Architecture Eating the Earth
Part One: Technological Extension
NOTE: This was going to be a single letter but it has been divided into two parts. The first part will discuss Georges Bataille’s general economy, technological extension, and his ideas for gift-giving as energy transfer. Instead of focusing on gift-giving between humans, as Bataille does, this will explore architecture as a means of giving gifts to the nonhuman earth. The second part, which will be sent out (hopefully!) next week will complicate this week’s letter by introducing Bataille’s own ideas about architecture. This letter relies on Hannah Arendt’s distinction between the human “world” and the natural “earth,” in which the world is the realm of human objects and the earth is all of the nonhuman.
The surface of the earth is full; life has filled every crevice. In The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy (1949), Georges Bataille argues that on an earth saturated with life, growth can only be measured in reference to a single species and not life “in general.” In other words, there is no growth; every extension of a particular species can only come at the cost of others. He argues that the economic division into groups—nations, classes, species—has only clouded our vision of the “general economy”: the transfer of energy across the face of the earth. Following this expansion of the economic realm, Bataille comes to two conclusions, 1) there is no scarcity, and 2) there is no room.
In a world without (general) growth, Bataille defines three transactional “luxuries” that allow for change in the makeup of life: eating, death, and reproduction. Together, these three luxuries mediate the transfer of energy within and between species in an “economic” relationship. These transactions reorient economic theory toward consumption, rather than human production. The frame of consumption allows Bataille to reveal humanity’s special form of “extension”: technology. For Bataille, “human activity transforming the world augments the mass of living matter with supplementary apparatuses, composed of an immense quantity of inert matter, which considerably increases the resources of available energy.”1 This technological apparatus lays claim to and extends the surface of the earth by creating the human world. Technology operates on the species scale and so is differentiated from eating, but as it stands human extension has historically operated through the consumption of the other, both human and nonhuman, transferring energy from the earth to the world.
This differentiated flow—enacted through these unequal transactions—builds stockpiles of unused energy until they burst, most often through war.2 Bataille tracks these bursts as they inevitably find an outlet, and argues for the importance of planned energy waste in human societies. More importantly for us, he argues against the differentiated stockpiling of energy in general, putting forward an anthropocentric solution that would see nations work to smooth these flows across the earth. In his example, the colonial/capitalist metropole (America) would give unreciprocated gifts to developing countries. For Bataille, this solution would smooth out the inequality of technological extension between human groups and prevent the inevitable explosion.
Bataille’s theory also sees the unequal transfer of energy from the nonhuman earth to the human world, but doesn’t extend his solution of gift-giving beyond the human. This is likely because the unequal flow from the earth to the world doesn’t quite explode into anything the scale of interhuman war, instead our relationship with the nonhuman is made daily through practices of extraction and destruction. We might extend Bataille’s framework and construct relationships to the nonhuman through reorienting gift-giving. The use of technology as a gift to the nonhuman earth is certainly growing in popularity through means that we would generally recognize as “tech,” but also through architecture, which is certainly within Bataille’s bounds of technology. If you need an example of architecture as a component of human extension look at the suburbs, a form of living that consumes biodiversity and returns little green lawns.
Architectural engagement with the nonhuman is a growing project. We might look at More Than Human, a book with the institutional backing of the Het Nieuwe Institute and the Serpentine Galleries, or the work of R&Sie(n), Harrison Atelier, and Barry Wark, or (on a tiny scale, comparatively) the work of my own sophomore studio at Kent State this spring where students were asked to design cross-species social clubs for humans and a specific nonhuman. These projects re-appropriate the human capacity for technological extension for the benefit of the nonhuman earth, adding to the “surface” of the earth to allow for the expansion of multi-species environments. In general, these projects are great, they often undercut a profit imperative and open a “waste valve” for the dispersion of human energy to the benefit of the earth. But, they are unavoidably human at their base. As a human specific trait, technology can seemingly only ever be human. This might seem redundant, but it's important. I would argue that extension is extension: all architectural production relies on the extension of the technological base, and the boutique “natures” of these practices inevitably valorize the underlying other technologies at their base (software, AI, or the material apparatus of construction) that are built on the unequal exchange of energy from the earth to the world.
Understanding these projects as always in relation might lead us to think that there needs to be an underlying change in something much larger than architecture in order to enact real change in our relationship with the nonhuman, and for the most part I agree. Architecture as technology is implicated by the web of other technologies that it is in relation with, and the ideology embodied in technology under capitalism is against the worker and the earth. What I want to complicate, and what will be the focus of the next letter is in further exploring the inevitability of the human image of the world in technology. Using Bataille’s famously negative definition of architecture, I’m going to ask if changing the production of architecture is 1) possible, 2) even the right place to start.
Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, trans. Robert Hurley(New York, Zone Books, 1949), 36.
It is important to note that The Accursed Share was published in 1949, only four years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but that it was in production throughout the war.