ABSTRACT
This chapter will explore whether contemporary affirmations of materialism and biopolitical affect can be brought together with forms of rationalism and critically reflective thought to which they are typically opposed. How, we ask, can we produce from these different traditions of constructing alterity, a theory of practice adequate to the demands placed upon architectural history and theory today?
Feminist and ecological thought alike have produced discourses in which reason and technology are sexed as ‘male’, and thus castigated as essentially oppressive, whereas the material, sensed or ecological are sexed as ‘female’. Opposing the continuation of this split as obstructive to the creation of an effectively ecological architecture, Rawes has turned both to feminist theories of the nonhuman – e.g. Haraway and Braidotti – and to the proto-ecological thinking of ‘ratio’ in Spinoza in order to argue for the possibility of a ‘humane’ architecture.In dialogue with Rawes,Spencer pursues a similar objective, through the same means, he will explore certain difficulties he perceives in the work of neo-materialists, such as Braidotti, around the discourse of bodies, subjects and their relationship to environments, including those produced through architecture.
