Current Issue    (Sustainability) + Pleasure, vol. 1: Culture + Architecture Number 30, Spring/Summer 2009

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Sustainability and Pleasure
An Untimely Meditation

By Andrew Payne

We should love even more
Pleasure attained morbidly, harmfully.
The body rarely feels what pleasure wants,
What morbidity and harm provide.
--Constantine Cavafy

The pairing of the terms sustainability and pleasure recalls a distinction familiar from historical discussions of architecture, a distinction between the discipline’s utilitarian and hedonistic dedications. Sometime before Vitruvius placed venustas in relative isolation from the terminological doublet that articulates his response to the necessitarian aspects of human accommodation (fermitas, utilitas), Cicero had already distinguished those arts devoted to the satisfaction of necessity, among which he had one-sidedly included architecture, from those devoted to the pursuit of pleasure.1 The distinction is made explicit in the dyadic formula “beauty and utility,” that organizes 18th-century thinking about landscape and to a lesser extent the building arts. The distinction of 19th-century architectural theorist Carl Bötticher between Kernform and Kunstform, which conceived the difference between the structural and artistic modalities of tectonic expression on the model of St. Augustine’s distinction between kernal and husk, represents still a third instance of this oppositional schema.2 In each of these examples, as in so many others, it is a matter of differentiating what is required from what is desired, those aspects of a building or a landscape thought to satisfy the conditions necessary to preserving an existent in its mere being from those necessary for precipitating those affective events thanks to which mere being is transformed into well-being. One powerful definition of architecture, shared by theorists as diverse as Alberti and Hegel, describes it as that art whose specificity consists precisely in the burden it carries of bridging necessity and pleasure, being and well-being.

Seen from this perspective, the pairing of sustain-ability and pleasure may seem to represent little more than the translation of this familiar schema into the idiom of a cultural epoch at once acutely sensitive to the fragility of the ecosystem that sustains it and acutely skeptical about the ideological motivations that underpin the narrow and idealist theorization of pleasure as aesthetic apprehension. Having said that, the interest of this semantic doublet may consist less in the way it adjusts familiar historical formulae than in the way it may be thought either to disavow or to implicitly contest the conception of architecture, and of cultural practice generally, that dominated the period immediately antecedent to our bioconstructive present, to wit, that period during which thinking in both the cultural disciplines and the human sciences was largely shaped by structuralist and the post-structuralist perspectives.

Adherents to these perspectives are known to have viewed as antagonistic the relationship between those behaviors devoted to the pursuit of desire and pleasure and those devoted to the provision of what is needed. If neo-structuralist thinkers like Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes are today largely remembered as theorists of pleasure and desire, it is because they challenged the utilitarian underpinnings of our common assumptions concerning these terms, teaching us not only to separate the vicissitudes of desire from the exigencies of mere need, but also to observe behind what we imagine to be our pleasures a jouissance whose most salient quality is its indifference, even hostility, to our personal well-being. From 1968 to the end of the 20th century, the influence of structuralist and post-structuralist thought (Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard) exercised a significant influence on a wide range of professional (Herman Hertzberger, Bernard Tschumi, Jean Nouvel, Peter Eisenman) and critical (Massimo Cacciari, Manfredo Tafuri, K. Michael Hays, Anthony Vidler, Mark Wigley, Beatriz Colomina) practices in architecture. Although important differences can be observed between these various players in their various domains, a set of intellectual and ethical commitments can be said to characterize the corporate ethos that emerges from that diversity: an insistence on the autonomy and artificiality of all forms of social and cultural practice (an insistence typically, though not invariably, predicated on the assumption of a radical discontinuity separating the cognitive and symbolic capacities of humans from that of other animal species); a suspicion, allied with this notion of cultural autonomy, of every naturalist or necessitarian explanatory framework for describing the genesis of human pleasure and desire and those cultural activities associated with them (hence the celebration of the destructive and transgressive impulse at work in all forms of cultural sublimation, as against the interpretation of those forms as strategies of bio-cultural adaptation); and, finally, but perhaps most consequentially for our purposes, a resolute insistence on negation of the given as a precondition for the production of human significance (a negation typically conceived as involving the expurgation of all vital substance from those materials comprising the given).

The counter-vitalist ethos that underpins this constellation of commitments is aptly expressed in Jacques Derrida’s sympathetic assessment of the structuralist legacy, offered in an essay written in 1963, in which he links the revelation of structure to a certain de-animation of form: “The relief and design of structures appears more clearly when the content, which is the living energy of meaning, is neutralized. Somewhat like the architecture of an uninhabited or deserted city, reduced to its skeleton by some catastrophe of nature or art. A city no longer in-habited, not simply left behind, but haunted by meaning and culture.”3 The conception of architecture that these lines communicate follows a legacy that includes, alongside Hegel’s description of architecture’s original vocation as one of containing not the life but the death of the mind, Adolf Loos’s description of architecture as the precise inverse of a machine for living: “When walking through a wood, you find a rise in the ground, six feet long and three feet wide, heaped up in a rough pyramidal shape, then you turn serious, and something inside you says: someone lies buried here. There is architecture.”4

Nothing could be further from the dedications giving rise to Derrida’s “deserted city,” with its diverse antecedents, than the sustainable ideals currently driving our thinking about the contemporary biopolis. To this we might add that nothing could be further from the critical reevaluations of the aesthetic project undertaken by post-structuralist thinkers like Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, and Paul de Man (in which the Kantian sublime is valued as locus of both an imbrication of pleasure and pain and a renunciation of the organicist and gestaltist underpinnings of Kant’s aesthetic of the beautiful) than the trivializing thematizations of sensation and affect that are today offered as critical filigree to a set of artistic and architectural practices apparently intent on refashioning the urban landscape into a colossal cabinet of mediatic wonders. In this garden of post-metropolitan marvels, curiosity and delight advance untroubled by either the demand for critical reflection or that sort of dread that comes from meditating on the fact, implacable from every ontogenetic perspective, that life is unsustainable by design.

That reflection and that dread can be said to have formed the very marrow of the age that has just passed, a morbid and histrionically artificial age in which nature existed largely as something to be negated or transgressed, in which the givenness of immediate circum-stances was not taken to set any insurmountable limit on the infinitude of human desire, and in which a certain “beyond the pleasure principle” was thought to serve as origin and end of every form of human significance.

How is it that we have migrated with such stealth from Derrida’s deserted city to this at once post-critical and post-human biopolis in which the model of the ruin gives way to the model of the animate network, in which the life process has come to represent an absolute value, and in which pleasure is its own justification? In responding to that question, I will focus primarily on the first term in our pair, sustainability. However, in my conclusion I will return to the question of pleasure in order to suggest that its current discussion is, no less than the discussion of sustainability, keyed to the at once biotechnical and biopolitical disposition of our age.

Scarcity and its discontents: Malthus avec Lacan

The geological ages have left their waste, too, waste that allows us to recognize order. But the pile of garbage is one of the sides of the human dimension that it would be wrong to mistake…. There’s never any problem in recognizing man’s passage through the world, his footstep, mark, trace, touch; there where one finds a huge accumulation of oyster shells, only man can have manifestly been.
--Jacques Lacan

Scanning the abundant literature on sustainability, it is difficult to find a version that does not in one way or another imply a notion that was anathema to structuralist and post-structuralist thought: scarcity.5 This notion has a distinguished history in modern economic theory. Dating from the Enlightenment physiocrats, it is associated with the view that the origin of human wealth is to be found in a nature whose resources are finite. Influential expressions of this view that human wealth in both its productive and its consumptive modalities is insuperably linked to the finitude of natural resources, most especially energy resources, can be found in later texts such as Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) and W. Stanley Jevons’s The Coal Question (1865). It is no less apparent in a set of remarks that Friedrich Engels makes to Marx eighteen years after the publication of The Coal Question. Concerning the attempts of the Ukranian physicist Sergei Podolinski to translate energy into a universal currency by means of which the economic cycles associated with the traditional work-based theory of value could be integrated, along thermodynamic lines, with the cycles of nature, Engels remarks: “What Podolinski has completely forgotten is that the working man is not only a fixer of present solar heat, but more than that, a squanderer of past solar heat. The degree of wastage of energy reserves, coal, minerals, forests, etc., you know only too well, more so than I.”6

Marx shared Engels’s skepticism concerning Podolinski’s attempt to naturalize the economic conception of social value as well as a cognizance of the problem of waste that the capitalist ratiocination of production and consumption implies; however, in Marx’s thought, Engels’s concern for the “wastage of energy reserves” is eclipsed by the historical optimism arising from his insistence on the superabundance of humanity’s productive power relative to its needs. To that extent his constructivist rather than naturalist theory of social value places the accent, pace Podolinski and his physiocratic predecessors, on a work-based rather than a resource-based conception of wealth.

Beyond the context of Marx’s and Engels’s critique of political economy, the conception of economic scarcity on the model of thermodynamic entropy (that is, as correlated to an ever-diminishing energy base) continued to make its influence felt in the newly emerging science of ecology, which the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel had defined as early as 1870 in a way that underlines the link between bioenergetics and economics explored above. Ecology is, on Haeckel’s definition, “the economics of nature.”7 Kindred attempts to naturalize economics on this neo-thermodynamic model can be observed in late- 19th- and early-20th-century planners and geographers like Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford, and Benton MacKaye. In terms that recall the second law of thermodynamics, Geddes decried the “dissipation of energy” and “deterioration of life” characteristic of his own “paleotechnic” epoch, and called for a new, neotechnical order committed to “conserving energies” and “organizing environment toward the maintenance and evolution of life.”8

After a temporary eclipse in the postwar period, a resurgence of interest in energy accounting appears in the early 1970s, in part as a response to the emergence of a new ecological consciousness as one facet of ’60s subculture and in part, no doubt, as a response to an oil crisis that made the geoeconomic implications of energy expenditure more immediately palpable. In works like Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, the need to think economic planning after a fashion responsive to the distribution of matter and energy inherent in natural processes is acutely felt.9 Georgescu-Roegen’s work also registers the reverberations, within the discipline of economics, of the analogical absorption of thermodynamic models within the new sciences of information and cybernetics.

This integration of bioenergetic, economic, and informational regimes also undergirds the introduction of eco-logical perspectives into landscape architecture in the 1970s, most especially in the work of Ian McHarg. Echoing the critiques of paleotechnic culture advanced by Geddes, MacKaye, and Mumford, McHarg enjoined the discipline to participate in an ecological orientation that would wed a new technical agenda (involving both novel methods for the production, analysis, and representation of data and a systems approach to the analysis of natural environments) to a philosophy of social change rooted in a homemade phenomenology organized around the figure of a planetary oikos. At the same time, we can observe, in works of this period like Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, a recrudescence of the scarcity scenarios first painted by Malthus.10

By the middle of the 20th century, and in part through the mediation of Marx and his followers, the thematics of scarcity had begun to resonate well beyond the trans-actions between modern political economy, thermo-dynamic science, and the emerging science of ecology. For instance, the term has a role in Jean-Paul Sartre’s account, modeled on Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, of the inter-psychic mechanisms giving rise to social alienation. In Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, the association of “scarcity” with a need whose determination would be in the last instance biological is over-turned in favor of a conception in which what is scarce is not the means of sustaining one’s vital existence, but the means for having that existence recognized by human others.11 If such recognition remains the most elusive and therefore existentially expensive of commodities, it is because its enjoyment is by definition unilateral. The existential one-upmanship that is implicit in this account of social recognition as a zero-sum game is apparent in a remark made by Sartre in his earlier and more famous text, Being and Nothingness: “I group the other’s look at the very center of my act as the solidification and alienation of my own possibilities…. I perceive that these possibilities which I am and which are the condition of my transcendence are given also to another, given as about to be transcended by his own possibilities. The other as a look is only that—my transcendence transcended.”12

Sartre found a worthy antagonist to his scarcity theory of the social in Georges Bataille, one to whom both structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers would turn to inform their own critical negotiations with the subject-centered and humanist dimensions of the existential legacy. According to Bataille’s gloss on the master/slave dialectic, human relations (and by extension the laws of symbolic exchange) are organized not around a fundamental scarcity or lack (expressing itself in the impossibility of reciprocal recognition between members of the social Bande), but rather around a constitutive surplus or waste. Hence for Bataille, who opposed the Hegelian conception of desire as want or lack, the primal scene of the social is not agonal but orgiastic, so that the various symbolic operations and forms that make up the social order are read not as a set of violence-deferring rituals in which social recognition is negotiated and social power stratified, but rather as so many mechanisms for containing the process of ecstatic de-individuation implied by the primitive wasting of our vital powers, a wasting that represents, according to Bataille, both the origin and the elusive object of collective desire.

Bataille’s critique of both bio-economic (Malthusian) and socioeconomic (Hegelian/Kojèvean13/Sartrean) extensions of the concept of scarcity finds its most developed expression in his three-volume work, The Accursed Share. In the first volume’s introductory chapter, “The Meaning of General Economy,” Bataille reveals the extent to which the bioenergetic conception of human wealth described above informed his own theory of social value. There he begins by posing the following questions concerning the relationship between human productivity and the planetary distribution of energy. “Shouldn’t productive activity as a whole be considered in terms of the modifications it receives from its surroundings or brings about in its surroundings? … Is the general determination of energy circulating in the biosphere altered by man’s activity? Or rather, isn’t the latter’s intention vitiated by a determination of which it is ignorant, which it overlooks and cannot change?”14 These questions have lost none of their relevance today.

In the response that he offers to the last in this series of questions, Bataille makes it clear that what “vitiates” the aims of human praxis is the planetary distribution of vital forces in conformity with an end placed refractory to those ends that are the targets of human design. As Bataille puts it: “Beyond our immediate ends, man’s activity in fact pursues the useless and infinite fulfillment of the universe.”15 According to Bataille, who here translates Hegel’s cunning of reason into the parlance of bio-energetics, the differential between the amount of energy acquired by the human organism and the amount required to sustain its vital functions serves as an index of the gap between those immediate ends to which we imagine ourselves to be directing our vital powers and the suprapersonal processes from which those powers originate and which they must ultimately be thought to serve. An insistence on this differential, this original surplus of biopower relative to the immediate requirements of individuated existence, forms the heart of Bataille’s critique of scarcity as an anthropocentric fiction. The move from a “restricted” to a “general” economy therefore consists in an economic analysis of the planetary distribution of energy that views the production of wealth from within the superhuman frame suggested by our awareness that the origin of the vital force that animates our actions is not to be found in ourselves. Says Bataille:

On the surface of the globe, for living matter in general, energy is always in excess; the question is always posed in terms of extravagance. The choice is limited to how the wealth is to be squandered. It is to the particular being, or to limited populations of living beings, that the problem of necessity presents itself. But man is not just the separate being that contends with the living world and with other men for his share of resources. The general movement of exudation (of waste) of living matter impels him, and he cannot stop it; moreover, being at the summit, his sovereignty in the living world identifies him with this movement; it destines him, in a privileged way, to that glorious operation, to useless consumption.16

Bataille’s insistence on the gap separating the intentions informing the conscious expenditure of our vital powers from the significance they acquire in contexts that are not of our own devising suggests Freud’s theory of the unconscious. But both his discussions of the constitutive role that waste and excess have in the distribution of vital forces and the privilege he accords to processes of ecstatic de-individuation suggest a more specific affinity with Freud’s concept of the death drive. It is well known that this concept itself benefited from what we have already observed to be the broad dissemination of thermodynamic models (and in particular those relating to the second law) into other fields of intellectual endeavor. The affinities between the operation of laying waste that lies at the heart of Bataille’s conception of wealth and Freud’s metapsychological musings on an unconscious cause in excess of the instinct for pleasure are arguably clarified by the reexamination of the death drive that Jacques Lacan, a close acquaintance of Bataille’s, undertakes in his seventh seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis.17

Like Bataille, Lacan was concerned to separate the mechanisms of human desire from any biologistic concept of scarcity or need; like Bataille, Lacan was inclined to relate the extra-necessitarian dimensions of desire to a limit-experience that he described using the vocabulary of excess and waste; like Bataille, Lacan described this limit-experience as implying the death or disintegration of the ego; and, finally, like Bataille, Lacan associates this limit with a transcendence immanent to immanence, which is to say the life process, itself. However, whereas Bataille’s invocations of the death drive are largely incidental or implicit, Lacan pursues these themes through a nuanced if tendentious reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, one in which his neo-structuralist conception of the unconscious drives a wedge between the biogenetic strands of Freud’s argument and their psychogenetic corollaries. The novel theory of the death drive that emerges from this rereading is one in which the operation of the drive is linked to our human facility for language, a facility that is in turn linked by Lacan to a radical alienation of the human subject from the cycles of genesis and decay that define biological existence. Lacan calls this his “creationism,” a creation-ism he places in explicit opposition to the advocacy of evolutionary perspectives in the human sciences. In the chapter on “The Death Drive” in his Ethics seminar, Lacan warns:

Beware of the register of thought known as evolutionism … for two reasons…. The first reason is that, however much the evolutionist movement and Freud’s thought may share in terms of contemporaneity and historical affinities, there is a fundamental contradiction between the hypotheses of the one and the thought of the other. I have already indicated the necessity of creation ex nihilo as that which gives birth to the historical dimension of the drive. In the beginning was the Word, which is to say the signifier. Without the signifier at the beginning it is impossible for the drive to be articulated as historical. And this is all it takes to introduce the dimension of the ex nihilo into the structure of the analytical field.18

This rereading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle turns on a delamination of the two principles around which Freud’s theory had been organized, the nirvana principle and the repetition principle. This delamination in turns involves a disentangling of the two distinct registers, biological and psychical, that are so notoriously inter-twined in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and in psycho-analysis generally. For if the principle of repetition concerns a return of that surcharge of psychical tension Freud associates with the replaying of an originally traumatic experience (and so refers to a strictly psychical distinction between pleasure and pain) the nirvana principle refers to an abolition of chemical tensions within the biological organism prior to any affective differentiation of experience.

Lacan’s innovation is to assimilate the nirvana principle, along with that biogenetic dimension of Freud’s discussion of the death drive associated with it, to the pleasure principle, so as then to situate the nucleus of the death drive in the repetition principle, a principle whose operation he describes as articulating the lure of desire along a vector refractory to the one that articulates those needs and satisfactions associated with the living organism: “It is because the movement of desire is in the process of crossing the line of a kind of unveiling that the advent of the Freudian notion of the death drive is meaningful for us. The question is raised at the level of the relation of the human being to the signifier as such, to the extent that at the level of the signifier every cycle of being may be called into question, including life in its movement of loss and return.”19

For Lacan, the capacity of language to separate humanity from the vital continuum that links the other species has everything to do with its capacity to place “every cycle of being” in question. According to him, no other species can do this. However, if language is thought by Lacan to have an essential bearing on the humanity of the human being, it must be added that this is only the case insofar as it simultaneously brings to light an inhumanity endemic to the human, a sovereign indifference to the set of conditions that define our collective attachment to the laws of natural necessity.

What decisively distinguishes our own moment from that of Lacan and his contemporaries can be indexed to the eclipse of this privilege granted to language and that task of inhumanizing the human with which it was charged over the period in which structuralist and post-structuralist approaches were regnant. On the other side of that eclipse, we can observe the new privilege granted to that very “life” whose value the Lacanian signifier had temporarily put in question. We may take as one symptom of this vitalist turn in contemporary thought, Giorgio Agamben’s remark, made in an essay published in 1996, that “the concept of ‘life’ … must constitute the subject of the coming philosophy,” a philosophy whose prescient exponents he took Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze to be.20

The biopolitical turn

And whosoever was not found in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.
--Revelation 20:15

Today, the social-constructivist conceit, promulgated by representatives of both structuralist and post-structuralist perspectives, that the raw is merely a disguised form of the cooked (since its rawness is in fact only raw in relation to an already established social practice called cooking) has given way to the bioconstructive conceit that the cooked is merely a disguised form of the raw (since there can be no cooking and no point to cooking in the absence of something whose mere givenness is available for being cooked). Evolutionary aestheticians like Frederick Turner, George Hersey, and John Tooby and Leda Cosmides inform us that the beauty that Lacan had linked to the intervention of the signifier in the libidinal destiny of the human animal is in fact merely the symbolic elaboration of practices observable in the sexual rituals of nonhuman species and therefore an atavism traceable to the mechanisms of biological selection.21 Neuroscientists like Jean-Pierre Changeux inform us that what we imagine to be the autonomous exercise of those theoretical and ethical powers that our post-Enlightenment political and cultural institutions enshrine are merely epiphenomena of electrical and chemical activities correlated in a large population of neurons in several specific cortical regions.22 Philosophers like Manuel DeLanda argue that the principles of self-organization at work in the formation of a human collective are homologous to those at work in the formation of, say, a hurricance, while others, like Donna Harraway, urge us to build our projects of political consensus not around the androcentric trinity of the political animal, the speaking animal, and the rational animal, but rather around the animal plain and simple.23 Everywhere we look the specter of a nature we once imagined ourselves as having exorcised from our social constructions makes its uncanny return—I say “uncanny” because the nature that returns is one thoroughly saturated in culture, haunted by the spectral presence of human desire and design.

Restricting himself to the political manifestations of this naturalist tendency, Roberto Esposito has elaborated a three-stage genealogy of the phenomenon, which, following Foucault and others, he calls biopolitics.24 The first, organicist stage, represented by the writings of the Swedish anthropologist Rudolf Kjellén (apparently the first to employ both the term bio-politics and the term geopolitics) and the German biologist Jakob von Uexküll, advances a biological conception of the state body in which the various classes and estates comprising the nation are seen as so many organs working on behalf of a spontaneously integrated organism.25 In many respects, this image of a biopolitical body is a very familiar one, numbering among its numerous historical variants Plato’s organicist conception of an ideal republic, the fictions of state linking emperor and imperium in the Roman Republic, and the constitutional fictions of incorporation that inform the theory of monarchy in medieval and early modern Europe. But the idea of the state as an organism takes on a different tenor in this new context, since it seeks legitimacy in the disciplines of the modern life sciences, in particular anatomy, physiology, and pathology, with the result that an entirely new relationship emerges between power and the bodies of those who are subjected to it. Esposito observes that of these three disciplines the new science of pathology was to prove most consequential in the German context, where it would soon give rise to a discourse in which certain sectors of society (Jews, homosexuals, Communists, etc.) would be treated as diseases to be eradicated in the name of the health of the body politic.

On Esposito’s account, the second stage in the development of a modern biopolitics can be dated to the French postwar context. Exemplified by works like Aroon Starobinski’s La biopolitique: Essai d’interprétation de l’histoire de l’humanité et des civilisations (1960) and Edgar Morin’s Introduction à une politique de l’homme (1969),26 this stage is marked by a distance taken with respect to the eugenicist implications of first-generation biopolitics and a neo-humanist insistence that recognition of the biological needs of a populace as a deter-mining factor in its political development need not preclude an appreciation for other—cultural and spiritual—factors.

Esposito situates the third stage in this genealogy in America, and dates its inception from Lynton Caldwell’s “Biopolitics: Science, Ethics, and Public Policy” (1964), before following its major episodes through the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. According to Esposito, what characterizes this stage in the development of bio-political thought is an unprecedented naturalization of the relationship between bios and polis. As Esposito puts it: “American biopolitics sees in nature … not only the genetic origin and first material, but also the sole controlling reference. Politics is anything but able to dominate nature or conform to its ends so itself emerges informed in such a way that it leaves no space for other constructive possibilities. … Against the thesis that social events require complex historical explanations, they refer here finally to dynamics that are tied to evolutive [sic] demands of a species such as ours, different quantitatively, but not qualitatively, from the animal that precedes and comprises our species.”27

Despite considerable enthusiasm for this naturalist tendency, apparent at all points along the contemporary political spectrum, a growing skepticism concerning its political and ethical implications has begun to emerge from at least some interested observers. Taking aim at the biopolitics of post-Fordist economics in The New Spirit of Capitalism, Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello question the “naturalization” of political dynamics that occurs when the ideologues of the new economies of “flexible labor” resort to an analogy between their own organizational structures and the models neuroscientists employ in describing brain plasticity. Arguing that capitalist production accedes to representation in each epoch by mobilizing concepts and tools that were initially developed in the theoretical sphere, they contend that this “naturalization effect is [today] especially powerful in those disciplines which, aiming to connect biology and society, derive the social bond from implantation in the order of living organisms.”28 The social critic Alenka Zupan?i? identifies the psychosocial correlates of this naturalization of the organizational and disciplinary regimes of the new economy in what she observes to be the rise of eudaemonism as a form of biomorality:

There is a spectacular rise of what we might call biomorality (as well as a morality of feelings and emotions) which promotes the following fundamental axiom: A person who feels good … is a good person; a person who feels bad is a bad person. It is the short circuit between the immediate feelings/sensations and the moral value that gives its specific color to the contemporary ideological rhetoric of happiness…. Biomorality … is replacing the classical notion of responsibility with the notion of a damaged, corrupt being: The unhappy and the unsuccessful are somehow corrupt already on the level of their bare life…. The problem is not simply that success and efficiency have become the supreme values of our capitalist society…. The problem is … that success is becoming almost a biological notion.”29

Perhaps the most unflinching critic of this biophilic tendency is Alain Badiou, stalwart defender of the Lacanian faith, who inveighs against the “animal human-ism” that he describes as the dominant ethos in this “age of ecology.”30 Working with an ontology formalized on the model of post-Cantorian set theory, and which he explicitly opposes to Deleuze’s ontology of life, Badiou articulates a philosophy that looks to mathematical formalization to complete the task of inhumanizing the human that Lacan had identified with the operation of the signifier, a task that for him involves the progressive liberation of humanity’s decisionist capacity for inventing the new from every form of biological dependency.

Badiou’s thought represents a bracing reassertion of the passion for formalization characteristic of structuralist and post-structuralist thought and a clear riposte to the neo-vitalist celebrations of flux and flow associated with the thought of Deleuze. But how do these debates concerning the theoretical legitimacy and ethical probity of the biopolitical paradigm, urgent as they may be, concern the technical, political, and ethical agendas of the sustainability movement, a movement whose advocates have been, on the whole, both pragmatic and consensus-building in their fundamental orientation and comparatively modest in their theoretical ambitions?

Sustaining what?

The device by which the living organism maintains itself … consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment.
--Erwin Schröedinger, What is Life?

Whatever the pragmatism and theoretical modesty of its adherents, sustainability as a social and political agenda finds its horizon of intelligibility within the at once biotechnical and biopolitical context described above, and no evaluation of its theoretical interest and political effects can be undertaken in the absence of attention to the ways in which its agendas resonate within that context, at once affecting it and being affected by it. As I have observed, this context is one in which all forms of group affiliation and all differences of ideological commitment tend to be referred back to a natural condition whose potentials are thought to circumscribe the range of human possibility and whose protection is thought to set the limit on every exercise of collective autonomy. The need to attend to the biopolitical implications of the sustainability agenda have become more acute as it has moved from the margins to the center of political and social policy discussion, not infrequently alongside expressions of concern for the social and environmental effects of economic globalization. That centrality was signaled by the codification of the movement’s fundamental commitments in Our Common Future, a report produced by the Brundtland Commission in 1987.31 Stressing the significance of economic, social, and cultural factors in responding to the current environ-mental crisis, the report advocates three principles: intra- and intergenerational equity, the conservation of biodiversity, and the adoption of caution in response to economic and technological initiatives whose environ-mental consequences are uncertain.

Equity, biodiversity, prudent development—it’s hard to argue with any of this. However, what sets the advocates of sustainability apart from other progressive political tendencies is a commitment, inherited from earlier ecological movements, to viewing the environment as a primary and, if prudently managed, perduring matrix out of which social and political institutions emerge as secondary manifestations of adaptive behaviors homologous to those found in the settlement practices of non-human species. This assumption of the at once logical and chronological priority of the natural system over its social and political correlatives can have the effect of precipitously foreclosing the question of how these various regimes interact with one another within the dynamics linking natural and cultural history, and further, what degree and sort of autonomy those interactions make possible. The posing of such questions is made all the more urgent when we consider how actively the bio-political legacy to which the sustainability movement attaches itself—a legacy that includes Geddes, MacKaye, Mumford, and McHarg—participated in a faith that the resolution of every political difference could be achieved through neotechnic adjustment of the bioenergetic ledger.

In the North American context, the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Katrina brought into bold relief the imbrication of ecological, economic, and political registers to which Our Common Future points. Architectural responses to the disaster also served to reveal the extent to which the rhetoric of sustainability can serve to obscure the complex and highly contested ways in which custodianship of the natural environment is negotiated against the demand for social justice. New Orleans: Strategies for a City in SoftLand, the published results of a studio under-taken at the Harvard Graduate School of Design with the support of the Tulane Architecture in 2005–2006, is symptomatic in this regard.32

In his lead article for the publication, “The Future of New Orleans,” Joan Busquets expresses a confidence, more broadly characteristic of architectural responses to Katrina, that “the difficulties that occupied the city during the disaster” can be bracketed so as to focus on “the city’s urbanistic conditions and its intrinsic values.”33 That these conditions may be inextricably linked to the difficulties that arose from them does not seem to have occurred to Busquets. Drawing, if only implicitly, on the legacy of Geddes, Mumford, and MacKaye (in which the city is treated as the central node in a regional network integrating natural systems and technological infra-structure according to the principles of energy accounting described above), Busquets situates the origins of the disaster in an exorbitant faith in the power of modern hydrological infrastructure to keep at bay the implacable givens of a deltaic landscape, and calls for a reconception not only of the city but of the region in more sustainable terms. In other words, he identifies both the origin of the disaster and the target of any future architectural intervention in a mismatch of ecological conditions and techno-logical infrastructure.

Busquets’s compelling observations concerning this mismatch of natural conditions and industrial infra-structure ought not to be dismissed. However, his single-minded insistence on that issue has the effect of effacing the complex interlacing of natural and cultural history that the Katrina event implies, with the result that any architectural response to the racialized diaspora that has occurred in the aftermath of that event is effectively effaced.

In some respects, Busquets’s response deserves to be seen as a gesture of professional realism. The truth is that the complexities associated with reconstructing the morphological conditions of a regional landscape, myriad and gargantuan as they are, are probably more tractable to the sorts of technical solution that architects and urban designers are trained to provide than are the complexities relating to historically entrenched and racially inflected economic inequity or flagrantly uneven access to inter-generational “quality of life.” But does the interest in keeping our pragmatic sights on what can be done justify bracketing the economic, social, and political dimensions of Katrina? In speaking about the conditions under which they labor, do architects not have an obligation to speak not only to the question of what must be done, but also to the question of what cannot be done, and, beyond that, to name the forces that impose these largely unspoken but nevertheless aggressively operative limitations and imperatives?

If professional realism means anything, it must mean that practitioners have an obligation to represent and criticize the limits of their professional agency and the ways those limits condition their response to the task of negotiating competing ecological, economic, and social-political demands. To represent and reflect on these limits in a practice that moves thoughtfully between professional performance and active citizenship represents a gesture more propitious to intergenerational equity than the act of conceptual disabitato that serves as the prelude to Bouquets’s naturalist projections.

A second essay in this publication, Ila Berman’s “Fluid Cartographies and Material Diagrams,” brings into focus the confluence between the ecologically minded advocates of sustainability and the neo-avant-garde advocates of animated architecture, a confluence that flows from their shared commitment to treating social systems and their attendant infrastructures as “living systems,” fully homologous to those found in the natural world.34 Purporting to de-sediment what she, using the familiar McHargian terminology, describes as the “deep ecological milieu from which the environment of New Orleans emerged,” Berman goes on to characterize this milieu in signally Deleuzian terms as a “rhizomatic fluvial matrix. ” This labor of de-sedimentation is advanced, on her account, by means of a diagrammatic practice that Berman contrasts with what she imagines to be a post-structuralist preoccupation with representation and language.

The contrast is dubious at best, and clearly issues from a very casual appraisal of Deleuze’s work and its singularity and significance within the broader canon of post-structuralist thought. As more than one commentator has noted, an interest in diagrammatic methods, far from being peculiar to Deleuze, is more broadly a feature of the post-structuralist tendency, making itself felt not only in Deleuze and Foucault but also in Lacan, Derrida, Alain Badiou, and others.35 What is more, her comments concerning the preoccupation with language and re-presentation ignores the fact that a deconstruction of the metaphysical opposition of presentation (Darstellung) and representation (Vorstellung) that was central in the work of all the thinkers associated with post-structuralism implies a conception of language in which Berman’s distinction between linguistic and extralinguistic operations is effectively subverted.

Berman’s flagrant misrepresentation both of the post-structuralist project and of Deleuze’s complex relation-ship to it would be entirely forgettable were it not for the fact that it echoes a set of prejudices currently prevalent in architecture, prejudices whose effect it is to obscure the complex legacy associated with the post-structuralist moment, but more importantly, the extent to which this legacy can still be leveraged in our efforts to address the dilemmas that today appear at the intersection of ecological, economic, and social-political crises. That potential is especially apparent in the range of penetrating analyses of our current biopolitical situation that has emerged not only from those immediately associated with the post-structuralist legacy (Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Agamben, Antonio Negri, Esposito, Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière) but also from a younger generation of thinkers deeply affected by their work (Cary Wolfe, Judith Butler, David Wills, Bernard Stiegler, Eugene Thacker).36

A more patient reception of this thought would reveal its relevance for any assessment of the political implications of sustainability as it is practiced and spoken about in the design disciplines. More especially, it would allow us to arrive at a clearer understanding of why the concept of life should have come to assume the prominence and authority that it has in current architectural discussion, and why it should have assumed that authority at a moment when the meaning of that concept has never been less certain. Suspended between the animal and the human, the organic and the inorganic, the biological and the informatic, the virtual and the actual, the cosmic and the microscopic, life—at once absolute fact and absolute value—is increasingly a mirage, an enigma, a specter. As specters so often do, it tells of our still unsettled accounts with the generation most recently passed.

So what would a settling of these accounts imply for a reconception of the sustainability agenda in light of its larger biopolitical context? It would imply, first of all, a more considered analysis of the semantic displacements to which the term life is subject as it travels across the scientific, political, and ethical registers that define the sustainability agenda’s field of efficacy. It would also imply a willingness to think of life as vitiated by a constitutive counterforce (variously construed as entropy, death drive, arch?technics). In addition to these two, sweeping implications, it would imply:

* an investigation of both the theoretical potential and the theoretical limits of cybernetic and systems-theoretical applications of this term indifferently to biological and informational modes of organization;
* an appreciation of the difference between ascribing an ethical value to the propagation of life per se, that is, apart from its organic individuation, and ascribing such a value to particular forms of life;
* the articulation of “post-human” ethical frameworks for assessing and legitimating the value ascribed to certain forms of life over others, and, following the work of Agamben, an at once historical and theoretical reconstruction of the transactions between mere life (zöe) and form of life (bios) in the constitution of the political field;
* a reconception of the human/animal distinction in which the faculties for tool-making and for language that devolve from our assumption of the bipedal stance are treated as essential constituents in what differentiates the human Umwelt from that of other animals, even as the more rudimentary development of those faculties in other species is treated as a potential site for cultivating new reciprocities between human and nonhuman societies;
* a questioning of the political implications of the call for biodiversity at a time when that term serves as a point of unexpected intersection between the concerns of environmentalists and the new interests of a globalized biotech industry;
* a recognition that the cautious approach to techno-logical development advocated by Our Common Future is inadequate in a context in which biotechnical researchers cultivate living tissue for potential use as a building material;37
* an attitude of acute skepticism in the face of appeals to the planet as embodying values whose preservation demands immediate and unquestioning fidelity on the part of all world citizens;
* an unwillingness to allow the cultivation of apocalyptic scenarios to deflect attention from or defer our response to historical injustices whose origin is economic and political, and a determination to consider the international distribution of responsibility for environ-mental steward-ship in light of historically uneven access to economic and technological forms of modernization.

Beyond pleasure: aesthetics after biopolitics

I’m not beautiful, I’m worse.
--Madame Dorval

I promised to return to the second term in our pair, pleasure. Although lacking the brand recognition of sustainability, pleasure has also been an object of special attention in recent architectural discourse, appearing not infrequently alongside terms like sensation and affect. What is the significance of its prominence? What does it tells us about our moment, and more especially about our negotiations with the recent past?

My own sense is that current appeals to pleasure, affect, and sensation are keyed to both a desire to re-engage the aesthetic dimensions of architecture and its experience and a very developed aversion to the conceptual frameworks that had guided Modernist and neo-Modernist discussions of that topic, more precisely, an aversion to the presumed liaison between contemporary cultural practice and contemporary thought that these frameworks had inherited from the Romantic retooling of the aesthetic philosophies of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and Immanuel Kant. More precisely still, these thematizations of pleasure and affect represent a eudaemonic alternative to the post-structuralist conception of contemporary art and thought as mandated to produce a limit-experience structured around a productive antagonism between sensation and cognition, pleasure and pain, delirium and critical reflection.

In opposition to the post-Enlightenment conception of aesthetic experience as a “disinterested pleasure” in which our sensuous and cognitive faculties cooperate in the apprehension and consequent judgment of an object thought to give concrete presentation to an otherwise unpresentable idea (an interaction from which the so-called chemical senses, taste and smell, would be excluded), the new sensationalists imagine such experience to imply susceptibility to stimuli implicating the full range of our faculties for sensuous response (including not only taste and smell, but also kinesthetic and proprioceptive modes of sensation as well), a susceptibility from which our faculties of critical reflection are then thought to be largely, if not altogether, excluded. According to the advocates of this position, such susceptibility deflects attention away from the singular object invested with a presumed intellectual content in the name of immersion in a formally undifferentiated milieu in which the object appears, when at all, as a relay or conductor of relations.38 Here dissolution of the object is matched by a dissolution, or at the very least a disorientation, of its correlative subject, somewhat on the order of the “deliverance from will” and “forgetting of individuality” that Schopenhauer associates with the aesthetic.39

At its most interesting, say in Diller + Scofidio’s Blur Building or certain works by Olafur Eliasson, this tendency represents an important parallel to developments in contemporary aesthetic theory—for instance, to Jean-Luc Nancy’s attempt to think of the arts as multiple “sense praxes” in which sense is understood as an event that occurs between bodies, in the syncopation of tact and contact that defines the operation of our physical senses,40 or, alternatively, to Gernot Böhme’s insistence that the “atmospheric” be included among the essential categories of aesthetic experience.41 At its least interesting, this tendency represents an aesthetic variant of the “animal humanism” that Badiou associates with the ecology movement and is both a retreat from the now- pressing question of how sense experience participates in larger structures of collective significance and a refusal to engage the cognitive, as against the purely sensual, dimensions of such experience.

Matters of Sensation, a recent exhibition at the Artists Space gallery in New York, cosponsored by the Columbia School of Architecture, makes the point. It is not that the work in the exhibition is without interest; indeed, some very promising young practices (e.g. Höweler + Yoon Architecture and Jason Payne) are represented there. What is disappointing is the curators’ decision to frame this work in a manner that actively discourages critical reflection on the significance of its appeals to affect and sensation.42 The exhibition pamphlet proclaims: “The group of young architects featured in Matters of Sensation produce work that attempts to answer no questions, solve no problems, and broach no oppositions.” That this, assuming it is true, should serve as the occasion for bravado rather than for embarrassment, is telling of a mood now pervasive in architecture. Such a modish retreat from the task of criticism is entirely inadequate to the issues that the discipline faces in its current condition, issues that include—alongside the co-implication of environmental, cultural, and political logics that the most sophisticated advocates of sustainability are trying to address—the technological refashioning of the human sensorium and its relationship to that reorganization and reinvestment of somatic experience characteristic of our biopolitical age.

Notes
1. Vitruvius, De architectura, Book I. In his The Ancient View of Greek Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), J.J. Pollitt argues that Vitruvius’s choice of the term venustas over pulchritudo makes clear the association of architectural beauty with pleasure, and more precisely with sensuous pleasure. As he observes, whereas pulchritudo translates the Greek to kallos, the ideal Platonic beauty, venustas refers to forms of gratification clearly ro oted in the body and its senses. Its closest conceptual counterpart in Greek would therefore be charis, meaning grace or elegance. In De natura deorum 2:69, Cicero points to the etymological links between venustas and Venus, thereby adding a decidedly erotic tint to the forms of sensuality that the term was thought to convey. For Cicero’s distinction between the arts of necessity and the arts of pleasure, see De natura deorum 2: 145–150.
2. Carl Gottlieb Wihelm Bötticher, “The Principles of the Hellenic and Germanic Ways of Building with Regard to Their Application to our Present Way of Building,” in In What Style Shall We Build? trans. Wolfgang Hermann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1989). For Augustine’s exegetical distinction between kernel and husk, see Homilies on the Gospel of St. John, XXIV and passim. It is worth noting, in the context of present discussion, that the system of scriptural exegesis that this pair of terms denotes correlates to an ontology based on a distinction between what is to be used and what is to be enjoyed.
3. Jacques Derrida, “Force and Signification” trans. Alan Bass, in Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 5.
4. G.W. F. Hegel, ‘Independent or Symbolic Architecture,” trans. T.M. Knox, in Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 650–654 and passim. Adolf Loos, “Architecture (1910)” in The Architecture of Adolf Loos (London: British Arts Council Exhibition Catalog, 1985), 108.
5. Notions of scarcity and precariousness are implicit in Ignacy Sach’s wry opposition between the “doomsayers,” whose apocalyptic scenarios fuel the urgency of sustainability politics, and the “cornucopians,” who drown out the bad tidings of global devastation by reciting the formulas predicting exponential growth extending into an infinite future. Ignacy Sachs, “Social Sustainability and Whole Development: Exploring the Dimensions of Sustainable Development,” in Sustainability and the Social Sciences: A Cross Disciplinary Approach to Integrating Environmental Considerations into Theoretical Reorientation, Egon Becker and Thomas Johan, eds. (London: Zed Books and UNESCO, 1999).
6. Quoted in Luis Fernández-Galiano, Fire and Memory: On Architecture and Memory, trans. Gina Cariñó (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000). For Engels’s interest in the relationship between the critique of political economy and contemporary developments in biology and physics, see his The Dialectics of Nature. As Fernández-Galiano observes, both Marx and Engels were hostile to the second law of thermodynamics, despite their very developed interest in the first.
7. Quoted in Ernst Mayer, The Growth of Biological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 121.
8. Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution (New York: H. Fertig, 1968), 60–74. For a discussion of Geddes’s and Mumford’s interest in thermodynamic theory, see Fire and Memory, 194–201. For discussion of Geddes’s early training as a zoologist and the influence of Darwin’s theory of evolution on his mature conception of regional planning, see Volker M. Welter, Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the City of Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002). For Benton MacKaye’s relationship to Geddes and Mumford, see Keller Easterling, Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways, and Houses in America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).
9. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process: Tales from the Cruise Adventure of a Lifetime (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972).
10. Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968). For a discussion of the Malthusian resonances of contemporary ecopolitics, see Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2004), 93–98.
11. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Verso, 1982), 130 and passim.
12. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 253.
13. Along with Jean Hyppolite and Alexandre Koyré, Alexandre Kojève was responsible for introducing Hegel into 20th-century French thought. Among those influenced by his lectures were Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, and Maurice Blanchot.
14. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 20–21. It is interesting to note Bataille’s reference to geochemist Vladimir Verdadsky’s concept of the biosphere, which he promises to explore from “different viewpoint.” Verdadsky is claimed as an important precursor of Gaia philosophers like Lynn Margulis.
15. Ibid., 21.
16. Ibid., 23. In this passage Bataille touches on the thin strip of conceptual territory shared by both deep ecological and post-structuralist perspectives, their critique of anthropocentrism.
17. Jacques Lacan in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan (1959–60) Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1986). Lacan’s second wife, the actress Sylvia Maklés, was Bataille’s former wife, and this circumstance seems to have provided the occasion for a long, if somewhat distant, friendship.
18. Ibid., 213–214.
19. Ibid., 211.
20. Giorgio Agamben, “Absolute Immanence,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford, CA; Stanford University Press, 1999), 220–239.
21. Frederick Turner, “Biology and Beauty,” ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, Incorporations, Zone 6 (New York: Zone Books, 1996), 406–421; George Hersey, The Evolution of Allure: Sexual Selection from the Medici Venus to the Incredible Hulk (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996); John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds?” SubStance 94/95 (2001), 6–27.
22. Jean-Pierre Changeux, Neuronal Man: The Biology of the Mind, trans. Laurence Garey (New York: Pantheon, 1985).
23. Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London: Continuum, 2006). Caroline A. Jones/Donna Harraway, “Zoon,” in Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art, Caroline A. Jones, ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 241–245.
24. Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 17–24.
25. Rudolf Kjellén, Grundriss zu einem System der Politik (Leipzig: Rudolph Leipzig Hirzel, 1920), 3–4; Jakob von Uexküll, Staatsbiologie (Anatomie-Physiologie-Pathologie des Staates), (Berlin: Verlag von Gebrüder Paetel, 1920).
26. Aroon Starobinski, La biopolitique: Essai d’interprétation l’histoire de l’humanté et des civilisations (Geneva: Imprimerie des Arts, 1960); Edgar Morin, Introduction à une politique de l’homme (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1969).
27. Esposito, 22.
28. Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2005), 149.
29. Alenka Zupan?i?, The Odd One In: On Comedy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 5.
30. Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007), 176–177.
31. World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
32. New Orleans: Strategies for a City in Soft Land, Joan Busquets and Felipe Correa, eds. (Cambridge: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2006). My comments on Joan Busquet’s and Ila Berman’s contributions to this book are informed by Yates McKee’s commentary on these two texts in his survey of architectural responses to Katrina, “Haunted Housing: Eco-Vanguardism, Eviction, and the Biopolitics of Sustainability in New Orleans,” Grey Room 30, Winter 2008. For a broader discussion of the politics of environmentalism very much germane to my own discussion, see his “Arts and the Ends of Environmentalism: From Biosphere to the Right to Survival,” in Non-governmental Politics, Michel Feher et al., ed. (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 539–583.
33. Joan Busquets, “The Future of New Orleans: Summary of the New Orleans Studio and Consideration after Katrina,” in New Orleans: Strategies for a City in Soft Land.
34. Ila Berman, “Fluid Cartographies and Material Diagrams,” in New Orleans: Strategies for a City in Soft Land.
35. W.J.T. Mitchell, “Diagrammatology,” in Critical Inquiry, Spring 1981, 622–633; John Mullarkey, Postcontinental Philosophy: An Outline (London: Continuum Press, 2006), 157–186.
36. Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthuman Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004); David Wills, Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, trans. Richard Beardsworth (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Eugene Thacker, The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005).
37. Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, “Semi-Living Art,” in Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond, Eduardo Kac, ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 249–266.
38. The most articulate spokesperson on behalf of this position is Caroline Jones. See her several contributions in Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art, Caroline A. Jones, ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).
39. I have attempted to treat these issues more fully in “Surfacing the New Sensorium,” The Expanded Surface, Praxis 9, fall 2007.
40. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Why Are There Several Arts and Not Just One?” trans. Peggy Kamuf, in The Muses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 1–40.
41. Gernot Böhme, Atmosphäre: Essays zur neuen Ästhetik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995).
42. It is worth noting that in this exhibition the appeal to “sensation” chiefly manifests itself as an interest in ornament and pattern. For a discussion of the vitalist underpinnings of the current preoccupation with ornament and pattern in architecture see Robert Levit, “Contemporary Ornament: The Return of the Symbolic Repressed,” Harvard Design Magazine 28, Spring/Summer 2008, 70–85.