The Grace Machine : Of Turns , Wheels and Limbs

Exploring Architectural Form: A Configurative Triad | Spring / Summer 2018 | 7–32 however, to do something well we must employ an altogether different, internal measuring technique, which we denote as ‘the way’ we do things, relying on a rhythm, a pace, a course or a fluency while still incorporating those causes and ends. In doing something well, the cause, the end and the way of doing something are so intricately intertwined that we cannot separate them without destroying the effect of each on the whole.

however, to do something well we must employ an altogether different, internal measuring technique, which we denote as 'the way' we do things, relying on a rhythm, a pace, a course or a fluency while still incorporating those causes and ends. In doing something well, the cause, the end and the way of doing something are so intricately intertwined that we cannot separate them without destroying the effect of each on the whole.
Every single day, we find ourselves driven by a massive range of motives: we can do things out of sheer playfulness and relaxation, or spurred by a sense of moral duty, or as is more often the case, motivated by compensation, forced by physical necessity, or driven by hidden psychological desires or needs. And though all these variations -the spontaneity of play, the burden of duty, the effort of work, the necessity of nature -will play a prominent role in our analysis, none can tell us how to enact them as never before. This is undoubtedly an awkward statement, since it paradoxically implies that we have done that act a thousand times before and this time could be the best instance of it. We need to be cautious here: though such a process of instantiation singles out an act as unique, it does not necessarily mean we are looking for excellence. While excellence is continuous with a form of striving, that is not in itself its purpose. Doing-well or living-well does not involve a need for perfection. In its constant dealings with obstacles, it can never take form in a purified state; its constituent parts are always diverse and full of contrasts. What The Grace Machine: Of Turns, Wheels and Limbs Lars Spuybroek 8 stands by itself, and stands out as a figure that has been released from its origin rather than remaining attached to it. Doing something well, then, would be better described as a lessening of control than as an increase in it: a letting-go and a letting-happen more than a making-happen. Later on, we will have an opportunity to study examples of people who felt less present as events unfolded, especially in cases when things were going well -and the latter expression speaks for itself, suggesting that when one is doing well, things are too. In this sense, the figure of the turn should be perceived as a thing, and shelving it automatically under the category of motion, gesture or action will not suffice. In its figurative mode, the turn is not so much a movement between objects as it is the turning of movement into an object and, conversely, the turning of an object into movement -a reciprocal, symmetrical formula that will emerge as our central thesis.
Before our discourse starts to sound like an embarrassing misconception of quantum mechanics, we should hasten to point out that this fundamental vagueness of object and act has a history going far more deeply back in time than anything modern.
In fact, its history winds through so many different periods that we cannot say exactly where and when it started -thousands of years ago, at least. From the perspectives of numerous disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, theology and aesthetics, the notion of doing well has been denominated as grace, a deviously complex term with linkages to gratitude, gracefulness and gratification as well as favour, pleasure, beauty and much more. The briefest way of defining grace would be to say it is movement that exceeds its agent, though admittedly such a cryptic definition calls for extensive elaboration. Grace is in many ways such an elusive concept that in each of the abovementioned disciplines it carries a completely different meaning. One explains it as an efficiency of mobility, another as an infinite power of transcendence, still others as mere good manners, and some as acquired customs and we do and the way we do it might diverge. To do something well, we must often act against the very nature of the action, similarly to the technique of counterpoint in music. For instance, to play well, we should not act as if we are doodling; on the contrary, we should take the game completely seriously or else there is nothing at stake. As they say in football, it's life or death. And conversely, we can only do our duty as if we are playing tennis, since we would completely fail at a difficult task when doing it strenuously. Likewise, we can only do our work well if we find relaxation in it, and attend to necessities as if they sprout from freedom. How often do we not follow our desires as if they are our own ideas?
Doing something well, then, means giving things a twist or a turn -the form action takes when we do several things at the same time. When driving well, we manoeuvre smoothly between slow-and fast-moving traffic, accommodate the behaviour of others, and operate without making abrupt changes.
And when cooking that six-course meal, we time the preparation of one course to occur while the other is simmering on the stove and a third has been baking in the oven for hours. In these realms of action, the notion of turning and twisting can be interpreted quite literally, as actual curves left behind by a body moving in space. But the turn goes beyond mere pliancy and flexibility.
When we turn play into seriousness, or duty into ease, the turn is figurative, not literal. This concept of the turn goes much further than curvature and smooth movement between edgy obstacles, and undoubtedly further than a naïve opposition to the straightness of doing things right. It is made up of motion and activity, naturally, yet the movement in itself does not follow the way things take a turn.
Our concrete movements are fed by a motion that is both larger and more abstract. The turn is larger than its agent. It is as much born out of a situation as it is initiated by an individual, and it is as much a figurative movement as it is concrete. In fact, it would be more correct to say the figure of the turn however, are by no means terms that should be associated only with monotheism; we encounter them in at least as fundamental a form in a period when a myriad of gods populated the heavens, namely in ancient Greece. 1 At that time, grace was denoted with the Greek word charis (pronounced with a fricative 'h', as in the German Bach), and the concept played a central role in politics, love, friendship, competition and battle as well as religion. It is a word we encounter in many forms in the epic poems of Homer, Pindar and Hesiod, and in the hundreds of written works that constitute the classics. Today, we still find charis in words like 'charity' and charisma', to name just two derivations. Yet to properly understand the concept of charis, we will have to expand our study even further and go beyond that of the ancient Greeks, since charis is deeply rooted in gift culture, which in turn precedes Greek history by thousands of years.
And it is not exactly clear -nor, perhaps, that relevant for our purposes -whether those roots lie in the Indus valley, in Minoan Crete or with the nomadic tribes living north of ancient Greece; probably in all three. Of course, gift cultures were and still are spread all over the planet, with the gift constituting a fundamental form of exchange in which aesthetics, sociology, economy and religion are undifferentiated. We will not be going into all the intricacies of gift exchange; what matters for our discussion is that charis conceptually originates in gift exchange, and that we will only be able to properly grasp the meaning of grace once we understand the gift.
The English word 'grace' is derived from the Latin translation of charis, gratia, and we encounter it in various forms related to gift culture: for instance, as 'gratitude', or thankfulness; 'gratification', the pleasure of receiving; and 'graciousness', a form of giving. In commentaries it is usually explained that charis is derived from the old Greek word for pleasure, chara. 2 Such a connection would start to explain not only why the exchange of goods as we habits. It is all of these and none. Grace is both the quality of the act and the movement that carries that act: in other words, it is both of and beyond the individual, anchored as well as unanchored, immanent as well as transcendent. How can this be? Certainly, for that reason it might seem a troublesome term for some, but studied more closely, the history of grace will not only prove comprehensive, but will demonstrate to be especially illuminating when viewed as a conceptual history. The further back we go, the more it will adjust later notions of itself. And though it has as many religious connotations as well as aesthetic, moral and social ones, this history will show that none of these domains is able to conceptually claim the ground on which we can explain the effects on the others.

Grace and gift
Nonreligious readers will quickly associate the term 'grace' with gracefulness, an aesthetic term that seems to originate in a bygone age when elegance and convoluted formalities regulated public behaviour, or when now-forgotten treatises on sculpture emphasised tentative gestures and a soft expression of the flesh. Religious readers, on the other hand, will immediately recall the singing of 'Amazing Grace' or recognise the term from Sunday-school discussions of sufficient and efficient grace, signifying the ultimate source of generosity and goodness. However, neither the wholly aesthetic nor the solely religious, even in its social or moral guise, can claim the powers of grace for itself. Actually, things are far more confounded: all these neatly distinguished domains of human endeavour become more and more inextricably tied up with one another the further back we trace the term's history. It would be impossible to understand the Judeo-Christian enterprise of institutionalising a superhuman grace without acknowledging that the idea has aesthetics at its core. And, conversely, it is as impossible to accept the aesthetics of grace without understanding it as involving at least some form of transcendence. Generosity and goodness, answers he subsequently offers -has occupied and often troubled scholars of anthropology: 'What rule of legality and self-interest, in societies of a backward or archaic type, compels the gift that has been received to be obligatorily reciprocated?
What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?' 3 We would probably formulate the question somewhat differently and more subtly; be that as it may, what matters is that (a) Mauss makes it categorically clear that the gift is never free: 4 every gift needs to be reciprocated in whatever form; and (b) that he locates the obligation to return not in mechanisms of the social or economic but in the 'force of things'. 5 In the Maori gift culture on which Mauss based his studies, this power is identified as the hau, often translated as the 'spirit of the gift'. 6 It is the hau in particular that makes gift-giving into a cyclical activity, not merely an oscillation between a giver and a receiver but making the receiver transform into a returning agent. Therefore, we should always keep in mind that gift exchange is structured according to three stages, not two agents, as our dualistic models of information exchange and communication prescribe. What exactly, then, is this power, which he calls the 'force of things'? For almost a century, this has posed serious problems in anthropology. Some have vehemently denied its existence; 7 others have developed variations or allowed asymmetries and unilateralisms; 8 and still others have categorised it as a form of 'personhood', an animist notion 9 in which the donor's personality -somehow -remains in the given object, causing it inevitably to return to its source. After the social and economic models, this adds a psychological explanation for gift-giving.
However, all theories offering secondary explanations are bound to fail. After our initial explorations of the turn and grace, we might be able to offer a simpler solution. When object and act are inextricably entwined, the act of giving an object becomes the same as that object giving itself. Though this is find it in tribal gift cultures cannot be unambiguously forced into social or economic models but also, and more importantly, why it took on the chiefly aesthetic receiving and returning'. 17 And even though he uses words like 'grateful' and 'gratitude', he surprisingly disregards their evolution into cultures of grace and even explicitly refuses to 'take into account the aesthetic phenomena' related to the gift. 18 In this respect, what the ancient Greeks offer us points resolutely in the opposite direction of Mauss's thesis: charis signifies each of the three stages of gift exchange, the cycle itself, as well as its intrinsic connection to aesthetics. As a matter of fact, the conflation of those meanings led to charis being personified by three goddesses, the Charites, or in a rather abstract formulation, we recognise it from art: we never know if the effect a work has on us is equal to what the artist effectuated. And it is no accident that this example is derived from aesthetics.
In other words, we will never be able to fully distinguish between what an object does to us and what is done to it. The vector of the action proceeds through the object without changing, without any real before or after, that is, without origin or end. With such a reversal, a formula for beauty emerges that was in fact concocted by Henri Bergson in 1904: 'Beauty … is arrested grace'. 39 Beauty, then, is not on one side of the equation, identified with the fixity of the object, but rather occupies the same middle position as grace, while operating the other way around. Beauty is an object that acts like it is moving. Or, in a terminology used earlier, it is a still object that radiates movement -a formula that fits the towardness of Venus and the halo of Apollo as much as it does the shining of Aglaea. Although beauty is not the principal subject, we should mention that radiance is a concept that is as crucial to an understanding of ancient Greece as is charis. 40 It explains why Homer confused Charis with Aphrodite, and why words such as 'glowing', 'shining', and 'gleaming' flood the pages of the epic poems. It explains the Greeks' obsession with anointment, Odysseus's shining locks of hair, the endless combing and bathing, the gold on Achilles's shield, the fluting of marble columns, the polychrome paint on the same marble, and the gold It is the perfect formula. Edmund Burke's definition in A Philosophical Enquiry, which contains only a single, short paragraph dedicated to grace, is similarly structured but falls short in its conceptual depth: 'Gracefulness is an idea belonging to posture and motion.' 36 38 At first, Schiller performs his extraordinary have mentioned a few times now: that of standing.
One might think standing was a problem of connecting bones together, as one would the posts and beams in an architectural structure -that is, a problem of compressive forces. But Leonardo finds as many muscles and tendons in the human body as he does bones, analogous to his interest in the pulleys, springs and ropes that fill his notebooks. Grace, he tells us there, is "eurhythmia"; that is, "movement which does well".' 52 The above quotes create the impression that Ravaisson fully equated habit with grace, but this is not always obvious. In his early, 1838 work Of Habit, Ravaisson compared habit to 'prevenient grace', that is, to the Christian concept of God's efficiency, enabling humans to act, choose and move. 53  Nevertheless, it cannot be emphasised enough that Ravaisson touched the heart of the matter by connecting habit and grace. Regardless how we define grace, it involves a movement that exceeds its agent, and such excess can only be supplied by habit. Ravaisson, in another way of saying that this movement is larger than us, writes of the 'effacing of effort': our actions become more and more effortless, as if carried by a greater force. 58 According to many philosophers of habit, including Ravaisson, habit is based on the fact that at the moment we reach a certain level of effortlessness, the inclination to repeat the act increases, while at the same time, the feelings that accompany the act decrease. 59 In the framework of grace, we can appreciate the movement, and the act of liberality characteristic of divine goodness: the two meanings of the word grace were identical for Ravaisson. 60 To be sure, the two meanings of grace are synonymous, not because of etymology but precisely because of what Bergson points at by using the language of gift exchange, implying the cycle is nothing but an exchange of generosity. A 'movement recorded by a form' is met by a moving form.
Thus, grace cannot be reduced to its relationship with habit and must be consistently analysed as part of the gift cycle.
When we apply this model to driving a car, the question arises: Which of the two is actually moving, us or the car? We are sitting still in the driver's seat, changing the form of our bodies by moving our limbs. The car, however, is not changing its form at all but moving at high speed. Where is the actual exchange taking place? In this sense, driving a car is the opposite of riding a horse. When we ride, we become the immobile torso, and the horse acts as the limbs; in the case of driving, we are the limbs and the car the torso, in what is essentially a form of harnessing. We and the car are both built -that is, structures in the sense of Schiller's Bau. We both have a build inasmuch as we have been built in a certain way, with an architecture of still and mobile parts. Again and again, Schiller speaks of the 'technology of the human structure', die Technik des menschlichen Baues. 61 Obviously, the car has been built according to our build. Our way of driving adapts to the car, and the car has been adapted to our way of driving. In terms of the gift cycle, we might have a gift for driving, so to speak, but that gift is partially substantiated by the car; the car enables us to drive. We drive thanks to the car, but the car does not drive itself through us; it is a gift we have to receive, and which we try to return by increase, by driving well. The Graces are 'givers of increase', as Jane Harrison said. the expansion of feeling. It is certainly correct to say that with increased effortlessness the act liberates itself from its subject, but not from feeling. As stated earlier, in the gift cycle we don't own our feelings.
The inclination is not merely to drive, or a liking to drive, but to drive well. Habit transforms the first step into the second, the skill of driving into the pleasure of driving; and grace transforms the pleasure of driving into driving-well. Habit is the run-up to the jump of grace. It explains forwardness, but grace explains towardness.
A disturbing question creeps into the mind. Is there any correspondence between the ongoing example of driving as finding grace and the description of grace as a machine? In short, yes, but the longer answer is: not in the way we might think.
Though it is a machine, grace is never an assured outcome. While habit is surely part of its mechanism, we are looking at a machinery that runs on certainty in one direction and on uncertainty in the other. From grace to habit, the machine's workings are determined; from habit to grace, they are not.
Never will it be certain that doing-again will result in doing-well; the machine does not produce grace as a commodity. Every time we act, we add speed to the turning wheel of habit, and thus to the transcendence of grace; however, grace given is not the same thing as grace received, and definitely not the same thing as grace returned. Here the argument turns sharply against ergonomics: the more that things and we adapt to one another, the less movement there will be. Fully adapted to us, the car will drive itself, and we will merely sit there being passengers. The whole secret of the gift cycle lies in the fact that the figure of grace cannot be appropriated, neither by us nor by the things around us. To drive well, or better, to live well, we need between us and things a certain gap: a word that slowly starts to take a central position in our discussion. We and things do not -and Since turns and counterpoints fundamentally govern the playing of games, roles, and parts, play must rely on habit as well as being embedded in the machinery of grace. To properly understand how the different varieties of sport, custom, and theatre relate to our research into grace, habit and inhabitation, we will surely need more than this essay. For now, however, to complete our sketch of the grace machine, we should look into a few of their aspects.
In sports, we easily find dozens of connections to grace, habit and even charis -the references in Pindar's Olympian Odes to the charis of athletes are numerous. Everything seems connected to our discussion of grace and habit: the relentless practicing of moves during training, the admiration brought on by striving, the searching for ease without strain, the grace of the figures with respect to posture, the uncertainty whether things will work out in the actual game, and the shining of the winners.
Though habit concerns ordinary activity and training extraordinary activity, we should consider the two continuous and based on the same principles.
Training in sports evolved from military drill, and some sports still show direct links to a military past, such as the javelin throw, boxing, judo and archery.
In its relation to habituation, training is comparable to acquiring customs in social roles, and to rehearsing a part for the stage. We should keep in mind that customs are akin to costumes; we can put them on and take them off, in exactly the way Venus used the girdle of the Graces, according to Schiller. The fact that play, movement, training and grace occur in such an intricate web of workings becomes even more apparent in the lengthy argument of Plato's Laws, the book that was so important to Schiller as he was writing 'On Grace and Dignity'.
Perhaps because it was the Greek philosopher's last book, it seems to have been written by a thinker who has mellowed slightly. Having come out as the sworn enemy of mimesis in The Republic, in which he noted how essential imitation was in military training, 74 Plato now arrives at the view that dance is a necessary core activity within education When Federer hits his forehand or a football player makes an incredible move, when a volleyball player hits a smash or a high jumper throws his back over the bar, when an alpine skier performs a slalom or Valentino Rossi takes a bend on his motorcycle -lying on his bike like a huge frog -or when a diver jumps off the springboard, a gymnast performs a somersault, a boxer strikes a right blow, a skater does a pirouette, or a judoka makes a back throw, mimesis, we have slowly developed a clearer picture of how the machine of grace is constructed, and before we tie up the argument, we should redirect it toward the larger issue of habit and inhabitation, the two poles of the machine. By looking at dance, art, sports, and play, we have enhanced our understanding of the path between habit and grace, the temporal pole of the machine. We have seen how the route from grace to habit, backwards in time toward memory, is assured by training and incorporation. We have also seen that the path forward in time, that of the production of grace out of habit, is not assured, and in this sense, the distance between habit and grace is part of the larger gap between habit and inhabitation.
But we have only occasionally been able to elaborate on the spatial side of the gap. Looking at sports has shown us that space itself contains such a gap. Indeed, space is broken, or, if you will, polarised. What we have called the pole of inhabitation is itself split in two. Sports, because of its intrinsic reliance on figuration, thrives on this dichotomy and takes place in the most radical manifestation of the gap possible, between pure field and pure object. In no way do the two fit together. Games are played on highly schematised fields, abstract surfaces we encounter in every type of game: boards, tracks, courses, arenas, pools, rinks, rings -surfaces that are geometrically divided by lines to create boxes, halves, bands, circles, corners, squares. A simplified geometry is inscribed on a highly abstract, smooth surface, not altogether different from the extreme abstraction of the highway's asphalt and striping.
Invariably, these are surfaces of speed, rhythm and movement; there hardly exist more radical examples of space taking on the properties of a drawing or diagram. They are even more abstract than plans, and more like schemes. Still, the field is just one half of what defines the realm of games. The other half consists of its antipode, namely concrete objects: sticks, bats, bows, hurdles; vehicles such as boats, cars, and motorbikes; and of course dozens of teach rhythmic movement to their children 'as by a tonic, when they are moved by any kind of shaking or motion, whether they are moved by their own action -as in a swing or in a rowing-boat -or are carried along on horseback or by any other rapidly moving bodies'. 75 Rocking babies as part of teaching the law of the limbs! Motion administered 'as by a tonic'! Rhythm is 'taken in', absorbed, or -as we put it earlier when discussing Euphrosyne -swallowed, and returned beyond its sphere, in the realm of Thalia, as bloom and growth, or, in Plato's words, in a child's upbringing. This leads Plato to advocate a structured programme of training citizens through a set of dance routines that differ for each age group.
And Plato goes further, especially with respect to paideia (play) and its connection to choros (dance): It is the life of peace that everyone should live as much and as well as he can. What then is the right way? We should live out our lives playing at certain pastimes -sacrificing, singing and dancing -so as to be able to win Heaven's favor and to repel our foes and vanquish them in fight. 76 'Live as well as he can' -practically the first sentence of our essay. For the older Plato, dance, grace, training, education, and the appreciation of laws are so interconnected that he permits himself a wordplay on choros and charis 77 and even relates joy to mimesis. 78 Perhaps Kant, who stated that 'imitation has no place in morality', should have studied the Greek philosopher more thoroughly. 79 In this sense, Plato's ideas even go beyond Schiller's and Ravaisson's, because the coupling of moral stance and aesthetic pleasure, viewed in the framework of charis, becomes a cyclical argument. Plato's advocacy of collective dancing -during festivals that recur every two weeks, no less -would make it an activity shared by the whole community, doubtless inspired by the dancing Graces.
With the complex affinities between the various concepts of grace, charis, habit, training, play, and types of balls: big, small, hard, soft, perfectly round, round and flat, and not quite round. Nothing tells the ball where to go on the field, except figuration. The figures we encounter in sports should be consistently examined as bridging-jumping between abstract surfaces and concrete objects.
This complex machinery of grace, of which sports is merely the most radical form, structures nothing less than our whole lives (and, I would add, those of all other things, but let us leave that for now).
We cannot inhabit space directly with our habits.
Undeniably, an enormous danger for architects, designers and engineers lurks in the idea that we can. Habit and inhabitation do not fit together like a hand and a glove; they are necessarily separated by a gap, a double gap with two sides: a horizontal, temporal side that ejects figures of grace that can only appear on the other, spatial side of the gap, itself structured as a vertical gap between abstract, smooth fields and concrete, contoured objects.
Oddly enough, all the parts of what we have called the grace machine can be clearly defined and described -the wheel of habit and training; the rhythms it produces being spatially reflected in the abstract field; the existence of concrete objects, lifted from the field over the vertical axis of gravity -but not grace itself. Being wholly dependent on workings, it can never be assured of whether the machine works. Indeed, this radical uncertainty is the whole reason for its existence; it is a machine with a fundamental question mark at its heart. Bergson's remark comes from his essay on 'The Life and Work of Ravaisson', and he seems to be quoting from the work of the nineteenth-century French philosopher. However, the exact quote cannot be found there either. The closest is: 'Forms are beautiful, but movement possesses grace … If it is possible to consider forms (as often happens in geometry) as the durable vestiges of movements, as immobilized movements, one can equally say, it seems, that beauty is akin to the once mobile grace that has become fixed' (emphasis added). At this point in the text, Ravaisson is not yet discussing the work of Leonardo; he does so in the paragraphs that follow. See: Félix Ravaisson,