Keller Easterling

EO

How did you first get into architecture?

KE

Well, almost by accident. I was initially doing theater at Princeton. You couldn't major in theater, but when you got finished with rehearsal, the lights were on in the architecture building. So I ended up majoring in that. Not having any money, I figured this was sort of a reasonable thing for me to do during the day, while I pursued other things. And then, after doing theater here in New York for many years, I finally had to pay attention to being a professor, writing books, and doing things to stay alive in the architecture world. That's the honest answer, because it's not as if I chose architecture first. But I have been trying to read the connection between theater and architecture.

EO

What was the relationship between theater and architecture to you?

KE

I'm not sure there was one at the time. Princeton Architecture was doing a kind of postmodern thing. So it was a lot of mostly young men making balsa wood models, which was a joke to me. I mean, the whole thing was a joke. I just kind of bluffed my way through it.

EO

How did you end up at Princeton?

KE

I grew up in a rural area of North Carolina during part of my childhood. Somebody got me an audition for the Governors School of North Carolina, which is a program that allows teenagers two months to focus intensely on a field of study—in my case, theater. But others were doing math or music or whatever their specialty was. You were plunged into what happened in the 20th century. You were a teenager doing Marat Sade, Ionesco, Artaud, and other things. Or, if you were a musician, you were doing Stockhausen. I was very poorly educated, but for my Princeton application, I wrote an essay on Theater of Cruelty, and they accidentally let me in. I hadn't been that far north or east before. I didn't know anything about it.

RRL

Theatrical tropes can be found in your works. In your book Medium Design, for instance, you urge designers to think about the interplays in and between architectural and urban things. How did metaphors like this resonate with your readers?

KE

I use the term interplay to wrench attention away from the nominative to the active. That's what you do in theater. You're up to your elbows in verbs, rather than nouns. That's how you communicate. That's what you're working with. I feel like what I've really been trying to do is to transfer my theater training to a poor or bankrupt training in architecture.

RRL

What do you mean by the nominative and active (or dispositional)?

KE

It's an interesting question. When you are acting, you may have a line, like, “I love you,” or “come home, son.” But that’s only the script, the information is really conveyed in what you're playing. This might be to murder you while saying “I love you,” or to reject you while saying, “come home, son.” The real message may be in the actions and not in the words. In architecture, I've been trying to shift emphasis from forms understood as shapes and outlines to forms of interplay or active potentials in arrangement. The room we are in right now—where we're all facing one direction—has potentials, possibilities, and limits embedded in arrangement. Your dog hears you say the words “good girl,” and after a while they might get to know the lexical expression, but they would never rely on that. They're looking at how close you are to the door or to the dog bowl, or whether you have a leash in your hand, or whether you're angry. I'm trying to foreground the often unexpressed capacities of that canine mind.

EO

I want to hear you talk more about Antonin Artaud. But also, thinking with architecture and especially the “Disposition” chapter in Extrastatecraft. I'm really in the trenches right now with Rem Koolhaas and it’s just where my mind’s at because we’re currently working away on the New Americana issue of PIN-UP. But I’m specifically interested in the concept of “Disposition” because it’s like a consumerism model. It gets into the psychology of the lacuna of the word, specifically in the performance of language, and the lexicon, and the visual nature of language. Sure, you're in this container, or you're on stage, for instance. But what are you feeling? I keep referring to what you say, is “Theater is dance,” because of the way that the words move on the page. And the rhythm. There’s this dichotomy that you create between the ‘Know How,’ and the ‘Know That.’ That is really what I'm trying to kind of gesture at or create, a system where you see that there's like the representation of the thing, and then the truth of it. What's your relationship to that form of thought, now?

KE

You mention the difference between “Knowing That” and “Knowing How,” which is borrowed from Gilbert Ryle. In Medium Design I try to generate a relay between many thinkers who think dispositionally. They think about the affordances of things—the capacities or potential made possible by arrangement. It is culture’s tacit knowledge or muscle memory. Sometimes if you focus on piano notations or fingerings, you can't play the piano. “Knowing that” is knowing the right answer, versus knowing how to do something. But knowing how to do something comprises most of our knowledge—how we manage things. When you cook, you open the fridge and you don’t know what you are going to make. But you know how to put a meal together from a mix of considerations—expiration dates, nutrients, recipes, or what tastes good together. This kind of important knowledge sometimes goes unexpressed. Maybe it is eclipsed by the declarative expressions and right answers.

EO

But that is performance. What makes a good performance is seeing the feeling communicated visually that drives the knowledge that they’re performing.

RRL

I want to echo with you that rumors are perhaps the ultimate application of the intelligence of “Knowing How.” They do not concern themselves with giving the most convincing piece of truth, fact, or the right answer. They operate in this world through the virality of lies. Maybe it is time for architects and designers to learn from the fake news. How does this, let’s say, operative intelligence, or the knowledge of working on and being in this world, inform contemporary architectural practices?

KE

In Extrastatecraft, I was trying to say that, while architects are making masterpiece buildings, there's a fire hose blast of spaces produced by organization men. They're figuring out the logistics of consumption in spatial products of different sources and creating some of the most radical changes to the globalizing world. I wanted to suggest that maybe there's a chance we, as architects, might know something about how to work on these strange spaces. Maybe it would be a way to declare ourselves politically, while operating in sly ways on non-lexical space. This space is spreading like a germ or a rumor. So a designer wouldn't be thinking, “oh, I'm going to make this a building,” but would instead be thinking about making something that could piggyback on a multiplier in this spatial medium. What would unwind, short circuit, or create a counter contagion? At the very least, we should not participate passively in it. I tried to expose the violence embedded in those organizations and the buckshot that was coming from them. These engine rooms of neoliberalism with shiny skyscrapers are sites of labor and environmental abuse. It is a little weird to see one's colleagues making complex geometries for yet another tower for these free zones. It is not a problem with a solution. It is a form that is something like a chain reaction—a platform for inflecting multiple objects.

EO

Brian Larkin writes about the promise of architecture, which lends itself to the speculation of it as a self-prophesying field. Architecture works on the allure of prophecy. “We’ll eventually get there,” but it doesn’t necessarily map out how. You write about structure and systems. I understand it now through when you're distilling them in terms of, “What's the system that makes up the building?” It hasn't been normalized to concretize what buildings actually do. We know it in terms of form versus function, and these concrete impacts have been abstracted. Form and function has now been considered in terms of the way it’s performed linguistically, but not in terms of the actual metadata, or how it can be obfuscated with furniture and how interior spatial politics redefine how you interact with actual infrastructure. Once you place things in places, people respond—color, and even material make an impact. This is your way of addressing the commerciality of the professionalized profession.

KE

The book was written for a broader audience. And it was picked up by a broader audience, by social scientists, and others who were also testing the boundaries of their disciplines and methodologies—researchers keen to consider some very vivid evidence.

EO

When I'm reading your work, I'm not thinking about architecture, I'm thinking about anthropology, sociology, spatial politics, and language. Things that can really move that aren’t solely policy-based. Thinking of people like Gregory Bateson, these theorists you show—who are the thinkers that made up that informed your process of writing?

KE

Yeah, Bateson certainly is one of them. He's kind of an uncle. But about the audience, all these books are about politics—they're about outwitting the superbugs of power. They're written out of disappointment or desperation as you are trying to find some way to stop, unwind, or trick accumulations of power. I’m writing to anyone with a political imagination. That is the motivation for it.

RRL

Speaking of outsmarting the institution makes me think of the essay you wrote for the catalog of Wolfgang Tillmans’ show at the Museum of Modern Art. When I was browsing the document it struck me to see your contribution because it didn’t necessarily feel like something up your alley. I was like, “What does Keller or medium design have to do with Tillmans?” It turned out it is not about how the photographer’s work and your thesis relate. It’s the way the entry functions in the catalog responds to your call to trick the superbug. This becomes clear when you write: “There should probably be no text like this in a book like this. It is part of an apparatus, a set of protocols that serve an institution and a career.” And I thought your focus on the toucan was a brilliant conceit, which makes the piece both meaningful and operative at the same time. It rewires the aesthetic data of the art exhibit—Tillmans has a picture of a toucan in the show—into a kind of critical software, parasitic to the institutional apparatus that it seeks to examine, if not destabilize. I want to hear about how you approached this assignment.

KE

I have been asked sometimes to write for catalogs and there's something about the assignment that doesn’t suit me. My assignment was to address Wolfgang Tillmans and global infrastructure. A few times now I’ve said I am not really qualified to write a piece like that in the third person. But I’ve agreed to write something else that uses the work.

EO

What does that mean?

KE

The Tillmans text is sympathetic to, or in the spirit of, his work. It's all about correspondence and interplay between the pieces. I just chose some things I wanted to write about and put them into interplay. Toucan has the qualities of a performer. Those little black eyes that seem to be saying, “It’s not about my beak.” You almost can't do it better than a Toucan. And it's so nice of you to have asked that question and read my entry to the catalog in that way.

All the things that I chose to write about in Tillmans’ catalog were things that fascinated me: teenagers, the night sky, scrotums, bellies, and so on. Different things that make our organisms more than the horrible sort of human that we have constructed for ourselves so far. The beyond-humans capacities treated in Tillmans’ work was something worth writing about.

They were transposed to an active register in this work. The text starts out by saying, we've all treated our bodies like these modern Enlightenment receptacles that are facing forward and processing reasonable information in the brain. But I was foregrounding more cephalopodic potentials in the human—in teenagers, in images on paper that are recording an active matrix of things. So it's all the same fascinations.

RRL

It’s so refreshing to see the way you play with the exhibition catalog. The piece does not fulfill the art historical assignment that the medium asks. It processes the aesthetic data from the exhibition into something active and propositional, something, like you said, “unexpected in a document like this.”

KE

It is nice that you point this out. The piece was also meant to be jostling that kind of catalog culture and the careerism in art shows. I'm pretty sure no one read it that way but you. So thank you.

RRL

I can’t help making those connections. Your work often challenges what you call “the modern habit of mind” that is hardwired into a kind of solutionism, the impulse to look for the cure. In contemporary cultural discussions, the figure of the nonhuman or what some might call the more than human came to the foreground. Donna Haraway urges us to stay with the trouble and to inhabit a messy field of more-than-human agencies. I find her anti-solutionism resonates with your idea of what medium design ventures to explore. It asks us to overcome the self-righteous manifestos, which is a kind of mediatic relic from the last century, and to start to be nimble, agile, cunning, and strategic.

KE

Medium Design looks at the stubbornness of modern Enlightenment whiteness, which is constantly constructing knowledge in terms of “the one,” “the one and only,” or the Manichean struggle. Constantly looking for an elementary particle that can parse the whole universe. There is a frustration with the way in which even the smartest people in the world seem to constantly be reproducing that whiteness. It's somehow the water that the fish can't see. And the more we look for singular enemies and singular solutions, the easier it is for superbugs to outwit us. We make it way too easy for them. I was trying to look at a spectrum of evil—capitalism, whiteness, racism, fascism, xenophobia, femicide, caste, and on and on. I'm sure that disappoints those who want to identify a singular evil and singular enemy. But I was really insisting on that spectrum. Maybe it is a stronger position to “stay with the trouble.” Even to say that problems are themselves a resource. The more problems you have of them, the more you can make resourceful assemblages of problems or a robust matchmaking between problems.

EO

I've been thinking about TRIC (Tahoe Reno Industrial Center) in Nevada, and the idea of building for machines. What are the conversations being had, even amongst your students, about the desire to build? What lies in their desires to build right now?

KE

I end up teaching students who are trying to experiment with other kinds of forms—not only object-based forms, but forms of interplay or are attached to some kind of activist potential. That's often what I see in my students. But sometimes I feel like I'm bursting a bubble about the digital world because I'm trying to put emphasis on heavy information, on relationships in solids and physical IRL things . In part, that is because of the automatic harm that comes from so many financial and technical abstractions. Just financial abstractions, you know, you don't need me to convince you of that. Sometimes, I can see that my students think that the only innovation—this is again the modern mind reproducing itself—can be one that uses a new technology of digital, because the new technology kills the old technology, and all that. You know, like blockchain. The real innovation may be about the way that emergent and incumbent technologies interact.

EO

I’ve been thinking about Facebook and Apple—TRIC is this territory outside of Nevada where they’re building large infrastructures to house machines. I recently interviewed Rem Koolhaas and he is excited about it because it's a new type of building. It’s not building for a material line or a factory. It’s like we're living in a newer mechanical age. In terms of this modern mind that you’re mentioning, we're kind of born into abstraction, and this perpetual hall of mirrors. Your writing is like, “Wait, take a second and look at the ground, the ground is brown.” Or you’re even introducing this conditioning of analytical thinking where, with blood and the symbolism of red, and how red communicates violence in television. Building permissions and abstraction—it’s like signage. We live in a city of signs. I really like how you even talk about zoning and cities, because you bring specificity to these abstract models, cities as a distraction, or businesses, the specificities of these different models that are not in place for us to question, but instead we learned, like, “pack it up and move on.” In your role now in academia, beyond your program, do you feel like your project has changed?

KE

Maybe not changed, but developed, thickened. I mean, it's a strange, autodidactic set of instincts in a way. One thing that keeps me interested in the architecture world is the physicality of space. When you see the failures of economics, you see the automatic harms and failures of capital. When it fails, what's left is the physical stuff. When a house stops being a trafficked mortgage product, it returns to some dirt, a tree, and a bunch of wood. So, it's those moments of failure where we get all that stuff back. It comes back to us with all of its physical values. It's architects who usually work with solids and put things together. When capital fails, it is like, “great, okay, now we can roll up our sleeves and work on reassembling this in a way that overwhelms that capital.” It's not saying, “I have the singular solution which will replace the previous singular solution.” It's kind of like the possibilities of an information system that's physical and made up of all kinds of different values. And maybe you can overwhelm capital not by replacing it with another universal system but with multiple modes of exchange, that don't have a single elementary particle, that aren't a currency. These are forms of mutualism—forms that value position, proximity, kinship, and all those other things that do not register on the ledger of capital.

RRL

This reminds me of Anna Tsing’s work, which attends to the more-than-human cominglings in the ruins of modernity that you just described. What do you think architects can do at these sites of disturbance, distress, and toxicity?

KE

I have recently been reading some of the things that Tsing writes about indigeneity, which are really nourishing to me as they are in dialogue with other feminist thinkers. But one of the things that struck me was her discussion “inconsistency” as a secret weapon. And the other word that she uses, which just makes so much sense to me is “patchy.” Usually, the world only rewards you when you've come up with the perfect solutions, or the homogenized, pasteurized, complete, universal answers. But maybe the moment of innovation now requires something patchy, partial, and impossible to parse with an elementary particle. It cannot be understood according to the modern affliction of consistency. Maybe that's the way we can outwit the superbug, keeping them starved and disoriented instead of making an easy target for them.

RRL

But, in return, the superbugs are well-versed with the techniques of being patchy and irregular as well—such as the free zone, which is the subject of Extrastatecraft. The zone has this patchy, variegated texture, because it affords a space of governance where laissez-faire can be juxtaposed in close proximity with the heavy handedness of regulation and control. And I must say I find it productive to think with you about the figure of the pirate as this eighteenth-century predecessor to the free zone. Their transgression was sanctioned by the states because they performed certain maritime, and therefore colonial, functions that the terrestrially seated center could not. The government needed the pirates back then, just as it needed the zones in the latter part of the twentieth century.

KE

Right. Regarding the superbug, two can play at this game. The zone is, for the state, a kind of pirate ship. It's the place where you have your shadow characters and, legally, do your cheating. They have made it legal, within this zone, to cheat. Just like the king would letters of marque to go out and do all kinds of shadow things. Now, piracy and cheating are naturalized in office parks with ponds, ducks, golf, and colored fountains. It is made to look like a perfectly clean fantasy of the city with bursting hearts, rainbows, and fireworks.”

RRL

Yes, the free zones kind of run Pirate 2.0. As we entered the second decade of this century, the zone as we have known it since the establishment of UNIDO is half a century old. I started to hear neoliberal alarmist narratives that go, “globalization has encountered its bottleneck, and the dark time of the state is coming back.” But punishment and sanction, or taxation and exemption, have always been oscillating in this extrastatecraft-y thing since the time of piracy. Back and forth. It’s nothing new. What we are experiencing now that is new is perhaps the heightened frequency of this oscillation. The spatial products, to use your term, that result will perhaps be patchier and patchier.

EO

I want to piggyback on this because you talk about cities as formulas. What does it mean to map a visual lexicon onto a new city? I was thinking about keywords that you introduced and mass production and the general insincerity and banality of building. What happens when New York is Singapore is California is Hong Kong? Where do we go from there? What do we do about this existing formula of city building?

KE

I guess what you're asking is: “Do you think the free zone formula is waning?” All the zones are slightly different, and they develop in different political contexts. MBS is doing this kind of not-your-father's free zone, which is called The Line or NEOM or whatever. It is chilling. I mean, the free zones that I was looking at all promoted themselves with the same kind of cartoon videos. They have the same components—shiny towers, intermodal ports, and so on—with the same kind of ecstatic, cartoonish promotional soundtrack—coming down from the stratosphere, finding the new center of the earth, and all that. NEOM or The Line presents itself with another kind of upbeat, soft-focus photography and clip art. It looks like a pharmaceutical ad. There are lots of expats running around the desert and doing cartwheels or otherwise trying to make things look benignly smart.

RRL

I like the metaphor of patchwork in thinking about the zone and, potentially, its aesthetic manifestation. I appreciate the diagnostic work you’ve done in Extrastatecraft. It reads like a sobering account on the zone in terms of what is really going on in a global, infrastructural level from an urbanist and, let’s say, macro-economic viewpoint. But sometimes I feel the urge to map the rich cultural and aesthetic lives taking place in and against these zones. Like, what are our aesthetic agencies in this global zone-making apparatus? Folks from Times Museum and Video Bureau in Guangzhou, for instance, seem to have done curatorial and archival work that presented and reframed a kind of counter-culture in and against the geography imagined as Pearl River Delta, which has been this poster child of all zones since 1979. Through them, we learn about, among other very interesting work, the performance Drive Shaft by Lin Yilin, the video work One Hour Game by Liang Juhui, and the collaborative practice of Big Tail Elephant. There seems to be a sensibility of a critique of the zone that is shared among their works. For instance, all are critically attuned to the socio-political implications of the hyper circulation of capital, labor, bodies, and information brought by the zones. Perhaps, while the zones are streamlined through the gray literature and promo vids from the McKinsey consultants and World Bank experts, we also have a kind of very rich and radically charging counterculture metastasizing in the very locales where the global imaginary is manufactured.

KE

The zone is precisely designed to neutralize resistance or counterculture. That is why it was invented. Of course, it may still exist, but everything is working against it—against expression, citizenship, collective bargaining, and any form of uprising or protest. In the zone, it is hard to see a way to deploy client based professional architecture as dissent.

EO

Can we zoom out a bit? It seems like we’re talking about the differences between aesthetics and style. In terms of thinking about postmodernism and functionality. Consumer culture is so different now and malls serve such a different purpose than they have historically in the past, now they’re business cards for these brands to interact with the products instead of being a space of gathering around consumption. [Laughs.]

KE

Sidney Lumet said, “Style is the thing you can't see”…or something like that. Consumer culture is composed of totemic signals. Dubai, China, and Kazakhstan are very good at creating a kind of mediagenic set of images.

EO

Where are you going with these concepts and things that you just mapped out?

KE

I am working on designing different forms of interplay to reverse engineer sprawl, rewire transportation networks, reduce the violent temperament of some organizations, or reduce the obstacles to community and mutualism among many other things. We are designing all kinds of protocols of interplay, testing them, drawing them, playing them out, and animating them. We are looking at all kinds of things to do with migration, climate change, whiteness, racism inequality—the full spectrum of evils. Right now, the thing I'm really focused on is alternative landholding organs—trusts, cooperatives among them—that can take land off the capitalist property ledger and make it available for the incalculable values created by the mutual exchanges of community. I am telling a historical story. I am looking at a site in the US that became a global stage for experimenting with these alternative organs and a cross roads for activists at a moment of solidarity between the Pan-African, Non-Aligned, civil rights, and Tricontinental movements. I hope this history will inform contemporary planetary activism.