ABSTRACT
The history of western culture is perhaps the history of the slow breaking down of both the opposition and its hierarchy. The digital may herald the beginning of a period when the two are viewed as equally important forms of code. The digital revolution is spreading, nature is returning in the form of impending environmental crisis, to insist on its foundational importance. This internal contradiction should be catalyst enough to persuade us to look at an alternative, inclusive, paradigm: binary dependencies: body and mind, nature and culture, urban space and cyberspace. There is, then, and has been within western culture, a kind of ‘running bass’, a counter-model to binary opposites, one that perceives the embeddedness of the unembodied in the embodied. The most architecturally influential of the Situationists, Constant Nieuwenhuys, was categorical about this: Spatiality is social. In New Babylon social space is social spatiality. Space as a psychic dimension cannot be separated from the space of action.
