tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12393779415222173172024-03-20T00:05:40.660+01:00Awaking LucidAwaking Lucidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04895103534811454236noreply@blogger.comBlogger35125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1239377941522217317.post-39094728260365345902015-07-18T17:30:00.000+02:002015-07-18T17:30:00.196+02:00Sovereign Capability: Refugees<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Since the Arab Spring the question of refugees has become increasingly stressed in domestic, nation-state politics in the European Union. Being a driving force behind the rise of far-right political parties throughout the European Union that hold xenophobia as a principle. On 21 May 2015 data was extracted and published by Eurostat, the department of statistics for the European Commission, about the asylum applications and decisions in the European Union in 2014. The following graphs present a quantitative analysis of Eurostat's data coupled with and crossed by other data collected from various public national sources.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhA_rAKFkcv1oV1d0Y23uo_iTWVJngRSDJ46eQI6M2Iuj18hya91Ch0AX7Ue2QpETmhRBRGCQ2CQMZ-KaLwHvEElw_wNFvBe3vNiRCcaq4PfFPuSVdLncTNvBHzMTnTq_lsA9ZgAn0YSZA/s1600/Sovereign+Capacity+-+Refugees-01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Figure 1: Sovereign Capabilities: Refugees" border="0" height="314" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhA_rAKFkcv1oV1d0Y23uo_iTWVJngRSDJ46eQI6M2Iuj18hya91Ch0AX7Ue2QpETmhRBRGCQ2CQMZ-KaLwHvEElw_wNFvBe3vNiRCcaq4PfFPuSVdLncTNvBHzMTnTq_lsA9ZgAn0YSZA/s640/Sovereign+Capacity+-+Refugees-01.jpg" title="Figure 1: Sovereign Capabilities: Refugees" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">Figure 1: Sovereign Capabilities: Refugees</td></tr>
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In political discussions about the refugee question facing the EU today, a position of helplessness is taken by the sovereign power in saying something along the lines of "we just can't". The reasons why the asylum status of so many refugees is rejected are excessively complex and not the subject of analysis here. Instead of resorting to political ideology, a new logic is sought.</div>
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There is an intricate line between 'capacity' and 'capability'. The former largely purports an objective frame of analysis, whereas the latter shifts from the realm of technical possibility to that of awareness, agency and ultimately, politics. The analysis conducted here seeks to shed light on the frontier between these two concepts by devising a metric, entitled here as 'relative capability', that is the result of a basic formulaic operation between national population, sovereign land area, and GDP.</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxki6HGjHe-9mrMKpntEVEGqYYZhNVlEJHVcT6AjbqlMcNZJTkpyRclhPRmmUwtDwQ4mRBUmS4uSi5j6KgBMLjwdLAJbLmv3YOEVug55OrSWmSy5vt-XGIbd1qU86nHT08z0-naocPbUI/s1600/Sovereign+Capacity+-+Refugees-02.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Figure 2: Sovereign Capabilities: Refugees" border="0" height="314" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxki6HGjHe-9mrMKpntEVEGqYYZhNVlEJHVcT6AjbqlMcNZJTkpyRclhPRmmUwtDwQ4mRBUmS4uSi5j6KgBMLjwdLAJbLmv3YOEVug55OrSWmSy5vt-XGIbd1qU86nHT08z0-naocPbUI/s640/Sovereign+Capacity+-+Refugees-02.jpg" title="Figure 2: Sovereign Capabilities: Refugees" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">Figure 2: Sovereign Capabilities: Refugees</td></tr>
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This project seeks to call into question the relation between demographic, geographic and economic prosperity with the sovereign distribution of rights to others. By bringing national policy to the fore, it is ultimately two forms of absolute politics – ideology and opportunity – that becomes visible.</div>
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<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUFRIKu0-93bmn9VRVCcvKJ1UNtjYfXgsk2By883-Ba4e_RycTfCf-jLsRq9KTuPGJWPc1Amt8wuSDsjBJOXgWgkWVUIc6H-N_v7C9InFedBfGYhOU4GEtER_wsmvQk8Dwu2kCDYs_-qc/s1600/Sovereign+Capacity+-+Refugees-03.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Figure 3: Sovereign Capabilities: Refugees" border="0" height="314" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUFRIKu0-93bmn9VRVCcvKJ1UNtjYfXgsk2By883-Ba4e_RycTfCf-jLsRq9KTuPGJWPc1Amt8wuSDsjBJOXgWgkWVUIc6H-N_v7C9InFedBfGYhOU4GEtER_wsmvQk8Dwu2kCDYs_-qc/s640/Sovereign+Capacity+-+Refugees-03.jpg" title="Figure 3: Sovereign Capabilities: Refugees" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">Figure 3: Sovereign Capabilities: Refugees</td></tr>
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<a href="https://mega.co.nz/#F!eokn0ICK!2xyqsmk_WqwouMFEaMDcMA" target="_blank">Download high-resolution versions of the images here.</a></div>
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List of sources:<br />
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Asylum_statistics<br />
http://www.theguardian.com/world/datablog/2015/may/11/which-eu-countries-receive-the-most-asylum-seekers<br />
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_European_Union<br />
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_population</div>
Awaking Lucidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04895103534811454236noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1239377941522217317.post-27851423448151901392015-07-06T01:17:00.000+02:002015-07-18T14:27:29.212+02:00Political Climate: The Greek Referendum<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuKljkrZuwXgGMFQ8wz1wzzC_1KO26MrtWm4SM0hNpb82DVKFGbtvI2uWNU4crC2jPHzLn0EHly1zqzKKP5TlX7dMMbeQOoxE0FjJnhuV_VafsfTzn9P4uEOdxp3tb5qbuEIRsHVOOTxA/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-07-05+at+11.54.50+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuKljkrZuwXgGMFQ8wz1wzzC_1KO26MrtWm4SM0hNpb82DVKFGbtvI2uWNU4crC2jPHzLn0EHly1zqzKKP5TlX7dMMbeQOoxE0FjJnhuV_VafsfTzn9P4uEOdxp3tb5qbuEIRsHVOOTxA/s640/Screen+Shot+2015-07-05+at+11.54.50+PM.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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The Greek Referendum was reported under the Business section of The Guardian. With the no vote having won, an archive is collected of the event's development, almost entirely taking place live on line in real time. We can look back using archive.org's Internet Archive Wayback Machine to view the public archive of The Guardian's June Business section. Key dates of the event are June 25, 26 & 27. On June 25th talks broke down and on June 27th Tsipras made his speech and officially launched what I can only term a war. The archive has been subject to massive manipulation of what is and what can be publicly recorded, and how. This folder is an extensive archive of the events. It was developed around the media retrieval protocols and available procedures for retrieving as much pertinent information as possible. Having witnessed these events on these websites, the pertinence of information is subjectively determined and represent a highly personal and intimate reading of profoundly historical events. Evidentiary procedure was followed as extensively as possible. If we follow the logic of remote sensing data and satellite tasking, someone tasked the Wayback Machine to take a picture of these websites this many times at these times. <span style="line-height: 1.714285714;">If this is indeed the case: </span><span style="line-height: 1.714285714;">who? Are these the <i><u>only</u></i> records of the extensive amount of reporting that took place? What happened to the tasks that must have been made of June 26 and 27's Guardian Business Livefeed? What happened on June 28? Where are the records?</span></div>
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Additional material to The Guardian Business Livefeed is included in the archive, including major news events that shaped the course of events and critical commentary made during.<br />
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I have and continued to liveblog the events via social media. <a href="https://www.facebook.com/nick.axel" target="_blank">Facebook</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/alucidwake" target="_blank">Twitter</a></div>
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<a href="https://mega.co.nz/#F!nl9FhL4R!1syNa0CkS0MbmSOoJ7vvEA" target="_blank">https://mega.co.nz/#F!nl9FhL4R!1syNa0CkS0MbmSOoJ7vvEA</a></div>
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June 6th, 2015</div>
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Belin</div>
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Awaking Lucidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04895103534811454236noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1239377941522217317.post-61130328584240945782014-04-16T23:52:00.003+02:002014-04-16T23:52:30.535+02:0024. Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency - Architecture after Revolution<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (DAAR) is a unique model of interventionary practice established by Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal and Eyal Weizman operating from and within Beit Sahour, Palestine. <i>Architecture After Revolution</i> presents a collection of stories that make a robust and compelling case for architecture to be conceived of as a situated instrument of political practice. <br /><br />The book is arranged into five chapters, though as each one is in fact many, it would be unjust to reflect on them as individual projects but rather as the articulation of a singular project. Through a series of entangled instances of history and architecture, the immanent significance of political terms within present-day Palestine are teased out. By polemically employing the concept of ‘colonization’ as a framework the present is made decipherable as the ground for political action while formulating what is at stake when we consider notions of justice in such charged environments.<br /><br />The work begins by situating itself within the recent evacuation of Israel from Palestinian zones and speculates on its continuation. By asking the question “what is decolonization today?” (p.18) the authors develop a politics of subversion by considering architecture as a temporal assemblage that cannot simply be forgotten nor reused, but instead demands to be critically reckoned with. Buildings are treated as “optics from which to investigate and probe the political, legal, and social force fields” (p.35) with the ultimate goal of “[provoking] politics to reveal itself and act upon it” (p.25). The projects investigate the built environment as a vessel, one that constitutes a historical time by bringing the past into the present, and as such, the material for constructing a just future.<br /><br />Central to the project is a methodological reflection on its own ambitions. If decolonization is the intention, it is first and foremost imperative to ensure that intervening does not repeat the colonial gestures that instantiated the political situation being addressed in the first place. Taking influence from the concept of “profanation” in the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, their work seeks to “liberate the common from the control of authoritarian regimes, neo-colonialism and consumer societies” (p.183) and architecturally formulate “a set of new propositions and re-activations of common uses” (p.184).<br /><br />Although subtle, the practice’s Marxist tone shows itself at moments, such as in the explicit identification of the refugee as the political subject of decolonization. Drawing from its contemporary political definition, the refugee has an inherent “moral and historical claim” (p.44) for the right of return[1], posited as decolonialization’s foundational act. Yet the work begins from the problematic recognition of the fact that the subject and place of returns has been irrevocably altered since the original event of exile. The practice is therefore constituted as an “arena of speculation” for the discovery of what is at stake when we speak of the right to return. Towards these ends, architecture is not only indispensible for “opening the imagination” by inviting speculative participation into the future of the built environment, but also the privileged medium for actualizing returns.<br /><br />The situation of return between the refugee camp of Dheisheh and the destroyed village of Miska is taken as a prototypical case study in which the subject returning and the locations returning to and from can be easily identified. A careful investigation of the camp’s urban milieu that has accrued over the past 65 years as well as the physical remnants of Miska result in a doubled notion of identity. This demands the mirroring of any intervention in both sites and results in the inverted transplantation of one site onto the other in a way that unhinges the potential of the present for what could be to come.<br /><br />As the narrative advances, the projects set out to explore more complicated examples of refugeeness, such as in the case of a building complex in Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv. In this instance there is no population returning to a place, but instead an architecture that claims to render the past in the present. While not making an architectural proposal for the museum that currently stands on its site, the authors build a case through the minute reconstruction of photographic evidence that proves disingenuity in what the building claims itself to be. The architectural narration of a false history of one monolithic structure instead of three densely interwoven buildings effectively impedes the urban conditions of return by mystifying the place being returned to, and subsequently forsaking the potential of a convivial city.<br /><br />The remaining chapters seek to repurpose colonial remnants, in which a housing subdivision, a military base and a parliament are taken as examples. What is most striking about these interventions is their demonstration that “colonial architecture doesn’t necessarily reproduce the functions for which it was designed” (p.21). Despite the built environment’s implication in political regimes and the weight it may carry as “real existing colonialism”, architectural form retains a powerful degree of neutral propensity that cannot be subsumed. The exemplary work of DAAR proves the value of architectural speculation in its capacity to create an opening towards a tangible future from the dirty and “less-than-ideal” grounds of the present.<div>
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<b>Notes:</b>1. “The term right of return refers to a principle of international law, codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, giving any person the right to return to, and re-enter, his or her country of origin.” <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_return">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_return</a> <div>
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<a href="http://www.domusweb.it/en/reviews/2014/03/07/critical_proximity.html" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small;" target="_blank">This piece originally appeared in DomusWeb on March 7, 2014, as 'Critical Proximity'</a></div>
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Awaking Lucidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04895103534811454236noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1239377941522217317.post-32833266221925870902013-10-30T10:18:00.000+01:002013-10-30T10:18:04.905+01:0023. San Rocco - Book of Copies<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 9.0pt;">“The argument which
follows involves the surrender or at least, the temporary suspension of a
prevalent monocular vision, the willingness to recognize certain fantasies
about history and scientific method for the totems which they are, the
concession that political process is likely to be neither very smooth nor very
predictable and, perhaps above all, the dissolution of a cherished prejudice
that all buildings can be, and must become, works of architecture.” <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 9.0pt;">Colin Rowe
& Fred Koetter, Collage City (MIT, 1978), p.101<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In 1987 Catalan
theorist Ignasi de Solá-Morales published an essay titled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Weak Architecture</i>, in which a crisis in contemporary architecture was
diagnosed as a symptom of the modernism’s apparent end. Resulting in a
historical condition of radical groundless in which “contemporary architecture,
in conjunction with the other arts, is confronted with the need to build on
air, to build in the void,” Solá-Morales contrasts the concepts of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">weakness </i>with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fundamentalism</i> in architecture. While the former threatens to
reproduce the crisis-inducing machine that is modernism, the latter<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>escapes its ideological and aesthetic conditions.
Both tactics approach building as a representation of ideology: fundamentalism digs
deeper into history in order to posit a “more true” ground whereas weakness accepts
the impossibility of a true ground at all.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The project and
recent exhibition <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Book of Copies </i>by San
Rocco, the notorious architecture collective that produces its eponymous publication,
is a timely meditation on the present-day significance of these two modes of
architectural production. A copy itself, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Book
of Copies </i>was originally presented as a part of FAT’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Museum of Copying </i>in the 2012 Venice Biennale. It has been revamped
</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">as
a solo show currently on view at London’s Architectural Association </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">with </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">numerous new books</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">
a new exhibition design b</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">y young Milan-based firm PIOVENEFABI</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Each Book of Copies
presented is composed of two parts: a collection of photocopied images, and a
title, “naming a class of buildings that could be produced by copying the
figures.” The project synthesizes the fundamentalism of naming an architectural
type and the weakness of revealing the complexity of what naming a “type” may
mean. While the project admittedly does not intend to “present an exhaustive
taxonomy” it does posit the necessity and liberty of the taxonomization process
in order to “redefine … collective knowledge”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Throughout the books
on display, the tenuous relation between each book’s signifier and signified is
played with in various ways. Some books take rather common classes of building,
such as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tunnels, Highways, Chinese houses,
Blue buildings, Churches</i>, and so on, to present what might not have been,
but perhaps should be, considered integral to the type. Others take an opposite
approach, proposing unconventional architectural types such as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pachinko Parlors</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Villas</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Where to Shoot a Porno
Movie</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Buildings Arguably Built by Aliens,</i>
and<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Brothels</i>, expanding the notions
of what is built and can be architecture. A third approach is neither focused
on the book’s title nor its content but the fact that it is a book and can be
read as such, emphasizing parts of the built environment that may be overlooked
as merely components of the architectural event, like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Billboards, Pilotis, Park gates, </i>and<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Shop Windows</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Installed with
two photocopy machines in the room, each Book of Copies can be copied and taken
for personal use. As such, the exhibition literally furnishes the architect
with the material for becoming a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">bricoleur</i>,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>the famous identity posited by Colin
Rowe and Fred Koetter for the postmodern architect capable of forging the
future. The bricoleur walks the tightrope between “scientific idealism” and
“populist empiricism,” between Solá-Morales’ weakness and fundamentalism: not
merely characterized as one who performs an act of bricolage, the bricoleur is
one who is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">conscious</i> of the context
of making itself. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<!--StartFragment-->
<i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: ES; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">Book
of Copies </span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: ES; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">should
be recognized as a critical response to the milieu of architectural practice
actively dissolving its own boundaries to incorporate other disciplines as a
means of extending architecture’s audience, and (hopefully) reasserting its
contemporary value. Yet, though fully cognizant of the field’s expansion, <i>Book of Copies</i> is a bold argument for interiority.
If architecture as a discipline is actively being reconfigured along with most
other disciplines in an emergent post-2008 order, San Rocco accepts a certain
lack of control over its future, and instead argues for focusing creative
disciplinary energies on doing best what architecture is known to do, so that however
architecture is conditioned by planetary forces, it can be done so consciously
and respectably.</span><!--EndFragment-->
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: ES; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://www.uncubemagazine.com/blog/11212397" target="_blank">This piece originally appeared in ubcube on October 29, 2013, as 'And Again...'</a></span></span></div>
Awaking Lucidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04895103534811454236noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1239377941522217317.post-40812911267266147902013-10-06T12:26:00.002+02:002013-10-06T12:28:43.357+02:0022. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour - Learning From Las Vegas<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The following post inaugurates a new type for this blog. Whereas the earlier posts could be largely characterized by an intention to explore the contemporary operationality of a work, a sort of immanent vicariousness, this post can be loosely characterized as schematic, in which the goal is not so much to <i>use</i> the work, but to search out and extract from the work what was, can, and could be used. If we could call the former a 'projection', we could call the latter a 'gleaning'.<br />
<br />
It is perhaps then incisive that the first example of this type of post is <i>Learning from Las Vegas</i>, the infamous manifesto of 1972 that itself argues for an architectural approach that is more akin to the methodology of gleaning as opposed to projection. This book, the result of a studio at Yale, acted as the first concrete theoretical opposition to the architectural epistemology of modernism that was championed (via failure) by Le Corbusier, and as such paved the way for post-modern discourse.<br />
<br />
The works that will be treated in the series of posts that follow in the same format will largely be of a highly sensitive nature, and it is therefore this sensitivity itself that needs to be respected and maintained. As a methodological consequence of the presuppositions that have been outline here, the content of these posts will be merely a series of quotes, introduced by a very brief historical and discursive contextualization.<br />
<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
"to question how we look at things." p3<br />
<br />
"The morality of commercial advertising, gambling interests, and the competitive instinct is not at issue here, although, indeed, we believe it should be in the architect's broader, <i>synthetic</i> tasks of which an analysis such as this is but one aspect. The analysis of a drive-in church in this context would match that of a drive-in restaurant." p6<br />
<br />
"The overlapping of disciplines may have diluted the architecture, but it enriched the meaning." p7<br />
<br />
"orthodox Modern architects ... shunned symbolism of form as an expression or reinforcement of content: meaning was to be communicated, not through allusion to previously known forms, but through the inherent, physiognomic characteristics of form." p7<br />
<br />
"This architecture of styles and signs is antispatial; it is an architecture of communication over space; communication dominates space as an element in the architecture and in the landscape. But it is for a new scale of landscape." p8<br />
<br />
"Architecture is not enough. Because the spatial relationships are made by symbols more than by forms, architecture in this landscape becomes symbol in space rather than form in space" p13<br />
<br />
"Each city is an archetype rather than a prototype, an exaggerated example from which to derive lessons for the typical. Each city vividly superimposes elements of a supranational scale on the local fabric..." p18<br />
<br />
"The zone <i>of</i> the highway is a shared order. The zone <i>off</i> the highway is an individual order." p20<br />
<br />
"The most unique, most monumental parts of the Strip, the signs and casino facades, are also the most changable; it is the neutral systems-motel structures behind that survive a succession of facelifts and a series of themes up front." p34<br />
<br />
"The occupant of an anonymous vernacular tenement on an Italian medieval street could achieve identity through decoration on a front door - or perhaps through the <i>bella figura</i> of clothing - within the scale of a spatially limited, foot-going community. The same held for families behind the unified facades of Nash's London terraces. But for the middle-class suburbanite living, not in an antebellum mansion, but in a smaller version lost in a large space, identity must come through symbolic treatment of the form of the house, either through styling provided by the developer (for instance, split-level Colonial) or through a variety of symbolic ornaments applied thereafter by the owner (the Rococo lamp in the picture window or the wagon wheel out front)." p154<br />
<br />
"We architects who hope for a reallocation of national resources toward social purposes must take care to lay emphasis on the purposes and their promotion rather than on the architecture that shelters them." p155<br />
<br />
"Understanding the content of Pop's messages and the way that it is projected does not mean that one need agree with, approve of, or reproduce that content." p162</div>
Awaking Lucidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04895103534811454236noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1239377941522217317.post-45975176044651342092013-10-05T13:22:00.000+02:002013-10-05T13:22:01.309+02:0021. Giorgio Agamben - Opus Dei<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>"The problem of the coming philosophy is that of thinking an ontology beyond operativity and command and an ethics and a politics entirely liberated from the concepts of duty and will"</i></span></div>
<i><br /></i>
<i>Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty</i>, written by Giorgio Agamben and translated by Adam Kotsko, is the chronological and conceptual culmination of his long-standing <i>Homo Sacer</i> project. It could be conjectured that the overarching goal of the project has been to understand the present: to explain why we do things the way we do them and how the world as it is now could have come to be. Frustratingly so, more than pointing the way forward, Agamben reveals how what has and can be conceived of as the foundation for a future is in fact only solidifying the grip upon which the logics of the present impede the coming of history.<br />
<br />
The book explicates two radically distinct yet congruous and overlapping modes of existence, one of "being" and one of "having-to-be." In other words, whether the substance of the individual is either their bare fact of existing, or what the individual does, makes, produces, effects. This latter ontology is posited as the dominant mode of the moderns, one in which has resulted in the total economization of time and space. Importantly, this economic ontology, in which what is only is because it can be measured in a particular way and for a particular reason and as such is structurally dependent on that system of measurement, is not itself foreign from a more classical ontology of being, but instead emerged from within it, from its very ambivalence to definition. In fact, the only way in which the ontology of "operativity" could overcome the ontology of "being" is by appropriating its language of virtue and framing it a new way and towards other ends, by making virtue a duty.<br />
<br />
By tracing the evolution of existential ontology as akin to a colonial process, Agamben shows the impossibility of utopically returning to this more 'authentic' mode of being, but instead posits the need for a new conceptualization of being, in its reasons and its means.</div>
Awaking Lucidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04895103534811454236noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1239377941522217317.post-13551702138627407492013-09-25T18:00:00.001+02:002013-11-05T19:55:08.374+01:0020. Lisbon Architecture Triennale - Close, Closer<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">An ecology of architectural ideology.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Unless your –ienniale
takes place on a small urbanized island in the northwest corner of Italy, it is
not unusual for the relation between the event itself and where it takes place
to act as a primary catalyst for reflection and production. With its complex
topography of both production and reflection distributed throughout its
exhibitions and events, the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale is no different
in these regards to the phenomena of –ienniales that has taken place in the
creative fields over the past decade. Focusing from the outset on the effect
over time events of this magnitude have on the city, most of the exhibitions
are designed to unfold over the course of the next three months. As such, at
this point it is futile to make any sort of value judgments regarding its
success or failure (because, really, who would it be a success or failure
for?). This approach instead orients the critical gaze towards the individual
projects themselves and how they respond to the ambitions, conditions and
constraints they have taken upon themselves.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The event is
multifaceted, taking shape in four main curated exhibitions and a vast program
of affiliated projects that are all in different mediums and locations
throughout the spatiotemporal city. As a consequence of this distributed
nature, it is perhaps more common for one to come across a single manifestation
of the overarching curatorial project rather than entering into a heterotopia
of discourse. Under the title <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Close,
Closer</i>, curated by Beatrice Galilee the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale
approaches the community of architectural discourse by casting a wide net to
reveal what is actually there in the sea and foster its potential rather than
investing in specific technologies and locations to harvest a single population
of fish that everyone purportedly likes. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The range of
interpretations given to the local and discursive constraints of the Triennale
is wide, but all find common ground amongst each other in their sincerity and
clarity in projecting a highly contingent vision forward. Schematically divisible
into two groups, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reality and Other
Fictions</i>, curated by Mariana Pestana, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Future Perfect</i>, curated by Liam Young, present radically opposed
yet deeply homologous interpretations of the opportunity to exhibit work in a
context formerly known as the museum, whereas on the other hand <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New Publics</i>, curated by José Esparza,
and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Institute Effect</i>, curated by
Dani Admiss, meditate on the processes of producing this thing we call work
itself. While the difference between these two pairs runs deep, it is also a
divide that emerges rhetorically to the surface: the former proclaims itself to
be based on transcendental nouns such as the ‘future’ or ‘reality,’ the latter
concerns itself with transient verbs such as ‘to make public’ and ‘to
institute’. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In this sense,
the experience of each exhibition is highly particular and responds directly to
the context in which it is located. Located in the former electricity power
station that has recently been transformed into a museum about its own past,
Young’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Future Perfect</i> sets out to
materialize at a 1:1 scale what elements of the future city may look like and
do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Taking shape in construction robots,
surveillance drones, interactive light installations, wax clothing, and a
series of videos all situated within an artificial forest inside a reasonably
small room of the museum, the exhibition ultimately demands of the museum-goer
that they are not only highly informed, a ‘fan’ in its own sense, but that they
submit the momentary potentials of their individual consciousness to this
hyper-particular and somewhat over-aestheticized vision of the future.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">On the other end
of the museum spectrum, Pestana’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reality
and Other Fictions</i> takes place in a grand palace which was once home to the
first Marquis de Pombal, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, the Prime Minister
and architect of Lisbon’s urban reconstruction after its infamously sublime
earthquake of 1755. Set within a decadently ornamental context, the work within
largely reflects on the building’s extravagant beauty, and in a sense the
contingent and particular nature of all things beautiful. With exquisitely
detailed installations, topics such as the personal and architectural
embodiment of power, the declaration of rights and its formalization as law,
the inscription of discourse and the perceptions of comfort are rhetorically
materialized in such a way that a latent process of self-reflection is effectively
induced in the experience of the space.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Esparza’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New Publics</i> is paradoxically both the
loudest and quietest of the four primary curatorial lines. Considered more a
program than an exhibition, if one was to go and look for it, there would
honestly be very little to see. Sitting in </span><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Praça da Figueira,</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">
one of Lisbon’s central and most prominent squares, Mexican architect Frida
Escobedo’s delicately figured and finely detailed <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Civic Stage</i> acted as the literal platform for a series of speeches,
performances and plays that occurred during the inauguration of the Triennale.
While the stage will only be intermittently populated by informal classes or
whatever other ways the citizens of Lisbon decide to inhabit its open surface,
this very gesture of absence and potential is profound. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">Like John Cage’s interpretation of the
significance of a concert in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">4’33”</i> or
Marcel Duchamp’s approach to the museum in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fountain</i>,
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New Publics </i>treats the architecture
of public space as the arbitrary yet necessary and incessant medium for the
performance of society.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">As if realizing
in a state of melancholy that what was made in the euphoric liberty of public
performance only lasts for as long as the performers are on stage performing
the performance, a few blocks down the road and back inside is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Institute Effect</i>. Situated within
MUDE, a museum of fashion and design that inhabits the contemporary ruin of a
former bank that was stopped in the midst of renovation, a series of sequential
residencies take as their task a highly reflective process of revealing what it
takes to make and what it means to have an institution. Starting from a tabula
rasa, ten independent architectural institutions from around the globe
iteratively occupy a single space over the course of the next three months
while holding workshops and public programs. Including the likes of Fabrica
(IT), Storefront for Art and Architecture (US), LIGA (MX), SALT (TR), Z33 (BE),
and many more, each institution’s singular identity is subconsciously presented
in the very way the space is occupied. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">With respect to
its original curatorial intention of positing questions as opposed to proposing
answers, it could be decided that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Close,
Closer</i> did in fact achieve the goals it set out for itself, but it should
perhaps be reflected upon whether the questions it has, and will continue to
raise, are indeed the ones it wants to be asking. The 2013 Lisbon Architecture
Triennale is an event that is saturated with ideology yet haunted by the
absence of hegemony. If what has become the norm is in fact problematically
unsustainable, it is crucial to interrogate the ways in which discourse evolves
away from that tradition. While it appears as if the only possible explanation
for the radical lack of Álvaro Siza or Eduardo Souto de Muora in a Portuguese
architectural event is the result of decision to not include this certain type
of architectural thought, it is perhaps a presence that is so prominent within
the contemporary Portuguese architectural discourse, pedagogy and culture that
it should not have been ignored altogether. Instead of trying to convince those
who attend the event one way or the other about its projected form of architectural
ideology, the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale perhaps most strongly makes
the case for the need of mutual recognition and an ecology of ideological
difference.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-size: x-small;"><span style="background-color: white;"><a href="http://www.arquine.com/blog/una-ecologia-de-la-ideologia-arquitectonica/" style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;" target="_blank"><span style="background-color: white;">This post was originally published in the Arquine blog on September 25th, 2013, in Spanish as </span><b style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;">Una ecología de la ideología arquitectónica</b></a></span></span><br />
<a href="http://www.domusweb.it/en/architecture/2013/11/05/close_closer.html" style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="background-color: white;">This post appeared, altered, in DomusWeb on November 5th, 2013, as <b>Close, Closer</b></span></span></a></div>
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Awaking Lucidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04895103534811454236noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1239377941522217317.post-61722502736834367482013-09-08T23:08:00.000+02:002013-09-08T23:08:10.085+02:0019. Shane Carruth - Upstream Color<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>Upstream Color </i>is a 2013 film by Shane Carruth, his first since his 2004 premier <i>Primer</i>, infamous for its extremely low budget and impossibly confounding story. Akin to the latter, <i>Upstream</i><i> Color</i> is a rigorously independent and experimental film directed, written, produced, and starring Carruth himself. It is perhaps what could be called an <i>auter</i> film for the age of technological and epistemological accessibility. Since its release earlier this year, as will be read at the beginning of anything else about it, the film has quickly generated a plethora of discussion and commentary, with a great deal of "explanation" as the impetus, brought on by the beautifully expressive yet intentionally fragmentary, nonlinear, broken temporality of the film. It has a poetic approach that at times leaves information too sparse, unfortunate only because it is this very technique itself that imbues the passage of scenes with such potency. The film is what I would like to term an 'embodied experience', meaning: the medium through which sensory information is transmitted is transmitted in such a way that the experience of the information itself communicates the content of that information. The medium and the message are one.</div>
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In the many interviews Carruth has given about the film, he is upfront and surprisingly straightforward about the intentions of making the film, which is, to paraphrase, to reflect on (contemporary) alienation. What is surprising about his admittance of this is not that artistic laborers want to hide the 'meaning' of their work today in the age of precarity, but the fact that this meaning, this intention, is very clearly identified and really quite simple. For this reason, the fragmented montage of spatiotemporality and narratives itself embodies the experience of film with 'the film' (or, 'the project'). In this sense film becomes a medium. </div>
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Before going any further, I will take cue from the New Yorker review (<i><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/05/the-thoreau-poison.html" target="_blank">The Thoreau Poison</a></i>) in saying that what follows may contain what is known as "spoilers", but ultimately what is most potent about the film cannot be spoiled through any divulgence of plot information. Furthermore, while the following discussion will largely focus on a single device that Carruth, in interviews, has more or less outright stated was an arbitrary choice for inclusion, I will again take cue from the review previously cited in saying that this object might in fact be the key to unlocking the true philosophical complexity of the film, for while it's choice might be contingent, it is <i>necessary</i>. </div>
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What is perhaps most problematic about the film is its central <i>objet</i>, the book <i>Walden</i> by Henry David Thoreau, which functions as the device around which the story weaves it's path. Much of the debate that has arisen about the film has focused on Carruth's particular, yet emphatic if in no other way than rhetorical, use of the book. Enigmatic lines are repeated like religious hymns; the trauma which occupies the first third of the movie is predicated on the book's incessant transcription, whereas the finale directly posits the book as the key to salvation. Beyond the profoundly resonant score, sound, a fundamental element of Thoreau's book, is integral to the development of the story, acting as the means by which Kris (the main character) finds her way out of the trauma, as well as the sublime and foreign way in which Kris and Jeff are able to identify the impulse that guides them towards salvation.</div>
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It is deeply unclear in which type of light the book <i>Walden</i> is presented; at the same time it is what leads the characters to salvation, it is what facilitated their alienating trauma in the first place. One gets a very uneasy feeling at the end as to whether <i>Walden</i> is really the solution, or in fact the problem itself. But perhaps this line of questioning is fundamentally ambiguous and ambivalent for its fallacious interpretation of the effect for the cause. What is therefore ultimately most problematic is not <i>Walden</i> itself but it's traumatic instrumentalization. It is here that I must insist, in the face of Carruth's comments, that <i>Walden</i> as a sign is not innocent, but in fact points again towards the project that was (re)initiated with <i>Upstream</i><i> </i><i>Color</i>. </div>
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<i>Upstream</i><i> </i><i>Color</i>, and conjecturally <i>Walden</i> itself, seems to posit the corruption of a human essence by the evolution of society, potently represented as a physical trauma (with visible traces). The trauma itself is composed of two parts: the first in which the subject is imbricated with a foreign force, making the one two, and as such allowing for the manipulation of the one by a foreign operator; the second element of the trauma is in which the subject, passing from an "authentic" one (Kris working) to an "authentic" two (Kris being manipulated) to an "inauthetic" one (Kris alone after manipulation with the force loose inside her body), is split into two in an attempt to restore the subject to its authentic wholeness. Instead, what is produced is a lacking pair, in which Kris returns to her life, finding it completely empty without a job, unable to communicate with others nor control or understand her emotions. What makes this view most enigmatic is its transcendental nature: while it may be undeniably real (with scientifically identifiable physical traces) the trauma is itself posited as contingent. What this means is that the source of the trauma can be identified, and even though it cannot be erased from memory, can be treated, which in the case of <i>Upstream</i><i> </i><i>Color</i>, is accomplished through the awareness of said trauma. The awareness of the trauma will produce two effects: it will lead the traumatized to be united with its severed half while stopping the trauma from repeating itself to others. </div>
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The emphatic presentation of trauma and its transcendence is questionable not in an artistic, but philosophical sense, and as such puts in question the level on which <i>Upstream Color</i> should be interpreted. For example, is the traumatic act (the imbrication of Kris) really contingent? If trauma is treated as something perhaps fundamental to existence, or at the very least human subjectivity, at what stage in the traumatic process can it be said is the 'default' condition? Can an ontological framework for an ethics be constructed on the conceptual basis of trauma? While the philosophical questions this film raises may be questionable, what ultimately stands out for this film is its lucid representation of alienated connectivity, and the belief, albeit transcendental and debatable bordering on religious, that another way of being is possible.</div>
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Awaking Lucidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04895103534811454236noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1239377941522217317.post-33213991651760038182013-08-16T17:51:00.001+02:002013-09-01T15:22:09.584+02:0018. Doug Spencer - Architectural Deleuzism <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The essay written by Doug Spencer entitled 'Architectural Deleuzism' was originally published in the journal Radical Philosophy in 2011 and is taken from his Ph.D which is currently being reformulated into book form under the provisional title 'An Architecture of Compliance', on "neoliberal/managerial governmentality and architecture." while the essay had come into my purview some time ago, I would like to thank <a href="http://rosswolfe.wordpress.com/">Ross Wolfe</a> for raising it to my attention again. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The premise of the essay is rather straightforward and executed with stunning clarity and impressive rigor. Spencer's argument is to demonstrate how the critical devices of Deleuze & Guattari's repitoire were subsumed and coopted by the emerging market logic of the 1990's through their very politicization. In other words, how in both the architectural and theoretical work of, for example, Patrick Schumacher and Alejandro Zaera-Polo, critical concepts such as the smoothing of space and the autonomy of affect were implemented with explicitly political intentions (perhaps instead of critical intentions, and as such possible to realize in the market) and surreptitiously furthered the hegemonic reach of the very problematic these concepts were originally developed to dismantle. Spencer is able to make his critique transcend scales, ranging from managerial plans to facade patterns. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Key to the type of criticism Spencer deploys, which in its sheer power and ingenuity could, should act as a model for the criticism-to-come, is a Marxist approach. I hesitate to write this word, but there is simply no other way to describe his methodology. The hesitation is not just for fear that people will be instantly turned off from reading the essay or form preestablished judgements, but because Marx is not present in the essay, but more infiltrates it in every thought. Therefore, Spencer's methodology is Marxist insofar as it is methodological and critically grounded. It is not clear in its reading any sort of class antagonism, highly suitable for today's complex context of causality, but moreso "the market" is framed nebulously and frustratingly intangible (as it is, is it not?). Spencer's motivation, if I may make a conjecture, is fundamentally based on revealing the contemporary techniques of exploitation, in decodifying the complexities of contemporary power as it is immanently manifest in architecture, not necessarily to say what is to be done, but to raise awareness to the effects of what is done. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I will end this post with a series of quotes from the essay. The essay is available online (again thanks to Ross), which I would recommend to anyone interested in the future of critical politics. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.scribd.com/mobile/doc/160101221?width=800">Doug Spencer - Architectural Deleuzism</a> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">" Between Deleuze’s ‘sieve whose mesh will trans-mute from point to point’ and ‘gradient vectors of transformation’, on the one hand, and Schumacher’s ‘spaces of enclosure’ and ‘clearly bounded realms’, on the other, the account of a transition from a striated to a smooth space can be followed in parallel across both passages. The movement that can be traced between them, however, when the passages are returned to the frame of their respective contexts, is one from critique to valorization; from Deleuze’s warning to Schumacher’s affirmation. This movement paradoxically turns Deleuze’s analysis of a nascent control mechanism into a prescription for its implementation.Critique is absorbed into the very forms of knowledge and power it had sought to denounce in order to reinvent and valorize their operation." <u>p12</u></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">" Only within the business organization, [Zaera-Polo] argues, can the ‘progressive realities’ – such as ‘de-hierarchization, matrix andnetwork organization, flexible specialization, loose and multiple coupling, etc.’ – thus be found to fill this‘ideological vacuum’. These ‘progressive realities’ are, in any case, not seen as the creations of business itself, but as conditions ‘forced upon the capitalist enterpriseby the new degree of complexity and flexibility of thetotal production process’. Hence they can be brack-eted from their neoliberal context, and then pursued, in themselves, as a means by which architecture can locate and pursue a supposedly emancipatory project." p13</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">" Treated as a means to an end, affect becomes reifiedand is turned to a use opposite to that suggested by Deleuze and Guattari: rather than a path towards the deterritorialization of subject positions imposed by a molar order, affect serves to reterritorialize the subject within an environment governed by neoliberal imperatives." p19</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">" What is presented as an emancipatory release from the confines of a disciplinary model of spatial programmes operates, in fact, as a means through which former spaces of enclosure are opened out to the market as an uncontested mechanism of valorization." <u><u>p20</u></u></span></div>
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Awaking Lucidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04895103534811454236noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1239377941522217317.post-36540296407286132142013-08-14T17:11:00.002+02:002013-08-14T17:29:36.475+02:00X.5.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Untitled, 2013</span></i></div>
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Awaking Lucidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04895103534811454236noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1239377941522217317.post-70706693561030416522013-08-10T21:38:00.001+02:002013-08-10T21:38:32.614+02:0017. Giorgio Agamben - The Kingdom and the Glory<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Published in English in 2011 (originally in Italian in 2007 as <i>Il Reigno e la Gloria</i>), Agamben's <i>The Kingdom and the Glory</i> is the decisive turning point of his longstanding <i>Homo Sacer </i>project, tentatively figured as II, 2 (this while temporally written after <i>State of Exception</i> and <i>Remnants of Auschwitz,</i> this book would be situated in between the two). Much like almost every other book in the series (except <i>State of Exception</i>), in lucid fashion the subtitle contains the book's central concepts from which his archaeological method will unfold: <i>For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government</i>. The summation of the title is perhaps misleading, for the subtitle does not relate in any structural or direct way to the former, but instead by privileging the first two Agamben pre-emptively reveals a conclusion to the book itself by diagnosing a fundamental problematic in the contemporary political sphere in its supposedly secular (i.e. modern) nature. From this point, we could state that the intention of the book is to reveal the essentially <i>theological, </i>religious foundation of Western power that has only recently manifested itself in contemporary forms of biopolitics. Agamben does this by tracing in painstaking detail the contingent historical evolution of certain concepts from Ancient Greece, through Christianity, into the Middle Ages, and into the Enlightenment.<br />
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While Foucault might have revealed the metaphysics of power in governmentality, his project was undeniably left unfinished and insufficient for rendering pliable its contemporary manifestations. While certain theorists have continued his project <i>forward</i> towards societies of control and the pharmacopornographic regime, Agamben instead looks back in an eruditic, if not hermetic, fashion that posits the immutable nature of power itself, and as such seeks provides the vocabulary for its contemporary philosophical disentanglement. The chapter titles reveal a surprising amount about his methodological rigor: The Mystery of the Economy, Being and Acting, The Kingdom and the Government, the Providential Machine, Angelology and Bureaucracy, The Power and the Glory. While these concepts seem to be rather general and applicable to many discourses today, Agamben shows how the specific utilization of these terms figured decisively in the evolution of philosophical thought, and more importantly, governmental politics. My intention behind discussing the books structure is not to vault Agamben's methodology above those of other methods, but merely communicate the challenging nature of this book, lest one be from a properly theological background (which I am not).<br />
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Agamben ultimately defines the nature of Western power as essentially bipolar, in which he locates a contemporary problematic our inheritance of modern political form in its secularizing gesture (despite explicit reference to theology in the works of Rousseau). The consequences of this are profound, only few of which Agamben details himself, while primarily centering himself on 20th century's catastrophic attempts of reintroducing sacredness into politics in fascism. What if power cannot be reduced to merely the organization of things, but is also what legitimizes that organization and keeps the system running? If government, a unified body of power, is not our source of causality, we can witness some potential consequences from over the past 50 years of money and fame taking its place. If neither the former nor latter are neither suitable nor desirable, it is only through comprehending their fundamental (and necessary) coexistence and coproduction can we potentially conceptualize its total inoperativization and the possibility of a future.</div>
Awaking Lucidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04895103534811454236noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1239377941522217317.post-20219185991394182812013-08-07T16:03:00.000+02:002013-08-07T16:04:12.567+02:0016. Batlle i Roig Architects - Head Offices of the CMT<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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In a city whose modern development has based itself on the
inseparability of architecture and urbanism, where not only the plan but the
elevation has been defined and strictly regulated for over 150 years, there is
something uncanny about Barcelona’s developing neighborhood “22@” – the
“Innovation District.” Situated in the old industrial zone of Poble Nou, the new
development’s treatment of the local existent architecture is emblematic of the
relation between neoliberalism’s compulsion towards the new and the contextual
history in which this gambit takes place. Street signs at the base of oversized
shiny towers and weird techno-ecological buildings point towards a perplexing
amount of factory-turned-historical-<span style="mso-comment-continuation: 2;">museums</span>.
The sensitive filigree that characterized early-twentieth century Catalan brick
architecture is often lost in translation to the language of a curtain wall,
either glazed over or excessively complicated and aestheticized.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Few stipulations were made regarding what could take place
inside of urban planner Ildefons Cerdá’s enigmatic octagonal blocks, or “illes”
as Catalan people call them, under the condition that each was to be planned
and developed as a whole. The freedom given by the municipal government to the
district’s creators was an experiment carried out under the aegis of
“innovation,” designed to generate marketing and cognitive capital as much as
monetary revenue. Then again – isn’t that the kind of freedom that ultimately
enabled Gaudí to build his fantastic structures?<o:p></o:p></div>
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Like a rough-worn jewel underneath the current of a riverbed,
the Head Office building of Telecommunications Market Commision (CMT) is nestled
peacefully behind Nouvel’s sex-toy Torre Agbar. Built by Batlle i Roig
Architects, the stout 11-story CMT building is a delicate polemic. As if to
grasp Dürer’s truncated rhombohedron, the building’s appearance radically
changes with every step around its exterior – and throws the superficiality of
its architectural context into relief. The baffling simplicity of its rigorous
horizontal louvers provides a phenomenological dynamism unparalleled in the
rest of 22@. Glances into the geometry’s mystical interior are afforded from a
distance, only to be concealed once one gets too close, at which point the
building’s lightness is suddenly transformed into gravitas. Terraces
strategically placed through the building and oriented towards the sea sit
between the façade and the boundary layer to add an additional element of
depth. <o:p></o:p></div>
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While the typical contemporary demand for spectacular
architecture is fulfilled through the building’s prudently expressive gestures
and boldly simple techniques, arriving at the building’s base fully reveals it
innovative approach. Its geometry is placed on top of an old textile factory
that is located in the center of the block, though unfortunately still hidden
by construction scaffolding from the adjacent empty lots. The aesthetic affinity
between the new and old is<span class="MsoCommentReference"><span style="mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> formally and
metaphorically</span></span> reinforced by the louvers that continue over the
factory to connect the two in a swooping gesture. Housing the more personal
functions of the building, such as conference rooms and a children’s nursery,
the graceful restoration of the factory below exploits its spatial
characteristics to stimulate its new function. By locating these more intimate programs
in the factory, the tower is optimized for its operation as offices with an
uninterrupted floor plan that achieves double the standard floor area – while
affording 360<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">°</span> panoramic exterior views.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Defining the form of post-industrial urbanism, 22@ is
predicated on a provisional compromise between the past and the future. In this
context, the awkward feeling of walking down 22@’s unusually sparse streets
alongside construction scaffolding in the shadow of refined contemporary
development has sadly started to make sense. The development plan’s lack of local
programmatic diversity that other parts of Cerda’s plan is are famous for
should neither be regarded as inevitable nor longed for. Despite its tendency
to instill a sense of melancholy, 22@ is to a certain degree immune to critique
by its very fact of being there. In a geopolitical context where urban calamity
has become the norm, the old idealism of the left has seemingly exhausted
itself, running head-first into the wall of the real. Perhaps Promethean
capitalist development or top-down planning should be treated not as a wall to
jump over or tear down, but a building to enter and occupy. <o:p></o:p></div>
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With this building Batlle i Roig Architects powerfully
demonstrate that it is possible for architecture to overcome its developmental vision
and ideological shortcomings, effectively pointing the way forward for urbanism.
While most historical remnants of the old Poble Nou neighborhood in 22@ have
already been dealt with in a definitive manner, this building works towards
establishing an ethical framework for architectural intervention. It does this
by critically calling into question <span style="mso-comment-continuation: 3;">the traditionally
negative connotation implied in the term <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">subsumption</i>
by demonstrating the potential for a synthetic harmony between histories on a
properly architectural scale</span>.
If the places in which we act are ultimately what give our actions meaning, it
would behoove us to conceive of existence as coexistence, and as being as being
amongst things.</div>
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<a href="http://www.uncubemagazine.com/10271815" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="background-color: white;">This post was originally published in the Uncube blog on August 7th, 2013, as </span><b style="background-color: white;">A Delicate Polemic</b></span></span> </span></a></div>
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Awaking Lucidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04895103534811454236noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1239377941522217317.post-70326522248052318392013-08-04T19:01:00.000+02:002013-08-14T17:09:35.000+02:00X.4.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">The economy of the mystery, 2013</span></i></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">The mystery of the economy, 2013</span></i></div>
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Awaking Lucidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04895103534811454236noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1239377941522217317.post-8377590447347555582013-07-13T23:25:00.004+02:002013-07-13T23:25:57.417+02:0014.2. K. Michael Hays - Ludwig Hilberseimer and the Inscription of the Paranoid Subject<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The architecture of both Hannes Meyer (whose work was the subject matter of the first part of this book, previously discussed <a href="http://awakinglucid.blogspot.com.es/2013/06/141-k-michael-hays-hannes-meyer-and.html">here</a>) and Ludwig Hilberseimer can only be appropriately understood as pivotal figures in Modern Architecture if observed as a part of a larger avant-garde movement that swept throughout Europe in the early 20th century, manifesting itself in a particularly radical form in the years following World War I within the geopolitical context of Germany and the Weimar Republic. Despite the undeniable pedagogical and conceptual influence these two architects had upon the historical development of architecture as a modern discipline, it still may be pertinent for some to question whether and why we (as architects) should view them as an integral part of our ancestral lineage, particularly when the affective reasons not to do so are readily apparent in their interpretably fascistic aesthetic. Akin to other notable Germans such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger in the years following World War II, it is therefore the task of any writer who seeks to treat these two architects as a historical force, particularly as one that cannot be ignored, to distinguish right from wrong, good from bad, safe from dangerous. But the question still remains: what value is to their potential good if it can hermeneutically result in such bad? Can the two really be separable? To the extent that it is this very separation, inscribed deeply into the modern subject, that acted as the impetus and central problematic for their works, we must answer yes.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Perhaps one of the most enigmatic characteristics of their work, particularly noticeable in the extensive writings of Ludwig Hilberseimer, is the extent to which it was predicated on the interpretation of contemporary metropolitan conditions and the subsequent formulation and projection of an immanent form of metropolitan subjectivity. In this sense, the work can paradoxically be 'diagnosed' as diagrammatic <i>and</i> realist, acting more as a rhetorical device of reflective self-awareness than ethical statements on the way things <i>should be</i>. This is not to say that the architects were disinvested in the projections they were making: their use of architecture as a diagram is a carefully deduced conclusion from a series of political and ideological beliefs. It is therefore from the vantage point of a particular subject position, perhaps itself related to the problematic subjective mode of the industrial city, which the architects themselves sought to representationally embody through the creative medium of architecture.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This approach to a problematic subjectivity is peculiar from a methodological standpoint, and is perhaps more important at this point than the historically contingent problematic mode of subjectivity itself. The approach can be conceived of as such: if there is a problem for the subject, it could be logically assumed that the <i>cause</i> of the problem is not the subject itself (in its agency/will), or else the subject would act to correct that problem. Let us think of the problematic situation as that of the relation between the humanist model of subjectivity, one based on identity, unity, authenticity, sincerity, quality, meaning, definition, value, etc., and the modern industrial metropolitan society in which the subject inhabits, one based on economics, mechanization, repetition, ambiguity, abstraction, optimization, totalization, etc. The problematic relation between the individual and society (or part and the whole) is certainly not a modern invention, but its modern incarnation is particular in that the subject is alienated, structurally incapable of 'correcting' the problem, inherent to the problem's essential indeterminacy, ambiguity and deferral. Based on these presuppositions (which we will take up in closer detail later on), the question then stands as, how can the subject deal with the pathological consequences of this situation, one in which the subject is not the origin and can only marginally effect its manifestation? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">"For Adorno, as for Mies, the renunciation of humanist subjectivity is consequent to an act of 'immersion in particularity,' of the subject giving itself over to the object (in Mies's case the city), which leads not to the subject's self-discovery but to the discovery of a social structure in a particular historical configuration. ... [Mies's early unrealized skyscraper projects] plunge into the chaos of the metropolis to seek another order within it through a systematic use of the unexpected, the aleatory, the inexplicable. [They] are objects in crisis. They attest to the fact that the humanist conceptions of formal rationality and self-creating subjectivity cannot cope with the irrationality of actual experience. In the modern city, such constructs of rationality fail to function, and the mind, the subject, is consequently unable to perceive a pattern in the chaos. At such a moment, the subject has its one opportunity to escape reification: by thinking through what it is that <i>causes</i> reality to appear to be only a collection of fragmented images; by looking for structures and processes operating in time behind what appears to be given and objectified; by constructing, in an aesthetic modality, a cognitive mechanism understood 'as a dialectically entwined and explicatively undecipherable unity of concept and matter.' Crisis, in short, is converted into a critical mediation between various levels of form and its social context. And the other aspect of Mies's 'exact fantasy' ... attempts to negate that contextual status quo, asserting itself as a radically different, subversive object within an unsatisfactory social and physical fabric" (Hays, p.190-194)</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Mies's posthumanist approach to a politically operative architecture can therefore be construed as follows: within metropolitan social space, architecture can interject an objective presence of the other, a sign of contingency, and through its immanent juxtaposition allow the subject to dialectically rationalize the fragmented-whole and the significance of that very difference. The subject therefore does not <i>change</i> the problematic situation, but instead gains a degree of faith that the problematic situation <i>may not one day be as such</i>; indeed, the solution bears the mark of the problem itself: deferred, ambiguous, sublated. Hilberseimer's approach bears the same genetic code of negation, but is singular with regards to the extent he is able and willing to take it. He critically faults Mies's architecture for slipping back into the fallacies of expressionism, the humanist direct causal relation "between matter and spirit, between daily life and life's essence", despite bearing the flag subversion.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">"the nostalgia for past totalities, the welling up and formal dramatization of subjective protest against the objective universe that threatens to crush the individual, along with the provincialism of presentness, what [Hilberseimer] called 'the unshakable belief in one's own face,' these expressionist tendencies effectively block the possibility of any genuine opening onto the future, of imagining a future that might be constitutionally (rather than affectively) different from the present." (Hays, p.220)</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">If Mies essentially located the solution to modernity's problematic subjectivity in the appearance of space (which we could therefore conjecture that Mies locates the problem itself as being one of spatial appearance), we could henceforth posit that Hilberseimer locates the problem (and its solution) neither in space nor the subject, but a shared existential principle between the two. This is to say, yes, the subject is alienated, but so is the city. Hilberseimer thus asked the question, what if the subject is not alienated from the city and vice versa, but the two are equally alienated from the same thing? Hilberseimer prescribes the same ontological status to the subject and to the city itself, united them in a dialectical, mediated relation. </span><br />
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"Between the multilayered functions within the city, the means of production, and the architectural form that is supposed to be their product, there is not the determined correspondence necessary for a notion of origin. On the one hand, the serial, cellular organism that constitutes Hilberseimer's city follows from the placable logic of the city's production cycles. But it is not transparent to those cycles. It is rather a tissue of representation that reveals only their most salient contours. Hilberseimer's project organizes a metaphor for the city's own productive and functional procedures, mediating those procedures through the conventions of architectural form and thus effectively truncating the complex technical, social, and economic conditions that produced the project, concealing the 'real' origins of its formation by displacing them with a substitute-an irreducibly architectural form." (Hays, p.179-180)</blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">At this point it is important to turn our gaze to the contextual specificity of Hilberseimer's early years in the Weimar Republic. Following the First World War, a specifically new mode of subjectivity was actively projected to reconcile the social and political tensions brought about by the forces of Modernity, whose latent antagonism could be conjecturally claimed to have helped to engender the war itself. Modernity's primary instruments of change, industrialization, was recognized as an extant fact, an irreversible presence, and its pregnant futures were subsequently evaluated. Despite its inherent potential for communalization, the split subjectivity of Modernity effectively undermined the possibility of a causal and determined faith in a single mega-identity such as the state or even a meta-identity such as a community. The contingent forms and processes of the present that engender its alienated, distracted, paranoid, schizophrenic subjectivity, in a truly <i>anti</i>-humanist gesture, were projectively naturalized under the pretenses that what we thought to be a problem is only a problem if we view it as such, and therefore, if shifted in a parallax, is not only not the problem, but the very base condition for the possibility of a solution. In other words, despite Modernities' contingent nature, it is real, and despite causing the will to escape and flee to the utopia 'before the fall', such a metaphysical revolution is perhaps even more transcendental than the development of an immanent and contemporary subjectivity. The task of avant-garde political action was therefore first and foremost to expose the present as an immanent and singular historical temporality, and therefore liberate it from the contingencies of the past. Perhaps due to its unparalleled generative, autopoietic, and ideological force it provided to Modernism, capitalism was conclusively interpreted as a <i>necessary</i> <i>essence</i> to the present, as the existential cause of both the subject and the city, and as such the condition for its future. Furthermore, capitalism itself is predicated on<i>,</i> if not inaugurating itself, this anti-humanist avant-garde metaphysics.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">"capitalism is a stage in the process of demystification (<i>Entzauberung</i>) by which history, through unsentimental rationalization, continually dismantles those superstructural and naturalizing myths whose regressive effect is to prolong the notion of some unchanging and proprietary human essence.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">'However, the rationale of the capitalist economic system is not reason itself but obscured reason. ... <i> It does not encompass human beings.</i> The operation of the production process is not set up to take them into consideration, nor is the formation of the socio-economic organization based on them. There is not one single instance where the system is based on human essences. ... Capitalism does not rationalize too much but <i>too little</i>' [Kracauer, "The Mass Ornament," 70, as quoted by Hays]</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The sign of capitalist thought is abstraction, but the present state of abstractness is ambivalent; its alternative poles are the growth of abstract thought or the decline into false concreteness. All of which means that the process of demystification and demythologizing is incomplete." (Hays, p.265-266)</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Hays's diagnosis of Hilberseimer as a paranoiac projectionist has become evident in these bare revelations of his methodological presuppositions, from which we can begin to formulate a critique. Primarily, if we view his anti-humanist approach as intent on separating that which is necessary from that which is contingent, seeking for solely that which is necessary ('functionalism'), Hilberseimer views the past as contingent and the present as necessary. A problem quickly arises when we think of the terms 'past' and 'present' as things that can be either contingent <i>or</i> necessary: necessity implies corporeal embodiment, a material presence, an objective definition, an absolute inertia, whereas contingency presupposes that whatever is contingent exists but theoretically can not, affording it the status of being 'immaterial'. It is therefore contradictory to believe that the present, that which passes day by day, is necessary, and that the past, that which remains, is contingent. Evidenced by the immemorial western cultural beginnings of the 21st century, a paradoxical effect is produced when the present is conceived of as a temporal necessity in that it automatically not only becomes contingent, but simply not a part of the present (and as such, disappears).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">When confronted with the will and subsequent impossibility of utilizing the present as a necessary thing, Hilberseimer was forced to <i>abstract</i> its referent, metropolitan vitality, the busyness of the streets, the sound of the industrial machines, the anguished citizen, into its causal force, which, particularly in the moment of the Weimar Republic, was easily identifiable as capitalism. Hilberseimer needed to abstract his metropolitan context in order to posit the present as necessary (and in his opinion, the future as possible), to locate a seed of the positive (future) within the negative (present), ultimately resulting in a diagram of architecture's potential to be a part, and as such a potential guide, to the project of the city. Despite his resolutely anti-humanist ideology, Hilberseimer was surreptitiously only able to represent that image of the future by resorting to a humanist epistemology that is based on fixed identities, timeless essences, absolute truths and pure meanings. Despite the fact that Hilberseimer abstracted, he still abstracted it into a thing: by Hilberseimer's logic, capitalism itself was an essential necessity to the metropolis of his time and was therefore the elementary possibility for the realization of its will-to-future (based out of a discontent with the present).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Hilberseimer's solution, however, is not to reassert the now discredited forms of individual unity or transcendental subjectivity, but to totalize the disunifying components of the real with an entirely different conception of the subject. The amalgam of Riegl's supraindividual <i>Kunstwollen</i> [the will-to-art] and Nietzsche's will to power ... replaces the individual subject in a construction that can totalize capitalism as the socioeconomic force of modern society, Fordism or Taylorism as its logic of instrumentalization, cellular repetition and seriality as its architectural form, and dispersion as the subjective condition of everyday life. The very concept of the subject is thus prized loose from the embodied individual and catapulted into some ontological sphere, and there the <i>Kunstwollen</i>, suitably ambiguous, can play its totalizing role. The fundamental category under which Hilberseimer's thought operates is that of the latitudinal <i>whole</i>: we oscillate back and forth between the cellular and structural, molecular and molar, local and global, between euphoria and distraction, until a totality of 'will' is reached. As the <i>Kunstwollen</i> becomes a kind of field phenomenon, it appears to operate as a virtual subject, accountable to no one while seeming to account for everything, and thus resolving the tension between the impacted closure of the present structural matrix and that impossible, free-floating, and inchoate future to be installed in its place." (Hays, p.272-273)</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I would like to draw attention to what I believe is a non-coincidental relation between the notion of metropolitan architecture as an abstract diagram, industrial capitalism as an economic model, and a non-humanist future as an historical possibility of transcendence. All of these three projects converged in a single historical moment in post World War I Germany and the Weimar Republic, and through their dynamic positive feedback reached new representational and epistemological limits, the fruits of which we are still discovering today. But despite this immense capacity for theoretical productivity, the problematic nature of subjectivity which Hilberseimer and his contemporaries sought to mediate and overcome has arguably only become intensified since the aesthetic project of the avant-garde began. Furthermore, an affinity between Meyer & Hilberseimer's theoretical project and the alienated autopoiesis of the contemporary metropolitan multitude again calls into question the potential value of Hilberseimer's discourse as an operative critique and not merely a reflective image. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">"what seems to structure Hilmerseimer's punctually felt urge to totalize is, as I have said, a kind of paranoia: a paranoia that is all to cognizant of everyday life, all too aware of a world out of control, and that consequently tries to fend off the threatening and destructive identification between the discursive formations of architecture and social reality in favor of some more affirmational construction of the same." ... "The totalization is fundamentally </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">imaginary</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> in Lacan's sense, which is to say it is illusory with respect to the chaotic reality of the city and the body (Lacan's </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">corps morcelé</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">), </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">and</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> it is essentially visual, for it is only before a visual image, a </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Vorbild</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, that the subject constructs its 'beautiful totality,' even at the same time that that image 'prefigures its alienating destination; [the image] is still pregnant with the correspondences that unite the </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">I</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> with the statue in which man projects himself, with the phantoms that dominate him, or with the automaton in which, in an ambiguous relation, the world of his own making tends to find completion.'" (Hays, p.274)</span></blockquote>
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Awaking Lucidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04895103534811454236noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1239377941522217317.post-75950688526302377432013-06-08T16:24:00.002+02:002013-06-08T16:24:16.962+02:0015. H.C. Potter - Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House</i> is a film directed by H.C. Potter, featuring Cary Grant, Myrna Loy and Melvyn Douglas. Based on a 1946 book by Eric Hodgins of the same name, the film's release in 1948 coincided with the beginnings of Levittown and what we have come to know as the post-World War II American suburban morphology. In returning to the research originally undertaken during my thesis, the democratization of suburban dwellings was originally implemented in the United States primarily for ideological, anti-communist, ends, with public programs such as "A Nation of Home-Owners" (1922), American Individualism (1922), and How to Own Your Home (1923). Within the great depression, industry recognized housing as a means to spur the economy, which was itself politically institutionalized in 1934 with the Federal Housing Administration.<br />
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Upon its release 73 replica "dream houses" were built across the country, made available for public viewing, and subsequently raffled to the public. The vast majority of these houses were equipped with high-end General Electric kitchens, which in following with General Electric's promotion of the FHA and pro-home ownership initiatives, leads me to believe the promotion, if not the movie itself, was promoted by said company.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfw97SkSO02pv_rr81w_36sbC9SX2OqcLIaGbdY1Sj43ibqP7_CXPnmfIJT_chfm9KdLoTlRtplJu3jnhjltTG23vlHKA1xuZYwtuVJuYwvOwxFhB-K7kM4UxMq00b8DmeNY758SJ3t8k/s1600/Screen+Shot+2013-06-08+at+3.35.58+PM.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfw97SkSO02pv_rr81w_36sbC9SX2OqcLIaGbdY1Sj43ibqP7_CXPnmfIJT_chfm9KdLoTlRtplJu3jnhjltTG23vlHKA1xuZYwtuVJuYwvOwxFhB-K7kM4UxMq00b8DmeNY758SJ3t8k/s640/Screen+Shot+2013-06-08+at+3.35.58+PM.jpg" width="472" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">GE Advertisement referencing <i>Mr Blandings Builds his Dream House</i> in LIFE Magazine, 28 June 1948</span></div>
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The story itself does not shed a positive light onto the trials it takes to build a home, more explicitly represented in the book's more recent interpretations as films with the titles of <i>The Money Pit</i> (1986) and <i>Are we done yet?</i> (2007). Mr. Blandings is a successful advertising agent in New York City, who after being confronted with the problems of Manhattan apartment's 'space problems' and the price/inutility of an interior decorator, sets his mind on moving to Connecticut. He is taken to see a purportedly 50-acre property whose house is nearly falling down. After buying it for more than twice the price it would have sold for to non-Manhattanites, consultants with various structural engineers convinces Mr. and Mrs. Blandings to tear down the house. When speaking to an architect to build a new house on the site, confronted with generic plans, the couple go wild with their every wish, literally not even letting the architect get a word in edgewise within the discussion: closets and a private bathroom for each child, a sewing room, private dressing rooms, a sun room, and the enigmatic "flower sink", among others. Upon leaving, they ask the architect to have it cost "under $10,000", which the architect promptly responds is impossible, but $12,000-12,500 may be possible. After synthesizing all of their whims and desires into a shockingly generic looking house (although they claim to "want something a little different"), the couple return and are presented with an estimate of $21,000, which prompts the architect to claim that it may be possible to reduce to $18,000. Furious with the budget's inflation, the Blandings leave, but on their way out see a rendering of the projected house, and seduced by its allure, agree to $18,000. In an attempt to further reduce costs, the architect asks whether it is really necessary for each of the two young girls (no less than 13 years old) to have their individual private bathrooms and closets, to which the Blandings vehemently refuse to give way on. With the construction underway, foundation work reveals a ledge rock that needs to be demolished with dynamite, an unforeseen stream is found 6ft below grade and floods the site, and an elusive well ends up containing highly corrosive water, demanding special filters so that the pipes won't rust. On top of this yet despite all of these problems, the Blandings receive a 30-day eviction notice for their apartment in Manhattan, and move into their semi-finished house.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVsYFyUoAaRCbsXc6G4hwqs4BtRC9YycgRogHmx6GGdW7rGbuy0hyeOAKNISt7b5hhvt4mOlCzfdv9e9ofhJs5KASp73iFu6l4Dc5ct1NZCvUYB6NckJD39k0E9fKw2nZOSVvA0hA23gA/s1600/Screen+Shot+2013-06-08+at+4.17.50+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVsYFyUoAaRCbsXc6G4hwqs4BtRC9YycgRogHmx6GGdW7rGbuy0hyeOAKNISt7b5hhvt4mOlCzfdv9e9ofhJs5KASp73iFu6l4Dc5ct1NZCvUYB6NckJD39k0E9fKw2nZOSVvA0hA23gA/s320/Screen+Shot+2013-06-08+at+4.17.50+PM.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">The Blandings' Dream House</span></div>
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<a href="http://tigger.uic.edu/~pbhales/Life%20magazine%20images%201949-/Bernard%20Levey%20family%20in%20front%20of%20original%20Cape%20Cod.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="317" src="http://tigger.uic.edu/~pbhales/Life%20magazine%20images%201949-/Bernard%20Levey%20family%20in%20front%20of%20original%20Cape%20Cod.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Bernard Hoffmann for Life Magazine, Bernard Levey Family standing in front of their Levittown house</span></div>
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Plagued with faulty locks, missing windows, an inconvenient commuting schedule, and ever-accumulating minor-fees, Mr. Blandings is unable to focus on his imminent deadline and begins to lose trust in his wife when he suspects her of being in love with his best friend. The story ends when after a failed all-nighter in the office trying to prepare the submission for his deadline the next day, Mr. Blandings gives up, claims to "just care about the little things," leaves his office accepting the fact that he will be fired, and goes home. He arrives to find the architect explaining to his wife the need for additional services, as well as his best friend walking down the stairs in his robe. A neighbor who drilled the well comes to return money that he overcharged the Blandings for his work; his friend, on his way out the door and into the City, turns around to the family and says something along the lines that even though you have faced a great deal of hardship and spent way too much, you made the right decision: "Maybe there are some things you should buy with your heart, not your head. Maybe those are the things that really count." The kids come running in and the (black) house-maid makes breakfast, unknowingly saying the catch-phrase that Mr. Blandings needed for his deadline, saving his job right after his ego. The film ends with an idyllic scene of the Blandings sitting on their lawn with their friend, their kids playing in the background, saying "Drop in and see us sometime."<br />
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So despite its initial appearance of being anti-home ownership, it is dreadfully clear by the end to have switched opinion. But its promotion of home ownership is highly particular: despite the fact that throughout the movie it is repeated that it is not a <i>house</i> they are building but a <i>home</i>, the ideological emphasis in the end is exactly on the house. What the story reveals is that a house does in fact lead to a home, but the process of the house coming to be can threaten the livelihood and happiness of the individuals. Therefore, what is advocated is an approach to housing that is pro-suburb, pro-developer, anti-architect (as the architect is merely the person who figures out how to take a list of things given to him and make it work as cheaply and beautifully as possible).</div>
Awaking Lucidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04895103534811454236noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1239377941522217317.post-70529723126220831962013-06-07T19:08:00.002+02:002013-06-07T19:08:44.727+02:0014.1. K. Michael Hays - Hannes Meyer and the radicalization of perception<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
In 1992 the book <i>Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject</i> was published by MIT Press, presenting the culmination of K. Michael Hays' Ph.D at MIT. It presents the work of two architects, Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer, as the largely overlooked tail-end of the early 20th century avant-garde. It would be fair to relate the <i>type</i> of insight that can be gleaned from these two architects if we reflect upon Bernard Tschumi's work, himself situated in (or as) its decline (as I have previously discussed on this blog <a href="http://awakinglucid.blogspot.com.es/2013/04/4x-thermodynamics-of-ethico-political.html" target="_blank">here</a>), providing a comprehensive synthetic discourse of the late avant-garde as a radically historical and contingent metaphysical force. Furthermore, these two architects have recently been gaining a great deal more theoretical attention, though moreso Hilberseimer than Meyer, through the discourse of Pier Vittorio Aureli. The two architects that are the subject of Hays' book are at the same time closely related and worlds apart in their ideology and methodology. It is important to note that both architects were closely involved with the purported 'decline' of the Bauhaus, Meyer as its second dean who hired Hilberseimer as the director of the school's newly created building department, a defining feature of Meyer's comprehensive pedagogical reformulation.<br />
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The book itself is divided into two separate parts with a single essay uniting the two, though it is evident throughout that it is impossible to situate the latter without the former. Hays makes his discursive form clear from the beginning, based the dialectical relation between subject/object or receiver/transmitter that is the chief methodology of the Frankfurt School and Lacanian psychoanalysis. While initially apprehensible, he uses this type of discourse to ultimately demonstrate how Meyer's work sought to overcome this exact dialectic itself, identified as one of the most basic structures of the humanist metaphysics that resisted the socialism-to-come.<br />
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The historical context within which both Meyer and Hilberseimer were working is of crucial importance to understanding their methodology in a way that can begin to separate contingency from essentiality, and as such, determine its contemporary operative value. While their forms of representation were drastically more muted than their historical precedents within the avant-garde, the conditions to which these two architects were responding to were virtually the same: the advent of modern technologization and the potentially imminent revolution of everyday life. Furthermore, the primary years of each architect's career took place in post-World War I Germany as a part of the Weimar Republic. What was at stake in their work was utility, and the question very clearly became how architecture could be used, through its material literality, to engender the ideal of socialism as an actively lived reality in the built environment.<br />
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"the act of building as the mapping of the total situation of subject and object; building as trans-formation -- not a transport of an already constituted meaning that exists outside and before architecture but an organization of processes, a set of operations, a production of certain effects not available without the building performance." (Hays, p28)</blockquote>
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The <i>attitude</i> of Meyer's political, critical architecture takes in relation to its historical and social context is of crucial importance. His architecture is not <i>resistive</i>, nor is it <i>complacent</i>: he does not fear nor welcome the imminent technological change because he does not view it as having a form. Putting for an innovative approach to Marx's theory of commodity alienation, "aesthetic practice must submit to reification, making commodity form tangible and perceptible in order to refunction the commodity status" (Hays, p53). Technology is a latent, yet real potentiality; it can be either appropriated as a structure itself of class society, or can be made available and the tool for societies' becoming-classless. That said, Meyer's praxis is based largely on a humanist causal chain between sender and receiver, between "sign and procedure, to have the aesthetic signs be understood as traces of production procedures, and to enact the eventuality of socialized production" (Hays, p93) from which he is able to conclude "design [can pilot] technology ... [T]hat industrial production is not wedded to the social relations that engendered it" (Hays, p103). </div>
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Meyer's logic is furthermore one that aims to subvert the system not by aesthetically juxtaposing it, but by supplanting it: by doing what it does better than its 'enemy' does it. His design methodology suggests an ethos of diagnosis and shame as a means of revolution. It is in this regard that Meyer's architecture can be viewed as "harsh", in its explicitly anti-, post-humanist ideology. </div>
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"the Petersschule organizes its elements in such a way as to reveal the present order as unsatisfactory ... it <i>produces the concrete effects</i> of what the city lacks. Like a prosthetic device that is both the mark of and compromised solution to a debilitation, the Petersschule produces a <i>significant absence, </i>that is to say an absence that it at the same time <i>represents.</i>" (Hays, p107)</blockquote>
A point which I will be developing in greater detail soon, the displeasure caused by Meyer's architecture is not only to be expected but is itself intentional. Crucially, it is not displeasure <i>with</i> Meyer's architecture but a subsequent displeasure of <i>everything that is not Meyer's architecture</i>.<br />
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As its potentially Fascist consequences can be gleaned from Hilberseimer's Hochhausstadt project, the task at hand is to determine if, and in what way, this type of revolutionary logic can be used to implement not only a socialist society, but a <i>society that we want to live in</i>.<br />
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Awaking Lucidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04895103534811454236noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1239377941522217317.post-56423032503291839342013-05-31T16:05:00.001+02:002013-06-11T16:31:52.170+02:0013. Walter Benjamin - Critique of Violence<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The purpose of this reflection is to discover whether the agonistic relation between ethics and violence can be overcome. To say that there </span><span style="font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is</span><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> a relation between the two may appear as either outright erroneous or as a problem easily solved, but these epistemological reflexes merely advocate further for the need of philosophical inquiry. If we were to define ethics by a lack of violence, for example, it could be conceived that ethics and violence are only joined by their polar opposition. But this dialectical formulation is reactionary, ultimately forbidding an autonomous ethics: for if there was no originary violence, there would be no possibility of ethics. This view is furthermore utopian and transcendental, implying that violence can be erased and that ethics can (and should) champion. In fact, this theoretical proposition is strictly the result of a properly ethical judgement that is genealogically tied to the development of Western humanism which must itself be subject to criticism, and therefore should not ground a metaphysical foundation of judgement. In an attempt to find a way out of this spectacular condition that has merely generated an unprecedented proliferation of violence and ethics-in-vain, I will henceforth investigate the liminal space offered by both concepts in an attempt to reveal their absolute congruency and ultimately their mutual contemporary insufficiency for the existential justification of our lives.</span></span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In order to proceed, Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay of 1921 </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Critique of Violence</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> will be utilized as an operative framework to investigate the interrelation between these two concepts. Benjamin starts by declaring that the force of law becomes violent when it infringes on ethical issues, and that it is therefore in relation to law that both ethics and violence exist. Although this strongly echoes the reflex mentioned above with ethics and violence composing the two ends of a spectrum, this juridical framework is fundamentally inadequate as this would sanction violence as ethical as long as history records it as righteous, as is often the case (if not the impetus) of those who write history and depend on its words for the maintenance of their powerful status as embodiments of law. Despite the apparent facility to further the anterior claim and declare that ‘law is unethical’, law, in an expanded sense (not limited to its embodiment as the state), theoretically contains the potential for a nonviolent resolution of conflict that would subvert the original regressive claim ‘violence is unethical’ and as such deserves our closer inspection. Furthermore, the belief that ‘violence is absolutely unethical’ covertly enter the believing subject into a social contract that concedes our fundamental potential for violence as human beings to a legal body and its subsequent apparatuses of enforcement and control, such as the state’s police or religion’s guilt. Therefore, if we were to formulate and comprehend an ontologically grounded ethical conception of violence, we could perhaps prove historical embodiments of legal power, such as the state or the church, to be not only radically contingent, but simply irrelevant.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In considering the potential form of nonviolent conflict resolution, we paradoxically encounter the pivotal notion of the contract to be the violent act par excellence. Insofar as the contract not only fulfills both of Benjamin’s characteristics of violence, both making and preserving law, the contract in its origin “points towards violence”, and therefore prohibits the true potential for nonviolence as it itself is based on violence, though sublimated and virtualized. It could therefore be questioned, besides the state’s survivalist instinct, why would the recourse to violence be necessary? Moreover, why does law have the need to be maintained? Any answers to these problematic questions may lie not in the contract as the medium of law, but in the contract as a metaphysical object itself. As was observed by Benjamin and has recently been further detailed by Giorgio Agamben (</span><a href="http://books.google.es/books/about/The_Sacrament_of_Language.html?id=bhjiRgAACAAJ&redir_esc=y" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">1</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">), more than the formalization of an agreement, the contract seeks to guarantee the integrity of speech, to surreptitiously undermine the inherent fallibility of language and interpersonal communications. It is a particularly </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">modern</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> feature of executive institutions, henceforth encompassing both legal and religious bodies, in which perjury or lying is structurally antagonized through the virtual threat of righteous violence or damnation. Despite its characteristically brief mention by Benjamin, the value of Agamben’s archaeology of the oath lies in the crucial revelation that this threat itself is not the origin of institutionality, but is merely the result of a historically contingent interpretation of the contract. It is therefore the metaphysics of guarantee, the relation between the contract and its instantiation of a threat, that presents itself as the terrain for ethical reformulation.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Before we move on any farther, it would behoove us to trace Benjamin’s arguments to the point where he himself, despite not using the specific word, argues for the possibility of an ethics in the oath as opposed to its impossibility in the contract. Benjamin brings legal violence to its limit in mythic violence, which can be concisely summarized as the violent manifestation of unwritten laws’ presence, be it unmarked geopolitical frontiers or the religious sacrality of human life. Mythic violence is essentially inadequate at instantiating the possibility of an ethics as it merely supersedes unethical law with another law in the same, yet debatably greater, unethical </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">form</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. He therefore infamously juxtaposes executive violence, ultimately embodied by the contract, with divine violence, embodied by the commandment. Despite Benjamin’s conjecture that these two are antithetical to each other, Agamben’s analysis reveals that both the contract and the commandment function equally insofar as they employ the oath to place the subject within a relation of fidelity, of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">obedience</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to an absolute conception of right, good and truth. That said, there are significant differences between the two, which, while recognizing that the form of the commandment is insufficient for a contemporary ethics, could beget its formulation. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A counterintuitive yet defining feature of divine violence is its affinity to nonviolence. Nonviolence, according to Benjamin, “never [applies] directly to the resolution of conflict between man and man, but only to matters concerning objects” (Benjamin, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Reflections</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, p.289), whereas divine violence is violent insofar as it is “annihilating … with regard to goods, right, life, and suchlike, never absolutely, with regard to the soul of the living” (Benjamin, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Reflections</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, p. 297-8). It is therefore fair to propose the following questions: Does divine violence destroy law itself, or does it destroy the things over which law holds power? Furthermore, is law unethical in the fact that it structures objects, or the way in which those objects are structured? A deeper analysis that space does not permit for at this time reveals that Benjaminian divinity itself is a law, or, said in post-modern terminology, no law is in fact a law. Therefore, does the ethical essence of divine violence truly lie in the way it takes executive law as its ultimate subject of violence, or in the way that it provides a critical position for the human to take in relation to the power of law? We should therefore perhaps not be speaking of violence itself, but the way it is mediated through power.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A second distinction between divine and executive power is way they respectively deal with the transgression of their laws. Here we again come across the correlation between executive law and its threat of violence in the contract. The punishment of executive law’s transgression is the responsibility of the institutional body of power. Therefore, one necessarily needs to be caught transgressing executive law, and in such cases, the specific actors in the event that brings the criminal into the eyes of power and carries out their punishment can be localized in specific persons and their choices. This highly identifiable and culpable characteristic is confounded by the arbitrary interpretive and translative</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">position that each of the actors is forced to take in relation to the law which they are supposed to be agents of. Subverting its own existential foundation, it is not only impossible to equate offenses such as environmental damage to executable punishments, but the ultimate decision of punishment cannot be reciprocally associated directly to the agent who decides it as it was done so only because of and on behalf of the law itself.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Conversely, divine power is fundamentally independent of the consequences of its transgression, to the degree where it could be conjectured that divine power and divine violence should be considered as two essentially unrelated things. For this, I quote Benjamin:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“the [divine] injunction becomes inapplicable, incommensurable once the deed is accomplished. No judgment of the deed can be derived from the commandment ... It exists not as a criterion of judgment, but as a guideline for the actions of persons or communities who have to wrestle with it in solitude and, in exceptional cases, to take on themselves the responsibility of ignoring it.” (Benjamin, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Reflections</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, p. 298)</span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As opposed to the mediation of executive violence through its institutional embodiment, divine violence is therefore mediated by the conscious act of transgression itself. Said differently, executive violence relates to executive power </span><span style="color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">through</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> executive institutions (power is </span><span style="color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">made</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> violent), whereas divine violence is </span><span style="color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">directly</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> related to divine power (power </span><span style="color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> violence); executivity is mediated through transparency, whereas divinity is mediated through belief. To highlight the difference between executive and divine </span><span style="color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">modality</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, we can take reference from Agamben’s 2011 lecture titled ‘What is a Commandment?’, which I will quote at length:</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“For example, when I say “Walk!”. In order to understand the meaning of this utterance, let’s compare it with the same verb in the indicative mood: “he walks” or “Charles walks”. This second sentence ... states something (“he walks”) about someone and it can then therefore be true, if Charles is truly walking, or false, if Charles is not walking. But in many cases, the proposition refers to something in the world; it refers to being. On the contrary, although morphologically identical with the indicative and although having the same semantic kern[el] (the idea of walking), “Walk!” as a commandment in the imperative mood says nothing of no one, does not describe a state of things and, without being for that false, does not refer to something being, to something existing.</span> </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">By the way, you [have] here carefully to avoid the misunderstanding according to which the</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">meaning of the imperative consists in the act of its execution. The order, for instance, given by an officer to his soldiers, is accomplished, is perfect, by the mere act of its utterance. The fact that the soldiers obey or disobey does not put in question the validity of the commandment. The commandment is perfect in its mere utterance. We must therefore admit that the commandment does not refer to something existing. Nothing in the world as it is could respond to the imperative. And this is why people say that the imperative does not imply, does not refer to an ‘is’, but rather to an ‘ought’.” (Agamben, </span><a href="http://waltendegewalt.wordpress.com/2011/04/01/giorgio-agamben-what-is-a-commandment-%CE%B1%CF%80%CE%BF%CE%BC%CE%B1%CE%B3%CE%BD%CE%B7%CF%84%CE%BF%CF%86%CF%8E%CE%BD%CE%B7%CF%83%CE%B7/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What is a Commandment?</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">)</span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Agamben continues on to trace the archaeology of the commandment to its conceptual companion, </span><span style="color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">will</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and while accepting that an explanation of “what </span><span style="color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">will</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> means” is even more impossible than that of a commandment, he is able to link the etymological origins of the word to the verb </span><span style="color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to can</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Despite revealing a profound distinguishing characteristic between Greek philosophy and Christian theology in the difference between potentiality and volition, what is crucial is that both </span><span style="color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to can</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and </span><span style="color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to will</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> are what linguists call </span><span style="color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">modal auxiliary verbs</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. This type of speech is particular to Germanic languages, but correlate to certain forms of verb conjugation in Romance languages such as the the subjunctive, conditional, and indicative, and can most easily be defined as </span><span style="color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">empty</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, needing to be “filled” or “supplemented” by another, non-modal, verb. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We have thus far traced the metaphysical relation between executive power, as it is reified by the threat of violence, and divine power, as it is consummated by the fear of punishment. Despite the fact that the former regime is more directly prone to unethical acts, particularly in our contemporary geopolitics, it is insufficient to believe a return to a more primitive form of metaphysical causality will engender a more ethical world, notwithstanding if it is even possible to enact such a historical regression. The question thus stands, as it has, what is to be done? It is not difficult to discover a great deal of things that can and should be done; as many do, we can carefully map the consequences of our contemporary global order to work towards suturing the fractured social and urban landscape. Instead of positing the question of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">what</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is to be done, I would like to propose the great existential question that has been lingering in between these lines all along, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">why</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> do what can be done? </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Despite the vertigo induced by this question, I do not write those words as a means of nihilistic and depressive therapy, but to probe at the larger problem of (a)temporality. Despite the immense power of urban activist practices to establish a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">now</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, I personally do not believe their employed concepts, such as affect and solidarity, are capable of creating a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">future</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. If both divine and executive powers are based on empty verbs such as is/ought, can/could, will/would, may/might, shall/should, perhaps we should critically call into question the value of emptiness itself. If something is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">intriguing</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> enough </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">as it is</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, what is the need for the linguistic signifiers of historical modalities’ unethical traces? This is not to say that a return to rhetorical practices will necessarily lead to more ethical practices, but what it will do is provide the means to judge, and if we are able to identify the origin of law in the metaphysical operation of the oath, we could conjecture the origin of ethics in the metaphysical operation of the judgement.</span></span></div>
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Awaking Lucidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04895103534811454236noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1239377941522217317.post-82529989438840368382013-05-30T15:01:00.002+02:002013-08-14T17:09:44.917+02:00X.3. If it belongs to one it belongs to none<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>From the suburb to the monastery, 2013</i></span></div>
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Awaking Lucidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04895103534811454236noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1239377941522217317.post-75641811749762704492013-05-30T14:59:00.002+02:002013-05-30T14:59:51.283+02:00X.2.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Awaking Lucidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04895103534811454236noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1239377941522217317.post-34121704089621006252013-05-30T12:40:00.003+02:002013-05-30T12:40:40.968+02:00X.1.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Awaking Lucidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04895103534811454236noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1239377941522217317.post-69804886900651882872013-05-22T13:22:00.000+02:002013-06-07T10:59:51.584+02:0012. Miguel Gomes - Tabu<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>Tabu</i> is a film from 2012 by the Portuguese director Miguel Gomes that is structured in direct reference to F. W. Murnau's 1931 silent film of the same name. It is, in a word or two, a sublime representation of the Portuguese <i>ethos</i>. In personal conversation, the words 'caricature' and 'camp' were raised when talking about its representational modality, but if either of these words are to be accurately attributed to the film, they must be conceived in a radically different aesthetic from their traditional associations.<br />
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The film is broken into three parts with their respective epochs and distinctive styles, though all are claimed to take place before the Portuguese Colonial War. The entire film is articulated in what was described to me as a populist intellectualism, which synthesizes the paradox between words and things into an ambiguous and discomforting whole. The film begins with a soliloquy narrated over a Portuguese explorer traveling through the jungle with a band of indigenous people. If it is impossibile, as it is claimed, to translating the Portuguese word <i>saudade </i>into English, this brief scene is able to successfully communicate the significance of the word's concept by joining its representation with its origin. As opposed to the typical filmic technique of montage and indirect allusion, it could be said that this form of poetic hyper-representation reaches the sublimity of the idea, extending beyond the word or its definition through using other impossible-to-define words such as melancholy or nostalgia, to a cultural and historical context in which the word was birthed simply to give name to an existant force.<br />
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'Paradise Lost' is the name given to the second part and depicts the relation between three women living in Lisbon. Gomes inverts Murnau's form by not only presenting the future before its historical antecedent, but by showing the forms of life that emerge within the urban context of the colonizers, as opposed to the colonies. But this is not to say that the oppressive nature of colonization is not felt, but it is sublated into the characters interpersonal relationality of power, obedience, trust, command and expectation, resulting in a profound meditation on the subtle metaphysics of slavery. The final segment, 'Paradise', is an explicitly <i>mythical</i> narrative that depicts the early life of the chief agonist of 'Paradise Lost', Aurora, in the African plains surrounding Tabu Mountain. Young and pregnant, she starts an illicit affair with a friend of her husband's, Gian-Luca; strongly discontent with her life, Aurora and the man plan to run away together, during which she goes into labor as they are confronted by a mutual friend who is shot after trying to stop them in their plans. After Aurora's husband is sent for, the two never see each other again. The murder is fallaciously claimed by a insurgent nationalist group that is used to propagandize and initiate the Portuguese Colonial War.<br />
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What was perhaps most powerful about <i>Tabu</i> as a filmic experience is its ability to create situations of absolute ethical ambiguity; if the question "is this (un)ethical?" is to be asked about specific details, an answer would be effectively stifled. Furthermore, if a specific gesture or speech act was to be declared as unethical for the purpose of a thought experiment, an operative <i>solution</i> would be conjecturally impossible to find. To ethically think that history is a <i>problem</i> that can be <i>fixed</i> is perhaps an ethical problem in-and-of itself.<br />
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<b>PROLOGUE</b></div>
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<i>Under the rain and scorching sun,</i></div>
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<i>a melancholic creature</i></div>
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<i>treks through jungles</i></div>
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<i>and arid lands for months.</i></div>
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<i>In the heart of the black continent,</i></div>
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<i>neither beasts nor cannibals</i></div>
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<i>seem to frighten</i></div>
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<i>the intrepid explorer.</i></div>
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<i>Followed by a contingent of men</i></div>
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<i>carrying beads fabrics</i></div>
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<i>and modern</i></div>
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<i>scientlfic expedition tools.</i></div>
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<i>The group includes in its ranks</i></div>
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<i>His Majesty the King of Portugal,</i></div>
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<i>or at least his will,</i></div>
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<i>as expressed in a royal decree,</i></div>
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<i>and He who is above</i></div>
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<i>who all creatures call Creator,</i></div>
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<i>and whose voice lives in the Bible.</i></div>
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<i>But even if his legs move forward</i></div>
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<i>by superior will</i></div>
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<i>sovereign or divine</i></div>
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<i>the heart, the most insolent</i></div>
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<i>muscle of all anatomy,</i></div>
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<i>dictates other reasons for the march.</i></div>
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<i>Poor miserable man!</i></div>
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<i>This whimsical organ</i></div>
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<i>rules over both King and the Eternal.</i></div>
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<i>So we here by reveal</i></div>
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<i>the true law of this expedition</i></div>
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<i>to roam the ends of the world</i></div>
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<i>walking away from the land where he saw</i></div>
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<i>his beloved wife perish,</i></div>
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<i>as if he could ever stop death.</i></div>
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<i>Intrepid he is,</i></div>
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<i>but out of desperation.</i></div>
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<i>Taciturn and melancholic,</i></div>
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<i>the sad flgure wannders desolately</i></div>
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<i>over thne inhospitable planes.</i></div>
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<i>And by mysteries unknown,</i></div>
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<i>he is visited from afar by the one</i></div>
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<i>whom his heart begs for,</i></div>
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<i>wearing</i></div>
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<i>- oh morbid detail! </i></div>
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<i>the dress that hugged her</i></div>
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<i>when she returned to dust.</i></div>
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You may run as far as you can,</div>
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for as long as you like,</div>
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but you will not escape your heart.</div>
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Then I will die.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicdwEooiAcKXcbtTCBshK1gTbLs0hNotk_NkY0XD2ZFOZQff5FlhRbvpdeTmiqwhGpqOGfko532JcJAL4qBhx15SNNNYqxIbDis8piSniBPIdPMfNKzCalIHU_T0XAxA_k07T8GVJkuXE/s1600/Screen+Shot+2013-05-22+at+12.07.43+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicdwEooiAcKXcbtTCBshK1gTbLs0hNotk_NkY0XD2ZFOZQff5FlhRbvpdeTmiqwhGpqOGfko532JcJAL4qBhx15SNNNYqxIbDis8piSniBPIdPMfNKzCalIHU_T0XAxA_k07T8GVJkuXE/s320/Screen+Shot+2013-05-22+at+12.07.43+PM.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
You sad and poor soul.</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>A crocodile awaits its moment,</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>submerged in murky waters.</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>The intrepid explorer is well aware</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>he will meet his destiny in this river.</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>His men witness the horror.</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>The explorer bids farewell to life.</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Night falls in the savannah,</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>as will a thousand and one more.</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Then and ever since,</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>despite how absurd this may sound</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>to men of reason</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>some swear to have witnessed</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>this ghoulish sight:</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>a sad and melancholic crocodile</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>with a lady from days gone by, </i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>an inseparable pair</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>united by a mysterious pact</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>never broken by death.</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
Awaking Lucidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04895103534811454236noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1239377941522217317.post-58168915750041194752013-05-19T14:40:00.001+02:002013-06-07T11:00:11.799+02:0011. Nikolaus Hirsch & Markus Miessen - Critical Spatial Practice<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<b>Politics in and of the printed word</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
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A mainstream public discourse of apprehension and
reconciliation has emerged over the past ten years, as architects have begun to
rediscover the inherent power of creating space. In this spirit, the <i>Critical Spatial Practice</i> book series, edited
by Nikolaus Hirsch and Markus Miessen, takes as a historical starting point the
post-financial crisis social movements and seeks to uncover a deeper affinity and
significance underlying the recent compulsion to “be political”. The series
follows on Miessen’s trilogy on <i>Participation</i>,
and accompanies his recently initiated Architecture and Critical Spatial
Practice<i> </i>program<i> </i>at the Städelschule, Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste,
Frankfurt. <i>Critical Spatial Practice</i> attempts
to understand how creators of space can act as active political agents, and how
space can facilitate political agency itself. Tactfully avoiding a preemptive
answer to such broad issues, the editors construct a larger discursive
foundation about how space can be interpreted as a political medium within
which action can take place. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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Framing such actions within the concept of “criticality”,
this political and spatial discourse is given a subversive and resistive
connotation. <i>What is Critical Spatial Practice</i>?,
the first book in the series, interviews over 60 architects, historians, curators,
philosophers, writers, and artists, asking “what, today, can be understood as a
critical modality of spatial practice?”. It immediately becomes apparent that not
only is criticality itself not dead, it has possibly never been so alive. The
wide gamut of opinions and interpretations on the contemporary significance of
what it means to be critical today shares a discursive commonality: they
textually perform the political itself. No intervention exceeds three pages, and
each one acts as a mini-manifesto, with candid declarations and clear
strategies for political praxis. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The second book in the series, titled <i>The Space of Agonism</i>, is a (re)presentation of a series of
conversations between Miessen and political philosopher Chantal Mouffe, which took
place sporadically between 2006 and 2011. Agonism is a political and
ontological model based on the fundamental ineradicability of conflict, but
insists on the contingent relationship between conflict and violence: hence <i>agonism</i>, a subtraction of <i>antagonism,</i> and the notion of
“conflictual consensus”<sup>1</sup>. While this model is only one of many, the
authors enact the political by specifically choosing to develop further this one.
Furthermore, as if proof were necessary (or possible), they claim: “reflecting
on recent history, it seems that the views put forward in the conversation are
being confirmed by reality”. <o:p></o:p></div>
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While the first book ‘s structure produces a more polemic,
scattered, and therefore fragile discourse, the second book wields the solidarity
of one specific discourse as a lens to see, speak, reflect, understand, and
generate constructive ideas about the contemporary global historical moment.
The discursive format of each book in relation to each other reflects a larger
trend in contemporary historical discourse and its social repercussions. Despite
the fact that Mouffe’s theory of agonism is based on the “shared symbolic space”
of pluralism itself, the relationship between the plurality of views expressed
concisely in the first volume and the comprehensive, yet privileged view explored
in the second goes unmentioned, making the contrast between these two
interpretations of the politics of space rather stark.<o:p></o:p></div>
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More than just a small and portable set of provocations, by
creating books that physically represent the central concept they are trying to
discuss, the <i>Critical Spatial Practice</i>
series transcends compulsion, offering instead a reflective performance of the
political. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify; text-indent: -18pt;">1. Mouffe, Chantal. </span><i style="text-align: justify; text-indent: -18pt;">On the Political</i><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify; text-indent: -18pt;">.
London: Routledge, 2005.</span></div>
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<a href="http://www.domusweb.it/content/domusweb/en/reviews/2013/05/17/critical_spatialpractice.html" style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;" target="_blank">This post was originally published in DomusWeb on May 17th, 2013</a><br />
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Awaking Lucidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04895103534811454236noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1239377941522217317.post-71959929947617769692013-05-10T17:25:00.001+02:002013-06-07T11:00:32.352+02:0010. Aleksandr Sokurov - Faust<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1437357/" target="_blank">Faust</a></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> is a 2011 film by the Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov that won the Golden Lion award at the 2012 Venice Film Festival. It is a cinematic interpretation of the Germanic legend, with historical precedents within the medium from the likes of F.W. Murnau (</span><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0016847/" style="font-family: inherit;" target="_blank">1924</a><span style="font-family: inherit;">) and Jan Svankmajer (</span><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109781/" style="font-family: inherit;" target="_blank">1994</a><span style="font-family: inherit;">). The tale of Faust was first expressed using language in the form of a play in 1594 written by Christopher Marlowe. It is probably most famous for being the source of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's magnum opus in the form of a two-part </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethe's_Faust" style="font-family: inherit;" target="_blank">play</a><span style="font-family: inherit;">, first performed in 1806. It was furthermore interpreted by Charles Gounod as an </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faust_(opera)" style="font-family: inherit;" target="_blank">opera</a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> in 1859 and by Thomas Mann as a </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doktor_Faustus" style="font-family: inherit;" target="_blank">novel</a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> in 1947. The legend itself is summarily described as the story of "a highly successful scholar but one dissatisfied with his life who therefore makes a pact with the Devil, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures"(</span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faust" style="font-family: inherit;" target="_blank">1</a><span style="font-family: inherit;">).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The notion of the Faustian bargain has been incorporated into the discourse of architecture largely by Rem Koolhaas, possibly first mentioned in his infamous <i>Junkspace</i> essay in his identification of the economy as "Faustian" (<a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=9&cad=rja&ved=0CGsQFjAI&url=http%3A%2F%2Firis.nyit.edu%2F~rcody%2FThesis%2FReadings%2FKoolhaas%2520-%2520JUNKSPACE.doc&ei=oNltUdCuHsuw7AaFmIGYCQ&usg=AFQjCNHCYtn962qFF_IoCyWVx4GFQeglNQ&sig2=eNRFCAlJF-6HzYKyNru-Jw&bvm=bv.45218183,d.ZGU" target="_blank">2</a>), but has been more recently brought to bear on architecture itself in the Chronocaos exhibit in which Koolhaas claims the architect traded significance for prominence (<a href="http://www.oma.eu/projects/2010/venice-biennale-2010-cronocaos" target="_blank">3</a>).</span><br />
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Faust, as a myth which has no one original or "true" form, condemned to <i>interpretation </i>and <i>representation</i>, can be considered a meditation on the historical significance of ethics. As such, Sokurov's film is a contemporary statement on the profound <i>ambiguity</i> of ethics by structuring his narrative around the causality of doubt as well as desire.<br />
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The following post is largely a description of the movie, to which a more detailled theoretical analysis will follow in longer form and in another venue. Once it has been published, I will be posting it on this blog. The movie has been describes as complex and almost too hard to understand, therefore I am not sure to urge the reader to read this post or not; I am unable to declare if the theoretical content of the movie can be apprehended distinctly from the unfolding of the plot. Therefore, it is possible that this post can serve as either a guide or a hinderance to such a powerful, beautifully crafted movie.<br />
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Sokurov's Faust is embattled in a highly existential discourse in which he employs law, medicine, philosophy, and theology, to search for the existence of the soul and the assurance of meaning in his endeavors. His failures have left him poor and deeply unhappy, to which even his father dismisses him as being impractical in his refusal of "work". Eventually turning to a moneylender, Mauricius, he attempts to sell without luck a ring, "the philosopher's stone", that despite "explaining the nature of things ... [is] worth nothing". Despite his failed transaction, a social relationship is formed between the two men, consecrated by Mauricius' honesty, in returning the ring which Faust forgot in his shop, and generosity, in bringing food for Faust to eat. Through Mauricius' high reverence for Faust as a man of knowledge, they embark together into the town. Ending up in a bar where a group of young soldiers are celebrating a war being terminated, remaining high tensions on both sides result in one of the soldiers being killed in a mob frenzy generated by Mauricius' performing of a miracle, drawing wine from stone. Technically, Faust was the one who was holding the fork that stabbed the man, but the fork was only pushed into the man by Mauricius himself. They both depart the bar in a hurry, with Faust exclaiming in his own resolution of guilt that it was "As if the Devil himself put the fork in my hand".<br />
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Upon discovering that the killed man was the brother of Margarete, a woman who Faust had recently met and lusted for, Faust subsequently desires to relieve his moral guilt for killing this man. Unable to do so himself using the symbolic gift of gold, Faust obliges the help of Mauricius, to which he complies without much hesitation. Through their direct confrontation and dialog, Faust is able to captivate and entice Margarete with his intellectual posture. After their encounter, Faust find himself extremely pleased but yet wanting more all the same. He then pleads Mauricius to disclose his knowledge of Margarete and his creativity in finding a way to become closer to her. Again, complying without objection, Mauricius proposes that Faust put himself in the church's confessional booth to which Margarete frequents, which reveals that the priest is one of Mauricius' "clients", and could therefore be distracted easily. Margarete's growing fondness of Faust is complicated when she returns home to find out that Faust is her brother's murderer. Unable to believe her source of information, she immediately runs to see Faust, and despite being unable to ask the question once she arrives and instead settles into a more playful emotive stance, upon leaving she asks whether Faust killed her brother, to which he confesses.<br />
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Terribly afraid that this event will not only lead to Faust's imprisonment but the termination of his relationship with Margarete, Faust returns to Mauricius to explain the situation and beg for his services so that he can spend one whole night with her. Unable to find a solution, in place of "imagination", Mauricius claims to have "something better", a contract that would pledge the soul of the signer to the Devil upon death in exchange for his one wish. Signed in blood, passing through an underground tunnel in the basement of Mauricius' shop the night unfolds in an oneiric state. After being confronted with uncomfortable signs, Faust quickly leaves the house and is met by Mauricius at its exit with a suit of armor, with which Faust must avoid death and earn his guilt's forgiveness. Their path leads them to purgatory, where Faust is swarmed by dead men in thanks for their death. Pulled away from their grasp, the two continue forward alone onto a mountainous rocky terrain where they come across a geyser, fascinating Faust. When claiming to not know how it works upon being asked, Mauricius expresses his desire to leave and move onwards. Faust vehemently resists, bites Mauricius' arm, and tries to seek independence. In light of its potential ineffectivity, Mauricius confronts Faust about his upholding of the contract. </div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Mauricius</b> - Wait! You can stay longer if you wish. Even without a soul.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Faust</b> - Leave me alone. I don't need you anymore! What is it you want? Why did you show me those madmen who even In the sleep of death cannot forget their war? What have you given me? Not even money for my ring!</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Mauricius</b> - Power, influence ... one can only seize such goods oneself! Nature and spirit ... that is all one needs to create here, on this free land, a free people. But. seriously now, I have a contract.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Faust</b> - A contract? [Laughs]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Mauricius</b> - You signed it!</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Faust</b> - I have to concentrate! Leave me alone. [Faust runs into the distance]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Mauricius</b> - Wait! The soul! Your soul. I'm entitled to It.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Faust</b> - The soul?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Mauricius</b> - You signed the contract with your blood!</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Faust</b> - Feel free to submit it on Judgement Day.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[Faust rips the contract from Mauricius' hands, pushes him into a hole, and throw large rocks on top of him until he is questionably dead, though definitively quiet and invisible]</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">[Faust runs "over there, farther and farther" in "</span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">eternal solitude, </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">and no hope of salvation"]</span> </blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ4y4LiOvMd11GckinvW19ed3XEvatNFlFgJTaStsjuKLnXuGdfE-rVpA_UiOlDjGOYkJ0OMw70k9MX9bo7Vwgi84PmzXYQKTDyrZAmaWrWIhns_meD5m-ouYhX6uu-LYVIwXhCOR8XcI/s1600/Screen+Shot+2013-05-10+at+5.16.03+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="291" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ4y4LiOvMd11GckinvW19ed3XEvatNFlFgJTaStsjuKLnXuGdfE-rVpA_UiOlDjGOYkJ0OMw70k9MX9bo7Vwgi84PmzXYQKTDyrZAmaWrWIhns_meD5m-ouYhX6uu-LYVIwXhCOR8XcI/s400/Screen+Shot+2013-05-10+at+5.16.03+PM.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Film still, <i>Faust</i> (2011) </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">[Film end]</span> </blockquote>
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In conclusion, Sokurov's <i>Faust</i> is extremely successful at representing a moral order, and, not necessarily its immanent inapplicability, but its radical contingency, and as such, the potential for its disregard. While the concepts of ambiguity and contingency have been used within discourse as a basis for resistive, reformative, and revolutionary activity, this movie viscerally communicates the vertiginous effect, and consequence, of space without law.</div>
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Awaking Lucidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04895103534811454236noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1239377941522217317.post-83484355238000888652013-05-07T14:32:00.000+02:002013-06-07T11:00:43.943+02:009. Ian Bogost - Alien Phenomenology<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i><a href="http://books.google.es/books?id=MwaK2aUclo8C" target="_blank">Alien Phenomenology</a></i> is more of a re-articulation of the arguments for and developments of Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) than a book that seeks to introduce a radical new theory. Since the movement's official foundation in 2010 with a series of conferences organized by Bogost at Georgia Tech, published in 2012, this book puts for the declaration 'this is where we are' rather than 'this is what we are.' The reasons for which I have endeavored into such a book is not so much as to discover new concepts or insights, which are developed in more detail elsewhere, but to return my gaze towards OOO for its metaphysical deployment of <i>metaphor</i> as a way to draw a cartography of the contemporary architectural discipline. In this essay I will seek to investigate the idea of metaphor as it relates to the architectural design of the late avant-garde, and through its analysis reflexively determine a more operative definition for architecture as a political dispositif for the new.<br />
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Metaphor is a linguistic figure of speech, a type of rhetoric that deals with the formation of a new understanding through the chemical-like synthesis of its two anteriors. Metaphor is political in the Rancierian sense that the political act represents that which was not before that act of representation (<a href="http://books.google.es/books?id=UEABQkE1uYMC" target="_blank">1</a>). Metaphor is furthermore asymmetrical: as in bacterial symbiotic sex (<a href="http://books.google.es/books?id=-5T1narQlSsC" target="_blank">2</a>), one concept is consumed by the other to produce yet another. To use Graham Harman's example from Guerrilla Metaphysics (<a href="http://books.google.es/books?id=XSVBAoScCBUC&dq" target="_blank">3</a>), when we say <i>man is a wolf</i>, 'man' and 'wolf' are not equal in the metaphor and its resulting new concept, assuming that the metaphor is successful, is more akin to an augmentation of the <i>man</i> concept than the <i>wolf</i> concept. This rings oddly close to Deleuzean becoming, where the wolf-becomes-man, or the man-becomes-wolf, but with a key <i>ontological</i> difference:<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">"The familiar refrain of "becoming-whatever" (it doesn't matter what!) suggests comfort and compatibility in relations between units, thanks to the creative negotiations things make with each other. By contrast, alien phenomenology assumes the opposite : incompatibility ... remind[ing] us that no matter how fluidly a system may operate, its members nevertheless remain utterly isolated, mutual aliens." (Bogost, <i>Alien Phenomenology</i>, p40)</span></blockquote>
The basic tenet of OOO is that everything is essentially unknowable. That is not to say that we cannot know <i>anything</i>, but it is to say that we can only know the sensual qualities of each thing that we know, and that those things exist much more <i>deeply</i> than just in those ways that we know them. Metaphor reveals not only the finitude of our knowledge, but its latent potentials. It is therefore through metaphysical operations such as metaphor that we <i>indirectly</i> expand our knowledge of the very things that make up the operation. But specifically in Bogost's discourse, metaphor is induced primarily as a means to communicate not a thing, but the <i>experience</i> of a thing: for example, how bats experience space. He argues that even though we may be able to <i>describe</i> how bats use their senses to perceive space, that is not the same as <i>understanding the bat's experience of space</i>. Bogost identifies metaphor as having the capacity to communicate experience through its production of new understandings, such as: a bat's experience of space is like swimming in a black hole. This metaphor, ignoring its success or not, does not intend to communicate <i>exactly what</i> the experience of space is like for a bat, but instead creates a different <i>form</i> of understanding that may be <i>closer</i> to the experience we are trying to understand as opposed to if we were to create a aesthetic image of our humanized interpretation of echolocation.<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: xx-small;">Echolocation, <a href="http://magi.wikia.com/wiki/Echolocation">source</a></span></div>
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Politically, we could declare that architecture aims to be expressed, represented, experienced, regardless of whatever architecture may be. This political intention is clearly exemplified by Aldo Rossi's employment of archetypical geometries as a generator of contemporary history, Peter Eisenman's employment of architectonic elements as the disjunction to daily life, and John Hejduk's employment of urban symbols as the medium for social narratives. Each of these architects sought to <i>clearly</i> represent architecture through a process of <i>critical</i> <i>abstraction </i>in the etymological sense of definitively separating and deciding what is crucial from what isn’t. If we call the work of these architects <i>metaphorical</i> (in the metaphysical sense of the term), we can begin to identify their metaphysical tectonics. My question in, in the relation between geometry and history, between building and daily life, between symbols and narratives, where does architecture fit? Let us look at the algebraic possibilities: architecture can occupy either the primary, secondary, or product term. <i>a</i> + <b>b</b> = C | <i>a</i> + C = <b>b</b> | C + <i>a</i> = <b>b</b>. Referencing Bernard Tschumi's Hegelian (/Faustian?) bargain that architecture is a <i>supplement </i>(<a href="http://books.google.es/books?id=72P3PQr2tqAC" target="_blank">4</a>), we can deduce that architecture in the work of the late avant-garde, exemplified by these three architects, is a component of the metaphor of inhabiting space to produce something <i>else</i>. For example: in <i><a href="http://www.moma.org/collection_images/resized/266/w500h420/CRI_97266.jpg" target="_blank">House VI</a></i>, Eisenman manipulated architectonic elements within the architectural design process as a means to reveal the contingency of the Frank's daily life; in the <i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwgn39wxo0RZ6dAjnmSEVAIAC8QiTQOcM63cSQ_yCmbUHVGGgqOJJXNPGLFUp4bko58rElezZ36qsXAeQ3uAVW20NUqE8WucLGTlkvw8nNBNdvEd8Nlh_efFVWKygQpGk78Vu2UpScFeM/s1600/hejduk+berlin+masque.jpg" target="_blank">Masque</a></i> projects, Hejduk situated urban symbols within the architectural process of realization to effect a social narrative; in <a href="http://thonilitsz.arq.br/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/2_rossi_regione-perugia_low.jpg" target="_blank"><i>La Nuova </i><i>Piazza</i></a>, Rossi used geometric forms within the architectural process of institutionalization to produce a feeling of contemporary history. Formally speaking, none of these results - the revelation of contingency, the effect of sociality, or the institution of contemporary history - would have occurred without architecture: they are <i>dependant</i> on architecture.<br />
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It is perhaps suitable at this point to recall that concurrent to the development of the late avant-garde, claims of an 'architectural knowledge' were made, an autonomous form of knowledge that was particular and essential to the architectural discipline. Architects of the late avant-garde treated architecture as a <i>thing</i>. By using knowledge of architecture (its geometric representation of history, its formal edification of daily-life, its symbolic constitution of society) as a means to expand the understanding of whatever-else (the representation of history, the edification of daily-life, the constitution of society), their work, as a metaphor, only sought to reflexively <i>fill</i> the epistemological limits of architecture itself. The late avant-garde never asked themselves "is this architecture"? It would be logically impossible for their work to <i>not</i> be architecture as they start from architecture itself. But I would like to argue here that architecture, despite it's identifiable history, discipline, and institution, architecture <i>is not a thing</i>. Or, better said, it is not that architecture <i>cannot</i> be a thing, as it clearly has been and is, but architecture <i>should not</i> be a thing. What I would like to put forth in the following section is that although architecture can be conceived of and used as a thing, as it clearly has been and is at this very moment, architecture <i>should not be</i>.<br />
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The late avant-garde operated within a disciplinary context of crisis. Late capitalism had radically altered the heteronomous conditions within which architecture worked, and as a result of this disjunction, architecture was forced to redefine itself within this new situation. Despite the post-deconstructivist claims that architecture is not a text (and the recent calls for a return to 'reading a building', it is not unfair to claim that the late avant-garde employed architecture, in its various interpretations, as a language that can be used to achieve something, and through that effect, a socio-economic revaluation of architecture. It is certainly of intrigue to ask <i>why</i> these architects treated architecture at a language specifically in that historical context, just as the existential foundation of language as a signifying structure was being sundered, but for now it will suffice to state that it did and turn our gaze to its consequences. But my intention does not lie in criticizing the subjective phenomenological experiences of these aforementioned projects, but more-so to critically investigate the approach these architects took towards doing architecture.<br />
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Architecture as a discipline was confronted with a historically contingent yet real situation that threatened its existence, to which the architects of the late avant-garde responded by making a <i>myth</i> of architecture itself.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Myth, on the contrary, is a language which does not want to die: it wrests from the meanings which give it its sustenance an insidious, degraded survival, it provokes in them an artificial reprieve in which it settles comfortably, it turns them into speaking corpses. (Barthes, <i>Mythologies</i>, 132)</span></blockquote>
In the face of a questionable survival, architect's declared architecture as a language that could be put into built form, therefore making it impervious to the fate of the discipline. Albiet unintentionally, the late avant-garde made architectural ruins. If the discipline were to die, it would at least be possible to say 'this is architecture.' But perhaps, maybe this threat was misinterpreted, and instead of <i>threatening</i> architecture's autonomous disciplinary existence, the conditions of late capitalism merely <i>demanded more</i> of the architectural discipline.<br />
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We should make something clear: the architectural discipline was and is historically engendered by the building of buildings. But, as Hegel stated, again, architecture itself is the "supplement". By equating the architectural supplement with the process of building a building, the architects of the late avant-garde reduced architecture as to the ideal limit of what they could make with the budget they were given. It was believed that building + architecture = architectural thing. But as soon as we say 'this is architecture', we are confronted with the multitude of ways that it is <i>not</i> architecture, or, how other things are architecture <i>as well</i>, which questions the identification of this thing as an architectural thing. So I believe we must ask ourselves: are we suffice with ascribing architecture to the role of an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affix" target="_blank">affix</a>? Are we content with treating 'architecture' as a specific morphology of building, drawing, art, or whatever have you - a single species among many others in a Darwinist game?<br />
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Let me restate my thesis: despite it's identifiable history, discipline, artifacts and institution, that can be pointed to and called architecture, <i>architecture</i> <i>is not a thing</i>. Or maybe, it's not that architecture <i>is not</i> a thing, but architecture is <i>more</i> of a thing than we can possibly grasp. We could try to say what architecture <i>is</i> in abstract space such as this text, but this speech act most often goes unnoticed and is uttered more frequently than we can imagine, in the subtle identification of the architect with their work as a piece of architecture. By identifying architecture or the architect we inherently foreclose on the fundamentally withdrawn and infinite truth of architecture itself, the fidelity around which the discipline is founded upon; it becomes a "speaking corpse" that is paradoxically fighting for its survival while not realizing it is already dead. But this supposed death, I would like to argue, is merely an illusion. That is not to say that this death isn't real, as it <i>can</i> be identified and felt, but is entirely based on contingent presuppositions that all stem from the late avant-garde gesture of disciplinary abstraction that was engendered by late capitalism.<br />
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Late capitalism, in the spirit of its own foundational gesture of abstraction, often demands the architectural discipline to abstract its object in order to perform certain tasks. But it would be ludicrous to claim that in working under the conditions of late capitalism the production of architecture is impossible due to the abstract nature of its disciplinary demands. It would furthermore be useless at this point to go back to the Hegelian definition that architecture is that which is not utility. Instead, I would like to return to the idea of metaphor to offer a rudimentary framework for thinking about architecture.<br />
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More than having come to the conclusion of what architecture is, we have reached various conclusions as to what architecture <i>should</i> not be: architecture should not be a language; architecture should not be seen as a 'thing' nor should it be 'used'; architecture should not be named, nor identified; architecture should not 'do' anything. Architecture should not say anything. Architecture cannot represent itself. Architecture cannot be represented. Architecture can merely be alluded to. Architecture can only be produced, though if we intentionally try to make 'it', we forbid its existence.<br />
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In a time where the architectural discipline is again being threatened by the conditions of the capital it serves, we can think of architecture as the result of a metaphor through which a new understanding, a new consideration, a new value, can emerge.</div>
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<i>Desk Set</i> is a 1957 movie by Walter Lang that features Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. What is perhaps most unique about the medium of film, and is particularly encountered in the Golden Age of Hollywood, is that despite whatever attempts it may make to do otherwise, film is a historical document, an expression of spirit. Film, and perhaps all other expressive mediums, are trapped within the time of its making: the future is the future of that moment, the past is the past of that moment.<br />
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<i>Procedural Rhetoric</i> is the first chapter to Ian Bogost's book titled <i>Persuasive Games, </i>published in 2010. The book looks at video games as the expressive medium of our historical epoch, much like film was half a century ago. As film was infamously championed as the ideal medium of continuity, computer software, and video games in particular, is claimed to be the ideal medium of procedurality. Both of these mediums are considered to be ideal not because the processes they employ did not exist beforehand, but that the form of the mediums themselves <i>are</i> those processes.<br />
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It could easily be claimed that <i>Desk Set</i> is profoundly representative of a modernist ideology, but I would like to argue that the movie effectively complicates the signifying chain of representation that we (still) base our contemporary ideology on, one that is based on a dialectical form, visible in notions towards the operative domains of infrastructure and superstructure, software and hardware, individual and society, etc. In Bogost's lexicon, ideology is essentially procedure, "a way of creating, explaining, or understanding processes." (p3) The binary distinction comes from the belief that procedures both express things and at the same time are themselves expressions.<br />
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"Not all procedures are expressive in the way that literature and art are expressive. But processes that might appear unexpressive, devoid of symbol manipulation, may actually found expression of a higher order." (Bogost, p5)</blockquote>
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"procedural representation takes a different form than written or spoken representation. Procedural representation explains processes with other processes. Procedural representation is a form of symbolic expression that uses process rather than language." (Bogost, p9)</blockquote>
What complicates the dialectical distinction is what Bogost aptly calls "procedural rhetoric," which is the relation between procedurality, defined as "a way of creating, explaining, or understanding processes" (p3) through the utilization of the processes themselves. He further claims that this situation of the self within a rhetorical space is not only the 'essence' of video games, but play itself: "we explore the possibility space its rules afford by manipulating the game’s controls" (p43).<br />
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The movie takes as its plot the imminent use of computers in the corporate office environment, visible from the opening credits until the film's end. It expresses the social weight of threatened working conditions through explicit representations of social relations. It would be tempting to call these representations "ideological," particularly when Hepburn's character is portrayed as a transgressive heroine, championing numerical aptitude in an impromptu test by a senior male engineer, as well as portraying a highly independent and active social life.<br />
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What 'complicates' this ideological representation is precisely within Bogost's notion of procedurality and is exemplified by Hepburn's character.<br />
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"we tend to think of procedures as fixed and unquestionable. They are tied to authority, crafted from the top down, and put in place to structure behavior and identify infringement." (Bogost, p3)</blockquote>
Bogost, following the discourse of Janet Murray, claims that procedurality is the "fundamental notion of authoring processes." (Bogost, p12) My question therefore is regarding agency <i>within</i> procedure. In computer games, the agency of the player is to explore the limits of the game, but never to alter the limits of the game (though I may be able to be proven wrong in this, which I would gladly welcome, it is not unfair to say that this is the general strategy of games). Could we claim then that Hepburn's character does not subvert the ideological rules of high capitalism, but merely <i>sublates</i> them, and in the process <i>enforcing</i> them, to explore its limits?<br />
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Exemplified by customer service, procedure is not a fixed and impermeable form - it is "an approach, or a custom; a policy for ... relations" (p4). Therefore, as procedure is constituted by relations themselves, they are permeable, malleable. They are based on fidelity to an abstract idea, what Bogost locates in the metaphysical deployment of <i>rhetoric</i>, but as abstract, must be and are consistently negotiated, immanent to their manifestation. Hepburn without a doubt authors novel <i>unit operations</i>, to use Bogost's terms: she changes the rules with which we conceive of gendered social embodiments and economic relations. But by using the rhetoric of numbers as a metric for value, despite the fact that Hepburn liberates their gendered prejudice, she effectively diffuses their rhetorical hegemony. Foregoing its metaphysical (and debatably nihilistic) undertones that has arisen elsewhere on this blog already, is the problem: <i>who</i> has <i>access</i> to value, or the that <i>value itself</i> is considered to be a social privilege, something that can be accessed by some and not others? To put it another way, is setting an example enough? The supremacy of Hepburn's character is made evident not only in her spatial situation in the office and her role within the corporation, but in the attention and care her female work associates give to her and her social life. Hepburn transgresses, but what about the three other women who work with her? Is transgression itself a social privilege?<br />
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These possible answers to these questions ultimately reside in the metaphysical category of rhetoric, defined by Bogost as "effective and persuasive expression" (p3). The question can thus be reformulated as, is the performative act of transgression rhetorical <i>enough </i>to effect the alteration of the law which the act transgresses? Bogost himself advocates his own work in his company <i>Persuasive Games</i> as procedural rhetoric: the authoring of expressive processes for explicitly persuasive ends. His work itself questions the metaphysics of engagement, concurrently raising and redefining the questions 'why do we use programs' and 'what can programs do.' In computers, the primary issue may be its operationality, not the computer itself: computers are a fact of our reality that we are (still) only coming into contact with more frequently in our daily lives. The computer is a device, and for now, it still takes an explicitly conscious decision to use one. But when the 'procedural device' is not a tangible object, but closer to what Timothy Morton has termed a "hyperobject" (<a href="http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/hyperobjects" target="_blank">1</a>), it is legitimate to put in question its sociopolitical existence. The computer's problem access, and therefore its terrain for political action, is fundamentally different than that of ideology. The law of the computer is the computer itself, the thing that we are using to read these words, but the law of ideology has no identifiable object, but merely indirect manifestations.<br />
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Rhetoric was originally used for the deliberation of political matters within the Greek Republic, with which a decision would be made: it functioned within the corporeal law of power as a means to persuade the instrumentality of power in one way or another. The rhetorical difference between the object and hyperobject of law is the relation between the conscious and the unconscious. There were certainly <i>examples</i> that formalized the inequality between men and women, but as a <i>law</i> (in its universal sense) was never represented as such. Perhaps this is for rhetorical reasons itself, for if the law is presented in its bare form it is too easy to object to, and therefore it had to manifest itself with contingent evidence so that the idea can be indirectly affirmed through processes of in/de-duction.<br />
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There are a plenitude of issues regarding classical notions of rhetoric, but it is fair enough to say thats contemporary nature has changed. According to Bogost, this has resulted in what we consider to be 'success' in our actions shifting away from "effective influence" to "effective expression" (p20), effectively transforming the object of rhetoric's desire from "persuasion" to "identification." Strongly echoing Ranciere's political discourse of the speech act and the distribution of the sensible, we can reformulate our question from before: Is effectively expressing something that was not expressed before enough to subvert the the hyperobject of ideological value that makes expression itself a privilege? By posing this question I do not mean to propose that it is not <i>worth</i> representing the unrepresented, but I do question whether it is the right focus of our creative and political energies.<br />
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The questions to which we have come to here have no immediate answer, but it can be assured that whatever is answered (or even their deferral) will be the result of a rhetorical process. Though, it would be a fallacy to believe that all rhetorical processes effectively operate on the same level as every other one. And perhaps by identifying the levels of specific rhetorical discourses themselves, we can begin to navigate the political terrain in a more directed manner to address not necessarily the manifestations of procedures, but the procedures themselves.<br />
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I will leave this post with a set of film stills from <i>Desk Set</i> that beautifully demonstrate the extension of rhetoric into the visual realm.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="text-align: left;">Film stills from </span><i style="text-align: left;">Desk Set</i><span style="text-align: left;">, Walter Lang, 1957</span></span></div>
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Awaking Lucidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04895103534811454236noreply@blogger.com0