Heidegger,McLuhan and Schumacher on Form and Its Aliens

Form vs. Function

In his ambitious two-volume work The Autopoiesis of Architecture, Patrik Schumacher describes the form/function pair as follows:

Architectural discourse is organized around the lead-distinction of form versus function. Architecture, like all design disciplines, hinges upon this distinction. That architecture always has to address both terms of this distinction has been asserted over and over again by many architects and architectural theorists. Whenever one term of the distinction seems to be in danger of being neglected, vehement reminders are issued … There are countless instances of this theoretical steering effort against the twin evils of a one-sided Formalism and one-sided Functionalism. The perennial Formalism-Functionalism controversy is itself the clearest evidence for the thesis proposed here that the distinction between form and function is the lead-distinction of architecture/design and thus a fundamental, permanent communication structure of architecture’s autopoiesis. (Schumacher, 2011: 207)

Schumacher could hardly be clearer. He views architecture as a unique balancing act between two obligations: the self-referential constraint of ‘beauty’ (his own term), and the outward-pointing constraint that design must perform valuable societal functions. Thus he identifies form with architectural self-reference, while function is treated as the irreplaceable servant (contra Eisenman) of society at large. As a writer, Schumacher shows pedagogical gifts and clearly summarizes Luhmann's notoriously opaque writings in an easily digestible way. His account of the form/function distinction is useful. It sheds light on the perennial and perhaps permanent nature of this oscillating controversy, encourages us not to lose sight of either internal or external constraints, and also defines plausible provisional borders between architecture and neighboring disciplines. But despite these compelling professional considerations of architects, there are more general reasons to wonder whether form vs. function can serve as a ‘lead-distinction’ for architecture in the way that this term was originally meant by the sociologist Niklas Luhmann (who is explicitly credited by Schumacher as his inspiration).

For Luhmann, the lead-distinction of any discipline involves one self-referential term pointing to its interior, and another term that points outside the discipline (Schumacher, 2011: 204 ff.). For example, economics revolves around the distinction between price and value, with price referring to that index of a thing whose fluctuations economists can directly calculate, while value refers to the real qualities of things beyond all measured price. As we know, price and value are quite often out of synch, with worthless baubles garnering high prices on the market while masterpieces of human craft go ignorantly unrewarded. For science the lead-distinction is theory vs. evidence, with the former term referring only to the internal consistency of a theoretical framework, while evidence is a call of protest from the outside world when a theory fails to match it. In the legal system, Luhmann identifies the lead-distinction as being that between norms and facts, with norms never derivable from mere facts. We have already noted the pattern: one of the binary terms in each pair is internally oriented, while another points to the murky, unknown exterior of any discipline.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume Luhmann is right that every discipline must show this same double tendency. The question is whether form vs. function can satisfy this double demand for architecture. The answer can only be in the negative, no matter how intense the conflict of form and function may become for practicing architects. For notice that both form and function are treated in relational terms – hardly surprising, given that Schumacher thinks the relational exhausts the whole of the real. To treat a building functionally is to dissolve it into a web of social purposes. But perhaps more surprisingly, to treat a building formally also dissolves it into a web of relations, though here it is a question of how the outward look of a building relates both to an avant-garde design public and to more casual spectators. The building itself has a reality quite apart from its function, since the same function might be served by numerous different forms. But it also has a reality apart from its form, since the accessible form of a building might be modified in a variety of ways without significantly changing the building as an occupiable underlying entity.

Two analogies will be helpful. The first comes from the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, with its famous opposition between present-at-hand and ready-to-hand (see my account in Harman, 2002). Against the claim of phenomenology that the world must primarily be described as it appears in consciousness, Heidegger notes that palpable access to things is a relatively rare event. For the most part, we take things for granted or invisibly rely upon them. While hammering, we forget the hammer and focus attention on what we are building. It is mostly in cases of malfunction that things become present to conscious view. This is often treated as a profound insight into the distinction between theory and praxis, which we might also rewrite as a distinction between form and function (terms never used in this way by Heidegger himself). What is overlooked in typical readings of the tool-analysis is that neither the form nor the function of the hammer does it justice. The outward look of the hammer badly oversimplifies it, since it has countless properties never expressed in any given manifestation. Yet precisely the same oversimplification occurs when the hammer is embedded in its practical context, since the hammer’s interaction with nails and boards does not exhaust its reality either. The hammer is a surplus beyond both theory and praxis, both form and function, as seen from the fact that it can break. It is necessary to push Heidegger away from both theory and praxis towards a theory of the withdrawn hammer-object that must first exist in order to be translated into either theory or praxis. I am inclined to think that a building must pre-exist (though not temporally) its form and function alike. The building is a surplus whose flavor may become more savory under the right formal or functional conditions, but cannot be reduced to these conditions.

A second analogy comes from the raging dispute in the philosophy of mind between first- and third-person descriptions. Is there some true mental reality that can only be directly experienced, or can this reality be neatly reduced to external scientific descriptions? What advocates of both positions miss is that first-person and third-person descriptions are both descriptions, and for this reason neither can do justice to the reality of mental life. Any description will oversimplify, translate, caricature, or distort that which it aims to describe. For this reason I have argued elsewhere for a ‘zero-person’ approach to cognition (Harman, 2009). But this raises the analogous question of what a ‘zero-form, zero-function’, non-relational architecture might look like. The fact that architecture is still in a period when relationality is valorized does not weaken this proposal for a non-relational architecture, but strengthens it.

Form vs. Content

Another approach to the issue of form can be made by way of the familiar distinction between form and content. This is where McLuhan becomes relevant, since even more concretely than Heidegger it is he who relentlessly champions form. McLuhan’s most famous phrase, ‘the medium is the message’, also expresses his central idea: that the content of any medium is largely irrelevant compared with the structure of that medium itself (McLuhan, 1992). To argue over good and bad printed books is to ignore the transformative effects of print itself; to vote Republican or Democrat is to take the American two-party system for granted. This thesis reaches its most extreme form in McLuhan’s famous Playboy interview, where he claims that the content of any medium is no more important than the graffiti on an atomic bomb (McLuhan, 1969). This has understandably led to complaints that McLuhan is a ‘technological determinist’, since the underlying effects of our media seem so powerful as to undercut all of our surface political deliberations.

But, ultimately, McLuhan is no determinist, and herein lies the paradox of his theory. If it were really true that media lay powerfully hidden in the depths of the world, enframing each of our actions without hope of modification, then McLuhan would not only be a determinist but a thinker of absolute stasis. If he were only a theorist of the depths he would be paralyzed, as some think Heidegger is paralyzed, by an inability to account for change. If the depth were purely deep, we could hardly speak about it or interact with it in any way at all. But McLuhan does account for the alteration of depth, for changes in media. Paradoxically enough, these changes can only be triggered on the surface of the world, in one of two distinct ways (McLuhan and McLuhan, 1992). The first of these ways is termed the ‘reversal’ or ‘flip’ in which a medium is overheated through excess information. What used to be a silent background becomes so obtrusive that it reverses into its opposite, as when the previously hidden attributes of cars begin to clutter our lives once they reach a certain excessive number. The natural response to information overload is ‘pattern recognition’: for example, individual people cease to be regarded as individuals, and are modelled instead as points on a demographic curve. In this way the hidden form becomes a tangible form in the more usual sense of form as a depthless, visible profile. In architecture, the best analogy may be Rem Koolhaas’s retroactive manifestoes: once massive airports and supermarkets proliferate beyond measure, we may notice a new explicit formal language emerging from what used to be concealed environmental forms – or ‘substantial forms’, as medieval philosophers called them (Koolhaas, 1997).

But perhaps more relevant is McLuhan’s second example of a triumph of the surface, in what he calls ‘retrieval’. This is the domain of artists, he holds. The world is littered with clichés, with dead media that seem to be no longer effective contemporary forces: steam locomotives, nomadic tribes, icehouses, feudalism, leech cures, arranged marriages, Morse code. For McLuhan, the artist – in the broadest sense of the term – is someone who brings these dead clichés back from the dead, adapting them to new surroundings in a way that revives their fortunes and makes them credible once more. An easy architectural analogy here might be postmodernism, with its shifting repertoire of once-dead historical forms, revived with greater or lesser success in more or less believable present-day settings.

Reversal and retrieval are reciprocal partners: while the first brings hidden forms to the surface, the second almost magically converts the obtrusive figure into a thriving active ground. There might even be two different paths to innovation, each stemming from one of the two kinds of metamorphosis. Schumacher explains the first sort:

Try to describe the most obvious, banal, trivial, most general aspects of any architecture and then use those descriptions as levers of negation and substitution. This way you get the lever in at the foundations. The heuristics of a negative dialectic might demand: an urbanism without streets, or an architecture without buildings. Or challenge the medium taken for granted and posit an architectural drawing without lines which might lead to an architecture without walls, even without edges. Some of these creative negations have already come to fruition: for instance, single surface topographies try to differentiate space without walls or even sharp edges. (Schumacher, 2011: 407)

McLuhan teaches an even more general lesson that deserves to be worked out in detail in philosophy, architecture, and any number of other fields. Against all claims to a new era of ‘immanence’, there is depth and essence in the world and its elements, though not one that can be directly translated into tangible shape. This depth is necessarily static, lying as it does beyond all hope of direct manipulation. Both ‘form’ and ‘function’ in the old sense are merely ‘content’ in McLuhan’s sense, and this content escapes superficiality only by somehow striking a background chord, evoking a depth that can never quite take on definitive shape. Instead of formalism or functionalism, we need what the medievals might have called a ‘substantial formalism’, though perhaps a catchier name is on the way.