Genesis

Phylogenesis

Pathogenesis

Morphogenesis

Teratogenesis

Genesis

Genesis (Greek: Γένεσις, having the meanings of “birth”, “creation”, “cause”, “beginning”, “source” and “origin”) is the first book of the Torah, the first book of the Tanakh and also the first book of the Christian Old Testament.[1]

The word genesis has been connected with the idea of a prefect and ultimate creation. Apart from any kind of metaphysical approach that relates the specific word to a concept of “creation” where idea is considered to be superior to its material representation or where the creation is regarded as the reflection of the omniscience and omnipresence of a creator, the word is absolutely related, if not tied together, with the materiality itself.

Genesis, before any other meaning, means birth. In this text the word is being approached as a singularity that carries other singularities. Therefore, Genesis is followed by the other terms presented in this text (Pathogenesis, Phylogenesis and Morphogenesis). All of them are related to the process of creating not in the sense of constructing by a strict absolute plan but in the sense of giving birth; in the sense of creating the seed for the conception leaving it to grow as a result of a process of becoming rather than making or constructing. Having this being the main common characteristic these words share, all of them consist of the term “genesis” and each of them defines a different stage of the birth giving process.

Phylogenesis refers to the origin and the evolution of it. Or to be more precise, the origin of the product of a creation and the origin of the creation process in the same time.

Pathogenesis is the reason, the cause that activates the origin and the process of the creation.

Morphogenesis is the form generating process, the interaction of phylogenesis and pathogenesis within the active materiality.

The words above are being placed in what could be conceived as chronological order (what happens first what follows etc.) but what actually happens is that the terms are embedded into each other in a way that nothing happens first or second but all together interact with each other in a formative way.

The intention here is not to create the “equation”, the “algorithm” or the “plan” of the birth process neither to find the definition of the keywords used. It’s rather about generating a topological map of them taking the stand that the processes are stochastic[2], not deterministic.

Phylogenesis

Phylogenesis (or phylogeny) is the origin and evolution of a set of organisms, usually a set of species. A major task of systematics is to determine the ancestral relationships among known species (both living and extinct).[3]

If we attempt to detach the term phylogenesis from the context of biology and to broaden it we will find its properties extended in any process of formation or “becoming”. Phylogenesis as “the origin and evolution” is the concept which helps us understand the relationships between different parts in the formation of a continuum that consists of singularities. It is about the relationships of the general and the particular, the whole and its parts or in the Deleuzian way the universal and the singular and their evolutionary mechanisms.

In essentialism there are general types or fixed categories (such as animal species) and the particular members in each of them share common properties. In the Deleuzian philosophy these fixed categories or types are being replaced by bigger spatio-temporal individuals so that a given species is as singular, as unique, as historically contingent as the organisms that belong to it. “The relation between organisms and species is not one of tokens belonging to types, but one of wholes and parts: singular individual organisms are the component working parts of a (larger) singular individual species.“[4]

Here the idea of singularity is rather topological than geometric. One could regard the connection between the origin and the evolution in such a way. The way the origin participates in the evolutionary process is like a genetic algorithm which exists as topological algorithm and not as geometric. What happens is that the process of making or becoming (e.g. the growing of an embryo) of something is taking place in an energetic materiality that consists of spatio-temporal singularities, implicit forms that are rather topological than geometric[5]. Once this something is produced, no matter that the process is never finalized, its extensities and qualities will hide the process under the product and the product in turn will possess and develops a set of new capacities, for example by interacting with other individuals or the environment in creating the preconditions for the evolution.

In that case, an example outside of biology that one can draw is the map of Charles Jencks for the history of Architecture where history is not presented as a linear arrangement of historical facts but is being mapped as a flowing continuum where certain historical periods are interacting with each other are depending on each other, are being formed and deformed by each other (picture) in a process of perpetual evolution.

Pathogenesis

Pathogenesis is the mechanism by which a certain etiological factor causes disease (pathos = disease, genesis = development).[6]

The term pathogenesis (παθογένεσις), in its broader sense outside of biology, refers to the mechanism that produces the connections between a cause and an effect, the matter and the form connecting the realm of the potential with that of the real or activating the virtual, in a Deleuzian way.

In the ancient Greek philosophy “potentiality” and “reality” belong to two separate realms. For Plato the ideas exist prior to their representations, prior to form and praxis and they derive from a superior, perfect world.

In the Aristotelian philosophy and in particular in Aristotle’s Metaphysics the idea about the relation of cause and effect is illustrated in the concept of substance (ουσία) which is conceived as a combination of both matter and form, or in other words, of potentiality (δύναμις) and actuality or entelechy. The term entelechy traces to the Ancient Greek word entelecheia (εντελέχεια), from the combination of the words enteles (εντελές = complete), telos (τέλος = end, purpose, completion) and echein (έχειν = to have). Aristotle coined the word, which could possibly be translated in English as, “having the end within itself.” To Aristotle, entelecheia referred to a certain state or sort of being, in which a thing was actively working to be itself.[7]

The Aristotelian idea of entelecheia is connected to the concept of the final cause (τελικό αίτιο). For Aristotle in the concept of the final cause the reason which gives the purpose is the end (τέλος), in the sense of a fulfillment. The end as purpose pre-exists, is being embodied in the things and is being revealed by the process of working towards that end. In order to make more clear the concept of the final cause I will give an example; in the question “why is it raining?” thinking of the natural causes would result to the answer “because water evaporates and creates clouds and they become cold and it rains”, while thinking of the final cause might lead to the answer “it rains for the flowers to grow”. Aristotle defines his philosophy in terms of essence, saying that philosophy is “the science of the universal essence of that which is actual“[8].

The ideas of Gilles Deleuze about the matter and the form have as fundamental difference the fact that the purpose doesn’t preexist, is not predetermined or predominant and is not being conceptualized as an “end” or a “fulfillment”. Instead of the “purpose” there is a matter which in the process of working towards the goal is in the same time forming and being formed because of interacting with an entire energetic materiality in movement[9]. It is exactly what one could extract from what Jacques Derrida said, “My own words take me by surprise and teach me what I think” or what Marleau-Ponty remarked “The writers thought doesn’t not control his language from without“[10].

Contrary to essentialism, for Deleuze the form doesn’t preexist to its material realization and the matter is not functioning as a fixed mould that is able to produce forms from the outside. In order to make it clearer I will draw an example from his essay “the society of control” where he clarifies the differences in the formative processes of today’s “social control” and the “enclosures” that were taking place in the “disciplinary societies”. As he says:

“Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point“[11].

What is important here is the distinction between the mold and the modulation as two different processes of connecting matter and form. The mold could be conceived as analogous to essentialism’s idea for how formation acts on things while the modulation, the continuously self deforming cast, illustrates the idea of Deleuze about the same issue.

Henri Bergson said “Reality… is a perpetual becoming. It makes or remakes itself, but it is never something made.“

Morphogenesis

Morphogenesis (from the Greek morphê shape and genesis creation) is one of three fundamental aspects of developmental biology along with the control of cell growth and cellular differentiation.[12]

Morphogenesis (also referred in biology as ontogenesis) refers to the process of form generation, while something takes “shape” or “becomes”. Several points that concern the issue of morphogenesis have already been referred above which is an indication that borders between the terms phylogenesis, pathogenesis and morphogenesis are not fixed points but rather degrading spaces where the terms are merging together. This gives me the step to say that morphogenesis should be regarded like that, as a process that contains and is being contained to both phylogenesis and pathogenesis. This concept is partially supported but the “recapitulation theory”:

During the late 19th century, Ernst Haeckel’s recapitulation theory, or biogenetic law, was widely accepted. This theory was often expressed as “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny“, i.e. the development of an organism exactly mirrors the evolutionary development of the species. The early version of this hypothesis has since been rejected as being oversimplified.[13] However the phenomenon of recapitulation, in which a developing organism will for a time show a similar trait or attribute to that of an ancestral species, only to have it disappear at a later stage is well documented. For example, embryos of the baleen whale still develop teeth at certain embryonic stages, only to later disappear. A more general example is the emergence of what could develop into pharyngeal gill pouches if it were in a lower vertebrate in almost all mammalian embryos at early stages of development.[14]

Morphogenesis is the result of an origin which is being activated and actualized through pathogenetic factors. What needs to be made clear again is that the relationship of origin and form is rather topological than geometrical and I will draw an example from DeLanda’s “Deleuzian ontology” to describe this concept and how it works in terms of form generation.

There are a large number of different physical structures which form spontaneously as their components try to meet certain energetic requirements. These components may be constrained, for example, to seek a point of minimal free energy, like a soap bubble, which acquires its spherical form by minimizing surface tension, or a common salt crystal, which adopts the form of a cube by minimizing bonding energy. One way of describing the situation would be to say that a topological form (a singular point) guides a process which results in many different physical forms, including spheres and cubes, each one with different geometric properties. This is what Deleuze means when he says that singularities are like “implicit forms that are topological rather than geometric.”[15] This may be contrasted to the essentialist approach in which the explanation for the spherical form of soap bubbles, for instance, would be framed in terms of the essence of sphericity, that is, of geometrically characterized essences acting as ideal forms. Unlike essences (or possibilities) which resemble that which realizes them, a singularity is always divergently actualized, that is, it guides intensive processes which differentiate it, resulting in a set of individual entities which is not given in advance and which need not resemble one another.[16]

One could also draw examples from biology and the genotype – phenotype distinction. We consider the origin to be the decisive factor for the genotype of an organism, or to be more accurate, we assume that the genome of an organism is formed by its phylogeny. The genotype is in a certain degree determining the phenotype, which represents the physical characteristics of an organism such as height, weight, color etc. Similarly to the example of DeLanda with the soap bubbles, the concept of phenotypic plasticity describes the degree to which an organism’s phenotype is determined by its genotype.[17] A high level of plasticity means that environmental factors have a strong influence on the particular phenotype that develops while a low would mean that the influence was not strong. What this means, wide and large, is that a genotype has probably more than one possible phenotypes. In that sense morphogenesis should not be conceived as a closed, one way form generating process but rater as open-ended and interacting multiply with its surroundings.

Teratogenesis

Teratogenesis is a medical term from the Greek, literally meaning monster-making (τέρας = monster), which derives from teratology, the study of the frequency, causation, and development of congenital malformations-misleadingly called birth defects.[18]

Teratogenesis in the sense of deformation is an un-detachable part not only of the morphogenetic processes but of any kind of productive process; it is embedded in all the possible products of these processes. Evolution itself is a constant deformation, mutation and hybridization are actively participating in its processes creating new species and causing others to transform or even extinct.

Concluding, the result of any process, any kind of thing that could be considered as product, is always deformed therefore impossible to be absolutely predefined or predetermined. But on the other hand, also initiations are being deformed in the process of working towards the result. Maybe, even the word “result” is just a convention since everything is in a state of constant “becoming”.

[2]Stochastic, from the Greek “στόχος” or “goal”, means of, relating to, or characterized by conjecture and randomness. A stochastic process is one whose behavior is non-deterministic in that the next state of the environment is partially but not fully determined by the previous state of the environment. (Source Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic)

[3] Source Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogenesis

[4] Manuel DeLanda, ‘Deleuzian Ontology: A Sketch’. presented at New Ontologies: Transdisciplinary Objects, University of Illinois, USA, 30.03.02

[5] Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. p. 408

[6] Source Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathogenesis

[7] Source Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entelechy

[8] Source Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle

[9] Manuel DeLanda, ‘Deleuzian Ontology: A Sketch’. presented at New Ontologies: Transdisciplinary Objects, University of Illinois, USA, 30.03.02

[10] Adrian Forty, Language and Drawing: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture, Thames & Hudson, London, 2000 (p. 33)

[11] Gilles Deleuze, Society of control, L’autre journal, Nr. I, Mai 1990

[12] Source Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphogenesis

[13] Source Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogeny

[14] Source Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recapitulation_theory

[15] Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. p. 408

[16] Manuel DeLanda, ‘Deleuzian Ontology: A Sketch’. presented at New Ontologies: Transdisciplinary Objects, University of Illinois, USA, 30.03.02

[17] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genotype-phenotype_distinction

[18] Source Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teratogenesis

The spatiotemporal reality constitutes a continuum which is extremely complex and certainly not fixed or balanced or stable. On the other hand technical practices in order to be effective (especially in the frame of a capitalistic economy) they tend to be reductive and regard planning and production as linear practices that need to have a starting point and an end, therefore they follow patterns or methods that are often prefabricated, they follow the “formal” way. Formality then “executes” a production considering as fixed and stable things that are not, such as the idea of the end which in the case of technical productions becomes an artificial completion, an imposed conclusion, a fixed fulfillment of a prefabricated goal. In the technical world, something needs to be finished and execute the function that it was planned for, no matter that the need for another function may appear since necessities of any kind are not fixed and they emerge in ways that in general are not predictable (there is no accuracy in any kind of deterministic approaches that attempt predictions). Technical productions then fail to be open-ended and even when they attempt to be open they fail again (usually severely) because they define openness in ways that leave a predetermined degree o freedom but they cannot predict everything and cannot encompass everything (the ideas of the Japanese metabolists is a good example).

This is why the “formal” technical productions fall short in the long term and one could pose that the degree and the impact of failure increases with their scale.

What becomes obvious from the above is that technical productions cannot be holistic; they are mechanical, therefore fragmented and leave gaps between different scales, gaps between different strategies, between the general and the particular, the society and the individual, the total and the singular etc. while in all the above there is in between space. The problem is inherent in the concept of the detachment of the terms described above. For example the ways we practically link the universal and the singular, the general and the particular is by drawing lines that are either borders or connections between them. This is a reductive practice since there is an in between space apart from the two poles of all the dipoles and this is why there are exceptions, or to be more precise, everything are exceptions. Taking this into account it becomes highly critical the how we deal with these exceptions when we decide to “form” a rule, a canonization, a system or a method in order to go forward for production. How can we canonize a complex continuum which consists of infinite unique elements, relations, relations among relations etc? Isn’t it a fundamental problem?

In practice, in higher scales, it is easier to reduce the resolution of the analysis and be structural (meaning reductive) in order to deal with the “general” but while zooming in and the resolution increases what we find out is that there are unique things that always escape taxation and classification and they are far from the idea of the “general” and the structures we have created in order to describe it, understand it, regulate it etc. Therefore, (if we think with structures) we need to create a lower structure that supports the particular exceptions and try to link it to the higher. The first problem is that once we zoom in again we will have the same problem and we will need another structure. The second problem is the linking of these structures, something common in all practices, because any kind of addition is not independent but creates the need to go back and reform the whole system. A good example is to imagine the structure of a legislation system where there are always laws that oppose to each other and are constantly under reformation and negotiation. Often lower laws are the reason for the reformation (often cancellation) of higher laws and this is where the inversion takes place. From top => bottom productions we go to bottom => top reformations and negotiations where the strength of the particular prevails over the reduction imposed by the general. Or to be more precise, it is the relations between multiple individual ends that seek for a valid co-existence that prevail over the general and the technically imposed end and they push things towards a constant negotiation or multiple simultaneous negotiations.

These negotiations, the “how” things relate to each other and grow associations with each other being in states of symbiosis, are to be found in their most compact form in nature. (Here I will soon add a link to another post that will be describing the natural “end”)

The problem of the end is the one that I believe creates the major dichotomy among the natural and the technical, the ecotopia and technotopia creating a polarized dipole while in reality technotopia should be regarded as a part of ecotopia. If the technical world manages to perceive and encompass the “end” as it exists in the natural processes then there could be a much smoother transition among ecotopia and technotopia, the human nature and the human techniques and their products.

A continuous horizon, no alterations in height, just a straight line and what emerges from the ground is either trees or cityscapes. The only scars on the soil are the canals; also linear most of the times they constitute a huge drainage network that reflects the constant and amazingly fast alterations of the lively sky. The landscape itself is also lively, has also been subjected to tremendous changes and is still altering in such a way that becomes the archive of its own history. It is not a mere a container of history. No matter how much formable or deformable a container can be it is always detached from what it carries but here landscape and history are one, embedded to each other, the one exists as the result of the other and they are not preconditions to built upon them, they are built conditions that participate actively and formatively. What is the dominant as a formative condition is the artificial flatness with its great benefits for the functionality, efficiency, production and the exploitability of usable ground by maximizing the land area.

But what Holland has is what it lacks. Multiple horizons, curves of the ground smooth or dramatic forming hills and mountains are absolutely absent from both the Dutch landscape and the Dutch city. What is there instead is a flatness that defines equality but also kills spatial multiplicity.

This multiplicity the Dutch landscape lacks is to be found elsewhere; in the society itself which is a real mosaic of different identities and forms a social field of extremely complex and interesting interrelations connecting people that are different in any sense one could imagine, concerning, job, income, origin, ethnicity, language, political ideology, religion, sexual orientation etc. This social-scape though is not having an impact on the ground and is not a result of the ground itself, it is detached. Social grouping and exclusions, high concentrations of specific social characteristic and activities and low ones take place on two axes, on a surface where height and depth are absent. Instead of them, water dominates as the main factor of a landscape complexity and in the same time as the paragon fort the spatial articulation of different social characteristics.

But still an anomalous ground and a more complex topography have many important characteristics that it is difficult to substitute. They have certain ways of interacting with the society and activate social mechanisms only with the use of different viewpoints and altering visibilities.

A panoptic supervision as it is imposed by a viewpoint high over a city is often connected with the idea of centrality and the spatial accumulation of power. In his “Herostratus”, Jean Paul Sartre describes the feeling of superiority someone has while looking other people from above, from a high viewpoint. It is this ability of height to signify power that explains why palaces and castles were so often built on spots like that. But apart from concentrating and signifying the power such places have always been privileged for the development of cities. Ideal for defense against intrusions and in the same time able to function as places of gathering, as places for anticipating the surrounding landscape and for cultivating the idea of the city as polis, as a social formation, while the urban fabric was developing around them both literally and metaphorically. They were called Acropolis.

On the other hand, apart from height, there in a landscape there is also depth. The cavity of the ground was always to function as place for someone to be hidden, imposing a feeling of protection, becoming a shelter or a haven which when it was extending underground was resembling Kafka’s “Der Bau” adding a new layer to the city, contributing to its complexity and multiplicity.

The high and the low are so strongly connected with the exposed and the hidden, the public and the private. Terms that are carriers of binary oppositions that are binding them together and often inscribe them in space, making the city a result of their continuous interrelation forming multiple horizons and several layers of experiencing it.

Of course such a kind of complexity is a result of the natural preconditions. It cannot be planned or designed; it’s not a result of any kind of technical, technological or artificial approach towards the design process or the design product but rather the outcome of the combination of the topography of the ground and the intuition of people that built on it. It is the result of dynamic autopoetic processes that take place on the landscapes themselves, not on blank papers. The author is not one or two, is not even a system o authors since the idea of authorship is connected to the concept of authority and a city, or to be more precise a polis, should not be about authority or control but rather about losing control and sharing authority. It’s not about a designer looking the 2D plan from above as a superior creator who is detached from it. It is rather about experiencing the 3D landscape and cityscape as social fields, from their inside participating actively to the dynamic production of them.

Similarly to the words, forms have no meaning, they just convey meanings. Forms are the tokens for recalling an always deformed memory, they act like representations where meanings rather emerge from the sets of relations between the elements within the systems that constitute the forms or between the elements or the form and its context than from the elements or the forms themselves and they always leave space for multiple interpretations by the subjects that interact with them.

This is what probably Derrida means when he says that “Meaning is not a presence but a generalized economy of absences”. Perception is the result of a both projective and retrospective process, we project everything we know, think, have seen, heard or read to the reality and we receive back as a result of a reflection a subjectively seen image, not by perceiving straightforward what something is but rather what this something is not. This process is not exclusively or necessarily visual and is not momentary. In that sense perception and therefore perceived meanings have origins therefore are never detached from the processes of social construction. 

In the case of symbols what we conceive as meaning is the result of the projection of massive, prefabricated, usually socially constructed, concepts on the material forms themselves. What one sees on a symbol (e.g. a cross or a swastika) is not only its materiality; it’s all the sets of relations with other material and non-material elements that in turn are related or constitute of other symbols.

As envisioned by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, symbols are not the creations of mind, but rather are distinct capacities within the mind to hold a distinct piece of information. In the mind, the symbol can find free association with any number of other symbols, can be organized in any number of ways, and can hold the connected meanings between symbols as symbols in themselves.[1]

But symbols apart from being the chargers of meaning for the forms (similarly to the signified for the signifier in the sign) are what the interaction of tradition and history with the materiality has created, often not in an innocent way. Symbols, and therefore their meanings, have origins, reasons and purposes which make them positive or negative but certainly non-neutral in the sense that are being formed by certain purposes in the same way that are being formative for certain purposes, no matter if this is consciously driven or not.

The question here is who or what is this that creates the symbols; is it individuals or organizations of individuals with specific aims or symbols are results of dynamic processes? I would take the position that both of them are contributing in the conception or initialization of symbols in several different ways but in general it’s difficult to give a clear, specific answer and maybe it’s not necessary. No matter how a symbol is being conceptualized what is more important is certainly the public acceptance of the symbol as such which plays a key role in the establishment of the symbol as a vehicle of a meaning. Symbols are initialized as representations that function as reminders of things or abstract concepts. At the very moment that the mere representation becomes widely accepted as the carrier of a meaning or significance that is worth sharing or convinces that it’s worth sharing the mechanism that creates a symbol is activated. New symbols are often the parallaxes of older ones or use older ones as references to support their existence through reflections, inversions, oppositions and transformations of the original symbol.

What a symbol is and does or better what the term symbol implies becomes partially clearer since one attempts an etymological analysis of the word. The term “symbol” derives from the Greek word σύμβολον which in turn comes from the verb συμβάλλω which in English could be translated as “to contribute”. Thus, symbol is the “contributor” or in a more free translation the mediator.

But what a symbol mediates is more than the mere memory of its referent (might be a specific object or an abstract concept). The symbol contributes to the conception of its referent but in such a way that in the same time attempts to bring it closer to the idea of an archetype. In order to be more specific, a symbol attempts to charge what it symbolizes with an aura or essence of objectivity which is obvious by the fact that, historically speaking, symbols are referring to eternal truths, global concepts and in general to conventions that intend to remain hermetically sealed without becoming easily open to discussion or questioning but rather have already taken or attempt to take the position of an axiom. Taking this into account it becomes even more obvious that symbols are not mere vehicles of meaning and they are not neutral mediators but they certainly have intention to simplify the referent and charge with a glow of objectivity the concepts they convey. As Umberto Eco might pose it, in any kind of text, there are three intentions; the intention of the author (intentio auctoris), the intention of the reader (intentio lectoris) and the intention of the text itself (intentio operis) and one could approach the symbol in a similar way posing that what it actually attempts to do is to make these three intentions to merge into one.

The question that rises instantly is how the “objective” symbol relates to the “subjective” person or how it has been related to its social consciousness through different historical periods.

In the disciplinary societies as Foucault describes them in his Discipline and Punish in between 17th and 19th century what became dominant was the social construction that was taking place in different enclosed places through which a person was passing during the whole of its life such as the family, the school, the military camp, and sometimes the prison. Foucault quoting Walhausen explains that the idea behind the establishment of the disciplinary power was not any more to punish but to “train” the masses in order to use them better and more productively in the extraction of labor or power and it’s not by accident that disciplinary societies reach their peak point at the outset of the 20th century together with the industrial revolution.

The position of symbols and of symbolism in general in that context was certainly formative for the subjects into the “interior” of these enclosed spaces. The symbols were there in order to support the interiority and to play a didactic role for the positions people have in the society sharing authorities and social roles. Apart from the iconography of these spaces which was certainly full of symbols, the arrangement of bodies and gestures in these spaces had itself a symbolic value for the who is who. For instance the position of the teacher in a class sitting higher than the pupils was serving something more than just a functional purpose; it was rather about serving the establishment of a symbolic scheme of power, the establishment of the teacher as the ex cathedra speaker that transmits the knowledge to the pupils in a one way process. This symbolic articulation of power through asymmetries of that type is obvious also in the other spaces of enclosure described by Foucault and the final goal was obviously always the same, the formation of people in a way that conform with the rules they are being taught and produce without questioning the processes of production.

The situation with symbols and symbolism concerning the sharing of social roles and the division of authority was more or less the same earlier in times when religion was playing the dominant role in the social construction but also later on during the world wars and also the cold war. At these times political propaganda became an entire science on the use of information and symbols for the ruling and steering of the masses. Even later on, the collapse of the
Soviet Union was followed by a sequence of symbolic gestures and events that intended to seal once and for all the political reformation.

Today it seems that we live in what Gilles Deleuze named as society of control in his famous article. He described control as the new monster of our time and he makes the distinction of the differences among the societies of control and the disciplinary ones:

“The different internments of spaces of enclosure through which the individual passes are independent variables: each time one is supposed to start from zero, and although a common language for all these places exists, it is analogical. One the other hand, the different control mechanisms are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry the language of which is numerical (which doesn’t necessarily mean binary). Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.[2]

Symbols have never been fully detached from other symbols but they were always forming larger codification structures by being interconnected with each other. In our time it seems that these interconnections are of a broader scale forming a continuum in constant motion in a similar way as Deleuze describes control. The information society, globalization and the space – time compression have brought everything closer creating relations among things that have never been in the same context before. Different symbols or to be more precise different kinds of codifications or conventions that support communication are finding themselves interrelated. This results in a communication conflict that derives from a codification conflict.

In the same time everything are being regarded as interfaces that through them we mediate ideas no matter if this is happening consciously or not. These interfaces also use symbols or become symbols themselves and are not independent from each other; they are also interconnected and significant for each other (clothing and religion) forming a continuum with different properties from place to place and time to time. In the context with the different codification systems that have been brought together it’s normal to face continuities and discontinuities in this formation of the continuum but when symbols come to place and since symbols still today are often conceived as carriers of an unquestionable “objectivity” instead of discontinuities what we face are polarized oppositions between different “objectivities”. These polarized oppositions in turn become symbols themselves. One is not only defined as oneself but could be defined by a series of an anti-anything (I prefer to leave this “anything” open for personal interpretation) and this becomes apart from a symbol a part of an identity, a social role.

In addition, if we regard symbol as a sign, the importance is not any more in the signified but in the signifier itself, it’s a simulacrum that pretends to be detached from its history and its origin. A symbol today does not really refer so much to something outside of the symbol or the interconnection of the symbol with other symbols; it’s the flag that matters, not what the flag stands for. This is why it’s so easy today to de-contextualize symbols and re-contextualize them or to attach them to larger categories of symbols. For instance the symbol of McDonalds doesn’t merely refer to “food” any more or to be more precise it probably doesn’t refer to “food” at all. It’s rather about a reference to a lifestyle that is implied by the interconnection of the specific symbol with other symbols like the one of coca cola or the American flag which in turn is connected with the Christian cross and the symbol of the U.S. dollar and these connections could continue until eventually finding a polar opposition with another symbol.

Discussing the use of symbolism in today’s society is not going to have as an outcome the rejection of it. We certainly need the symbols as instruments for communication, what is an issue is what the symbol depicts and how conscious we are of the fact that it is only an instrument, a reductive tool that simplifies concepts having the danger of creating stereotypes. Marcel Duchamp was the one that in a symbolic gesture put a moustache on Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and maybe this is the answer of how we should treat symbols that have constituted our societies, not as fixed, closed systems but as open-ended fields for creativity, feeling free to question them, criticize them, invert them, deform them and eventually reform them. There lays the possibility of understanding them better, being familiar with their origins, their purposes in order to consciously conform with them or consciously again reject or disobey them.

Charalampos Cheizanoglou, April 2007

Bibliography:

Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir Naissance de la prison Paris, Gallimard, 1975 (Greek translation: Επιτήρηση και τιµωρία η γέννηση της φυλακής, ελλ. µετ. Καίτη Χατζηδήµου – Ιουλιέττα Ράλλη, εκδ. Ράππα, 1976)

Gilles Deleuze, Society of Control, L’autre journal, Nr. I, Mai 1990

David Harvey, The condition of post modernity: an inquiry into the origins of cultural change,
Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990

Thomas A. Markus, Buildings of power: freedom and control in the origin of modern building types. Routledge, 1993

Stan Allen, Practice: Architecture, technique and representation, G+B Arts International, 2000

[1] Source Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolism

[2] Gilles Deleuze, Society of Control, L’autre journal, Nr. I, Mai 1990

]]> http://harisheiz.wordpress.com/2007/05/16/13/feed/ 6 harisheiz http://harisheiz.wordpress.com/2007/05/16/new-things/ http://harisheiz.wordpress.com/2007/05/16/new-things/#comments Wed, 16 May 2007 00:14:30 +0000 harisheiz http://harisheiz.wordpress.com/2007/05/16/new-things/ ]]> The blog is new. New things are not produced as parthenogenesis but rather as results of evolutionary processes full of combinations and various manipulations (such as mutation, hybridization, assemblage, metonymy, copy, subtractions, inversion, scaffolding, positioning, superimposition, transposition, translation, representation, reproduction, reformation, deformation, deconstruction, destruction etc.) of older ones. In any kind of such re-, de-, trans- processes (transposition, transfer, transmission, translation) that create products with the use of other tings there is a bias or better there are sets of transitions that alter (deform or reform) the properties of the initial thing, therefore the product is always different. This often tends to be regarded as a reduction of the prototype (as it has happened often in history) raising issues of originality and firing discussions about the preservation of the initial intentions and qualities putting in the core the idea of authorship. I prefer to regard the fact, not as a reduction, but as the precondition for evolution, as a necessity which is uncharged from positive or negative meaning. This blog will grow in a similar way, by evolving…