What Does This Have to Do with Architecture?

Abstract

It was Gregory Bateson who coined the term metalogue. Enacting an imaginary conversation between father and daughter, Bateson argued that the structure and form of a conversation are critical to the problem that is being addressed. This is precisely why a metalogue is meta: it expresses a shared problem as a point of convergence. As such, a metalogue is by default transdisciplinary or impure, in the sense that it requires the production of methodological, theoretical, and conceptual innovations, novel trajectories that emerge so as to address a problematic field that binds disciplines together. What is the problem that architecture, perception, action and an epiphylogenetic understanding of the world share? We will claim that it is the world itself that needs to respond to this, in all its complexity, all its filthy heterogeneous entanglements, all the aberrant nuptials that in their differential can produce information or, as Bateson would have it, a difference that makes a difference. The information that produces architecture as a world-making technicity, and the information that architecture produces as an actual world-making consequence, will be brought together in the form of a metalogue between the architect and the world, attempting to outline an autonormative understanding of the architectural asignifying mediality, no longer depending on anything transcendent to it, but rather being reconceptualised as the driving motor of a purposiveness without purpose, a consequence-organised dynamic that is its own consequence.1 The strong conviction – that the conditions of sensations are, at the same time, conditions for the production of the new – calls for an aesthetic rather than merely epistemological approach to design. But this is easier said than done considering the traditional tendency to regard the singular – or the purely present – as fulfilled only in the thought of some representable whole. Claire Colebrook thus identifies an ‘architectonic’ impulse in metaphysics, “regarding as properly present only that which can be re-thought, brought to consciousness and rendered universal and transparent to thought in general.”2 Conversely, a particular metaphysical impulse in architecture makes it highly dependent on representation and as such prone to misplacing concreteness. The metalogue sets the convivial stage for the world to push back. The architect is yet to conceive that the opposite of the concrete is the discrete, not the abstract. [...]