From Flow to Habitus:
Notes on Software, Accounting, Environment
Benjamin H. Bratton
The Culture Industry, SCI_Arc and UCLA
November 20, 2002
Current interest in the problematics of “flow” as a figure through which to imagine the interrelations of software and architecture directs concern toward dynamic, bodily habitation as –again- the key environmental design conditions and criteria.[1] Flows configure the movement of things, real and virtual, through landscapes, concrete and infomatic, pulsing forward as capital fluidity. The language of “flow” affords a definition and conception of subjects and objects as processes, and of processes as dynamic encounters across multiple environmental membranes.
The temporality of architectonic space is modeled as a kinetic swarm, as a plateau of incorporation and fragmentation on which cross-pollinating trajectories of individuation and exchange are mobilized mobilize themselves. The blending of a spatial understanding of the materiality of information with a environmental design agenda for bodies-in-motion has both analytic and practical importance. For digital architecture, the reprioritization of the cultural complexities of social and bodily organization is an improvement over the 1990’s preoccupation with “information” as, on the one hand, an operation of (hardware + “users”) modeled as cognitive processing devices, and on the other as a purely formal, aesthetic generative apparatus on the other. This maturation should allow architects and environmental designers to conceive information technology systems as central to the core programmatic functions of the spaces they construct. Instead of only painting with electronic forms as an element of material surface, architects deploy software programming as an operation of site programming. Software becomes a fundamental element not only with which we model spaces before building them, but also out of which we fashion and construct those spaces, as both tangible structure and experiential flow: “bricks and bits.”[2] Likewise, spaces from furniture to factories to urban systems become infrastructure for the strategic design of information technology as a core medium of social, bodily complexity.
But the limit of flow as an imaginary is that it tends to direct our attention toward the mechanical performance of software-augmented space, accomplishing this at the expense of affective and cultural performance. The social dynamics of individuation, collectivization, differential embodiment frame and ultimately realize social denotation, distinction, and domination. To the extend that “software,” broadly indexe, is the new mode of production, mode of communication and –for architects of flow- the new mode of habitation, it is certain that software is also a technology of value and valuation. Software –as linguistic convention, as environmental condition- is a medium through which economies of financial, cognitive, aesthetic or functional value are assigned and communicated. However, flow’s overriding interest in field dynamics and organizational tectonics tends to flatten the expressivity of valuation and counter-valuation into just another emergent system behavior. Flow is experience, but experience is embodied, not only infomatic. Flow prioritizes fluidity over interference, and thereby backgrounds resistance.
My appreciation of flow, as a spatial figure of computation, is its dynamic sociocentrism; as my appreciation of flow, as social figure of space, is its technocentrism. Again, program into program. The blending of computational program with spatial program points toward several activations of software-narrated experience: indexical, inscriptive, and predictive. These are the functions of “accounting,” which is and will remain the killer app of augmented space (apologies to gaming, which serves a different set of purposes.) Within the accounting discourse, I (the user/inhabitant) construct a database of information indexing everything known about a certain organizational field according to the cognitive categorical conventions at play (rent, equipment, depreciation, lunch, car payment, meeting with Michael, etc.) As new events ‘take place’ they are cognized and categorized according to those conventions, ongoing inscription grows my indexical database (“new entry”).[3] In turn upon encountering ambiguous events, I refer to my database in order to make sense of the event and to give it meaning, I administrate its significance (“is there room in my schedule for that?”). The culturally constructed quality of each of these processes, their instrumentality and affect, is precisely why cultural performativity, not just mechanical performativity, is the condition whereby architectonic program and computational program can merge. That accounting institutionalizes the division and organization of experience into conventional embedded hierarchies of information, and legitimizes those as technologies of organization –personal and political- makes it a rich discursive prism through which to critically focus that merging.
Interface
The practical and discursive constructions of “accounting” interfaces for mobile and pervasive computation……. Toward locating these processes of indexing, inscribing and predicting as core functions of augmented space, I review below some (perhaps by 2003, even pedestrian) examples of accounting as a display and input interface. Attentive to Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus, I critique those interface systems as differential “structures of durable dispositions of action.”[4] Emergent pervasive software systems, whether hand-held or environmentally embedded, both displace and relocate the interface between embodied social actors and the “linguistic” technologies with which those actors construct systems of meaningful interaction. “Software” needs to be understood simultaneously as language (interface, code) and as architecture (as both habit (cognitive, corporeal) and habitat (environmental, enveloping). “Interface” is understood as both the textual condensations that operate computational choice (the screen interface), and the conversion or transposition of embodied action into a technology of software. The differences between interfaces can be mapped according to different qualities of the private and the public, and according to different modes of transposition (or, after Manovich, “transcoding”) between embodied and virtual layers of action.
The discourse of accounting organizes the subject position of the user as a specific agent of naming, categorizing, exchanging and compiling. As a control text that helps guide activity in the production of practical space, accounting interfaces create circuits between embodied economic activity, the management of that activity according to software, and the production of self as a manifestation of that personal computational management. Accounting software concretizes those habitual categorizations and process-related valuations of experience into interactive confession-narratives, ones that reveal and allow for more general understandings of the social constructions of individuation through software interfaces.
Habitus
Habitus is understood as “the systems of durable, transposable dispositions that structure”[5] Aaron Cicourel defines it as, “a self-regulating system of generative principles whose durable existence produces practices that are the outcome of both an objective structure of social relations and the particularity of the individual phenomenological experience in and of that structure.”[6] That phenomenology names the experience of being embodied in a navigable, meaningful world. The forms taken by habitus are the categories of possibility afforded by a particular form of embodiment. Human technologies form the horizon of worldly experience: we experience the world through them, and we reflect upon that experience. Habitus is itself that mode of embodiment.
Etymologically, habitus is related to both “habit” and “habitat.” Habitat is the artifactual residue of specific, habitual actions over time, grooves worn into the surface of the environment over multiple durations, and, simultaneously, bodily habits that are the subjective reflection of environment onto self. These processes, habituation and habitation, coordinate each other. They form a circuit whereby habit informs habitat as the artifactual residue of its performative repetition, and also whereby habitat stabilizes the stage and condition for those very habitual repetitions.[7]
The concept of habitus is employed by Bourdieu to convert the limits of both phenomenological and existentialist perspectives, as well as structuralist and historical-materialist interpretations, into a general instrument of sociological investigation. Central to this conversion is the common nexus of the body, understood as both a repository of historical construction, manifested as disposition, and as an agent in the limit-conditions of those constructions. Categorization of the life-world is a manifest function of this active embodiment., performing the instrumentality of social life: the competitions over the production, definition, valuation and expenditure of various modes of capital (social, economic, cultural) as each themselves are functions of differential embodiment.
Software as Habit
Software condenses embodied habits of thought and action into economic systems of cognitive hierarchies. As “language” software both inscribes and describes social action, and as technology an actor enunciates those systems of cognitive hierarchy as the medium of social action. As a structure of disposable inhabitation, software affords a reproducible form of habit, inhabitation and practice. Some contemporary software, designed specifically for the fabrication and maintenance of “self,” as technologies of its accountability, are direct materializations of computational subjectivization. As for any other sort of habitus, access to sites of reproduction is the architectonic capital with which habitat becomes habit. Software acumen provides access to the dispositions of practice it embodies: access to frames and institutions of reproduction and capital-formation in the digital economy. Software, as the operant life-world technology in the network society, structures in its image the construction of individual identity.[8] Software becomes not only a variable in the differential display of habitus; it becomes a grammar for the generation of doxa, of the conditions of the game itself. Software not only cleaves a new sort of class distinction deep into a new sort of social space, it is also reorganizes in its own image the terrain on which capital is produced.
The cultural and social legitimacy of any sort of continuous exercise of power is dependent upon its ability to restructure the techniques of the social field into its own terms and shape, and upon its ability to reproduce itself formally and institutionally. The social field in which, and over which, habitus organizes modes of capital is one not simply mediated by software, but most directly composed of software, built of software and of “soft” interactions. The production of the software-enabled habitus is in turn, reinforced by the production of habitus-enabled soft spaces. The acquisition and application of software-related skills is a crucial social strategy in the network society. Software acumen, considered broadly, does not only define the practical means with which to work and communicate in a software-based economy. Because of its importance in the definition and acquisition of economic capital in that economy, it also serves to redefine the quality and character of social and symbolic capital in general. Software produces the conditions of material space in its own image.
Software as Habitat
Software, as both language and technology, is not only a device-language with which we act upon space, it is also itself a material architecture. As surely as any other architectural reality, software is a lively, embedded feature of the social world. Glowing screens co-populate our homes and workplaces, fiber and copper wires traverse and materialize economic routes, and through those routes, software powers and provides multiple species of capital. Increasingly, it is impossible to imagine architectural or urban design projects without considering built space as an infrastructure for software-mediated activity, and without a foregrounding of software as a primary stage on which habitation will play out there.
The “interface, ” as both textual post-genre and as generic metaphor of connection and communication, has emerged as perhaps the dominant material discourse of action across multiple global cultures. Interfaces generalize and condense the utility of physical features and affordances of the life-world. Considered as nodes along the trajectory of a given day, modulating interfaces narrate everyday life. The practice of everyday life requires the navigation of a complex geography of interfaces. The scenario of the day involves a complex mapping of the distributed spread of interface. Interfaces animate most of our important social technologies; they are concentrated in automobiles, on television screens, on telephones, on PDA’s, videogame consoles, on desktop computers, on cash registers, on ATM’s, on portable music players, on remote controls, etc.
Interfaces are central to the programmatic logics of space. Specific interfaces are utilized in specific architectonic conditions: “Offices” are not just where certain kinds of socio-economic activity takes place, they are more specifically where certain software and material interfaces are activated; “living rooms” are not just where other kinds of culture take place, they are, likewise, more specifically where certain software and material interfaces are activated. The same interface specificity differentiates the inhabitation of public banking terminals, automobile interiors, retail purchasing registers, etc. Software and the interfaces that make software into social technologies frame the practice and personality of everyday space, and these modulations of interface discourses are crucial to practical urban and architectural design in the network society.
Mobile Computing and Augmented Architecture
Mobile computing and augmented architecture are two interrelated modes of pervasive computation. Both are dependent upon different modes of user-data interfaces, and accordingly produce different discourses of self-accounting, as well as attendant subject-positions.
The PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) is the iconic device of mobile computation. Representative products run the Palm OS or Pocket PC applications, but others, like the RIM Blackberry, are based less on the model of the handheld computer and geared more toward wireless email functions. Next generation phones running Psion OS or scaled down Java-applets, for example, drive handheld device convergence from the conventions of telephony and speech. Taken as a whole mobile computation should be understood not just as a technique for making data portable, but as a unique, socially complex system for the ritualistic, performative and emotional mediation of personal and public spaces. Mobile computation does not just link individuals and groups; it is also a technology for the production of social agencies and new modes of cultural organization. It demands difficult and contentious new definitions of privacy and publicity, of connection and dislocation. Mobile computing devices allow users to interpret the world, and accordingly input new data to their portable “personal data stack.” Users are able to judge events as they happen by making reference to that stack, and to anticipate or organize upcoming events. Portable software allows for individual users to construct personal control-texts that assist in their mastery of the field conditions of the life-world. It accordingly constructs self-identities in the practical image of those control-texts and that mastery. They do not simply enable the conditions of communication; they also produce the structure of that very enabling.[9] The interface organizes the world for the user of mobile computation.