Architecture readings and a 300-word comment
Based on the reading I gave, write a 300-word comment which related to the contents. The topic is climate divides
Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change
Dipesh Chakrabarty
New Literary History, Volume 43, Number 1, Winter 2012, pp. 1-18 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2012.0007
For additional information about this article
Access provided by Australian National University (2 May 2013 23:47 GMT)
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nlh/summary/v043/43.1.chakrabarty.html
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nlh/summary/v043/43.1.chakrabarty.html
New Literary History, 2012, 43: 1–18
Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of
Climate Change
Dipesh Chakrabarty
For Homi K. Bhabha
However we come to the question of postcolonial studies at this historical juncture, there are two phenomena, both topics of public debate since the early 1990s, that none of us can quite
escape in our personal and collective lives at present: globalization and
global warming. All thinking about the present has to engage both. What
I do in this essay is to use some of the recent writings of Homi K. Bhabha
to illustrate how a leading contemporary postcolonial thinker imagines
the figure of the human in the era of what is often called “neoliberal”
capitalism, and then enter a brief discussion of the debate on climate
change to see how postcolonial thinking may need to be stretched to
adjust itself to the reality of global warming. My ultimate proposition in
this essay is simple: that the current conjuncture of globalization and
global warming leaves us with the challenge of having to think of human
agency over multiple and incommensurable scales at once.
The nineteenth century left us with some internationalist and univer-
sal ideologies, prominent among them Marxism and liberalism, both
progenies in different ways of the Enlightenment. Anticolonial thought
was born of that lineage. The waves of decolonization movements of the
1950s and 60s were followed by postcolonial criticism that was placed,
in the universities of the Anglo-American countries at least, as brother-
in-arms to cultural studies. Together, cultural studies and postcolonial
criticism fed into the literature on globalization, though globalization
studies, as such, also drew on developments in the cognate disciplines
of sociology, economics, and anthropology. Now we have a literature
on global warming and a general sense of an environmental crisis that
is no doubt mediated by the inequities of capitalist development, but
it is a crisis that faces humanity as a whole. In all these moves, we are
left with three images of the human: the universalist-Enlightenment
view of the human as potentially the same everywhere, the subject with
new literary history2
capacity to bear and exercise rights; the postcolonial-postmodern view
of the human as the same but endowed everywhere with what some
scholars call “anthropological difference”—differences of class, sexuality,
gender, history, and so on. This second view is what the literature on
globalization underlines. And then comes the figure of the human in
the age of the Anthropocene, the era when humans act as a geological
force on the planet, changing its climate for millennia to come. If criti-
cal commentary on globalization focuses on issues of anthropological
difference, the scientific literature on global warming thinks of humans
as constitutively one—a species, a collectivity whose commitment to
fossil-fuel based, energy-consuming civilization is now a threat to that
civilization itself. These views of the human do not supersede one an-
other. One cannot put them along a continuum of progress. No one
view is rendered invalid by the presence of others. They are simply dis-
junctive. Any effort to contemplate the human condition today—after
colonialism, globalization, and global warming—on political and ethical
registers encounters the necessity of thinking disjunctively about the
human, through moves that in their simultaneity appear contradictory.
But since I come to all these questions as someone trained in the
discipline of history, allow me to approach them via this discipline and
by way of a brief historical detour. And I apologize in advance for the
slight intrusion of the autobiographical at this point, for I was also a
witness to the history I recount here. My entry into the field of post-
colonial studies, quite fittingly for someone interested in the theme of
belatedness, was late.1 Postcolonial ideas, as we know, took by storm
departments of English literature in the Anglo-American academe in the
1980s. Now when I look at back on it, postcolonial studies seem to have
been a part, initially at least, of a cultural and critical process by which
a postimperial West adjusted itself to a long process of decolonization
that perhaps is not over yet. After all, it cannot be without significance
that what brought Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha, and Isaac Julien together
to read Fanon in the London of the late 1980s and the 1990s was the
struggle against racism in a postimperial Britain, a struggle sometimes
given official backing by the radical Greater London Council and hosted
by the Institute of Contemporary Art.2
The American scene with regard to postcolonial studies was admittedly
somewhat different. Edward Said wrote Orientalism (1978) out of his sense
of involvement in the Palestinian struggle and Gayatri Spivak, I assume,
was responding in part to the culture wars on American campuses about
opening up core curriculum (as at Stanford in the late 1980s) and rede-
fining the literary canon when she introduced the Indian feminist writer
Mahasweta Devi to academic readers in the United States. Australian
3postcolonial studies
developments that I personally witnessed in these years drew on both
English and North-American instances. I got drawn into debates about
“culture as distinction” and about the literary canon that took place
in the meetings of the Arts Faculty at the University of Melbourne in
the late 1980s. A leading scholar in those debates was Simon During,
a pioneer in what was then emerging as the field of cultural studies.3
The University of Essex conferences on postcolonial studies had just
taken place. I was aware of During’s involvement in those conferences.
Lata Mani, then a graduate student with the History of Consciousness
Program at the University of California–Santa Cruz, had published a
path-breaking paper on “sati” in one of their proceedings volumes.4 But
the volumes still had not impacted the world of historians. We began
to publish Subaltern Studies in India in 1983 without much awareness of
postcolonial literary criticism. I remember Simon During returning to
Melbourne in the mid-80s from a postcolonialism conference overseas
and asking me if I knew of the work of Homi Bhabha. I answered, with
some surprise but as any educated newspaper-reading Indian would have
answered in those days, “Sure, a major Indian Atomic Research Centre
is named after him. He was one of our best physicists; but why would
you be interested in him?” That was the day the other Homi Bhabha
entered my life, as a problem of mistaken identity, through a stand-in,
as a question of difference within the identity “Homi Bhabha” (to mimic
my dear friend who bears that name).
Subaltern Studies, the historiographical movement with which I was as-
sociated, emerged out of anti-, and not postcolonial, thought. We were
a bunch of young men (initially men) interested in Indian history and
were in some ways disillusioned with the nationalisms of our parents.
The two Englishmen in the group, David Arnold and David Hardiman,
were anti-imperial in their political outlook and rejected the domi-
nantly proimperial historiography that came out of England. The Indian
members of the group were disappointed and angry about the Indian
nation’s failure to deliver the social justice that anticolonial nationalism
had promised. Our historiographical rebellion raised many interesting
methodological issues for Indian history and for history in general.
Ranajit Guha, our mentor, could easily be seen as one of the pioneers
of the so-called linguistic turn in the discipline of history though, it has
to be acknowledged, Hayden White had already raised many of the most
pertinent issues in the 1970s.5 Our analyses of subaltern histories were
deeply influenced by Guha’s infectious enthusiasm for structuralism of
the kind that was associated with Barthes, Jakobson, and Levi-Strauss, a
structuralism one could also associate with Hayden White and with an
early moment of cultural studies—especially in Britain where the New
new literary history4
Accent series of publications emphasized the importance of structural-
ism, and where Guha was originally based. Gramsci—with a selection
of his prison notebooks translated into English in 1971—had softened
the Stalinist edges of our Indo-British Marxism and attuned us to the
importance of the popular, and Mao—many of the historians in the
group had earlier been involved in the Maoist movement that took
place in India between 1967 and 1971—had helped us to think of the
peasant as a modern revolutionary subject. But we did not encounter
postcolonial thought until Spivak brought our group into contact with
her deconstructionist variety of Marxism and feminism, and made us
confront our theoretical innocence in proposing to make the subaltern
the “subject” of his or her own history. As we pondered the challenge
she posed to the group and embraced its consequences, we crossed
over from being merely anticolonial historians (with incipient critiques
of the nation-state form) to being a part of the intellectual landscape
of postcolonial criticism.
What was the difference? one might ask. The difference was signaled
by Spivak’s epochal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” that she had begun
to draft in response to the Subaltern Studies project and before our first
meeting with her took place.6 The human in our anticolonial mode of
thinking was a figure of sovereignty. We wanted to make the peasant or
the subaltern the subject of his or her history, period. And we thought
of this subject in the image of the autonomous rights-bearing person
with the same access to representation in national and other histories
as others from more privileged backgrounds enjoyed. A straightforward
plea for social justice underlay our position, just as it did in a variety
of Marxist, feminist, or even liberal histories. And like Fanon, we saw
the subaltern classes as claiming their humanity through revolutionary
upheavals. Becoming human was for us a matter of becoming a subject.7
This was why Spivak’s exercise in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” was so
salutary. It challenged the very idea of the “subject” that Subaltern Stud-
ies and much anticolonial thought celebrated and invited us to write
deconstructive histories of subjecthood.
This critique of the subject was not the same as that performed by
Althusserian antihumanism of the 1960s and 70s that so riled E. P.
Thompson, the great humanist historian of the last century.8 Postcolo-
nial critique of the subject was actually a deeper turning towards the
human, a move best exemplified for me in the work of Homi Bhabha. It
was a turn that both appreciated difference as a philosophical question
and at the same time repudiated its essentialization by identity politics.9
That single move—channeled not through identity politics but through
difference philosophies—connected postcolonial thinking to thinking
about the human condition in the age of globalization.
5postcolonial studies
To appreciate the close political relations that existed between “rights”
thinking and the body of postcolonial thought that drew on the post-
structuralist critique of the subject, we have to get beyond some of
the fruitless debates of the 1990s. I think it was a mistake of the Left
on both sides of the postmodern divide in the 1990s to think of these
two different figurations of the human—the human as a rights-bearing
subject and the figure of the human glimpsed through the critique
of the subject—as somehow competing with each other in a do-or-die
race in which only the fittest survived. The critique of the subject did
not make the idea of the autonomous subject useless any more than
the critique of the nation-state made the institution of the nation-state
obsolete. What I have learnt from postcolonial thinkers is the necessity
to move through contradictory figures of the human, now through a
collapsing of the person and the subject as in liberal or Marxist thought,
and now through a separation of the two. Before I discuss what forces
us to engage in such border-crossing in our thinking, let me illustrate
the fleet-footed movement I am speaking of by turning to some recent
writings of Homi K. Bhabha.
The Human in Postcolonial Criticism Today
Listen to Bhabha writing of the new subaltern classes of today, “the
stateless,” “migrant workers, minorities, asylum seekers, [and] refugees”
who “represent emergent, undocumented lifeworlds that break through
the formal language of ‘protection’ and ‘status’ because”—he says, quot-
ing Balibar—“they are ‘neither insiders [n]or outsiders, or (for many of us)
. . . insiders officially considered outsiders.”10 Classic Bhabha, one would have
thought, this turning over of the outside into the inside and vice versa.
Yet it is not the “cosmopolitan claims of global ethical equivalence” that
Bhabha reads into these new subalterns of the global capitalist order.
His eyes are fixed as much on the deprivation that the human condi-
tion suffers in these circumstances as they are on the question of rights:
“As insiders/outsiders they damage the cosmopolitan dream of a ‘world
without borders’ . . . by opening up, in the midst of international polity,
a complex and contradictory mode of being or surviving somewhere in
between legality and incivility. It is a kind of no-man’s land that, in the
world of migration, shadows global success . . . it substitutes cultural
survival in migrant milieux for full civic participation.”11
“Full civic participation”—one can see at once the normative horizons
on which Bhabha has set his sights. They are indeed those that acknowl-
edge that our recognition of the human condition in the everyday does
new literary history6
not eo ipso negate questions of social justice. On the contrary. Bhabha,
of course, acknowledges the fact that the politics of (cultural) survival
often takes the place of “full civic participation” in the lives of these new
subalterns of the global economy. But he has to move between these
poles (survival versus civic participation) to see the subaltern politics
of cultural survival not only as a zone of creativity and improvisation—
which it is—but also as an area of privation and disenfranchisement.
It will be interesting, then, to see how it is precisely this freedom that
Bhabha claims for himself to think contradictorily—to think mobility
(survival) and stasis (civic participation) at the same time—that allows
him to turn the tables on his erstwhile critics, Michael Hardt and An-
tonio Negri, who found in “nomadism and miscegenation” “figures of
virtue, the first ethical practices on the terrain of Empire,” since, they
argued, “circulation” or “deterritorialisation” were steps towards the goal
of global citizenship that entailed “the struggle against the slavery of
belonging to a nation, an identity and a people, and thus the desertion
from sovereignty and the limits it places on subjectivity” were for them
and this reason “entirely positive” developments.12 “Such an emancipa-
tory ideal,” writes Bhaba, “—so fixated on the flowing, borderless, global
world—neglects to confront the fact that migrants, refugees, or nomads
do not merely circulate.” Rather, he goes on to point out:
They need to settle, claim asylum or nationality, demand housing and educa-
tion, assert their economic and cultural rights, and seek the status of citizen-
ship. It is salutary, then, to turn to less “circulatory” forms of the economy like
trade and tariffs, or taxes and monetary policy—much less open to postmodern
metaphoric appropriation—to see how they impact on the global imaginary of
diasporic cultural studies. Positive global relations depend on the protection
and enhancement of these national “territorial” resources, which should then
become part of the “global” political economy of resource redistribution and a
transnational moral economy of redistributive justice.13
The point of these long quotations is simply to show how juxtaposed
and crossed-over remain the two figures of the human in these discus-
sions by Bhabha: the human of the everyday who illustrates the human
condition as the embodiment of what Bhabha once called “difference
within”—the insider as the outsider and vice versa—the human who
improvises and survives, and the human who asserts his or her cultural
and economic rights in the expectation of being the sovereign figure
of the citizen some day.
This constant movement between normative and onto-existential
images of the human in Bhabha’s prose is an index of the human
predicament produced by dominant forms of globalization. Bhabha
7postcolonial studies
turns to Hannah Arendt to explain this predicament. Arendt had once
argued that the very creation of a “One World” through the positing of
so many “peoples” organized into nation-states produced the problem
of statelessness, not from “a lack of civilization” but as “the perverse
consequence of the political and cultural conditions of modernity.”14
Modernity created this new “savage” condition of many human beings,
the condition of being declared stateless if they could not be identified
with a nation-state, forcing them to fall back on the politics of survival.
Today, it is not simply the arrangement of nation-states that creates this
condition of stateless, illegal migrants, guest workers, and asylum seek-
ers. It is a deeper predicament produced by both the globalization of
capital and the pressures of demography in poorer countries brought
about by the unevenness of postcolonial development. Whether you read
Mike Davis on The Planet of Slums or documents produced by Abahlali
baseMjondolo, the shack-dwellers’ movement in Durban, South Africa,
it is clear that today’s capitalism feeds off a large pool of migrant, often
illegal, labor that is cast aside by many as “surplus population”—a proc-
ess that deprives these groups of the enjoyment of any social goods and
services, while their labor remains critical to the functioning of the service
sector in both advanced and growing economies.15 At the same time, it
has to be acknowledged, refugees and asylum seekers are produced also
by state-failures connected to a whole series of factors: economic, politi-
cal, demographic, and environmental. Together, these groups, today’s
subaltern classes, embody the human condition negatively, as an image
of privation. No ethnography of their everyday lives can access its object
positively through the figure of the citizen. Yet our normative horizons,
belonging as we analysts do to one or another kind of civil society, cannot
but depend on the measure of “cultural and economic rights” and “full
civic participation,” even as any real possibility of effective citizenship
for all humans seems increasingly remote. Do not one billion human
beings already live without access to proper drinking water? When will
the illegal Bangladeshi and North-African workers one encounters on
the streets of Athens, Florence, Rome, Vienna, Paris, London—not to
speak of illegal Bangladeshi labor in the informal sectors of India and
Pakistan—become full-fledged European citizens? There is one predica-
ment of our thinking, however, that speaks to the contradictions of our
lifeworlds today. Our normative horizons, unlike those of Marx’s classical
writings, say, give us no vantage point from which we could not only judge
but also describe and know these classes, while ethnographies of what
the marginal, the poor, and the excluded actually do in order to survive
yield no alternative norms for human societies that are still in the grip
of large and centralizing institutions, corporations, and bureaucracies.16
new literary history8
This disjuncture is at its most acute now in what progressive European
theorists such as Etienne Balibar or Sandro Mezzadra write by way of
placing refugees, asylum seekers, and illegal immigrants in European his-
tory, politics, and policy.17 It may or may not surprise the reader to know
that Europe today is dotted with detention centers for these unwelcome
people. The number of such centers exceeds one hundred and they
extend outside Europe into North Africa.18 Europe has adopted border
protection policies that are reminiscent of those pursued by the United
States or Australia, except that in Europe the borders, if a detention
camp is indeed a border, are as much inside Europe as outside. It is this
indeterminacy of borders that has led Balibar to make the observation
that if the nineteenth century was the time when European imperial-
ism made frontiers into borders by exporting the border-form outside
Europe, we stand today on the threshold of an age when borders are
becoming frontiers again.19
However, reading Balibar and Mezzadra on these questions makes
it clear that their writing is caught in tension between two tendencies:
on the one hand they have to acknowledge the historical and current
barbarisms that have in the past acted as a foundation of European
“civilization” and continue to do so to some extent even in the present;
on the other hand they have to appeal to the highest utopians ideals
of their civilizational heritage in order to imagine into being a vibrant
European polity that not only practices the ethics of hospitality and
responsibility that Derrida, Levinas, and others have written about, but
that also grounds itself in a deep acceptance of the plurality of human
inheritances inside its own borders.20 It is no wonder, then, that Euro-
pean intellectuals, whether discussing refugees from outside Europe
or internal migrants from the ex-colonies and the question of “Eastern
Europe,” are increasingly debating postcolonial theory and are even
producing their own readers and translations of postcolonial writings.21
Europe today is clearly a new frontier of postcolonial studies—and not
because the classical peasant-subaltern subject can be found in Europe.
No, it is because the new subalterns of the global economy—refugees,
asylum seekers, illegal workers—can be found all over Europe and it is
by making these groups the object of his thinking that Homi Bhabha
arrives at a figure of the human that is constitutionally and necessarily
doubled and contradictory.
Let me now turn to the issue of global warming to consider how it
challenges us to imagine the human.
9postcolonial studies
The Human in the Anthropocene
If the problem of global warming or climate change had not burst
in on us through the 2007 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC), globalization would have been perhaps the most
important theme stoking our thoughts about being human. But global
warming adds another challenge. It calls us to visions of the human that
neither rights talk nor the critique of the subject ever contemplated.
This does not, as I said before, make those earlier critiques irrelevant
or redundant, for climate change will produce—and has begun to pro-
duce—its own cases of refugees and regime failures.22 The effects of
climate change are mediated by the global inequities we already have.
So the two visions of the human that I have already outlined—the uni-
versalist view of global justice between human individuals imagined as
having the same rights everywhere and the critique of the subject that
poststructuralism once promoted—will both remain operative. In discuss-
ing issues of climate justice, we will thus necessarily go through familiar
moves: criticize the self-aggrandizing tendencies of powerful and rich
nations and speak of a progressive politics of differentiated responsibili-
ties in handling debates about migration, legal or illegal. Indeed, one
of the early significant tracts to be written on the problem and politics
of global warming was authored by two respected Indian environmental
activists who gave it the title, Global Warming in an Unequal World: A Case
of Environmental Colonialism.23 The science and politics of climate change
have not rendered these moves irrelevant or unnecessary; but they have
become insufficient as analytical strategies.24
Consider the challenge that climate science poses to humanists.
Climate scientists raise a problem of scale for the human imagination,
though they do not usually think through the humanistic implications
of their own claim that, unlike the changes in climate this planet has
seen in the past, the current warming is anthropogenic in nature. Hu-
mans, collectively, now have an agency in determining the climate of
the planet as a whole, a privilege reserved in the past only for very large-
scale geophysical forces. This is where this crisis represents something
different from what environmentalists have written about so far: the
impact of humans on their immediate or regional environments. The
idea of humans representing a force on a very large geological scale
that impacts the whole planet is new. Some scientists, the Nobel-winning
Paul J. Crutzen at the forefront, have proposed the beginning of a new
geological era, an era in which human beings act as a force determining
the climate of the entire planet all at once. They have suggested that we
call this period “the Anthropocene” to mark the end of the Holocene
new literary history10
that named the geological “now” within which recorded human history
so far has unfolded.25 But who is the “we” of this process? How do we
think of this collective human agency in the era of the Anthropocene?
Scientists who work on the physical history of the universe or on the
history of the earth’s climate in the past no doubt tell certain kinds of
histories. But in Gadamerian or Diltheyan terms, they explain and are not
required to understand the past in any humanist sense. Every individual
explanation makes sense because it relates to other existing explanations.
But a cognitive exercise is not “understanding” in the Gadamerian sense,
and until there is an element of the latter, we do not have history, not
human history at least. Which is why, usually, a purely “natural” history of
climate over the last several million years would not be of much interest
to a postcolonial historian who works on human history.
What is remarkable about the current crisis is that climate scientists
are not simply doing versions of natural history. They are also giving us
an account of climate change that is neither purely “natural” nor purely
“human” history. And this is because they assign an agency to humans
at the very heart of this story. According to them, current global (and
not regional) climate changes are largely human induced. This implies
that humans are now part of the natural history of the planet. The wall
of separation between natural and human histories that was erected in
early modernity and reinforced in the nineteenth century as the human
sciences and their disciplines consolidated themselves has some serious
and long-running cracks in it.26
The ascription of a geological agency to humans is a comparatively
recent development in climate science. One of the earliest references
I could find of scientists assigning to humans a role in the geophysical
process of the planet was in a paper that the University of California,
San Diego, oceanographer Roger Revelle and the
University of Chicago
geophysicist H. E. Suess coauthored in the geophysics journal Tellus in
1957. “Human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical
experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be
reproduced in the future,” they wrote. “Within a few centuries we are
returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic car-
bon stored in the sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years.
This experiment, if adequately documented, may yield a far-reaching
insight into the processes determining weather and climate.”27 The
Environmental Pollution Panel of the U.S. President’s Science Advisory
Committee expressed the opinion in 1965 that “through his worldwide
industrial civilization, Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical
experiment. Within a few generations, he is burning fossil fuel that
slowly accumulated in the earth over the past 500 million years.” They
11postcolonial studies
went on to warn: “The climatic changes that may be produced by the
increased CO
2
content could be deleterious from the point of view of
human beings.”28 Even as late as 1973, the Committee on Atmospheric
Sciences of the National Academy of Science said: “Man clearly has no
positive knowledge of the magnitude or the manner in which he is pres-
ently changing the climate of the earth. There is no real question that
inadvertent modification of the atmosphere is taking place.”29
We can thus see a progress or inflation, if you like, in the rhetoric
of climate scientists. Man was an experimenter on a geophysical scale
in the 1950s; by the 1990s, he was a geophysical force himself. Silently
and implicitly, climate scientists have doubled the figure of the human
as the agent of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Humans put
out greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the biosphere. Here the
picture of the human is how social scientists have always imagined hu-
mans to be: a purposeful biological entity with the capacity to degrade
natural environment. But what happens when we say humans are acting
like a geophysical force? We then liken humans to some nonhuman,
nonliving agency. That is why I say the science of anthropogenic global
warming has doubled the figure of the human—you have to think of
the two figures of the human simultaneously: the human-human and
the nonhuman-human. And that is where some challenges lie for the
postcolonial scholar in the humanities.
The first challenge is the scale on which scientists invite us to imagine
human agency. Consider the point that, collectively, we are now capable
of affecting the climate of this planet and changing it, as the geophysicist
David Archer says, for the next one hundred thousand years.30 Such
numbers usually function as operators with which we manipulate informa-
tion. We do not understand them without training. Scientists are aware
of this problem and do what historians do to bring vast scales within the
realm of understanding: appeal to human experience. The Australian
social and environmental historian Tom Griffiths recently published a
splendid history of the Antarctic. But how does a social historian go
about writing a human history of an uninhabited and uninhabitable vast
expanse of snow and ice? Griffiths does what all good historians do: go
to the experience that past humans have already had of such a region
in order to write a human history of this place. He consults the private
papers of historical explorers, looks at their letters to see how they ex-
perienced the place, and intercalates his reading of these documents
with leaves from his own diary of traveling to the South Pole. This is
how the Antarctic gets humanized. We use the metaphoric capacity of
human language and visual records to bring its ice within the grasp of
human experience. The Australian explorer Douglas Mawson went to
new literary history12
the Antarctic for the years 1911–14, having just become engaged to a
Paquita Delprat of Broken Hill in Western Australia. In one of her love-
lorn letters to Mawson, Delprat wrote: “Are you frozen? In heart I mean
. . . . Am I pouring out a little of what is in my heart to an iceberg? . . .
Can a person remain in such cold and lonely regions however beautiful
and still love warmly?” Mawson reassured her that her love had warmed
her “proxy iceberg” and that “he felt less cold this time.”31 It is through
such interleaving of experiences and through the employment of figures
of speech—some telling metaphors and similes—that we make a human
history of the empty vastness and ice of the South Pole.
Scientists interested in creating an informed public around the crisis
of climate change make a very similar appeal to experience. For reasons
of space, I will illustrate the point with an example from David Archer’s
book The Long Thaw. Archer distills out of his analysis a problem that
turns around the explanation/understanding distinction I mentioned
earlier. Human beings cannot really imagine beyond a couple of genera-
tions before and after their own time, he says. “The rules of economics,
which govern much of our behavior,” he writes, “tend to limit our focus
to even shorter time frames,” for the value of everything gets discounted
in decades.32 Archer faces the problem that humans may not care for the
science he is telling us about. One hundred thousand years is too far—why
should we care for people so far into the future? “How would it feel,”
Archer asks, trying to translate geological units into human scales, “if
the ancient Greeks, for example, had taken advantage of some lucrative
business opportunity for a few centuries, aware of potential costs, such as,
say, a [much] stormier world, or the loss of . . . agricultural productivity
to rising sea levels—that could persist to this day?”33 I find it remarkable
as a historian that Archer, a socially concerned paleoclimatologist, should
be asking us to extend to the future the faculty of understanding that
historians routinely extend to humans of the recorded past.
But this is also where we encounter a real problem of interpretation.
We write of pasts through the mediation of the experience of humans of
the past. We can send humans, or even artificial eyes, to outer space, the
poles, the top of Mount Everest, to Mars and the Moon and vicariously
experience that which is not directly available to us. We can also—through
art and fiction—extend our understanding to those who in future may
suffer the impact of the geophysical force that is the human. But we
cannot ever experience ourselves as a geophysical force—though we
now know that this is one of the modes of our collective existence. We
cannot send somebody out to experience in an unmediated manner this
“force” on our behalf (as distinct from experiencing the impact of it
mediated by other direct experiences—of floods, storms, or earthquakes,
13postcolonial studies
for example). This nonhuman, forcelike mode of existence of the hu-
man tells us that we are no longer simply a form of life that is endowed
with a sense of ontology. Humans have a sense of ontic belonging. That
is undeniable. We used that knowledge in developing both anticolonial
(Fanon) and postcolonial criticism (Bhabha). But in becoming a geo-
physical force on the planet, we have also developed a form of collec-
tive existence that has no ontological dimension. Our thinking about
ourselves now stretches our capacity for interpretive understanding. We
need nonontological ways of thinking the human.
Bruno Latour has complained for a long time that the problem with
modern political thought is the culture/nature distinction that has al-
lowed humans to look on their relationship to “nature” through the
prism of the subject/object relationship.34 He has called for a new idea
of politics that brings together—as active partners into our arguments—
both humans and nonhumans. I think what I have said adds a wrinkle
to Latour’s problematic. A geophysical force—for that is what in part we
are in our collective existence—is neither subject nor an object. A force
is the capacity to move things. It is pure, nonontological agency. After
all, Newton’s idea of “force” went back to medieval theories of impetus.35
Climate change is not a one-event problem. Nor is it amenable to a
single rational solution. It may indeed be something like what Horst
Rittel and Melvin Webber, planning theorists, once called a “wicked
problem,” an expression they coined in 1973 in an article entitled “Di-
lemmas in a General Theory of Planning” published in Policy Sciences
“to describe a category of public policy concern that [while susceptible
to a rational diagnosis] defied rational and optimal solutions,” because
it impinged on too many other problems to be solved or addressed at
the same time.36 Besides, as Mike Hulme, a climate researcher, points
out: “This global solution-structure also begs a fundamental question
which is rarely addressed in the respective fora where these debates
and disagreements surface: What is the ultimate performance metric
for the human species, what is it that we are seeking to optimise? Is it
to restabilise population or to minimise our ecological footprint? Is it to
increase life expectancy, to maximise gross domestic product, to make
poverty history or to increase the sum of global happiness? Or is the
ultimate performance metric for humanity simply survival?”37
Given that it is difficult to foresee humanity arriving at a consensus
on any of these questions in the short-term future, even while scientific
knowledge about global warming circulates more widely, it is possible
that the turn towards what Ulrich Beck calls a “risk society” will only be
intensified in the current phase of globalization and global warming. As
we cope with the effects of climate change and pursue capitalist growth,
new literary history14
we will negotiate our attachments, mediated no doubt through the ineq-
uities of capitalism, knowing fully that they are increasingly risky.38 But
this also means that there is no “humanity” that can act as a self-aware
agent. The fact that the crisis of climate change will be routed through
all our “anthropological differences” can only mean that, however an-
thropogenic the current global warming may be in its origins, there is
no corresponding “humanity” that in its oneness can act as a political
agent. A place thus remains for struggles around questions on intrahu-
man justice regarding the uneven impacts of climate change.
This is to underline how open the space is for what may be called the
politics of climate change. Precisely because there is no single rational
solution, there is the need to struggle to make our way in hitherto un-
charted ways—and hence through arguments and disagreements—to-
ward something like what Latour calls “the progressive composition of
a common world.”39 Unlike the problem of the hole in the ozone layer,
climate change is ultimately all about politics. Hence its openness as
much to science and technology as to rhetoric, art, media, and arguments
and conflicts conducted through a variety of means. The need then is
to think the human on multiple scales and registers and as having both
ontological and nonontological modes of existence.
With regard to the climate crisis, humans now exist in two different
modes. There is one in which they are still concerned with justice even
when they know that perfect justice is never to be had. The “climate
justice” historiography issues from this deeply human concern. Climate
scientists’ history reminds us, on the other hand, that we now also have
a mode of existence in which we—collectively and as a geophysical
force and in ways we cannot experience ourselves—are “indifferent”
or “neutral” (I do not mean these as mental or experienced states) to
questions of intrahuman justice. We have run up against our own limits
as it were. It is true that as beings for whom the question of Being is an
eternal question, we will always be concerned about justice. But if we,
collectively, have also become a geophysical force, then we also have a
collective mode of existence that is justice-blind. Call that mode of being
a “species” or something else, but it has no ontology, it is beyond biol-
ogy, and it acts as a limit to what we also are in the ontological mode.
This is why the need arises to view the human simultaneously on con-
tradictory registers: as a geophysical force and as a political agent, as a
bearer of rights and as author of actions; subject to both the stochastic
forces of nature (being itself one such force collectively) and open to
the contingency of individual human experience; belonging at once
to differently-scaled histories of the planet, of life and species, and of
human societies. One could say, mimicking Fanon, that in an age when
the forces of globalization intersect with those of global warming, the
15postcolonial studies
idea of the human needs to be stretched beyond where postcolonial
thought advanced it.
In Conclusion
A little more than half a century ago, “an earth-born object made by
man”—the Sputnik—orbited the planet in outer space, “in the proximity
of the heavenly bodies as though it had been admitted tentatively to their
sublime company.” The author of these words, Hannah Arendt, thought
that this event foretold a fundamental change in the human condition.
The earth had been “unique in the universe in providing human beings
with a habitat in which they can move and breathe without effort and
without artifice,” but now clearly science was catching up with a thought
that “up to then had been buried in the highly non-respectable literature
of science fiction.” The Sputnik could be the first “step toward escape
from man’s imprisonment to the earth.” “Should the emancipation and
the secularization of the modern age,” asked Arendt, “ . . . end with
[a] . . . fateful repudiation of an Earth who was the Mother of all living
creatures under the sky?”40 Still, Arendt’s reading of this change in the
human condition was optimistic. A critic of “mass society,” she saw the
danger of such a society mainly in spiritual terms. A “mass society” could
“threaten humanity with extinction” in spirit by rendering humans into
a “society of laborers.”41 But it was in the same “mass society”—“where
man as a social animal rules supreme”—that “the survival of the species
could [now] be guaranteed on a world-wide scale,” thought Arendt.42
The Sputnik was the first symbol, for her, of such optimism regarding
the survival of the human species.
Today, with the crisis of anthropogenic climate change coinciding with
multiple other crises of planetary proportions—of resources, finance, and
food, not to speak of frequent weather-related human disasters—we know
that the repudiation of the earth has come in a shape Arendt could not
have even imagined in the optimistic and modernizing 1950s. Humans
today are not only the dominant species on the planet, they also col-
lectively constitute—thanks to their numbers and their consumption of
cheap fossil-fuel-based energy to sustain their civilizations—a geological
force that determines the climate of the planet much to the detriment
of civilization itself. Today, it is precisely the “survival of the species” on
a “world-wide scale” that is largely in question. All progressive political
thought, including postcolonial criticism, will have to register this pro-
found change in the human condition.
University of Chicago
new literary history16
NOTES
A draft of this essay was presented as a lecture at the University of Virginia in December
2010. Thanks to my audience and to the anonymous readers of the journal for construc-
tive criticisms. Special thanks are due to Rita Felski for the original invitation to write this
essay and for her helpful suggestions. I am grateful to Homi K. Bhabha for making some
of his recent writings available to me and for many discussions of the issues raised here.
1 See my “Belatedness as Possibility: Subaltern Histories, Once Again” in The Indian
Postcolonial: A Critical Reader, ed. Elleke Boehmer and Rosinka Chaudhuri (New York:
Routledge, 2011), 163–76.
2 I discuss these developments in “An Anti-Colonial History of the Postcolonial Turn: An
Essay in Memory of Greg Dening,” Second Greg Dening Memorial Lecture (Melbourne,
Australia: Department of History, The University of Melbourne, 2009), 11–13.
3 During gives his own account of these times in his introduction to The Cultural Studies
Reader, ed. Simon During (New York: Routledge, 1993).
4 Lata Mani, “The Production of an Official Discourse on Sati In Early Nineteenth
Century Bengal,” in Europe and Its Others, ed. Frances Barker and others (Colchester: Univ.
of Essex Press, 1985), 1:107–27. The book was published in two volumes out a conference
held at Essex in July 1984 on the subject of “the Sociology of Literature.”
5 See Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1983) and Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-
Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973). I have tried to bring Guha
and White together in my essay “Subaltern History as Political Thought” in Colonialism
and Its Legacies, ed. Jacob T. Levy with Marion Iris Young (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books,
2011), 205–18.
6 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpreta-
tion of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press,
1988), 271–313.
7 Guha’s Elementary Aspects was the best illustration of this proposition.
8 On all this, see E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1978).
9 The locus classicus for this position is still Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture
(London: Routledge, 1994). See Homi K. Bhabha, “Global Pathways” (unpublished).
10 Homi K Bhabha, “Notes on Globalization and Ambivalence” in Cultural Politics in a
Global Age: Uncertainty, Solidarity and Innovation, ed. David Held, Henrietta L. Moore, Kevin
Young (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008), 39.
11 Bhabha, “Notes,” 39–40.
12 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press,
2000), 361–62, cited in Homi K. Bhabha, “Our Neighbours, Ourselves: Contemporary
Reflections on Survival” (unpublished), 3. For Hardt and Negri’s critique of Bhabha and
of postcolonialism generally, see Empire, 137–59.
13 Bhabha, “Our Neighbours,” 3–4.
14 Bhabha paraphrasing Arendt in “Notes,” 38.
15 Bhabha, “Notes.” Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006). For details on
the Abahlali baseMjondolo movement, see their website http://www.abahlali.org/.
16 I read Partha Chatterjee’s Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most
of the World (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2004) as symptomatic of this predicament.
17 See Manuela Bojadžijev and Isabelle Saint-Saëns, “Borders, Citizenship, War, Class: A
Discussion with Étienne Balibar and Sandro Mezzadra,” New Formations 58 (2006): 10–30.
17postcolonial studies
18 See the map reproduced in Rochona Majumdar, Writing Postcolonial History (New York:
Bloomsbury Academic, 2010), 15. Thanks to Sandro Mezzadra for bringing these maps
to my and Majumdar’s attention.
19 Etienne Balibar, “Europe: An ‘Unimagined’ Frontier of Democracy,” Diacritics 33, no.
3–4 (2003): 36–44. Also Etienne Balibar, We the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational
Citizenship, trans. James Swenson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2004), 7.
20 See Balibar, We the People of Europe? and note 21 below.
21 Gerhard Stilz and Ellen Dengel-Janic, eds., South Asian Literatures (Trier: WVT Wis-
senschaftslicher Verlag, 2010); Sandro Mezzadra, La Condizione Postcoloniale: storia e politica
nel presente globale (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2008).
22 See the recent documentary film Climate Refugees (2009) made by Michael P. Nash.
http://www.climaterefugees.com/.
23 Sunita Narain and Anil Agarwal, Global Warming in an Unequal World: A Case of Envi-
ronmental Colonialism (Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment, 1991)
24 For an elaboration of this point, see my essay “Verändert der Klimawandel die Ge-
schichtsschreibung?” Transit 41 (2011): 143–63.
25 I discuss historiographical and some philosophical implications of the Anthropocene
hypothesis in my essay, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2
(2009): 197–222. See also Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill, “The An-
thropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” Ambio 36, no.
8 (2007): 614–21 and the special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society edited
by Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams, Alan Haywood, and Michael Ellis, “The Anthropocene:
A New Epoch of Geological Time?” (2011): 835–41.
26 For elaboration, see my “Climate of History.”
27 R. Revelle and H. E. Suess, “Carbon Dioxide exchange between atmosphere and
ocean and the question of an increase in atmospheric CO
2
during the past decades,”
Tellus 9 (1957): 18–27, cited in Weather and Climate Modification: Problems and Prospects, vol.
1, summary and recommendations. Final Report of the Panel on Weather and Climate
Modification to the Committee on Atmospheric Sciences, National Academy of Sciences,
National Research Council (Washington: National Academy of Sciences, 1966), 88–89.
28 Restoring the Quality of Our Environment (Report of the Environmental Pollution Panel,
President’s Science Advisory Committee) (Washington: The White House, 1965), Appendix
Y4, 127.
29 [Report of the] Committee on Atmospheric Sciences, National Research Council (Washington,
DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1973), 160.
30 David Archer, The Long Thaw: How Humans are Changing the Climate of the Planet for the
Next 100,000 years (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2010).
31 Tom Griffiths, Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ.
Press, 2007), 200.
32 Archer, The Long Thaw, 9.
33 Archer, The Long Thaw, 9–10.
34 Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine
Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2004). Also see the debate between David
Bloor and Bruno Latour: Bloor, “Anti-Latour,” and Latour, “For David Bloor . . . And
Beyond,” in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 30, no. 1 (1999): 81–112 and 113–29.
35 J. Bruce Brackenridge, The Key to Newton’s Dynamics: The Kepler Problem and the Principia
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1995)
36 Quoted in Michael Hulme, Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Con-
troversy, Inaction, and Opportunity (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009), 334. Here
is a contemporary definition of a “wicked problem”: “A wicked problem is a complex
issue that defies complete definition, for which there can be no final solution, since
new literary history18
any resolution generates further issues, and where solutions are not true or false or
good or bad, but the best that can be done at the time. Such problems are not morally
wicked, but diabolical in that they resist all the usual attempts to resolve them.” Valerie
A. Brown, Peter M. Deane, John A Harris, and Jaqueline Y. Russell, “Towards a Just and
Sustainable Future,” in Tackling Wicked Problems: Through the Transdisciplinary Imagingation,
ed. Valerie A. Brown, John A. Harris, and Jaqueline Y. Russell (London, Washington:
Earthscan, 2010), 4.
37 Hulme, Why We Disagree, 336.
38 Ulrich Beck, “The Naturalistic Misunderstanding of the Green Movement: Environ-
mental Critique as Social Critique,” in Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk, trans. Amos Weisz
(Cambridge: Polity, 1995), 36–57. See also the discussion in Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place
and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 2008), chap. 4.
39 Latour, Politics of Nature, 47
40 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed., introduction by Margaret Canovan
(1958; Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998), 1–2.
41 Arendt, The Human Condition, 46.
42 Arendt, The Human Condition, 46.
THE
ARCHITECTURE
OF CLOSED
WORLDS, OR,
WHAT IS THE
POWER OF SHIT
12
Sealed in a jar, Haus-Rucker-Co’s model A Piece of Nature (Ein Stuck Natur, 1971–1973)
implies an architecture of unrootedness (Figure 1). The miniature hut, covered in moss and
dirt and secured with twine like a laboratory sample, suggests an insulated, closed world,
disconnected from the exterior environment, an excerpt of Earth, neither receiving any
input nor discharging output. The contained microcosm is as much a sample of nature as
it is a representation of the earth in its totality. In the context of the alarming environmental
crisis in the early 1970s, the jar is an effort to preserve not only the fabricated sensation of
domestic safety in a natural setting but also the very idea of nature as something worthy
of conservation.
What is perhaps most enticing is how Haus-Rucker-Co’s encased domesticity
marks the end of nature as an unbounded field and the beginning of its reconstitution or
reengineering, as they advocate, in pieces. The jar is a powerful illustration of a period of
intense environmental anxiety, precisely because it is an excerpt of our lost idea of the
untamed land. It is like a fossil, marking the demise of nature as an indeterminate field of
its own and its subsequent translation in terms of recourses and their exploitation (see
Migayrou, 2003, p. 21). If one looks closer within this image of our vanished sense of
domesticity in the meadows, one may imagine other things lurking in the darker depths
of the jar. Pamela Popeson, of MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design, imagines
a little beach, a cliff, some hidden buildings and people, or even some wild animals (see
Popeson, 2011). Though independent of what one may or may not find in the jar, the
contained primeval shelter, openly referencing Marc-Antoine Laugier’s primitive hut in his
Essai sur l’architecture (1753), becomes a critique of not only our endangered earth but also
of architecture as an endangered species (Forty, 2000, pp.
22
1–2
23
), as a thing of the past.
If the primitive hut served for Laugier as an object to trace architecture’s origins in nature
and to argue for natural principles of construction and decoration as the closest analogy
to reason, the enclosed hut now stands as a preserved sample of a lost empire of reason.
Inside the sealed bubble, Walter Gropius’s Stunde Null (zero hour) had finally arrived and
architecture had become a different animal; it was no more than a transparent membrane,
following the famous “environmental bubble” of Reyner Banham (1965) and his call to
literally forgo the envelope. In most cases, a closed world replaces architecture, as the field
that shapes the use and form of the physical world, with a sensorial immersive environment
that copies and simulates the metabolism and experiential aptitudes of the natural world.
In many respects, it is like a death wish of the design object.
This closed world, and others like it, specifies an architecture of disappearance, as
well as a desire to return to our earlier home, the earth, the Garden of Eden. Yet, this world
is a conditioned and measured version of a simulated piece of nature; it is contented and
luxurious, allowing one to camp out in an idealized, manufactured climate. As industrial
designer George Nelson (1952) put it (before Banham), one could be alone with nature,
“but in a controlled, comfortable space, and integrated into contemporary society by
technology” (p. 89). Similarly, Leo Marx (1964) discussed in his eminent book The Machine
in the Garden our deeply rooted yearning to return to a simpler, harmonious existence in
an undefiled land, one that might allow us, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration
of Independence, to pursue happiness. In the civilized world of postwar, mid-twentieth
century culture, this premise was delivered, as Marx debated, through technological
instrumentation and the delusion that machines that regulate climates and environments are
the “spontaneous fruit of an Edenic tree” (p. 8). Citing Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset,
Marx called this regression an international form of primitivism, with humans thinking that
the civilization around them is the result of a spontaneous force. In his book The Revolt of
the Masses, Ortega y Gasset argued that in the depths of his soul, man is unaware of the
artificial character of civilization and does not extend his enthusiasm for the instruments to
the principles that make them possible. This curious state of mind has also been described
by Sigmund Freud as a collective neurosis and the very epitome of fantasy-making (Marx,
1964, pp. 8–9, referencing Freud, 1920), a pathology that humans unsuspectingly embrace to
regress to earlier life stages, as in the return of a primitive global era, when the relationship
between the individual and the environment was structured in different terms.
In hindsight, the closed world of A Piece of Nature signals a significant shift to the
formation of domesticity as a synthetic discipline and the construction of the house as a
machine, which literally (not symbolically) fabricates its own synthetic environment through
the recirculation of material and energy resources. The canned domestic cosmos depicts 13
a transformation in the field of ecology, from the purity of nature as a realm outside the
human-made to a technologically mediated science of instrumentation. In his book The
Closed World, Paul Edwards (1997) recalls the literature of Northrop Frye to argue for
“green worlds”—the unbounded natural setting of a forest, a meadow or a glade—as
opposed to “closed worlds” (pp. 12, 310). The closed world of A Piece of Nature sequesters
the green setting within its boundaries, reengineering nature in pieces of earth. Ultimately,
it functions like an improvisatory sealed structure that regenerates new conditions out of
what is available within its systemic borders. In a closed system, any modification occurs
internally, affecting the organizational structure of the system alone.
The starting point to this story is the view of the whole Earth, which had been highly
anticipated throughout the 1960s and eventually reached its apogee in the famous Earthrise
series taken from Apollo 8 in 1968 (Figure 2). These images, portraying humankind
entrapped in the finite space of a sphere, may be held accountable for a collective feeling
of anxiety in cultural imagination, as well as for a broad literature projecting plans for our
future survival within what Buckminster Fuller (1968) famously called our “spaceship Earth.”
This immersive imagery might also be held accountable for a genealogy of closed resource
regeneration systems, or smaller, highly engineered earth microcosms.
In 1976, A Piece of Nature was published on the cover of the March issue of
Casabella. Like the finite, spherical Earth, the jar proved to be a recurrent obsession for the
Haus-Rucker group of Laurids Ortner, Günter Zamp Kelp, and Klaus Pinter, who proposed
to use the bubble as an organization of containment to depict seclusion from a surrounding
physical reality, as well as an existential separation of the individual from the urban fabric
and the social sphere. This deliberate detachment—to uproot the individual or the house
from its context—is also evident in the group’s earlier projects, such as Environment
Transformer and Oase No. 7 (Figure 3). Both projects are objects encased in bubbles:
the former, a piece of a person—a head—and the latter, pieces of nature—a plant.
Nevertheless, by the time the jar appeared in Casabella it had become a response to
Architectural Design magazine’s “Autonomous Houses” issue published two months earlier,
in January 1976 (Figure 4).
In the “Autonomous Houses” special issue, edited by Martin Spring and Haig Beck,
the architecture of unrootedness appears under the umbrella of “autonomy” both to
popularize an ecological and libertarian way of living and acting and to herald “autonomy”
or independence from the energy grid as a political
statement against consumerism and capitalism. At the
bottom left corner of Cliff Harper’s ink illustration, a label
warns readers, “Autonomous Property. KEEP OUT.”
Like the primitive hut of Haus-Rucker-Co, the closed
world of the autonomous house harkened back to a
grass-roots mentality and pastoral iconography (see
Spring and Beck, 1976; Harper and Boyle 1976).
It presented a recognizable domestic environment,
removed from the urbanized landscape and thus
seemingly peaceful and dedicated to the pursuit of
happiness, as Marx would argue (1964, p. 6). This
landscape, nevertheless, was now equipped with
undercover machinery that guaranteed its blissful
sustenance as autonomous and independent of the
authoritative grid of supplies or tentacles of the
power grid.
The special AD issue presented to a larger
audience the development of the Alternative
Technology movement in Britain between 1972 and
1976, which was already outdated by the time the
autonomous house appeared on AD’s 1976 cover.
Similar to the jar, which was a fossil of a lost idea of
domesticity in nature, the autonomous house was
an illustration of the difficulty of reconciling previous
notions of environmentalism, including farming and
localism, with the instrumentalized regeneration of
Haus-Rucker-Co’s A Piece of Nature (Stück Natur, 1971–1973).
From Klotz 1985. 14
resources demonstrating, in many respects, technological supremacy. That same year,
the authors of the “Autonomous Houses” AD special issue published the book Radical
Technology, edited by Peter Harper (who later became director of the Centre for Alternative
Technology in Machynlleth, UK), along with Godfrey Boyle and the editors of Undercurrents
magazine (Harper & Boyle, 1976). The book compiled Clifford Harper’s Visions with drawings
of collectivized gardens, community workshops, and autonomous terraces, which had been
previously published in Undercurrents, providing a visual introduction to environmental
autonomy as a tool for political liberation.
Following the oil crisis and a decade of intense environmental debates, the terms
“self-sufficiency,” “self-reliance,” “life-support,” and “living autonomy” were already
pervasive in the lexicon of alternative technologies that had preoccupied the British avant-
garde scene for several years. Based on its biological definition, “autonomy” refers to
a system’s organic independence and self-governance, a notion that was transferred to
the domestic realm to advance the idea of the house as a closed system, unrooted from its
urban context. The “autonomous house” was like a restored Garden of Eden and a real-time
habitation experiment in which architecture, systems theory, and human biology could blend
together in the hope of radical social reform.
However, this idea of a world safely guarded and managed is now neither a poetic
metaphor nor a radical political proposition. It has become profitably real. Closed worlds
might be reflecting a commitment to a deeply rooted fantasy of architecture producing
nature, yet they are fully integrated within the very fabric of reality. In a way, all buildings
and large chunks of cities are closed worlds—“atmospheric enclosures that define
collectives” (Kim & Carver, 20
15
, p. 11). And this does not merely apply to Haus-Rucker-
Co’s A Piece of Nature, Banham’s “environmental bubble,” or Buckminster Fuller and
Shoji Sadao’s Dome under Manhattan in 1960. Our indoor environments today, such
as corporate office buildings, are in fact politically charged spaces that reflect political
agendas, social ideals, and culturally specific standards of taste and judgment. Because
data and measurements in environmental control offer trustworthy and convincing media
and illustrations, they have attained tremendous power and influence, which has been
maintained and circulated even though in most cases such criteria do not make any sense
and institutionalize absurd principles. The manipulation of organic and ecological processes
confined within artificial enclosures has become a metaphor for enforcing cultural and
biased standards of life by recalling the power of data and cultural capital.
Overall, the history of twentieth century architecture, design, and engineering has
been strongly linked to the conceptualization and production of closed systems. As partial
reconstructions of the world in time and in space, closed systems speak of the eerie
transference of life using architecture as the medium and vessel to secure a compulsive
cycling of matter, energy, and data. The projects documented in this book represent entirely
antithetical political agendas, from military ideas to assure humankind’s sovereignty in new,
uncharted territories to countercultural practices for autonomous living in the city, nostalgia
for the homesteading movement, and ecological tourism and environmental capitalism.
In every case these systems are real and invested in the strangeness of the real; they are
experimentally implemented rather than based on speculation, ranging from computer
models of the whole Earth, living experiments, artificial ecologies, robot prototypes,
and synthetic test beds for animal interaction with machines.
Unlike an open system, which is part of an exterior world and linked to its surroundings,
a closed system in this book implies an architecture of containment and detachment—
“the desire to shrink the world, to populate it” (Barthes, 1957, p. 66)—to alter it and condense
it to a manageable territory, so that all bodies can be monitored and controlled within its
borders. A closed system insulates itself from receiving any environmental input, as well as
from discharging output. Ultimately, it functions like an improvisatory sealed structure that
regenerates new conditions out of what is available within its systemic boundaries.
Any modification occurs internally, affecting the organizational structure of the system alone.
Closed worlds disclose a struggle to reconcile the utopian ideal of replicating Earth in its
totality with the visceral and raw material reality of “stuff” unexpectedly generated from
feedback loops. Somewhere between the idealization of Earth as a whole—as a complete
and interconnected system—and the messy and fuzzy leftovers of human physiology lies an
unexplored history of architecture dissolving into a reconstruction of natural systems.
15
DIGESTION AND AUTODIGESTION
In surveying the closed worlds documented in this book, it is important to highlight the
idea of recirculation projected on each of the living prototypes and the function of resource
digestion, which is a prerequisite for sustaining environmental autonomy. Each living
prototype is not only a sample of an endangered natural sample, like the primitive hut in the
jar, but also a reengineered piece of nature—a regenerative machine, like a giant stomach. It
is connected with its feeder with umbilical cords that cannot and should not be cut.
The prototype, along with its inhabitant, becomes a singular digestive device of
physiological substances that construct a new ecosystem model; all substances, fluids,
and humeurs are ingested and excreted with the help of hidden machinery in a continuous
process of material conversion.
At the commencement of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s, the first
ecological houses and communities were living experiments rather than measured objects.
They heavily involved the architect or builder in powering the house, which needed constant
maintenance. Like a natural system, the energy-resource systems of such living experiments
were self-regulatory and structured to “demand” maintenance; failure to provide that
upkeep would (naturally) result in component parts ceasing their functions and affecting
many other energy and resource systems contingent upon them. For example, failure to
properly sort organic and inorganic waste in a domestic living community could hinder the
composting of the waste and result in poor compost mulch for the food and animal-feed
garden crops; it would therefore negatively affect the subtle bond of circular productivity.
Therefore, the occupant of a closed world is its caretaker, steward, and feeder
(Figure 5). As Buckminster Fuller (1983) suggested, this dweller is also a “Guinea Pig B,”
with the B meaning Bucky; such occupants are not inanimate subjects that mentally
speculate on possible outcomes but scientists purposefully inserting themselves into the
living experiment and developing a visceral relationship to the living experiment.
The closed world dweller, feeder, or caretaker closely monitors and safeguards its operation.
Among the forward thinkers responsible for this archive of 37 living prototypes of closed
worlds, inventor Auguste Piccard reached the stratosphere for the first time in human history
in a hermetically sealed aluminum gondola that he designed; Russian researcher Evgenii
Shepelev, at the Moscow Institute for Biomedical Problems, was the first human to remain in
Apollo 8, the first manned
mission to the moon,
entered lunar orbit on
December
24
, 1968. That
evening, the astronauts—
Commander Frank Borman,
Command Module Pilot Jim
Lovell, and Lunar Module
Pilot William Anders—held
a live broadcast from lunar
orbit during which they
showed pictures of the
Earth and Moon as seen
from their spacecraft. Said
Lovell, “The vast loneliness
is awe-inspiring, and it
makes you realize just what
you have back there on
Earth.” Courtesy of NASA. 16
a closed life system containing chlorella as the only bioregenerative component;
Biosphere 2’s inventor and director, John Allen, enclosed himself for two days in the
Biospheric Test Module to test the air quality of the airtight environment; architect Graham
Caine was so busy feeding all the digesters of his fully functional Ecological House in
London that he could barely ever leave the premises, because if he did leave, its biotechnical
systems would degenerate and die.
In this sense, the recirculation of waste and resources is intricately enmeshed with
the physiology of the body and is thus woven into the ecology of habitation. Although
we tend to think of human waste as a phantom, relayed to the management of urban
resources, our ejecta infiltrates the air and water we breathe. The body’s physiology, and
the entirety of its metabolic loop, is historically a disenfranchised narrative, excluded from
contemporary environmental concerns. While ecological systems of the postwar period
portrayed the inhabitant as an indispensable part of building ecology, this image has been
dismissed. Environmental concerns promote a conservationist ethic and a list of cautionary
daily practices of scarcity. The narratives revealed through the living prototypes attest to
the disobedience of machines, as well as the complexity of integrating the body’s dirty
physiology in closed building systems.
The Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist Viktor Frankl disseminated throughout his
writings a quote from his teacher that connected body physiology with ecology, war, and
well-being: “Life is nothing more than a combustion process, a process of oxidation”
(Smith, 2013). In his best-selling book Man’s Search for Meaning, written after his release
from a Nazi concentration camp, Frankl argued that the difference between those who had
lived and those who had died came down to one thing: their ability to find meaning in the
most trivial, repetitive, and mechanical tasks of life. In his own words, “Happiness cannot
be pursued; it must ensue” (Frankl, 2006) and could in fact ensue from the meaning of
sustaining life through a series of problem-solving challenges. And there is nothing more
visceral as a participatory experience in a living experiment than the scientist’s voluntary
containment inside its premises as a guinea pig.
The pursuit of happiness as a game of managing human physiology could not be
more evident than in Ridley Scott’s science fiction film The Martian (2015). Happiness
becomes, for the Martian, the regulation of his life-support systems and the problem-solving
obsession of monitoring, capturing, and recycling human subsystems. Crucial to his survival
are the human feedback loop diagrams, illustrating the body as a closed ecology. Ingestion
and excretion cycles are strategically edited through the use of external apparatuses
that are assigned the mission of recycling all corporal flows. The Martian launches a new
biotechnological character, one in which human agency is delegated in terms of input
and output, yet one that seeks comfort in a serial loop of daily patterns that enable him to
conquer an unforeseeable and uninhabitable land (Figure 6).
All the work these explorers, feeders, caretakers, and stewards put into their closed
worlds demonstrates that their recirculatory machines are no more robust than a fragile
stomach, the operation of which, to efficiently convert input to output and leave no leftovers,
is unstable at best. What remains a paradox is the manner in which this questionable model
of total circular regeneration, imbued with the vitalism of a digesting stomach, has prevailed
as the mainstream model of what we now call a sustainable, net-zero habitat, opposing
energy loss. Perhaps what is most striking to witness, via cross-examination of the living
prototypes documented in this book, is the reflection of a lurking anxiety for the future of
habitation, as well as how little we know about regenerative systems that rely on the premise
of productive cycles. And yet, this premise of healthy feedback is the foundation of what
we loosely refer to as “sustainability.” In this light, the living prototypes cannot be seen as
solutions but as involuntary images of loss, or as an open call to evolve our practice
of habitation out of utter necessity for survival. At the same time, it is critical to question to
what degree resource conservation strategies are sustainable forms of practice, as well as
to recognize how impossible ideas become institutionalized through a series of bureaucratic
mechanisms and are eventually labeled “eco-friendly” or, even worse, “green.”
Originating from the space program and later migrating to countercultural groups
experimenting with autonomous living, closed living systems reflect our inability to mentally
or physically cope with the vastness of Earth as a system, one that is seemingly finite and
contained yet ultimately infinite. In the case of closed systems, the delineation of borders
is at the same time a highly restrictive but also resourceful model of creative production. 17
In other words, the closed system speaks to the invention that might take place within
the conceptual perimeter of a circle. The internal circulation and recirculation of matter
and ideas within a defined radius and circumference was a theme with various cultural
reflections of the 1960s and 1970s. It began with the enclosed, finite Earth, migrating from
the enclosed spacecraft to our perception of domesticity as a self-reliant ecosystem.
Even though ecosystems are mostly portrayed in simulations as robust as circular
systems, where waste equals food in an endless series of cycles and subcycles, the idea of
self-sufficiency is compulsive and hysteric in the will to ceaselessly generate new life from all
wasteful cycles of production. And this is how we structure our built environment. A closed
world, along with its dwellers, is a new type of unbalanced ecosystemic model susceptible
to the shortcomings of digestion; all substances, fluids, and humeurs are ingested and
excreted with the help of hidden machinery in a continuous process of material conversion.
Although a digestive machine is tasked with performing specific conversions, feedback
efficiency is not always the end goal. Digestive machines are sometimes disobedient.
They are connected with their feeders by permanent umbilical cords. All substances, food,
and fluids are ingested and excreted by digestive machines in a process of perpetual
exchange. Sometimes these machines digest, while at others they vomit; they are systems
of connecting vessels in which certain amounts of energy are channeled from one location
to the other, yielding deformities, swallowed regions, and outgrowths. Sometimes a closed
system becomes autodigestive and eats itself. If the idea of circular regeneration, the crown
jewel of sustainable enterprises, is a type of utopia, then arguably any idea of utopia ends up
eating its own roots, as suggested by the word “autodigestion.” As Manfredo Tafuri (1976)
argued, there are no more utopias in the era of late capitalism. On the other hand, however, it
is precisely this investment in the realm of impossibility, of redefining the reality of our built
world and our disciplinary territories that allows architecture to reconstitute itself.
Debatably, buildings operating as ecosystems are no more resilient than a giant
stomach, feeding off the anguish of connection or disconnection to life. Independently
of their performance, their engagement with an utter necessity for survival makes them
meaningful disciplinary exploratory vehicles, not because they illustrate solutions but
possibly because they constitute involuntary images of loss, in the utter necessity
for survival.
THE POWER OF SHIT
Both human and animal feces are useful; such material is technically powerful and valuable,
as it can generate methane and energy if treated properly. But more than a material,
a smelly, unwanted product of our own bodies, shit also indicates a stage of incoherency,
one where information is so finely grained and scattered that it cannot form bonds in
identifiable patterns. It is this state of indeterminacy and uncertainty that endows shit with
an unparalleled power to transform and to provide something useful, even something with
capital value. This cycle from shit to capital, which portrays a holistic and allegedly complete
understanding of the world, is in stark opposition to Georges Bataille’s (1985) notion of
excess and base materialism. Prior to World War II, Bataille consistently defied the utilitarian
idealization of matter and human aspirations and conjectured the existence of a
“base materialism,” an attitude toward the construction of a “scientific” conceptual edifice
that does not need to follow pragmatic or functionalist theories of materialism. He alleged
that a materialism that generates abstract “‘laws’ is in complicity with idealism” (Stoekl,
1985, p. xv).
Historically, the affinity between dirt and profit is vital; it is visibly witnessed in the
compulsive efforts of alchemists to convert shit to gold. As such, Hungarian psychoanalyst
Sándor Ferenczi (1950) argued that money might be dehydrated filth that has been made
to shine (p. 327). The Roman emperor Vespasian taxed the usage of public urinals so as to
expurgate the dishonorable act of defecation, and he capitalized on the logic of his levy with
the famous saying that pecunia non olet, meaning “money does not smell” (Laporte, 2000).
It is, however, with Sigmund Freud’s explanation of the anal-sadistic phase of psychosexual
development that children’s passion and affection for their feces comes clearly into view;
here is the first instance of the subject’s creation out of the materials in one’s own body.
In this sense, the pleasure in the clean object becomes a cover for satisfaction of the most 18
primitive anal-eroticism. Shit and urine are ejected from the body and rejected by the
psyche, whereas money is introjected by the body and accepted as a highly desired form.
If dirt and profit are of value, it is due to the fact that both states or entities allegedly
derive from the same primary matter in an ongoing recycling process. Materials are not
viewed as concrete objects, constituted out of, say, metal or paper, but as a disguise for
a sequential set of other substances that brought them into existence; in other words, shit
and urine undergo a serial transformation, assuming different material states all the way to
becoming objects of value. The purpose thus is to discredit the significance of objects and
to support the view that materials exist merely in stages, while they absorb qualities from
their previous stages: mud is shit deodorized, sand is mud dehydrated, pebbles are sand
hardened, and 3-D-printed beads are pebbles unearthed.
Material is then only a “vortex,” a “threshold,” or an “ideogram” that accumulates
meaningful associations between things, as, for instance, mud absorbs the qualities of
its previous feces stage and carries within it a fecal history. Each material “stage” is
defined by a threshold of information bits and their interrelated bonds. As an example,
in the stage of dirt, information is so finely grained and scattered that it cannot form bonds
in identifiable patterns. Essentially dirt is information so unrefined and randomly grained
that it is “interrelational loss” or incohesion between bits and particles that defines its
degenerate condition.
Recycling shit into money is as much a subject of theoretical analysis as a factual
constituent of capitalist production. Waste needs to go away, and this very process of
purging, transporting, and carrying into oblivion all that is worthless is utterly profitable.
Money is dehydrated filth made to shine. In recent history, new market “bubbles” have
originated from environmental issues rather than consumerist desires. After the housing
bubble, the latest market bubble grew from the exchange of carbon dioxide emission
credits between countries in compliance with the Kyoto Protocol. Future market bubbles are
predicted to arise from the trading of urban waste. Congested metropolitan environments
produce massive amounts of solid waste and sewage that are then transported out of the
city. The purging of this waste is invisible to our perception, yet it generates capital for those
who manage and transfer the raw materials. Waste is a phantom material condition,
but at the same time it is a product or, better stated, a by-product of social reality.
To write a counterhistory to optimized circular economies in material conversions, one
perhaps needs to look at shit. Only through this raw confrontation may the ecology of life be
somehow useful. As Donna Haraway (2015) argues, “I am a compost-ist, not a posthuman-
ist: we are all compost, not posthuman” (p. 161). We need to investigate, monitor, and
document the strangeness of the real, to invent an architecture completely devoted to
the problems of the real but not one that is unaware of its uncertainty and complexity.
Closed Worlds is not about constructing fictions and fantasies but about closely observing,
conducting forensic analysis, asking questions, and instrumentalizing our findings in
a creative way.
Haus-Rucker-Co’s
Environment Transformer,
1968. Courtesy of
Haus-Rucker-Co.19
THE CLOSURE PARADOX
In 1986, the World Health Organization (WHO) coined the term “sick building syndrome.”
Following on its committee report in 1984, WHO indicated that up to 30% of new and
remodeled buildings worldwide may be the subject of complaints related to poor indoor
air quality (US EPA, n.d.) As the historian Michelle Murphy (2006) suggests, office
buildings became architecturally airtight in the 1970s for the sake of energy efficiency,
while internally they were arranged in open floor plans. This typology allegedly led to sick
building syndrome, which did not exist before 1980. “In order to become ‘sick,’” Murphy
observes, “a certain kind of office building had to come into existence” (p. 2). WHO’s
acknowledgment of a syndrome of acute health and discomfort effects that individuals
experienced within enclosed built environments was significant, because it institutionalized
the framework for examining health symptoms linked to the time people spent enclosed
in buildings. Public concerns about indoor air quality have mounted rapidly since the
1980s, as large percentages of building occupants in heavily air-conditioned buildings
have repeatedly experienced symptoms of breathlessness, exhaustion, headache, nausea,
and unconsciousness. Air-conditioning systems are in several cases the main carriers of
diseases, as they can quickly transfer and distribute pathogenic airborne bacteria, as in the
case of legionellosis (Figure 7).
Cover of the Architectural
Design (AD) special issue,
“Autonomous Houses”
(January 1976). The cover
was drawn in ink by Clifford
Harper, a British underground
illustrator who contributed to
Undercurrents magazine and
Radical Technology. 20
In the early and mid-1900s, building ventilation standards called for approximately
0.5 cubic meter per minute (cmm) of outside air for each building occupant, primarily to
dilute and remove body odors. As a result of the 1973 oil embargo, however, national energy
conservation measures called for a reduction in the amount of outdoor air provided for
ventilation to 0.15 cmm per occupant. In many cases, these reduced outdoor air ventilation
rates were found to be inadequate to maintain the health and comfort of building occupants
(US EPA, 1991). Given the rise of sick building syndrome since the 1980s, it is significant
to observe that the rigid conservation ethic that appeared in the wake of the oil crisis
of the 1970s substantially contributed to a series of unpredictable environmental
problems detrimental to human health. In many respects, the sick building is a by-product
of policies earnestly instituted against profligate energy consumption in buildings.
These actions nevertheless resulted in heavily air-conditioned buildings that usually
generate problematic air-quality conditions due to the lack of exchange between buildings
and their surrounding environment.
In most sick buildings, there cannot be an identifiable cause for illness, as a causal
effect of a specific deficiency. This condition of uncertainty is vividly analyzed by Murphy
in her book Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty, in which she argues
that sick building syndrome was only recognized as a constellation of signs, not in a single
underlying mechanism that produces ill health effects. The nonaetiological pattern, which
was ostensibly “a phantasm of illness” (Murphy, 2006, p. 7) before 1980, is astonishing
to watch, as it reveals the technical deficiencies of closure and sealing, as registered on
humans. Accordingly, it weaves human and nonhuman subjects into the sensorial, chemical,
and atmospheric environment of habitation in a complex mixture of parameters, which is
precisely the topic of this book.
What remains a paradox is the fact that the airtight enclosure—the practice of sealing
buildings and controlling the indoor atmosphere—has surfaced as a sustainable design
practice, thus promoting buildings as regenerative and closed ecological systems capable
of harnessing waste and providing their own energy. Insulated from the mechanics of the
seasons and the flows of the natural world, buildings could, it was asserted, save significant
amounts of energy and thus become environmentally sound. In light of this perhaps
absurd conservationist ethic, protected, uterine-like environments have been consistently
translated as conserved ecological milieus blocked from the effluence of the exterior world.
Decades after having sealed many buildings, we may consider the viability of closed
ecological systems and the process of translating planetary ideals to environmental
policies and consequently to a set of physical rules and artifacts in the building industry.
The experiment of the closed world was most notably tested in Arizona, in the massive
Biosphere 2 project, which was completed and sealed in 1991; after a period of time, fresh
air had to be pumped in and food introduced into the sphere to assure the health of the
sealed subjects. But beyond the Biosphere 2, closed worlds exist within thousands of sick
buildings of corporate America.
The questions suggested by the 37 living prototypes described in this book are simple:
How are sustainable terms developed and institutionalized? How do they become tropes
to signal new political ideologies always expressing the left and the right simultaneously?
Veiled under the ethics of environmentalism, a new agenda has become the norm; “net zero,”
“ecological footprint,” “minimizing energy loss through sealing,” “loop systems,” and other
concepts have become a new form of capital.
EARTH HOLDING AND CIRCULAR FALLACIES
In 2002, the architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart published
a book that constituted their manifesto about replacing “cradle to grave” design—a linear
production model in which materials are discarded when obsolescent—with “cradle to
cradle” design—a circular production model in which materials can be repurposed and
reused once they have fulfilled their original function. Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the
Way We Make Things stemmed from work that Braungart conducted at the Environmental
Protection Encouragement Agency in Germany during the 1990s and his work on the
technical Frameworks for Life-Cycle Assessment. Overall, the authors proposed a circular
political economy within design fields, as opposed to a shortsighted linear economy, 21
arguing for circular causality as a means to achieving a diverse, safe, healthy and equitable
world with clean air and water, soil, and power. Circular reasoning defies death, or the end of
a material’s useful life, and promises that matter does not come to an end; it changes state.
Cradle to Cradle has been foundational in architects’ discussions on sustainability
and in establishing the technical dimension, as well as the logic of efficiency, optimization,
and evolutionary competition, in environmental debates. It resides in the libraries of most
architecture students and has sold more than 400,000 copies. The book has also evolved
into a production model implemented by a number of companies, organizations, and
governments around the world, and it has become a registered trademark and a product
certification, having begun as a proprietary system.
The problem with Cradle to Cradle and its widely circulated premise is that architecture
and design are projected as neutral fields with little disciplinary intelligence of their own;
the authors considered these fields ripe to institutionalize commonsense environmental
principles. The idea of a world in which all resources are recirculated and never wasted was
comforting to a broad, well-intentioned audience, yet it defies the complexities present in
both environmental science and creative design. Moreover, it dwells on wishful thinking,
on the idea of holism and the idealization of the world as a round field where all resources
can be effortlessly regenerated.
What is particularly troubling in the assertion of Cradle to Cradle is the axiom that
“waste equals food,” an axiom transferred from the operation of natural systems directly
to artificial systems, production lines, materials, and manufacturing. In this logic, the
life and metabolism of living creatures should be decoded, replicated via technological
instrumentality, and directly transposed to industrial and design systems advocating for
a full circle of life with no loss. This simplistic and, frankly, false sense of holism has been
directly applied to building systems and cities under the umbrella of “integrated systems.”
Moreover, circularity has fostered a perception of “Earth Holding,” prodigiously depicted
in images of Earth held gently and affectionately by human hands, as if the earth is a
wounded baby that needs care (Figure 8). The anthropomorphic perception of the earth as
an endangered living species that is cute and sentient, as a being that needs to be petted
by humans, its self-proclaimed conquerors, is delusional, as it positions our species at the
center of all pivotal planetary developments.
Ideas of effortless circularity, manifest in many of the living prototypes presented in this
book, also reveal a deeply rooted problem in the language of environmental representation,
which is visualized almost exclusively with the use of arrows. Since the 1960s, ecologist
Howard Odum’s Energese, or Energy Systems Language, has instrumentalized ecosystems,
The Martian (2015),
directed by Ridley Scott,
with Matt Damon as
Mark Watney (United
States: 20th Century Fox).
Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy
Stock Photo.
22
as well as human agency, in terms of input and output. This representational language for
ecological simulation models, derivative of electronic circuits, has become the primary tool
architects use to visualize performance and energy flow. Nevertheless, as evident in the
series of feedback drawings for each living prototype presented in this book, the language
of environmental representation needs to illustrate loss, derailment, and the production of
new substances and atmospheres. Can alternative notation systems and fields effectively
replace the reductionism of arrows, given that arrows can only point to the end goal of
conversions but say very little about the process of recycling itself?
The use of arrows in circular formats reveals a larger problem of deduction in
environmental representation. With the dissemination of these flow diagrams, environmental
concerns have been normalized to a circular form of reasoning, obscuring the illustration of
loss, derailment, and the production of new substances and atmospheres, thus attempting
to force the complex density of living systems into a simple mechanical flow paradigm.
This type of information deduction was an ongoing anxiety of the Chilean biologist Francisco
Varela, who with his coauthors Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch argued in The Embodied
Mind (1991), following Varela’s work on autopoiesis with Humberto Maturana (1980), that
cognitive systems cannot be understood explicitly on the basis of their input and output
relationships but by their operational closure. A system that has operational closure is one
in which the results of its processes are those processes themselves. The brain, Varela
Thompson, and Rosch (1991) argue, uses processes that change themselves while operating
and thus we cannot separate such processes from the products they produce (p. 139).
Similarly, the language of environmental representation represents a process of interlinked
threads, while these threads and their processes are trying to develop a relationship with
themselves. In the environment, perception is seen as a cognitive process of hypothesis
formation, not as a simple prescription or reflection of pregiven information.
In addition to reductionism of environmental representation, the studies also
touch upon the problem of efficiency and optimization, which is also promoted by the
promise of circular regeneration. In several of the living prototypes documented in this
book, redundancy is favored as a means to help ecosystems become more resilient. The
concept of species redundancy or ecological redundancy has recently been applied to
community and conservation ecology. If an ecosystem has redundancy, it can continue to
provide services after a disturbance has knocked out one or more species. Thus, having
a large variety of species can provide a buffer for ecosystem fluctuations, changes, and
perturbations. The idea of webbing alternate channels for energy and resources, the idea
of excess and diversity of systems and species and of built-in redundancies, is a different
Earth in my hands. Created
by Steven Guzzardi.
Creative Commons license.
23
concept than the notion of negative feedback, or teleological distribution of forces where
all energies are accounted for.
Our perception of the earth as one interconnected world, as an image of the whole
Earth that promotes unity and balance, is no longer relevant. Unilateral strategies for
divergent problems, in the ideological belief that the metabolism of the planet may become
the foundation for technology, culture, and design, are no longer applicable.
Conceivably, to write a counterhistory of the “cradle to cradle” view, one needs to
look at shit. Only through this raw confrontation may the ecology of life endow architecture
with new disciplinary intelligence. As Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley (2016) note in
their recent book Are We Human?, in 1926 the Berlin critic Adolf Behne argued that those
designers who care only about the mechanical logic of function and aim to make a building
a “pure tool” actually end up with an inhumanely standardized architecture. Behne claimed
that dehumanization is the very thing that leads to humanization (Colomina & Wigley, 2016,
p. 82). The reversal of intentionality is thus critical to the architect’s agency. The immediate
and easy assumption that once there is a problem, there is also a linear and causal response
to this problem, is convoluted if not futile. When a phenomenon is so multidimensional and
pervasive, woven into so many parameters of culture, it is not sufficient to address it at
face value. One might first need to invent novel ways to engage with the problem itself and
understand the diversity of its facets. This book is a regression, as well as a progression,
used as a catalyst to approach contemporary questions of climate change, recycling,
modern life, and the culture of making. Regressing into the examination of human nature,
through a kind of spatial and material experience, might bring to the forefront a side road:
a rerouting into the unconscious of the current political crisis of how little we understand
ecological problems. Closed Worlds provides only questions, not answers or solutions
to problems. Yet, forcing oneself to think and act in daily small diversions is what might
constitute change. And, possibly, shit is our only way out.
24
Illustration of the mechanical systems that sustain the natural replicas of the Closed World.
Drawing by Temitope Olujobi, 2016.25
CLOSED
WORLDS,
BUBBLES,
AND
VOLUNTARY
CONTAINMENT
280
November 19, 2016: winter has suddenly arrived, and outside it snows. I am inside, though,
airtight and connected to the world. I breathe my own exhalations while reading the
news of dismay over the US elections and exhale to make patterns on my superinsulated
window. Just seeing the condensation dripping along the glass surface assures me that
I am unaffected by the piercing cold, as well as the political disarray in Washington. I see
the city steadily freezing, yet my own sphere is warm, cozy, and equipped with power and
high-speed WiFi. My synched apps and devices deliver all plausible scenarios about my
schedule, as data refreshes. Synching might be more useful for survival than food, in fact.
Looking behind the walls, where this synching happens, I recollect Reyner Banham’s (1965)
words: my home is not a house. It is a labyrinth of noisy heated ductwork; pipes and wires
sustain my voluntary detachment from the visceral, raw experience of urban wandering and
forge my total immersion in electronic information trends. My atmosphere is fully recycled
by heavyweight infrastructure that I cannot see, nor would I wish to see. If I could add plants
in these pipes and soil rooted in my place, perhaps my hallucination that I am unaffected
by climate change and fierce political ruptures around the world could be prolonged.
Murmurations of water dripping through the foliage—Ikea’s homegrown garden program—
offer some distraction from the ongoing newsfeed. Now anyone can grow a garden inside,
and my plan is to grow vegetables and tomatoes, feeding them with my own shit. Inside my
microcosm, my safe replica of an unsafe world, the living and the manufactured have been
intertwined to secure a compound geochemical affinity between capital and excrement.
The purpose of this supersystem, this “egosphere,” as Peter Sloterdijk (2007) has called it,
is to nurture other complexities—me. Do I personify the contemporary human subject,
which is almost never terrified by what is outside? This subject—me—is blissfully
distant from all that matters, yet entirely immersed in a carefully curated replication,
or reverberation, of the world. Life cannot get any denser inside my anodyne bubble.
Screenshot from Saturday Night Live’s sketch
“The Bubble,” in which “life continues as if elections never
happened.” Originally aired on November 19, 2016.
281
The following day, a version of my inconsequential anecdote was featured in a sketch,
“The Bubble: Established 2017,” on NBC’s Saturday Night Live. In it, Buckminster Fuller and
Shoji Sadao’s famous Dome over Manhattan, from 1960, has now resurged above Brooklyn
to seal and shield progressive, environmentally minded intellectual millennials. As the actors
in the sketch proclaimed, in the Bubble “life continues for progressive Americans as if the
election never happened” (SNL, 2016). And yet, the Bubble is as much a satire as it is a
new social reality of what the news media now refer to as an “echo chamber:” a space of
voluntary containment where you purposely hear the reverberation of your own voice.
You receive only your own thoughts and witness the reconstruction of your customized
version of the world. The NBC show’s sarcasm is strikingly real. The progressives contained
in the Bubble are not only traumatized and disenfranchised while acknowledging the lurking
powers of the other America, but they are also in denial; they never saw this coming.
As one observer has noted, “Our digital social existence has turned into a huge
echo-chamber, where we mostly discuss similar views with like-minded peers and miserably
fail to penetrate other social bubbles” (El-Bermawy, 2016). The social bubbles that
Facebook and Google have designed for us are shaping our reality (El-Bermawy, 2016).
This “world in a bottle” is nothing new to architects. In fact, architecture’s role in the
reconstruction of idealized microcosms, as curated Earth replicas, is tied to the convoluted
history of utopia. Fuller and Sadao’s Dome over Manhattan, Haus-Rucker-Co’s A Piece
of Nature (Ein Stuck Natur), and Reyner Banham’s Environmental Bubble are iconic
illustrations of a period of intense environmental anxiety precisely because they manifest,
like jarred fossils, our lost idea of the untamed land (Kallipoliti, 2015). What is different,
nevertheless, in the 2017 bubble is that the containment is not explicitly environmental;
it is not simply a regulation of climate and air quality. Although the preservation of
natural samples and botanical capital is part of the equation, the bubble assures a total
preservation of civic interactions, lifestyle, and urbanity in an imagined, curated stage set
extruded from reality. All animate and inanimate bodies are coded by networks of exchange
and subsumed into urban production. Climate is directed, along with protocols of trade and
civic interactions.
The bubble might be committed to a deeply rooted fantasy of architecture naturalizing
and reproducing sections of the world, yet it is fully integrated within the very fabric of
reality. The resulting socialization of the ecological idea seeks to transform urbanism into
constellations of controlled enclosures, as verbatim replicates of larger Earth samples.
This type of carefully constructed urban interiority, with climate, lifestyle, and spectacle
being directed with the utmost care, is envisaged as inhabiting the world irrespective of
geographic restrictions. According to Frederic Migayrou (2003), we now see the world
becoming a “continuous environment with no hope of exteriority” (p. 26), characterized
by an ever-increasing hacking and mining of our desires for data. If we look back, the
experiment of the bubble is as much tied to the regulation of climate as it is to the regulation
of lifestyle, spectacle, and enhanced entertainment. In fact, the reconstruction of certain
environmental conditions is assumed to assure heightened levels of leisure and amusement.
In celebrating this kind of extreme interiority, reinforced by the allure of environmental
performance, we are spectators of a new urban experience: the network has given way
to the cloud, and the bubble is the incidental by-product of the cloud. The green bubble,
albeit unwittingly, rises as a control mechanism that detaches us from civic engagement.
The bubble also begs a simple question: What is the urban experience in this time of
voluntary containment? A new breed of psychogeographic drifters is roaming on
their customized itineraries as their phones instruct. In this new territory, where everything
is hyper-connected, the subject becomes increasingly contained. Every echo becomes
a world.
Our constant existence of being connected yet detached allows us to affirm ourselves
by augmenting our containment as something simultaneously interiorizing and exteriorizing.
Yet, our new communal existence with public space cannot exclusively be based on
mediation of data and the comfort of plants. As citizens and creative thinkers, we need to
think beyond the bubble. As a famous movie line suggests, “open your eyes” to the bubble
inside which you are voluntarily contained. Then, develop an erotic, yet resistant relationship
with your bubble. Then it might be possible to penetrate the bubble and imagine other ways
of being, even to imagine some real grounds of hope beyond the market commodity of
a digitally enhanced environmental euphoria. 282
The question I would like to leave you with is whether the material presented in this
book is a deviant story of architectural history and environmental science; my belief is that
it is not. Besides offering descriptive narratives of the cycling of material and informational
resources, the book’s narrative also reflects on the construction of a modern human
subject that is immersed in a carefully curated replication, or reverberation, of the world
as a preengineered fantasy. Inside the unimaginable carcass of bits and fragments of
information we encounter in our daily lives, the only way to navigate is relative to oneself, or
as French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux (2008) has put it, in a relational loss with context.
Our need for embeddedness in the world and the ecosystem might already be obsolete.
In psychoanalysis, this closure corresponds to an ontogenetic, and phylogenetic, stage
of development (the stage of the “protopsyche”) at which the organism has control over
nothing but itself, denying any environmental input, as well as discharging output. In some
ways, it becomes a self-referential reality.
This subject has not suddenly emerged; it has been silently forming in the breeding of
what sociologist and urbanist William H. Whyte (1956) termed the “organization man.”
This term consolidates the calculated and efficient modern subject, which has now evolved
to become the post-truth man. Post-truth was selected by Oxford Dictionaries as 2016’s
international word, demonstrating not only a deep crisis of governance, and citizenship, but
also that the power of narrative, metaphor, storytelling, and, most importantly, interiorization
has debunked data and measurements that had attained and maintained their influence
since the Enlightenment.
In this new world, we are possibly in dire need of a new kind of criticism, of new ways
to fathom via interiorization, and of methods to move past barriers in the way we narrate
stories through the design of our environments as well as the shaping of our reality. If every
bit of fact is designed in the world of post-truth, the role of the architect has expanded,
albeit unwittingly, to become more than shaping the physical world and the aesthetic and
experiential aptitudes of our daily existence. In many ways, it has become of civilizational
value. If the organization man represents the status quo, the mythic stories of closed worlds
and their disobedience, burdened by their visceral flaws, might be a viable counterpart to an
alternative, deviant future.
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