From Le Corbusier\u2019s \u201cmachines for living in\u201d to the \u201csmart homes\u201d of the present, discourses of architecture and technology have sought to extend the everyday assemblage of domestic performance (be it in registers of normativity or enhanced efficacy) in a human-scale middle ground between individual initiative and imposing ideology. With snapshot examples of modernist architecture and ubiquitous computing, this paper\u2019s focus is thus decidedly not on performance as \u201chuman or non-human\u201d behaviour<\/em>, but rather, on a sense of everyday performativity as the material intertwining (and hence perhaps co-emergence) of both. Whether the context is of \u201chousehold engineering\u201d or \u201cdistributed cognition,\u201d one key strand is how the dramaturgical organization of rooms<\/em> and kitchens specifically is variously seen to coincide with that of life processes or indeed ways of living; toward the end, the recurrent worry over human control is addressed by appeal to an openly mechanical sense of mundane theatricality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cA machine for living in\u201d \u2013 this is how Le Corbusier famously stated \u201cthe problem of the house\u201d in the 1920s: \u201cA certain number of cells appropriated to cooking, work, and personal life,\u201d with \u201creceptacles in which each thing can be put at once in its right place.\u201d Moreover, \u201ca specific compartment corresponds to a specific function, and the function arises regularly in a specific place\u201d \u2013 this concerning the house itself (where \u201cone sleeps, one wakes, one acts, one works, \u2026 one eats, and one goes to sleep\u201d) but also built-in fittings from which to \u201cbring out your pictures one at a time when you want them\u201d rather than \u201criot\u201d your walls with \u201call manner of things.\u201d With newfound affordances of steel, glass, and concrete, the source domain is decidedly extra-domestic: the world of airplanes and railways (the ratios and details of sleepers and dining cars and parlour cars); clubs, banks, and offices; \u201cthe decks of ocean liners.\u201d Indeed, with this migration of affordances and \u201ctype-elements\u201d from traffic machines, the very blocking of a Corbusier house \u2013 with sliding walls and servants conveniently hidden backstage \u2013 serves to support not only the merest manners of sitting down and moving about, but a collective ethos more characteristic of his fellow artists than of its prospective inhabitants. If Louis Sullivan\u2019s 1896 dictum that \u201cform follows function\u201d set the modernist ideal of functional performativity, with Le Corbusier it solidifies into set standards, \u201cbased on problems well stated\u201d and \u201cestablished by experiment.\u201d (Le Corbusier 1986, 107, 114\u201317, 120, 123, 131; Le Corbusier in Kirsch 1989, 113\u201315)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile, very similar principles are at work in American \u201cscientific management,\u201d set to eliminate unnecessary motions and to make the necessary more efficient. In her 1915 correspondence course on Household Engineering<\/em>, Mrs. Christine Frederick (dubbing herself a \u201cHousehold Efficiency Engineer\u201d) first laments her once lack of energy \u201cto \u2018dress up\u2019 in the evening\u201d to enjoy her husband\u2019s \u201cstory of the day\u2019s work,\u201d then takes up the \u201cefficiency idea\u201d to standardize her own industry or business of home-making: \u201cCouldn\u2019t my housework train be despatched from station to station, from task to task \u2026 [so] I wouldn\u2019t lose time in thinking what to do next or in useless interruptions?\u201d So again the domestic takes on the industrial: Food factory rather than heart of home, \u201cthe labour-saving kitchen\u201d is only reserved \u201cfor the preparation of food,\u201d small and \u201calmost square\u201d to \u201cpermit the most step-saving arrangement of the main equipment.\u201d Likewise, if kitchen work itself \u201cdoes not consist of independent, separate acts\u201d but only of the two interrelated processes of preparing food<\/em> and clearing away<\/em>, then both should be performed in definite steps, in a definite order, along set routes. For the work to \u201cproceed in a progressive, step-saving track,\u201d \u201cthe \u2018routing\u2019 or step-saving method of kitchen arrangement requires separate surfaces for each process,\u201d and also \u201ca definite piece of equipment [for] each definite step\u201d: Thus \u201carranging and grouping equipment to meet the actual order of work is the basis of kitchen efficiency.\u201d(Frederick 1923, 7\u20138, 14, 19\u201325 italics omitted) (See Mrs. Frederick\u2019s exemplary images of good and bad groupings<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eighty years later, similar ideas are again found in David Kirsh\u2019s now-classic article on spatial arrangements and dynamics that simplify choice, perception, and computation from the perspective of cognitive science: how we manage or organize the world that \u201cconstrains and guides our behavior,\u201d so as to reduce its \u201cdescriptive complexity,\u201d and to \u201cbring the time and memory demands of our tasks down to workable levels.\u201d For example, this happens through the hiding<\/em> or highlighting<\/em> of affordances, planting the environment with cues<\/em> and constraints<\/em> that \u201clocally determine \u2026 behavior at every choice point\u201d: Be they physical (blocked doors) or merely perceived (food out of sight), \u201cthe fewer degrees of freedom an agent has the simpler its task,\u201d \u201cballistically determined\u201d or with steps of decision \u201cdesigned out of the process<\/a>.\u201d One pertinent way of reducing the complexity of choice by hiding affordances evokes but also pre-dates my earlier examples: \u201cEvery time we serially decompose a complex task by dividing the space in which it is performed into functional stations where specific subtasks are performed, we create a production line.\u201d If \u201cthe equipment and surfaces of a station effectively trigger an action frame or task context \u2026 the local affordances make clear what can and must be done.\u201d Kirsh\u2019s example proclaims precisely the principles of household engineering that Frederick laid out earlier: \u201cIn my kitchen at home, a task as simple as preparing a plain garden salad, reveals a latent production line because I wash vegetables by the sink and cut them on a chopping board.\u201d (Kirsh 1995, 31\u20132, 43\u20134, 39, 49\u201350, 65)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, what I would specifically like to address here are the often functionalistic<\/em> and mechanistic<\/em> assumptions that these early-twentieth-century examples share with current accounts of mind as \u201cdistributed\u201d or \u201cextended,\u201d<\/a> figuring design and cognition alike as \u201cproblem-solving\u201d by machineries both mental and material, the conscious mind as \u201ca new-style business manager\u201d merely maintaining the overall performance. My default reference throughout is philosopher Andy Clark\u2019s Natural-Born Cyborgs<\/em> of 2003. (Clark 2003, 5\u20136, 135) If Le Corbusier\u2019s living machine, as Jonathan Hill suggests, \u201cis only an accurate description of functionalist sensibilities if the human is a component of the machine\u201d not its master or servant, for Clark \u201cmatrices of brain, body, and technology can actually constitute the problem-solving machine that we should properly identify as ourselves<\/em>.\u201d (Hill 2003, 16; Clark 2003, 27) While the machine may no longer quite so depend on its components remaining \u201cin place\u201d (pictures in cupboards, servants in their quarters, women in the kitchen), its operation is often still relegated to a \u201cuser,\u201d who again is often neutered or abstracted as fixed, measurable, passive, constant: for Le Corbusier, a universal male body that paradigmatically \u201clearns to operate a space the way the technician learns to operate a machine \u2013 the correct way.\u201d (Hill 2003, 16) (Surely this is all more pronounced in the 1920s, with Le Corbusier\u2019s critics wondering whether his houses present \u201ca program for living itself\u201d or \u201ca mere paraphrase \u2026 of studio life\u201d; or indeed, whether the intellectual \u201ctype\u201d could determine a form of housing for mass production, given that many potential clients would still prefer enclosed bedrooms not only to rest in but also to \u201cmake love, procreate, give birth, and die.\u201d (Cited in Kirsch 1989, 117\u201318)) Keeping to Clark\u2019s theme of our constantly \u201cbuilding better worlds to think in,\u201d (Clark 2003, 78) accordingly, perhaps these could also adapt to our cognitive strengths and weaknesses in a less-mechanistic manner?<\/p>\n\n\n\n With changes in prototypical technology, the modernist \u201cman and machine\u201d now appear increasingly immersed and implicated in tacit infrastructures without which they couldn\u2019t quite be sustained \u2013 ones perhaps that leave ourselves \u201cdumb in peace,\u201d rather mobilizing associations of home<\/em> than of the machine (as in \u201chome is where the Wi-Fi connects automatically\u201d), de-emphasizing rational intelligence for the style and art implicit in smart<\/em> (the new key quality sought in device, decorum, and dwelling). Hence the contemporary ideal of the living machine: the \u201csmart home<\/a>,\u201d replete as Dourish and Bell outline, with \u201cproactive networks, sensors and real-time feedback,\u201d \u201ccomputational devices \u2026 small and powerful enough to be worn, carried, or embedded in the world around us \u2013 in doors and tables, the fabric of clothes and buildings, and the objects of everyday life\u201d: \u201csensing doorknobs, intelligent toilet doors, \u2026 and anthropomorphic cleaning equipment along with the ever-present smart refrigerator.\u201d (Dourish and Bell 2011, 30, 2, 29) If the early tenets of functional efficiency came from the likes of F. W. Taylor and Le Corbusier, those of ubiquitous computing were outlined in Mark Weiser\u2019s 1991 declaration that \u201cthe most profound technologies \u2026 are those that disappear,\u201d \u201cweaving themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.\u201d (Weiser 1991, 78)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thus if there is truth to Lev Manovich\u2019s argument that cognitive science became \u201cfor the age of automation\u201d what scientific management was for that of industrialization, (Manovich 1995, 6) what it has since learned is now routinely exploited by our mundane environments. To cite Clark\u2019s pet example, if the homes of Alzheimer\u2019s sufferers may at times be quite conspicuously \u201ccalibrated to support and scaffold these biological brains,\u201d so too are our normative worlds increasingly integrated to our lives, capacities, and projects. To summarize his arguments, in Clark\u2019s view the smartest environments take on \u201cmany of the functions that might otherwise occupy our conscious attention\u201d: Becoming less technology than \u201chuman-centered,\u201d our most dynamically adaptive, transparent technologies are \u201cpoised to be taken for granted<\/em>\u201d much like our neural circuitry ever was. Second, \u201cas our worlds become smarter and get to know us better and better, it becomes harder and harder to say where the world stops and the person begins\u201d: \u201cThe very best of [our technologies] are not so much used as incorporated into the user herself \u2026 as aspects of the thinking process \u2026 impacting who, what and where we are.\u201d Third, what matters is \u201ctheir poise for easy use and deployment as and when required\u201d \u2013 not their apparent newness (indeed the \u201cgradual smartening-up\u201d of our homes and offices is built on generations of \u201cmindware upgrades\u201d provided by \u201cpen, paper, [and] the pocket watch\u201d), nor \u201cwhether they are neurally or technologically realized.\u201d(Clark 2003, 140, 30, 38, 44, 7, 198, 41, 10, 68)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Accordingly, what most obviously distinguishes our early-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century ideals of design and cognition are their respective allegiances to location<\/em> and ubiquity<\/em>, mechanical sequence and contextual saturation. With the straight line of modernist rationality veritably fragmented by \u201cweb\u201d imagery, the technological texture of everyday life now increasingly evades easy divisions of inside\/outside or private\/public. Thus also the ever-emergent smart home must navigate competing infrastructures, \u201cinherently messy\u201d and \u201cunevenly distributed\u201d (Dourish and Bell 2011, 42, 27\u20138) \u2013 the Internet of Things heralding the convergence not of man and machine but of operating systems, yet precisely challenged by their dissonance, maintenance, obsolescence, and Frederickian routing: In a world where categories both collapse (telephone\/camera\/computer) and expand (from furnishing to its Facebookability), the use of functionally definite equipment increases rather than reduces the number of operational steps per task. Cognitively, we may thus need to abandon the idiom of \u201ctasks\/problems\u201d altogether for that of skilled practice<\/em>, and the residually mechanistic notion of \u201cinteraction\u201d for those of coping and coupling or perhaps \u201cinterweaving\u201d: a more enactive performativity<\/em> of immersion and transparent incorporation; not to reduce mind and cognition to either the human agent or her technologies, but rather to tease out ways in which it is \u201cbrought forth\u201d in their very \u201cco-emergence\u201d or indeed \u201cco-evolution\u201d over time. (Cf. Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991; Paavolainen forthcoming-b) For enhanced efficacy to result, however, this very ecology must itself also recede from consciousness \u2013 whether it engages a factory of working bodies or mere haptics on a mobile device, all that once was solid now apparently melts into the Cloud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHow then [asks Clark] can we alter and control that of which we are barely aware?\u201d If Taylorist management strove to deprive the worker of any degree of freedom and initiative by strictly separating her execution of the work from its design and planning (cf. Frederick\u2019s worries of \u201closing time in thinking\u201d (Frederick 1923, 14)), these are currently even further displaced and distributed in technological environments that, as Clark also admits, \u201cprovide for an unprecedented depth and quality of surveillance\u201d: \u201cIn the era of ubiquitous computing and swarm intelligence, walls really do<\/em> have ears, and memories too.\u201d (Clark 2003, 48, 170\u20131) Setting aside the viral fringe of our newly-intimate technologies, however \u2013 of our smart pets and doors getting hacked behind our backs \u2013 there is an enduring myth of their still being ours to \u201cuse\u201d (surely only bolstered by my own use of \u201cour\u201d). An already suspect term in architectural discourse, \u201cuser\u201d also \u201cfails to reflect the sharply reduced volitionality\u201d that Adam Greenfield relates to the \u201ceveryware\u201d of ubiquitous systems, perhaps \u201cengaged by the [mere] act of stepping into a room\u201d: \u201cAmbient, peripheral, and not focally attended to in the way that something actively \u2018used\u2019 must be,\u201d \u201cone no more \u2018uses\u2019 [it] than one would a \u2026 floor to stand on \u2026 so the word carries along with it the implication of an agency that simply may not exist.\u201d (Greenfield 2006, 70) Cognitively, possible ways of theorizing this fluctuate between two close extremes: If cognitive extension<\/em> occurs when a set of heterogeneous resources is instrumentally recruited to an \u201cecological assembly,\u201d on the spot, then enactive incorporation<\/em> only occurs when such resources are no longer experienced as objects but \u201cfunction transparently in the body\u2019s sense-making interactions with the environment.\u201d (See Kiverstein and Clark 2009, 4; Paavolainen forthcoming-b)<\/p>\n\n\n\n So how are we to deal with the ethics of transparency insofar as it serves to naturalize both our technologies and the ideologies they always already embody? From Clark we can derive two options: First, the utterly resistant \u201cIn-Your-Face Technology\u201d of old, one not \u201cto fade into the background of anyone\u2019s life or work\u201d let alone \u201cblur the boundaries\u201d as it \u201cmade few efforts to configure itself\u201d to human cognitive capacities \u2013 not exactly \u201c\u2018hard to understand\u2019 as much as \u2018highly visible in use\u2019,\u201d such opaque<\/em> technology \u201cremains the focus of attention even during routine \u2026 activity.\u201d Second, \u201cflipping between invisibility-in-use and availability for thought and inspection\u201d (Heidegger\u2019s ready-to-hand and present-at-hand): making technology not invisible but \u201cextravisible\u201d as in Dourish\u2019s \u201ctangible computing,\u201d which Clark conjures \u201cto take digital abstractions \u2026 and make them as solid and manipulable as rocks and stones.\u201d Akin to Don Norman\u2019s early advice on keeping affordances visible, he notes it is often the very features \u201cthat make [a technology] \u2018tangible\u2019 (the way it exploits our ease and familiarity with everyday objects) that allow it to become invisible in daily use.\u201d (Clark 2003, 36\u20137, 48\u20139, 56; see also Norman 1995) A third option could be to take an aesthetic<\/em> perspective, as an alternative to \u201cthe \u2018user-friendly\u2019 approach [of] the human factors community, which [Anthony Dunne sees to] reduce<\/em> the relationship between people and technology to a level of cognitive clarity.\u201d Here we may either follow him in further \u201cpoeticizing\u201d their distance<\/em> through familiar figures of estrangement and alienation, or recognize with Manovich how even the traditional desktops were soon aestheticized<\/em> once redefined as consumer objects: how brands like Apple, in countering the standard modernist aesthetics of information appliances \u2013 \u201ccold, indifferent to human presence, suited only for business\u201d \u2013 would explicitly appeal to the senses by \u201cstaging technology as magical and supernatural.\u201d (Dunne 2005, 21\u20133 (my italics); Manovich 2007, 9)<\/p>\n\n\n\n But are not such emphases on dramatic experience<\/em> fairly opposed to Weiser\u2019s ubi-comp agenda of technologies \u201cweaving themselves into the fabric of everyday life\u201d? Certainly both are key to any discussion of theatricality<\/em> and performativity<\/em> as lived qualities: In terms of cognitive\/architectural \u201cecology\u201d (from a Greek stem for house), the na\u00efve question is whether the relationship of dwelling and inhabitant is designed to be fully functional or is ostensibly mediated by degrees of ornament and spectacle. In this paper, I have admittedly focused on overlapping varieties of the performative<\/em>, as novelty and normativity, doing and dissimulation, the heroic and the homeostatic \u2013 performances of uncluttered efficiency and their tacit grounding in cables or concrete, the \u201cmess and mythology\u201d of ubiquitous computing that Dourish and Bell discuss. The theatrical<\/em>, in this scheme, resides in the dramatic, the aesthetic, the sensuous: Expanded from ideals of \u201ctotal theatre\u201d to those of \u201caugmented reality,\u201d these have also been the qualities of choice when technology<\/em> has variously been equated either with malign manipulation (that which diverts, comes between, does not work) or with a magic enchantment of the everyday. So on the one hand we have here a specifically anti-technological variant of the good old anti-theatrical prejudice (Barish 1981), on the other, a newly positive (and hence suspect) valorization of theatricality as a potent slogan or marketing value at the cutting edge of the \u201cexperience economy.\u201d (Cf. Pine and Gilmore 1999) Inclined though I am to prefer metaphors of weaving over those of building<\/em>, (Paavolainen forthcoming-a; see also Ingold 2015) the value of such theatricality might just lie in its exploiting our crude sense of mechanics: If it is a \u201cperceptual modality,\u201d as many suggest (Notably Burns 1972), then in Clark\u2019s cognitive terms its very function is to \u201crender certain features of our world concrete and salient\u201d so we may \u201ctarget our thoughts \u2026 on elements of a scene that were previously too \u2018unmarked\u2019.\u201d (Clark 2014, 172)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Barish, Jonas 1981. The Antitheatrical Prejudice<\/em>. Berkeley: University of California Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Burns, Elizabeth 1972. Theatricality: A Study of Convention in the Theatre and in Social Life<\/em>. London: Longman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Clark, Andy 2003. Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence<\/em>. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013 2014. Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science<\/em>. Second Edition. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dourish, Paul, and Genevieve Bell 2011. Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing<\/em>. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dunne, Anthony 2005. Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design<\/em>. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Frederick, Christine 1923\/1915. Household Engineering: Scientific Management in the Home. A Correspondence Course<\/em>. Chicago: Home Economics Association. Online: https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/householdengine00fredrich<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Greenfield, Adam 2006. Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing<\/em>. Berkeley, CA: New Riders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hill, Jonathan. 2003. Actions of Architecture<\/em>. London and New York: Routledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ingold, Tim 2015. The Life of Lines<\/em>. Abingdon: Routledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kirsch, Karin 1989. The Weissenhofsiedlung: Experimental Housing Built for the Deutscher Werkbund, Stuttgart, 1927<\/em>. Trans. David Britt. New York: Rizzoli.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kirsh, David 1995. \u201cThe Intelligent Use of Space.\u201d Artifical Intelligence<\/em> 73, 31\u201368. Online: http:\/\/adrenaline.ucsd.edu\/Kirsh\/Articles\/Space\/intelligent_useof_space.pdf<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kiverstein, Julian, and Andy Clark (eds.) 2009. \u201cMind Embodied, Embedded, Enacted: One Church or Many?\u201d Topoi<\/em> 28:1, 1\u201373. [Special Issue on 4E Cognition.]<\/p>\n\n\n\n Le Corbusier 1986\/1931. Towards a New Architecture<\/em>. Trans. Frederick Etchells. New York: Dover.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Manovich, Lev 1995. \u201cThe Labor of Perception.\u201d Online:I<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Works Cited<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\nhttp:\/\/manovich.net\/index.php\/projects\/the-labor-of-perception<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n