We were on the deck at the time, and the headman of my wood-cutters lounging near by turned upon him his heavy and glittering eyes. I looked around, and I don't know why, but I assure you that never, never before did this land, this river, this jungle, the very arch of the blazing sky appear to me so hopeless and so dark, so impenetrable to human thought, so pitiless to human weakness.
(Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness 1899)
Scale is the last redoubt of humanism; the implicit mean. But is scale something we invent, a nominal device to measure with, or something we discover, like nature's secret signature? This chapter explores the ontological dimensions of scale in a landscape governed by emotions, not geometry.
The terrible truth in Conrad's Heart of Darkness is ‘The Horror! The Horror!’ But, in the dying words of Kurtz, through whom Conrad portrays the human heart as a kernel hollow, empty and dark as the universe, expression nevertheless resounds. In Camus's The Outsider (1942), the sun blazing down on Meursault is no less unremitting. In Heart of Darkness, the native woodcutters are cannibals: in The Outsider, the apparently civilised Meursault cannot help but commit murder. The existentialist challenge set by Conrad and Camus is that we should face up to the fact that nature has no heart, no sentiment, no inner meaning. So is human nature any different? The justice system that Meursault's crime invokes is so contrived that Meursault cannot not help but become an outsider. In Heart of Darkness, the tide that sweeps its flotsam of colonisers, missionaries, adventurers, mercenaries and traders into Africa, and Kurtz into the Congo, is civilisation itself. In both stories, ‘light’, whether sought in nature or human nature, blazes dark.
If neither Conrad nor Camus provides ontological succour, at least of the enlightened variety, they nevertheless see existence itself as real being, even if the meaning of being escapes jurisdiction. One might imagine that scale does not belong in this unbound world. However, there is a twofold reason for introducing their works; on the one hand, our writers remove the handrails and invite us to consider how truly we experience being, and, on the other, through the act of removal they draw attention to our topology of restraints and the precision embodied in their preventative measures. Marlow, Conrad's narrator, and even the flesh-eating woodcutters, exercise restraint: Kurtz does not. He tips into the abyss, and not by accident. Meursault is doomed because he is bound to a truth ‘born of living and feeling’. Meursault refuses to lie, to conform to expectations, to exaggerate or pretend what he actually feels: emotional honesty overrides even self-preservation. The boundary exercise that Conrad and Camus instate is centred on personal fidelity; authentic feeling is the only guide. So, one way of thinking about scale in a landscape governed by emotions is as something like handrails, close up, as something like boundaries in the middle distance and as something like the horizon at the outer limits of our view.
So, my kind of hero for this in the natural world are these tropical frogs. I got interested in them because they're the most extreme example of a surface where the texture and the – let's call it the decoration … are all intricately connected to one another. So a change in the form indicates a change in the colour pattern … So, when doing a centre for the national parks in Costa Rica, we tried to use that idea of a gradient colour and a change in texture as the structure moves across the surface of the building.
(Lynn 2005)
The idea for this chapter was provoked by Greg Lynn's ‘Ark of the World’, his project for an eco-centre set in the tropical rainforest of Costa Rica. The project eschews conventional architectural form and materials in favour of something that looks frankly biological, even fleshy. The forms and colours of the building mould seamlessly into one another like a clump of deadly rhizomes. The visual scale of the building is psychotropic: it looks pungent. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that Lynn has no interest in traditional architectural scale. Rather the opposite. He presents his work as heir to a tradition that equates beauty with geometry with nature. What has evolved over the centuries, Lynn claims, is the mathematics: the right kind of mathematics gives us direct access to both nature and beauty and their unproblematic translation into architecture.
So, for roughly 300 years, the hot debate in architecture was whether the number five or the number seven was the better proportion to think about architecture, because the nose was one-fifth of your head, or because your head was one-seventh of your body. And the reason that was the model of beauty and of nature was because the decimal point had not been invented yet … and everybody had to dimension a building in terms of fractions … finer and finer and finer.
In the 15th century, the decimal point was invented; architects stopped using fractions, and they had a new model of nature. So, what's going on today is that there's a model of natural form which is calculus-based and which is using digital tools, and that has a lot of implications to the way we think about beauty and form, and it has a lot of implications in the way we think about nature.
(Lynn 2005)
Lynn's work suggests that the existential prospect is not without its own brand of hubris: the blank unbound has its attractions. One of Lynn's current collaborative projects is called ‘New City’.1 It is billed as a ‘living virtual world’, and a trailer was produced for the 2008 MoMA exhibition, ‘Design and the Elastic Mind’. The theme and title of the exhibition addressed the ability of the mind to constantly switch scales, from nano to cosmo, from real to virtual, and back again in an instant, and presented the latest developments in design and science. The ‘New City’ project set out to create a real virtual environment, by which Lynn meant an architecturally scaled, high-definition, cinema-quality submersive world as distinct from the low-quality, cartoon-like versions currently available on the web. Lynn began the project by posing the question ‘Is a sphere the optimal shape for our world? If physical laws were no longer a concern, how would we mold the Earth to better suit our global economy?’ (Lynn 2011). Thus the geometric model for ‘New City’ is not the spherical Google globe with its primitive zoom control, but a series of interlocking, elastic torus rings designed to meld images from real time and data projections, their witting and unwitting congress.
The ‘New City’ project works on the assumption that there is an actual world upon which to model the virtual. Lynn's blank unbound is not in fact the actual world, at least not in the first instance, but the ability to represent or model the actual world – even in its entirety; such is his excitement. In Lynn's mind, architecture completes the torus ring, because you can build in the real world what can be imagined in the model. In this scenario, the role played by the calculus of modelling is an interesting one. On the one hand, the mathematics is understood as real, as transparent to nature's secret design code; on the other hand, the mathematics is sold as imaginary, as transparent to the desires of the designer/consumer. We thus have truth to nature and an unlimited horizon. Scale in this instance is elastic. The ‘New City’ project takes it for granted that mind and body work together in assembling the perception of ‘environment’ in any number and configuration of navigable space. Indeed, our ability to shrink and grow in tune with our perceptual environment makes Alice's efforts in Alice in Wonderland look positively somnambulant. But if feeling in the physical sense of being able to scale up or down is elastic, then what about feeling in the emotional sense? How do we take our bearings in this jungle?
The past relegation of emotions to the sidelines of culture is an artefact of the view that they occupy the more natural and biological provinces of human experience, and hence are seen as relatively uniform, uninteresting, and inaccessible to the methods of cultural analysis.
(Lutz and White 1986: 405)
For much of the twentieth century, the culture industries were indifferent to the emotions as a subject of study. Lutz and White were among the first to comment on the change in emotional climate that started in the 1970s when anthropologists noted how specific cultures seemed to influence the particular expression and social dynamics of emotions. Were emotions universal or culturally specific? Were the emotions a pan-human, inner potential that was moulded by the outer forces of social life or did social life engender emotional life?
Insofar as the subject of the emotions is treated in architectural terms, it generally assumes a psychobiological frame that can be accounted through behavioural science. A simple example is the application of colour theory to therapeutic environments in the bid to make patients feel more cheerful or children calm down. Alternatively, we might look at aesthetic theory. Curiously enough, both disciplines struggle at the social scale when they make the assumption that there is an emotional unit called the subjective individual. The behavioural scientists scale up using statistical averages, whereas in aesthetics the equivalent gesture is in the ratings. But, to track back for a moment, what are the phenomena called the emotions in any case, and, critically, how do they scale?
Historically speaking, the science of the emotions took a decisive step with Darwin when he applied his evolutionary theory not just to the development of living forms but also to their behaviour. Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872. In it, he argued that there was a biological link between emotional states, human expressions and movements of the body that ultimately derived from purposeful animal actions, like responses to pleasure or pain; human emotions were just more developed. William James published his seminal article, ‘What is an Emotion?’ in a philosophy journal called Mind in 1884. What focused the debate from James onwards was the problem of how to explain the stimulus-to-feeling sequence that defined how an emotion evolved within a subject. The question was whether the bit called ‘emotion’ was based in the physical or the cognitive, given that it included physiological changes, like heartbeat, as well as the consciousness of a feeling, like anger. James argued from animal physiology, that in effect we are sad because we cry, that the body is the first to respond and that our emotions are our conscious interpretations of shifts in our physiology.
Jean-Paul Sartre argued the opposite in his Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, published in 1939, claiming the cognitive case, because emotions amount to intentional and strategic ways of coping with difficult situations:
We can now conceive what an emotion is. It is a transformation of the world. When the paths before us become too difficult, or when we cannot see our way, we can no longer put up with such an exacting and difficult world. All ways are barred and nevertheless we must act. So then we try to change the world; that is, to live it as though the relations between things and their potentialities were not governed by deterministic processes, but by magic.
(Sartre 2010: 40–1)
Today, although it is still assumed that the emotions have a psychobiological framework, their involvement in social and cultural relations has provoked new areas of study. After the 1970s anthropologists went on to argue that the notion of emotions representing an inner potential moulded by social life reproduced a false dichotomy between ‘nature’ as a universal inner reality versus ‘culture’ as a particular public outcome (Milton and Svasek 2005: 8). Now a range of social-constructivist philosophers, moral philosophers and social historians all draw attention to the constitutive role played by the language, moral norms and institutions of different cultures in creating emotions: emotions are more like crimes than sneezes (Dixon 2003: 247). There is also a new interest in Aristotle's Rhetoric and the argument that the emotions are fundamentally ‘psychosocial’ – that all expressions of feeling are obviously and irreducibly social rather than private (see Gross 2006) – a subject to which we will return.
It's always interesting to watch a psychotropic house try to adjust itself to strangers, particularly those at all guarded or suspicious. The responses vary, a blend of past reactions to negative emotions, the hostility of the previous tenants, a traumatic encounter with a bailiff or burglar (though both usually stay well away from PT houses; the dangers of an inverting balcony or the sudden deflatus of a corridor are too great). The initial reaction can be a surer indication of a house's true condition then any amount of sales talk about horsepower and moduli of elasticity.
(Ballard 2001: 187)
In his story ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ written in 1962, J.G. Ballard imagines a house of the future tailored to embody and respond to the particular emotions of its inhabitants. At one level, the house is just a piece of technologically advanced real estate; at another it is the emotions of the house that endure and give form not just to the physical landscape of the house but also to the moods and events that take place within it. The house takes on a borrowed life and finds it hard to kick deeply engrained emotional habits, at least when it is switched on.
Ballard's vision of a psychotropic house is not yet on the market but there is plenty of evidence to suggest that we are attracted to designs that engage our emotional response. Savvy designers like Hartmut Esslinger, who founded Frog Designs, market themselves on this very premise. This successful global company designed Apple Mac's revolutionary user-friendly styling and more generally helped to popularise curvy, biomorphic product design.2 Esslinger's take on the frog – a classic green frog in his case – is the idea of metamorphosis and the fairytale frog that changes into a prince. His strapline is ‘form follows emotion’. It might be commented that Esslinger makes a successful commercial enterprise out of Sartre's insight: design can deliver emotional magic.
The point behind summoning Ballard's psychotropic house is not to suggest that it should remain in the realm of science fiction because crossing that boundary has already become an investment opportunity. Ballard himself has contributed to Lynn's recent publication Form and is billed as a ‘futurist’. The point is to examine how aesthetic theory might deal with emotional scale. For example, if built, how would the psychotropic house materialise what Ruskin famously called the ‘pathetic fallacy’?
When he coined the term, Ruskin was referring to the task facing modern writers in his book Modern Painters (1856).3 He was preoccupied with truth and recognised two sorts: the truth of plain facts and the truth of real feeling. To begin with, Ruskin described the pathetic fallacy as the reification or personification of the natural or inanimate world, the false ascription of emotions to, say, leaves, clouds or waves, as if they were alive and sentient beings when clearly they were not. He went on to elaborate in far greater detail the second and more difficult version of the pathetic fallacy. This had to do with the quality of the poet and his or her ability to convey real emotions without getting carried away. Good poets did not make the mistake of flooding the natural or inanimate world in their emotions in order to convey their sorrow, anger, astonishment, or love. Ruskin instructed the ambitious writer to keep the eyes fixed ‘on the pure fact, out of which if any feeling comes to him or his reader, he knows it must be a true one’. There had to be some kind of correlation between subject and object – like the perfect accord between the emotion Conrad ascribes to Marlow and the stark facts of his surroundings. The weak writer, in contrast, happily ascribed fallacious emotions to inappropriate objects.
When discussing the pathetic fallacy, Ruskin observed with some irritation that there were new-fangled categories that had to be dealt with – the categories of subjective and objective. These did not exist until the early nineteenth century (Daston 2005: 25). Some responsibility for their invention can be ascribed to Kant through his founding of modern aesthetics in Critique of Judgement (1969; first published 1790). This new discipline heralded a revolution in which Kant undertook an even more important emotional boundary-setting exercise than Ruskin. After Kant, the determination of aesthetics would depend not on the properties of the dumb object but the experience of the viewer. What prompted this revolution was the inclusion of the sublime, a category quite different to that of traditional beauty. It had been under development by a number of authors during the eighteenth century, partially in response to the new Newtonian cosmology of infinity. The aesthetics of the sublime began in the attempt to capture an overwhelming experience of immensity, an experience that could not be grasped by the immediate senses or even through calculation. Paintings of mountains, abysses, volcanoes, for example, could evoke the sublime feelings of awe, terror or astonishment. But, what made this emotional experience aesthetic was the sharp division Kant drew between cognition and appetite. Emotions in the aesthetic register depended for their satisfaction on representation: one should be able to feel the emotion of awe or terror, but without being indisposed in actuality.
Ballard's psychotropic house clearly crosses that boundary, even to the point of endangering its occupants. Is the psychotropic house a type of pathetic fallacy, or a mechanical object come to life and mind? It seems as if the animating world soul, having been banished by science through the front door, has returned via the service entrance – but unencumbered by any moral baggage.
Newtonian cosmology may have evoked a feeling for the sublime, but it also worked very well without the ‘God hypothesis’ – as Pierre-Simon Laplace put it.4 The chilling consequence of Newtonian physics was a mechanically sufficient universe, one quite indifferent to the fate of man and men. It was against this indifferent universe that the characters in Conrad's and Camus's novels struggled to retain the integrity of their emotions or what might be read as the last redoubt of the individual soul. Neither author could justify recourse to an idea of soul at a larger scale, whether manifest through God or nature, reason or civilisation. Nor could Ruskin, nor even Kant, despite the fact that they still saw everywhere the hand of a designer deity. This was not the case when God and nature took more of an interest in the consequence of man and played an active role in his animation. What disappeared along with God from the Newtonian cosmos was the once-ubiquitous agency called ‘soul’.
Entrenched in the concept of soul was the concept of the good. While soul still existed, the realm of the emotions had a place vis-à-vis the soul because the emotions were thought of as the outward manifestations of the soul's inner workings. They were better known as the passions. The passions marked the territory between the bodily appetites and the reasoning mind, and were susceptible to the influence of both (see Hampton 2004: 273). Their orientation was vertical and their composition hierarchical, with the good emotions at the top and the bad emotions at the bottom. The emotions were far from being morally indifferent. They provided the motive force that engaged the will and the pulse by which the soul's upward or downward trajectory could be assessed (Dixon 2003: 18–23). When the soul disappeared as the integrative agency, a process that started with the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century (specifically, with René Descartes), the status, origin and purpose of the emotions began to change (Lagerlund and Yrjönsuuri 2002: 28).
The moral reading of the emotions in relation to soul is obviously Christian, but the association was first formalised by the classical philosophers.5 In The Republic, Plato developed the model of the tripartite soul along with the first systematic account of emotional phenomena. He demonstrated that the notion of the good in the form of justice applied equally to the individual and the city-state. The structure of both – their tripartite organisation, the relation between the whole and the parts, their optimum dynamic – was perfectly analogous. His ideal city had three classes of citizens capable of acting for the common good: the leaders or guardians who were rational and wise, the soldiers who defended the city and were obedient and courageous, and the ordinary citizens who were able to moderate their desires. Plato conceived the individual soul in parallel terms. The three constituent parts had to act in concert and as a whole in order to act for the best. Plato described the three parts of the individual soul as the rational soul (which understood what was real rather than apparent), the spirited soul or volition (which was the active part able to carry out what the rational soul thought best) and the appetitive soul (the emotions and desires that want and feel, and the part that had to be kept under strict control).
Aristotle took his idea of tripartite composition from Plato, but he made a different interpretation of the emotions, in line with his different construction of the soul. In Plato's view, emotional reactions were not to be trusted because they did not evaluate what was truly real and thus could lead to false judgements. Moreover, the emotions tethered the soul to material things that might disturb the higher activities of the rational soul. Plato imagined the emotions as by nature wild. Aristotle did not share Plato's detached attitude to life, nor the view that nature was intrinsically wild rather than ordered. Aristotle's comprehensive treatise on the soul, De anima, explained what imbued animate nature with order. De anima can be translated as ‘on life’, and it covered plants and animals as well as humans. Aristotle framed a unified system in which the whole range of vital functions, from metabolism to reasoning, was treated as functions performed by natural organisms depending on their sophistication and complexity. His tripartite organisation of soul was both similar and different to that of Plato. The lowest level of soul was shared by all living things, and accounted for the activities of growth, nutrition and reproduction. The next level was shared by animals and people, and accounted for self-generated movement and the senses. The highest level was specific to humans, and accounted for thought and reason. Each level could be further subdivided and furnish taxonomies of phenomena that linked the lowest forms of life to the highest.
Aristotle shared Plato's interest in ‘the good’ as a goal for both individual and civic conduct, but he emphasised the knowledge born of experience and practice rather than the pursuit of idealised virtues. Aristotle thus made room for the emotions as a necessary part of the interaction that made up an individual and a social life. Part of this practice, like all knowledge-based skills, involved learning and moderating appropriate emotional responses in line with particular circumstances. Aristotle's most detailed analysis of the emotions was presented in Rhetoric. He distinguished between four basic components – cognition, psychic effect, bodily effect and behavioral impulse – and was particularly interested in feelings, the pleasant or unpleasant modes of being aware of oneself in various situations – an aspect favoured by modern interpreters.6 Aristotle's interest, however, was more extensive. Rhetoric was Aristotle's philosophical treatise on the art of persuasion, and aimed at politicians and poets, or all those who sought to sway their public. He framed the use of rhetoric as part of an ethical system of practical debate. Plato's stance on the topic had been more ambiguous. Although he began by condemning the arts of ‘flattery’ as ignoble and designed to deceive, he also offered a more moderate view by acknowledging that the soul itself was susceptible to right discourse. Aristotle's Rhetoric proceeded on this basis. It helped to underpin the ideology of the city-state and the idea of Greek democracy.
They praise Euphranor because in his portrait of Alexander Paris he did the face and expression in such a way that you could recognise in him simultaneously as the judge of the goddesses, the lover of Helen and the slayer of Achilles. The painter Daemon's remarkable merit is that you could easily see in his painting the wrathful, unjust and inconstant, as well as the exorable and clement, the merciful, the proud, the humble and the fierce.7
(Alberti 2004: 77)
In On Painting, Alberti set out principles of geometrical composition that ultimately referred back to Plato's notion of the ideal realm and the rational part of the soul. However, Alberti went on to explain how painting a historia could act in the same way as writing poetry, by which he meant the rhetorical tradition canonised by Aristotle. The painter could move his audience to laughter or tears when the painted figures represented their emotions clearly. The key to painterly success lay in the movements of the body; these the painter had to study with care because, as Alberti pointed out, ‘it is extremely difficult to vary the movements of the body in accordance with the almost infinite movements of the heart’ (Alberti 2004: 77). Representing mixed emotions, like the accomplished ancients Euphranor or Daemon, was the most difficult art of all.
In On the Art of Building in Ten Books, Alberti again began with geometric lineaments before turning to the content of architecture and its purpose, beginning with ‘public works’. The equivalent scale in building to the history painting was that of the city and its citizens (Alberti 1988: 95). Alberti noted what the ancients had to say about the different levels and types of citizenship, and how cities should be characterised. He observed that buildings were built to occasion pleasure as well as to serve practical requirements; they were also very varied. The innumerable movements of the heart had their parallel in its innumerable desires. Finding the right balance of architectural expression was a civic task. Alberti stuck firmly to the principles set out by the tripartite organisation of the soul.
If Kantian aesthetic pleasure overlaps with the realm traditionally occupied by the emotions, but without any of their moral baggage, there is a Stoic precedent for this in what the Stoics called the ‘indifferents’. These are objects that are indifferent in themselves rather than requiring that one is indifferent to them. Adiaphora, or things outside the application of moral law, do not promote or obstruct moral ends in themselves (Graver 2009: 49). Kant's use of indifference, however, was more extensive than that of the Stoic philosophers. Like Platonist and Aristotelian philosophy, Stoic philosophy upheld the idea of an intelligent universe and the pervasive notion of soul. The Stoics, however, were unambiguous monists: their notion of soul, or pneuma, was entirely immanent and material as well as rational and continuous. They held a complex view of the emotions in that they aspired to eradicating their emotional reactions – apatheia – under the rule of reason. But, in their view, reason was in itself a pervasive, good and immanent material force: one just needed to realise it. Leibniz reworked the Stoic idea of an intelligent nature, but Kant, who became a disciple of Newtonian cosmology, held no such confidence. Kant saw the hand of God the designer but did not think that nature possessed an inner natural harmony or that the emotions represented any such order in themselves. For Kant, nature and the emotions were morally indifferent (Schneewind 1996: 295). He thus chose to root his important theory of freedom and moral law in man's transcendental nature.
The Kantian justification of the aesthetic realm lay in its dedication to a freedom enacted by freeing aesthetic pleasure from ruling interests, even the good. Since Kant, the sublime has grown to become an accommodatingly diverse category as well as being godmother to the ugly and ordinary. It represents a genre of experience that suggests ontological status while being under no compunction to be ‘good’. Kant both institutionalised ontological indifference and used indifference in the form of the disinterested gaze to realise his new aesthetic philosophy. One of the most influential modern commentators on Kant, Jean-François Lyotard in his Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (1994), claims that though the idea of the good became far more abstract under Kant, it did not disappear. The aesthetic realm that Kant founded not only underpins the freedom of modern art, its notion of ulterior freedom now acts as an open model for human understanding.
So what role should the emotions play in figuring this more open landscape? Should scale in architecture, for instance, be treated as a matter of sublime indifference in order to preserve a wider horizon of freedom, or should scale be used more like music in its emotive intent and cultural expression – but submit to Ruskinian rules? One might ask whether indifference is an emotion in itself or an absence of emotion; whether the absence of emotion represents a lack, or, alternatively, an achievement (bearing in mind that Stoic philosophy recommended emotion's extirpation). The question is of particular interest when it broaches the public realm. Which is why Aristotle's Rhetoric is back in the frame.
1 The collaborators for ‘New City’ at the MoMA exhibition were Peter Frankfurt, Greg Lynn, Alex McDowell and Imaginary Forces. Available at www.imaginaryforces.com/featured/3/435 (accessed 11 April 2011).
2 Founded in 1969, Frog is a creative global network designing products, corporate identities and new media for a vast range of international clients including Disney, Levi's, Lufthansa and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
3 See John Ruskin, ‘Of the Pathetic Fallacy’, Modern Painters, vol. iii, pt. 4. Available at www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/ruskinj/ (accessed 11 April 2011).
4 In 1799 Laplace published his post-Newtonian Treatise on Celestial Mechanics. When Napoleon Bonaparte asked him why he made no mention of God in his theory – unlike Newton – Laplace famously answered ‘Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis’.
5 The following summary of the Platonic–Aristotelian soul is from Knuuttila (2004: 5–46).
6 See Knuuttila's comments on Heidegger and moods (2004: 41).
7 Alberti (2004) was quoting a passage from Pliny.