On Flat Ontology: Harman + Wiscombe
From Objects Models Worlds (2021)
Graham Harman and Tom Wiscombe
Tom Wiscombe: Tom Wiscombe Let’s talk about objects and collections of objects versus the ‘ontological lump’ view of the world that we both are rallying against. I remember how impactful it was to read some of your litanies in “The Road to Objects” (2011) — “flowers, stars, wild animals, pirate ships, copper mines” — it was like a breath of fresh air amongst all of the systems and network theory that was peaking at the time. That article really resonated for me, and influenced the shift in my work right around that time. Were you thinking about architecture then?
Graham Harman: A critic was claiming last year that I “niche-marketed” my philosophy to people in art and architecture, but that was just the product of ill-informed jealousy. People in these disciplines came to me, just as in every other discipline, and then I tried to learn about their concerns on the fly. Artists took an early interest in ObjectOriented Ontology (OOO) due to the primacy of aesthetics in my work. As for architecture, I was invited to sit on a jury and lecture at the AA in London way back in 2007, by Theo Lorenz and Tanja Siems, and then I was on a thesis committee at the Bartlett a few years after that. But it was not until my reunion with our SCI-Arc colleague David Ruy (my former undergraduate classmate), in New York in 2011, that I began to get looped into the architecture world on a regular basis. As for the litanies I use in my prose, they are a way of rhetorically slapping some sense into an intellectual world that lazily assumes there are two basic kinds of things: (a) humans, and (b) everything else. I call this the Modern Taxonomy, and it obstructs progress in so many different areas.
TW: Yes it’s amazing how entrenched humanity is in the notion that everything exists “for us,” implying a basic inequity of all things. It’s like an addiction, and we are reticent to go to rehab, even though we constantly witness the impact of non-human things like CRISPR DNA technology, rising sea levels, and Blackwater no-bid contracts. I really think that architecture is in a time of engagement with the “everything else.” The question is, how. There I want to stake a claim: I think that superficial engagement actually has the opposite effect in terms of this new awareness. An example might be how we accept the term “sustainable architecture” without much thought of what that actually means. It seems like it must be a good, responsible thing, because we hear it everywhere, but what is it really? I have yet to see a significant architectural invention that is built on sustainable engineering; instead we have solar panels, green walls, and windmills. Those adornments operate as signs pointing away from architecture and towards a set of vague notions about technology and societal good. So attaching to the word “sustainable” to the word “architecture” promotes a kind of vapor-thinking that appears engaging but is just another loop back to the human mind, and a denigration of architecture as a thing in its own right.
I’m interested in specificity, and the way that specific things have strict boundaries and are made up of many parts with their own strict boundaries. Thinking about specificity moves you naturally away from the vague realm of signs and memes. I think architecture is at its best when it engages the world from a point of independence from the world: when it doesn’t mirror the known but expands our outlook and our engagement with other scales and forms of being and even unknowable things. I think this is the radical social project of our time in architecture precisely because it is at odds with fake news, spin, influencers, and other everyday things that promote knowing and believing over discovery and imagination.
One of the things I realized in thinking about specificity and engagement is that architecture’s internal parts are often melted together into a lump. I want to pull these things apart and enchant them. Imagine the circulation of a building glued into all of its walls versus a circulation with its own style and liveliness. Or an interior that does not appear to fit into its exterior, defying expectations. Or a patchy envelope that follows its own rules with little regard to underlying mass edges, producing multiple readings. A building becomes a container of independent things, set in tension rather than a smooth, resolved unity. That’s one aspect of the flat ontology of architecture I’ve been talking about. Another is creating a gap in the building-to-world relation — not to favor tired ideas of formal autonomy but rather to let things ‘live.’
GH: I agree with all three of the techniques you mention in your article on the flat ontology of architecture1: the partially revealed forms, the independent envelope, and the fissure between building and ground. What bothers me about Deleuzean currents in both philosophy and architecture is their commitment to the continuous as somehow inherently more profound than the discrete. For Deleuze, the surface is sterile, and everything happens at the level of the virtual, which is said to be “both heterogeneous and continuous.” But I don’t think you can have both. For me, the depth is heterogeneous but not continuous, while the surface is continuous but by no means sterile. This is why I like your idea about the autonomy of the envelope. It’s another reason that I’m back to thinking about Jean Baudrillard, who first interested me as a graduate student way back in 1990. Now, since I’m a realist philosopher and Baudrillard is apparently the least realist philosopher since Berkeley (“everything is simulated, nothing is real”) it might seem odd that OOO could have any interest in his work. But the point is that Baudrillard’s surface isn’t just a surface: it’s a surface that seduces us, meaning that I and the surface that draws me in form a new, compound reality of our own. So, along with the ideas in your article about creating a gap between figure and ground, I’m interested in building new grounds on top of visible figures, precisely through a new object built of surface plus beholder — or whatever the architecturally equivalent term of “beholder” would be; I borrow that term from Michael Fried’s art criticism. Is there a way for architecture not just to sever the easy relation between figure and ground, but to generate new grounds out of the visible figure itself?
TW: Yes. As you say that, I’m imagining a ziggurat or a mountain or a castle with multiple new grounds embedded into their mass, but of course those objects are always tethered to ground as foundation, and they revere the sky. You would need to either undercut those foundation connections with oblique blades, or stack things one atop the other with no regard for foundation in the first place. Piling things is a good way to break the way we tend to privilege continuity with earth and the singular ground. I think there is a lot of work still to do there. It’s what I am calling ‘landing’ these days, or the idea that things come down from above rather than growing up from the earth.
Landing is a play on spacecraft and other-worldliness on the one hand, but it also refers to something Frank Lloyd Wright said (that was then later dusted off by Sylvia Lavin): “tip the world on it’s side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.” I think landing is definitively an Angelino approach, so different than the infilling approaches that you see for instance in New York. The looseness of the city itself is so shocking sometimes- I was driving down La Brea the other day and on the left was a high-end mega-mall and on the right was an operational concrete plant. New York or Paris would have evolved that plant out of the system and repaired the ‘tissue’ back into the continuum, but LA just keeps adding things next to and on top of one another. I think the inevitable densification of LA will not result in a regimented and continuous baroque density, bounded by height and streets you can march an army down, but rather the density of discrete city-states that are already latent but not yet fully expressed. The city-state model allows for true differentiation; for the special style of each city to be amped up across the larger space of Los Angeles. It also re-focuses density into a bounded condition, like filling a box with toys, instead of the unifying sprawl that threatens LA today.
Now, that said, I know you are also talking about a new form of subjectivity as well. The idea that a beholder and a seductive thing can comprise a new compound object is really intriguing. When I was an architecture student, subjectivity was always promoted as something “for us” — a private experience of how things in the world registered as phenomena in the human mind. I like the idea that human subjectivity, along with many other subjectivities, is real and part of things outside the mind, not a conscious theater playing out for us. What I would call engagement, or what Fried might call “absorption,” is when you are not conscious of the act of viewing but rather when you are “in” something, part of something. I try to achieve that kind of engagement in my work, so that means I naturally avoid irony and other linguistic approaches that put you outside the architectural object.
GH: I like your distinction between engagement and consciousness. My terminology for this is the difference between human as beholder and human as ingredient. Manuel DeLanda was onto this on the first page of his book A New Philosophy of Society. After saying that he seeks a realist philosophy of society, meaning society as it is apart from humans, he anticipates the objection that there cannot be a human society without humans. Well, of course there cannot be, just as there cannot be water without hydrogen: humans are one of the most important ingredients of human society. But that doesn’t mean that society is equivalent to what the human observer (Fried’s “beholder”) thinks it is. Human society is a real causal agent that is not understood by humans; the same holds for global warming, of which we humans are an ingredient while not being able to behold transparently all the features of this dangerous climate phenomenon. Fried has been an important author for me in a number of ways. But he remains a modernist in the Kantian sense, in that he thinks two and only two things must never be mixed: the human beholder, and the artwork. Granted, his intellectual honesty as an art critic led him to admit that Manet is not an anti-theatrical painter, but that his paintings confront the beholder directly. Nonetheless, Fried continues to this day to use the word “theatrical” as his invective of choice against any contemporary art he does not like. But again, this is a wider problem than Fried, since it structures the Kantian foundations of modernism. For Kant, as for most moderns, there are two basic kinds of things in the universe: (1) human thought, and (2) everything else. The way to get rid of this bias is not to get rid of one of the two terms, so that either everything is constructed by human thought, or so that even human thought must be rethought in terms of nature (meaning neural activation patterns).
So, what is the right way to end the modern bias and open up a new era of intellectual history? Bruno Latour diagnosed the problem brilliantly but chose the wrong solution. Namely, Latour saw in We Have Never Been Modern that modernism is structured as a taxonomy in which “nature” and “culture” are two separate poles that can never be mixed. He correctly noted that many entities today are “hybrids” that cannot be called either natural or cultural: such as the ozone hole, created by humans but now part of our “natural” environment. Unfortunately, Latour also decided that everything is a hybrid, meaning that nothing really exists unless humans are part of it. The most flagrant example came when he said that the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II cannot have died of tuberculosis because it had not yet been discovered in ancient Egypt. In other words, nothing is fully real unless its existence is somehow registered by human society. But the point isn’t that something needs a human ingredient to be real; that’s Latour’s overreaction to modernism. The point is only that just because humans are involved in something doesn’t make it unreal, as if humans contaminated everything they touch and needed to be subtracted all the time.
To tie this back to your points about Los Angeles, I love the idea of this city as a series of landings from above. By analogy, a post-Kantian conception of human thought would be that, instead of distorting a reality outside our minds, we land on top of already existing things and thereby create a new thing by combining with it. Among other virtues, this helps get rid of the lingering idea that humans are fundamentally alienated, alone, transcendent, melancholically distant from the world, and so on. Instead, I think of human thought as a Lego block able to snap into other blocks more easily than many other objects can.
TW: It’s so interesting how important ontology is to the way we see the world. How things and groups of things exist together, adjacent, nested, autonomous, hybrid, flat, or otherwise. It’s actually quite shocking how different the world looks in each case, and how that informs the intellectual breakthroughs (and limits) of an era. What I like so much about your idea about compound entities is that it pushes back on the trope of part-towhole in architecture, which too often privileges holism and balance of all the ingredients of architecture. I like the idea that things can brush up against one another, resonate with one another, and create a new object without the ‘ingredients’ losing their independence and style. It’s actually a much better model of what we mean by ‘ecology’ than those dumb network diagrams with bubbles and lines connecting everything together. What are those lines if not a drawing-in of one thing into another, for a period of time? The lines are not real, and if you were to let them all retract, the bubbles would begin to overlap and collect one another. I mean seriously, why would we be interested in an ecology that denigrates hammerhead sharks and keel-billed toucans by tangling them up in such a weak construction? It’s clear that when I say “hammerhead shark,” our human imagination ‘clicks’ into the shark in a way that is much less a virtual line and much more a sense of interiority and belonging, even if we can never really understand sharkness.
I’ve been intrigued by Levi Bryant’s concept of “strange mereologies” from A Democracy of Objects, which I assume branches from your idea of the world consisting of things inside of things inside of things. In a familiar mereology, parts assemble into a new entity that is often “more than the sum of its parts,” as in emergence theory, whereas in a strange mereology the parts do not aspire to holism but rather exist simultaneously as whole objects and parts of something else. Another related idea is Timothy Morton’s notion of “subscendence,” or the idea that wholes are less than the sum of their parts. For example, an individual might be part of a population of a city, but their function in that capacity in no way completely captures their complex identity and capacity. The concept of strange mereology was important in my decision to shelve the opposition of collage and emergence in my work some time ago, and move toward a model of things beside, on top of, or inside other things, things that resonate with one another but are never subsumed by each other. These are chunky things, fully formed and lively, and decidedly not panels, handrails, beams, shingles, or other reductive subdivisions of architecture. I invented the word “supercomponent” — simultaneously “super” or “above” and a “component-of” or “below” — to try to capture the idea that something can simultaneously be part of something larger and retain its own independence and aesthetics. So the chunkiness you see in my work is not just about the explicit form language — which is indeed chunky — but it is also about the chunkiness of architecture all the way to its core.
Speaking of that, I wanted to loop back to something you said at Manuela the other night when we were discussing how you look at architecture. I remember that when I showed you our Vilnius project, you said you thought architecture was good when it was “memorable.” I followed up with the idea that memorable things might be those things that have edges. I’d love to talk more about that.
GH: As we discussed in our conversation at Manuela, there is a frequent problem I have noticed with student work in architecture, and I doubt it’s confined to students. In its simplest version, it is the tendency to explain a form by justifying the process that generated the form. To say it in OOO terms, it is a way of undermining form, of fetishizing the backstory of something that ought to be able to stand on its own two feet. This points to a more general problem. Today, the extensive use of software makes it easy to generate incredibly complex forms of unbelievable intricacy, with hundreds of spike-like shapes radiating in all directions, and so forth. But you cannot really remember one of these projects ten minutes after seeing it, because there’s little way for the human mind to distinguish between one of these crazily complex figures and another.
It reminds me of what Descartes said in the Meditations about the difference between intellect and imagination, though I disagree with his conclusion. If someone asks you to imagine a triangle, you can do it. But if someone asks you to imagine a chiliagon (a thousand-sided figure) you can’t really do it: you can of course try to imagine a manysided figure, but you can’t really imagine 1,000 sides as opposed to 1,001. Descartes, of course, thinks that the intellect can grasp the chiliagon even though the imagination cannot, to which Pierre Gassendi answered that the intellect can only understand the “meaning” of “thousand-sided” without really being able to grasp anything more than that meaning.
Perhaps the simplest response to this debate is that, at any rate, architecture needs to address the imagination and not just the intellect. I don’t really care about the intellectual process that generated your gazillion-faceted architectural logic. I want to see the result of your logic, and it had damn well better be simple enough that a human brain can keep focused on it and recollect it. Thus, the biggest compliment I can and do give students at their reviews is this: if someone asks me to sketch this project 24 hours from now, I will be able to do it. This means that it has touched a new space in my imagination.
On this note, let me say something about the Sydney Opera House, which is of course a huge public favorite, though when I ask architects they seem fairly uninterested in talking about it (much as with Frank Lloyd Wright, I might add). In the case of the Opera House, the most articulate complaint I’ve heard from architects is that it lends itself too easily to cheap metaphorical language: sailboats, shark’s teeth. All right, that’s an objection I can understand.
Nonetheless, even if the public often compares it to such familiar objects, I think the public likes the Opera House for a different and better reason. Namely, it is a distinct and memorable form made of otherwise easily intelligible shapes. In Cartesian terms, it addresses the imagination rather than pretending to occupy the level of the intellect, which always results in these crazy blend-o-rama complexities that I know we both dislike. One of the things I really appreciate in the early essays of Peter Eisenman is his recognition of how much architectural language boils down to just two shapes: the oblong and the centroidal. It seems to me that you can already do a lot with unusual permutations of just these two.
TW: That reminds me of Le Corbusier’s Three Reminders to Architects, where he argues that architecture should be based on pure geometrical forms such as spheres, cylinders, and cubes, because they are unambiguous and legible, particularly under sunlight. Therefore pyramids are more beautiful than cathedrals. It is worth noting however that one of his most inventive projects, Firminy, is a compound object rather than an identifiable cube or cone or set of cubes and cones, however. So it is not the purity of the primitive that is crucial, but a thing’s silhouette that makes it memorable. In fact I’d say that legibility of pure primitives can make a building easily consumable as the mind goes through and files things before the imagination can do its magic. In my work I’ve been using what I call jacks, ziggurats, tesseracts, totems, spires, hammerheads, and so on: things that are legible as independent shapes, but are ambiguous enough in terms of their origins that they defy conceptual reduction. The architectural effect depends on their silhouettes being slightly familiar, so that they at first seem intelligible but ultimately leave you not knowing what you are dealing with. As you noted earlier, I also sometimes degrade the legibility of these chunky figures through the use of loose containers or envelopes, so their full extents on the interior are hidden.
Somehow, we have found ourselves in an era of confusion without mystery. We spend our days tracking Trump’s latest tweets and surfing the currents of fake facts and otherwise being showered with a sham reality. I prefer actual mystery and intrigue in the world, focused on the strangeness of the real world outside the human mind: Mayan megacities hidden in the Guatemalan jungle, colliding black holes, the hollowed-out Antarctic ice shelf. It’s like drawing the curtain back. The dynamic between unknowability and discovery is crucial to imagination, and to architecture. That’s why I think the linguistic turn in architecture, which began in the 80’s but keeps coming back like a zombie, is no longer viable. Language is a closed loop and lives in the intellect, and moreover it tends to rely on known phrasing. Even more than that, language has been weaponized by partisan politicians and special interests, to the point that belief, which resides in the mind, has overpowered wonder, which resides outside it.
The time of “digital virtuosity” in the 00s and early 10s was doomed the minute it became an arms-race of technique. As you say, these techniques often auto-justify within small groups of acolytes, and their ‘success’ is too often untethered from their impact. The ever-smaller parts and gooey fusions with no hope of enclosure now seem to slide off the eye, and worse, they have begun to feel almost sentimental. I agree that architecture needs to be disconnected from process, and I’d argue that we need to actually break the tools rather than simply not talking about process. I don’t mean beating up our computers or anything like that, but rather using software badly to break the smoothness of employing software to its highest and best use. So breaking the tools might mean loosely moving in and out of different platforms, using certain functions to the ‘wrong’ ends or at the wrong scales or resolutions, or overlapping digital and analog techniques. The point would not be to create a secondary arms race of new “post-digital” techniques, but to avoid, at all costs, seeing the traces of these tools on the architectural object there in front of us. The minute you see how it was made, you’re dead. The way that idea is manifested in the office right now is through what I call “throw it down,” which is parlance for literally jamming, stacking, copying, rotating, and scaling things in a speedy, inelegant way. Of course we do this all in the latest software, which definitely mediates how we make those moves, but my guess is that we are overriding what the software wants to do most of the time.
Notes
1. Tom Wiscombe, “Discreteness, or Towards a Flat Ontology of Architecture,” Project 3 (Spring 2014): 34–43.