GHASSAN ALSERAYHI
MSc. Arch, M. Arch, B. Arch, Assoc. SCE
ARCHITECT + EDUCATOR + RESEARCHER
What Happened to the Human? Reconfiguring Subjectivity in the Digital Condition
Abstract:
This paper investigates three leading concepts of "the human" in the digital condition - Hayles's embodied posthuman, Jarzombek's civilianized subject, and DeLanda and Protevi's emergent assemblage subject. These frameworks serve as competing origin stories of the digital condition, each installing a different architectural subject and a different understanding of what "the digital" is, rather than merely updating philosophical anthropology. The subject is recast by Hayles's posthumanism as a spliced, embodied coupling of flesh and code in which media, inscription technologies, and bodies are closely intertwined; In contrast to DeLanda and Protevi, who reconstruct selves as emergent patterns in multi-scalar assemblages governed/structured by mechanisms, attractors, and intensive differences rather than essences, Jarzombek's onto-formation reframes humans as "data-fog" within civilianized cybernetic infrastructures that recode being into thermodynamic and informational terms. When combined, these paradigms diverge in their ontological commitments but converge in redefining digital subjectivity as distributed across interfaces, infrastructures, and material systems.
The paper assesses their impact on architectural theory and practice and finally conducts an experiment with current BIM workflows. My thesis is that assemblage realism should be the most fruitful approach to architecture since it places agency in multi-scalar relations between bodies, interfaces, protocols, and material systems instead of considering it to be solely embodied cognition or infrastructural capture. The paper begins with a delineation of these three ontologies and then follows this resonance in architectural discourse in the works of Allen, Picon, Meredith, and Carpo, where field conditions, code-concrete hybrids, post-digital pragmatics, and algorithmic authorship give the digital a disciplinary narrative. An experimental section stages a BIM coordination meeting within its environment in three stages, in each of which the same vignette is read-through and theorized in accordance with each of the three allocations of attention, responsibility, and agency. By juxtaposing these readings, the paper argues that architectural futures will hinge on which figure of the human designers choose to operationalize, whether as an embodied splice, an infrastructurally captured node, or an assemblage effect, since each framework reorganizes what counts as authorship, decision-making, and material consequence in the digital milieu. Selecting between the architectural translations of these posthuman, data-fog, and assemblage narratives is akin to selecting between various digital architectural genealogies.
This paper investigates three leading concepts of "the human" in the digital condition - Hayles's embodied posthuman, Jarzombek's civilianized subject, and DeLanda and Protevi's emergent assemblage subject. These frameworks serve as competing origin stories of the digital condition, each installing a different architectural subject and a different understanding of what "the digital" is, rather than merely updating philosophical anthropology. The subject is recast by Hayles's posthumanism as a spliced, embodied coupling of flesh and code in which media, inscription technologies, and bodies are closely intertwined; In contrast to DeLanda and Protevi, who reconstruct selves as emergent patterns in multi-scalar assemblages governed/structured by mechanisms, attractors, and intensive differences rather than essences, Jarzombek's onto-formation reframes humans as "data-fog" within civilianized cybernetic infrastructures that recode being into thermodynamic and informational terms. When combined, these paradigms diverge in their ontological commitments but converge in redefining digital subjectivity as distributed across interfaces, infrastructures, and material systems.
The paper assesses their impact on architectural theory and practice and finally conducts an experiment with current BIM workflows. My thesis is that assemblage realism should be the most fruitful approach to architecture since it places agency in multi-scalar relations between bodies, interfaces, protocols, and material systems instead of considering it to be solely embodied cognition or infrastructural capture. The paper begins with a delineation of these three ontologies and then follows this resonance in architectural discourse in the works of Allen, Picon, Meredith, and Carpo, where field conditions, code-concrete hybrids, post-digital pragmatics, and algorithmic authorship give the digital a disciplinary narrative. An experimental section stages a BIM coordination meeting within its environment in three stages, in each of which the same vignette is read-through and theorized in accordance with each of the three allocations of attention, responsibility, and agency. By juxtaposing these readings, the paper argues that architectural futures will hinge on which figure of the human designers choose to operationalize, whether as an embodied splice, an infrastructurally captured node, or an assemblage effect, since each framework reorganizes what counts as authorship, decision-making, and material consequence in the digital milieu. Selecting between the architectural translations of these posthuman, data-fog, and assemblage narratives is akin to selecting between various digital architectural genealogies.
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