightest; we use these dollars to hand hold the dumbest.

I'm not saying we should leave the stupid behind. Not exactly. I'm saying we should emphasize the smart, the critical, creative thinking, lively thinking — and make everyone follow.

I was in a client meeting today with a very large, very well known software company. We were presenting concepts and language. Much of the language was sophisticated, clever, challenging — not like Kant is challenging but challenging for this world. To which the client responded, "Well, I like these. But I have to think about all those people out there."

This, alas, is our prejudice, our assumption: the people out there are stupid and — and! — we should cater to them. Those are two disastrous assumptions that lead directly to the endless parade of dreck that passes for movies, television, and literature — not to mention politics and newspapers — in today's world.

People often say to me: "It's great, Coffeen, that you and maybe three other people get what you're talking about. But who else?" This drives me insane. Because I'm more generous than that. I speak to the smartest in people and, frankly, to the smartest people. If the dummies don't get it, fuck 'em. It's not the job of smart people to cater to dumb people. It's the job of dumb people either to shut the fuck up or try and be smarter.

And the fact is: I actually think people can be smarter than many assume (did I just say that?). Hear me out...this may seem odd.

I recently watched the first season of a television show called "Friday Night Lights." And I am impressed with the complexity and ambivalence it manages to maintain throughout the entire season. Unlike the television shows I remember, this one seems to have no real tonic note per se. It shifts perspectives and sympathies, often relishing the multiplicity of said perspectives and sympathies. There are no clear good guys, no clear bad guys. People in the show are complex human beings. There's some schmaltz, sure, but it's rarely egregious.

I have enjoyed television shows before but they've usually been on HBO — "The Wire," of course, and "Curb Your Enthusiasm." And the fact that those shows were not only made, not only broadcast, but that people seemed to like them made me wonder if people, perhaps, are smarter than I gave them credit for. But then I assumed, well, it's HBO and maybe only a few thousand people have HBO.

But this other program — and I'm not comparing "Friday Night Lights" to "The Wire" — is on network TV (I think). So maybe there is an appetite out there for multivalence, for multiplicity, for things that are not just straightforwardly stupid. And maybe, just maybe, there is no such thing as the lowest common denominator, not when it comes to people.

But perhaps that's irrelevant. Because the fact is I will continue to speak to the smartest and the brightest — not necessarily the most learned, by any means, but the most intellectually creative and lively. And I do that out of an ethical obligation I feel to be generous to the world, to spur its collective intellect on.

Infinity Bound

Here's an essay I wrote over 10 years ago; I just found it by accident. It ain't bad, even if it's sometimes not quite right.....

Infinity is not a threshold into which the finite passes; infinity is not the generality of things As Kierkegaard explains to us about Jesus, the finite and the infinite exist within the same body, at impossible yet actual juxtaposition. A thing can be bound and yet be infinite.

A Calder mobile, for instance: it is bound by its own and particular play of balance and weight and yet it is not stable or fixed: it moves as the world around it moves. It is in perpetual motion -- and yet it is not open to any and all possible motions. Rather, it moves the way that it moves, bound by its own limitations and yet open to infinite variegation.


Compare this to, say, Keith Haring's endless wall of interlacing figures: they spread towards the horizon in every direction at once. Any limits encountered -- the size of the wall, for instance -- are considered obstacles. (Haring, I have to say now, relishes the limit, too.) Calder, on the other hand, seeks the (open) limits of weight in the world. Or Matisse: his figures relish the limitations of the frame, even ducking their heads to remain within it.



The science of binding infinity is called calculus. That is, if geometry is the science of fixed spaces, of stable coordinates, calculus is the science of stipulated movement. A differential equation at once has a limit and is infinite; it determines its own limit in the process of its own becoming. Take the number Pi: it is infinite and unpredictable. The only way to know what Pi is to follow the equation out to its next step. And yet it remains Pi: each step is at once determined and unpredictable, bound and infinite.

Bach's organ fugues spread to infinity; they maybe based within one key, but like Haring's interlacing figures, this is an inconvenience; if it could cover every key and every modulation of every key, it would. A pop song, on the other hand, enjoys being bound while simultaneously enjoying a certain infinity, a pop differential equation: The Beatles' "Happiness is Warm Gun," the Breeder's "Cannonball," "Ween's Push the Little Daisies."

Jorge-Luis Borges' odd little stories are bound, and yet they are defined by a certain indeterminacy which opens them up to infinity; the subject matter emanates from impossible places, the author's identity a perpetual unknown. Or, better, the subject and author are known only by their effect; like the number Pi, they are determined and yet unpredictable.

An episode of the Simpsons functions in much the same way, resisting closure or finite stability, and yet remaining bound by its style, its colors. In fact, each episode provides a final stitch, a nod in the direction of a moral. And yet this final stitch remains open, multiple, a variety of options offered, all of which are viable.

The possibility of a bound infinity is the very possibility of language. A word has the odd power of shifting, morphing so as to fit its environment -- the ear of the audience, the breath of the speaker, the peculiarities of penmanship. And yet the word, despite its relentless changes, does not lose all meaning. On the contrary, the meaning of a word is its unique set of infinite uses.

Reimagining the Corporation

So I finally watched the documentary, "The Corporation," and was astounded to learn that corporate personhood was unleashed along with the 14th Amendment. That is to say, the very Constitutional move that nominally sought to assure recently freed blacks had equal protection under the law was the very same move that birthed the modern corporation: a virtual person, albeit devoid of liability.

It's too perfect: the end of one form of tyranny — nominally, that is — and the birth of a new form in the same breath ! (Well, corporate personhood was officially established in 1819. But, in 1886, with the 14th Amendment, corporations asked to be treated like everyone else — and won that right! It's literally insane and marks the birth of the virtual entity, long before the internet.)

For those who might not know what I'm talking about, corporations in this country have the same legal rights as individuals — they can enter contracts, sue and be sued, buy property. You may say, "Duh! Of course." But not of course. It's actually incredibly strange: a corporation is not a person — it has no feelings and no body. It can't go to jail. And it has no interests, by definition, other than profit. This is not true of human beings, even incredibly greedy human beings. Because even the most greedy motherfucker wants to eat, sleep, dream, pee, think, emote, opine, speak. A corporation is not anything; it is thoroughly virtual. And, again, is has — by definition — no other interest than maximizing profit.

When corporations first began, they did so at the behest of the public good, offered their corporate status by the government in order to serve the public good — to build a bridge or mine coal. This corporation was severely limited in what it could do — it could not, for instance, buy other companies. It could not go public. Its reign and purview were limited by the terms of its incorporation.

But, with the 14th Amendment, corporations claimed that, as people (you following me? It's bizarre and insane), a corporation should be free to do as it pleased within the boundaries of the law. Just like anybody else. Again: did you hear me? Just like anybody else.

And so the modern corporation was born and, very quickly, began to take over basically every aspect of life, including the legislature, the police, the military. The government fights wars to defend corporate interests — and yet the corporations don't pay for the war. We do. No fair!

Corporations are persons — bereft of sentiment and body, of course — who act with relative impunity. After all, you can't put a corporation in jail — it's a thoroughly virtual entity. And you can't put the officers in jail because they work for the corporation and hence have limited liability.

If a group of individuals were, say, to dump enormous amounts of pollution into a river causing birth defects, cancers, and death those individuals would be arrested, indicted, stand trial, perhaps go to jail. A corporation, meanwhile, pays some fines — maybe — and — maybe — loses a civil action suit and pays money to those left dead and deformed.

And this is the normal functioning of this country! This is how corporations are legislated! It's madness. And it's not normal. It's not capitalism. It's corporatism in this very particular, relatively unrestrained form.

To limit what corporations can do is not to go against liberty for all, against the rights of the individual. On the contrary! Corporations are not people! They are tax and legal entities! They only exist because of a law that brought them into existence!

You want capitalism? Well, level the playing field and eliminate the corporation. You can do business; you can make and buy and sell. But not as a corporation.

So let's imagine, for a moment, how it might be different.

What might things look like if we eliminated the corporation all together? That is, individuals could get together and form companies but, legally, they would have to do business as a group of liable individuals. How might behaviors change? Would a corporation still be as willing to dump pollution? Release products that make people sick? Could they grow as exponentially (by eliminating all those individuals involved and creating one entity, the corporation, it makes acquiring money swift and easy: get rid of it and a business has to move much slower)?

Or let's keep the corporation but change the laws. What might we do? How about this: all profits exceeding x amount have to go towards employee pay, starting from the lowest paid? You want the right to be a corporation? Then that's what we, the people, require of you for that privilege.

What else? Let's re-imagine our corporate culture. What might we do differently?

Towards Real Critique, or Why Nothing in America Will Change

"The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media works as environments." — Marshall McLuhan

The most brilliant thing the American system does is make reform the agenda of change — and reform, necessarily, is constitutive of the very system it seeks to change. Real change — systemic change — becomes impossible.

Consider professional football, a subject that has received a lot of press recently. For over 100 years, there has been a steady movement to reform the sport, to make it safer. The forward pass and discrete play, for instance, were instituted to prevent injuries associated with the scrum. But that means more open space, more acceleration, and harder hits. So they began making more robust padding. Which, in turn, allowed players to hit harder which, of course, led to more injuries. So they changed the helmet from leather to plastics. Which, in turn, led to players leading with their heads which led to increased head injuries. And so on.

The point is all the changes operated within the very logic of the game so of course not only do things not "improve," the system becomes more focused, better engineered: injuries increase.

Now, this is true of the American political system. The most ardent call for change in this country in recent years was a presidential candidate running under the same old rubric of parties and corporations and wars. The only thing radical about Obama is that he's smart. But, in a sense, that only makes him more dangerous because now we have a smart man refining the system that is destroying us.

Take the Jon Stewart show. I like Jon Stewart. He's funny and smart. His show is funny and smart. I see why people like watching it. But, c'mon, all it does is recapitulate the terms of the system it critiques. The thought is: if only we acted differently, things would be better. But there is no critique of the system itself! Look at the format: it is a news show. And who perpetuates the system? The news! His show acts like every other show, only smarter and funnier.

Where, in this country, do we have any — any! — critiques on a systemic level? We mock or ignore the radicals and communists who hand out pamphlets at subways and street corners. In other countries, this was the norm — think about the Communist movements in China and Russia. They were not fucking around. Critique began at a systemic level; change was then enacted systematically.

Now, I am not supporting the Cultural Revolution: it was a violent, cruel movement. But I am saying that change can only come at the level of the system and that begins with systemic critique. And yet we lack the tools, not to mention the will and desire, to perform such critique.

Look at our movies. Look at our literature. Look at our tv shows. They are all about the individual trying to work things out — to get a better job, to love his or her family, his or her life. Nowhere is there any critique of the system. Sure, there are critiques of the politicians, of the wars, but not of the system itself.

I think the first move is to institute a culture, a vocabulary, of critique. We have to teach people, teach kids, how to think on the level of a system. We have to teach them to consider the terms of a system, the terms of media, the terms of the conversation and not the conversation itself. We need an active press that discusses the terms, the environment, rather than focusing on the content.

More, soon.