Context

Henri Lefebvre
Introduction to Modernity: Twelve Preludes
Eleventh Prelude / To Kostas Axelos
September 1959-May

Focus

Sometimes the use of discourse to heighten awareness of conflicts does not help to supersede them, but simply makes them worse. The solution is to be found in praxis. If techniques were improved and better adapted to practical use - that is, to praxis - then perhaps the conditions for spontaneous vitality could be reconstituted. However there is every indication that before a possible unity can be rediscovered, the disjunction between the self and itself, as well as the disjunction between nature and anti-nature, will have to be lived through... Modernity is doomed to explore and to live through abstraction. ...Abstraction perceived as something concrete, anti-nature and a growing nostalgia for nature which has somehow been mislaid - such is the conflict lived out by "modern" man.

How strange the contradiction is between the modern "reprivatization" of everyday life, and the "globalization" which is being thrust into the very heart of private life by mass media. On one side of the picture the horizon shrinks, with everything turned back on the family and the self. Turn the picture, and we see a limitless expanse where the idea of the "world" already implies its supersession. But this "picture" cannot be summed simply as something with two contradicting sides. It is misleading to think that we can look at one side, then the other. The crucial thing is to seize the dramatic and conflictual interpretation of each "side" of the picture. And the picture is just a metaphor for a technical operation, itself abstract, by which the movement from one to other can be grasped.

There is no greater alienation than the alienation which cannot speak its name.

This generalized and disjointed determination has to make do with the transformation and abstract transposition of an everyday life which has itself been reduced to a "private" abstraction: verbalism, rhetoric, moralism and aesthetics. Whatever we can formulate as thought has been made into a reality "for us" by praxis, and it is therefore not the action of some kind of independent and externalized consciousness which internalizes it; it has been transformed into consciousness by praxis and the movement of praxis.

Links

http://books.google.com/books

Context

Peter Sloterdijk & Erik Morse
Frieze Magazine / Issue 127 Nov-Dec 2009

Angel Borrego
Office for Strategic Spaces, 2009

Focus

The Spharen project is about the creation of a specific human interior. On a metaphysical level, the meaning of my theory is that human beings never live outside of nature but always create a kind of existential space around themselves. Urban spaces are a humanized environment where nature is completely replaced by a man-made reality. This can provoke a kind of alienation; a sense of loss within cities that you might normally expect to feel in nature...

...I have quoted Benjamin in a very positive way. In some of the most interesting parts of Passagen-Werk, he develops the idea that the bourgeoisie of the 19th century created these artificial interiors. And so when the world became globalized, the bourgeoisie in their salons wanted to absorb everything that is exterior into this interiority. According to Benjamin, the art of the bourgeois form of life was, in the 19th century, the effort to neutralize everything that is exterior and to create an interior that contains the totality. And that is what the arcades are all about. In the arcades, in the passage, the whole world of production - the whole world of trading and exploring - is neutralized and re-presented in the presence of the commodity. The commodities bring these outer totalities into the apartment of the bourgeoisie. Between the ocean and the apartment is the passage; the arcade where all these goods can be bought.

But between the modern shopping mall and the primitive arcade of the early 19th century, there was a step that is very symbolic. This is the London Crystal Palace, which is for me the major symbol of the Postmodern construction of reality. [A cast-iron and glass building designed by Joseph Paxton to house The Great Exhibition of 1851. It included 14,000 exhibitors from around the world, displaying examples of the latest developments in technology.] Because the power of interiorization here reached a kind of historic maximum, I chose it as the title for my most recent book on Postmodern capitalism: The Crystal Palace. In German the title is Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals [the big interior of capitalism]. Weltinnenraum is a word borrowed from Rainer Maria Rilke who, in a poem from 1914, created a vision of a fantastic space in which everything communicates with everything else. In his vision of pantheistic communication, everything is produced by psychic powers, whereas in the Weltinnenraum of capitalism, the communicative force is money.

-

An exhibition would seem to require a certain order or arrangement of the pieces in the space, a space which possesses a concrete form. ...We have made the typical dividing walls one normally finds in exhibitions partially disappear, turning them into semitransparent partitions. If we are not sure about our ability to make design metaphorically vanish, at least we try to achieve it in a physical way, turning the walls into a less physical presence, as if in the process of disappearing. This transparency, together with the way of making them, with a clearly differentiated front and back, gives the route through the exhibition a non-subjective, defined and undisputed directional quality that connects it with the irreversibility of the passing of time.

We want the public to fully control the exhibition right from the word go, just as the Angel of History does with the recent past. That said, this control intensifies the attraction one can feel towards the discovery of each piece glimpsed through successive layers. These dissolved walls weigh less, are easily assembled and made with a great economy of means... We would like to think that, while it is impossible to eschew the idea of destructive progress, this succession of planes, silhouettes and shadows achieved by scant means speaks of a less violent version of progress. How can an exhibition be designed to do away with the undesirable imposition of design?

Links

http://www.frieze.com/
TALKING TO MYSELF ABOUT THE POETICS OF SPACE
Atmospheric Politics
Between Air and Space
FEEDFORWARD - The Angel of History at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creacion Industrial

Context

Georges-Louis Leclerc
Comte de Buffon
Histoire naturelle, generale et particuliere
Natural History, 1749-1788

Focus

Systems are constructed upon uncertain facts which have never been examined, and which only go to show the penchant men have for wishing to find resemblances between most disparate objects, regularity where variety reigns, and order among those things which they perceive only in a confused manner.

Links

http://www.societerealiste.net/

Context

Inaugural Report to the Munich Conference
Internationale Situationniste #3, Dec. 1959

Focus

Current cultural conditions, the decomposition of the individual arts, and the impossibility of the renewal or the perpetuation of these arts have produced a creative vacuum that can only be favorable to our undertaking. The disappearance of traditional artistic forms and the progressive organization of social life has brought about a increasing lack of ludic possibilities in everyday life. Not only does our refusal of this state of things drive us to seek out new conditions of play, but it obliges us to reconsider every cultural problem in order to finally arrive at a unified theory of the practice of consciously constructing ludic environments.

The architect, as with other workers in our enterprise, finds himself faced with the necessity of changing his profession: he will no longer construct mere forms but complete environments. What makes the architecture of today so infuriating is its primarily formal preoccupations. Architecture's problem is no longer the opposition between function and expression; this question has been superseded. In all use of existing forms, in the creation of new forms, the architect's principle concern should be the effect that all this has on the behavior and existence of inhabitants. All architecture will therefore be part of a more extended and more complete activity, and finally, like all other arts, architecture will move toward its own disappearance, beneficial to this unitary activity.

To this end, we have come to an agreement on the founding in Amsterdam of a Bureau of Investigation for a Unitary Urbanism, with the task of the realization of teamwork and the study of practical solutions. This work must be severely distinguished from teamwork as it exists today between individual architects; for us, collective creation is not a simple unity, but an infinite quantity of variable elements. The Bureau of Investigation for a Unitary Urbanism must be the first real step in our elaborate projects, which, at the same time as completely illustrating our ideas, should constitute the micro-elements of what unitary urbanism will become.

A Nomadic Town

For many a year the gypsies who stopped awhile in the little Piedmontese town of Alba were in the habit of camping beneath the roof that, once a week, on Saturday, housed the livestock market. There they lit their fires, hung their tents from the pillars to protect or isolate themselves, improvised shelters with the aid of boxes and planks left behind by the traders. The need to clean up the market place every time the Zingari passed through had led the town council to forbid them access. In compensation, they were assigned a bit of grassland on the banks of the Tamaro, the little river that goes through the town: the most miserable of patches! It's there that in December 1956 I went to see them in the company of the painter [Guiseppe] Pinot Gallizio, the owner of this uneven, muddy, desolate terrain, who'd given it to them. They'd closed off the space between some caravans with planks and petrol cans, they'd made an enclosure, a 'Gypsy Town.'

That was the day I conceived the scheme for a permanent encampment for the gypsies of Alba and that project is the origin of the series of maquettes of New Babylon. Of a New Babylon where, under one roof, with the aid of moveable elements, a shared residence is built; a temporary, constantly remodeled living area; a camp for nomads on a planetary scale.

Social Space

Sociologists extend this concept to the aggregate of social relations and ties that define man's freedom of movement in society, and also, and above all, its limits. This symbolic interpretation of space is not one we share. For us, social space is truly the concrete space of meetings, of the contacts between beings. Spatiality is social.

In New Babylon, social space is social spatiality. Space as a psychic dimension (abstract space) cannot be separated from the space of action (concrete space). Their divorce is only justified in a utilitarian society with arrested social relations, where concrete space necessarily has an anti-social character.

The Social Model

The question of knowing how one would live in a society that knows neither famine nor exploitation nor work, in a society in which, without exception, anyone could give free rein to his creativity -- this troubling, fundamental question awakens in us the image of an environment radically different from any that has hitherto been known, from any that has been realized in the field of architecture or urbanism. The history of humanity has no precedent to offer as an example, because the masses have never been free, that is, freely creative. As for creativity, what has it ever meant but the output of a human being?

Yet let us suppose that all nonproductive work can be completely automated; that productivity increases until the world no longer knows scarcity; that the land and the means of production are socialized and as a result global production rationalized; that, as a consequence of this, the minority ceases to exercise its power over the majority; let us suppose, in other words, that the Marxist kingdom of freedom is realizable. Were it to be, we could no longer ask the same question without instantly attempting to reply to it and to imagine, albeit in the most schematic manner, a social model in which the idea of freedom would become the real practice of freedom -- of a 'freedom' that for us is not the choice between many alternatives but the optimum development of the creative faculties of every human being; because there cannot be true freedom without creativity.

Links

Internationale Situationniste #3, Dec. 1959
New Babylon / A Nomadic Town

----------------------------------

Context

Wall Systems:
Social Capital, Contemporary Forms of Life and Urban Designs
Creative Industries as Mass Deception
Interiors
Service Aesthetics
The New Spirit of Capitalism

Focus

In a recticular world, social life is composed of a proliferation of encounters and temporary, but reactivatable connection with various groups, operated at potentially considerable social, professional, geographical and cultural distance. The project is the occasion and reason for the connection. It temporarily assembles a very disparate group of people, and presents itself as a highly activated section of network for a period of time that is relatively short, but allows for the construction of more enduring links that will be put on hold while remaining available.

- Luc Boltanski & Eve Chiapello

What is now called "creative industries," not only by neoliberal cultural politics and urban development, is something completely different from old-school culture industry, both in its function and its form. Turning to the third component that involves the institutional form, it is obvious that creative industries are not structured as huge media corporations, but mainly as micro-enterprises of cultural entrepreneurs, conceptualized at best in clusters of these micro-enterprises. So if we ask about the creative industries as institutions, it might be better to talk about non-institutions or pseudo institutions. Whereas the model institutions of culture industry were huge, long-term corporations, the pseudo-institutions of creative industries are temporary, ephemeral, project based.

These "project institutions" appear to have the advantage of being based on self-determination, on the rejection of rigid hierarchies, as in (cultural) corporations. ...I want to stress that the project institutions of the creative industries conversely promote precarization and insecurity. In fact, it is clear that a glaring contradiction is evident in the idea of "project institutions": on the one hand the desire for long-term exoneration that the concept of the institution implies and on the other a distinct time-limit implicit in the concept of the project. Following Paolo Virno again, emphasizing the project character leads increasingly to an overlapping of fear and anguish, relative and absolute dread, and ultimately to a complete diffusion of this dread throughout all the areas of life and work.

- Gerald Raunig

Links

Creative Industries as Mass Deception
Service Aesthetics by Steven Henry Madoff
Minima Moralia
The Culture Industry
A Chapter in the Philosophy of Value
Georg Simmel on Philosophy and Culture Herman Miller

Context

Spatial Practices:
Beyond Models of Consensus

Focus

There is a need for actors operating from outside existing networks while leaving behind circles of conventional expertise and overlap with other post-disciplinary fields of knowledge. An alternative model of participation within spatial practices will be rendered, one that takes as a starting point an understanding of participation beyond models of consensus. Instead of aiming for synchronization, such a model could be based on participation through critical distance and the conscious implementation of zones of conflict. Through cyclical specialization, the future spatial practitioner could arguably be understood as an outsider who, instead of trying to set up or sustain common denominators of consensus, enters existing situations or projects by deliberately instigating conflicts as a micro-political form of critical engagement. ...It seems that today we are in urgent need of re-evaluation of spatial production beyond traditional definitions, acknowledging the possibility of an "architecture of knowledge" that is being built up by actively participating in space. The prerequisite to an understanding, production and altering spatial conditions is to identify the broader reaches of political reality.

- Markus Miessen

According to the agonistic approach, public spaces are always plural and the agonistic confrontation takes place in a multiplicity of discursive surfaces. I also want to insist on a second important point. While there is no underlying principle of unity, no predetermined centre to this diversity of spaces, there always exist diverse forms of articulation among them and we are not faced with the kind of dispersion envisaged by some postmodernist thinkers. Nor are we dealing with the kind of 'smooth' space found in Deleuze and his followers. Public spaces are always striated and hegemonically structured. A given hegemony results from a specific articulation of a diversity of spaces and this means that the hegemonic struggle also consist in the attempt to create a different form of articulation among public spaces.

- Chantal Mouffe

During the heyday of modernism, no one seemed to care about "the environment" because there existed a huge unknown reserve on which to discharge all bad consequences of collective actions. There was an exterior since, to use the economists' term, action could be externalized. The environment became public when there was no longer any exterior, any reserve, any dump in which to discharge the consequences of our actions. Environmentalists, in the American sense of the word, never managed to extract themselves from this contradiction that the environment is precisely not what lies beyond and should be left alone - this was the contrary, the view of their worst enemies! - but what should be even more managed, taken up, cared for, stewarded, in brief, integrated, internalized in the very fabric of their polity. Here N&S are at their best: between the environment and the ecological struggle, one has to chose. Nature, no matter grey or green, does not mix well with politics. Only "once out of nature" may politics start again and anew.

- Bruno Latour

.pdf

Felix Guattari / Remaking Social Practices
Yann Serandour
Henrik Plenge Jakobsen
Future7

Context

Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Okonomie
Fragment on Machines
Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Focus

The example of labor shows strikingly how even the most abstract categories, despite their validity - precisely because their abstractness - for all epochs, are nevertheless, in the specific character of this abstraction, themselves likewise a product of historic relations, and possess their full validity only for and within these relations. ...the categories (concepts) which express social relationships in the most advanced society...also allow insights into the structure and the relations of production [whose] nuances have developed explicit significance within it.

Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process. Machine [as fixed capital] are not only socially organized by socially organizing

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or - this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms - with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic - in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.

-Karl Marx

Video

Glenn Gould / Keyboard Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, BWV 1052: I. Allegro

Audio

.pdf

http://www.metamute.org/
Paolo Virno
The General Intellect

Context

Max Neuhaus
Creating the Context:
New Sounds In Natural Setting

Focus

In a small, quiet grove of trees off the main path, the sound is encountered as one enters the area. It is not a startling sound but one that feels organically connected to the area, emerging out of the songs of birds, the crackle of twigs, and the rustle of leaves in the breeze. The first impression is one of peace and calm, even before one is aware of the sound itself. Once the sound is located, the impulse is to stop and listen, locate the source perhaps to be better able to locate oneself in direct line with a speaker, to be in the direct path of a droplet of sound. As you circle the tree, there are points where the sound urges you to stop and listen as it continues to travel from speaker to speaker, distributing the different pitched clicks around the ground in their spiral orbit. One hears the path of the sound as it travels away and around the tree to return to your stopping place. Then one moves on to a new location, repositioning to listen again in a new drop-spot. The effect is one of sheer serenity. Neuhaus has designed an electronic system whose sounds are so consistent with the environment that they seem indigenous to their location.

- Joan La Barbara

.pdf

Aural Gardens
Documenta 6

Context

Nature for Its Own Sake:
First Studies in Natural Appearances
John Charles Van Dyke

Focus

A person stands at the edge of the sea, intent upon nothing. He hears a sound of the waves, noisy and continuous, even though after a certain time he is no longer listening. That person perceives, but without being aware of it. The perception of the uniform motion of the waves is no longer accompanied by the perception of self as perceiving subject. This perception does not at all coincide with what in philosophical jargon is called apperception, or the consciousness of being in the act of perceiving. At the graying edge of the waves, the person standing there absorbed is one with the surrounding environment, connected by a thousand subtle and tenacious threads. This situation, however, does not pass through the filter of a self-reflexive "subject." Rather, this integration with the context is that much stronger the more the "I" forgets itself. Such an experience, however, clashes with what has become the point of honor of modern philosophy, that is to say, with the thesis that perception is inseparable from apperception, that true knowledge is only the knowledge of knowledge, that reference to something is founded upon reference to oneself. The experience of the person on the beach suggests, rather, that we belong to a world in a material and sensible manner, far more preliminary and unshakable than what sweeps out from the little we know of knowledge.

- Paolo Virno

-

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

-Wallace Stevens
The Idea of Order at Key West

Links

The Idea of Order at Key West
John Charles Van Dyke

Context

Henri Lefebvre
The Production of Space

Focus

Spatial interchangeability inevitably brings a powerful tendency towards quantification in its train, a tendency which naturally extends outwards into the surroundings of the housing itself - into those areas variously represented as the environment, transitional spaces, means of access, facilities, and so on. Supposedly natural features are swallowed up by this homogenization - not only physical sites but also bodies, specifically, of the inhabitants (or "users"). Quantification in this context is technical in appearance, financial in reality and moral in essence.

- Henri Lefebvre

Links

The Production of Space
A Grammar of the Multitude
Social Capital

Context

Info-Labor
Maurizio Lazzarato
Franco Berardi
The Frassanito Network

Focus

It is clear, for example, that the ascendancy of autonomy within the liberation movements implied an analogous requirement and sought to institute within a single social system a precise border between an inside and an outside, between the horizon proper to a particular community (determined by specific codes of belonging) and the rest of the social system, which was effectively reduced to being a simple environment. One of the most incisive effects of recent technological developments has been to subvert this distinction between community and environment - first by rendering ever weaker the ties of the community, then by colonizing the environment in an ever more massive way, and finally by generating theoretical practical paradigms capable of being applied indiscriminately to social reality no less than to the environment, that is, to nature. ...Its naturalness, however, refers in every instance to a necessary structure, to a given fact independent of any possible external interaction. ...The transformation of nature into environment implies the dissolution of this factuality, as much at the level of scientific theory as at the level of technical practice.

- Massimo De Carolis

Video

Maurizio Lazzarato at Tate Britain on 19.01.2008

Links

Immaterial Labour / Maurizio Lazzarato
Info-Labor
Franco Berardi
The Frassanito Network

Context

unitednationsplaza

Focus

What's the scenario? A constantly mutating sequence of possibilities. Add a morsel of difference and the results slip out of control, shift the location for action and everything is different. There is a fundamental gap between societies that base their development on scenarios and those that base their development on planning. It could be argued that the great Cold War divide in socio-economic structuring was rooted in the different kinds of results that you get if you apply either one or the other technique to working out how thing might end up in the future. And it is claimed that scenario thinking won. Our vision of the future is dominated by the "What If? Scenario" rather than the "When do we Need More Tractors? Plan." Yet what is the quality of this scenario mentality and how is an awareness of it connected to the work of some artists now? ...Scenario thinking dominates Western cultures within politics, economics, film, television and literature. At one extreme a destabilised sense of doubt is crucial to the success of capitalist structures. Yet the nature of scenario thinking is deeply rooted in other forms of activity. It is a defining characteristic that is common in post-modern societies. It is crucial to the risk taking and delicate balance sought by those who wish to exploit resources and people yet it is also the tool of those who wish to propose change.

- Liam Gillick

.pdf

The Discursive
Prevision / Reading Room
A Short Text on the Possibility of Creating an Economy of Equivalence
Three Linked Cubes/Interior Design for Space Showing Videos

Context

Ina Blom
On the Style Site
Art, Sociality, and Media Culture

Focus

Just as the standard interpretation of the commodity as a "thing" had to be modified by the fact that a key product of contemporary informational and immaterial economy would seem to be affects, feelings, sensitivities and communications - in social relations - the artwork or art event could equally be understood as a social space rather than an objet - a producer of social relations. ...The key issue here is how style is associated with the notion of appearance and how appearance in turn relates to processes of recognition and identification. The question of style then has to be thought in relation to the forms of social identity that arise from processes of recognition. It is this relation - the interaction between appearance, recognition and social identity - that should be understood as a site. It intervenes, more precisely, in a specific historical and cultural situation in which design and style issues have taken on unprecedented significance - both in relation to economic "production," in the traditional sense and in relation to ideas about changes in the concept of production itself - changes brought on by the so-called information economy or attention economy. ...The style site is, perhaps above all, treated as a mediatic site and is associated with the global information networks of contemporary capitalism, with all the difficulties this entails for concepts such as "place" or "context."

- Ina Blom

Links

http://www.sternberg-press.com/