He showed me an illustration of a teacup and asked me what I thought it was. "It's a penis-holder", I told him. "Or a penis-cover. Men put it on their penises to keep them warm. Penis, singular."
It was a teacup. I wasn't in the mood for this kind of rubbish. Over the years the council had sent several inspectors to our premises to make sure we were complying with their rules and I was starting to lose my rag. "It's a teacup."
The inspector seemed surprisingly chipper. He was a very intense man. "Well that's the point. For you - for you - this is a penis-holder; for most people it's a teacup, but how do we know that? What makes it a teacup?" to which I replied that it was obviously a teacup. The design was made to hold hot liquid such as tea, but it was too fancy for e.g. engine oil or hydraulic fluid, ergo if we’re being generous it was a hot beverage holder, and as this was Britain it was a teacup. It couldn't be a penis-holder because it would fall off, unless it was held on with straps, which were not apparent in the illustration thus suggesting that they didn't exist and therefore it was a teacup.
After some minutes of this banter he cut to the chase. The council had been going through their records. They had been asked by the government to audit their property portfolio, but there was a problem. The architectural firm that designed our office building had long since gone bust, and the council’s records had been mislaid. Our building no longer had meaning, so the council had appointed a building inspector to determine its nature. And here he was.
"Have you ever heard of hermeneutics?", the inspector asked me. "Hermeneutics is the scientific art", and he stressed those words, "the scientific art of determining the meaning of a text through careful consideration of the historical context. Not just texts. All things. When I say text I mean everything that has meaning, or rather latent meaning, which means everything. The clothes on your back have meaning beyond their physical form. This chair." There was a pause. "The arrangement of the chairs, even." He leaned forward. "We are all wafts of dust in the cosmic wind."
He explained that he had been asked to perform a hermeneutical analysis of our building in order to determine its true function. "For you and your employees," he said, "it is an office building, with office workers and photocopiers. But you are not professionals", to which I replied that in fact I was a professional, I had a degree. He apologised. "But you are, at least on a philosophical level, not trained in the art of contextual analysis". Given that our company paid the rent I felt that we had a jolly good right to define the context of our working environment, but nonetheless he produced documentation from the council which, to my dismay, showed that they would accept his recommendations in the event no suitable counter-argument was presented at a board meeting scheduled for next month.
And so the building inspector embarked on a series of tests. He measured each of the rooms. He showed me his laptop, on which he had created a three-dimensional model of the building complete with little models of all the employees. "There's even a little model of me", he said, pointing to a stick figure standing at the apex of an imaginary pyramid one hundred feet above the roof of the building. "The pyramid represents my field of view", he explained. "I am simultaneously an observer of, and a participant in... and a commentator..." he said, as he fiddled with the laptop's trackpad, "simultaneously a chronicler of the ongoing construction of the ongoing construction of the dominant critical framework." The laptop had illuminated buttons that could make smiley faces appear on the screen. Every fibre of my being urged me to press one of the buttons, but I suspected he would accuse me of assault, or obstruction, so I refrained.
Mid-way through the month he had refined his model. The building was now a series of separate rooms linked together with double-ended arrows. To complicate things one of the receptionists had got married and moved away, so we had moved the reception desk around, which upset the building inspector. He forbade us from moving any more furniture and so for two weeks I took great pleasure in shifting the bins slightly before I left for the night just to mess with his mind. On my own initiative I produced a small file of press clippings which demonstrated that the building was a former technical college that had been built in 1965 but then sold off when the college merged with a local university in 1983, at which point our firm had moved in. He explained that he had not been hired to analyse press clippings; that was not his field. It appeared that the council hadn't bothered trying to contact the architects, even though two of the partners were still alive, because their intentions were irrelevant. To all further objections the inspector accused me of being originalist - "one of them" as he put it - which was apparently a bad thing.
One month later we met in the council boardroom. The inspector presented his findings, but I had done some preparation of my own. It seemed that the inspector was not a popular figure. He had attempted to apply hermeneutical analysis to the council staff, arguing that although the chairman thought of himself as an experienced executive, and had indeed worked for twenty years as a council chairman, he was instead cut out to be an Alpine farmer, driving cattle to and from mountain tops. The chairman had taken this as a jab at his weight and they had not seen eye-to-eye since then.
Furthermore the inspector's qualifications were suspect. He had a degree, but it was in podiatry. He had spent several years treating foot diseases, but after staring at hundreds of infected toenails he had had an epiphany which led to his abrupt career change. Perhaps some kind of foot fungus had rotted his brain. Nonetheless the council were bound by law to at least conduct the inspection, albeit that they were not compelled to abide by his findings, and therein lay a glimmer of hope.
During the presentation the inspector revealed that he had had yet another insight. Buildings were not homogeneous, he explained, they were instead vessels that housed a spectrum of meaning that pivoted through time. Thus our building was not a creation of bricks and mortar, it was a contextual gradient. He declared that the lower floors were in future to be room for prayer, and that the upper floors were to gradually merge from office space into a public swimming area, which would over the course of the next twelve years become a smelting furnace. The lower floors would, over a longer period of time, transition from prayer room to a place where expectant mothers could gather and swap tales of the moon. He suggested that the pool could be lined with carbon fibre-impregnated ceramic so that it would not melt. Seventy-five years hence the library would become a historical record of a library, with imaginary books and a staff of actors paid to act out the roles of library assistants.
This was of course not on. It sounded very dangerous, besides which there was no longer any space for our office. Luckily I had spent several years working for one of those internet companies that had been fashionable a decade or so ago, so I knew a thing or two about convincing rubbish. I presented my defence.
"I put it to the board", I said, "that although your inspector's analysis has merit, it is excessively skeuomorphic and fails to account for the impact of the internet of things", which was true on both counts. "The examples he gives, of the swimming pool and the grain silo - the suspension bridge as well - they are backwards-thinking legacy artefacts. Within a few years the building will be thoroughly embedded in the cloud, at which point its physical form will be meaningless. It will instead be a hot-swappable processing node in a giant hive mind." I was warming to this.
"In my view the traditional roles envisaged by your inspector are architecturally heteronormative. It is not the place of la humanidad to metaphorically assign genders to the structures with which we cohabit this planet. To unpack frankly, it is up to the structures themselves to define their meaning". As I said all this I pulled up some slides that had diagrams of buildings linked together ephemerally with wi-fi rays. They were also linked to passing cars, an airliner, and some little stick figures holding mobile phones. The headline read DEVICE MASHING.
"This slide illustrates what I'm talking about. In the very near future, entities - and that includes buildings, and people, but I'm talking about buildings - will occupy a metasynchronous space where cloud-enabled devices can define their own context. Cloudizens, I call them. Citizens of the Cloud, and in my view citizenship of this new realm is not the sole preserve of the white man, or of men, or even people". I glanced at the building inspector, who was at this point fiddling with a pen. He had a grim expression on his face; I imagined terrible visions of rotting toes dancing in his mind.
"However our office has not yet reached critical mass. In order to achieve singularity we need to scrum the power of big data into a cloudy singularity, and we won't be able to do that if half of the building is a bloody swimming pool. To sum up, although the inspector proposes a transformational framework that ostensibly reflects the hermeneutical exactitude of the building in question, he is mistakenly imposing an objectivist framework rather than harnessing the latent emergent power of the building's consciousness. He is, not to put too fine a point on it, not sufficiently woke".
The board convened to consider their findings, and that was the last I heard of them, and the building inspector.
