Keller Easterling and Her Insight on "Infrastructure as a Recipe for Politics"

http://archinect.com/features/article.php?id=41816_0_23_0_C

Keller Easterling Interview on Archinect

Maybe that question concerns an amplified understanding of what constitutes infrastructure. For some time we have been considering infrastructure to be something beyond transportation, communication and utility networks. Infrastructure may even include collective standards or shared mechanisms of financing. Still some of our spatial skills would find new territories (and seductions) in an understanding of infrastructure as a recipe for political disposition. Organization Space was already looking at landscape networks as a kind of infrastructure. More importantly, it was looking at the spatial product of suburban housing as an infrastructure.

One always knew that suburbia was a logistical apparatus which was also host to psychic content and emotional cultural stories about home ownership and patriotism. But was that phenomenon just related to a spatial product like housing, known to pull at the heart strings?

In answer to your question, it may also be worth mentioning that Wildcards and the articles that led to Enduring Innocence were also eventually nourished by discussions of various forms of sovereignty and extra-jurisdictional space that were part of the discourse on globalism. Still the evidence related to spatial products gave me a foothold in the discourse and served as a heuristic device. Architects have more to learn than to teach about global studies, but these formats proved to be good indicators of market aggression and political disposition. Their bid to remain intact and exempt from political responsibilities is itself a special form of violence. So the behavior of these formats led me to speculate that we have something valuable to contribute to discussions of globalization.

Similarly when one thinks of branding - the irrational values attached to economic exchange that reflect and create desire - one tries to reconcile this evidence to evidence of pre-capitalist practices. Pierre Bourdieu's discussions of symbolic capital, for instance, come to mind: The family buys extra oxen at the end of the harvest season when it is not really needed to raise the apparent worth of a daughter that is soon to be married. If branding adds a new twist on this old practice, it is that the irrational desire is also completely capitalized in the conventional sense. It is assigned numerical currency values and lending points. It is capitalized symbolic capital. (Marx's discussion of the fetish flies out of the book and has its own self-possessed life.) Economic exchange (let's not call it "capital" if that relegates the discussion to an evidence-excluding Marxist historiography) is very agile and able to alternate between amnesias and "discoveries," national and non-national swaggers or believing and cheating. It is all part of a special stupidity with which to create a refreshed narcotic reality.

Can we not be ingenious (or sneaky) enough to be effective against duplicity and evasion. Righteous symmetry is not complex enough. It may even serve a camouflage for actions we oppose. More than any other profession I can think of, the work of architecture engages multiple realms from finance to logistics to the heights and depths of frivolity and fiction that ultimately rule the world. Some think that work in the communication stratosphere is the truly powerful position. But with architecture one also engages the heavy material of global economies, moving from communication and branding to shipping to the physical/financial shape of a golf course to the designing of functional expressions between layovers and shopping to the indexing of global labor and materials. Would it not make us powerful political animals to simply be aware of this nexus of movements and begin to index and make ethical choices within it? We are in a position to help divert some of the world's most abusive situations.

Game theory and political theory are not very different. They develop logics that are not designed to deal with deception and folly. Strange, since urban design and planning as they are accomplished every day, must dig their way out of a pile of circumstantial detail that is most sturdily arranged by bureaucracy. One wonders what opportunities or epidemics might appear if its administration was arranged in a more entrepreneurial fashion. Urbanism is a slot machine.

So it would have been nice if my teachers had been Cedric Price or someone like him. I would have been able to understand architecture a little better. As it was transposed, the theatrical training has made the idea of active organization and the mechanics and character of organization more clear to me. In a cocktail with theatrical training, Bateson offers insight about the architecture of active organization.

America's stupidity as our greatest national resource, something we can learn to use wisely. The stupidity is so pervasive and the political deadlock so obdurate that is it strangely ... inspiring.