--Trish Glazebrook

I don't want to live forever. I just don't want to die right now, here. And I always feel like that. Kagan recently argued that fearing death doesn't make sense. [6] Nothing new there – Epicurus argued in the 3^rd century BCE that when I am here, death is not; and when death is here, I am not; so what's death to me? [7] Has nothing new been said about death in two millennia? Those who consider intellectual history typically take the Eurocentric view that it began in ancient Greece and culminated in contemporary technoscience. For a long time, I had known that a therapeutic alternative is desperately needed in a world sick with fossil fuels, habitat destruction, conflict …

Then I met Madeline. Finally, I could come to the question that is death not in fear. Not a reason to live, but living reason.

Immortality has recently slipped through the fingers of radicals like Extropians and Betterhumans, into the hands of mainstream researchers who consider death an engineering problem. Aubrey de Grey, a computer technician in the Department of Genetics at Cambridge who describes himself as a "theoretical gerontologist," claims that for US$ 100 million, his Institute of Biomedical Gerontology will turn his Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence into reality. [8] Futurologist Ray Kurzweil and nutritionist Terry Grossman recommend a "bridge to a bridge" strategy using available technology to slow ageing and get to subsequent technologies not yet available. [9] Kurzweil takes 250 dietary supplements daily and weekly intravenous infusions to restore cell membranes. Genetic tests determine his susceptibility to cancers and the best therapies. He says nanotechnology is only 20 years away from replacing the digestive tract with tiny robots to provide direct nutritional delivery to organs and tissues. Such technoscientific approaches assume that aging is a technical problem best approached through engineering, and that science and technology tend towards the better.

Indeed, much of the 20^th century saw improvements in life expectancy. The 1990s saw expansion of the role of government in health, e.g. anti-smoking legislation and Safe Sex campaigns, coupled with an increased sense of individual responsibility for lifestyle choices of diet and exercise. Yet since 1990, rates of life expectancy increase have slowed or stalled. In Canada, from 1920 to 1992, life expectancy rose by 16 years for males and 20 for females. [10] But it was the same in 2003 as it was in 1992. [11] In Germany, the rate of increase from 2000 to 2003 was half that in previous decades. In New Zealand, life expectancy rose by increasing amounts in each decade between 1970 and 2000; but in 2003, it was the same as in 2000. Given substantial advances in knowledge, e.g. mapping the human genome, awareness of genetic factors in cancer, it is clear that more knowledge does not necessarily lead to longer lives. Science and technology seem in fact more likely culprits contributing to mortality as they underwrite poor consumer practices and increased exposure to toxins. It may be time for knowledge and thinking to evolve beyond technoscience.

Indeed, engineering-oriented immortalists have failed to consider that there is no way to predict what effect longevity will have on the mind. Organisms that person are not just bodied but embodied, that is, phenomenologically located as bodies that think. Immortality thus calls for as much re-engineering of conceptual space as it does of bodily process. Arakawa and Gins (AG) are unique in their contribution that architects precisely such originary reconceptualization. They reject the defeatism underlying the "assumption or attitudinal stance [that] we – each and every one of us – must die," [12] and devise instead an architectural ethics that values life by seeing "mortality as fundamentally unethical." [13] Given the statistics above, longevity is indeed in crisis: AG's "crisis ethics" [13] is an architectural praxis that constructs surroundings for the embodied self that make it possible ultimately for "an organism-person to go on indefinitely." [14] That is, mortality is no longer necessary to the human condition.

Rather than providing detailed explication of AG, my intent is to push their thinking by raising three objections. The first is the philosophical claim that death is what makes thinking possible. The second asks whether AG can be green. The third asks where they stand on gender.

Being-towards-Death

Heidegger argues in Being and Time that being-towards-death is fundamental to authenticity. [15] Awareness of temporality, i.e. that one's future contains a possibility beyond which there are no more possibilities, makes possible inquiry into being beyond, for example, scientific collection of facts. Heidegger may of course simply be wrong. Western philosophy is founded on the idea that knowledge consists not in duplicitous, short-lived truths concerning nature, but begins with a vision of eternity. As Diotima tells Socrates, one turns "to the great sea of beauty, and, gazing upon this, [gives] birth to many gloriously beautiful ideas and theories." [16] The lover of wisdom thereby gains a share in immortality.

What sense, however, does "a share in immortality" make? Immortality seems more like pregnancy: there are no partial states. In the physicists' terminology, immortality is not a continuous spectrum variable. Or is it? Is it qualitatively different from indefinite quantitative extension of life? Here AG perhaps agree with the engineers. Unlike a divine who is in principle eternal, human immortals may instead be simply mortals that go on indefinitely. Thus immortality would be, borrowing from Aristotle on infinity, like the Olympic games; experienced not as a single event, but as a sequence of successive events. The point is not not-to-die once and for all, but not to die right now, here, in every instance.

Thus the philosophical proclivity for eternal truth does not preclude death; rather, death is what makes philosophy possible. So is "crisis ethics" ever finished? When architectural body actualizes, is death left behind? Or does the new paradigm have at its heart continual revolt against death? Is immortality on-going refusal, forever "crisis ethics," or is death obliviated in its first refusal? If death's refusal is an active foundation of landing sites, then Heidegger's claim that being-towards-death is constitutive of thinking lives at the heart of the architectural body.

Organic Truths: Nature and Death

Landing sites are embodied, embedded ecosystems. Nature is radically different from human projects of architected space: nature is always already there, despite always being mediated by thinking and interpreted. The belief that human being transcends the natural order has played a substantial role in the globally destructive ideology that privileges the human species, and thereby entitles people, often by divine imperative, to reduce nature to its instrumental value. Does refusal to die entail transcendence of the natural order? How then might sustainability be incorporated into crisis ethics? Are landing sites green? Nature is oikos – home – landing sites are always already eco-logical openings, and the original Garden of Reversible Destiny is beautiful in its harmony of naturalized architecting.

Rebirth into immortal thinking would be midwifely smoothed by explicit articulation of the place of sustainability in AG's archi-ethical principles. Yet the ideology of the technoscientific practices underwriting current global destruction depends entirely on erection of universal, unchanging, immortal truths. In contrast, understanding that everything dies supports an organic conception of truth. That is, truths themselves are born, grow, perhaps flourish, and eventually die. Critiques of science and technology that target universalist conceptions of truth suggest instead eco-logical epistemologies that model knowledge on natural process toward sustainable praxes of science and technology; that is, they ground praxes that work with natural process rather than seeking to control and dominate nature. [17] Is refusal to die at the heart of the eco-problem ideologically as well as obviously practically (how many immortals can one planet sustain)? Are AG incompatible with sustainability?

AG make nonsense of the human/nature, nature/civilization either-ors that make these questions possible. Their immortality is procedural – never fixed and static, but always on the move, provisional. Personing, organisming is valued inherently, while truths are instrumental, and come and go. This is not hypostatization of libidinal economies, but a critical, ethical call to conscience in which the destiny of technoscientific capital is reversed by proceduring responsibility. Why cannot personing be green? How can it be anything but?

Gender and Life

Irigaray argues in Speculum of the Other Woman that the philosophical tendency to immortality is a phallic project. [18] She reads Plato's cave analogy as a kind of inverted Oedipal Complex: the father is loved, the mother murdered. Her cave is the originary place, the womb. In making the philosophical journey outside the cave to the realm of the forms, the philosopher leaves behind the mother and the natural order, that is, mortality. Killing/ignoring gender enacts a phallic logic of the same that marginalizes and oppresses women. Indeed, historically woman has been displaced and disempowered by her failure to measure up on sticks calibrated according to male criteria. For example, Aristotle's woman is a man without enough body heat to turn blood to semen; Freud's is a castrated man. Whitbeck further identifies "woman" historically as partial man; the secondary, lesser term in a series of oppositions; and man's assistant and helpmate. [19]

In AG, landing sites are embodied. So gender must be either significant in archi-ethics because it architects experience; or … Can AG's project enact difference of any kind, but especially gender? If AG's refusal to die does not re-cement the phallic order, then Irigaray is wrong and it is possible to think immortal without succumbing to reductive logics of the same.

~

These issues pose three versions of one question: is it possible to think immortal without universal truth? If AG invert truth and human existence – organisms that person can go on indefinitely, but truths pass away – then space is archi-ethiced for sustainability and justice. Thinking is a womb: originary placing.

--TG, October 2012

-- Jondi Keane

For Arakawa and Gins everything is Context. In order to provide a context for the aims of this collection of essays, two aspects of Arakawa and Gins' project must be confronted, both of which have become sticking points to engaging with their work. After a first encounter and perhaps because the tone and purpose of the work is difficult to locate at first, responses become polarized. Two issues stand out in this regard:

1.) the declaration not to die and

2.) the seemingly static conditions of architecture.

From these provocations and potential blockages two vital processes emerge to suggest a way through the morass of philosophical and scientific information that offer enticements to further engagement:

a.) parlaying indirectness [20] and

b.) constructing heuristic life.

Two sticking points to further engagement with Arakawa and Gins

1. The first sticking point for many people is the declaration "We have decided not to die" most famously emblazoned across the cover of the 1997 Guggenheim catalogue. The undertow of this confronting statement stems from its personal nature yet also implicates the reader immediately by positioning them potentially as supporters of the conditions that make this statement seemingly impossible. Many mistake this as an immortality scheme or an absurdist proposition, an ironic stance thrown in the face of a troubled world. The point, however, is not to defy or erase death, but to test the seriousness of anyone who proposes to be an advocate for health, increased capacity and collective action. Arakawa and Gins concede "perhaps a less terrifying and therefore more inviting way … is as an open challenge to our species to reinvent itself and to desist from foreclosing on any possibility, even those our contemporaries judge to be impossible." [21]

2. A second sticking point that many persons face when encountering Arakawa and Gins' project is the observation that architecture is static and therefore a person would get "used to" the disorientation that procedural architecture produces. It is argued that the fixity of architecture would undo procedural architecture's usefulness as an ongoing research tool. Architecture does not change or move, at least not at a tempo we would describe as movement. Objections to reversible destiny based on a notion that architecture is static does not account for the way complex forms participate in the dynamic relationships with other things, co-mingling material processes and meaningful consequences. For example, books and paintings, like architecture, are static objects in this generalized sense. In books, the words do not re-assemble from day-to-day or year-to-year and paint does not re-arrange (other than to fall off, crackle, fade) … yet from day-to-day and year-to-year, one's engagements with a select book or painting alters dramatically and even profoundly, often based on the task one sets for searching and re-searching.

Of course, a constant and ongoing re-entry practice such as the one Arakawa and Gins promote, must be complex enough to sustain engagement over time. If a system becomes complex enough in the relationships that it offers, it will continuously generate sets of infinite possibility and potential reconfigurations. The invention and assembly of architectural procedures involves producing conditions that are not the equal of life, but are equally generative of life on other terms. In this way, Arakawa and Gins' reversible destiny project shares with Artificial Life researchers an emphasis on the generative without attachment to the form that sentience takes or the matter from which sentience emerges.

Two vital processes

If a person persists, either through curiosity or enticement, to continue their engagement with Arakawa and Gins, then the transformative potential procedural architecture may emerge in the form of two vital processes that address the hesitations caused by seeming impossibility or fixity versus recursion: parlaying indirectness and constructing heuristic life.

a. Parlaying indirectness. Gins and Arakawa's term organism-person-environment [22] signals the permeability that tentativeness may produce, which would countermand the fixity of identity in favor of continuity and modulation. New modes of continuity (reconfiguration of the senses, changes to the extent of person, interaction of perceptual and conceptual processing, etc) generated by procedural architecture are replete with emergent connections that deregulate the labor required to move from organism to person to surround. The deregulation of movement across material processes and scales of action emphasizes the link between research and embodied practice, which in turn, makes disciplinary findings available for collaborative inquiry. Indirectness involves honing skills of anticipation that initiate change in the organism by generating complexity in the environment. Endeavors to sense and negotiate a complex environment in any given situation can be inflected by the conditions presented via "tactically posed surround". [23] If the environment sets up an "atmospheric intricateness" then no single feature, movement or segment of awareness can be held directly responsible for initiating action and/or change. It is the movement through tentative nets of relationships that brings (an) architectural body to life. By factoring the emergence of unanticipated connections into procedural architecture, one might begin to devise conditions and environments that dilate relationships and hold them open for re-entry.

b. Constructing heuristic life. Arakawa and Gins' overarching aim is to provide observational-heuristic devices so that persons may devise transformational and reconfigurative opportunities. The stipulation is that the new opportunities must be body-wide, that is, built investigations that engage connection across the organism-person-environment. Heuristic tools are pragmatic. They prompt perceptions and actions. They evaluate and question the assignation of value. In the case of procedural architecture, the heuristic tools prompt re-entry, tentativeness, indirectness, sited awareness, landing site configurations, perceptual learning, procedural knowing, etc. Heuristics is not processes of production but supplies an additional loop of awareness conditioning the possibilities of production. In Arakawa and Gins' reversible destiny project, heuristic tools are presented in the form of tactically posed surrounds, which ask the perceiver to become aware of the way s/he is perceiving. Heuristic tools whether built hypotheses or discursive sequences, are of no use if they do not provide a way forward, a way of learning.

In the search for a new process, new methods or tools, it is crucial not to favor one modality /process/connection at the expense of others. For example, to value perceptual learning over conceptual knowledge, the continuous over the discrete, deeds over words. Learning, in terms of evolution, reflects inventiveness, adaptability, and exploitation of pre-adaptive potential. Heuristic life as a form of daily research, applies the emergent processes of learning and the degrees of freedom it makes available towards transformation of selection and organization.

A crucial and novel aspect of Arakawa and Gins' ethical approach to research is their willingness to ask, "who benefits from the research being conducted?" Experimental science is not set up to benefit the subjects of the experiments but to allow the trained observer to draw out invariants beneficial to us all. In contrast to the experimental model in the sciences, Arakawa and Gins' experiments benefit the subject who is also the researcher and asking him/her to share their finding. In this way, we all become resident-researchers-in-training, or organism-persons on the path to becoming (an) architectural body bent on communal devising.

--JK, October 2012