Re: importance of architecture

Jay Lemke (jllbc who-is-at cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Wed, 24 Sep 1997 23:54:26 -0400

This is really a very stimulating discussion! Jan Nespor's bibliography is
quite a choice one and contains most of my own favorites and those often
recommended to me, some of which I have not yet read. Jan, Paul Prior, and
David Dirlam each in slightly different ways take the next step in
developing an approach to the space/place dialectic for
settings-in/of-activity by applying the sort of network or ecological logic
that I tried to develop in the paper I offered and circulated about
multiple-scales of intersecting processes in ecosocial systems. What I said
in my last post was meant as just such a start -- you will never hear me
offer anything as a complete or final theory, there is always more to
added! :)

My own approach here is precisely a blend of ecological dynamics with the
Latourian network model, with its emphasis on material-artifactual linkage
among different activities and practices, semiotically crossing over
different scales. It is the latter property which means that one cannot fix
the boundaries of even the material space, much less the place. The place
as a meaningful-place and a place-where-meanings-are-made is always partly
meaningful through its relations to other places and other spaces. Every
material affordance, whether object or spatial relationship, is a potential
link to other activities and other settings.

What ecodynamics adds to this is the potential synergies of interacting
processes. Notions like space and place per se are not conceptualized
directly in process terms (this is rather built into the semantics of
English-like languages: participants-in-doings/beings-at-times-in-places)
until we reinsert them into the activities relative to which they are
settings. We can then also define them semiotically as actants and change
their semantic roles, so we can speak of the production of places, and even
places as 'influencing' us (the patient and agent roles, respectively, of
participants). Latour's logic of symmetrized heterogeneity does not apply
just to actors and objects, but to places (and times?) as well. The
ecodynamics depends on all the processes or practices in which
spaces/places figure, in whichever semantic role. Artifacts and places
link, or mediate, the connections among processes or activities. They make
processes on different spatial and temporal scales, and themselves situated
at some remove in space and time, relevant to one another in newly possible
ways.

And they can interact just like the moose and wolves: creating interlocking
cycles and fluctuations and quasi-stabilities and chaotic transitions, etc.
-- all indeed without the need for external control variables. Here is
where we revise one of the notions about place, that spaces materially and
semiotically (i.e. as places) influence or control activities within them
while remaining given or fixed or inert. It does not matter whether they
change on the scale of the activity or not: they belong to a larger ecology
of activities which not only changes them but has produced them in the
first place. Settings are a 'live' component of activity networks. They
have agency, but not autonomous agency (I don't believe anything has
autonomous agency). They are products, but not inert ones. They offer
affordances and constraints in the way that circumstances or
material-semiotic contexts of situation are normally understood to do. All
of these, and all by virtue of the synergies of the ecology/network of
activities.

I will post separately on sustainability. There is always more ... JAY. :)

---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE

CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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