The Daily Drool

Postmodernism, objective value, and… architecture?

Alireza just sent me a link to an essay called Postmodernity goes to war.

I enjoyed this piece by Philip Hammond, which critiques descriptions of Gulf War 1 and 2 as “postmodern” simply because they use information technology. In so doing he draws out the deeper postmodern political currents present in the elaborate image-making, propaganda, and discourse around 9-11 and the Iraq conflict.

One thing that really stood out for me in the article is an uber-concise definition of postmodernism as “incredulity toward metanarratives.” It’s actually a bit more open than some conceptions of postmodernism which is that metanarratives are simply impossible and there is no absolute truth or value. It just means that you have to approach such metanarrative ideas with a critical eye, particularly toward the role of power in their construction. I see clear space in this definition for a “post-postmodernism,” “reconstructive postmodernism,” or “integral” culture, where metanarrative currents emerge out of a field of deep, collective, reflexive inquiry (dialogue) that crosses boundaries of hegemonic power systems. Without that, postmodernism simply fragments any shred of moral clarity by discarding the possibility of discovering objective value and disabling any use of power to achieve the greater wholeness or good. I’m not a big fan of that form of “deconstructive” postmodernism that effectively disables right action.

A lot of my thinking about these things of late has been influenced by reading Christopher Alexander, an architect who has written a 4-volume series called The Nature of Order. He proposes a theory of wholeness and life in architecture that makes a profound case for the existence of objective value in geometric configurations. In fact, he takes the step from architecture to cosmology and argues that life and value are inherent to space itself, and are intensified through the creation of living structure. The worldview Alexander ends up describing is deeply harmonious with mystical conceptions but is also well informed scientifically (see this article for more).

I’m finding Alexander’s ideas absolutely captivating, because he manages to transcend many of the problematic dichotomies of of the Cartesian era – mind/heart, ornament/function, fact/value, science/art. There are a lot of people who describe the need to transcend these dichotomies in the next step of human intellectual development (esp. Ken Wilber). But Alexander is the first person I’ve actually DOES “integral” theory.

A lot of Alexander’s ideas have been composed through research in which he shows people pairs of photographs of objects, scenes, and buildings and asks questions like “which of these has more life?” and “which of these is more like your self?” In working with these questions, he finds that there are two layers of people’s answering the questions. There is one layer that he often calls “opinion,” which is based on a kind of idiosyncratic sense of what is “interesting” or “contemporary” in aesthetic, and often has all kinds of intellectual justification. When people answer at that level there’s not much consonance between people’s opinions, and you get sort of a postmodern pluralism of value conceptions. This ends up permitting all kinds of architectural monstrosities in the profession (like Mather House, my own undergraduate dorm).

But there is another level where he gets people to answer the question from the heart, from a place of their own humanity and deepest understanding of their own self, the kinds of buildings people would actually want to live in. At that level there is unbelievable consonance in what people feel to have more value, across cultural and class boundaries. To get beyond this as merely a psychological phenomenon, he then goes about uncovering fifteen properties of living structure that are common to the things people identify as having more life (e.g., strong centers, boundaries, symmetry, alternating repetition, non-separateness). Each of these have clear intuitive and geometric reality, even if they leave a bit of mathematical precision to be developed by subsequent thinkers. So in the end, he articulates this lovely conception of value that is harmonious with people’s deep intuitions but also has objective geometric correlates.

One thing that this body of work has helped me see is that a lot of postmodern discourse is actually quite disingenuine. People have become so afraid of the exercise of power and clean discernment of value that we permit and justify things that in our heart we know to be wrong. We’ll work at that brainy “opinion” level and say “to each his own” or “we can’t judge them in their context” in response to stories about female genital mutilation, hard core pornography, suicide bombing, etc. while knowing deep down that there is something unhealthy and unbalanced about the phenomenon.

At the same time, I’m trying not to revert to modernism or premodern conceptions of absolute truth that carry their own arrogance and holier-than-thou morality. It’s an easy trap, because I have cultural blinders as anyone does. I haven’t grown up in a culture with a strong sense of ritual and initiation, and so there are aspects of female genital mutilation ritual in its cultural context that have wholeness I can’t see. But I have faith that there are ways to carry out what Alexander would call a “structure-preserving transformation” on the structure of the ritual that preserve its cultural meaning while increasing its wholeness and life. My impression is that such tranformations are, in fact, happening, as a result of the kind of deep, collective, reflexive inquiry and dialogue between Africans and foreign activists that I mentioned earlier.

As I’m reading this, and disembedding myself from my own intellectual inquiry of the past few months, I’m seeing that there are some big jumps here – from architecture to cosmology to social theory to dialogue. It all makes sense in my own head, at least, and I hope isn’t too nonsensical for my audience after a long blogging hiatus.

Actually the one link I need to work on more fully is the extension of the word “structure” from architecture to social systems, and then the application of some of Alexander’s themes and ideas to the creation of wholeness in social systems. Bill Isaacs tells me that there is a rich and rigorous articulation of social structure in the family systems therapy literature, so I’ll be diving into that. For both of us, the interesting questions are about the intentional construction of social structures for work and learning (i.e., organizations), and their relative degrees of life, wholeness, and promotion of human generativity. At Dialogos I’m helping launch a research initiative in this direction, and my intention is for it to lead directly into my own doctoral studies starting in 2005.

One aspect or activity of my inquiry will be to participate in this year’s Leadership for Collective Intelligence (LCI) program. I’ll be there as a hybrid of participant and observer, making whatever contribution I can to the dialogue while collecting audio and notes in a “knowledge capture” role. I’m also building the infrastructure for an online community to surround the program. There’s a strong boundary of confidentiality around the LCI “container” (this is part of what allows a particular depth in the dialogue) but I hope to share general reflections and thoughts on my blog throughout the year. The LCI seems to be one social structure that has been able to consistently produce generative inquiry and learning among its participants for the past 6 years.