Maybe Something More Like Disposition

There is the content of theory, and then there is its disposition. A few decades ago, architecture theory rejected intersections with politics, environment, urbanism, and media for fear of a weakening interdisciplinarity. The remedy, unironically, was an amateur engagement with disciplines like linguistics and philosophy, and a claim of autonomy that nudged architecture closer to the art world. While the content of the theory might have been perverse or ill-fitting, many people found some career utility in the disposition—the potentials in the arrangement. There was the benefit of declaring something passé so that something new could burst upon the scene and clear the field. Associations with the art world were cooler and more high-heeled. And the relative difficulty and obscurity of some extra-disciplinary theory generated a mystique—so much so that subsequent theoretical turns, like some of those associated with digital formalism, chose to retain smoke and mirrors as accoutrement. Meanwhile, the most elegant thinkers used this new arrangement as license to link spatial studies to more intriguing cultural curiosities.

Still, the shape associated with this disposition of architecture theory might be a cul-de-sac. While architecture refined its own internal argot, the world was exploding. Some of the most consequential changes to the globalizing world were being made in the language of architecture and urbanism. But since there were not many architects to observe these changes, nonspatial disciplines like economics, or political science—which had already been given the authority for reporting and public scholarship—evaluated these spatial phenomena in their own terms. And architects and urbanists equipped with the spatial knowledge and curiosity to reach outside the cul-de-sac were patted on the head and told to run along. Given the previous decades of preparation, they were treated as if they should only offer non-consequential rhetorical commentary in art-adjacent biennale installations. At the same time, the incurious architecture practice might unknowingly be making exquisite shapes for some of the most violent forces in that exploding world.

The discipline may still maintain the shape of a cul-de-sac, but luckily there is no longer the sense that all of architecture, like an exclusive society or club, must, in lockstep, reject one direction of theory in favor of another. There are countless curiosities related to space that are now reaching out beyond the cul-de-sac—inventing practices, forging coalitions of all sorts, trying to make up for lost time. The content of those theories, in their multiplicity and plurality, is thrilling. Each one meets no unified critique, but calls for its own particular critique. Bored with the rhetorical, most are worthy of urgent application. But the architects voice, which is usually only associated with client-based practices, often isn’t recognized when associated with many of these non-client-based practices. And their expressions may still migrate to art-adjacent venues with tiny audiences and even more miniscule sources of funding.

Beyond architecture’s cul-de-sac, culture at large lays other dispositional traps. Sometimes they are difficult to detect, even for the smartest people in the world—even for those anointed disciplines that have so much authority. Dispositions have been called the “promise or threat” latent within an arrangement. An operating system in a computer has a specific disposition.1  It can handle an infinite amount of content, but as a field of operations, its disposition shapes and constrains that content by making some things possible and some things impossible. Culture has some dominant mental operating systems. The white, modern, Enlightenment habits of mind look for singular evils and singular solutions, utopias, comprehensive manifestos, and monocultures of all sorts. Ideologies shaped by this mental firmware—often taking a monist or binary shape—can create impossibilities and conundrums that foreclose on expressed intentions.

Just as it’s hard for architecture culture to see the constraining dispositions that accompany some of its theoretical turns, it’s generally difficult to unfocus the eyes and see, not the upstaging declared content, but the underlying arrangements and habits of mind that warp it. This dispositional vortex can draw content into fatal errors. Countless thinkers try to escape that white, modern, Enlightenment habit of mind with an absolute manifesto that only reproduces it. Or with sword raised overhead, they demand a politburo to organize mutualism, deliver a three-part Presbyterian sermon on promiscuity, create a monetized sharing economy, or launch a single blockchain currency to create a perfectly decentralized government. They believe that a social media platform is information-rich, when it is really threaded through a binary of likes and dislikes that makes it information-poor. They fail to see that, whatever the content of both left- and right-wing ideologies, both can result in concentrations of authoritarian power.

The dominance of quantifiable expressions in academia is one example of dispositional blindness. Related to solutionist thinking, culture favors the airtight proof or the Turing-complete world for which there is an elementary particle. But in the face of multiple planetary crises, if there is only currency in measurable phenomena, how does the planet design changes to help itself? Is it only possible to provide a more precise measure of our doom?

Similarly, since the early twentieth century, the world has been working on “the economy” as if the only exchanges were exchanges of financial abstractions in a single overarching system managed by national and international regulatory agencies. Meanwhile, all of the other economies of care, biological life, community interplay, and reproduction that have nothing to do with financial abstractions have been straining to behave like money. And it is believed that to make a change in “the economy,” one must replace the single prevailing system with another singular system. This tragic fallacy does not recognize the multiple, coexisting, and divergent economies that rely on multiplicity, difference, and métis to foster exchanges. 

A war against capitalism as a singular evil is also nowhere near critical enough. It sounds ideologically strong and radical, but it is dispositionally weak and conservative. Capital is not the one and only monolithic enemy—it is so much worse than that. There is a spectrum of dangers from capitalism, fascism, racism, whiteness, sectarian violence, religious intolerance, caste, genocide, femicide, xenophobia, sociopathic leadership, and countless other means of hoarding authoritarian power while oppressing others and abusing the planet. By declaring a singular evil or a proper form of activism that adheres to a single ideology, you reproduce dispositions you are trying to shed. You not only make yourself an easy target for authoritarian power, but you also miss most of the violence of the world, including forms that insidiously aid and abet capital.  

Over the past 500 years, this monolithic thinking has eclipsed a body of knowledge—the counternarratives to whiteness coming from those who have felt most of its harms. Despite being brutally suppressed, that knowledge has been generously shared. The current political regime will try to suppress it again, but will not succeed. Beyond constraining legal, financial, quantifiable expressions, this knowledge often communicates relationally. Its resistance and survival often relies on stealthy dispositional moves rather than overt declarations. And often, space is its preferred medium of expression. 

Learning from these eclipsed habits of mind, designers may also further develop a special talent to detect disposition—potentials embedded in the contours of a situation, be they the affordances of a teacup, the chemistry of a street, or the underlying political capacities of a community. This is not the same as “theory”—it is more like a meta-structural understanding of arrangement. And theory about it can have its own productive or unproductive dispositions. 

Whatever the content of the theory, designers can see potentials in not the unifying position or the binary fight, but the messy mix. Spatial studies provide a mixing chamber of the disciplines—the opposite of the feared interdisciplinary dilution. Spatially embedded activism deploys a dizzying set of techniques that create productive dissensus. It has the fugitivity and opacity to protect the most vulnerable, the inconsistency and impurity to keep power guessing, and the patchiness that resists monocultures. The mix is all. 

Even though designers may be under-rehearsed, there is a chance that this special faculty might be useful in navigating and leading others through authoritative theories that have tragic dispositions. So, maybe the interest is not in one theoretical turn or another. Maybe the interest is in something more like disposition.