Glass as a metaphor for multispecies injustice

By Danielle Celermajer, SEI Deputy Director, and Matthew Darmour-Paul, Architectural Designer and Researcher

When humans decide to live and work within spaces of glass, they are not simply making aesthetic choices; their actions are matters of justice – multispecies justice. How can this be so? The answer is at once simple and complex. Simple because the glass that enables pleasure for some (humans) is deadly for others; complex because the ‘glass palaces’ that typify hypermodern life form part of, and also constitute larger political, social, technical and ethical orders and grids of opportunity and loss.

For the most part, humans seduced by western modernity have simply followed the path that promises a perfect alignment between technological innovation and (their) pleasure or success. If, though we reflect more clearly on the costs of this path, how it distributes those costs, and to whom, very different decision paths become an ethical imperative.

In The World Interior of Capital, Peter Sloterdijk depicted the Crystal Palace, the central feature of the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, as emblematic of a new socio-technical order. Such palaces, he argued, placed their human occupants within an immersive environment wholly separated from the external world, yet where that world appeared as transparent and fully available to their gaze.

Creating and then occupying such spaces becomes an embodied technology for forming a particular kind of human: the modern liberal subject who comes to assume a frictionless interiority safe from the messiness of the outside.

A line can be drawn between the 1851 Crystal Palace designed by the gardener engineer Joseph Paxton, and the 2017 Apple Headquarters designed by the architecture firm Foster and Partners, a building with the largest panes of ultra-clear glass ever constructed.

The Crystal Palace provided an immersive space for the ‘opaque’ masses to experience the spectacle of global industry under imperialism, a precursor to the entertainment stadia and shopping centres that provide a common experience for citizens in overdeveloped countries today. A century and a half later, the Apple headquarters assumes an already transparent subject to roam its spaces, fully ‘open’ to the digital surveillance required of Apple in particular and platform capitalism in general.

Sloterdijk was seeking to make apparent how spatial arrangements and technologies constitute humans in a particular, and non-innocent way, but, humans are not the only ones who experience and are impacted by the worlds glass makes. As technologies of transparency have been ‘perfected’, the worlds they create for beings other than humans have become lethal.

At one level, that lethality is immediate. The glass humans are now able to create has become so transparent that birds are no longer able to discern its materiality. Whereas the human desire for immersion becomes the occasion for a sensual experience of unimpeded access to ‘the world’ beheld, birds find themselves involuntarily immersed in a perceptual world where their habitats appear to continue, deceptively without impediment, on the other side of a hard surface. If you have noticed more birds lying stunned or dead beneath large windows in recent years, or heard them hit their soft bodies on hard panes, it is because what we naively call technological innovation conceals a brutal exchange: their lives for erasing all interference with human desire. Their deaths are no accident.

But this is not the only way in which the technologies of ‘transparent life’ are lethal. Creating and sustaining ‘glass boxes’, especially under conditions of ever more extreme climate change, requires a constant supply of energy. So long as the production of this energy rests on the extraction of fossil fuels, the ‘pleasure’ of a transparent life forms part of a complex assemblage destroying human and more-than-human life – in the past, right now, and reaching into the future. Those deaths are not only largely beyond the purview of behind the glass, but carefully concealed by the political and semiotic systems of the world it helps to create.

The immediate dimension of lethality could be addressed in a number of ways, by modifying glass itself and what surrounds it. For example, the simple placement of zen curtains, decals or small mesh netting will save birds’ lives. But these avenues will only be pursued when the impact of the technologies of the built environment on other creatures comes to matter to those with the power to make technological and design decisions.

The good news is that there is precedent for coming to recognise how technology and the built environment create injustice for some, specifically by disabling humans with different abilities. Marginalised human groups have long been ignored by normalised development processes, but in recent years, Australian building regulations have been modified to reduce the safety risks large glass windows and doors posed to children and people who are vision impaired. The latter was a response to the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (Cth), which was itself the outcome of decades of advocacy by people with disabilities pressing decision makers to whom their forms of life were invisible to ensure that their different abilities were not the occasion for injustice.

Given that (at present) western institutions provide no legal or political avenues for birds to advocate their own interests, such changes will only occur when humans (in the hypermodern west) make sense of the world and develop legal, political and design systems that accord real value to lives of beings other than humans.

A start would be to interpret the sign of dead and stunned birds as a signal of their interests. We may not call it politics, but there is no opacity to the meaning of the communication.

Addressing the more complex lethality will be – well – more complex. Nevertheless, the metaphor of transparency provides a good starting point. As the impacts of environmental destruction on humans press ever more intensely upon us, both directly and in the form of our experience of loss of the worlds we now realise we treasured all along, so too does the pathological and illusory character of the subjectivity constituted behind glass.

The barrier between humans and the worlds they sought to survey, control and exploit did its job only so long as it appeared impenetrable and invisible, and thus completely natural. As damage permeates that barrier, so too, its constructed and fictional nature comes into view. And as the violence wrought by constructed transparency gets closer, other forms of subjectivity perhaps also become available and with them, the realisation that we have built worlds in which birds are not the only ones condemned to kill themselves as they hurtle into what they cannot see.

Birds must navigate the environments of today’s transparent human subject: one that has gradually grown to be environmentally insensitive, over (air) conditioned, “made operational – subordinate to a calculable, steerable and controllable process.” Correcting this tendency – unbuilding certain universalising projects and building others – is a material imperative for multispecies justice.

Danielle Celermajer is a Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney, and Deputy Director – Academic of the Sydney Environment Institute. Her books include Sins of the Nation and the Ritual of Apology (Cambridge University Press 2009), A Cultural Theory of Law in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury, 2018), and The Prevention of Torture: An Ecological Approach (Cambridge University Press, 2018). She is Director of the Multispecies Justice Project and along with her multispecies community, she has recently lived through the NSW fires, writing in the face of their experience of the “killing of everything”, which she calls “omnicide”. She is the Research Lead on Concepts and Practices of Multispecies Justice.

Matthew Darmour-Paul is a researcher and designer based in Sydney, Australia. His work explores architecture’s entanglement within political ecology, ruralisation and the financialization of nature. He is a cofounder of Feral Partnerships, a collective focused on re-claiming architectural knowledge in an age of rapid biodiversity loss and species extinction as spatial practices in the pursuit of multispecies flourishing.

Header image: Image by Josh Calabrese via Unsplash.