Stephen Read

Meaning and Material: Phenomenology, Complexity, Science and ‘Adjacent Possible’ Cities

For most people, even today, phenomenology stands squarely on the human science side of a ‘two worlds’ divide between human science and physical science that has dominated the understanding of the sciences throughout the twentieth century. Phenomenology has been associated with human interpretation and with a hermeneutical method which has been seen as antithetical to the facticity and formal methods of the natural sciences. However, phenomenology’s relationship to science has always been more interesting and complex than this. There have been a few in the last century who have understood the role of practice and hermeneutics even in the hardest of the natural sciences, and today the ranks of those who question the division of science into two worlds—along with a metaphysics of different realms of meaning and material—is growing. At the same time, the essentially negative ‘post-modern’ critique of a dualist metaphysics is also being supplemented by a more positive and ‘constructive’ metaphysics which sees us creating our practical ‘worlds’ and knowledge hermeneutically in material and especially technical situations. This ‘technoconstructive’ view might be seen to be essentially about the way we construct human environments in which specific logics, functionalities and meanings are technically supported. It is a view, therefore, which may lead to an understanding of the way in which urban environments are ‘technoconstructions’ which support specific urban societies and economies. I review these issues and demonstrate how the Amsterdam of the seventeenth century could be seen as just such a ‘technoconstruction’. I also insert a subtext which problematises a common understanding of complexity science as just another set of formal methods, which unifies science by applying the same formal methods to both human and natural sciences, and I suggest instead that all science should be understood as material hermeneutics and ‘technoconstruction’.

Revisiting “Complexification,” Technology, and Urban Form in Lefebvre

Henri Lefebvre gave suggestive hints at a theory of urban form that have inspired those involved in the design and planning disciplines. His search was for an urban praxis that opened potentials for new forms of social relations and to this end he proposed a “metaphilosophy” designed to engage with the open-ended material relations of cities and societies. This, however, contradicted his Marxist commitment to a “finality” of man and society and his association of technology with alienation. We try here to rethink technology as intrinsic to human and social life: not as means to realize thought in the materialization of spaces and societies, but as medium and source, in processes of historical realization, of orders that come before thought in human practice. We relate this to “worlds” of practice which are the technically and historically constructed “metaphilosophical” “totalities” within which we are enabled and act. This pluralizes and technologizes “world,” and Lefebvre’s “urban form” becomes a construction of multiple relational–technological “worlds,” each perceived, conceived, and lived as wholes. These articulate with one another and evolve historically. It is the articulations and interfaces between “worlds” rather than the “worlds” themselves which locate the places of productivity and vitality in the city. The question of an open urban shifts subtly from one of resistance to the abstract rationalities of “planning” or an “authoritarian state” to one of the maintenance of open relations between different “worlds” each with their necessary technical or abstract rationalities.

Rethinking Social Relations: Towards a Different Phenomenology of Places

So-called phenomenological approaches to the understanding of social and spatial relations usually deal with these in terms of ‘mental space’, ‘existential space’, ‘social space’ and so on. These modes of space are regarded as ‘subjective’, ‘soft’ and short on the ‘hard’ mathematical, geometric or objective properties that give spatial analysis a rigorous analytical capability. I argue here that this misrepresents and misunderstands a central principle of phenomenology and overlooks phenomenology’s potential to objectively map us in our world. In its essence phenomenology is founded on the relation of intentionality. It is not necessarily about an interior mentality at all but about a subject-object relation in the world. The model that says there is an interior subjective or imaginative realm on the one hand and an exterior objective, physical or real one on the other, between which relations must be established for human knowledge or action to be produced, is replaced by one in which a perfectly real subject at one end of an intentional relation is connected to a perfectly real object at the other. A different phenomenology of places would be about how these relations between subjects and objects are structured and intentional knowledge and action mediated in the world. It would be about the environmental relation where the notion of ‘environment’ is captured in the relations between intentional subjects and the objects of those subjects’ attention and intention. I argue that this is eventually about how we order and construct human ‘worlds’ technologically and spatially so that we may effectively inhabit and use them. These ‘worlds’ exist as whole networks of subjects and objects, in part-whole, mutually constitutive, relations with ‘worlds’. The translation of the intentional relation into geography and urbanism involves us in an historical process of the construction of metageographical structures through which subjects establish and order their knowledge of and practices in the world. Enclosures, divisions and connections made by us in the world have shaped these structures and established the geographical and urban frames of our lives. This requires us to understand the human world as an historical construction, an anthroposphere, of regions and places, as equipment for framing our knowledge of the world and our local and translocal actions in it. I start by looking critically at social relations as these are imagined today, finding their origins in an Enlightenment metaphysics which bifurcates nature into mental and corporeal realms, and suggest an alternative founded in this reassessment of phenomenology. This alternative centres our attention on the anthroposphere as a construction, and a topological ‘structure of places’, organised as a layering of places and infrastructural ‘grids’ into a set of normative ‘levels’ which have a metageographical, intelligibility-giving and practice-defining character. ‘Structures of places’, ‘grids’ and ‘levels’ are perfectly objective and mappable and are proposed as the foundation of a new phenomenological urban and geographical model.