TABLE OF CONTENTS
II. Why Singulars?
III. The Singular and the Particular
IV. Singularization and Architectural Science
V. Conclusion
BIBLIOGRAPHY
This is the second of four installments, and contains section II.
II. Why Singulars?
I define a singular event in the world as an event that by necessity can only occur once. Its very nature makes it unrepeatable. Here are some examples: the Big Bang, my birth, and my death. This definition applies equally well for every dawn, sunset, and daily occurrence that as an individual event is unique and unrepeatable. Yet, the very regularity of planetary motion means that the phenomena “dawn,” “sunset,” and so-on recur diurnally. As phenomenal “repeatables,” they’re regular and recurrent; as events that are “unrepeatables,” they’re singular and occurrent.
In contradistinction to singulars, we can define particulars. Every conceptual scheme can be seen as containing the universal (laws or rules that apply everywhere, regardless of context), the general (laws or rules that apply in a given sub-domain, but still across a variety of cases), and lastly, the particular (the final unit of analysis that nevertheless can be inherently related back to the general and the universal). Clear examples of this structure can be found in taxonomical orders. For instance, in botany, we can define orders, families, genera, species, and subspecies. Thus, the herb Calamintha nepeta ssp. nepeta is a subspecies of C. nepeta. One level up, this species is a member of the genus Calamintha. In turn, this genus is part of the family Labiatae, which is itself embedded in the order of dicotyledons.
This taxonomical scheme is designed to position every entity in a larger order, grounding it in a larger superstructure of which it is a part.[i] The particular may be unique as an individual, but it is ultimately relatable to and fully explainable in terms of a higher-order category. For the natural sciences, this way of working has proven to be of immense value and has been fruitfully applied across a variety of fields such as botany, zoology, geology, biology, and physics. Like every model, however, the relation between representation and reality is of a broadly analogical kind.
Moreover, this taxonomical system imposes a structure on the world whose conceptual logic is clear, but its relation to the subject matter is not. After all, such taxonomical structures are our cognitive instruments for understanding the world; but it is not as if the world were necessarily pre-structured in such a way as to conform to such schemes, or deliberately conceived in structures that are neatly categorizable. They are regulative ideals in that they enable and shape our inquiries, but they do not represent the structure of reality as such or provide the final level of analysis by splitting it up into essential categories or orders.
To put this in Immanuel Kant’s terminology: many sciences are carried out by means of “determining judgments” that subsume particulars under larger, higher-order categories and general concepts. But the problem is—as Kant knew all too well—that this type of human cognition is unfit for understanding large portions of manifest reality. Categorizing is all fine and good, but there are many areas of human cognition that are not preoccupied with categorization or general conceptualization in any way, or that, even if they do categorize or conceptually generalize over some items here and there, they’re not fundamentally interested in constructing unassailable cathedrals of thought with such categories and general concepts.
This is especially true when comes to thinking about any broadly creative practice. It may be possible to say about a certain painting that is a work of visual art; that it belongs to the category of paintings; that it is figurative; that it was made with a certain type of paint etc. But while these statements may be true, they are probably not the most insightful remarks one could make about it.[ii] The work’s relation to the artistic, psychological, and cultural context in which it appeared, the way it is positioned as an entity in “the artworld,” its possible contribution to the larger phenomenon called “fine art,” etc., may actually lead to questions that have a certain relevance what the painting as singular object represents and effectuates.
The mistake that occurs often when thinking about the results of creative practices is to treat a singular (unique, unrepeatable) object as if it were a particular (subsumed, taxonomized) one; and consequently, inappropriately applying a set of categories and general concepts to it. Broadly speaking, the same mistake has repeatedly been made in thinking about architectural science. By treating it as “another science” with all the accompanying assumptions about its content, methods, and preferred standards, actual discourse about architectural science has been invisibly contaminated by external norms that had nothing to do with its actual content.
If my reasoning is sound, the very question with which we started should therefore be turned around: why, after all, should an architectural science be required to work with particulars, if it clearly deals with singulars instead? Early design researchers had some inkling of this, as their central insight that the creative disciplines needed a discursive space of their own indirectly points back to the very issue with which we started: what kind of science is Architekturwissenschaft?
One possible answer can be found in Kant’s third Critique. If we are confronted with an object that is singular, and we also make judgments about it, what kind of judgments are they, really? To put it in Kant’s own words:
In regard to logical quantity [i.e. unity] all judgments of taste are singular judgments. For since I must immediately hold the object up to my feeling of pleasure and displeasure, and yet not through concepts, it cannot have the quantity of an objectively generally valid judgment, although if the singular representation of the object of the judgment of taste in accordance with the conditions that determine the latter is transformed into a concept through comparison, then a logically universal judgment can arise from it: e.g., by means of a judgment of taste I declare the rose that I am gazing at to be beautiful.[iii]
As is apparent in this passage, Kant realized that “judgments of taste” (but you could equally well somewhat more longwindedly call them “judgments about the appropriateness and fittingness of a given design choice” are singular judgments. They are not aimed at categorizing or generalizing over an object, but instead at evaluating it both as singular object and with its impact on the senses in mind. Consequently, there is always a subjective hue to such judgements. It explains why two different designers faced with the same situation could end up making different choices. Moreover, it also explains the influence of experience: accumulated knowledge from the past reverberates in choices made in the present.
Kant uses the example of a rose that is evaluated from the viewpoint of pleasure and displeasure. But again, it is not far-fetched to extend his description somewhat, and to maintain that designers very often work from intuition, “gut feeling,” and the direct affective feedback they experience when looking at a drawing. Michael Graves called it the “visceral connection” that’s inherent in architectural sketching and in this, he was absolutely correct.[iv] Some of these feelings may involve pleasure and displeasure, but equally they involve emotions like delight, frustration, boredom, and relief. There is quite some robust evidence from so-called “protocol studies” that the (non-conceptual) affections are driving forces in creative activities.
Given a suitable background experience (roughly, the conceptual toolkit that designers use for comparison and reference) a “logically universal judgment” can indeed arise from a collection of singular judgments. In other words: decisions that have been taken on intuitive grounds can—when properly systematized, ordered, compared, and refined—lead to technical and conceptual knowledge. That is, they can assume a logically valid status. This means that the singular judgments are contextualized, ordered, and presented in such a way that they acquire a certain argumentative force: they can be used to convince others, to justify choices or to drive the reasoning process forward. Again, in Kant’s words:
A representation which, though singular and without comparison to others, nevertheless is in agreement with the conditions of universality, an agreement that constitutes the business of the understanding in general, brings the faculties of cognition into the well-proportioned disposition that we require for all cognition and hence also regard as valid for everyone (for every human being) who is determined to judge by means of understanding and sense in combination.[v]
The universality that Kant appeals to here is not that everyone agrees on a given judgment, but that its rationality can be made intelligible. And indeed, this is one of the hallmarks of good design. It appeals to rational reasoning as well as aesthetic pleasure. It unites “understanding and sense in combination” and becomes thereby convincing.
Like any other science, an architectural science can only be constituted in a way that does justice to the content it actually deals with. And since its working unit is the singular object rather than the particular object, it follows that the very notion of the singular (and its associated cognate singularization) stand at the very center of architectural practice, and consequently forms the root metaphor for architectural science.
And if we follow Kant’s line of thinking even further, we can imagine how a design process that starts out intuitively and affectively gradually develops to such levels of precision that it may lay claim to scientific accuracy and argumentative coherence. By linking up singular judgments, and comparing and contrasting them to larger conceptual frameworks, the dynamics of design practices can be made intelligible, communicable and systematic, without thereby losing the explorative, creative edge of that characterizes design.
But what does all this mean for the spatial singular, that is, the result of creative design practices in the architectural disciplines? How should we define it? First, we must demarcate which notion of “singular” we’re actually using. The very idea of something’s being “singular,” and the associated concept of singularity, have been overdetermined somewhat by theirapplication in mathematics, philosophy, biology, literary studies, and technological studies.
The notion I use here as basis for my reasoning has close ties to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.[vi] In their philosophy, the creative potentials of human cognition and natural forces play pivotal roles. Indeed, they regard philosophy itself as the “creation of concepts.”[vii] Not surprisingly, their conceptual toolkit is stacked to the brim with thinking tools that support this creative activity. Singularization in their philosophy is roughly defined as the process (or set of processes) that brings about the transformation of entities. Instead of thinking about the classification or identity of a given entity, Deleuze and Guattari are more interested in what disruptive, unexpected, or unique potentials that an entity possesses to transform or affect the world around it, and correspondingly, what forces and relations are responsible for its change, differentiation, mutation, or transformation. In short, they are more concerned with what it does than with what it is.[viii] In his introduction to Guattari’s conversation with Shin Takamatsu, Genosko defines singularization even more precisely:
Singularization is a self-organizing process that at its most basic level concerns bringing together ensembles of diverse components (material/semiotic; individual/collective), that is, assemblages (‘straddling’, in interaction, between radically heterogeneous domains’) that deploy their own intrinsic references (inventing relations with the outside as well), and the analysis of their effects (especially transformations) on the formation of subjectivity beyond the individuated subject and prefabricated versions of him/her; for Guattari, “the assemblage of enunciation ‘exceeds’ the problematic of the individuated subject, the consciously delimited thinking monad, faculties of the soul (apprehension, will) in their classical sense.”[ix]
So far, this sounds quite abstract, but it is actually close to the way in which many architectural designers speak about their own output, or at least it resembles the conceptual framework they use to talk about it. In designing, an entity or object (whether an actually existing one, or an entity that has yet to be realized) is gradually developed and reworked. And while its specific characteristics play a pivotal role in this process, they do so with regard to a context, whether environmental, spatial more generally, or social. The resulting object (whether a building, a landscape or a design for a park) engages intimately with its context, even to such a degree that it gets inextricably enmeshed in it. Even the most striking and distinguishing design acts on its context, but is also simultaneously acted upon by that context. In this reciprocal transaction of effects, something new and singular emerges out of both components, the object and its context, and the internal and external forces that are active in it.
The potential of design lies exactly in the fact that not only the expected effects arise, but equally well the unexpected.[x] Designed objects are always “open” to some degree.[xi] The open out into their context, and simultaneously, their context opens out into them, unlocking something new and unique, an interaction that has been traditionally labelled genius loci. And we can extend this point even further: what makes the architectural design practices decidedly more than mere problem-solving or object-construction is their ability to point beyond themselves, and towards what I might somewhat unhelpfully call “the metaphysical.”
Guattari developed his understanding of the “singular” as a way of commenting on how the capitalist subjectivity was produced, but in the process of doing so, he has much to say about the specifics of architecture and its organizing role. In his article “Les Machines Architecturales de Shin Takamatsu,” Guattari describes how the interaction between object and context takes place in precise terms:
The “third way” at once exploits a certain degree of closed perfection as an aesthetic architectural object (detachment) yet remains open to its context in the manner of a Buto dancer: “This suggests to me the position of a Buto dancer, such as Tanaka Min, totally folded into his own body and, however, hypersensitive to every perception emanating from the environment.” An open [processual and spatial] enfoldedness, one may say, that is also fractal, given symmetries at the micro-and macro- levels and interior and in reference to a vaguely defined Japanese tradition but whose salient feature is a principle of design based on unity and continuity of architecture-garden-nature realized through the deployment of various devices (hedges in gardening, grills and screens on domestic buildings).[xii]
The spatial singular, then, is an entity that emerges out of such processual and topological interactions, but that in turn creates new interactions in, with, and through the context in which it is embedded, and from which it simultaneously emerges as entity. The question that Takamatsu poses regarding singularization is therefore fully accurate: is singularization not “the construction of an overwhelming distance by internalizing an object, in this case the autonomous system of architecture?”[xiii] At first sight, this question contains a glaring paradox: how can you create a distance by internalizing an object? Is internalization not the most intimate relationship between observer and object? However, when seen from the viewpoint of singularization, this reversal is essential: by fully internalizing an object, in all its singularity and its autonomy, one creates not only a familiarity, but simultaneously a distancing. What was once familiar distances itself once scrutinized still more closely. We can find a close analogy of what happens here in the literary strategy called “estrangement” or “making-strange” (ostranenie).[xiv]
Relatedly, the Czech literary theorist and author Jan Mukařovský acutely observes that foregrounding (i.e. isolating an object or event), as a literary technique, is a purposeful disturbance of clichéd, automatic response:
Foregrounding is the opposite of automatization, that is, the deautomatization of an act; the more an act is automatized, the less it is consciously executed; the more it is foregrounded, the more completely conscious does it become. Objectively speaking: automatization schematizes an event; foregrounding means the violation of the scheme.[xv]
Foregrounding—and equally the singularization of an object—is a destabilization, a displacement so that it no longer submerges into the usual order of things. It temporarily foregrounds itself from out of a context. Foregrounding makes an object or event visible or perceptible in a qualified manner. It starts to distinguish itself from its environment in ways that distort both our perception of its properties and the environment in which it so seamlessly seemed to fit, yet it remains firmly embedded in it, creating a tangible experiential tension.
Mukařovský uses the Czech word aktualisace to describe this process.[xvi] That which is foregrounded becomes more “actual than actual,” and the remainder becomes temporarily non-actual, retreating in a perceptual realm that cannot be surveyed with the same level of intensity.
The singularization of an object occurs, then, if it foregrounds itself from out of a context, without dislodging itself entirely from it. It is perceptible as an individual entity, yet it cannot be analyzed completely apart from its context. The tension between the properties that “actualize” themselves and those that remain partially submerged in the context can simultaneously create both the “distance” and the “internalization” that Takamatsu spoke of. Only an object that actualizes itself with a certain affective force can be truly internalized; and yet it is this forceful actualization that sets it apart as a singular object for the aesthetic reflection.
NOTES
[i] (De Bruyn and Reuter, 2011).
[ii] See (Paans, 2020a) for a more elaborate discussion of this point in relation to Kantian reflective judgment.
[iii] (Kant, 2002: 100).
[vi] (Deleuze and Guattari, 2011, 2015).
[vii] (Deleuze and Guattari, 2015: 34, 40–41).
[viii] There is already a clear foreshadowing of this pragmatist orientation in Deleuze’s thought in his major 1968 work Difference and Repetition. In the Introduction to the English version of A Thousand Plateaus, Brian Massumi describes it as follows:
Deleuze’s own image for a concept is not a brick, but a “tool box.” He calls this kind of philosophy ‘pragmatics’ because its goal is the invention of concepts that do not add up to a system of belief or an architecture of propositions that you either enter or you don’t, but instead pack a potential in the way a crowbar in a wiling hand envelops an energy of prying. (Deleuze and Guattari 2011: xv)
[x] (Nelson and Stoltermann, 2014: 41-42).
[xi] See (Paans, 2020b) for a discussion of open objects and its relation more broadly to Object-Oriented Ontology.
[xii] (Genosko 2001: 129). Genosko partially quotes the text of Guattari’s article and summarizes his conclusions in a few sentences.
[xiii] (Adams, 2001: 135).
[xiv] The literary technique was first explicitly described in Victor Shklovsky’s 1917 essay “Art as Technique.”
[xv] (Mukařovský, 2010: 44).
[xvi] (Mukařovský, 2010: 44).
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