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Abstract
In Stieglerian fashion, this paper is concerned with both the loss and the re-creation of knowledge in the field of architecture. The student of architecture must be the one who learns new tools and new forms of knowledge and this has profound implications and applicability for the philosophy of education as it is a question of the recuperation of architecture with negentropic tools. Why? In the realm of the digital, it is the case that architectural student is at risk of dis-individuation, the loss of knowledge of such. Therefore, the paper concerns itself with questions of maturity, critical intelligence, trans-individuation, the crisis of noetic being, the artisanal mode of learning and finally the proletarianization of the faculties. It is concerned with the reclamation of noetic space and the search for negentropic tools. This paper is thus pertinent to the philosophy of education because it pertains to the act of creation, the question of imagination and to the loss of thinking as such. Focusing on the history of architecture it demonstrates the loss of knowledge in the history of architecture and shows this has clear implications for the philosophy of education, which is precisely concerned with the nurturing and maturing of the thinking subject. The crisis in the proletarianization of the faculties in architecture pinpoints the role of the artisan’s mode of learning and its crisis brought by the digitisation of architecture. The conclusion shows that Stiegler’s philosophy of the pharmakon is appropriate to understand this movement as it points to new and embraces new modes of learning in the present.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 It’s a process by which exosomatic objects (As according to Stiegler, Upper Palaeolithic was the first exosomatization of mental content which externalised the memory in the form of flint) become exosomatic organs by forming an analogous relationship with human endosomatic organs (hand, claw, fingers, etc.). Exosomatic objects are the inorganic objects that are organically organised inorganic matter that become part of the human world and form their technical milieu. (cf., Lotka and Georgescu-Roegen as cited by Stiegler (2018)). Architectural artefacts such as schools, factories, hospitals, etc. are the exosomatic organs/objects for humans, indeed can also at a time be endosomatic elements for a city to pulsate.
2 Donald Winnicott identifies the transitional as an object of childhood, which allows an infant to experience the self and the other as non-separable entities. According to Stiegler (Citation2016), the contact between the self and the other is made possible because of techne. (p. 227)
3 Pharmakon simultaneously carries two meanings of cure and poison within it. This was first applied by Plato against writing and later revisited by Derrida in a seminal essay, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’. Stiegler broadens its horizon beyond the Derridian notion of difference. According to Stiegler pharmakon brings new capacities within the human form of life with every technical development - right from the first flint till today’s digital technology.
4 Notion proposed by Merleau-Ponty, that locates the self and the other in a harmonious cognition.
5 Stiegler (Citation2016) states that it is not culture but technic that allows a unity between humans and (p. 227).
6 According to Alberto Pérez-Gómez (Citation2016a), “Techne has specific set of rules that can be handed down by a master and internalised through experience and embodied skills. While autonomous, it relates both to practical knowledge, phronēsis, the knowledge of habits and customs of the people, articulated in the form of stories, and to theoretical knowledge proper, episteme or scientia, manifested as the mathemata in the supralunar cosmos” (Timely Meditations, Selected Essays on Architecture, p. 27).
7 Proto-Indo-European root meaning; to weave, to fabricate, to make wicker or wattle fabric for (mud-covered) house walls; Sanskrit - takshak (carpenter); Latin - texere (to weave); Greek - tekton (carpenter), tekhne (art) (https://www.etymonline.com/word/*teks-).
8 Specialized individuals here can be equated with Stiegler’s individual with Technical consciousness that means anticipation without creative consciousness. Anticipation means the realisation of a possibility that is not determined by a biological program.
9 Stiegler (Citation2013, Citation1998) will define the Hephaestusian tradition as the constitution of technical milieu within an ethnic milieu. It was associated with the God of craftsmanship Hephaestus, who was born crippled and hated by his mother, who never learnt the way of Winnicott's 'good mother' hence lacked the knowledge of adapting to a 'transitional situation' which according to Stiegler is also pharmacological in nature. (p. 3), (p. 94)
10 Metis means both the working and the work of ‘transformative intelligence’ It “embraces both mental and manual prowess, both language and material. Metis works by continual shape-shifting, turning the morphe of defeat into victory’s tool. Its method includes dolos (trick, trap), the kerdos (profit-gaining schemes) and the ability to seize the kairos (opportunity)” (Bergren, Citation1993, p. 8).
11 One among several examples such is the Egyptian influence of quarrying the large blocks to the desired sizes as per the construction demand, streamlined the complete flow of material from the quarry to the end location where blocks need to be placed. These Technics directly impacted the building form and the gesture through the stone dressings and bonding. Enough scholarship is invested into finding the reminiscences of a technical memory from Egyptian architecture that shaped Minoan-Mycenaean building tradition and emerged into its own distinct style.
12 According to Pérez-Gómez (Citation2016a), the verb “to see” was reciprocal in Greek; whoever saw was seen, and the blind were invisible (p. 11).
13 For Stiegler (Citation2010) it is a limit, a dead-end of thought in its extremity reaching a pinnacle when a philosopher is perplexed with wonder (thauma), which carries a pharmakon at its origin. (pp. 109–110).
14 Episteme for Plato is ontologically grounded through an anamnesic memory: the source of all knowledge. Stiegler (Citation2013) calls this memory transcendental which constitutes the pure autonomy of thinking for oneself (p. 18).
15 Vitruvius’s treatise is the textualisation of rationally grounded knowledge (for example, Grammatisation of Architectural orders such as Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian). Stiegler identifies this as literately constructed knowledge. According to him, this construction is a three-step process that begins first with deep attention giving rise to rational knowledge built upon the anamnestic interiorisation of its own hypomnesic traces of transindividuation's long circuitry. In the next step, it creates return/paying attention which gives access to the transindividual “according to the rules governing the simultaneous construction of anamnesis and dialectic” CITATION Sti08 \p 210 \n \y \t \l 1033 (p. 210). The third step is through concentrated attention, an attention that is formed literately and distinguishes itself from the oral tradition. Here the object is constructed literately by forming a text through the object as described, analyzed and resynthesized (Citation2010, p. 82).
16 According to Husserl as cited by Stiegler, the communitization of knowledge is made possible due to a shared and communal horizon of competence in reading and writing. In this assemblage "both reader and writer are the bearers of knowledge that they necessarily embody, which they have literally incorporated through extended motor apprenticeship". They both “share the same incorporated technical knowledge” (Citation2015, p. 38).
17 Mario Carpo reads perspectival geometry as a data compression tool where infinity is geometrically projected onto a picture plane that can be measured with a set of notations.
18 Psycho-somatic, technical and socio-ethnic programs form a transductive relationship establishing new circuits of trans-individuation. Stiegler defines this tripartite ecosystem as general organology. Any change in a single program can create a structural change in the other two and will generate new circuits of trans-individuations.
19 P. V. Aureli borrows the term Absolute from its Latin root Ab-Solvo, which suggests separated, freed from. For him, the possibility for absoluteness of Architecture lies therein which is separated from, and that which separates, while being in a confrontational agonistic space for its embodiment.
20 According to Stiegler (Citation2013), digital technology transforms into technologies of the spirit through reconfiguration of psychic and collective individuation. (p. 95)
21 Stiegler (Citation2013) identifies that this dynamic system formed through spatio-temporal compression is in “constant evolution and is grounded in a relational economy of miniaturised and personalised equipment and relational services” (p. 96).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Santosh Jaising Thorat
Santosh Thorat is a Senior Associate at Serie Architects, India with a degree in Architecture from Mumbai University. He has worked on wide range of architectural and master planning projects like cultural centers, mass housing projects etc. He is a regularly invited critic at architecture colleges in Mumbai. His research interests include the Technical History of Architecture, Philosophy of Ideas in Classical and Renaissance, Deleuze’s Concept of Immanence, Stiegler’s work on Pharmakon. He has also studied Hindustani classical music.