Free Session II Reading Synopsis Essay Sample

Both "Victor Hugo's Ted Talk" and Bruno Latour make a case, in their own respective manners, about the significance of the agency of acting in art and architecture. Hugo, with his 19th-century assertion that "Architecture is information", could have landed himself a spot as a TED speaker. Latour, using the metaphor of acting, argues that actors in any given scenario exhibit more complex agencies than social theorists, with a limited metaphysical vocabulary, can possibly describe.
Latour propounds his Actor-Network Theory (ANT), stating that once an actor, or "actant", invents a technology such as the computer as a result of his thinking, that technology, in turn, ironically, re-shapes his thinking. In this sense, Latour's studies of social behavior go beyond those of traditional social scientists. Latour wants to know what the actors of an organization are doing as well as what they are saying. His processes ascribe an organizational intelligence apart from the actors in the organization. While they both influence each other, the influence is immeasurable. The very process that social scientists engage in, i.e. naming and categorizing, does not reflect the flow, or dynamism, of the actions they observe, Latour asserts.
In terms of architecture, infrastructural space has its own dynamics, similar to Latour's social studies. An important quality of the interplay between infrastructure and its space, or matrix, is its disposition. A philosopher named Ryle theorized about the "ghost in the machine". To Ryle, the ghost is disposition itself, that is, how a structure or form is disposed to do something, how it is disposed to act, even if it does not do so. Ryle also used theater arts as a metaphor to explain his theoretical musings. Like Latour, Ryle stresses the "know-how" as well as the "knowledge".
While neither of these thinkers specifically addressed architecture, especially urban architectural forms and infrastructures, their thinking can lend itself to the subject in an analogous way. When architects design active forms as opposed to object forms, their designs serve as a type of contagion that has transformational capabilities. Architects can design not only objects that know what to do; they can also design space that knows how to do, to borrow Ryle and Latour's terminology.
Lastly, this art both informs and expresses polity and can lie "hidden" like Ryle's "ghost in the machine". As it appears and disappears, nuanced yet concrete, concrete yet dynamic and beyond definition while lending itself to disposition, the work of the architect, like the actor, is perceived not as merely as a medium on a canvas. The object is less than its space, its defining space that remains as intangible as the action itself. Rather than form lending itself to description, "form", as the essay concludes, "is the action." Not only does this assertion apply to the world of acting and the social sciences, but it applies to the world of communications and urban architecture.