Ecological thought emphasises the interplay of part-whole relations,

those of parts, for instance a plant, a species, operating in a non-unified

whole. Ecologies are wholes that are never complete. Tey emerge out of

the interactions of a multitude of processes and entities and operate and

are acted in at multiple scales. Tis complex relation between the part and

the whole is an aspect of what makes ecologies open to being thought

of as systems. It also allows us to think about ecologies in abstract terms,

as something sharing qualities with other non-totalising systems such as

media.

Tis condition of interplay between parts and wholes is something that

characterises aesthetic work, the relation of a musical phrase to that of

the whole symphony; the particular style of movement of a character in a

computer game to that of the capacities of others; the particular inflection

of design of a door in its relation of analogy and differentiation to the

other objects in a room, the treatment of its surfaces; and its keying in to

the design of the building as a whole in architecture. Music, games and

buildings, as different media systems (if we can take that term broadly)

each have their own characteristic ways of addressing or composing an

idea of the general: how they act to compose the world in terms of unifor-

mity, differentiation, and co-composition. Te relation between the speci-

fic and the general can in turn be seen as a translation of the part-whole

figuration. To take a particular example, something as everyday as a bridge

plays out a relation between the specific and the general.

When you are thinking about design at the infrastructural level you must

resist thinking from the basis of precise cases. For instance, in designing

a bridge, you don’t bring it together on the basis of the particular vehicles

that travel over it, this specific car, or that individual truck. You certain-

ly don’t think about a particular group of people driving over it whilst

singing a certain song on a certain day several years hence, or design the

rumbling of the road surface in contact with the tyres to assuage the

distress of a particular group of sheep who might be on their way to the

slaughterhouse in the back of a lorry. A bridge deals with the general, not

with the specific.

A bridge is designed in relation to certain generic standards such as those

of construction strength, the habitual or novel use of form and materials,

expectations of use characterised at a statistically developed level. It im-

plies a certain universality of travel. At the same time though, it may react

to local conditions, propose new stylistic or structural concerns, articulate

the relation between what is under and what is above, spread the expe-

Inmaterial 01. Matthew Fuller

rience of movement across it, suture landscapes, economies or languages,

and do many other things.

Bridge design can be used of course for a certain amount of disruptive

activity. Tis is perhaps why bridges are so often targeted in conflicts, as

means of disrupting supplies and movements. Bridges are also a classic

artefact in claiming a politics of technology. Tey may act as a force of

blockage as much as one of conjunction¹.

¹ For a story about bridges, see

Winner (1999). For a critical

response, see Joerges (1999).

Te urban theorist Keller Easterling writes about such things as part of

her discussion of a politics of infrastructure (Easterling, 2014). Standards,

road typologies, the size of physical interfaces to banking devices, ID

cards, all integrate, amongst their universalism, a kind of uniformity. It is

the specific texture and tonality of this uniformity that engenders much

of their politics. Tis politics is not to be simply understood as one of

prohibitions, mobilisations, commands and so on - a model drawn from

the military - but rather one of establishing the means by which things

gain the conditions of becoming possible. Here, design thinks about itself

in the role of producing the raw materials for a further stage of change.

Establishing the grammar of such change is a key stakes of power in the

present era.

Perhaps anticipating this condition, and also seeing it played out throu-

gh a paternalistic modernism of buildings with their modes of use being

overly-prescribed in advance, Gordon Pask (1969) talked about a cyber-

netically-inspired ethics of design in terms of what he called “Underspe-

cification”. Tat is that things should be made in order that their function

can be reinvented, coupled with other things, that they do not pre-empt

the future. A bridge in this sense is also then a platform, a set of condi-

tions for things to happen². Underspecification is a conceptually advanced

² For a discussion of platforms

in digital media see Goriunova

form of modesty for architecture, the idea that it is to make entities out

(2013).

of which other things will be composed. It aims to allow for the relation

between the specific and the general to remain unfinished.

Te extent and affordances of the underspecification of objects and

systems is an important condition for contemporary design in an era of

digitalisation, expanded forms of materiality and of globalization. Easter-

ling’s reflections are particularly useful for a consideration of the latter, as

standard objects proliferate as means of implementing and maintaining

conjunction across the globe. Here, she identifies a nuanced micropolitics

of the artifact, and of norms and the interplay between them to create a

grammar for global assemblages. Tere is a sense in which parts become

Inmaterial 01. Underspecified Dreams of Parts and Wholes

simply subsets of wholes, rather than wholes arising from the interplay of

parts, where the general conditions the particular - leading to the danger

of a loss of variety, and of a politics of homogeneity arising from the sim-

ple unfolding of pre-formatted parts.

Modular forms may also open up possibilities for recombination and ge-

nerativity, as in the ideal of the sandbox - as found for instance in games

and in learning. However, underspecification may also function as a tech-

nique of absorbing the unexpected emergence of otherwise irresolvable

social forms, as a form of preemptive architecture of crumple-zones.

Tat is to say that the particular forms in which an underspecified design

plays out, in terms of its texture, what it blocks, combines with, draws out,

or inspires have a fundamentally political level, but one that is often arti-

culated as being solely technical in nature: when the technical is unders-

tood to be ostensibly neutral. In particular we see this in the “facilitation”

offered by software and by computational infrastructure, of the everyday,

of governance and of selfhood. Te expanded forms of materialization

that constitute the remarkable way in which computational forms have

been woven into and now substantially constitute the condition of con-

temporary culture.

In a sense, there is an argument that the position that software develo-

pment is “simply technical” works, in that it is an argument that itself is

truly underspecified. It thus gives room for an abundance of invention,

manipulation and counter-currents of use, since those aspects of the work

that were seen to be non-technical are not attended too.

At the same time, there is an increasing attention to the modes of cul-

tural operation of things such as algorithms, data structures, file formats,

databases, interfaces, protocols, data security and so on that constitute the

everyday technical material of software developers³. Here, for the purpo-

³ See for instance in the journal

Computational Culture (http://

ses of cultural invention, or for understanding such materials in political

www.computationalculture.net/).

terms, it is important that the recognition of their materiality is expanded

beyond the simple replication of their technical description.

Te scholar Ben Kafka notes something similar in relation to the question

of paperwork and the files characteristic of bureaucracy, a close description

of their agency, must be accompanied by a recognition of their integra-

tion with and incitement of neurotic and desiring activity (Kafka, 2012).

Indeed, this is so much the case, that, as with the “simply technical”, un-

derspecification per se can only be a description of a tendency. Attempts

Inmaterial 01. Matthew Fuller

to reduce things to a purely functionalist level of description can indeed

occur - as in border crossings, or other zones where there is tight, and

highly tense, reduction of things to a stable script. Tese specimens require

an enormous amount of supplementary equipment and work to hold such

a condition in place.

Te extended debates amongst developers about whether the fifth ver-

sion of HTML (the mark-up and programming language for the web,

that now includes vastly expanded provision for the creation of apps, and

for video, amongst other things) should include a native mechanism for

so-called “Digital Rights Management” show that the question of what

and who a technology is for, and what implications it has for the circu-

lation of culture, even if only in well-established discursive forms such as

the discussion of that curious formula “Intellectual Property”, have at least

some degree of traction. In this case, other interests prevailed.

In the last chapter of her book, Easterling suggests that a certain kind of

cunning with technology and with standards is required in order to work

politically in the present. To put this differently, to work with the agency

of the particular characteristics of certain kinds of code, interface, screen,

is part of the art of the contemporary. And such an art is articulated diffe-

rently by multiple actors: regulators, inventors, user experience designers,

companies, hackers, international standards bodies. To make such an

incomplete list of actors is to suggest an ecology of part-whole relations

around and constituted in a technology. Alongside these figures, we can

array others who specifically work to maintain qualities of underspecifica-

tion, even in the most totalised of medial systems.

One of the means of rendering even the most totalising system into a

state of underspecification is to submit it to the imagination - and here

Kafka’s injunction to recognise medial materiality in relation to questions

of psychic conditioning and desire comes to the fore. Here too, the histo-

ric role of art, even if it has been one that has been partially swapped out

for something tidier and more convenient, is worth attending to.

Te Russian Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov is the author of a myriad of

brilliant texts; a visionary, linguist and geographer, he had the great for-

tune to be the author of “Te Radio of the Future” (Khlebnikov, 1921), a

prognosis for media systems that thrills with its capacity to overstep the

bounds of the foreseeable, the standardized and the normative. At the

same time, the text imagines a new deliriously inventive form of univer-

sality, or space of general communication. Russian Futurism took the

Inmaterial 01. Underspecified Dreams of Parts and Wholes

future to not simply mean the tense that comes after the present, but the

condition in which becoming becomes. From this position they were able

to enter into their present from the point of view that was no longer what

it was, since it had already entered into becoming. An understanding of

materiality, whether that was of words, languages, paint, clothing, alcohol,

and technology, was coupled with this imagination; a vivid materiality that

specified the hitherto unspeakable, rendering the world open to the play

of delight and invention and of dreams.

A related opening up of technology to the imagination can be read in

feminist work that rejects the convention of acquiescence to an imagi-

ned nature. Te 1970s writing of Shulamith Firestone, particularly the

closing chapters of her “Dialectic of Sex” (Firestone, 1970), or the recent

Xenofeminist manifesto (Laboria Cuboniks, 2015), and certain currents

within Sadie Plant’s “Zeroes and Ones” (Plant, 1995) work this seam in

which the cantankerous and cretinising part-whole relations of gender

standardisation are opened up through, as Firestone puts it, an integration

of the poetic and the technological. Feminism of this kind is an immense

resource in thinking through designing in the era of digitalization, expan-

ded forms of materiality and globalization since it is very familiar with

the relentless labour of challenging the supposedly natural and organic

nature of certain ways of reducing people to parts, the overspecification of

relations and of the immense and intimate labour of standardisation.

Whilst it shares with art an openness to reinvention and dream, such

feminist work is reasonably suspicious of making yet another call to dream

in order to reconstitute the world, for this is already common knowledge,

and the world is an accretion of such dreams or of desires taken for reality.

Living in a time when a technical disposition to openness, also provides a

form of capture, we know that certain dreams, namely nightmares, are of

great preponderance. In this condition, the question of the composition

of the relation between the specific and the general becomes one in which

a certain cunning is required in order to remain underspecified, with a

certain tensile relation to becoming.

Inmaterial 01. Matthew Fuller

References

Easterling, K., 2014. Extrastatecraft, the power of infrastructure space.

London: Verso.

Firestone, S., 1970. Te Dialectic of Sex. Te case for feminist revolution.

New York: William Morrow and Company.

Goriunova, O., 2013. Art Platforms and cultural production on the internet.

London: Routledge.

Joerges, B., 1999. Do Politics Have Artefacts? Social Studies of Science,

29(3), pp.411-431.

Kafka, B., 2012. Te Demon of Writing: powers and failures of paperwork.

New York: Zone Books.

Khlebnikov, V., 1921. Te Radio of the Future. In: Ch. Douglas, ed. 1987.

Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov, 1: Letters and Teoretical Writings.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp.392-396.

Laboria Cuboniks, 2015. Te Xenofeminist Manifesto. [online]

Available at: <http://laboriacuboniks.net/> [Accessed 27 May 2016].

Pask, G., 1969. Te Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics.

Architectural Design, September issue, pp.494-496

Plant, S., 1995. Zeroes and Ones, digital women and the new technoculture.

London: Fourth Estate.

Winner, L., 1999. Do Artifacts Have Politics? In: D. Mackenzie,

J. Wajcman, eds. 1999. Te Social Shaping of Technology. 2nd ed.

London: Open University Press.

Underspecified Dreams of Parts and Wholes. Matthew Fuller