John May Everything Is Already an Image To patiently describe the world to oneself is to prepare the ground for an as yet unavailable politics. New descriptions can, under the right circumstances, be made to serve as the raw substrate for political impulses that cannot yet be ex- pressed or lived because their preconditions have not been arranged and articulated. This essay is an outline of one such descriptive effort undertaken in recent years by our office, MILLIØNS. It is the rough sketch of a long-standing proj- ect of clarifying, if only for ourselves, the status of computa- 1 1. Our position throughout this exploration tional images in our thought and work. is that the word digital has, through overuse and generalization, lost all sense and mean- What follows is not a theory of architectural images but ing and that we will have to rely on other rather a brief philosophical description of architecture after words, other concepts, to describe the world anew. Certainly the remarkable and ongoing imaging. My aim in airing these ideas is not so much to con- “Archaeology of the Digital” project at tradict the prevailing discourse – in which terms like digital the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), has gone some way to recover this and post digital are used regularly – but simply to show what lost meaning during a specific moment in happens if the technical basis of architecture is examined very architectural thought, but as will become clear, the present description of computa- closely, if its technical terms and concepts are taken very seri- tional images diverges from that project in ously, at times even literally. fundamental and irreconcilable ways. 2. See André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture First, three axioms for reading this essay: and Speech, trans. Anna Bostock Berger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993); or Jean Axiom 1: There are no pretechnical forms of thought. There Bottéro, Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning, are no ways of thinking that remain isolated from technical and the Gods, trans. Zainab Bahrani and Marc van de Mieroop (Chicago: University acts, no ideas or dreams or fears or desires insulated from the of Chicago Press, 1992). characteristics of a given technical age. The notion that ideas 3. See Leo Marx, “Technology: The Emer- gence of a Hazardous Concept,” Technology exist apart from their technical formation (in the brain or and Culture 51, no. 3 ( July 2010): 561–77. “the mind”) is one of the most pervasive fallacies of modern life. Even our oldest forms of thought and expression – many of which were prelinguistic (ideographic, pictographic, cu- neiform, etc.) – involved thoroughly technical-gestural acts of marking, inscribing, and engraving.2 Seen from an anthro- pological view, technical life is inseparable from processes of hominization – inseparable, that is, from the very processes by which a group of animals learned to think of themselves as human subjects distinct from an objective world. This paleo-ontological view, which asserts that life is always lived by means other than life – that is, by way of technical organs (objects) – is what establishes technics as a conceptual cat- egory distinct from so-called technology (a term that will not be used here).3 9 _Log40_Book.indb 9 6/16/17 4:55 PM Akkadian clay tablet, ca. 1900–1600 BCE. Column 2 contains a partial ver- sion of the ancient Sumerian Legend of Etana written in cuneiform. From Albert Clay, A Hebrew Deluge Story in Cuneiform, and other Epic Fragments in the Pierpont Morgan Library (1922). All images courtesy the author. Axiom 2: Nothing technical is ever merely technical. There are no “minor technicalities”; or rather, all technicalities are tethered, in some way or another, to the deepest regions of consciousness. All technicalities warrant historical and philo- sophical reflection because we can discover hidden aspects of ourselves and our thought in even the most seemingly mundane technical routines. New descriptions of those aspects will never amount to a “solution” to any specific life problem, because life’s technical immersion is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be continually reunderstood. Which is to say that the best philosophies of technics are, strictly speaking, useless. Axiom 3: The specific conception of time embedded in a techni- cal system is inseparable from the forms of thought and imagina- tion it makes possible or impossible. Distinct technical ages are bound up with distinct conceptions of time. Technics contain specificmodels of time, which resonate with lived life. From an anthropological view, all technics are an externaliza- tion of programs: gestural-mental routines for living life. For our purposes here, all technics may be regarded as mnemo- 4. I am drawing heavily here on Leroi- technics: storehouses of the cumulative knowledge and wis- Gourhan’s analysis of programming in Ges- ture and Speech, but also on Bernard Stiegler’s dom we now refer to as “culture,” whose memory exceeds the reading of that work in his own Technics and lifespan of the finite individual. In the processes of external- Time volumes. It is impossible to adequately acknowledge here the full debt owed by the izing memory (which, in their accumulation, form cultures), present essay to that body of work. The third the storage speed of the medium – its speed of inscription axiom, for example, is a hopelessly reduced condensation of Stiegler’s central thesis: or recording and its retentional duration – is decisive for the “Technics, far from being merely in time, forms of consciousness with which it is associated. The struc- properly constitutes time.” Technics and Time, vol. 1, The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard tural pace with which any given technical system allows us to Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: record our thoughts and actions is inseparable from the ways Stanford University Press, 1998), 27. of life it makes possible or impossible.4 10 Log 40 _Log40_Book.indb 10 6/16/17 4:55 PM Film still from The Language of Drawing, Mechanical Drawing Series, produced by the McGraw Hill Book Company, 1948. Drawing, Photograph, Image These three axioms can be driven sideways through the three categories of visual depiction that supposedly define contem- porary architectural culture: drawings, photographs, and images. Architecture today seems uninterested in distinguish- ing between these three or, at the very least, seems unable to 5 5. See Sam Jacob, “Drawing in a Post- parse their ambiguities with any consistency. Far from indi- digital Age,” Metropolis 36, no. 8 (March 2017): 76–81; or Peter Cook, Drawing: The cating the permanence, exchangeability, or “resurgence” of Motive Force of Architecture (Chichester: any one category, the slippages between them is symptomatic Wiley, 2014). These ambiguities have also surfaced in countless academic events, of a chronic confusion, throughout the design fields, that is including recent exhibitions and symposia rooted in basic category errors concerning the enmeshment at Yale (“Is Drawing Dead?,” 2012), MIT (“Does Drawing Have a Future?,” 2014), of life, thought, and technique. In place of that ambiguity, let Princeton (“Postmodern Procedures,” us establish certain minimum technical criteria to define each 2015), California College of the Arts 6 (“Drawing Codes: Experimental Protocols category. of Architectural Representation,” 2017) and Drawing: What is architectural drawing? In the first most recently, and perhaps most clearly, at SCI-Arc (“Drawings’ Conclusions,” 2017). place, drawings consist of hand-mechanical gestures that 6. It must be asserted at the outset that our project at MILLIØNS is wholly agnostic inscribe or deposit geometric, rule-bound (syntactic) marks regarding the relative value of these three into or onto a seemingly stable surface. Hand-mechanical technical formats. From a technical- historical standpoint, it is simply nonsensical depiction is static: once drawn, drawings do not move. At to ask whether one is “better” than another, base, “architectural drawing” refers to acts of geometric or whether one constitutes an improvement over the others. We are concerned only to gesturing always aided by mechanical tools, always in some understand them as technical categories way mechanized, such that the gesture itself belongs to a (knowing that such categories inflect lived life), through a kind of engineering analysis synchronization between the hands and various external- of their epistemic carrying capacities – an ized organs (straightedges, compasses, squares, etc.). Even enumeration of the possibilities and limita- tions contained within each format. If our “freehand” drawing (sketching) always involves the becom- work declares the end of drawing, it does so ing-mechanical, through practice, of hand movements in completely unceremoniously, and only on the basis of an undeniable technical (gestural- relation to a tool. In both cases, gestures become predictable, mental) obsolescence that remains largely obscured by a slowly fading nostalgia. regular, controlled, and approximately repeatable; their co- ordination is mechanistic. 11 Log 40 _Log40_Book.indb 11 6/16/17 4:55 PM Photograph: Seen technically, all photography is a form of heliography: the writing of the sun. Photography always involves the organ-ized – that is, coordinated by mecha- nisms – exposure of a chemical “first substance” to “the action of light.” The photograph is thus always a mechani- cal-chemical (or chemomechanical) visual format, depicting “without any idea of drawing . the most detailed views, the most picturesque scenery.”7 Despite its capacity to de- pict a visual scene nearly instantaneously, the invention of photography amounted to a regression in the domain of vi- sual mathematiziation. Whereas the constructed perspective drawing was a thoroughly mathematical depiction (draw- ings were geometric arrangements of geometric quantities), the mathematics of a photograph always remains locked deep within its chemical composition – in the formulas and equa- tions expressing that composition. The photograph offers no empirical surface for immediate calculation; it must be labored over if quantities are to be extracted from it.