Choreographic things: rhythm affordances of situated care

I am concerned with how situated ecologies of care come into being through the interplay of rhythms (patterning movements) and affordances (potentialities) of materials and constructions, be they those of buildings, things, artefacts, environments, bodies, or other forms of life. The notion of rhythm-affordances will be developed through what I have come to call choreographic things which, whilst inherently in flux, establish, in Karen Barad’s words, a cutting-together-apart. In this cutting-together-apart these choreographic things, these rhythm-affordances, are what might be understood as instances or phenomena (Barad) of enlivenment (Weber), a concept which asks us to engage in shifting our perception, and therefore reception, to recognize the intrinsic aliveness, interconnectedness and subjectivity of all beings-in-relation, human, non-human, and more-than-human alike.
Suffusing this particular take on the nature of architectural produce through the diffractive lens of choreographic things is a long-held position that the methods, methodologies, epistemologies and most importantly the ontologies (theoretical positions, values, ethics, beliefs) inhering in architectural 'production' are not commensurate with complex situated ecologies of multiple planetary beings, which are essentially entanglements of contingent relations-in-movement. Our pressing matters of care, – for climate, for all manner of marginalised and excluded planetary beings, for inequalities, oppression, violence –, call for methods of engagement which embody interconnectedness, relationality, and essentially non-dualistic precepts which question notions of separateness – spatial and temporal – which inhere in what I refer to as the projective mode of architectural production.

In this projective mode, architecture anticipates but does not fulfil the desire of something constructed; it is the apparatus of represented speculations. This mode is certainly extremely important; indeed, architectural representations can be understood to have a materiality in their own right and are important discursive practices which participate in the making of the world, indeed of the material knots of everyday life. Such speculations have the potential to participate in the transformation of individuals and communities, to set dreams in motion, and to instigate/trigger new imaginings and meanings.

But this projective cast is a long one, in terms of space (e.g., it takes in the studio, with its technologies of representation,) time (e.g., its historical time), and effects. As focussed on representation, and representation's primary mode of meaning making through embedded discursive and semiotic relationships, the projective is deeply implicated in what Bourdieu calls "strong discourses" which swell around and often through it, such as the deeply representationalist binaries of all descriptions, such as the either/or, us/them/, male/female, subject/object etc. And there are discourses which need to be articulated, to be amplified, not through representationalist means, but through doing otherwise, such as those about public space, the city and other territories, about marginalised communities, about the oft-complicit embrace of neoliberalism and architectural production, about gendered or and racially exclusionary implicit policies, about precarious conditions of survival, about climate catastrophe and design for other-than-human. These discourses are particular distributions of the sensible as Jacques Ranciere would call them: they have a significant role in bringing things to bear, of making the world.
Architecture, as materials, constructions and discourses, participates in becoming, that is in worlding, that is, as a verb,⁠ architecting. It is not separate from our bodies, but is our bodies, just as sun is light because our retinas register it so, or sound is sound because the waves intra-act with the tympanic membrane in our ears. In a sense, when we perceive and sense architecture, we bring it into being. And, understood as not separate from us, it brings us into being. Into being refers not to some achieved terminal state, but to the ongoing unfolding of the world. Elsewhere I have described an architectural (pedagogical) 'choreography', which is delineated through various often intertwined modes. These include expanding the situational dimensions we use the process of site making, the body's performative and implicative force in making, and the role of intraventions of bodies-cum-materials/constructions in live situations. The choreographic thing focuses particularly on the latter, on bodies-cum-materials/ constructions in movement. The essential performativity of architecture is about entangled materials, technologies, discourses and bodies, and how, through this meshwork, phenomena come into being. The materials and constructions of architecture are affordances, in our bodily intra-action with them.
I explore the notion of choreographic things, of rhythm-affordances, as 'dimensions' of situations to approach the complex, intimate, and care-full dance of attention and correspondence that fuels connection amongst things-within-relations, and co-responds to their immanent shifting, movement, and liveliness. Rhythm-affordances emphasize the entanglements, the constant sharing of shifting, oft differentially repeating and patterning cues, and vibrant articulations amongst things within ecologies, which can no longer be seen as separate but must be necessarily thought through an ontology of interconnectedness, interdependence, and sympoietic cooperation and collaboration. Things are entangled and they constantly share partial messages and cues and signals with each other about the various ways in which they understand or feel or grasp their being part of such.
Several key thinkers will help my meanderings into ways of thinking and doing which critically engage with this always in flux worlding, acknowledging and using our entanglements in what we might call situated ecologies of care. From the ontological perspective, Donna Haraway and Karen Barad will be in attendance, with their understandings of situatedness, phenomena, being-with, and intraventional performativity (an area which will nod to the notion of 'radical performativity' [ref]). Henri Lefebvre's engagement with rhythm accompanies me, and the notion of affordance of course gives a nod to James Gibson but is developed through more nuanced understandings of reciprocity across intra-acting bodies. And working with Bruno Latour's notion of 'dingpolitik' and Jaques Ranciere's 'distribution of the sensible' will afford possibilities to configure choreographic things as political dimensions that matter.