Thinking about stuff: posthumanist phenomenology and cognition

Abstract

Emerging digital technologies, such as sensors and pervasive computing, provide a robust interplay between digital and physical space. Architecture as a disciplinary endeavor has subsumed the capacities of these technologies without allowing the difference these technologies afford to challenge fundamental notions of architecture, such as cognition, visibility, and presence. This essay explores the inverse of the architectural ground by exploring the cognitive capacity for non-animate entities. The implication of this posthuman phenomenology is that entities themselves pose questions and that “stuff” thinks. Given an expanded definition of thinking, the environment is an active agent of entities that respond to human building with forces, tensions, marks, and crossings—physical elements that yield symbolic significance in our world.