Frontiers of Manipulation
Reza Negarestani
What are the limits and conditions of material manipulability? More importantly, is there a
connection between the concept of the material and the function of manipulation in the
sense that the latter decides the former? Drawing on some of the recent discussions in
the field of engineering with regard to models, cross-level causal manipulation and intralevel intervention, renormalization groups, morphogenetic analysis (the science of forms)
and non-extendable explanatory and functional levels, this presentation aims at
providing a concept of material organization beyond but reconcilable with the level of
appearances. Whilst claiming that (1) material descriptions are blind to explanations and
(2) only causal and functional explanations are capable of rendering the material
intelligible and making material intervention possible, a robust concept of construction
and manipulation cannot dispense with descriptive resources of appearances and
macro-level domains. Once approached through local possibility spaces opened up by
deep explanatory levels or the scientific image, the powers of abductive inference
implicit in the manipulation conditionals at the level of ordinary descriptions enable a
mode of construction that expands its frontiers from the top and from the bottom. This
marks an encounter with the material that is neither quite speculative nor quite empirical
while it is both abductive/non-monotonic and under real constraints.
***
This presentation is built around one claim: manipulation is able to account for
materiality. In order to elaborate this claim, I would like to introduce a formalism of
manipulation and for this purpose, it is necessary to impose certain limits and regulatory
restrictions on the scope of materiality we aim to examine.
One of the most consequential developments in the field of modeling and intervention
(namely, intervention at the levels of structural and functional organization) and in the
domain of ‘engineering epistemology’ is the radical change in the definition of the
system. According to this this shift, system is no longer understood by the analysis of its
intrinsic systematic architecture. In order to know the system and in order to be able to
act on it, we do not require ideas such as intrinsic architecture, foundation and essential
constitution. Even the duality of part-whole relationships which was previously used to
describe a system is no longer necessary. Instead, the system is identified in terms of
tendencies as abstract properties that determine the behavior of the system, in terms of
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the functional organization of the system and its overall behavior. In other words, ‘what a
system is’ cannot be studied independently of ‘what a system does’, and what a system
actually does cannot simply be understood as what it appears to be doing. That is to
say, for a complex system what a system appears to be doing is hardly ever what it
actually does, insofar as the surface character of the system’s function is realized by
qualitatively different sets of individuating powers and activities (qua realizers) to which
we do not have immediate access. According to this definition of the system, the totality
of the system is not real, it is only a side effect of the integration of the system’s
functions. In short, there is no totality but only functional integration.
Here, I approach the term function in a technical sense. Firstly, a function is attributed
not to an item or a thing but to the item’s behavior and what a thing does. Function of X
being Y does not explain X directly; it explains the system to which X contributes.
Functions are marked by their plasticity in the purpose-attainment of a system or its
various undergirding mechanisms. But here the purpose-attainment should not be
interpreted in the sense of an inherent purpose but simply a state of activity. Functions
are not determined by their structural constitution. They can be reconstituted in different
material substrate as long as specific material-organizational criteria for their realization
are fulfilled. This is the basis of multiple realizability thesis.1 In short, functions are
multiply realizable while multiply constrained. These constraints are set by various
organizational levels which play a role in the individuation or realization of functions.
The multiple realizability of function is not pure abstract realizability. In other words, a
function cannot be fully abstracted from its material organization so that it can be
implemented in a limitless number of material substrates. Nevertheless, the embodiment
of the function is not an impediment against its multiple realizability and cannot be used
as an argument against functionalism. A function can be realized by different realizer
properties and for different purposes as long as organizational constraints associated
with the embodiment of the function are taken into account. While a function cannot be
abstractly realized insofar as it is individuated by different levels of material organization,
the multiple realizability of a function implies the weakening of the determining influence
of the structural constitution over function. Hence the definition of the system in terms of
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According to the multiple realizability thesis, the realization of a function can be satisfied by
different sets of realizing properties, individuating powers and activities. Therefore, the function
can be realized in different environments outside of its natural habitat by different realizers.
Multiple realizability usually comes in strong and constrained varieties. The strong version does
not impose any material or organizational constraints on the realizability of a specific function,
therefore the function is taken to be realizable in infinite ways or implementable in numerous
substrates. The constrained variety, however, sees the conditions required for the realizability of
a function through a deep or hierarchical model comprised of different explanatory levels and
qualitatively different realizer properties which impose their respective constraints on the
realization of the function. Each mechanism that explains an activity (qua explanandum) is a
realist constraint upon that activity. But since mechanisms responsible for an activity are not
uniformly or contiguously distributed, the constraints they impose are dimensionally varied.
Accordingly, the criteria for the realization of a function are characterized as dimensionally varied
and multiply constrained.
2
‘what it does’ and ‘what it can do’ can be elaborated without recourse to constitution or
an account of ‘what the system is’. This shift suggests that in order to render the system
intelligible, the activities of the system at various levels must be highlighted. But the
examination of activities requires complex modes of intervention at different
levels of the system’s organization so as to determine how these activities are effected
and to what dimensions of the system they are attributed.
In order to explain a system by way of its tendencies, in a similar way, first we have to
single out tendencies or abstract properties which individualize the behavior of the
system. But we cannot identify these tendencies, unless we amplify them, in a sense
identifying them by manipulating parameters responsible for their behavior.
Consequently, obtaining information regarding tendencies and functions requires modes
of intervention and manipulation. A system can be rendered intelligible, its organization
can be mapped and its local-global picture can be acquired by identifying tendencies
and functions through various modes of intervention and manipulation. Models
accordingly are not just analytical tools, they are interventive tools that entangle with the
structural-functional organization.
Throughout the last three decades, the rigid account of system theory that has its roots
in the early gestalt theory and has developed by the likes of Ludwig von Bertalanffy has
fundamentally changed. The advent of robust conceptions of the functional organization,
hierarchical complexity, generative entrenchment and tendencies has allowed us to
understand and examine systems in a new light. The epistemology of the system—
which is to say, the knowledge of the system—no longer focuses on the question of what
a system is but instead closely examines and interacts with what a system does and
what it can do. Since as mentioned earlier, the totality of the system is in fact nothing but
its functional integration—its qualitatively distinct activities and individuating powers
distributed across various levels of its organization—then in order to know the system
one must examine the functional organization of the system. But epistemic insights into
the functional organization of the system is not a matter of simple analysis. Functional
links between various organizational levels of a system cannot be correctly localized and
characterized unless through online interaction with these functions—that is, by way of
manipulating the system and its functional parameters through action-based modes of
inference. The epistemology of the system, accordingly, is understood as an
armamentarium of complex heuristics that study the system (qua functional integration
and tendencies) by manipulating it (intervening with its functional organization and
tendencies). This constitutes a new model for understanding materials and examining
their organizational dimension, i.e. what makes them intelligible as materials.
However, we should note that the origin of this manipulative or interventive mode of
epistemology is not inherently new. The roots of the idea that in order to know a thing we
need to intervene and manipulate that thing can be traced back to the origin of
philosophy, especially the Socratic tradition of ethics. In the classical program of ethics,
the self is regarded as a material from which the philosopher should navigate both the
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landscape of truth and the landscape of goodness. Self is the veritable material of the
philosopher that has the characteristics of a problem. It is a problem because one
cannot take it as a given nor from the outset pretend as if one is free from the self.
Whereas the former leads to illusions irreconcilable with reality, the latter only
reinscribes selfhood under the illusion of freedom from the self. Therefore, the self is
treated as a problem that needs to be worked out procedurally. As the primal material of
the ethical philosophers – such as the Cynics and the Stoics – in order to know the self
qua the immediate material of the philosopher, you must organize the self, but one
cannot organize the self unless through construction and individual-collective
manipulation of the self. This becomes Socratic dictum that shapes the origin of the
ancient Greek ethical program: A philosopher should not exert influence on others
unless he first attends to himself but he cannot attend to himself unless he knows
himself, (ergo, the oracular dictum ‘Know thyself’). Yet he cannot know himself unless he
constructs himself, which is to say, treat the self as an object of understanding-viaconstruction—a manipulable problem or what is called a non-explanatory hypothesis.
Accordingly, ethics becomes a program for the design of conduct that allows for the
constructability of the self as a material that is no longer bound to a fundamental
constitution (an intrinsic meaning or identity, a prior state of affairs, etc.). Ethics is then
defined as a program for the knowledge of the self in the sense of working out the
problem of the self by way of procedurally constructing it and manipulating its traits and
boundaries. Correspondingly, ethics becomes a project which is not moral, codified,
voluntaristic or contractual but is rational and destinal. Destinal in the sense of selfrealization, because once one understands these conducts or activities as functions,
then they can be repurposed, recontextualized and even furnished with their own
functional autonomy. This is what a function is, a designated activity, a role that is
capable of escaping the straitjacket of its constitution and by doing so, realizing itself in
different organizational substrates. The ancient program of ethics in this sense can be
regarded as an initial gesture for understanding the system through manipulation. For
after all, what is a system other than an integration of functions into a canonical
subjectivity.
Now what I would like to discuss is how engineering approaches materiality by way of
manipulating its structural-functional organization. But before that, it is beneficial to this
discussion to give a very brief introduction about what we mean by materiality here.
Materiality is about a certain form of organization, a nested hierarchical complexity of
structure and function, and their mutual influence over one another. This hierarchical
organization—which is hierarchy both in terms of the structure and the function—is the
register of complexity in material systems and marks the frontiers of manipulability or
what we can do to a given material. Obviously, the depthwise complexity of this
hierarchical organization is directly associated with not only how much we can
manipulate something but also and more importantly, where does the manipulation takes
place (i.e. where in the organization the results of our manipulation register). The relation
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between manipulability and complexity is not by any means straightforward. More
complexity doesn’t essentially translate to more manipulability. Where there are
numerous functions already accumulated and integrated into an entrenched functional
organization, then manipulability is much harder. Similar intricacies arise on the level of
structure. Our manipulations do not essentially spread all across different structural
levels. These are all aspects of the relation between material organization and
manipulability that need to be taken into account and of course, explaining them far
exceeds the scope of this presentation.
The realist account of material complexity is the stochastic expression of nested
hierarchies where true decentralization takes place. A good example for understanding
the hierarchical account of complexity is the biological organization which is comprised
of various phase spaces and biological hierarchies. The most important thing to know
about these biological hierarchies is that they have distinct explanatory levels and their
governing principles are not the laws of physics proper. This is why the biological
domain cannot be thoroughly reduced to the physical domain. The relation between the
two is that of unification rather than strong reduction. The organization of materiality at
the level of physics proper involves the so-called geodetic principles or Lagrangian
optimality—the law of the least action for a given trajectory. For example, a river always
runs along the shortest path (the geodetic curvature) toward the sea. This type of
optimality however is absent in biological organizations because biological evolution is
not about geodetic optimization insofar as biological evolution is not simply evolution
along a specific trajectory. Biological evolution deals with an entirely different concept,
the ecological fitness which is optimal selection in terms of generic rather than specific
trajectories of evolution.
However, just as the explanatory and descriptive levels of biological organization of
matter cannot be stretched or reduced into those of physics, different explanatory levels
of a physical organization cannot be overextended to one another either. Both the
intelligibility of the material and its limits of manipulability are determined by the physical
organization of materiality. But the physical organization is neither flat nor homogenous.
Instead it is distinguished by qualitatively different and non-extendable strata or levels of
structure and function. It is precisely the organization or the intricate interactions
between these levels which render the term materiality intelligible both from the
perspective of what it means for something to be or behave as material and what it
means a material to be manipulable. Lacking a multi-level account of material
organization, the concept of materiality is merely a metaphysical curiosity if not a
contentless term.
The first important point in investigating the logic of hierarchies in material organization
is that these organizational levels have their own specific rules of manipulation, precisely
insofar as they are qualitatively different. In this sense, each level is endowed with
different explanatory and descriptive resources. The concept can no longer be applied to
the material x all the way down. In fact, the concept cannot and should not retain its
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semantic content across different strata because that would amount to the flattening of
various organizational levels which render the material intelligibility and allow for
designated manipulability. This is why conceptual patchworks are used in studying
materials and their organization and the conceptual behavior changes from one level to
another.
Within the hierarchical-organizational framework of materiality, extreme modes of topdown and bottom-up approach—such as strong eliminativism and strong emergentism—
are revealed to be models built on elision of different levels. It is this elision or incorrect
merging of different organizational levels which (erroneously) permits the overextending
of conceptual, descriptive and explanatory resources from macroscopic levels to
microscopic levels or from lower level to upper level phenomena. Both reductionist and
emergentist models contribute to the understanding of the material organization by either
uncovering the richness of lower levels or the complexity of higher levels. But once the
top-down or bottom-up approach is universally privileged to the exclusion of the other,
the multi-level account of explanation is flattened, richness of reduction turns into
impoverishment and complexity of emergence becomes so ubiquitous that signifies its
banal vacuity. Short of the multi-level account of material organization and the
differentiation of explanatory-descriptive levels, we are exposed to a wide array of
fallacies and metaphysical biases in defining, modeling and manipulating materials. Not
only identical conceptual resources cannot be mobilized from one level to another, rules
of manipulations or the so-called manipulation conditionals cannot be overextended from
one level to another either.2 For example from the perspective of material manipulability,
there is no necessary continuity between macroscopic levels, microscopic levels and
dimensions at atomic scale length.
Explanatory resources, descriptions, concepts, individuating powers and properties,
rules of manipulations and functions cannot be overextended from one level to another
because there is a discontinuity between organizational levels. The criterion for the
classification of these organizational levels is usually the scale at which the phenomenon
is active. The question of scale is addressed through the concept of length scale or the
length determined by one or a few orders of magnitude. Physical phenomena or material
configurations of different length scales cannot usually affect one another. In order
words, connections between different length scales of a material organization are
complex and not fully differentiable. The discontinuity between different length scales
requires a different mode of examination, one that would be capable of decomposing the
material into its organizational levels and subsequently, recomposing the information
gathered from these distinct organizational levels into a robust conception of materiality.
2
Manipulation conditionals are specific forms of general conditionals that express various causal
and explanatory combinations of antecedents and consequents (if… then…) in terms of
interventions or manipulable hypotheses. For example a simple manipulation conditional would
be: If x were to be manipulated under a set of parameters W, it would behave in the manner of y.
For a theory of causal and explanatory intervention, see James Woodward, Making Things
Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
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Therefore in the wake of the discontinuity imposed by different length scales, the
question of materiality becomes the question of integrating various structural-functional
levels without overextending their conceptual resources, descriptions and explanatory
valences. In the same vein, if the concept of materiality is comprised of different nonextendable organizational levels, then how can we have a robust account of material
manipulation (or intervention at the level of material) that does not simply overstretch
specific modes or methods of manipulation from one level to another. It is in this sense
that lacking explanatory differentiation and an account of inter-level discontinuity or
complex continuity results in trivial material manipulation. In other words, absence of
multi-level explanation results in explanatory impoverishment, while impoverishment at
the level of explanation and description culminates in inconsequentiality at the level of
material intervention.
In classical modeling, the question of studying the material organization and the question
concerning the relation between material and manipulation are answered by way of
infinite idealization. Since in classical modeling, the explanatory differentiation of various
organizational levels doesn’t exist, infinite idealization is the most optimal solution to
picture the organization of materiality and accordingly, devise solutions for material
intervention. But what is infinite idealization? We have a steel beam. We endow this
beam with a zooming function capable of zooming in and out of the fabric of the beam.
Once we zoom in on the steel beam, we see the structure of grains, the further we zoom
in, we still see the same structure and the same organization all the way down. This is
infinite idealization. Zooming in and out of the material x yields the same or similar
picture, only contracted or dilated. Some minor organizational features might differ but
main characteristics are preserved as we zoom in or out. The infinite idealization brings
about a construction-friendly picture of materiality, precisely because it uniformly
deepens the domain of the ordinary language which is specific to the stabilized surface
phenomena of macroscopic length scales. Since the domain of the ordinary language is
rich with manipulation conditionals and enjoys a maximal stability at the level of form, it
is applied all the way down or idealized as the constructive model of the material
organization. But the morphogenetic stability of form and the conceptual mappings of the
ordinary language are exclusive to the macroscopic surface phenomena and the world
of appearances. They cannot be treated as ubiquitous features throughout different
levels of material organization. It is for this reason that engineers cannot solely rely on
models built on infinite idealization.
Any model of material organization or material manipulation should be able to
incorporate three domains of hierarchies or span across three length scales: (1)
Macroscopic level, which is often associated with surface phenomena and affordances,
and can be adequately defined by the resources of the ordinary language adequate to
describe the familiar world; (2) Mid-level or meso-scale where various bridging
microscopic levels are located. In the steel beam example, it can be the domain of
crystals; (3) Beneath the microscopic levels there is the atomic length scale. At this
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lower dimension, the descriptive, structural and functional continuity completely breaks
down. Rules, descriptions and modes of intervention specific to the upper hierarchies
can no longer be applied to this level. Structures and behaviors of grains and crystals in
the steel beam cannot be extended to the atomic scale where the material behavior
radically changes.
The inter-level discontinuity is also discontinuity at the level of the concepts applied to
the material organization. One cannot make a conclusion by way of conception at the
level of surface phenomena and extend its conclusions downward to the microscopic
levels. The same also applies to bottom-up conceptual inferences. Conceptual behavior
should reflect the complex inter-level discontinuity. Concepts which retain their semantic
content across different domains in the material organization are favored by speculative
philosophers precisely because they are building blocks of big ideas where speculation
can be exercised at whim. But as far the material ontology is concerned big ideas are
either the products of flat pictures of the material organization or the infinite idealizations
of one domain and its overstretching into everything else. In short, when it comes to
material ontologies, big ideas are results of global trivialization. In the same vein, models
lacking an account of the three general scales (macroscopic, microscopic and atomic or
upper, meso and lower dimensions) present weak, inadequate and biased
interpretations of what materiality consists in and how it can be manipulated or
constructed.
Since the morphogenetic stability of macroscopic levels is suitable for construction and
also descriptive resources of the ordinary language are specific to surface phenomena, it
is then obvious why models of material intervention tend to apply the key features of the
macroscopic dimensions to every other level. But this is also why engineers are also
wary of all-encompassing models or any formulaic account of material organization. In
studying and manipulating a steel beam for example, engineers do not seek a picture of
the beam that remains similar regardless how far we zoom in on the beam. What they
are interested in is how the behavior of the material organization of the beam changes
as we zoom in or move from one level to another. In other words, what they need are
multi-level perspectives. But these perspectives are intrinsic to the material organization
and must be capable of disassociating or stratifying the causal fabric into mechanisms
and specific structural-functional hierarchies. Only then it is possible to correct the
application of concepts and implement change in the material organization. However,
these perspectives are not subjective viewpoints, they are special tools, modes of online
manipulation of the material organization and the causal fabric. They are heuristic tools
that allow for the stratification and designation of the material organization and its causal
fabric. Their task is to distinguish the explanatory layers of a material organization, how
one level explains another and how a specific behavior of the material organization is
explained by structural and functional components. But explanation in what sense? This
is explanation in the sense of elucidating the relation between explanans and the
explanandum.
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A rudimentary example of explanation would be a shadow on the wall. When we try to
explain a shadow on the wall by itself i.e. by referring to its own characteristics, we are
merely describing the shadow. In order to explain the shadow it is necessary to
intervene or manipulate what casts the shadow. By manipulating the wooden pole, we
decide if it explains the shadow or not, and if yes, then in what way. This is what is called
the manipulationist account of explanation: X explains Y, if and only if had we intervened
with X, Y would not have been produced. Intervention becomes synonymous with
explanation. What is intervened with here through complex heuristics is the invariance,
because the relation between explanans and the explanandum can be studied in terms
of the thresholds of invariance preservation under given modes and conditions of
intervention. If the invariance is not preserved under certain parameters of intervention,
then there is no explanatory relation. The failure of explanation is in fact advantageous in
picturing the material organization, because it points to other hitherto unobserved or
unknown mechanisms or explanatory levels.
In order to construct robust and nontrivial models of materiality, it is necessary to have
multi-level perspectives capable of crosscutting the material organization into different
explanatory strata through deployment of complex modes of heuristic intervention. The
model in this sense not only explains the material organization, elucidating what
materiality consists in but also manipulates and intervenes with it. The concept of
materiality cannot be rendered intelligible without an account of material organization.
But the material organization cannot be coherently pictured without deployment of
complex modes of manipulation and interventive heuristics.
Manipulation techniques and interventive heuristics required for the navigation of the
different levels of the material organization must be specific and parameterized. Since as
it was argued earlier, manipulations at the level of atomic scale cannot be overextended
to other levels, their effects do not essentially translate into effects on macroscopic or
microscopic levels. Accordingly, any complex explanatory-interventive model must have
specific forms of designated manipulation capable of targeting a specific strata or length
scale. This is where engineering comes to play because in the broadest possible sense,
engineering is the armamentarium of complex heuristics and manipulative modes of
inference for online interaction with the material organization or the system under study.
This is heuristics not simply as trial and error techniques, but instead manipulation as
inference and designated intervention as thinking-in-doing. Here, however, the mode of
inference is neither deductive nor inductive but rather what Charles Sanders Peirce calls
abductive. It characterizes a mode of inference that is non-monotonic and revisionary. It
permits error-tolerant rules, that is a fallibility that is required for interaction with dynamic
systems and complex organizations.
Engineering’s abductive inference treats materiality as a manipulable hypothesis.
Intervention begins with a designated patch of the causal fabric. Then information
acquired as the result of intervention is used to synthesize various possible explanations
in the manner of new arrows pointing to the possibility of new levels, observables and
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behaviors. This deepening of behaviors in turn demands the design of new models,
perspectives and conceptual patchworks or maps. As the picture of the material
organization is deepened beyond the level of appearances or the surface characters
which are usually associated with forms, the demand for updating and expanding the
scope of manipulation also increases. This is expressed by the reinforcement between
the deepened picture of the material organization and the expansion of the manipulative
tools and techniques, between what the material is and how it can be manipulated,
between the definition of the system and how it can be constructed.
The heuristic approach, accordingly, does not preserve any foundational account of what
the material or the system is, it makes sense of the material organization in a piecewise
manner. For this reason, it uses logical procedures which do not entail truth, but instead
simultaneously preserve and mitigate ignorance. In this fashion, the constructability
implicit to the abductive manipulation becomes isomorphic to the understanding of what
the system or the material organization is and how it can be modified in any meaningful
sense. Correspondingly, expanding the scope of intervention and enriching the
armamentarium of manipulation techniques results in the deepening of epistemological
insights into the workings and the organization of the system. Just as the logical
structure of the abductive inference does not preserve truth, interventive heuristics of
engineering epistemology do not preserve the constitution of the system either. In a
certain sense, they implement the logical structure of abductive inference (nonentailment, non-monotonicity and non-preservation of truth) in the very material
organization they interact with. Rather than studying the system or the material
organization by focusing on the constitution as the main point of reference, the complex
heuristics intervene with the constitution. In other words, as a material equivalent of
abductive inference, the interventive method does not identify the system on the basis of
its constitution, it does not transfer or axiomatize the material constitution; instead it
changes the constitution in the course of its epistemic operation. For this reason,
interventive heuristics are synthetic operators rather than analytical tools.
As synthetic operators, interventive heuristics treat materiality as a problem. But they do
not break the problem into analytical elements for the purpose of study, explanation and
devising solutions. They literally transform the problem into another problem by
manipulating and interfering with its parameters. If the invariances of the problem are
preserved after the transformation, then they can be approached, analyzed and solved
on more optimal levels. The synthetic transformation disperses the epistemic fog that
prevents us to coherently approach and solve the problem. On another level, the
interventive heuristics dissociates different strata of material organization, thereby
reducing the risk of eliding different explanatory levels without which we cannot
understand or solve the problem. From a certain perspective, interventive heuristics
remove the lower bounds of materiality, that is to say, the privileged role of constitution
in studying the system or a material organization, fundamental assumptions with regard
to how a system behaves or how a material system can be modified. Once the
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foundationalist role of the constitution is removed, by virtue of its hypothetical dimension,
the system can be constructed further. Therefore, also the upper bound of the system—
that is, the limit of its evolution—is also removed. It is in this sense that the evolution of
the system in terms of exploring the possibilities of its (re)construction is integrated
within the explanation of what materiality is and what the system, its behavior, consists
in. The understanding of the ontology of system becomes tantamount to understanding
the behavior of the system which is itself a register of its constructability. In the same
vein, materiality is approached by way of heuristics which not only map its
organization—what makes material, material—but also intervene with its fabric. The
interventive or the manipulationist account of the system or the material organization,
however, does not require an a-priori understanding of a law or systematicity in order to
explain and construct, since what is needed for designated manipulation is information
regarding invariance. But in order to identify invariants, one does not need to know laws.
Inferential reckoning or tracing of spatiotemporal continuities and recognition of
processes is sufficient for the identification of invariants. The concept of materiality is
empty without its material organization. But the material organization requires
information regarding both intra-level and inter-level activities, mechanisms,
configurations and structural-functional links. Yet again this information cannot be
obtained without intervening with the material organization.
However, one question still remains: If the manipulationist / interventive account of
materiality removes the lower and upper bounds of material organization, then how can
we generally construct anything given that construction requires both regulatory
constraints and dynamic stability? How does engineering work if it does not establish
any lower and upper limits? The answer is that construction primarily requires access to
the surface characters and descriptive resources of macroscopic phenomena. For
example, the stress field of a steel beam, the solidity of a wood and its tolerance for
pressure. At this level, construction can be carried out using the rich descriptive
resources and manipulation conditionals of the ordinary language. In order to embark on
construction, to make something that functions, the engineer does not need the
knowledge of the atomic scale. The engineer can use the descriptive resources of the
ordinary language which are specific to macroscopic characteristics and morphogenetic
stabilities. By using the manipulation conditionals of the ordinary language
characteristics of surface phenomena, the engineer is able to make things which can still
function: For example, ‘if this amount of pressure is applied to a steel beam, it bends in
this manner.’ But the if…then… structure (the manipulation conditional) associated with
the bending of a steel beam is exclusive to the macroscopic levels and morphogenetic
stabilities of upper levels which cannot be extended to the lower dimensions.
However, construction is not solely about stability; it is also about expansion,
modification and fine-tuning. In order to expand the scope of the construction, to finetune the construction and if necessary to modify and revise what has been constructed,
the engineer must access the scientific concept of materiality by searching for
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mechanisms, navigating different levels of the material organization and extracting new
observables. It is this scientific conception of materiality that is continuously undergoing
changes and constitutes the space of possibilities for the expansion and modification of
the construction. In this regard becomes, the task of the engineer becomes how to
connect or more accurately extend the local domain of construction at the level of the
macroscopic to the ever-deepening space of possibilities, descriptive materiality to the
scientific conception of matter. To do so, first engineer uses procedures of localization
and conceptual mapping to restrict the scope of construction to specific set of
parameters or problems on the surface level (associated with descriptive resources of
the ordinary language and stable behaviors). Subsequently, these maps of construction
must be located within the space of possibilities and lower-level behaviors opened up
and uncovered by science. But this bridging of the stabilized and readily constructible
upper-level domain with the lower-level space of possibilities cannot be understood in
terms of a rudimentary continuity. The discontinuity between different length scales does
not allow a simple bridging between upper-level stabilities and lower-level behaviors
where possibilities of further expansion, modification or revision of the construction lie.
The constructive mapping of local spaces of the macroscopic level within the space of
possibility of lower levels calls for a view from the bottom and a view from the above. In
other words, only the simultaneous deployment of the top-down and bottom-up
approaches can ensure both the stability and the expansion of construction in the
absence of any upper and lower limits. While lower levels expand the possibilities of
construction and revise the higher-level models, the upper levels normalize and orient
the deepening of lower levels and correct their speculative dimensions under real
constraints. The conjunction of both views allows for the stabilization and expansion of
the construction by gluing upper-levels’ capacities for orientation and stability with lower
levels’ powers for deepening the possibilities of construction. It is through the gluing of
the top-down and the bottom-up that manipulation of lower levels contributes to the
intervention at upper levels and the manipulation equivalents of upper-level interventions
can be located or developed at lower levels.
For example, in order to synthesize a perfume with the fresh scent of the sea, a
perfumer first locates and develops the manipulation conditionals of his perfume in the
domain of the ordinary language associated with the macroscopic level. At this level, the
manipulation conditions are developed out of the rich descriptive resources and the
metaphoric plasticity of language: Since the smell of salt and algae on the skin is
suggestive of seawater then in order to synthesize a fresh sea scent, we can use
compounds found in algae and salt combinations. The next task of the perfumer is to
find the mid-level equivalent of such manipulation conditionals. This entails the
translation of the metaphoric language of the perfume into the mid-level chemical
reactions and compounds. The final stage required to construct and optimize the
perfume is to find the lower-level equivalents of the mid-level manipulation conditional
specific to chemical reactions. At this stage, construction is carried out using the highly
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technical language and complex manipulation techniques at the level of molecules. The
material organization of the perfume, its language and manipulation techniques at the
level of molecular chemistry are fundamentally discontinuous to the language of
materiality and construction methods peculiar to the domain of ordinary language.
Rather than overextending the constructive potentials of the upper levels to the lower
levels, the engineer finds the equivalents of manipulation conditionals of macroscopic
levels on microscopic levels, and subsequently locates the manipulation conditionals
specific to meso-scale spectrum of the material organization in lower dimensions. The
constructive navigation is as much on each level as it is between and across different
levels. The engineer’s space of possibility is the depth of the construction—the
stereoscopic coherence between the stability and observable properties on the one hand
and manipulable lower-level behaviors and parameters on the other. Here, the depth of
the construction is the very map of the material organization that must be brought into
focus by realigning various models of intervention with regard to one another.
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