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Oh Pioneers! Bodily Reformation Amid Daily Life
© David Kolb, 2003
Arakawa and Gins have been fomenting revolution for a long time. In the last twenty
years their attention has turned more and more towards architecture and urban planning
as a way of reforming our bodily existence. Their proposals enter daily life rather than
staying in the isolated sphere of the museum or gallery. These constructions are to be
lived in, not contemplated. Will daily life then blunt or sharpen Arakawa and Gins's
power to educate and revise our "architectural bodies"?
“The Task of Reform”
Architectural traces appeared early in Arakawa's paintings. Works from the 60s and 70s
often include outlines of enclosures, connecting spaces, and room and street plans. In the
80s the inclined planes one climbed to see his paintings began the spatial manipulation of
the viewer. This led eventually to the collaborative construction of experimental mini-
environments such as the Ubiquitous Site series and theNagi Museum's recreations of the
Ryoanji garden. In addition to these projects, Arakawa and Gins created plans and
models of houses and parks, then of whole residential quarters.
In theorizing their architectural proposals, Arakawa and Gins analyze the perceptual and
bodily world as a dispersed assemblage of different kinds of "landing sites" for
perception and imagination. Our architectural body is formed by the "cleavings"
(holdings together and keepings apart) within this assemblage of landing sites. These
landing sites create signification with features of the environment, which are themselves
ongoing "cleavings" of other energetic centers (so that ultimately Arakawa and Gins can
describe the living environment as "bioscleave").
A person parses the world at any given instant into particular distributions of
landing sites, or better, an organism-person-environment can be parsed into these
distributions. (AB 6)
If persons can never be extricated from surroundings, then what must be looked at
is the extent to which they are bound to and influenced by them. In what respects
and how variegatedly do physical surroundings invite bodily action. How far out
into the environment does an organism that persons extend? (AB 40)
Being "in" a place is not a passive being-located in the way a pencil is in a drawer. Being-
in is an ongoing activity, changeable and never completed. In that sense it is always
tentative, not being-in-place but holding-in-place, holding ourselves and holding the
place together. At the same time, architecture is no passive container for our being-in.
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Architectural works can direct the body's tentative constructing toward a holding
in place, its forming in place. But it is also the case that how the body moves
determines what turns out to hold together as architecture for it. (AB 50)
Arakawa and Gins want architecture to take advantage of that interaction to re-form our
lives.
We find ourselves within an already on-going process that by its nature remains mostly
habitual.
People interact with bioscleave largely through what has come to be called
procedural knowing, a term covering both instinctual sequences and encoded
knowing, that is, habitual patterns of activity. . . . Acquiring a skill involves
integrating all steps needed for skillfully performing a task and then reducing
them to a procedure. . . . The many activities and considerations that subsist as
procedural knowing within or to one side of sited awareness, taking up fewer of
its sites now than they had need of before they were thus reduced, free it to be
active elsewhere. With steps and nuances of coordinating skills handled apart
from awareness, a person can go on to acquire still other coordinating skills. (AB
52-3)
Through carefully designed spatial tactics our habitual world perception-
construction/action processes can be made more self-aware. Once that happens they can
be reviewed and perhaps revised. Arakawa and Gins propose constructing architectural
surrounds that will accomplish this task.
That which counts as procedural will need to be enlarged and made to exist so
that it can be entered wittingly. Only once the procedural can on its own account
be entered, only when procedural has been writ large . . . a constructed world that
has, with great forethought, been tactically posed and thus been given its
procedural due will instruct people in brand-new coordinating skills and in the
compounding of skills attained. Ability to coordinate a greater number of skills
leads to a freer and wider-ranging and more perspicacious intellect. (AB 53-4)
The first citation suggests that freedom to acquire new coordinating skills increases when
we let some processes drop out of focal awareness. The second suggests that freedom
will increase when we have more focused self-awareness of already existing processes
and can consciously change them. The two claims can both be true, but there is a tension
in how architecture can help them to be realized together, and it is this tension that I
explore in this essay.
The task of re-forming is imperative for Arakawa and Gins because they believe we are
victims of long established processes that lead into personal and social harms, and
ultimately to the grave. Such processes may be social, causing environmental
degradation, or they may be individual habits such as improper diet. Arakawa and Gins
further hypothesize, though, that harmful yet alterable processes also occur at the level of
our perceptual-physical world-formation. Arakawa and Gins' gamble is that by creating
architectural environments that constrain and disrupt habitual processes, we could be
brought to re-vision and re-form ourselves and our world on this basic level. By
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intervening to alter fundamental actions and cleavings we might be able to take charge of
our destiny in unforeseeable ways. By joining such alterations (and the knowledge of
human possibilities they could bring) to the scientific work on life extension, even the
grave might be avoidable.
It is because we are creatures of an insufficiently procedural bioscleave that the
human lot remains untenable. . . . members of the human species have neither the
wherewithal to figure out the nature of their agency nor the requisite skill to
engineer for themselves . . . procedures through which we could sustain ourselves
indefinitely. (AB 54)
The urgency of this task is evident from our widespread acceptance of limited
possibilities, not just the grave but patterns of bodily and social functioning that are not
open to the full – and presently unknown – range of human creativity.
“Architectural Procedures”
As their part in meeting this crisis, Arakawa and Gins propose a "procedural architecture"
that both guides and frustrates habitual actions. An architectural procedure is not just "a
fixed set of called-for actions" but an ongoing "spatiotemporal collaboration between a
moving body and a tactically posed surround" (AB 73). The architecture is designed to
embody specific procedures which will "slow down the automatic dispersal [of
perceptual-bodily landing sites, and] enter the dispersing itself" (AB 46). "A surround
constructed to constrain a sequence of actions presents a procedure to be followed; and as
soon as someone sets foot into an architectural surround that constrains action, the
architectural procedure it stages gets going" (AB 55). An architectural procedure
constructs the possibility for bodies and buildings to cooperate in the creation of new
modes of phenomena. In particular, Arakawa and Gins want architectural procedures to
build tentativeness into our lives and bodies, so that the processes of bodily world-
formation remain open and revisable.
In Architectural Body Arakawa and Gins describe two such architectural procedures. The
first is the Disperse-to-Contrast procedure, which works by providing contrasts to a
current space. As we move through a house or a neighborhood or a city we find ourselves
within repeating modules. The contrasting modules might be twins of one another, or
they might be similar but not identical. A module might be a room, an apartment or
house, or a city quarter. The identity or variation might show up in the overall volume, or
in the terrain levels and pattern, or in orientation, scale, and surface textures. The effect
would be to sharpen the process of locating ourselves within the current place, as we
distinguish it from its twins or similars. The aim is that "this continual series of
assessments and comparisons naturally brings about in residents a greater degree of
alertness and a far sharper than ordinary sense of the architectural surround" (RD 283).
The second procedure is the Tentativeness-Cradling procedure. Here, instead of
contrasting a set of clear and definite spaces, a single space is made indefinite and
difficult. A room might have sections built to different scales, or a house might have
twenty entrances, or an open prospect have multiple ground planes and horizons.
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Arakawa and Gins superimpose different orders "to generate conditions for a multiplicity
of sitings" (Knesl, RD 221). The aim is that "it will not be possible to take an
unambiguous step" (RD 263). The person is to be "forever getting her bearings only
tentatively," and "continually in start-again mode" (AB 77).
When scale loses its traction on sited awareness, the tentativeness of the forming
moment -- raw process, the raw process of venturing forth as existing all up in the
air within nearground, middle ground, and farground simultaneously -- will be
seen, heard, and smelled to as-if flutter in the breeze. (AB 76)
In both procedures, the inhabitant is brought to explicit and focused awareness of
perceptual and bodily world-construction. Altering or improving that process, she is
aided to "pull together an otherwise all-over-the-map sited awareness" (AB 60) into a
"surefooted rightful hesitation" (AB 50). "Architectural procedures disclose, highlight,
and explicate the tentative steps by which an organism maintains herself as a person"
(AB 73). Habitual processes are thus brought into clear awareness so that they can be
examined and reformed.
Mediating for a person much of what hitherto existed for her as procedural or
unconscious, movements and the sited awareness they modulate turn groups of
walls and room features, lifeless material, into a more focused, higher level of
the procedural. . . . the procedural having thus been brought into palpable
view, its fixed sequence of actions can be altered. (AB 56, my emphasis)
Activating an architectural procedure, a person comes alive to her own tacit
knowing; body-wide and wider, occurrent tacit knowing goes explicit. . . . A
person stays alive to how she is dispersed and then to how she is again and again
dispersed through and into that dispersal. (AB 60, my emphasis)1
Procedural architectural surrounds are intended to affect the way the body organizes itself
and forms its world. They are to force us to reexamine and reform our basic processes of
world-construction. The reforms Arakawa and Gins are seeking cannot be accomplished
unconsciously, as if someone were to substitute a more powerful engine in your car while
you slept, and you discovered to your surprise the next day that the car now operated
better. The active process of inhabitation is to be made more conscious and controllable,
"staying focused on the elusiveness as such of this tenuous event-fabric or event-
matrix." (AB 49, my emphasis) The question is how that investigation can stay focused.2
1 Describing his experience at an exhibit that modeled and partly embodied some of these
elements, a visitor to one of their installations remarked that "Feeling dynamic, I made my way
out of that space." (Kisaragi Koharu, "A Walk though the Arakawa-Gins Exhibition."
http://www.ntticc.or.jp/public/ic_mag/ic025/html/173-175e.html)
2 Does talk of focused awareness impose some centered controlling self, such as has been
attacked in recent psychology and philosophy? Not necessarily. We could speak with Arakawa
and Gins of the "organism that persons" rather than a centered self. We could have an ontology
of the self that is Nietzschean or Deleuzean or Parfitian, with momentary selves and sub-
individual processes and no central "I." However, even so the issue of the togetherness of
different processes would still remain, because Arakawa and Gins want to reform processes, not
just have them coexist in parallel.
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So far, Arakawa and Gins have described in detail only two architectural procedures. The
two are, however, general enough to encompass many different variations. Because the
two work in opposed ways, using either definite or indefinite spaces, they cover a wide
field of possibilities. Still, over time Arakawa and Gins can and will make explicit more
architectural procedures.
In their series of panels, "The Mechanism of Meaning," Arakawa and Gins investigate
the processes by which visual and perceptual meaning is established. The procedures
employed in this piece indicate new architectural analogies. I wonder if another heuristic
for finding more architectural procedures might consider the ways we "inhabit" the
"architecture" of written texts. The analogy is imperfect, since textual inhabitation is not
so bodily, but reading a text does involve perceptual and imaginative landing sites as well
as bringing together a dispersed multiplicity of signifiers and signifieds. In addition,
reading as a process includes a long history of attempts by authors to turn the process
back on itself, making us aware of what we are doing as we make sense in and of a text.
Literary authors have tried to make textual inhabitation into a process that is self-aware,
complicated, and self-reflexive of its own process, thereby changing the way we read.
Such textual procedures might provide clues for architectural procedures.
Gins' own writings are full of textual maneuvers that might be translatable into more
architectural procedures, but wee could just as easily consider other authors. In fact, if we
were to take architectural procedures to be the architectural equivalents of repeatable
words --as Arakawa and Gins at one point suggest -- then we might look at how words
can be worked on and changed, for instance in James Joyce and Lewis Carroll. What
would be the architectural equivalents of portmanteau words,3 such as those Carroll
invented in "Jabberwocky," or of Joyce's multilingual puns and creations in Finnegans
Wake? Or, hou might wee fynde architectural equivalents ov using deliberately archaique
or artificiall spellynges, or Elizabethan iregularr spelings, or tabun mixing Wörter från
linguae différentes?
If, on the other hand, we were to take the sequence of experiences in an architectural
procedure to be something like a sequence of sentences and paragraphs, then what would
be the architectural equivalents of walking among the different rhetorics of the chapters
of Joyce's Ulysses? Are there spatial equivalents for Italo Calvino's self-enveloping
narrative in "If on a winter's night a traveler..."? Of Pynchon's overloaded narratives? Of
Whitman's stringing-togethers or Eliot's excerpts, or Pound's relentlessly allusive Cantos?
3 "This term for "blend word" comes from "portmanteau", "a leather traveling case that opens into
two hinged compartments" (from the French for "carry cloak"), by way of Humpty Dumpty in Lewis
Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass : 'You see it's like a portmanteau -- there are two meanings
packed up into one word.' Although most modern blends are simply the first part of one word plus
the last part of another (e.g., 'brunch' = 'breakfast' + 'lunch'; 'smog' = 'smoke' + 'fog'; 'Chunnel' =
'Channel' + 'tunnel'), Carroll himself formed his portmanteau words in a more subtle manner:
'slithy' = 'lithe' + 'slimy'; 'mimsy' = 'miserable' + 'flimsy'; 'frumious' = 'fuming' + 'furious'. Carroll's
coinages 'chortle' (which is now in most dictionaries) and 'galumph' (which is in the OED) are
generally understood as 'chuckle' + 'snort' and 'gallop' + 'triumph' respectively, although Carroll
himself never explained them." (http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxportma.html)
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Indeed, there could be spatial analogues to such textual maneuvers,, and such textual
tactics suggest the expansion of existing architectural procedures. To date Arakawa and
Gins' designs ignore historical styles and culturally specific meanings. Rather, the
variations and contrasts they manipulate are bodily-geometric-perceptual features such as
scale, volume, and ground plane. Their procedures do not involve decorative styles or
cultural purposes, but they could: imagine the Tentativeness-Cradling procedure
providing working bathroom fixtures on living room sofas, or a room that is both Empire
and Bauhaus, or even a room whose indicated use(s) reach toward five different cultural
horizons at once. There are many variables that procedures could manipulate, and many
dimensions of contrast and definition to work with.
Of course, to treat such aspects procedurally risks descending into the kind of dull
pastiche found in bad postmodern design. The austerity of Arakawa and Gins' designs
successfully avoids this peril. Nonetheless, their spaces are pure, and if actually lived in
from day to day, they would surely acquire decorations and culturally specific
assignments. Those might overpower the intended procedural effects, so perhaps decor
and cultural readings of the purpose of a room could also be subject to procedural
manipulations.4 So far Arakawa and Gins have built only isolated examples, the largest of
which is the Site of Reversible Destiny, located in the town of Yoro, in Japan. It was
designed before the notion of architectural procedures was fully developed, but it
contains many objects and features meant to provoke the user/visitor into new bodily and
perceptual spaces.
“Working Out Yoro”
In the summer of 2000 my wife and I visited the site at Yoro park, and the theme of this
essay was triggered by my experiences there. We rode a Japan Rail medium-sized train
from the large city of Nagoya to the town of Ogaki, then a Kintetsu private railroad diesel
putt-putt from Ogaki to the village of Yoro, passing farm fields and clusters of houses.
We arrived at Yoro station just after lunch; no one was around. From a tourist map on a
billboard, I plotted what I hoped would be the shortest route to the park. It turned out to
be the long way around and included a steep hill, but perhaps that put us in the mood for
the park's own slopes. The proper shorter route would have brought us to the northeast
corner, where the looming bulk of the park's construction would not have been so
obvious at first.
A sign located where we paid the entry fee offered us, free of charge, bicycle helmets and
rubber-soled shoes to wear while in the park. We didn't take them, but we could imagine
that some stylish Japanese, especially women in fashionable heels, might need such
equipment. Still, the emphasis on safety created a distracting undertone that suggested
holding back full commitment to the terrain. There were only a few other people at the
site that day, plus two or three wardens patrolling along the upper part of the rim. They
4 Such manipulations would magnify the concerns about central control that are discussed briefly
later.
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were keeping an eye out for accidents, but their presence against the skyline distorted the
scale and interfered with the interaction of the rim and the nearby mountains.
The entry path wound up onto the tipped concrete rim of the bowl, where we looked over
the city street maps filling the surface. The maps did not work on us, perhaps because we
were not familiar enough with the street patterns of the Japanese cities being referred to.
Nor was I observant enough; during our whole visit I never registered the ochre and
green outline of the Japanese islands that sprawled across the bowl, though perhaps the
high grass made it less visible.
We hiked further along the rim and then descended into the bowl. My first reaction was
that the bowl was both steeper and smaller than I had expected from photographs. My
second reaction was that the design was as exciting and challenging as I had hoped. We
walked and climbed all over the park, from one striking vista or object to another. We
also made probes into the Critical Resemblance House. I was most taken by the recently
constructed "office building" near the entry. Unlike the other constructions in the park it
featured bright exterior and interior colors in striking combinations. It had usable rooms,
yet their strange shapes, uneven terrain, and the half-height partitions that interrupted the
path created interesting effects. It was not exactly disorienting, but it demanded a
heightened bodily attention to the surroundings and to my maneuvering within the paths I
chose.. The changes in floor level and steepness were particularly effective because even
though I could see the whole room, the small partitions that interrupted any straight path
also prevented me from seeing the floor as a whole. Consequently, as I walked I was
continually surprised and needed to readjust my body at each turn.5
The instruction sheets for the Yoro site suggested exercises in movement and perception:
If accidentally thrown completely off-balance, try to note the number, and also the
type and the placement, of the landing sites essential to reconstituting a world.
Try to incorporate two or more horizons into every view.
Associate each of the extreme forms your body is forced to assume in traversing
the field with both a nearby and a distant form.
I found these difficult to carry out. In the end, the Yoro site did not have its full effects on
me. Perhaps this was my failure, like the failure of the person who "just doesn't get" a
Jackson Pollock painting. Should we then take the Yoro site as a work of art that needs to
be approached in some special way? Since there is a set of instructions for the park,
perhaps so. But is it as "a work of art" that the site should be approached? Was my
problem akin to the philistine who can't appreciate Pollock, or more akin to the person
who wanders into a gym but does not use the exercise machines? It was clear from the
structure that the double horizons were built into the park. I could see how they were
5 When we were finished exploring the site, we walked to Yoro station to once again ride the little
train, but this time when we arrived at Ogaki, we impulsively continued on to Kyoto. We ended up
at that city's Maruyama Park, a pleasant, standard collection of recreational and display areas. I
imagined it strewn with Yoro-type constructions that interfered with its casual flow and easy
progression of horizons.
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supposed to work, but I could not make the effort because other goals interfered. This
gym-explanation avoids the aesthetic elitism of the original objection, but at the same
time it raises concerns about Arakawa and Gin’s goals in relation to those of daily life.
My first reflection on the experience at Yoro was that while we were there we were too
busy taking in the novelty -- "look at that!," "and over there!". I thought that more time
would have helped the park to work on or with us. More specifically, we needed enough
familiarity with the park to be more fully affected by the multiple horizons and other
features, allowing us to experience movement through the terrain without being focused
on getting to the next remarkable space or artifact. If we had enjoyed a picnic lunch, or
conversed with friends as we strolled about, or walked a dog or tried to throw a Frisbee,
there would have been less touristic demand to see each item. But later reflection evinced
a different analysis, one that sees the park not as a site for daily activities subliminally
influenced by architecture, but rather as a site for concentrated exercises and strenuous
efforts. Once the novelty had worn off, we should have devoted ourselves more to
following the instructions.
“Pioneer Life”
Arakawa and Gins intend their constructions to do more than influence people indirectly
in the way architecture usually does. Accordingly, theirs is to be a special zone of
exercise. But if it is the latter, then we still have to ask how these sites will relate to the
daily activities that will also be carried out there. For Arakawa and Gins have gone
beyond designing specialized equipment such as the Yoro park, and are designing
procedural architecture for residences and towns.
Architecture is always an impure art: even the most artistically designed building is not
just contemplated but lived in. Walter Benjamin pointed out long ago that most
architecture has its effects through distraction rather than concentration.
Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as
follows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters
into this work of art the way legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed
his finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art. This
is most obvious with regard to buildings. Architecture has always represented the
prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity
in a state of distraction. The laws of its reception are most instructive. . . .
Architecture has never been idle. Its history is more ancient than that of any other
art, and its claim to being a living force has significance in every attempt to
comprehend the relationship of the masses to art. Buildings are appropriated in a
twofold manner: by use and by perception -- or rather, by touch and sight. Such
appropriation cannot be understood in terms of the attentive concentration of a
tourist before a famous building. On the tactile side there is no counterpart to
contemplation on the optical side. Tactile appropriation is accomplished not so
much by attention as by habit. As regards architecture, habit determines to a large
extent even optical reception. The latter, too, occurs much less through rapt
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attention than by noticing the object in incidental fashion. This mode of
appropriation, developed with reference to architecture, in certain circumstances
acquires canonical value. For the tasks which face the human apparatus of
perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that
is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the
guidance of tactile appropriation.6
Standard non-procedural architecture already shapes bodies and actions. It is not
accidental that so many civic buildings have a solemn Roman form: our body changes
upon entering a courthouse or a capitol or a cathedral.. Entering a home or a nightclub, it
changes in other ways. Even though there are social norms for different spaces—a home
or a nightclub change the body in different ways than a courthouse--the architecture of
the space on its own also alters our comportment, our bodily extension and possibilities.7
People notice architectural objects "in incidental fashion" because they are in the building
or on the street with a purpose or goal that they glimpse across the architectural
landscape. They are not concentrating on the landscape itself. Otherwise how could they
change the baby's diaper, or get to the grocery store? But do Arakawa and Gins intend us
to go the grocery store? Certainly not at Yoro, which is a special experience. At Yoro,
Arakawa and Gins constructed a "philosophical garden" (RD 195), but they also want to
build philosophical towns and cities. These would provide the means for long-term
experiments and pervasive influences: "It would be better not only to construct the
procedural but also to have it become one's home ground, one's training ground" (AB 55).
Such training grounds will require inhabitants to be more directly involved with the local
architecture than in the distracted way described by Benjamin. These inhabitants are to
concentrate on the phenomena and the processes of world-and-body-formation that
movements in these surroundings will reveal.
But these training grounds are also houses, which are not just gyms but places to carry on
daily activities. The directions for the use of the Yoro site say "[t]ry to incorporate two or
more horizons into every view." How are the two "horizons" of body-world reformation
and daily life activities to be combined? Is being with-in a piece of procedural
architecture to be an all-consuming occupation meant to occupy our total awareness? If
the housing and city quarters Arakawa and Gins design are meant to be environments in
which inhabitants carry out daily activities in a new self-aware way, what kind of
awareness is involved?
Arakawa and Gins' rhetoric often expresses uncompromising rejection of daily activities
in favor of self-investigation. In Arakawa and Gins's earlier, rasher years, before they
worked out the full notion of an architectural procedure, they might have been heard to
say: "imbalance, life-threatening danger, and absolute chaos are needed to enable us to
6 Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." The essay is
reprinted in many anthologies. This excerpt is from a translation found at
http://www.student.math.uwaterloo.ca/~cs492/Benjamin.html.
7 The social norms are powerful enough, though, that they may counteract the architectural
effects: imagine a courtroom turned into a night club. Arakawa and Gins need to give more
attention to the potential tension between social norms and architectural forms, since it could
affect their constructions.
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realize how our lives are constructed […] and so to begin to reverse our destiny" (RD
217).This would make it hard to keep an eye on the children. In this uncompromising
mood, Arakawa and Gins can maintain that "[c]omfort is no longer a factor. That it might
take several hours to go from one room to another in a reversible destiny house is of no
importance a long as the sensibility of the person traversing the room flowers and catches
onto itself in transit" (RD 241). Such a house would make urgent operations impossible
when they are needed. If my body is to be "so greatly and so persistently thrown off
balance that the majority of its efforts have to go entirely towards the righting of itself,
leaving no energy for the routine assembling of the socio-historical matrix of the familiar
or, for that matter, for the 'being of a person'" (RD 33), then this would not help me go to
the library or buy a loaf of bread. In instances such as these, I need social conventions
and smooth negotiations.
Arakawa and Gins’ willingness to be disruptive stems from the worry that daily activities
might be part of the crisis of humanity. They seek inhabitants for their constructions who
will be pioneers.. They will be experimenters, taking nothing for granted and willing to
develop new ways of being and acting rather than passively accepting the fate of death
and mediocrity. The motto of these pioneers seems to be: let ordinary functions be
suspended if necessary while we come to know who we are and what we can be, and
invent new ways to live. There is an elitism here, but it does not come from the usual
avant-garde aesthetic or political elite.8
However, the issue of daily activity cuts deeper than whether or not we go to the grocery
store. Ordinary life doings are part of a net of practices that rely on other practices. For
instance, to take a bath I have to know how to use the faucets, soap, and a towel.
Handling soap requires a familiarity with what kind of thing a bar of soap is, what it is
"for," and how that fits into a network of activities concerning hygiene, which in turn get
their meaning and direction from fitting into a broader network of bodily practices which
in turn fit into yet broader networks. The linkages never come to an edge where they stop.
The net cannot be seen as a whole and it cannot be disassembled, though any part of it
can be examined and reformed. Insertion into the network is the condition of the
possibility of any purposeful activity. Both practical and cognitive meaning requires a
horizon of absent practices, "know-hows" and goals that can never be made totally
present.9
Arakawa and Gins ask "what would a hat be for you if you had never seen one before?
Let every act of perceiving be unique to itself" (qtd. in Haxthausen 321). But life would
be impossible if we had to negotiate unexpected novelty for every action and social
transaction.10 Without the background absences, objects and actions would have no
8 It might seem that these pioneers would have to be supremely willful and controlled, but in fact
their powers of concentration would be put at the service of a program of desubjectification aimed
at cracking open standard self-unities.
9 The most thorough analysis of these conditions on everyday activity is found in the first part of
Heidegger's Being and Time.
10 In a similar vein Lyotard asks of one of their constructions, "Would its space begin anew each
day?" (RD 11) He does not say that it should begin anew each moment. He dreams that
"instantaneous habits would come and go." Yet an instantaneous habit is not a habit. Presumably
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meaning. It is true we need to perceive things afresh, but without the taken-for-granted
(but questionable later) background we could not perceive at all.
Arakawa and Gins' designs for regions and cities involve varying terrains and disrupted
ground planes, modular repetitions of many kinds, and other scale effects within their
architectural procedures. For example, they describe their proposal for a new city sector
in Tokyo Bay as including "layers of artificial terrain, multiple horizons, winding roads,
numerous pocket parks, module-based, paired and contrasted neighborhoods, panoramic
views at regular intervals" (RD 232). Even though their proposals so far have been
single-use residential districts including parks, there is no reason their constructions could
not be multiple-use. These would be locales where people will carry out the activities of
daily living. How do we live and act within their constructions in a way that is both
efficient for daily purposes (posting letters, caring for the children, etc.), yet also mindful
and investigatory?
For instance, Arakawa and Gins propose a whimsical baseball field with a wildly varying
terrain(RD 228). Its wonderful twists certainly defamiliarize the ordinary, but suppose
you had to play baseball on that field, and your team was in a league that played games
on other fields. Suddenly the field seems impractical; its self-awareness function
obstructs its ordinary function. Its odd terrain becomes a barrier to getting on with the
game. "So," you might respond, "let's have all the league fields be distorted in different
ways, each a different kind of experience. Even today variations in size and lighting and
wind are taken as acceptable challenges and hazards as a team moves from field to field.
We could add a dimension to all the games with more extreme new fields." But then the
specific design of each extreme field would become a strategic maneuver to enhance
home field advantage; there would be complaints that this or that field was designed to
favor excessively a home team that had practiced its slopes and twists; regulations would
soon limit the procedural possibilities. In short, the daily function--playing the game--
would end up overpowering and restricting the procedural self-awareness function.
Arakawa and Gins intended their twisty ball field for some new, yet-to-be created game.
But my point is that if the field were to be a place for playing any game that had its own
built-in rules (rather than being a place where one played at playing a game while
concentrating on examining the architectural body), then the field will be enmeshed in a
what he means is that a novel act could contain its own projection of a future of similar acts and a
way of living them, then be replaced by another unique act projecting a new future. But this
pushes up to a second level the question of the active unity of the self through time as these
horizons and habits change. Romantic paeans to total fluidity and constant change make forceful
rhetoric but questionable philosophy, risky policy, and weak architecture. Habituation and
routinization are inevitable, yet so is resistance to them and change within them. There is no
arrival at total freedom, yet it can still make sense to ask for "A fluid teleology in service of a
transgressive ethics. Not in service of a reintegrative strategy, either socially or on the level of the
individual, but in a quest to invent new selves constantly" (Keller, qtd. in RD 217) -- as long as
that "constantly" is not "every five minutes," or there would be no life at all.
12
network of activities and goals that go beyond self-examination and self-reformation and
will limit the effect of their manipulations.
Again, could a heavy industry factory be designed with an undulating terrain or other
features that made workers self-conscious of their world-forming perceptual cleavings as
they moved within the building? If the workers' attention were so distracted, it could
endanger their safety and the efficiency of production. Could someone come up with
features that introduce architectural procedures without compromising the function of the
factory? Architects with less radical goals have had some success introducing new moods
and social interactions into office buildings and light industry, but heavy industry resists
such maneuvers. Of course, there are a few striking exceptions, such as Gropius's turbine
factory and some automobile plants, but there the innovations were mostly limited to
exterior appearance and symbolism.
Life has other goals than self-examination, and no sense of crisis will make those goals
disappear. On our home ground we bathe, prepare meals, call our business associates,
make love, play with the children, dust the furniture, solve math problems, read novels,
write poetry. How could Arakawa and Gins' architectural procedures keep their strength
while such daily functions absorb attention? The answer to this must lie in the bodily
nature of their investigations. We should not have to choose between focused self-
examination and Benjamin's distracted attention. The activities of our lives take place
within what Arakawa and Gins call our architectural body, that dimension created by the
dispersal and joining (cleaving) of perceptual landing sites, imagination, spatial
construction, and features of the environment. This creation is not a separate goal or
process within the mesh of goals and meaning; it opens space for that mesh. While
Arakawa and Gins want their pioneers to engage in a specific process of bodily self-
examination, what they are examining is not one process among others within the net that
is the condition of possibility for meaningful actions. It is the bodily reweaving of that
net. Furthermore, the horizon of meanings and goals is not totally created by our bodily
activities; the architectural body is within a social and historical surround. Nevertheless,
the presencing of that net happens within the architectural body, and thus it should be
possible for self-examination of that presencing to accompany other activities. Even
though Arakawa and Gins' rhetoric often uses images of total concentration, their
investigation is meant to continue even while we move about our daily rounds.
The Buddhist meditator sits on a cushion becoming aware of her breathing and thinking.
In slow walking meditation she tries to be aware of the most subtle movements of her
legs and muscles. Outside the meditation hall she faces the problem of keeping that
awareness active in daily life. An awareness that can only be achieved in the protected
environment of the meditation hall is not yet full mindfulness. She must learn how to
keep that mindfulness while going about her daily activities, such as balancing the
checkbook or directing a large office. The Christian tradition calls this the problem of
contemplation in action.
In performing her daily activities mindfully, the meditator is not being asked to divide her
attention between two separate goals. Mindfulness is not multitasking. Rather she is
13
being mindful of the how, the manner in which she accomplishes her ordinary activities.
That how is both bodily and psychological, as she stays aware of how she performs her
movements and of her desires and attachments. Such an ongoing awareness of the bodily
how of our actions provides an analogue to what Arakawa and Gins are proposing. Their
architectural surrounds could provoke an accompanying mindfulness rather than constant
focal awareness.
And yet there is a further twist to the problem of daily life. Arakawa and Gins claim that
"[p]erforming an architectural procedure, a person launches an inquiry-on-the-go into her
own constituent factors. As long as that inquiry-on-the-go continues, the procedure has
not gone dormant" (AB 73). But how long can it be kept awake? Won't we become
habituated to the surrounding contours so that they no longer challenge us? The most
contorted piece of procedural architecture might become routinized. I could eventually
treat its odd terrain just as something to be dealt with as I go about my business. No self-
investigation, just perception and moving, as I might navigate a difficult rocky path in the
rain and wind on the way to the house of a friend. I cope with the surroundings but they
do not change me. A procedural house could soon become a background that would
influence me in the indirect way Benjamin describes, but it would not continue to
provoke special investigation or awareness. The wardens at the Yoro site probably
receive no lasting effects from its design, simply because they must be there all the time
and are busy with their tasks.
If this routinization poses a problem, one response could be to fight to keep the
architectural procedures always active. Arakawa and Gins hope that they have built in
"enough self-subverting elements" to prevent their procedures from ever becoming "de-
radicalized." In fact, there is a temptation to see routinization as a failure of the user's
attention, akin to my failure at Yoro, and so to demand constant attention from the
devoted pioneers. However, routinization is a necessity, not a danger to be avoided. The
know-how that a practice relies on has to have a habitual component in order to be
available.
Aristotle argues that activities are perfected when they become habitual; the best
craftsperson does not need to deduce from theory what to do with a particular piece of
material. Heidegger may write polemics against "das Man" and the stifling averageness
of life, but he knows that what he calls "everydayness" and "fallenness" are structurally
necessary. There can be no total self-awareness or self-control. Nor can all world-
constituting activities be made present at the same time. Some of what Husserl calls the
"passive syntheses" that bring about our unified experience of the world can be made
conscious by reflection, but they cannot all be kept actively self-aware. Husserl urged
that the layers of constitution and passive synthesis be made available, but his interest
was in evidence, not reform. In what they seek, Arakawa and Gins are closer to Deleuze's
desire for new modes of bodily self-awareness.
Arakawa and Gins address the problem of habituation when they employ images from
athletics rather than from scientific investigation: at the "training ground" the formation
of new habits is not a problem, but is part of the solution. What happens on a training
14
ground? Athletes practice by concentrating on individual movements in order to perfect
them. The batter examines her swing. The martial artist develops a new maneuver. But
later they concentrate not on the moves but on the game. There is a rhythm of training
and life: practice intensely, then play "in the zone," effortlessly, without focusing on your
movements or tactics. Catch the ball, react fully in the moment. Arakawa and Gins
gamble that this rhythm could apply to the deeper level of world-body-formation itself.
We can envision architectural procedures influencing people through a rhythm of focal
self-examination that leads to the formation of new habits, but Arakawa and Gins
envision a still larger rhythm. They propose multiple and different procedural
architectural constructions and movements from one to another. They imagine
environments that include a great many "tactically posed architectural surrounds." Some
would aim at increasing self-awareness, others would aim more at transforming our
bodily world-formation. Some would do both at the same time.11 An architectural
procedure might change us and we could let its adjustments and changes become a new
habit. There would be many architectural surrounds enacting different procedures and
provoking different re-visions. When we have learned or been transformed by one, we
could move on to another. As we relocate our residence, or our workplace, or our leisure,
we learn. What we gain would not be an accumulation of facts about ourselves, but new
ways of being our bodied self. Some of this learning would be in new habits, some would
be in new tentativeness.
Arakawa and Gins see multiple locations and procedures combining into spatial
discourses of discovery. Different areas might invoke the same procedure, but concretize
it in varying ways. A town might combine procedures into an architectural rhetoric that
encouraged different self-discoveries. "It is hardly a far reach to think of architectural
procedures responding to and expanding on the consequences of other constructed
procedures" (AB 56). Even today, "Los Angeles has a lot to say to your body about what
Chicago or Paris or Singapore has led it to become" (AB 60).
She contrasts in slow motion, or in odd motion, her intricate sitings of herself in
terms of this town and the previous one, examining effect and upshot of landing-
site dispersal, savvy to the need to identify constituent factors that knit, explode,
and weave the world's occurrence. (AB 61)
At one point Arakawa and Gins compare architectural procedures to words, and
combinations of procedures to paragraphs and discourses with "three-dimensional
THEREFORE'S, BUTS, ORS, ANDS" (AB 59). As yet they have no grammar or
rhetorical rules for these combinations. Perhaps these cannot be developed until the
repertory of architectural procedures is expanded. Here again, though, the textual analogy
might be helpful, considering the ways in which rhetoric and sequence have been used
and deliberately abused by experimental writers.12
11 This would, of course, "exponentially increase the tremendous amount of forethought that is
needed for town planning." (AB 61)
12 Arakawa and Gins want architecture to take up many of the tasks traditionally assigned to
science and philosophy: the discovery of new bodily and social phenomena, the creation of new
kinds of personal and social unity, the experiential validation of hypotheses about how we ought
15
To create a world of such elaborated spaces would demand great expense and control:
"We ask only that enormous sums of money be spent on constructing the world as a
tactically posed surrounding for the benefit of the body" (AB xix). This is reminiscent of
the dreams of the great modernist architects such as Le Corbusier, who thought that
greater architectural control and planning on many scales could improve cities that
suffered from unhealthy and disorderly nineteenth-century conditions. With the
appropriate translations, Arakawa and Gins are arguing something similar. As Knesl says,
"[t]heir modernist hubris is invulnerable to accommodating temptations" (RD 215).
Individual projects obviously require great planning and control. (Although procedural
control does not extend to the level of style and decoration, I argued above that their ends
might be enhanced if their procedures did extend that far.) To create dialogue among
their multiple projects would demand yet further control.13
Despite their modernist tone, unlike the high modernist planners Arakawa and Gins do
not work with a limited palette of functions that they think architecture and city planning
should allocate. Rather they want to open up experimentation and the creation of new
functions and values. Their planning is very directive, but this is to clear away old
directives that are giving us bad messages. It does not replace the old with new definitive
messages, but rather with a space for new discoveries.14
to live. We can even imagine "arguments" and "dialogues" among differently posed procedural
sites, leading to informed choices and rejections. It seems right that new kinds of sites could re-
form us and open us, so that the self-re-making side of Socrates' quest could be enriched. But
Socrates does more. The testing of general principles, precise arguments in logical form,
questions of consistency and basis, these demand discourse and explicit linguistic concept
creation to provide a thought-space within which experiential effects can be questioned. Still,
philosophy always seriously underestimates what kinds of self-reflection can be possible without
explicit language. Underlying this is the worry of Plato and the philosophical tradition generally
about allowing art and rhetoric to have the last word, and the desire for reflective distance from
immediate experience. But the expanded possibilities from the arts do not disprove that linguistic
discourse is needed for some important kinds of self-reflection. An argument about the necessity
of discourse could not be conducted in painting or architecture.
13 Arakawa and Gins argue the necessity for such control when they point out that "For those
who have no choice but to be contingent, the engineering of contingency is all that is the case."
(AB xii)
14 Learning from different architectural procedures resembles the process of incremental criticism
of beliefs and values proposed by Habermas, and earlier by pragmatists such as Peirce, Dewey,
and Quine. However, Arakawa and Gins's aim is more directly bodily than the kinds of criticism
proposed by such thinkers, though without denying the formation of social meaning by other
processes. Arakawa and Gins need to say more about the connection between architectural and
social meaning. It is not enough to say that "By creating a second horizon, or better yet many
more, we can be released from the out-of-date moral values or obsolete structures of common
sense that accumulate on the ground-surface we normally exist on. We'd be truly free to develop
potentially more fruitful and expansive moral values." (RD 32) Values are rooted in social and
communal structures that need their own critique, since the linguistic and the cultural cannot be
fully reduced to the level of architectural body formation, though they are active on that level. It is
not yet clear how the kind of self-criticism they propose relates to other modes of criticism and to
the reformation of explicit and implicit beliefs, leading on to the criticism of ideological formations
and political-social systems.
16
The proposal for multiple procedural architectures introduces a further element of
complexity, and a new kind of space. This becomes evident by asking whether if the
result is what Deleuze would call a striated or a smooth space. For Deleuze the archetypal
striated space is a centrally controlled agricultural society such as existed on the edges of
Eurasia. The archetypal smooth space is the central Asian steppes inhabited by nomads.
In the striated agricultural society, space is striped and cut up into parcels tied by
ownership to specific groups or individuals. People, too, are separated into groups tied to
bits of land and/or to particular social roles. The society is administered from a center that
has a view of the whole and orders it by separations and assignments. A smooth space
lacks such divisions. It is far from empty, but its texture comes from small variations in
natural conditions. The nomad does not own any land, and is assigned nowhere, but in his
wandering he observes microenvironments and determines where best to pasture his
animals, and when to move on. It is not that the nomad is free to wander without any
constraints, but the constraints come from the environment and from dispersed attention
to detail, rather than from central decrees.
At first glance, the spaces of the multiple tactically posed surrounds Arakawa and Gins
suggest seem prime examples of striated space. Each area would have a task and each
would be highly designed and divided into modules that resemble tightly striated fields.
A given area would control how you can walk and what you can build there. You have
your space; your neighbor has hers. Neither in the ordinary sense nor in Deleuze's special
sense are these spaces smooth. Still, what Arakawa and Gins are proposing is a new
hybrid space. It is like striated space in that it is defined and assigned with a high degree
of imposed organization. However, there are multiple horizons and ground planes, and
multiple and competing, perhaps incommensurable, definitions running at angles to one
another. Places are indicated, but you seldom are unambiguously in only one of them.
Navigating such spaces would demand the kind of micro-attention to the local
environment that the Deleuze's nomads need in their smooth spaces. What you might
learn from living in such spaces would not be a centrally distributed lesson or role;
indeed it would try to uproot you from such roles. An inner nomadism is being created,
and an outer as well, if you move from one such learning space to another. In the new
spaces there could be new selves.
Arakawa and Gins’ exciting discussion of perceptual landing sites provides another way
of questioning the dominance of the subject-object relation. They offer an approach to
architecture beyond the usual discussions of social meaning and symbolism. Their
proposals for procedural architecture seek to reform our bodily space and time. In this
they are akin to Deleuze, who urges such reformations and analyzes artistic modes that
reflect such changes, for instance in his discussion of space and time in modern cinema.15
As Benjamin said , "the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the
turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation,
alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation."
[need reference] As Arakawa and Gins say "[t]he tense of architecture should be not that
15 See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: the Movement-Image, and Cinema II: the Time Image.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986 and 1989.
17
of 'This is this' or 'Here is this' but instead that of 'What's going on?'" (AB 49). We go
back to the twisty ball field, we practice and then play.
18
Works Cited
ARAKAWA and Madeline GINS. Architectural Body. Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press, 2002
______ Reversible Destiny: We Have Decided Not to Die. New York: Guggenheim
Museum/Abrams, 1997
BENJAMIN, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Based
on the edition by Julian H. Scaff.
http://www.student.math.uwaterloo.ca/~cs492/Benjamin.html
CARROL, Lewis. Through the Looking Glass. Ed. Lancelyn Green. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1982
DELEUZE, Gilles. Cinema I: the Movement-Image, and Cinema II: the Time Image.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986 and 1989
HAXTHAUSEN, Charles. "Looking at Arakawa." Constructing the Perceiver --
Arakawa: Experimental Works. Tokyo: National Museum of Modern Art, 1992
HEIDEGGER, Martin. Being and Time. Transl. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson.
London: SCM Press, 1962
KOHARU, Kisaragi. “A Walk though the Arakawa-Gins Exhibition.”
http://www.ntticc.or.jp/public/ic_mag/ic025/html/173-175e.html
Israel, Mark. “Portmanteau Word.” http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxportma.html
