Designing Place Topologies of Maker Labs
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Designing Place Topologies of Maker Labs Sascha Rashof PhD Cultural Studies Centre for Cultural Studies Goldsmiths College I declare that the work presented in this thesis is my own. 2 Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to thank my (co-)supervisors Prof. Scott Lash, Dr. Luciana Parisi and Prof. Bernard Stiegler. I also want to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding this project for three years. I am grateful to my interviewees who generously donated their time, especially to Amitraj Deshmukh and his family for their assistance and care in India. Thanks to Matthew Holder for his support in academic as well as personal matters and for making life as enjoyable as it could be throughout writing up. I finally want to thank Dr. David Cunningham for his help in all things Heideggerian. 3 Abstract This PhD thesis is working towards a techno-social ontology of ‘place’. Place [topos] has been an underdeveloped concept in modern philosophical thought in ‘the West’, mainly subordinated to the more universal/ising terms time and space. Also media theory has often used conceptions of time as its primary category due to its foundation on notions of ‘process’. Even though media theory and geography are increasingly converging, however predominantly through conceptions of space, considerable ontological treatments of medial place are still missing. In order to develop a notion of place/s that is more singular and pluralistic than Deleuze and Guattari’s (spatial) rhizomes, which have now largely become the logics of post-Fordism, this thesis works with Peter Sloterdijk’s topo-logy of Spheres – through, with, beyond and against Heidegger’s ontology. Spheres, here systematically read as ‘Being and Place’, will however not just be explicated as universal/ising representation of Being/s, but as singularly de-constructing itself ‘in the world’ – via ‘maker labs’, i.e. meso-scale collaborative work-places where humans cohabit with/in technological systems to produce and share ‘open designs’ for local needs. Through a media- phenomenological approach close to the ‘spherology’, especially the third book, Foams, as well as the conception of ‘organised networks’ (Rossiter & Lovink), three of these labs will be explicated through their singular organisation/s of place: Vigyan Ashram, an experimental rural development college in Pabal (India) where school dropouts learn to design predominantly agricultural hardware and the ‘natural’ environment for local (survival) needs; the London Hackspace, a community-run hacker space where tinkerers make ‘open designs’ primarily in their spare time for experience value by sharing tools and knowledge; betahaus Berlin, a co-working space functioning as a mix of coffee house, home office, R&D lab, university, hacker space, carpentry 4 workshop and start-up incubator. The thesis concludes by pointing towards the limitations of Spheres as (philosophical) anthropology. 5 Table of Contents Introduction 9 I Heidegger’s Techno-Platial Ontology 28 II Sloterdijk’s Spherology 61 III Topologies of Maker Labs 117 III.I Vigyan Ashram j 143 III.II London Hackspace 174 III.III betahaus Berlin 201 Conclusion 266 6 List of Images Fig. 1: 147: Geodesic domes with vegetable garden accommodating female students, Vigyan Ashram, Pabal, India, 2012 Fig. 2: 147: Guest houses, Vigyan Ashram, Pabal, India, 2012 Fig. 3:161: Kitchen lady using solar cooker, Vigyan Ashram, Pabal, India, 2012 Fig. 4: 162: Geodesic dome structures on Pabal hill, Vigyan Ashram, Pabal, India, 2012 Fig. 5: 163: Toilet-building process, Vigyan Ashram, Pabal, India, 2012 Fig. 6: 164: Pedal Power prototype, Vigyan Ashram, Pabal, India, 2012 Fig. 7: 165: Aquaponic out of use, Vigyan Ashram, Pabal, India, 2012 Fig. 8: 166: Moisture-level sensor, Vigyan Ashram, Pabal, India, 2012 Fig. 9: 172: Vigyan Ashram’s formation in 2007, Pabal, India Fig. 10: 172: … in 2009 Fig. 11: 173: … in 2012 Fig. 12: 175: The London Hackspace on 447 Hackney Road, 2014 Fig. 13: 176: Basement workshop, London Hackspace, 2014 Fig. 14: 176: Spaceship environment in the LHS Bikeshed, 2013 Fig. 15: 186: Hybrid LHS/Mindhackers logo, 2012 Fig. 16: 189: LHS/LBH logo, 2014 Fig. 17: 190: LHS/MHS logo, 2012 Fig. 18: 199: Hackney Road outside of the LHS, 2014 Fig. 19: 204: betahaus Berlin at 19-20 Prinzessinnenstraße, 2013 Fig. 20: 209: betalab, Berlin, 2009 7 Fig. 21: 210: Multi-functional café with ‘tree house’, betahaus Berlin, 2013 Fig. 22: 213: Open co-working environment, betahaus Berlin, 2011 Fig. 23: 218: Moritzplatz becomes ‘Makerplatz’, Berlin, 2011 Fig. 24: 221: Open Design City in 2010, betahaus Berlin Fig. 25: 224: Redesigned ODC workshop, 2013 Fig. 26: 227: DIY BaustelMontag, betahaus Berlin, 2013 8 Introduction But where is time? Is it at all and does it have a place?1 […] I do not want to be so absolutely dogmatic and assert one could only understand Being out of time, perhaps tomorrow someone discovers a new possibility.2 This PhD thesis is working towards a techno-social ontology of ‘place’. According to Edward S. Casey, throughout modern philosophical thought in ‘the West’, the concept of place [topos] has been “not only neglected but actively suppressed.” 3 Place has generally been conceived as a subcategory of the universal/ising terms time and space, by simply being seen as a point in, portion or modification of these.4 As Casey argues, it is only recently that philosophy has started to take a renewed interest in notions of place, citing thinkers such as Bachelard, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari as well as Irigaray. However, I would say that this philosophical concept has still hardly been developed as such. I would furthermore add that also media theory has often used notions of time as its primary category, as one of the fields which have come out of the acceleration of technological development in 5 modernity, hence being founded on notions of ‘process’. The concept 1 Heidegger, M. ‘Zeit und Sein’ in Zur Sache des Denkens in Gesamtausgabe Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 2007: 15 (my transl.): “Wo aber ist die Zeit? Ist sie überhaupt und hat sie einen Ort?” 2 Heidegger, M. Logik – Die Frage nach der Wahrheit in Gesamtausgabe Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976: 267 (my transl.): “[…] ich will nicht so absolut dogmatisch sein und behaupten, man könnte Sein nur aus der Zeit verstehen, vielleicht entdeckt morgen einer eine neue Möglichkeit.” 3 Getting Back into Place – Toward a New Understanding of the Place-World Bloomington, IN: IUP, 2009: xiv 4 Getting Back into Place – Toward a New Understanding of the Place-World Bloomington, IN: IUP, 2009; The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History Berkeley, London, Los Angeles: UCP, 1997 5 See, for example: Lazzarato, M. [transl. by Geene, S. & Stein E.] Videophilosophie – Zeitwahrnehmung im Postfordismus Berlin: b_books, 2002; Stiegler, B. [transl. by Beardsworth, R. & Collins, G.] Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998; Stiegler, B. [transl. by Barker, S.] Technics and Time 2: Disorientation Stanford, CA: SUP, 2008; Stiegler, B. [transl. by Barker, S.] Technics and Time 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise Stanford, CA: SUP, 2011; Virilio, P. [transl. by Polizzotti, M.] Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology New York: Semiotext(e), 1986; Virilio, P. [transl. by Degener, M.] Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light London: Continuum, 2005; Virilio, P. [transl. by Rose, J.] The Futurism of the Instant: Stop-Eject Cambridge: Polity, 2010. 9 of place seems to be, literally, out of place.6 Even though media theory and geography are increasingly starting to converge – however predominantly through conceptions of space – 7 considerable ontological treatments of medial place are still missing. Over the following pages, place will be explicated not as deriving from time or space, but indeed as time and space. Place is the in between of time and space: a singular – not particular – space-time. The globalising-globalised ‘world’ of (post-)modernity, where hardly any point on the geometric axis has become unreachable, appears as homogenised exterior (or -interior, however one wants to see it) through which capital circulates: a meta-technological mono’sphere’. Its only limit is itself, or so it seems to be. In order to develop a differentiated theory of ‘the world’ at the beginning of the 21st century, a change of its formation [Bildung] needs to take place. ‘The world’ is not universal, but pluralities of singular places – neither too ‘macro’, nor too ‘micro’, but meso-scale organisations, existing in each other, connecting with each other, crossing through each other, repelling each other, transgressing into each other, provoking each other, living next to each other. Places can neither be seen as the smallest homogeneous elements, nor as the largest decentralising processes, but as multi-dimensional hybrids where immanence and transcendence converge – in between ‘the local’ and ‘the global’. Due to the deepening pervasiveness of technological processes throughout ‘the globalised world’, we can talk about being placed in the ‘anthropocene’ – i.e. an epoch in which human culture is 6 Which has led some more geographical thinkers to conceive of ‘non-places’ (Augé, M. Non-Places – An Introduction to Supermodernity London & New York: Verso, 2008), a ‘placeless culture’ (Meyrowitz, J. No Sense of Place – The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behaviour New York & Oxford: OUP, 1985) and ‘placelessness’ (Relph, E. Place and Placelessness London: Pion, 1976). 7 See, for example: Castells, M. The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban-Regional Process Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989; Castells, M. The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010; Ekman, U. (ed.) Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013; Farías, I. and Bender, T.