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Notes
1 Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 112.
2 Reyner Banham, “A Home Is Not a House,” Art in America 53, no. 5 (1965): 75.
3 See Todd Gannon, Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High Tech (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2017).
4 Positive feedback loops amplify changes in a system and often produce damaging ecological consequences, as when fertilizer is added to soil to increase its fecundity and eventually results in the degradation of that soil. Negative feedback loops mitigate change, as when increasing heat generated by a furnace signals a thermostat to break the circuit that powers the furnace. For a discussion, see Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 7.
5 See Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
6 Morton, Dark Ecology (note 4), 8.
7 For a more substantial discussion of OOO in the context of architecture, see Todd Gannon, Graham Harman, David Ruy, and Tom Wiscombe, “The Object Turn: A Conversation,” Log 33 (Winter/Spring 2015): 73–94. Mark Foster Gage's “Killing Simplicity: Object-Oriented Philosophy in Architecture,” pp. 95–106 in the same issue, is also apropos.
8 Morton, Dark Ecology (note 4), 16. Morton develops the point in greater detail in Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2013).
9 Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2011).
10 Ibid., 69–81. OOO starkly contrasts theories of direct causation (often referred to as “naïve realism”), which hold that objects in the world interact directly, and that that interaction is available, unimpeded, to our consciousness. References to the long history of philosophical assaults on naïve realism, as well to recent advances in theoretical physics and quantum mechanics that further strain its credibility, pepper the literature of OOO.
11 This view of causality cleaves closely to Friedrich Nietzsche's: “For between two absolutely different spheres, as between subject and object, there is no causality, no correctness, and no expression; there is, at most, an aesthetic relation.” Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” [1873] (Seattle: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015), 28.
12 Causality was baked into Immanuel Kant's famous characterization of a beautiful object as involving purposiveness without purpose just as it was in Horatio Greenough's definition of beauty as “the promise of function.” Notice in both cases that the cause of beauty, its purpose, is displaced in space and time. Kant relegates purpose to an ambiguous elsewhere (purpose is absent), while Greenough puts it off until later (function is in the future). See Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790; repr., New York: Hafner, 1951), 56; and Horatio Greenough, “Relative and Independent Beauty” [1852], in Form and Function: Remarks on Art, Design, and Architecture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947), 71.
13 Morton, Dark Ecology (note 4), 149–50.
14 It also answers objections that aesthetic effects are produced solely in the mind of the perceiving subject, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. For Morton and other proponents of OOO, beauty is very much in the world.
15 Morton, Dark Ecology (note 4), 153–58.
16 Reyner Banham, “The Man-Mauled Desert,” in Richard Misrach, Desert Cantos (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), 1–6. On the ubiquity of shell casings on the desert floor, see Banham, Scenes in America Deserta (Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith, 1982), 170.
17 See Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (New York: Longmans, Green, 1932), 304, where Wright attributes the phrase to Victor Hugo. Banham discusses Wright's activities in the desert in Scenes in America Deserta (note 16), 69–89.
18 Banham, Scenes in America Deserta (note 16), 205.
19 Ibid., 20, 68, 110.
20 Ibid., 120.
21 Morton, Dark Ecology (note 4), 158.
22 Banham, Scenes in America Deserta (note 16), 208.
23 Ibid., 17.
24 Ibid., 224.
25 Ibid., 221.
26 Ibid., 227.
27 Ibid., 228.
28 Banham, “The Man-Mauled Desert” (note 16), 1. These are just some of the traces of the 12,000-year history of “agrilogistics” that Morton outlines in Dark Ecology (note 4).
29 Banham, “The Man-Mauled Desert” (note 16), 6.
30 Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (note 1), 86–93.
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Todd Gannon
Todd Gannon is Professor and Head of the Architecture Section at The Ohio State University's Knowlton School. His most recent book is Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High Tech (Getty, 2017).