cardiff / zoontotechnics: animality/technicity

http://info.cardiff.ac.uk/encap/newsandevents/events/conferences/zoontotechnics.html

Zoontotechnics (Animality / Technicity)
Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory / Cardiff University
20th Anniversary Conference
12-14th May 2010

La pudeur et la demeure : architecture and the animal

Of course the question of architecture is, also, the question of the animal. And of course, it needs some explanation. Or, more precisely, demands it.
Maybe I'm not sure I could offer this explanation in full by now, but I hope this paper will unfold some different traces and reveal some disguised tracks of what this partially neglected relationship between architecture and animality could offer to rethink not only (what Derrida calls) l'animal que donc je suis (The Animal That Therefore I Am-More To Follow-), but also the inherent animality-technicity architecture is a product of.
And of course, this rumination points to a much broader context, so I expect that pointing and tracing this particular relationships will also illuminate certain aspects of the architecture and technology problem, and in so doing between this and the origin of society (and the greek polis), inscribing the whole problem in a much broader political (and in some ways ethical) context. A context in which technology, animality and architecture will be intertwined in a somewhat economical circularity that will point to a reconsideration of our own constitution as humans and to the rights, if any, of our prosthetical way of live.
What will follow are, then, some short reflections that try to capture, at least part of the ways in which architecture and the animal relates to our being as animals in build space.

1. Maybe we could say that the question of architecture is the question of techne, and in some ways, specifically the problem of the origin of any techne, of any fabrication and of any instrument(ality). Origin that, as Heidegger reminds us, is not technical, and indeed could not be technical, but origin that could be linked to the main question of man inhabiting the nature. It is frequently stated this necessity of technique for the man to survive in the open (we'll later verge on what Bernard Stiegler calls The Epimeteus sin). Technique delves then into a second nature or (sobrenaturaleza as Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset states in an important lecture in 1933, "Meditación de la técnica"): for one hand a kind of necessity that separates us from the animal (as language does although in other ways, nevertheless being technical), and for the other, and that's important, a kind of orthopedics or orthopaedia that both supplements and corrects human living in order to transform it and in fact to make it possible (again Ortega y Gasset, now in his "El mito del hombre allende la técnica", his lecture in the Darmstädter Gespräche of 1951, the day after Heidegger's "Bauen, Wohnen, Denken" advances the concept of the technical as a "fabulous and great orthopaedia"). It should be noted that orthopaedia comes from Greek orto and paideia, so it traces an interesting relationship to education: orthopaedics correct or allows to avoid the deformities of human body both through different devices and through different physical exercises. So what we usually term as only technological and external is, indeed, mainly internal: techne as machine and as practice.
At this point is important to distinguish between orthopaedics and prosthetics. Because we should not mix up what is specifically a prosthetic addition and what is a kind of enhancement through education and expertise. The prosthetic is what we need to replace (and sometimes to repair) a missing organ of our body, and as such is caught in the undecidable logic of supplementarity: as is known, the supplement both adds and replaces. So the prosthetic, in its technological deployment.
(We leave aside now the, in any case obvious, intimate relationship of architecture to orthopaedics, its intimate interlace)
And is precisely this ambiguous condition of the prosthetic not what distances us from the animal, but exactly what tries to fill the gap with them. The animal, so to say, inhabits its world just as being in it, no orthopaedics or prosthetics needed. The human on the other way needs precisely this supplementary condition of techne just for trying the (impossible) way in which the animal lives in its world, the natural manner of the compound body-nature the animal shows. So is this supplement of the technical, and specifically of the technological (the prosthetic), this hybridation what precisely, in a desperate (and ultimately futile) effort, is suppose to make of us an animal: one who inhabits the world as the animal does. Though, the problem arises when this supplement takes position not only as an addition or enhancement, but in fact radically impersonating what supposes to only assist.
In this way, the known statement by Descartes about the animal as a kind of blind machine, that only could respond mechanically to the external stimulus in order to survive in the nature, only a mechanism that blindly follows a technical set of instructions (build in its DNA, for example), is more accurate than we usually think, but indeed must not be applied to the animal, but to us the humans.
And this is one of the usual perversions that we apply to the animals: in order to seem and behave just like them, we need this techne that in fact open and abyss between we and them. The animal as the other, the absolute other, then, as the one taht do not need any prosthetic devices to live, to inhabit a (the) world, this alterity of who is our neighbour, is what precisely joins us in the (same) animality: the animal, from its untechnical life demands us an answer. The question is not if the animal could answer, then, but if we can answer him. And hold on his gaze.

2. La pudeur et la demeure, we said.
Let's begin with a short citation from Levinas: le sujet contemplant un monde, suppose l'événement de la demeure, [...] le recueillement dans l'intimité de la maison. [...] La naissance latente du monde se produit à partir de la demeure as cited (and abridged) by architect Benoît Goetz in his book La dislocation. Architecture et philosophie. For Goetz, then, the house, architecture in its broadest sense is not so much a technical instrument but a precondition of our being into the world, of having a world: an structural framing for the subject. Inhabiting the world is being at home in a home, in a place of residence, seems to say (both Levinas and) Goetz; a situation that of course could only be achieved as humans: le sujet contemplant un monde couldn't be an (the) animal, because, it is known, animals have no subject (or so we say). And of course, as we stated before, this house/home is necessarily the result of a techne or an orthopaedics (despite the ontological priority Goetz seems to asses), because in Goetz's view l'architecture aménage des lieux pour l'habitation des hommes .
But, in a second instance, yes, we will be surprised to recognize that the word demeure relates not only to the notion of (human) residence or inhabitance of a place, but also with the cavern, grute or the nest or den of (what the man calls) animals, specially (Littré) in hunting: Endroit fourré de bois où se retirent les cerfs. It is interesting to note, then, that we could trace a not so thin line between human residence (in form of architecture: usually demeure relates to domicile) with animal inhabitance of a place or a land, but not trough a kind of anthropocentrism that attributes to the animal some of the characteristics exclusive of men (the house) but through its own way of being in the world, through its same (own) demeure. Demeure could be thought, now, not only through the building of a house, but through an absolute opening to the world, that of the animal who makes its nest; the event of la demeure is not something that happens to us, human and specifically human as subjects, but to all living being in its being naked (before any techne, specially the dressing one, because animals have no techne as such). In this sense it is not the technical dimension of architecture what is at stake, but it's being event: it's giving place "donner lieu/dar lugar" as an opening to the be-coming, "a-venir/por-venir". What the (question of) the animal allows to think is architecture not as techne (or not only) but as opening to the other and as opening to the world, and finally as an opening to the event, as space of be-coming, at its radical incertitude about what's going to be. As its apocalypses.
The animal inhabit the world as radical mortal as we do (and do not forget another use of the french demeure: La dernière demeure, la sépulture, the final residence, the tomb), but as we, they do it in the form of opening to a be-coming, and the place of be-coming is framed as architecture: as the interruption of time in space, as the absolute openness to the other. Indeed, the animal is, also, this other.
The question, then, is not if the animal could make a home, and then, as Levinas through Goetz says, in the intimacy of this build house open itself to the (latent) naissance of a (the) world, that we know not, but the acknowledgment that it already has happened, that the animal (and the man) inhabits a world not through the presence of a techne (or the different questions about land property, for example) but through the exposition to the other. And this other, indeed an absolute other, is in the form of the animal. If, as Derrida will state, is the radical impossibility of the appropriation of death what constitutes the indebtedness I have to the other, I have this indebtedness to the animal as equal as the animal to me. The animal is as mortal as I. And in its eyes I find a certain answer, in its very gaze I could recognize the other of mine: to look is then to experience death, the death of mine in the death of the other. To look: to be turned into stone. Gorgona: the animal as the absolute other.
In this sense an interesting excursus could be done through the concept of track, the imprint (and trait) that the animal is continually leaving behind, tracks and imprints that, we suppose, couldn't be (consciously) erased by the same animal, tracks that in certain aspects we could account as a kind of animal architecture, a spatial framing of the territory that relates to notion of property or priority. As is known, architecture as techne always happens as an imprint, as a physical imprint in space that, as said above, establishes a house/home or place open to the event. But at the same time, if we usually deny the animal a superior status in the evidence that the animal could not erase its own tracks, could not disguise it, what we forget is that, as Derrida will point out , the tracing of any track always implies at the same time erasing (of another track): the structure of the track always implies a tracing that is erasing. In this sense the tracks couldn't be erased by anybody, though indeed the tracks are erased, continuously. Architecture as track testifies then its own erasing, but not through the man nor the animal, but because its own structure.

3.Interestingly enough, demeure also translates stay and/or remain, a certain delay or retard, a kind of linger on, and in fact what we could term as a certain awareness of what will come (l'avenir), though precisely in its not coming yet (or maybe in its coming from behind, its coming late).
This demeure, this structural delay that is etymologically linked with the residence, then, implies some interesting questions, in the sense it insert this displacement or disjoint that actually is working in any time and in any space, so to say in any architecture and in any conception of living/inhabiting at the center of the problem animality/technicity. A delay that we, as thrown beings in a (the) world only could but certify: always too late or too soon, the Dasein is always being thrown into the world, from a time that it's not its own, in a world that always survives him. And we only could recognize that, in its having a mortal existence because its having (a) name, a name that already yet survives them, this structural delay works in the animal as animal, being human or not. The name, its name, signs its own disappearance . The question, then, is not if animals have time (as Heidegger will put in doubt in Sein und Zeit), but how the structural delay, la demeure, implied in time is at work in the technical dimension of architectural demeure and if this same delay , and I think so, is also working in the animal demeure, so to say, before any architecture.
Finally, demeure as retard also introduces a kind of manque or lack, a missing or a shortage (is necessary to say that in French the word is applied for example to a retarded person), that of course usually is thought as constitutive of animal being: its mind being a special kind of retarded mind, (including the case of great apes or whales), its having only a diminished mind or a defective language, supposedly confine them to be only a simple living being. But I'm not sure if in this deformed mirror through which the animal (mind) reflects us, the question at stake is the question of their animality opposed to our humanity but rather the other way up: precisely this degradation is not their own missing something, but the argument we use to treat them as "animals", the same we treat human animals in torture or extermination camps. It's our own missing: the lacking of aidos, pudency-honesty-demureness (decorum).

4. Finally, La pudeur. Yes, la pudeur, the pudicity or pudency, the decorousness that in some ways Derrida feels when a cat (his cat?) stares at him in the bathroom, being naked (and naked himself), sets now in motion another intriguing and related set of envois, in some ways a political one, but necessarily an architectural one, since we are now intimating with architectural techne as cloth and dressing as much as building, as protection of the (human) animal and as making social the animal (human), zoon politikon as the result of both a zoon logon ekhon and zoon arckhitekton, that of course is a zoon tekhnikon. But that, nevertheless, not only remains an animal, but in constituting a/the society necessarily address the question of the animal in its origin, as its origin. Both through domination of the techne of the arts and the techne of the political, man separates from the animal, because its lacking, so to say, because it's not being totally an animal: just in order, in some way, to be an animal. Now, is precisely in this very lacking that supposedly rest is right of domination.
It is well known the myth narrated by Plato in the Protagoras (320d), the story of the disastrous error committed by (the demeured -retarded- 321c) Epimeteus, that, forgetting the man in the distribution of the different resources to the species of animals, obliges his brother Prometeus to stole fire and the arts from Hephaestus and Athena (which of course deserves a severe punishment). His fatal oblivion demanded the necessity of a techne that could supplement (both adding and substituting as we know) what the man have not in order to survive in the open and to compete with the rest of the beasts in the struggle for life. But the question is that this techne, that began through the building of altars to gods and develops through speech and house building, still lacks something: the faculty of living in cities, the political knowledge that allows it. The source of that is now Zeus, who established the necessary two pre-conditions that the man will need to live in common and build a city, to establish himself as a zoon politikon (in the already known later Aristotelian words) : aidos and dyké, pudency (or honesty) and justice.
The birth of the political and of architecture as the art that develops the frame in which the political would happen (and it is very important to recall the unavoidable simultaneity in building up the Greek agora of politics and architecture, the build void at the centre of the city being the necessary counterpart to the political breaking of the democratic polis) could be understood, then, as the imposing of two conditions that, in a undecidable movement, transforms the lacking of something in its very opposite, the owning of everything, turning the man in lord and master of nature. Maybe it's time to understand that both aidos and dyké oblige us not only as political animals between ourselves, but as political animals in general. That the use we have to do of pudency (or honesty) and justice in order to become humans (and survive as race) necessarily applies to nature in general. That both honesty and justice is what we are indebted the animals for, and in so doing, acknowledging the debt that we have with them. Only that, with the gift Zeus gave us because the animals, of course, we are in a way damned. A gift, as every gift, of course could disguise a condemnation. The gift, always impossible, both, medicine and poison: pharmakon.
José Vela Castillo