The Universal Shop
Disciplines
Post Planetary Design
Architectural Theory
Political Philosophy
Socially Engaged Design
Collaborators
The New Centre for Research & Practice
Status
Independent & Collaborative Research Project
2015 - first writings on the topic
2023 - ongoing
A Personal Note on the Project
The Universal Shop is, first of all, a memory from my childhood: a shop of it all. I grew up in a dusty post-communist Romania where my sense of normality was warped by, on the one hand, generations that still refluxed much of the inherited memory, and on the other, by ideas of ideals of democracy. As a child of transition, politics has been a wonder for me and in many ways I hope it will remain so - it feels both humbling and adventurous this way.
Though it is touching a serious topic, the project as I bring it back to the future, started as a playful side reflection to the ongoing political discussion on high-tech at urban & global scale. While politics nowadays are still looking to the right or to the left, in parallel it is slowly rendering, what media philosopher Benjamin Bratton calls, an“accidental megastructure” - a stack of multiple layers coding themselves in a decentralised way, via a global distributed technology. Not bothered by the current political borders, top-down deals, trades, tariffs, well defined laws that protect an entity's integrity, the accidental megastructure is ruled by code, algorithms, artificial intelligence and ultimately inhabited by, what architectural theorist and post-planetary firestarter Ed Keller calls, a "distributed cognition" - one that feeds its behaviour from a deep stack of memory.
The little story that The Universal Shop carries is the one of a batch of generations shaped by one political ideology (communism), a social contract, with its own distributed cognition, ultimately a body of memory that suffered a steep rupture at the time of its revolution towards democracy. Together with this story, which is one that many countries experience in their journey, The Universal Shop's train of thoughts carries three main wagons: the question, the hope and the invitation.
The Question
In his book "City of Bits", William J. Mitchell writes: "the digital realm is depicted as a ferociously Darwinian environment characterised by constant adaptation, competition, and the rapid discarding of outdated elements. This concept extends beyond the physical architecture of cities, encompassing the virtual spaces and interactions facilitated by the internet and digital technologies".
Though uncomfortable, easier to ignore than deal with, the "accidental megastructure" of Benjamin Bratton forces political thinking to go back to basics: nature. The Universal Shop is about the still-to figure-out politics of this and about the concept of "cosmopolicy" lifted by Yuk Hui in his article "Cosmopolicy as Cosmotechnics". Rather looking into “the point of locality” (Yuk Hui) or “the point of universality” (Ed Keller), the project questions which should be the right point of departure for this discussion?
The Hope
The "accidental megastructure" is charged across its digital medium by a boundless topography of mixed cultures, entangled in hierarchies of code, yet distributed evenly across the web. While its claims of sovereignty have little to do with territory, inside this medium, everyone is a nomad of its kind. "But the question is what in nomad life is principle and what is consequence" discuss Deleuze & Guattari in their Treatise on Nomadology.
While this discussion engulfs extended talks on free will and degrees of awareness, The Universal Shop hopes for a more accumulated view and kind manners in shifting political gears. In my personal experience as a generation caught in between gears, I haven't understood, at the time, the silent waves of generational trauma post-revolution and their after effects. My hope is that The Universal Shop, as a childhood memory, can serve both as a playful tool and gentle reminder for wilful resilience.
The Invitation
The state-controlled universal shop had it all covered for the customer - no need for branding, marketing campaigns, shelf life arrangements. Things were stacked on top of each other, inside, outside: help yourself and find your truck tires, barbie dolls, medical instruments, dog food, TV's, household supplies, freshly baked buns, flip-flops, all you need in the universal shop. When communism fell and made room for democracy, people felt natural to take over and make their own universal shops, however this time with different flavours depending where the products were imported. Universal remained an ideal.
The invitation that comes with The Universal Shop is about objects of study in the Universe, but as well a reflection on what feels natural to do when old rules suddenly don't apply anymore. The project proposes an easy conversational sit-through with an array of objects of interest, some relevant for our co-existence, some not, but having the function of a crisp breath in between hot baths of information. Across the scroll, you will find a few samples of "objects", so far as video shorts that did not have the necessary time and expertise to process solid theoretical physics, but aim to spark the imagination of further ideas. The purpose is to create, as much as to discover, what is out there in The Universe in a techno-shopping fashion.
Soon, one can find in The (new) Universal Shop everything from Black Holes of different sizes and they way we suspect they work, Quasars, low key Quasi-Stellar Objects, Infinity Hotels, Astral Charts, Asteroid Mines, The Lunar Library, Little Prince, Black Dwarfs, Liquid Gold, Point Nemo, Pickled Particles and more to come. Though playful, almost irresponsible as it may seem at first, the project is mainly intended to bring ease and, hopefully, a bit more courage in a time of rapid change and uncertainty. The Shop is a mundane approach of a seeming exploration of wonder, yet, by the time our goods will have reached the load, we will know we have found it.
The Universal Shop came into being while reading and reflecting on Yuk Hui’s article “Cosmopolicy as Cosmopolitics”. In this article, Yuk Hui writes about cosmopolicy as being both a commercial regime and a politics of nature, bringing the crisis of the Anthropocene and scaling it up “where the Earth and the Cosmos have been transformed into a gigantic system, a rupture which we call modernity”.
He refers to Rémi Brague writing on the globalisation of modern technology which necessarily forms one of the conditions for us to reflect on cosmopolitics today and illustrate the inefficacy of a biological metaphor for cosmopolitanism - ”the realisation of an organicism whole”. I would agree to hold back on the “biological metaphor” when engaging with political thinking, as raw matter follows raw matter moved by universal laws. In my opinion, an attempt to politicise ideas around nature is an attempt to “formalise the unconscious” (Jacques Lacan) and, although with an improving intention at first, all political systems had to deal with the after effects of this. The Universal Shop’s concern is particularly about these after effects that may not take much space today in the discussions on the topic of geo/cosmopolitics.
The Radicant (Nicholas Bourriaud) is a book that can add a perspective to the article. The author writes about our “liquid modernity” and it departs from the biological term “radicant” while referring to an ivy, a plant that grows and sets roots along its path, following its instincts and tentacles to morph and adjust to its context. “To be radicant: it means setting one’s roots in motion, staging them in heterogenous contexts and formats, denying any value of its origins, translating ideas, transcoding images, transplanting behaviours, exchanging rather than imposing” (N. Bourriaud).
From another important perspective, in his article “The Cosmopolitical Gesture”, Ed Keller writes about the much larger scale and context of the Universe, where “flows of information, energy and life” bring together and accompany our transitory condition on Earth. Yet, the extends of these flows and where do we sit in our agency are little known. “What sets human consciousness apart from other biologically evolved phenomena is that it makes a reality appear within itself. It creates inwardness. The life process has become aware of itself” (The Ego Tunnel , by Thomas Metzinger).
Cosmopolicy is about outwardness and The Universal Shop is about where should we begin. Is it the point of locality, as Yuk Hui suggests, or the point of universality, from where Ed Keller writes? While the topic of alignment, so far, is under public debates, the intention of The Shop is to simply sit with them, while mapping new territories of understanding. Surveilling what “universal” might mean and our extensions in processing its mechanics, the project is an invitation to play with cosmopolicy until it feels that there is something solid in our hands to work with. If not knowing where to begin, perhaps collecting elements and “selling” their use is an idea to warm up with.
The Curious Case of Cosmopolicy
