How to make yourself a Feminist Design Power Tool E-Book

Hélène Frichot

• Herausgeber: Spurbuchverlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: The Practice of Theory and the Theory of Practice
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 159

Beschreibung

Set amidst the experimental ecology of practices that supports feminist thinking and doing in architecture, this small book outlines an instruc- tion guide that presents six provocative steps toward the invention of productive concept-tools. It invites readers to explore creative and messy methodologies that combine an aesthetics with a practical ethics. Frichot encourages us to think and do architecture in ways that challenge a dog- matic status quo that celebrates major gures, while overlooking the care and labour of minor gures and practices.

Leseprobe

Contents

Introduction: Taking Instructions

Step One: Just Do It (Now That You’ve Already Begun)

Step Two: Compose a List, Make a Manifesto

Step Three: Construct a Conceptual Persona and an Aesthetic Figure

Step Four: Chart Your Environment-World

Step Five: Collectivise a Heteroglossary

Step Six: Follow the Material!

A Final Note

Bibliography

Fig. 1: Hélène Frichot, Maria Reiche dot-to-dot, 2016.

Introduction: Taking Instructions

The greatest potential, and the greatest threat, in writing instructions is that they can be subverted, reinvented, and recuperated for dubious ends. The object of the instructions outlined in what follows is to extend an invitation toward an ‘experimentation in contact with the real’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 2). These instructions are an invitation to simply go ahead and try to see what happens when you make contact with your local environment-world.

The challenge lies in altering prevalent practices that rely on (bad) habits, (mere) opinions, and (prejudiced) clichés. It’s a question of how to circumvent the empty platitudes you use to sooth yourself in the face of radical contingency as you struggle within your local universe of value, especially when it turns out, after all, to be wildly unpredictable. To take a risk, but also to take care.

While the user’s guide is intended to be received as a playful invitation, it is directed toward the serious question of how, as architects or becoming-architects, and also as artists and designers, you might alter your practices and think and do otherwise amidst your local environment-world. Playing off the idea of a ‘user’s guide’ (which is what instructions are), and extending an invitation to ‘do it yourself’ and mess with the instructions explored here, I will outline a series of steps. This will mean that I will take on a somewhat exaggeratedly pedagogical, although I hope not didactic, approach. There is an inherent and intended dysfunctionality in these instructions as they await further use, because they do nothing by themselves. They do not posit a readymade answer or a solution to a problem that is yet to be named, nor are they a well-planned choreography of the kind formulated in anticipation of a battle.

Ideally, a (concept) tool and its associated instructions emerge directly in contact with a given material field of action, a ‘site’ if you like, which erupts as a matter of concern that brings a number of interested subjects or actors together (Latour, 2005). The instructions I offer below are inspired by a great number of thinkers and practitioners, who admittedly come from a number of fields, not just from within architecture, design or art. If I sign what appears to be my own name to these instructions and tools, it is always in recognition of the great debt that I happily owe to my precursors. I’ll avoid where possible mentioning the big names, which can feel so overwhelming, so large and over-impressive; names, nonetheless, will necessarily appear here and there, as fleeting signatures. In addition, toward the end of each Step in this guide, I draw attention to examples. Beyond mere illustrations, the use of these examples is motivated by my own proximity with the work that they are the product of. I have learnt a great deal from the projects I present.

Instructions can also be verbally issued, such as between a client and a lawyer, between a patient and a doctor, or between a choreographer and a dancer. They might also be instructions on how to lead a life, even an ethical life, and how to do this from the midst of your creative practice, a discussion that will be raised in the final chapter, Step 6 of this guide.

It is all very well to offer up imperatives: Be creative! Experiment now! Such calls risk making matters worse, as the very act of creation that the architect, artist, or designer (as ‘creative type’) desires to succeed in is supposed to be a terribly mysterious, alchemical process. Architect-designers, unlike scientists, tend to be deeply suspicious of methods, and once methods become methodologies (as in established ways of doing things) then the architect runs away… fast. Creation is out of step with itself and cannot be second-guessed: it is less methodical, more erratic, taking wild leaps and making improbable connections. This does not, however, mean that instructions cannot be followed in curious ways to procure radical outcomes, or that methods cannot be improvised, or that provisional methodologies cannot be discussed or shared.

You must make your own map of your local environment-world – and better still, do this collectively – thereby making connections that expose you to other worlds and subjectivities in process. The feminist ethos that forms a supportive background here, and which will also loom into view from time to time, aims to unsettle the status quo, to question normative structures, and to disturb unconscious schema – to upset different renditions of what can also be described under the moniker of a hegemonic ‘image of thought’. The image of thought: meaning what it is to get stuck in a rut, to think that, to think of course it’s like that, naturally! So these instructions go about asking how can such dogmatic structures be challenged where they become most oppressive. An immediate problem arises in that it is often hard to see or recognise when and where you are oppressed. You rely on what you have come to expect as you traverse the familiar landscapes of daily life. This is what normalisation, what an internalisation of implicit disciplinary regimens, does: it makes everything seem ho-hum. Please carry on as usual. Everyday life, its habitual modes of practice and associated habitats, come to seem so regular, so acceptable, and oh so predictable. Right up until the point you are stopped dead in your tracks and realise you can proceed no further.

Regular habits, and how they assume a well-tempered habitat, can be comforting, like a feeling for home where every phenomenological nook and corner is felicitously known. Sometimes, it is exactly this regulated disciplined rhythm of life that arouses the desire to be disruptive, to be radical, that is, to cast out in another direction. To explore other modes of practice is exactly the challenge this instruction guide proposes to extend.

This holds specific relevance for the discipline and practice of architecture, which is at its core a conservative discipline, even while it attempts to make of its works something radical. In architecture, matters become quite paradoxical because architects usually want to make of their practices and forms something exceptional, something adventurously avant-garde, or else something that is simply good enough to make an appearance where it counts (print media, online, Web 2.0, etc.). The ambitions of an avant-garde or rather a neo-avant-garde too quickly empty out, and the best of intentions (of architects) risk turning into dull refrains. The advance party, the architectural vanguard, heads further into exhausted posthuman landscapes in search of illusions. Grasping at a mirage. Battling windmills. Becoming, all the while, more entrenched in old ways. One of those old ways pertains to the exclusion of certain persona, certain kinds of actors, from the ‘theatre’ of architecture. Although you are not supposed to complain, even today it’s important to ask: Where are the women architects? (Stratigakos, 2016). And further, what can women, and other minority groups do to architecture, conceived as a thinking and making practice?

As the title already indicates, these instructions will direct themselves toward a particular problem – how to construct a feminist design power tool. In the process the instructions assume a feminist ethos, not to mention a tongue-in-cheek approach, taking the form of a self-help guide for those confounded by an exclusionary discipline like architecture. It would be presumptuous to assume that the instructions in this book can solve the problems of all – of any – of the minority groups attempting to tackle the too often exclusionary, walled off domain of architecture. (It may well in any case turn out that everyone belongs to a minority group, in one way or another, and that everyone has a complaint to submit to the discipline.) While the modifier ‘feminist’ strongly suggests a position whereby women are understood as constituting a minority group that remains underrepresented in the teaching, practice and leadership of architecture, the use of ‘feminist’ also welcomes into the discussion other intersections and concerns, including class, race, ethnicity, corporeal capacity – difference, then, of all kinds. To ask what women do to architectural thinking and making also means to ask what any underrepresented group can do. This means to be alert to what we are missing out on in not listening to a multiplicity of voices that come from different positions and life situations and that adopt different points of view.

No doubt many who have ventured into the walled city of architecture have discovered, sooner or later, that they have something to complain about in terms of why they have not been able to ‘pass’ as an architect, or why they have been obliged to exit or escape, even once they have achieved their qualifications. There have no doubt been innumerable ‘attacks of the castle’, the stories of which should be told and retold (Cixous, 1997). Under the professional title ‘architect’, furthermore, the stress is too often placed on the architect as ‘designer’, a role that is still presumed to be the most exalted position in the professional hierarchy. It is the design architect who wins a prize for his signature building, whose serious face most often appears in the press. There persists a great temptation to lament the exclusions, the unconscious schema, the oversights and assumptions, the lack of diversity, equity and representation, even the lack of, or lower, pay. There is a great desire to contract the habit of making the count, of quantifying the exclusions, and listing the occasions of oversight. I speak here of the critical task of conducting a ‘count’ by asking at every opportunity: How many men? How many woman? Why are there so few women who have been awarded this prestigious architectural prize? And why are no women represented on this international panel at that biennale? How come that famous school has listed only one woman on its lecture series this year? And yet, rather than just enlisting the ‘count’, an activity that is necessary and political (who is counted, who is not?), and rather than lamenting what appear to be the compounded losses of the wrong gender identity, what about another approach, one in which you actively equip yourself with creative and critical tools and practices? This process of equipping yourself also suggests something of a ‘Do It Yourself’ approach. Of course, it’s all very well having a tool, but unless there is some specific project or problem to which that tool can be applied then it will rest latent on a shelf, or in a document, or in the mind of the thinking-designer who desists from designing. Furthermore, a DIY approach can never just be about you as a singular and independent actor, for your performance takes place on a larger, more complex geopolitical stage that is filled with other actors and other concerns.

An important note on concept-tools

Like a baton in a relay race, a tool is necessarily passed from hand to hand, and every tool needs an instruction for use that is passed on too. From hand to hand. Even when it is a question of Do It Yourself, the self or subject is always an outcome of a community or a collective, and the construction of subjectivity is always undertaken in the process of that doing. Becoming an individual, a specific subject, is a project too, and one that cannot ever be considered completed. Tools, once we shift our focus, also assume broader networks of relations – they are part of larger machines, structures and infrastructures, in which they are put to work, or of which they are a product. Tools make second-order tools. What should not be overlooked is that a tool is not only something that can be handled, like a hammer, or a spanner, or a motorised power tool; a tool is also a conceptual tool. A tool may well be immaterial, a think-tool, a mnemonic device, but that is not to suggest it cannot have an enormous impact on a situation, in relation to a site and an associated problem. Concepts, which are the kinds of tools that architects frequently refer to (‘I began with the concept of an X, for the design of this Y’), are as powerful as motorised construction tools. As we proceed with these instructions, many concept-tools will be introduced, the idea being that they are taken as batons and transformed as they pass from hand to hand, from one situation to the next, and from one delineated problem to another. No one takes hold of a tool, concept or otherwise, in quite the same way, just as no problem, site or situation is ever entirely the same.

The invention and construction of a feminist design power tool is an inevitable act of experimentation that necessarily deals with the situation at hand – with the problems that you face, right here, right now. It is anything you want it to be, so long as it works, but then the onus is on you to outline the ethico-aesthetic criteria of assessment that determine how well it has worked in situ. This is to bring an aesthetic sensibility together with an ethical attitude in a conjunctive way (more on that later). Tool and method are closely associated, and if there is anything that the creative disciplines need it is a way to celebrate the ways of doing they already actively partake in (albeit with the proviso that practitioners remain wary of bad habits that are exclusionary, or that circumscribe an expert field of knowledge that is actively made inaccessible to others, to the uninitiated). Inevitably, these methods will be discipline specific, and more than that, they will be specific to the situation at hand. For a discipline like architecture, perched as it is between the sciences and the humanities (and it is both weaker and more fascinating as a result), this presents a challenge – architecture’s methods need to be rendered distinct from those of its closest disciplinary neighbours.

To apply a tool, you need a working method, and once you reflect on this method, what you have is a burgeoning methodology, that is, a logic of how you are doing what you are doing. Where a method is a process of gathering the material required for addressing a problem or a site, a methodology is the logic of this gathering, even a post-justificatory analysis, or an after-the-fact ‘how to’ that only emerges following all kinds of improvisation, and some false leads or dead-end trails. Your ‘feminist design power tool’ can be passed from hand to hand, transforming the subject (architect) who handles the tool, the tool itself, and the situation that the tool is being applied to (Stengers, 2005A). The tool always gathers together at the very least subject, tool, and situation, but the subject in question is less a fixed unity of apperception than a process of subjectification, a subjectivity apt to transform through her encounters. The feminist philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers explains that what she calls an ecology of practices ‘is a tool for thinking through what is happening’, and, importantly, like all other tools, a tool that is ‘never neutral’ (185). I will return to this facilitative notion of an ecology of practices below, but for now, Stengers helps us think with tools, and understand that tools are for thinking.

The tool for thinking exposes the one who thinks, placing them at risk, but they must be daring. The tool, Stengers advises, should operate in a ‘minor key’, that is to say it should challenge the status of a major or dominant paradigm, aiming to create ‘a different practical landscape’ (2005A: 187). Haraway, whom Stengers refers to from time to time, also draws attention to tools as part of The Cyborg Manifesto, where the challenge is for minorities (which she folds under the figure of her famous Cyborg) to seize the tools to ‘mark the world that marked them as other’ (1991: 175). Tools, Haraway goes on, are also rendered as stories to be told and retold so as to reverse the stabilised sets of beliefs that have marginalised so many. So concept-tools are directly about what’s happening in a situation and about whose worth is being devalued (or inflated). Unfortunately these ‘economic’ allusions are used intentionally in our contemporary moment, where what seems to count most is how a researcher can capture grant money through scoring points with their peer-reviewed publications: the game of research, which ultimately determines their wage. Stengers explains that the relevant tools, the tools for thinking, address and actualise the ‘power of the situation’, and it could turn out that these tools are not very respectable, exactly in that they challenge the norm. Rather than simply allowing us to recognise what we already know, the tool helps us think in relation to a pressing matter of concern (Stengers, 2005A: 185). The power of which Stengers speaks is important to the formulation of the feminist design power tool; this is a power of existence, rather than a power over, and all such power is mobilised in relation between at least two, but usually more, parties.

A ‘power tool’ not only alludes to hand-held motorised power tools, but to the equally real question of power relations and how they are redistributed across the existential territories where everyday life is lived out always in relation. Power relations are neither good nor bad per se, and it would be safe to say that when it comes to life and how life is practiced always in situ, in the midst of some local environment-world, there is no outside to these relations. Power relations are codified and captured where state structures become most oppressive, but because power relations are mobile, fluid, moving across fields of action, there is still possibility in power. This becomes the promise of resistance as a creative force, whereby power relations can be de-codified and re-codified for other, more liberatory purposes (Foucault, 1980: 123). Power relations and how the subject (of architecture) is formed in their midst can enable liberatory encounters and new modes of life, but they can also devolve into bad habits and dogmatic regimes, and worse. Again, it is crucial to remember that a concept is a tool; it can wreak as much havoc, or else be as constructive, as a motorised power tool. Warning: Ideas can be hazardous! Handle with care.