The Butcher Boys, Jane Alexander (South Africa), 1985-86

Download the full studio syllabus here.

from the Critical Theory Institute
University of California, Irvine

What futures hold for the category of the human when the self-as-proprietor explodes into a dispersed network of corporate interests? Whither social protest when the privatization of identity recodes interests as fungible preferences? How can critical theory map this post-humanist, or as some prefer to call it, posthuman landscape? How can we provide a theoretical grip on the new subjects and objects of a hyper-commodified world? Can we find theoretical means or grounds for a critique of the privatized human body that does not fall back into a humanist nostalgia?

Across disciplines and theoretical orientations, the very boundaries of the human are in the process of being redefined. The challenges to personhood have vast implications and ramifications beyond the material, political, economic, social and cultural spheres. They affect the social and cultural imaginary, the psychosocial formation of persons or subjects, as well as possible philosophical, ethical and epistemological conceptions of the subject, of personhood, and of agency more generally. A wide range of recent theories on the posthuman and the posthuman body (Deleuze/Guattari, Halberstam/ Livingston, Squier, Hayles, Haraway) as well as the inhuman (Lyotard) have been engaged in theorizing, analyzing, and conceptualizing these profound changes in the status of personhood. A whole body of current theoretical work is equally concerned with issues of privatization and related challenges to property and personhood. Theorizing the posthuman in critical theory today, concerns identity, sexual and gender politics, bioethics, communal politics, subject constitution, human and civil rights, as well as modes of information characteristic of a technological media culture.

Sidebar
The Cultural Landscape uses geographic concepts to emphasize where people and human activities are located, why they are located in particular locations, and what significance these observed arrangements represent.  That significance reveals relationships of power defined by parameters of technology, race, class, gender and sexuality.  That these set of relations can be understood as space is to theorize that space is "heterogeneous" and that "we live inside a set of relations that delineate sites, which are irreducible to one another, and absolutely not superimposable on one another.... one might attempt to describe these different sites by looking for the set of relations by which a given site can be defined."2

More specifically, the blurring of boundaries exponentiated by technology and media propel the changing relationship between the public and the private, and the challenges posed by privatization and new property constructs, similarly determine the politics of cultural reproduction, pertaining to the renegotiation— if not obliteration—of the boundaries between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, inhuman or posthuman. According to Halberstam and Livingston, "the posthuman does not necessitate the obsolescence of the human; it does not represent an evolution or devolution of the human. Rather it participates in re-distributions of difference and identity". Such profound redefinitions of personhood, and of the boundaries of the human more generally, pertain to global culture and global flows of capital, information, discourses, and bodies. In the social imaginary, they engender a particular "postmodern gothic," a "gothicization of the body" (Halberstam/Livingston) afloat with phantasms of the "body without organs" (Deleuze/Guattari; Beckett) or even of the "grotesque clone" (Baudrillard). If this posthuman body is, as Halberstam and Livingston argue, only the "seismograph and epicenter" of epistemic changes, the concomitant revaluation of cultural values affects all politics, transcoding the spheres of economy, technology, law, biology, culture, and psychology. Theories that trace the effects of globalization in the cultural imaginary—such as those of Appadurai, Jameson, Deleuze and Guattari, Haraway, among others—prepare the futures of theoretical models that make such transcodings part of their basic presuppositions.

Hence, as digital media, technology, and globalization, reconstitute the meanings of space and time as well as reshape the cultural landscape what are the affects upon the body and issues of space and "new" ways of seeing power/knowledge structures, hierarchies, boundaries, and borders in our political and socio-economic world?

Even while the very categories of the human, the subject, and personhood are under revision, the "human" is enjoying a remarkable renaissance in global discursive fields centered on "human rights." Human rights are precisely not a universal standard applied irrespective of place, not a bulwark against the processes of privatization or the reconfiguration of personhood. On the contrary, the very notion of human rights circulates within the circuits of governmentality structuring and structured by a privatized, neoliberal global economy. For example, the World Bank and IMF attach "human rights conditionality" to countries receiving "assistance" in "structural adjustment." Human rights become a device of governmentality and commodification when deployed as an index of "liberalization" (of markets) and "democratization" (of non-Western political orders). Thus, discourses of the human, human rights and humanitarianism need to be critically explored under these changed conditions.

Hence, the question for us is what is architecture's role in critical discourse as an instrument for seeing, translating, and spatializing relationships that underlay the questions of "human" and "human rights"?

Context

While the pressures of globalization and other transnational threats exert forces on human identities and cultures around the world, South Africa remains a particular case. Until fourteen years ago, South Africa remained a global pariah outside the sphere of globalization. With the end of apartheid South Africa became a global inspiration open to the global economy that had been denied during the Anti-Apartheid Movement and divestment campaigns. Yet, today the questions of identity politics are deeply impacted by the internalized forces after-affects of apartheid that are not so much reshaping human identity as questioning the value of human identity.

Hence, the context for this studio's investigations is situated in cultural contexts:  

     [Transformation-> identity -> society]

                        and a physical context

             [Formation ->identity -> body].  

Under the forces of 21st century globalization, these sites offer opportunities for cultural analysis, interrogation of the meaning of corporeality among the ephemera of digital life, and deployment of specific spatial, architectural, and urbanistic implications and possibilities.

Studio Purpose

How can architecture be critically deployed as an instrument in the network of human flows, cultural and commercial exchanges, public space, and urban life?  How can architecture spatialize this cultural context and confront the restructuring of social and cultural values brought on by the evermore-uncertain status of the body?

The studio project will entail the examination of the issues related to "human" and "post-human": body and society (knowledge) and the design of a Forum for Global Justice (Archive for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission) in Cape Town, South Africa.

The intent of the studio is to examine architecture's relationship to the liminal condition of the body in a globalized and disputed context.

Studio Design

The overall approach will be experimental with regard to both program and design methodology. The studio will be divided into two sections, which will operate at multiple scales.

Prosthetic Architecture
The first section will explore questions of the body and questions of identity through the examination of works by African artists.  These works will generate two sets of drawings:  

Set A ---> Analyses
Set B ---> Transformative / Generative

These drawings will be followed by the fabrication of a prosthesis to augment or "enhance" functions of the body.

Sidebar
It is no longer meaningful to see the body as a site for the psyche or the social but rather as a structure to be monitored and modified. The body not as a subject but as an object- not as an object of desire but as an object for designing. The psychosocial period was characterized by the body circling itself, orbiting itself, illuminating and inspecting itself by physical prodding and metaphysical contemplation. But having confronted its image of obsolescence, the body is traumatized to split from the realm of subjectivity and consider the necessity of reexamining and possibly redesigning its very structure [3]. Altering the architecture of the body results in adjusting and extending its awareness of the world. 3


Post Apartheid Posthuman
The second section will be an investigation and design intervention for The Forum for Global Justice (Archive for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission) in Cape Town, South Africa.

End Notes

¹ While the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 have slowed certain globalization flows in the short run, the shape and long-term trend of globalization remain significant.

² Michel Foucault,  "Des Espace Autres,"  (Of Other Spaces) published by the French journal Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité in October 1984.

³ Stelarc, "Prosthetics, Robotics and Remote Existence: Postevolutionary Strategies", Leonardo, Vol. 24, No. 5 (1991), pp. 591-595 Published by: The MIT Press.

Works Cited:


Posthuman Bodies. Eds. Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995.

Squier, Susan Merrill.

Babies in Bottles: Twentieth Century Visions of Reproductive Technology. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1994.
  

Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor W. The Culture Industry : Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Routledge Classics. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.

Ballard, Susan. “My Viewing Body Does Not End at the Skin. http://www.voyd.com/ttlg/textual/ballardessay.htm

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Baudrillard, Jean. “Radical Thought.” Translated by Francois Debrix. Sens & Tonka, Eds., Collection Morsure, Paris, 1994.

Baudrillard, Jean. “The Violence of the Global.”  Trans. By Francois Debrix. Ctheory.net. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, Editors. May 20, 2003. http://www.ctheory.net/text_file?pick=385.

Benjamin, Walter.  “The Task of the Translator.”  Illuminations. New York:  Schocken Books, 1969.

Crary, Jonathan.  “Modernity and the Problem of the Observer.”  Techniques of the Observer.  October Books.  Cambridge:  MIT Press. 1993. pp. 1 - 24.

Enwezor, Okwui. The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945-1994.  Munich:  Prestel Verlag.  2001.

Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics. (Spring) 1986.

Foucault, Michel. "Subject and Power." Michel Foucault. H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Editors. London:  Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982.

Graham, Elaine. "Post/Human Conditions."  Theology and Sexuality. 2004 Vol. 10. No. 2. p. 20.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman : Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Jameson, Frederic. “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology.”  Architecture Criticism Ideology. Joan Ockman, Editor. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1985. pp.51-93.

Kellner, Douglas. “Globalization and the Postmodern Turn.”

Kwinter, Sanford. Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.

Lokko, Leslie Nae. “White Papers, Black Marks – Architecture, Race, Culture.”

Moores, Shaun. “Media, Modernity and Lived Experience”. Journal of Communication Inquiry  19(1): 5-19, 1995.

Oguibe, Olu and Okwui Enwezor, Editors.  Reading the Contemporary:  African Art from Theory to the Marketplace.  London:  Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA). 1999.

Parker, Andrew and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Performativity and Performance. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Stelarc.  “Prosthetics, Robotics and Remote Existence: Postevolutionary Strategies.” Leonardo, Vol. 24, No. 5 (1991), pp. 591-595. Published by: The MIT Press.

Teyssot, George. "The Mutant Body of Architecture." Flesh: Architectural Probes. Ed. Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofido. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994. pp.8-35.

Tschumi, Bernard. “The Pleasure of Architecture.”  Questions of Space.  New Edition.  London:  Architectural Association, 1990.

Section One  - Recovering Sight: Research and Experimentation

Research one of the works listed below and develop two sets of drawings.

Set A = Analytical:

Draw out, discover, and uncover the content, meaning(s), and theoretical positions of the work.  The drawing(s) are a cultural autopsy and should seek to reveal the pathologies of production and representation inherent in the work as they pertain to issues of identity.  Hence, the autopsy must be executed with rigor and precision of conceptualization and execution.

Each work is highly precise in terms of its conceptual structure and representation.  Therefore, the drawings should be vector based or parametric yet highly experimental in terms of analysis and methodology.  You are encouraged to be inventive. The analyses should simultaneously embody meaning(s) and re-present a theoretical position.

For Thirty Years Next to His Heart. 1990 – Sue Williamson

Color laser prints in handmade frames (49 in total) 196 x 262cm

Diary of a Victorian Dandy:  14.00 hours. 1998 – Yinka Shonibare

Chromogenic print 183 x 228cm

Snow White. 2001 – Berni Searle

Double projection video installation, opposite each other, in sync. Duration 9 minutes

Ai 26s Smoke Tik, Beaufort West. 2006 - Mikhael Subotzky

Chromogenic color print, (82 x 100 cm).

The Butcher Boys. 1985-86 – Jane Alexander

Plaster, bone, horn, oil, paint, wood 128.5 x 213.5 x 88.5cm

Grazing at Shendi. 1969 – Amir Nour

Stainless steel, 202 pieces 304 x 411cm, variable

Game Station. 2002 – Pascale Marthine Tayou

Mixed media installation

Blind Alphabet. 1995 – Willem Boshoff

Wooden sculptures -338 pieces, wire baskets, Braille on aluminium, cloth, steel base

Dimensions variable.  
Base and basket: 72 x 35 x 50.5cm each

Nothing to Loose XII ('Bodies of Experience'). 1989 - Rotimi Fani-Kayode

Dye destruction print 49.5 x 49.5cm

Sympathetic Magic. 2002 -  Penny Siopsis

Mixed media installation

King (A Portrait of Michael Jackson). 2005 – Candice Breitz

16-Channel Installation: 16 Hard Drives

Duration: 42 minutes, 20 seconds

Lifeline. 1999 – Berni Searle

Digital prints, archival pigment ink on arches watercolour paper

24 photographs 42x50 cm each

Set B = Generative

Generate a second set of drawings (based upon Set A) with spatial and three dimensional implications.  The theoretical position articulated in Set A should sustain the transformation from the analysis of the production of identity to the re-presentation of identity with implications to transform the body.  Structure / Surface / Volume

The new set (Set B) will be used to generate a prosthetic architecture that will engage your body at a 1:1 scale.

Schedule

.01.30.09         -         Pin Up Discussion

.02.13.09         -         Quarter Term Review

.03.06.09         -         Mid-Term Review – Prosthetic Architecture (Body)

03.08.09         -         03.15.09 South Africa

Readings

Ballard, Susan. “My Viewing Body Does Not End at the Skin. http://www.voyd.com/ttlg/textual/ballardessay.htm

Enwezor, Okwui. The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945-1994.  Munich:  Prestel Verlag.  2001.

Foucault, Michel. "Subject and Power." Michel Foucault. H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Editors. London:  Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman : Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Oguibe, Olu and Okwui Enwezor, Editors.  Reading the Contemporary:  African Art from Theory to the Marketplace.  London:  Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA). 1999.

Teyssot, George. "The Mutant Body of Architecture." Flesh: Architectural Probes. Ed. Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofido. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994. pp.8-35.