Nowadays, technology and technicality is the new metaphysics. After the collapse of political utopias and since god had already been killed by Nietzsche what remained for the people as a field to project their hopes is the technological utopia. Technology offers to human beings what in the past an ideology or a god was offering to them, the hope for safety and preservation of their being. This becomes so dominant that eventually technology becomes our being. People believe in systems and not only connect themselves to them but they grow attached to them. This is certainly because of many plausible reasons but on the other hand this belief has several side effects. Technology becomes an extension of ourselves and also a formative device, becoming itself a scope, in such a way that we often cannot see further than the "formal".
Descartes' rationalism introduced a model of thinking which apart from the contribution it certainly had to the history of humanity, was followed by dichotomies (the body and the mind, the natural and the technical), fragmentations, centralism (the 0,0 and orthos logos itself) etc. The critique to Descartes from the scope of the architects focuses mainly on the Cartesian space but a discussion about that is rather reductive because we always end up discussing about forms which rather underlines the way how, as architects, we tend to perceive our practice, as a "form making". In reality the things we should be critical about Descartes, apart from the Cartesian space, are much more essential and they refer to the mechanical way of thinking rationalism introduced together with the various dualisms. One really important dualism that originates in Descartes is this of natural and technical, where the nature is hetero-defined through the technical and it is really interesting to see that the nature is being referred as a "machine" as something purely technical. Apart from that Descartes' goal was to reach truth in order for the humans to become ‘masters and possessors of nature' and this is a concept upon which the whole technical world (and also capitalism) is been based still until today. But the idea of reaching the truth (apart from the truth itself) and mastering nature is rather problematic. In the first place because the existence of truth is questionable, but apart from that, because of the fact that reaching the truth takes place with the use of technical media and conventions. The word truth itself is a technical word, it refers to our ability to perceive and describe phenomena that are not true or false, they just are. The concept of truth refers to a reason and an imposed goal, a why things are and not merely to a how they came to be. No matter if this "why" has an answer or not, or if there is a goal, a logos, the way technical practices function is deeply influenced by it.
What is inherent in technical productions is their mechanical perception of the "end", in the sense Heidegger uses the word, meaning the fulfillment, the completion. Any strategy that has its origin in the realm of the technical (which rather means all of them) has to focus on a goal, an aim and a targeted fulfillment which is always singular. This technical end always refers to only one particular think or set of things selecting always a specific resolution of analysis, which is usually defined by the method, the tools and the particular definition of the context which is different every time. It is this idea of focusing to the particular (usually in only one spatiotemporal variable) and defining a specific resolution that makes technical productions to fail to be holistic and encompass the associations of particular but not individual or independent ends with the totality which is full of relations and relations among relations.
The spatiotemporal reality constitutes a continuum which is extremely complex and certainly not fixed, balanced or stable. On the other hand technical practices in order to be effective (especially in the frame of a capitalistic economy) they tend to be reductive and regard planning and production as linear practices that need to have a starting point and an end, therefore they follow patterns or methods that are often prefabricated, they follow the "formal" way. Formality then "executes" a production considering as fixed and stable things that are not, such as the idea of the end which in the case of technical productions becomes an artificial completion, an imposed conclusion, a fixed fulfillment of a prefabricated goal. In the technical world, something needs to be finished and execute the function that it was planned for, no matter that the need for another function may appear since necessities of any kind are not fixed and they emerge in ways that in general are not predictable (there is no accuracy in any kind of deterministic approaches that attempt predictions). Technical productions then fail to be open-ended and even when they attempt to be open they fail again because they define openness in ways that leave a predetermined degree of freedom but they cannot predict everything and cannot encompass everything (Japanese ideas of metabolism is a good example). This is why the "formal" technical productions fall short in the long term and one could pose that the degree and the impact of failure increases with their scale. The reason is that they frame and they name and by this way they formalize. We could distinguish some basic characteristics and actions that take place within formal systems and structures:
- Definitions. The aim is to have nothing left undefined, nothing ambiguous. Concerning space even the last square meter of land is recorded. You name it therefore it exists, by naming it you bring it to the realm of the known, the recognizable (the predictable) but once naming takes place it is not certain that it is what it was before being named. It is not singular any more, it is not unique, it is a unit in a category, it is not self-defined and autonomous but hetero-defined and heteronomous.
- Categorizations. Naming imposes purposes and characteristics, it positions things and practices into general categories (sets, genres), this does this, the other does that, creates an identity which doesn't only refer to a category and an origin but also to a purpose, an "end". This is end is usually pre-constructed unless the name is new, not predefined but then it is not recognizable; it is not serving the aim of the action of naming.
- Distinctions. Naming defines borders by categorizing and classifying. "This belongs here, this cannot do this and this can do that."
- Relations. The aim is to define how individual ends meet and connect or oppose, how they interact, how they are being articulated but because of the fact that things through naming lose uniqueness and become general conditions, any kind of connection within a system is rather mechanical. Systems function mechanically as points and connections, definitions and relations, general categories and general conditions that connect them. But a mechanical system fails to encompass particularity and uniqueness, therefore is not a continuum as it would be if we were not thinking with abstract general conditions but we took into account the exceptions. Everything are exceptions. When the connection is linear, like a bridge, what it achieves is to make more distinct the ends that it connects, to signify the differentiation, the bordering, the discontinuity, the dichotomy.
These negotiations, the "how" things relate to each other and grow associations with each other being in states of symbiosis, are to be found in their most compact form in the realm of the natural where these continuous negotiations become also the key for evolution. The main difference of natural practices from the technical ones is the fact that no matter that they tend towards an end they don't conclude, they are continuous interrelated and this is perpetual while the ends are multiple and, contrary to technical practices, inherent in the processes, not imposed by an external factor. This is what Aristotle describes with the term "entelechy" (εντελέχεια).
The mechanical perception of the end in the technical world is what I believe that creates the major dichotomy among the natural and the technical, the ecotopia and technotopia creating a polarized dipole while in reality technotopia should be regarded as a part of ecotopia. If the technical world manages to perceive and encompass the "end" as it exists in the natural processes, as "entelechy", then there could be a much smoother transition among ecotopia and technotopia, the human nature and the human techniques and their products. Concerning architecture in particular, the "naturalization" of the architectural processes, the smoothening of the boundaries between the natural and the technical is something I regard as a necessity since architecture is the technical expression of a fundamentally natural condition, this of habitation.
The growth of informality as a natural condition
Nature hates gaps. These gaps (described above) in the technical world that "formality" leaves open are there to be filled in by the natural consequence which is informality. As Gilles Deleuze poses, no matter how close one will lay the stones of the pathway there will always be gaps for the grass to grow.
Informality is the child of the coexistence and the relations between technical and natural ends and it shouldn't be considered a side-effect but rather as a natural condition. The informal is immanent in the fields or the connections between different particular formalities, expressed in any material or immaterial way, pending for activation and emergence (later in the text I describe the term). Once it grows, informality becomes the link connecting individual formal ends, altering them or creating new ones. It is almost natural the way how informality emerges and flourishes. The idea is that since informality is almost a natural phenomenon we should use it as something that is in a state of a symbiosis with formality. This symbiosis would smoothen the artificially imposed boundaries between the technical formality and the natural informality, technotopia and ecotopia. These terms are not detached no matter that often the policies and strategies of today still regard them as such.
