#keller easterling

Culture is good at pointing to things and calling their name but not so good at describing the relationships between things or the repertoires they enact. It privileges declarations, right answers, litigious proofs, universals, elementary particles and telos. It circles modernist scripts that celebrate freedom and transcendent newness — narrative arcs that bend toward a utopian or dystopian ultimate. This collective mind that looks for the one or the one and only is so often organized like a closed loop.

From golf courses and shopping centres seemingly fixed in place, to broadband cables and supply chains which circulate information and goods in perpetual motion, spaces and objects are more than just volume and geometry: they have their own active potentials. Easterling calls this form of hidden agency and temperament “disposition.” Just as a round ball and inclined plane suggest direction, disposition locates activity in a thing’s latent tendencies and its interaction with other things.

Picture the places where we live: the parking places, skyscrapers, turning radii, garages, street lights, driveways, airport lounges, highway exits, big boxes, strip malls, shopping malls, small boxes, free zones, casinos, retail outlets, fast food restaurants, hotels, cash machines, tract housing, container ports, industrial parks, call centers, golf courses, suburbs, office buildings, business parks, resorts. In the retinal afterglow is a soupy matrix of details and repeatable formulas that generate most of the space in the world—what we might call infrastructure space.

As a site of multiple, overlapping, or nested forms of sovereignty, where domestic and transnational jurisdictions collide, infrastructure space becomes a medium of what night be called extrastatecraft—a portmanteau describing the often undisclosed activities outside of, in addition to, and sometimes even in partnership with statecraft.

While evidence of infrastructure space within the contemporary city might appear to confirm the death of architecture, perhaps it really only demonstrates that the giant is alive again. Architecture makes unique objects—like stones in the water—while a constant flow of repeatable spatial formulas constructs a sea of urban spaces. Architects and urbanists typically characterize this state of affairs as disempowering, but if architecture was indeed killed by the book, perhaps it is reincarnate as something more powerful—as information itself. Infrastructure space has become a medium of information. The information resides in invisible, powerful activities that determine how objects and content are organized and circulated. Infrastructure space, with the power and currency of software, is an operating system for shaping the city.

Perhaps it is, then, not surprising that so many profound problems seem to be unresponsive to a solutionist approach. The very nature of a solution, standard or a masterplan that aspires to declare the end of a problem or to establish stability once and for all is very weak in the face of changing circumstances and duplicitous political actors. In other words, solutions can be mistakes. They are information poor. [...] But consider Parrondo’s paradox – a counterintuitive game theory positing that if you play a game with a low probability of winning, you will lose, but if you alternate between two games, each with a high probability of losing, you can begin to generate wins. The resulting graph of the wins resembles a ratchet, and the process may actually behave like a ratchet – as if the losses create a kind of traction against which to make many small gains that generate a win. When the failures are truly remarkable, the field of play that is often in denial of information is finally released from the grip of solutions and can become information rich again. As in Parrondo’s paradox, where losing games work together, failure inspires different organs of design that multiply rather than eliminate problems. It is not the solving or even the content of problems but the interplay between them that is most productive or robust. Problems from any quarter might leaven or catalyse each other. Similarly, maybe it is not the replacement and obsolescence of technology that is somehow smarter and more advanced: the idea of newness and succession may be quite dumb – rather it is the interplay between technologies that is smart. Not homeostasis but imbalance, not fixed pools of information but rather extrinsic information, contradiction and mixtures of information systems provide a wealth of potential to disrupt the closed loop.