Second skin : the architecture of pedagogical encounters

The existence of the individual self or subject as a nodal point in networks of communications circuits was central to the discursive turn in the late 1970s and 19802, a turn that shifted fundamentally the way we understood what it meant to be human. Human subjects were no longer understood as the sovereign agents of liberalism, but as interconnected and interdependent, subjected through discourse and becoming active subjects through discourse. No longer existing outside the flows of communication that make them up, they are still able to take action, to have agency, to change the line of action or even the fabric of relations in which they are, with others, embedded. Building on this shift, the spatial turn that we have explored in this book, located human existence in a network of sensory connections. Those networks extend beyond human and discursive networks to the animate and inanimate world: the “world itself is like a single ‘skin’ over which our senses, expelled and diffused, extend like networks.” Architecture and things take on, in this spatial turn, much greater salience becoming actors in the networks in which we are now, no longer nodal “posts,” but ourselves networks spreading out into our surroundings, and our surroundings spreading themselves out into us.