"Design Technology and Digital Production: An Architecture Anthology"
Edited by Gabriel Esquivel
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“Anotherness”, whispers our hypothesis. Far from the invariably vampirized mark of alterity of classical philosophy or the fetishized and necessarily othered other (xeno) of postmodern philosophy, the notion of “anotherness” suspends the categories of “self”, “other” and “world” in order to think of hospitality in light of a completely different imaginarium: rather than conceiving its gesture as the compulsive oscillation between “self” and “other”—which is always this self and any other, it affirms, always and everywhere, that there is more, more of the same, another one, but every time different, every time another thing. Anotherness; circulation rather than oscillation, multiplication rather than addition. A percolation void of originary arche and terminal telos, suspension in between vanishing points. Neither selfness nor otherness, only the intermittent—and at times permutative—motion of hosts and guests. But always in light of a recreative gesture: a variational and pleasurable action of multiple births that is not nihilistic, indifferent or alienated, but committed to a hospitable planet, a planet more alive and friendlier, a planet that is more fraternal.
Perhaps more clearly than ever, today this planet appears as a moving horizon of interchanges and intermittences that is no longer subordinated to the self par excellence, the human being. The hole in the ozone layer, frozen seed banks, global pandemics, xenobots, ocean garbage patches, or transgenic animals are not the others of the human, but instances of “anotherness”, recreations that flatly variate rather than hierarchically oppose or oscillate. How, otherwise, could we account for the fact that some or even most of these crossbreeding creatures constitute the Earth while showing complete indifference with respect to the flourishing of any human project? Solar multitudes and kaleidoscopic composites whose non-hierarchical (dis)encounters with the human being necessarily invoke forms of hospitality that are poly-plural rather than only reciprocal or permutative; they involve uncountable zoe/geo/techno fleshes and beings whose multiple spatio-temporal scales question what perhaps is the biggest naturalizing exercise of Western globalization: the reduction of all narratives into a single “Hyper Axis”, a fiction defined by the sequence “Pre-Modernity – Modernity – Postmodernity – Apocalypse”. Its logic is well known in today’s Euro-Christian universe: before Modernity (Pre-Modernity) everything is primitive. During Modernity, there is a world. After Modernity (Post-Modernity), only a nostalgic irony is left. And outside Modernity (Apocalypse) there is nothing. Since the agglutinative vocation of the “Hyper Axis” reframes any alternative narrative under the eschatological, anthropocentric, and colonial logics of the Enlightenment, it fails to address the onto-epistemic rupture of Linnaean taxonomies produced by the Anthropocene’s hybridations: mixtured strangers conformed not just by all sorts of human bodies and collectives, but also by biological, algorithmic, geologic and ecological motifs whose multi-natural resonances do not always involve the human phenomena.
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