020 Buildings as Social Objects Part 01

What is the role of buildings in society?

The simple proposition that human beings inhabit two types of co-existent worlds:

1. A continuos material world of objects and space which we occupy and move about in physically. 

2. A discontinuous world of expressive forms, signs and symbols which we occupy cognitively. 

The act of building, through the creation of configuration in space and form, converts these into a single world. Building is the meeting point of the two worlds, where real space is converted into logical space. 

Buildings convert the material world which we inhabit into a non-discursive world of culture, indeed into culture's densest locus. Through, this conversation, the material world becomes for us information and idea, rather than a thing. Because culture functions non-discursively, and makes the artificial appear natural, the built world we have made into information and idea comes to appear material to us. 

Through this assimilation of the material world in the cultural world, buildings becomes a puzzle for us. We become so used to its automatic culturality that we are taken by surprise when we remember its physical nature. 

We begin to make distinctions between house and home and between building and dwelling, protesting that building is 'mere material' while something else, some immaterial human stuff, is the essence of what appears at first to be a physical object.

How can the material world be involved in our social and cultural lifes?

The same difficulty occurs when trying to separate social institutions from the building they occupy. Its defined tat social institutions is an arrangement of people. Therefore, we can say that a church is 'mere bricks and mortar' nothing without the priest and congregation. 

The fact is that a church building without its social set up is no longer 'really a church'. The fact that the social set up 'gives a meaning' to the building is more than an association of ideas. 

Once a social set up with its building exists, then the building is much more than a stage set or background. The case of the church is particularly clear, since the entire form of the building is dedicated to the support of a spatialised ritual of some kind, and the provision of an audience for that ritual. 

By providing a spatial form adapted to a particular ritual, the building becomes part of the means by which that ritual is acted by its community. The building becomes a powerful part of the means by which that ritual is perpetuated, and transmitted into the future. 

How can the abstraction we call 'society' take a physical form, as it seems it must do it it is to be real in the manually accepted senses of the world? If society does exist, then in what sense does it exist?

There is a problem in assigning society a material existence in the same sense that we assign an individual a material existence. If we do not assign society some kind of material existence, it seems unlikely that we can formulate answers to questions as to why and how spatialization through the house as home and the church building as an aspect of the church institution should be so consistent ways?

If society is immaterial, then surely it would not require this consistency of materialization. 

The idea of society is not exhausted by the possibilities of existence in the same sense that individuals, or material objects, exist, that is as continuos finite entities occupying a well-defined region of time-space. 

To conceptualize society as a thing has its origins in the most fundamental of our materialistic prejudices:

The Idea of A Thing. 

Beginning a famous problem in philosophy, by Heraclitus and discussed by at length by Quine, about the definition of rivers. 

How can we say that a river is a thing when its constitutive elements - water molecules - keep changing, and will be found now here, now elsewhere in the river, then is a nearby sea, then as falling rain?

The elimination and replacement of parts is also true of human beings. We should see ourselves, not as things, perhaps, but as processes. The common sense definition of individuals as things, and even of things in general, seems after all to be illusory. 

Is all 'flux and change', and are all assertions of the 'thingness' of the world just temporary fixations? 

By considering three entities which seem to have different degrees of thingness: 

1. one meter cubed empty box lying on the ground below a tree, on a warm summer evening with a light wind. 

2. a swarm of gnats, three meters above the box. 

3. a cubed meter of gnats-free air 3 meters to the east of the swarm. 

The box is clearly a thing, the cubic meter of air is not. The swarm we instinctively mean as a thing, even though it seems dubiously to satisfy common sense criteria. 

Can we arrive at a general definition which clarifies what is and is not a thing?

What does a swarm have that the cubic meter of air does not?

The swarm appears random but its not. Its a partially random system subject to at least one restriction. Individual gnats move randomly only until they see a field of vision empty of gnats, when they turn and fly back in the direction of gnats. 

This rule is enough to convert a set of individuals into a swarm. Every now and then a gnat will be lost and gained, but this won't effect the existence of the swarm because the swarm does not depend on any individual. 

However, do we have a conception of a swarm, and are inclined to call it a thing...why?

How can we conceptualize this sense of thingness?

First, the sense of thingness appears because we note through time relational persistence among gnats which manifest themselves in space and persists through time. Because these relations are multiple and simultaneous, we may call them configurational persistencies.

Secondly, these configurational persistencies have the quite objective effect that the thing we think we see, the swarm, offers some resistance to determination by forces of the external to itself, i.e. the light wind. 

In this sense, the swarm differs from the cubic meter of air. The light wind blows away the air molecules and replaces them with others, but leaves the swarm of gnats. 

The configurational persistencies of the swarm offers a certain resistance to externalities that manifest itself as a temporary stability in space-time, and this seems enough to call it a thing. 

the cubic meter of air is clearly not a thing, but the box on the ground clearly is. It's configurational persistence are of a more durable and fixed kind than those of the swarm. As with the swarm, they do not offer endless resistance to externalities. 

Taking the definition of things further a field, it seems to work for rivers, which we can see as configurational persistencies among banks, water molecules and land gradients, rather than simply as water molecules. 

Clearly it works for less difficult cases such as human beings. If it has configurational persistencies, then we can call it a thing. 

An interesting aspect of this definition of what we see and say is a thing is that what we are defining is a process, or a particular stage of process. We have made our problems in defining things, that what we see appears to be process rather than fixations When we see a universe, a human being, a box or a swarm, what we see is a constructive process unfolding in space-time under morphological necessity.