On "The Nature of Order"

{I Publish following little review  (which relates my overall impression of all the books in the series, not just the first one) here as a sort of place-holder for a much longer essay on the subject of “Living Structure” and “Living Infrastructure” as one of the four aspects of healthy culture, which I am still working on, and which will also post here, or one my motime blog, when I'm done–I-P}

“The Nature of Order”, Christopher Alexander's Magnum Opus quartet of books about architecture and cosmology is at once profound, bravely honest and frustratingly close to being really Individual and Personal in nature. They introduce and copiously illustrate the fundamental structural principles (Vol. 1), processes (vol. 2), cosmological, psychological and spiritual attitudes (vol. 4) that Alexander deems indispensable to the generation of Living Structure” (I might say “Living Infrastructure”). Volume 3 is about the potential of the application of the process as illustrated by a large number of examples of real life attempts.
 
The books are in some sense a continuation and elaboration of what was started in his previous works, of which “A Pattern Language” and “the Timeless Way of Building” are the most famous. I very much recommend all of these as well.

 I don't really have the space here for a more detailed description of the contents of the books. For that you can visit natureoforder.com. or patternlanguage.com. Instead, I hope it is not misleading if I see fit to limit my review to more of a critique. Make no mistake; these books are a brilliant, beautiful and sincere attempt by a highly educated (acculturated) individual to make sense of the world and to come to grips with, and get free from and replace, those assumptions of his own culture/education that, as they translate into practice, threaten to turn nature and the future into garbage. I write what I write here only because I feel it is crucial to the success of what I think we are both trying to accomplish that someone do so, and because I have no sense at all that anyone else is going to express it. 
                

I think that the only real flaw in the books is Alexander's unconscious undervaluing of (and perhaps even misconception of) culture. By this I mean not only “the Culture of Building”(Howard Davis), in some unnecessarily restricted sense, but culture in general as it relates to building among many other things. Rather than treating the Descartian worldview, science, and physics, as cosmological manifestations of a sick culture, Alexander seems to want to make culture itself subject to a new “trans-Descartian” physics which is nevertheless still fundamentally flawed and prejudiced by sick culture assumptions of Apart-ness and dissociated specialization.
 
I think he misses a more truthful approach because the sense of Culture as an irreducible subjective/objective whole and as an inextricable union of Cosmology, Identity, Ritual, and Infrastructure is relatively absent from his work/life, as it is from that of most people. Without such a healthy conception of culture (which is, “recursively”, itself an aspect of healthy culture) , he seems to think he can limit his diagnosis and prescription to treating of only one aspect of our culture, only some aspects of our dysfunctional Cosmology and only some aspects of Infra-Structure, leaving out Identity and Ritual almost altogether. Not unrelatedly, he does this primarily from the specialized and dissociated Identity-politics of “an Architect/Artist and Scientist” within the limited field of “Architecture/Art” (however broadly defined)…

The overall effect of this approach is extremely frustrating; it is as though important evidence is revealed in a way that obscures its most important implications; in a way that obscures the deepest truth that it is evidence of. It is like witnessing someone proving that the “emperor has no clothes” in a way that might make it harder and not easier to challenge “empire” itself.
 
This, I believe, is because real wholeness and real healthy culture (and healthy infrastructure as an aspect of that) cannot be achieved, or even inspired, through primarily specialized means and methods, nor by primarily “specialized” individuals. The assumption of the essential togetherness of subject and object (or of Nature and “The I”) is not just a means to a specific infrastructural end, nor even only the informing basis of an entirely different kind of science/cosmology, but both the cause and effect of a fundamentally different Way of Life (culture) individually and personally. The shift to that inner-and-outer culture of healing cannot be made or even furthered, as a public-private figure but only as an Individual-Person in the active practice of Healthy Culture.

For example,  Alexander shows regarding “material” structure in the “Process of Creating Life”, how a rigidly willful and egotistical image of the final building is typically violently imposed on the land in a building process that violates and insults rather than ornaments and brings out, its inherent Living Structure. In just the same way, the rigid “Identity-Structure” of being a “professional” within some relatively dissociated “field” constitutes an ego-driven image that fails to “ornament”, and even partially destroys, the authentic, living structure of the Individual-Personhood of any real human being.

Another kind of example of what I mean can be gleaned from the story Alexander tells (I think it is in book 2) about being accused of being a communist when he suggested, in a plan for a neighborhood in california, that the process of sighting and building individual houses  manditorily proceed in such a way as to improve the form and possitive space of the neighborhood as a whole. The dissociated “individualistic”  default identity-politics of the average member in good standing of the american version of the dominant culture of apartness, as well as the one-sided logical paradigm  of such culture generally, cannot but  combine to create a disfuntional worldview in which such a suggestion needsmust be filtered through the normal false dichotmy of individual vs community or capitalism vs socialism (a recent blog entry of mine called “name change” goes further into this). 
 
As with disfuntional identity structures of sick culture so with the structure of the kind of mathematics which Alexander takes for granted and in terms of which he tries to formulate and, perhaps, legitimate his experience. What I am saying is that these cognitive structures and identity-structures (as well as the various everyday rituals that support and reinforce them) are part and parcel of the culture which has generated the present, relatively life-denying built environment, and that each of these represents as naked an “emperor” as doe's modern architecture. They, and the institution of modern (and most “ancient”) education that transmits them across time, are old bottles, incapable of holding the new wine of the paradigm that is needed.

Returning to the theme of Identity, I wonder If Alexander has read “Disabling Professions” by Ivan Illich. I am sure he would say (honestly) that he is trying to be an “enabling” rather than disabling professional but I tend to think that that is an oxymoron. Or rather the idea of “enabling” is still pretty arrogantly unilateral and beside the point. It is only through an expression of egalitarian friendship as wounded (but also healing and even whole) Individual-Persons, putting aside the factional identity politics of Profession just as much as those of race, and gender etc, that human beings can really be helpful–not only to others but necessarily to themselves. I want Christopher Alexander to “come out” as an Individual-Person (an Individual family- member, neighbor, citizen-of-the-world and soul) rather than as an Architect or scientist. And I want him to do it in the context of the cosmological assumptions of really Healthy Culture (such as those comprising what I am calling Integral Science: see integralscience.motime.com/). I don't know that he is aware of the possibility of doing this and so I offer this review also as an informant and an open invitation to such an enterprise.

 Such a “coming-out” (for any “Professional” in any field) would constitute a kind of initiation into the cosmology, identity-politics, ritual and spatial-temporal infrastructure of Healthy Culture. To that same extent it would involve the acknowledgement of lingering traces of the culture of apart-ness (it's factional identity politics, dissociated cosmology, and its rituals of inner and outer apart- ness), as things that are part and parcel with its alienating infrastructure, not only in the outer world, but in his own life as an Individual-Person. I think that if Alexander did this, then the essential truth in what he is saying would be more clear, more clearly put into perspective, and, with modifications consequent on its integration into a real inner and outer Cultural healing process, more likely to be put into practice at the scale intended.

In short, a sick infrastructure, an infrastructure of Apart-ness, is a symptom of a Sick Culture of Apart-ness (conceiving “culture” as Cosmology, Identity, Ritual, and Infrastructure). The sustainable transformation and healing of our collective and individual-personal infrastructure will come about only as an aspect of the transformation and healing of Culture itself conceived and practiced in this truly holistic sense; a sense inclusive of not only Cosmology and infrastructure, but of Identity and Ritual as well. Healthy Culture conceived and enacted not only collectively but Individually and Personally (and both inwardly and outwardly) is a both the begining and end of any “Generative Sequence” in which it is true and sustainable healing that is being  generated. To start with anything else is itself a ritual of apart-ness that will inevitably thwart and baffle even the most well-meaning attempts at any more specialized  conception of “healing”.

All of that having been said, I want to reiterate my feeling that these books are works of incredible importance and intrinsic Beauty. Like all of Alexander's works of which I am familiar, both written and built, they approach, both in message and in physical being, that kind of beauty–the only true kind–which is an expression of Beauty because it as an expression also of Goodness, of Truth, of Life…