On Discreteness: Morton + Wiscombe
From Objects Models Worlds (2021)
Timothy Morton and Tom Wiscombe
Tom Wiscombe: Tim, I love the title of your recent book, Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People. This idea of “nonhuman people” is intriguing — I thought I had misread it the first few times I saw it. You’re asking us to engage all things in the world as specific entities with their own style and demeanor, as we might engage people we know. Regarding a German shepherd as a person is weird but not as weird as regarding a bottlecap or a black hole as a person. That is expert level! To call a nonhuman entity a person is of course not to anthropomorphize them but rather to allow ourselves to open our eyes to the liveliness and enchantment of beings at all scales around us. We can’t expect Bengal tigers, snowy mountains, and fire ants to march on Washington alongside people, and that isn’t the point. The point is that we are inside ecology and ecology is inside us, and that constitutes a new kind of intimacy.
This is a picture of my house. If I think about my house this way, as a collection of parts, I start to get there. The cats, cockroaches, human inhabitants, leaky dishwasher, fountain, Cuban concrete tiles, all laid out on a table. The house itself is larger, and contains these other things, however it is still just one thing, alongside all the other one-things on the table. Sounds like a conundrum at first, but when you sit with it a while, the scene begins to scale and adjust like a lens coming into focus. Slowly, you realize the fact that there is a reality outside human values, hierarchies, and categories, independent of us. It’s a realization that is terrifying and freeing at the same time.
In architecture, one of the most calcified ideas is what we call part-to-whole. Part-to-whole is a classical idea that attempts to deal with the fact that architecture is made out of a bunch of parts, both compositionally and tectonically. A classical column is made up of a base, shaft, and capital, which, if we listen to Vitruvius, conspire to form a balanced, beautiful unity. Well I’m here to say that the intricate, alluring column capitals are preparing to hold a rally for their rights! When you look at one for a while, it doesn’t seem incomplete or otherwise less-than the column. It is simultaneously individuated yet part of something else. This is not a contradiction if you are thinking ecologically. Robert Venturi, in his book Complexity and Contradiction of 1966, talked about the case of the “difficult whole.” The difficult whole is a thing which is unresolved because its parts are somehow lively and vibrating and from different sources and times. The “difficulty” was holism itself — a kind of holistic fundamentalism he identified in late modernism and wanted to break. While I’m not down for the idea that architecture should be pieced together from motifs lifted from history books, I think Venturi’s idea of the difficult
whole — if expanded to include a much wider range of entities — is still relevant today.
Tim Morton: I’m not sure what I love most about your work, Tom, there are so many aspects that I love. But if I was going to have to pick just one, that would be the adjective playful. Your work is deeply deeply playful. Play is interestingly suspended between true and false in ways that vanilla logic tells us is illegal — section gamma of Aristotle’s Metaphysics states the so called Law of Noncontradiction — you can’t be telling the truth and contradicting yourself at the same time. But it’s never been proven. For a start, you would need the Law of Noncontradiction (LNC) to prove it!
Gregory Bateson has an interesting theory about cat bites, which is a topic I know a lot more about than the load bearing properties of materials, Tom. When a cat nips you in play, she’s saying “This is a bite, and this is not a bite,” at the same time. It’s like what my daughter said about Avebury, an ancient pilgrimage stone circle site of indigenous Britain: it’s very serious but it’s also a gigantic “boob joke” as she put it (just look at diagrams of the pathways and the stones). It’s this overlap of serious and not-serious — not that they’re the same, that would be boring either way (it’s all a lie or it’s all true), but that there’s a flickering, ambiguous overlap. Avebury, an integrated village and circle, is matriarchal or matrilineal or at any rate non-patriarchal social space. While I was there I heard a voice going “Why shouldn’t there be a more efficient, straighter line to the stones?” — and then I heard the sound of the Trinity Test.
I truly believe that your work is speaking to us from a future where we accept that true and false can overlap. You know the trouble with fake news? It’s that it claims to be absolutely true! It’s fake news that believes in a rigid true-false distinction. News news is a lot more ambiguous.
I’m convinced that there is in fact a powerful gender politics in your architecture Tom and I think that this sort of gender politics — which is to do with allowing true and false to overlap, because the rigid binary is a patriarchy product — is in itself a profoundly ecological politics. To let things like meadows and forests exist you have to believe that there can be piles of things that are made out of all kinds of stuff — and rigid LNC rules won’t let you. Might as well pull down paradise and put up a parking lot.
Your refusal to let stuff be “true” or “false,” the way in which even the final result seems like one of the models, the way in which model and actual thing overlap, all that stuff — it’s very important. For example, I’ve heard you ask this kind of question: how come the ground is always below us? Why can’t it be above? Why not stack cities on cities? It would after all provide a whole lot of shade. I like how the buildings you’ve shown me appear to be playing, shuffling back and forth between different sizes and shapes as if they were moving, like each building is a sort of architectural Nude Descending a Staircase (the famous action-replay-looking, animation-looking Duchamp painting). You’re letting, like Duchamp, another dimension enter the space of the building, letting it shrink and expand, come hither and retreat. It’s very endearing. It immediately makes you want to smile and boy oh boy do we ever need some of that in our world today.
In general the approach is rigorously non-violent, like swords to ploughshares, or in your case, I imagine, Blackbird SR-71 spy planes into buildings. Why can’t social space look and feel and sound tentative, exploratory, hesitant? I like the idea of considering other lifeforms as people, as you say Tom. But the thing about people is, and this is what makes you treat them nice, you can never be sure that I’m not an android — neither can I! I might be someone’s wind-up toy for all I know. I get pretty wound up! There’s a difference between android and person, yet they overlap in the beings we call people. That’s what I like about your work. It’s not about enforcing an either-or belief about belief. It’s about realizing that uncertainty is part of what keeps us together and keeps us reaching out to aid other lifeforms and include them in our designs on the future.
TW: Yes. Not knowing is such a better place to be than trying to fake-know everything in order to feel secure and all-powerful. We just launched our new website and we decided to add a shop as a kind of ambiguous element to our practice. Selling model kits is weird for an architect... “we make models, you can too!.” The architectural model is so often seen as a tool or part of a process pointing at something much bigger, but I’m telegraphing that models are enchanted entities with their own inner, speculative life. So you can order a model or order a building, we’ve got all scales! Fine print: model may deviate from actual building/ model comes complete with spare parts... We definitely need to sell a wind-up Tim toy — maybe it could be a scale figure inside one of my models — spitting sparks and repeating: “We are the Asteroid, We are the Asteroid!”
So much violence is happening in the world due to ideologies being mistaken for reality. I have a big issue with the term belief, which seems to have replaced imagination lately. Belief in things is disregarding the actual situation on the ground which is sometimes quite intricate, messy, and full of possibility; belief says “I have my opinion and you have yours, and they are both equal.” How ridiculous. Global warming doesn’t require human belief in it to exist. Ideological bubbles can only maintain their own insidious arguments because they exclude certain information and ideas from consideration altogether, as you see in cult behavior. The word ‘opinion’ seems to have been weaponized and retrenched in our time. There is barely any difference between the Church of Scientology and the GOP congressional Trump supporters at this point! Imagination on the other hand has no strict boundary, and relies on not knowing to make discoveries. Knowing and imagination are incommensurable concepts in my book.
Now, discreteness — as much as it sounds like it promotes separation — is really a form of reaching out to other things as you say. But you first need to regard and revere things as specific, unique entities, rather than as outcomes of processes or symptoms of a system. Biology, for all its beautiful and weird leopards, eagles, and hammerhead sharks, too often undermines its objects by placing evolutionary processes above them. It’s actually shocking how often biologists communicate (maybe inadvertently) that fitness and selection operate as a kind of creationism, a Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. But hammerhead sharks have no discernable ‘fitness’ over other sharks, in fact, their wide head makes it difficult to see and therefore to hunt, and that’s why they swim side to side. So shark aesthetics and shark style are just not reducible to the efficiency inferred by ideas of fitness and selection, no matter how hard you want to believe that. I’ll take hammerheads, or SR-71s, one by one, over generalizing processes and fake efficiencies any day.
Discreteness individuates things, and asks you to peer into them instead of filing them into a system. That is part of it. But the other part that makes me smile is the fact that everything is also a collection. A vibrating, dancing collection of entities inside of other entities, with no bottom and no top. That is for me the definition of a flat ontology, a concept I discovered in Levi Bryant’s blog about 8 years ago and subsequently dragged into architecture. It resonates for me because it ties together ideas from OOO and the digital culture of collecting and curating we live in today. I feel I have to be kind of defender of the concept at this point though, because it is so often communicated back to me as scary/simplistic ideas like “everything is equal” or “everything is disconnected.” The missing ingredient in that kind of thinking is really you, Tim — the way you have been able to revamp the concept of ecology, bridging the worlds of philosophy, science, art, and politics.
TM: I’m pretty cross with scientists right now. It turns out there’s compelling evidence that they skewed global warming facts (a fact is an interpretation of data) to appeal to right wingers who didn’t want to believe them anyway, with the result that Earth is going wrong so obviously much much faster than we had been prepared for. Turns out that it’s socially constructed after all, in ways that are much worse than the regular old fashioned ways of saying that. The OOO way of saying that is better — it would just be exactly what I said. Earth systems are freaking out at a much faster clip than we had anticipated, and that’s because no one, from Earth scientists to bananas, have exclusive or direct access to those systems. All we have are data, and interpretations of data.
All that teleology in evolution theory and evolution “facts” were always totally beside the point. Just flat wrong. It’s amazing how scientists and journalists feel no qualms in interpreting the data in utilitarian ways. Utilitarianism is totally teleological — the point is to have more utility (vanilla “happiness”) than what you started out with. Consider the first ever beetle to be born with an iridescent wing case. It wasn’t “for” having better sex. It was probably seen as a weird aberration at the beetle high school. Beetle-ism might be a thing. Now consider the first female beetle to fall for an iridescent beetle. There was no good reason for it, much less of a reason than there is for me to want to mention Phil Collins at art openings. She was being neither a philistine nor a performer of good taste nor, moreover, an actuator of increased utility. She just happened to want to have sex with that iridescent one, and when interviewed on Oprah later, she couldn’t determine anything like a reason why — her choice was Kantian and sub-Kantian at that. It wasn’t even that the beetle looked as if he had been designed for her to figure out that the beetle hadn’t been designed for her.
I really think that this is the way your architectural practice can help out. According to the other lead singer of Genesis, Peter Gabriel, “All of the buildings, all of the cars / Were once just a dream in somebody’s head” (“Mercy Street”). When you lift a fork to your lips you’re lifting a metastasized, embodied series of overlapping and contradicting thoughts to your lips. Ideas about how violent utensils should be, for example. I did a lot of research on the history of food back in the day, and forks are considerably more advanced than knives but less so than chopsticks. I’m not sure one can illustrate OOO, by definition, but one can I’m sure encourage people to understand and embody what it’s all about.
TW: Specificity of words is so crucial today. Especially being precise with what constitutes a real thing. Tim, you and I were just talking about that. Facing Ukraine-gate and a president who believes that he is a King with “great and unmatched wisdom,” we need to examine words one by one. Words have been weaponized to cause confusion and violence. Confusion is the opposite state of solidarity. Your brilliant take-down of words like nature and world is the first step. Myths of holism are so entrenched in our minds that we fail to notice how the phrase “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts” commits violence against parts. Nature sounds like a whole, something that bonds all the green things together into a kind of kingdom. But there is no kingdom, and certainly no King. Plastic is natural. We have plastic inside our bodies now, apparently. As well as lots and lots of bacteria. Are we natural? If nature is all around us, and inside us, where is it really? A blueberry muffin or even dark matter exists more than nature; real objects can be adjacent to us but also contain us. Even an ideology can be a real object and be part of an ecology, but strangely, nature itself is not ecological.
Another word dripping with holism is sustainability. Of course, more and more it is getting outed as people are asking — what is it that we are sustaining, exactly? And the answer is.
All that teleology in evolution theory and evolution “facts” were always totally beside the point. Just flat wrong. It’s amazing how scientists and journalists feel no qualms in interpreting the data in utilitarian ways. Utilitarianism is totally teleological — the point is to have more utility (vanilla “happiness”) than what you started out with. Consider the first ever beetle to be born with an iridescent wing case. It wasn’t “for” having better sex. It was probably seen as a weird aberration at the beetle high school. Beetle-ism might be a thing. Now consider the first female beetle to fall for an iridescent beetle. There was no good reason for it, much less of a reason than there is for me to want to mention Phil Collins at art openings. She was being neither a philistine nor a performer of good taste nor, moreover, an actuator of increased utility. She just happened to want to have sex with that iridescent one, and when interviewed on Oprah later, she couldn’t determine anything like a reason why — her choice was Kantian and sub-Kantian at that. It wasn’t even that the beetle looked as if he had been designed for her to figure out that the beetle hadn’t been designed for her.
I really think that this is the way your architectural practice can help out. According to the other lead singer of Genesis, Peter Gabriel, “All of the buildings, all of the cars / Were once just a dream in somebody’s head” (“Mercy Street”). When you lift a fork to your lips you’re lifting a metastasized, embodied series of overlapping and contradicting thoughts to your lips. Ideas about how violent utensils should be, for example. I did a lot of research on the history of food back in the day, and forks are considerably more advanced than knives but less so than chopsticks. I’m not sure one can illustrate OOO, by definition, but one can I’m sure encourage people to understand and embody what it’s all about.
TW: Specificity of words is so crucial today. Especially being precise with what constitutes a real thing. Tim, you and I were just talking about that. Facing Ukraine-gate and a president who believes that he is a King with “great and unmatched wisdom,” we need to examine words one by one. Words have been weaponized to cause confusion and violence. Confusion is the opposite state of solidarity. Your brilliant take-down of words like nature and world is the first step. Myths of holism are so entrenched in our minds that we fail to notice how the phrase “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts” commits violence against parts. Nature sounds like a whole, something that bonds all the green things together into a kind of kingdom. But there is no kingdom, and certainly no King. Plastic is natural. We have plastic inside our bodies now, apparently. As well as lots and lots of bacteria. Are we natural? If nature is all around us, and inside us, where is it really? A blueberry muffin or even dark matter exists more than nature; real objects can be adjacent to us but also contain us. Even an ideology can be a real object and be part of an ecology, but strangely, nature itself is not ecological.
Another word dripping with holism is sustainability. Of course, more and more it is getting outed as people are asking — what is it that we are sustaining, exactly? And the answer is. . . wait for it. . . ourselves! So sustainability is then a reflection of human desire and fear of loss, not a thing that is “out there.” Your ecological thought is something far weirder, oscillating between the mysterious and the familiar. You and I were saying yesterday that the Tesla is the perfect creepy sustainable death machine. Look — no grille! The familiarity of the combustion engine is gone. We get this happy smiling face reminding us that it runs on renewable energy and we can all relax. And yet we know that it is insanely fast, quiet, and can drive itself autonomously. What could go wrong?
Maybe this gives architects a way to move past the intellectual and aesthetic dead end we have seen in what I’d call sustainable expressionism — so many green balconies, windmills, and metal louvers pointing back at the industrial machine of the 20th century. Maybe we have been thinking about it all wrong. Maybe we need to enter a dark and playful mode, where things are not as they seem, even contradictory. I was laughing when I read this passage from you the other day:
Talk of efficiency and sustainability are simply artifacts of the relentless use of fossil fuels. In a solar economy, you could have a disco in every single room of your house and way fewer lifeforms would suffer, perhaps vanishingly few, compared to the act of simply turning on the lights in an oil economy. You could have strobes and decks and lasers all day and night to your heart’s content.
I love that. We find ourselves at the end of the world, not sad and depressed, but liberated by excess and pleasure!
TM: Haha, what could go wrong indeed . . . You have to be some kind of holist to care about ecological issues: an ecosystem is a whole, a forest is a whole, a meadow is a whole . . . but what kind of whole? Well the two dominant holisms on offer are pretty gnarly. One of them is flat out fascist: being incorporated into a whole that is greater than (more real than) the sum of its parts. A droplet dissolves in an ocean. I’ve never liked this way of talking and it’s everywhere in ecological political and ethical speech. The other kind is utilitarian holism, or as Mr. Spock says, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” Damn your Vulcan logic, Spock, not because it’s logic, but because it’s not the only logic. You can be perfectly logical and a lot more nuanced than that. People don’t realize enough that if they don’t like a certain thought process, they are welcome to change the underlying logic to achieve a different result. Both kinds of holism are pretty bad for Tom — not you, but this coral reef I’m imagining called Tom. Tom is sad because you don’t care about him, you only care about him as a small part in the total population of coral reefs in the world, or as a component in an emergent Gaia-like being.
I want to be nice to Tom the Coral without being an individualist. I want to have my holism cake and eat it too. So you can solve this pretty nicely using object-oriented ontology.
Things always exist in the same way, if they exist. Let’s suppose a soccer team exists. Okay so it exists just as much as the players. You can swap players out and still have the same soccer team, right? Anyway, there’s one soccer team, and there’s eleven players. Now comes the stunningly simple conclusion: the whole is always less than the sum of its parts. Notice how when I say that either you delete the thought immediately as crazy, or you suppose I must mean that the whole is less real aka I’m an individualist. I’m not! The whole is just as real, which is why you can say it’s less in the one way that counts in a rubber meets the road sort of a way: there are less teams than there are players.
I’m calling the regular vanilla holisms explosive holism, and I’m calling this one implosive holism, or subscendence, if you want to be fancy about it. And I think it has really major, and very creative, effects on architecture and design once you start to let it work on you.
In your work I already see this holism operating — I was probably thinking of it when I first found myself saying “Maybe the whole is actually less than the sum of its parts.” I was in Albert Pope’s architecture class at Rice University in Houston. He was explaining a paradox: Houston is gigantic (it’s the third largest megacity in the USA right now, just below LA). But it’s a devil of a job pointing to it, for instance saying definitively where it starts and where it stops. Albert was using my hyperobject concept to describe that — you can think and compute these massively distributed things, you just can’t point to them or experience them all at once. But the logic of implosive holism explains why hyperobjects are hyper. It’s a really good idea, although I say it myself! Tom the Coral is thanking us, Tom.