Thanks for the comment, Ari – it certainly complicates overly-simple definitions of architectural modernity.

You’re making me think about the speculative use of diagrams, though—I’d been thinking of them as basically descriptive.

Thanks for your view. The contrast I was trying to draw was between what I see as a more tightly-woven prose structure in Hydriotaphia and a looser one in Pseudodoxia Epidemica and Religio Medici. In my view, this is a result of Hydriotaphia‘s anchoring to a specific set of artefacts. Obviously the other two essays aren’t completely unstructured (I certainly overstepped when I said that Pseudodoxia Epidemica has no discernible plan); but I do think there is a discernible difference.

I’ve read all the texts in question so if it’s nonsense it’s first-hand nonsense, not regurgitation. I’d be interested to know who else has made similar suggestions, though.

Hi Jeff. The idea of an internal life is counter to how I read Latour. He emphasises the externality of relations, and the flatness of relations. Objects, he suggests are like ‘black boxes’ that can be opened to reveal more objects. My phone can be taken as an object — it operates as a unit with capabilities and properties of its own; but it can also be opened up to expose the circuits, antennas, casings, switches, etc. In the classic sense of parts and wholes, these are parts that only take their significance from being elements of a ‘greater’ whole. But the being of the LCD screen in my phone is not exhausted by the strong relationship it has to the phone as a whole — its manufacture had environmental effects, effects on the person who sits at the LCD-fitting station of the factory, and it could be removed and used for an infinite number of other things. The LCD panel is not less than the phone as a whole. Latour repudiates the whole theory of parts and wholes. No object (phone, building or person) is more partial or more whole than any other object, only more or less connected.

So for me, it’s not a matter of pieces having internal lives, but external lives.