Journal of Architectural Education

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Strange Loops: Toward an Aesthetics for the

Anthropocene

Todd Gannon

To cite this article: Todd Gannon (2017) Strange Loops: Toward an Aesthetics
for the Anthropocene, Journal of Architectural Education, 71:2, 142-145, DOI:
10.1080/10464883.2017.1340787

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10464883.2017.1340787

Published online: 28 Nov 2017.

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 Strange Loops
Toward an Aesthetics for the Anthropocene
Beautiful things ... act like small
tears in the surface of the world that
pull us through to some vaster space.
... We find that we are standing in a
different relation to the world than
we were a moment before. It is not
that we cease to stand at the center
of the world, for we never stood
there. It is that we cease to stand
even at the center of our own world.
We willingly cede our ground to the
thing that stands before us.
­—Elaine Scarry1
In his famous 1965 essay, “A
Home Is Not a House,” Reyner
Banham argued for a shift away
from traditional built form
toward technologically assisted
environmental performance. To
make his case, he identified a fork in
the road of architecture’s prehistory:
Man started with two basic ways
of controlling environment: one
by avoiding the issue and hiding
under a rock, tree, tent, or roof
(this led ultimately to architecture
as we know it) and the other by
actually interfering with the local
meteorology, usually by means of a
campfire, which, in a more polished
form, might lead to the kind of
situation now under discussion.2
With half a century’s hindsight,
Banham’s partitioning proves less
tidy than he made it seem. The
tradition of hiding under a rock
produces plenty of interference with
the local (and global) meteorology,
which we now track in terms
of resource depletion, carbon
footprints, heat islands, and other
142
Todd Gannon
The Ohio State University
deleterious effects. At the same
time, the technological means with
which we interfere tend to produce
their own forms of monumentality,
as François Dallegret’s exquisite
drawings that accompanied
Banham’s essay made clear.
Banham structured some of
his most well-known arguments
as duels between competing
ideologies such as aesthetics and
ethics, tradition and technology,
and style and performance. While
he sometimes displayed a clear
preference for the latter terms, more
often he worked to uncover hints
of “other” architectures that had
less to do with abandoning one side
for the other than with accounting
for the paradoxical co-presence of
contradictory ambitions in the built
environment.3
Though Banham’s search for
alternatives was cut short by his
untimely death in 1988, inventing
“other” architectures that more
nimbly negotiate the relationship
between what we build, where
we build it, and how we occupy it
remains a pressing concern. And
as we become increasingly aware
of humankind’s culpability in
the irreversible ecological effects
associated with the Anthropocene,
we must be more mindful of our
impact not only on our own probable
futures but also on those of the
myriad animal, vegetable, mineral,
and other nonhuman entities
affected by our actions.
Promising lines of thought
will resist the easy partitioning of
issues into dire choices (people
vs. planet, complacency vs. action,
oblivion vs. salvation) and instead
will acknowledge that the options
outlined in such showdowns, like
those in Banham’s binaries, tend to
curl back on themselves in complex
feedback loops through which
environments and their inhabitants
co-construct one another. In these
loops, oppositions do not finally
settle into fixed hierarchies or
resolve into dialectical syntheses.
Rather, they reveal the imbrication
of certainty and doubt, cause and
effect, and beauty and justice in the
uncanny coexistence of the human
“us” and the nonhuman “other.”
Such loops course through
Dark Ecology, Timothy Morton’s 2016
case for a new kind of ecological
awareness. Though the effects of
positive and negative feedback loops
are well known in environmental
literature,4 Morton emphasizes
the importance of strange loops,
paradoxical structures that, like M.
C. Escher’s drawings, confound our
understanding of the hierarchies
that organize them.5 He offers the
simple act of starting a car as an
example:
Every time I start my car ... I don’t
mean to harm Earth, let alone cause
the Sixth Mass Extinction Event
in the four-and-a-half billion-year
history of life on this planet. ...
Furthermore, I’m not harming
Earth! My key turning is statistically
meaningless. ... But go up a level and
something very strange happens.
When I scale up these actions to
include billions of key turnings,
... harm to Earth is precisely what
is happening. I am responsible as
a member of this species for the
Anthropocene.6
At varying scales of observation, our
everyday actions prove both innocent
and apocalyptic. Too often, pundits
in the climate wars acknowledge
just one metric and argue with
half-truths. Yet, strictly speaking, the
skeptics are correct—individuals
and small groups exact a negligible
toll on the environment. Of course,
environmentalists are also correct—
the human species causes undeniable
damage to the planet. Unfortunately,
neither side knows where to draw
the line between innocence and
culpability. Definitive answers to the
most difficult questions elude us, so
round and round it goes. Everybody’s
right; nobody wins.
In Dark Ecology, Morton
attempts to break the logjam. Key
to his argument is accepting that
ecological awareness is weird.
Etymologically, the term implies
both looped structures and more
familiar associations with the alien
and strange. Rather than work to
domesticate the world’s weirdness
(as Western thinking usually does),
Morton exalts it. He revels in
paradoxes—you are both individual
and species, both part of the problem
and not—encountered everywhere
in ecological debates. He does so not
to resolve contradictions, but rather,
by showing that uncanny actions and
paradoxical coexistences are less
exceptions than the rule, to outline
a future at one with the mystery and
magic he finds throughout the world.
Morton draws heavily on
the philosophical movement of
object-oriented ontology (OOO),
in which he is a major voice, and
devotes significant attention to the
problem of causality.7 A succinct gloss
concludes with a crucial claim:
Object-oriented ontology holds
that things exist in a profoundly
“withdrawn” way. ... You can’t know a
thing fully by thinking it or by eating
it or by measuring it or by painting
it. ... This means that the way things
affect one another (causality) cannot
be direct (mechanical), but rather [is]
indirect and vicarious: causality is
aesthetic.8
Gannon
At first blush, Morton’s claim may
seem counterintuitive. Termites
chomped on a wood beam and caused
it to collapse. Case closed. OOO
doesn’t see it so simply. Graham
Harman, generally regarded as the
movement’s founder, builds on the
thought of Edmund Husserl and
Martin Heidegger to understand
the world in terms of sensual
objects, which (following Husserl)
are available to consciousness,
and real objects, which (following
Heidegger) cannot be known. For
OOO, the most salient distinctions
are not between subjects and objects
(as in most Western philosophy),
but rather between relational
entities (sensual, and available to
consciousness) and autonomous ones
(real, but impossible to know).9 In
the parlance of OOO, real objects
are “withdrawn from access.” You
can’t interact directly with them,
and they can’t interact directly with
you. Nor can they interact directly
with themselves, nor you directly
with yourself. For OOO, causality is
indirect; reality is elsewhere.10
This introduces a problem.
Things clearly happen, even if we
cannot fully know how they happen.
The aesthetic dimension, Morton’s
version of Harman’s sensual realm,
accounts for the how of happening.
It provides a way to understand
that objects interact with one
another at a distance, that the world
often operates more like art than
machinery. For OOO, there is more
to causality than direct, “sensual”
contact, as when a termite chomps a
beam. Causality among “real” objects
is indirect and extremely weird, as
when a work of architecture “moves
you.” Aesthetic causality is causality
without contact. It is causality at a
distance.11
By linking it so closely with
causality, Morton seems to move
aesthetics away from its traditional
associations with beauty. In fact, he
doesn’t move it that far.12 Consider
his take on the causal ambiguities
of beauty: “The basic issue with
beauty is that it is ungraspable. I can’t
point directly to it and I can’t decide
JAE 71 : 2
whether it’s me or the thing that is
emanating beauty. ... Things influence
one another such that they become
entangled and smear together.”13 As
with those billions of car ignitions,
a weird looping structure undoes
straightforward mechanical causality
and calls into question the status of
subjects and objects.14 For Morton,
these loops, and the flattened
hierarchies that result from them,
demand a wholesale reconsideration
of philosophy, politics, and
art. Through them, he aims to
articulate, as opposed to camouflage,
our paradoxical status as both
perpetrators and victims of ecological
crimes and to chart an alternative
future through “ecognosis,” his
neologism for a fuller, more honest,
and even joyous knowing of our place
both in and as the world.15
Dark Ecology presents a
daring alternative to mainstream
ecological thinking. The intellectual
investment, however, is substantial.
For architects, it involves extended
sojourns into territory beyond
even the most ambitiously drawn
disciplinary boundaries. Many
won’t be willing to make the trip.
Fortunately, uncanny premonitions
of Morton’s ideas exist comfortably
within the architectural ken, in
Reyner Banham’s late-career writings
on the American desert.
In these little-discussed texts,
Banham set out to make sense of
the fascination, exhilaration, and
befuddlement he felt in the Mojave
and other western deserts. His is
not the pristine, empty desert of
popular imagination, but rather a
“man-mauled” landscape literally
shot through with evidence of
human activity.16 It is crisscrossed
by freeways and power lines,
pockmarked by rusted out cars and
deserted campsites, and punctuated
by odd “oases” like Baker, Zzyzx, and
Las Vegas. All this adds to the desert’s
poetry, and some objects, such as the
McMath-Pierce solar telescope in
Arizona, exude a stunning sense of
rightness and conviction. Banham’s
experience is far removed from Frank
Lloyd Wright’s romantic quip that
143
the desert represents “where God is
and man is not.”17 The term “desert,”
Banham reminds us, is rooted in
desertion and abandonment.18 As
human activity is integral to Morton’s
understanding of ecology, for
Banham, people precede the desert.
And like Morton’s ecology,
Banham’s desert is deeply weird. Each
chapter in Scenes in America Deserta
(1982) begins with a “Revelation”
provoked by the desert’s alien
qualities. These range from strange
atmospheric effects (“It was uncanny,
as if the law of nature had been
suspended”) to the appropriateness
of the unusual (“Only the exotic
or the outrageous in architecture
tends to look at home”) to personal
feelings of incongruity (“I kept my
head down, and wondered if I seemed
equally weird”).19 At Mesa Verde and
other “inscrutable” ancient sites,
Banham feels alienated, as if he had
“come up against a glass wall through
which seeing was possible but
comprehension was not.”20
Yet with its alien forms, uncanny
colors, and ethereal light, Banham
finds the desert to be profoundly
beautiful. Here again we find an eerie
parallel with Morton. For Morton,
the joy of ecognosis is akin to the
experience of the immersive colored
light in a James Turrell installation, in
which “the environment at its purest
seems to absorb me from all sides.”21
Banham finds a similarly ecstatic
dissolution outside Las Vegas:
The towers of lights and the
changing skysigns were ... wavering
dizzily and fractured into flickering
filaments and ripples of pink and
electric blue and gold, floating above
a reflecting pool of mirage in the
purple air. ... The effect was ... like
a dream city dissolving in its own
ecstasy.22
Like Morton, Banham finds
traditional aesthetic terminology
inadequate to understanding such
beauty. “The desert,” he observed,
“is not strictly ‘beautiful’ in the
technical sense of the term as
employed by eighteenth century
144 Strange Loops
philosophers of aesthetics.”23 Nor
was Plato’s discourse on beauty,
“so good on solids ... disappointing
on color and ... dull on light,” up
to the task.24 Rather, in a distinct
premonition of one of Morton’s
favorite phrases, Banham finally
admits that the desert “just is”
beautiful.25
Even so, the desert’s beauty
appears to have to do with a Kantian
sense of displaced causality:
“Something in my long-term
uneasiness and fascination with
the desert derives from my never
having found a suitable disguise or
function with which to designate
my relationship to the landscape I
love.”26 This insight leads Banham to
reassess his own subjectivity:
The desert has made me ask
questions about myself that I would
never otherwise have asked. And
since I have no convincing answers
to those questions ... I have not
done what one is supposed to do
in the desert ever since the time of
Moses—I have not “found myself.”
If anything I have lost myself, in
the sense that I now feel that I
understand myself less than before. Ohio State University’s Knowlton
What I have truly found, however,
is something that I value, in some
ways, more than myself.27
Thus, Banham arrives at a place
Morton would discover three
decades later, a place where we
humans might learn to shed
at least some of the persistent
anthropocentrism we have inherited,
to relinquish our claim to stand at
the center of the universe, and to
face up to the role we have played
in making and unmaking the world
around us. Whether we trace the
twisting braids of Morton’s dark
ecology or set out along more scenic
routes in the desert with Banham,
we will discover an environment
bereft of its mythological trappings
and stripped bare of its supposedly
“natural” purity, a landscape
“stained and trampled, franchised
and fenced, burned, flooded,
grazed, mined, exploited, and laid
waste.”28 This place is weird, alien,
and uncanny, coiled into strange
loops by persistent ironies and
paradox. “We need to learn to live
with situations like that,” Banham
reminds us, “to take pleasure and
reward from the good we can extract
from the results of our actions, as
well as responsibility for our often
unforeseeable consequences.”29
Pleasure and responsibility. In
place of the stark choice between
(apparently extraneous) form and
(supposedly productive) function
with which we began, a last strange
loop, this one between an end
effect of beauty and a root cause of
justice. Linked through language in
shared affinities to the word “fair,”
the two concepts are analogous;
beauty motivates the slackening
of self-interest from which justice
springs.30 It should come as no
surprise that aesthetics would figure
so strongly in projecting viable
futures in the Anthropocene.
Author Biography
Todd Gannon is Professor and Head
of the Architecture Section at The
School. His most recent book is
Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High
Tech (Getty, 2017).
Notes
1 Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 112.
2 Reyner Banham, “A Home Is Not a House,” Art in
America 53, no. 5 (1965): 75.
3 See Todd Gannon, Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes
of High Tech (Los Angeles: Getty Research
Institute, 2017).
4 Positive feedback loops amplify changes in a
system and often produce damaging ecological
consequences, as when fertilizer is added to soil
to increase its fecundity and eventually results in
the degradation of that soil. Negative feedback
loops mitigate change, as when increasing heat
generated by a furnace signals a thermostat to
break the circuit that powers the furnace. For a
discussion, see Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For
a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2016), 7.
5 See Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An
Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
6 Morton, Dark Ecology (note 4), 8.
7 For a more substantial discussion of OOO in
the context of architecture, see Todd Gannon,
Graham Harman, David Ruy, and Tom Wiscombe,
 “The Object Turn: A Conversation,” Log 33 27 Ibid., 228.
(Winter/Spring 2015): 73–94. Mark Foster Gage’s 28 Banham, “The Man-Mauled Desert” (note
“Killing Simplicity: Object-Oriented Philosophy 16), 1. These are just some of the traces of the
in Architecture,” pp. 95–106 in the same issue, is 12,000-year history of “agrilogistics” that Morton
also apropos. outlines in Dark Ecology (note 4).
8 Morton, Dark Ecology (note 4), 16. Morton develops 29 Banham, “The Man-Mauled Desert” (note 16), 6.
the point in greater detail in Realist Magic: 30 Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (note 1), 86–93.
Objects, Ontology, Causality (Ann Arbor, MI: Open
Humanities Press, 2013).
9 Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object
(Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2011).
10 Ibid., 69–81. OOO starkly contrasts theories
of direct causation (often referred to as “naïve
realism”), which hold that objects in the world
interact directly, and that that interaction is
available, unimpeded, to our consciousness.
References to the long history of philosophical
assaults on naïve realism, as well to recent
advances in theoretical physics and quantum
mechanics that further strain its credibility,
pepper the literature of OOO.
11 This view of causality cleaves closely to Friedrich
Nietzsche’s: “For between two absolutely different
spheres, as between subject and object, there is
no causality, no correctness, and no expression;
there is, at most, an aesthetic relation.” Nietzsche,
“On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” [1873]
(Seattle: CreateSpace Independent Publishing
Platform, 2015), 28.
12 Causality was baked into Immanuel Kant’s famous
characterization of a beautiful object as involving
purposiveness without purpose just as it was in
Horatio Greenough’s definition of beauty as “the
promise of function.” Notice in both cases that the
cause of beauty, its purpose, is displaced in space
and time. Kant relegates purpose to an ambiguous
elsewhere (purpose is absent), while Greenough
puts it off until later (function is in the future).
See Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790; repr., New
York: Hafner, 1951), 56; and Horatio Greenough,
“Relative and Independent Beauty” [1852], in Form
and Function: Remarks on Art, Design, and Architecture
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947), 71.
13 Morton, Dark Ecology (note 4), 149–50.
14 It also answers objections that aesthetic effects
are produced solely in the mind of the perceiving
subject, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
For Morton and other proponents of OOO, beauty
is very much in the world.
15 Morton, Dark Ecology (note 4), 153–58.
16 Reyner Banham, “The Man-Mauled Desert,” in
Richard Misrach, Desert Cantos (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1987), 1–6. On the
ubiquity of shell casings on the desert floor, see
Banham, Scenes in America Deserta (Salt Lake City:
Gibbs M. Smith, 1982), 170.
17 See Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (New
York: Longmans, Green, 1932), 304, where Wright
attributes the phrase to Victor Hugo. Banham
discusses Wright’s activities in the desert in Scenes
in America Deserta (note 16), 69–89.
18 Banham, Scenes in America Deserta (note 16), 205.
19 Ibid., 20, 68, 110.
20 Ibid., 120.
21 Morton, Dark Ecology (note 4), 158.
22 Banham, Scenes in America Deserta (note 16), 208.
23 Ibid., 17.
24 Ibid., 224.
25 Ibid., 221.
26 Ibid., 227.

Gannon JAE 71 : 2 145