Sunday, 7 June 2015

Week 3

Discourse, as an extension of the human condition, is an ever expanding aspiration. Like methamphetamine to a junkie, humanity is in a constant state of rationalisation, determined to establish coherence within a multiplicity of material, we always need our fix. Michael Foucault offers up several themes as pathway to discursive enlightenment; principally aroused by “the interplay of the rules that make possible the appearance of objects during a given period of time” Foucault draws a parallel between the use of displacement and madness as catalyst to discourse. Once subjects can effectively segment, the intrigue is how one can categorise and individualise the coexistence of these objects, highlighting the system of division, parallel dependency, morphogenesis and they interaction of location, arrangement and replacement of the established heterogeneous.

By comparison, Sean Ahlquist and Achim Menges draw conclusion that parametricism as result of mathematical discursion is the computational embodiment of morphogenesis. Given expression through “Form… is a system which organises itself in the presence of both internal and external forces, and that the organisations can shape patterns traced through mathematical rules.” Ahlquist and Menges clearly mirror Foucault’s notion that the interplay of rules define the appearance of objects. Both texts also define the importance of context in the processes of classification, however Ahlquist and Menges approaches the topic from a less anarchic stance, evaluating where the role of the designer or orchestrator would become apparent in a world of self-defining, morphic computation. Stating that the designer is now the author of the rule-set as descriptions towards the development of the form, they position the architect as a more philosophical role, endowed with the power of selection and argument generation in “both a technical computational manner and a theoretical material vain.”


Academics revel in the anarchic upheaval of established discourse, drawing parallel between factions, however Foucault beautifully grounds the temptations of theoretical inflation, poetically noting that “the rules of formation are conditions of existence in a given discursive division.” Like the built environment and other established social structures, we must be wary of geo-divisional morphogenesis and note similarities, differences, and interactions within the micro-environment withholding the information that we seek.

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