Does society 'really exist' that is, is it some kind of thing?
What we see of society in space-time is individuals interacting, encountering and perhaps also seeking refuge from all these.
Is society then the sense of the interactions that we see in space-time?
It cannot be so. Society must persist through time. Society is, at the very least, something that outlasts individuals. The reduction in individualism is in fact the one thing we logically cannot do.
If we are not talking about interactions in space-time when we say 'society' then what are we talking about?
What persists under human interactions that we observe in space-time?
What persists is not interactions, but certain configurational patterns underlying the interaction. Individual interactions are endless replaced. But certain underlying patterns persist. These are patterns that we name as 'society' The patterns can be the result of any number of different pattern formers: Form of production, social institution..., but it is these that we name as society. This allows us to include space form to society among the patterns.
Space is one thing that can generate and restrict encounter and interaction probabilities. This is how space becomes involved in society.
Society then is not the space-time manifestations of society as the interaction fields. The entity which we name society is not a thing but a abstraction.
Does this entitle that society could be seen as an imaginary concept?
Firstly, it is real. Secondly, its real when its realized in space-time. The world of interaction in which we live, is not itself society but it is by which society realized itself in space-time and thus projects itself through part to future.
The realization in space-time is the means by which society as a system of configurational persistence achieves this persistence and transmits itself across time.
Society is in this sense an abstraction. It is the genotypes of social arrangements that are reproduced through time and which are therefore recognizable in the relational complexes which are realized in a specific form at one point in time. Society is in the sense a dematerialized thing and this is why we find it hard even to acknowledge its existence as a real thing.
Although society is seen as this dematerialized genotypical thing, the means by which it is projected through time is anything but dematerialized. On contrary, the material form of society at any moment of time is not that society, it is the means by which that society is transmitted into the future. The means of society as an abstraction is realized in space-time and then reproduced.
Society is not in itself its material form, but even so only exists through its material form.
This double-take is why all social practices take the form of abstract structures. Dominating the reality can be done by structuring what can happen in it.
Buildings happen within this double take. Like the social events which they contain, they themselves are space-time realizations of abstractions. Buildings are seem less than social events, in that they are not made up of thinking human beings, but they are long lasting, almost permanent, transformations of the world in the image of society that which governs it's form.
Buildings are not maps of human interaction. They are maps of social genotypes of human interactions. This is what makes them so powerful.
Buildings only contingently house the phenotypes of human interactions. The mystery of the social nature of building now becomes clear.
It's essential nature is to give form to an abstraction and through this to give that abstraction the realization which enables it to be projected through time.
Buildings reflect on the generic abstractions which constitute society itself. It is these abstractions that need to be transmitted through time.
Buildings make this powerful by hosting these genotypes into the very materiality of our existence.
Buildings are thus the most powerful means that a society has to constitute itself in space-time and through this to project itself into the future.
In this sense, societies are throughly dependent on space.
The art of building is, inevitably a social act.
As such it entails risks, risks that the forms will not be these that permits the society to reproduce its essential form.
In modern societies, these risks are carried out between architecture and the social agencies through which architecture is legitimated and controlled.
Architecture persists both because society changes and must change its built form in order to perpetuate itself in a different way to it predecessors. These must always experiment with the future.
The real risk is in the persistence of error through time, so that form inconsistent with the perpetuation of a good society became dominant. It is exactly from such high risks that we, in the late twenty century, seen recently to have made our escape.
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