History & Theory #7: Waugh 'Decline & Fall'

Decline & Fall has been a been really welcome change from the more obscure academic writings of Lefebvre (for instance), but just because it is a comic novel doesn't mean it can't carry with it some important ideas.  It is part of a long tradition (Punch, Spitting Image...) of using satire to expose some crazy notions which have become accepted, whether they be in politics, society, or in the case of Professor Silenus, modernism in architecture.
Waugh brilliantly turns some of the most famous quotes from modernists like Le Corbusier into physical or mental characteristics of the architect himself, showing how bonkers they were.  'Machines for living' became Silenus' complaint about the human need for stairs "Why can't the creatures stay in one place?... Why can't they sit still and work?..." as he himself demonstrates, expressing machine-like qualities while he thinks about his next project "Two hours later the foreman in charge of the concrete-mixer came to consult with the Professor.  He had not moved... the hand which had held the biscuit still rose and fell to and from his mouth with a regular motion, while his empty jaws clamped rhythmically; otherwise he was wholly immobile."

Its easy to poke fun at the architect, but we as the reader, the public, don't get off so easily either - in the very next chapter, Paul Pennyfeather 'the shadow' spectre who really just observes events, meets his friend Arthur Potts, who is basically a cipher for the majority of us, or at least the majority of Waugh's reading audience.  Potts is not upper-class, he's a worker bee for the League of Nations, a mid-level functionary.  Educated and liberal, with reasonable views and a solid middle class background aspiring to be more - 'discussing many subjects of importance - Budgets, birth control and Byzantine mosaics.'  He contrasts radically from the debauched upper class Bullingdon lot who abused Paul at Scone, but get on far better, and the Beste-Chetwynde's who just DO without care to the rest, or ideas of morality.
Arthus Potts is basically 'us'.  His judgement of Silenus (read Modernism) is "it all looks extraordinarily interesting... its the only really imaginative thing since the French Revolution."  So while the pseudo-intellectual Silenus is shown to be deluded, we are shown to be lapping it all up as well.

Waugh goes on with Silenus, with scenes where he describes how he may or may not marry Margot, but that he can see virtually no distinguishing factors about her - her digestive tract apparently works, he like the functionalism of that, but he does not recognise any of the human characteristics which have made Pennyfeather fall head over heels in love with her.  Modernist architects had completely lost touch with humanity was his implication.  What is more, Waugh gives him a strongly Faustian set of characteristics in relation to his treatment of Kings Thursday (total destruction of the old) and when asked what he thinks of this new creation, for which he has been so highly praised, he 'despises it.'  The creation, however much better he believes it to be than the old mansion, has failed - the real world can only disappoint.  The next logical step is to destroy it, and start over. The continuous revolution of modern development, sharply juxtaposed against the old house which has resisted even electricity and hot water, having had 'rushes burning in the sconces'.  How could this be translated into a modern day satire on architecture?  Instead of an obsession with machinery and dynamos, might the Silenus character in a contemporary version just want entire rooms full of insulation and constructed entirely from straw and mud found on site, or be some parody on Zaha, zooming endless around the world only touching down to sign a contract for a new city in Xengdu province?
Silenus stays relevant...


However there is a scene at the end of the book, where Pennyfeather bumps into Silenus again at Margot's villa, which provides a slightly different perspective on his cold robotic facade.

Silenus, penniless and wandering after failing to secure any more clients, cracks and admits "maybe I will marry Margot", only to be told, too late, she's married off into the aristocracy and is now Lady Metroland.  His humanity starts to show a little - his modernist principles only run so deep - in crisis he reverts.  He goes on to describe his view on life - is this Silenus, or Waugh speaking? - as a great spinning disc, from which people are thrown by the centripetal forces.  Its a game really - the rat race.  Paul, he says, isn't even in the game - but somehow was forced to play and was damaged (thrown off), whereas others play for fun.  He see that at the centre there is a point of total rest/stillness where these forces either don't affect you, or could be seen as the forces emanating from... either way, Silenus sees himself as close to this centre and sort of protected.  Conversely though, he recognises some kind of association with Paul - this weak character so different from how he sees himself - "...its inevitable, they think the scrambling and excitement and bumps and the effort to get to the middle... and when they do get to the middle [where Silenus thinks he is], its just as if they never started.  Its so odd."
He doesn't like this comparison that they are both standing still, it comes too close to collapsing all his ideas, so he quickly reverts to his mechanistic descriptions and decides to arbitrarily classify people as static and dynamic.  And then disappears off to bed without further discussion...

History & Theory #6: Marshall Berman 'All That Is Solid'

Eye opening, I loved it.  It seems unbelievable that the original had been written two hundred years ago and yet was so prescient of today's modern world.  The continuous destruction/reconstruction of the world about us, and the inability to call a halt - to pause - in what we are doing.  To be 'better' is to be new.

Faust begins as the Dreamer, alone in a garret in the dead of night - he is disconnected from the real world, contemplative from a distance but not experiencing it - academic, theoretical about its nature. He does not truly know the world, or himself.

After meeting Mephistopheles, this ambiguous character who seems to be the Devil, but could also be representative of many other things, Faust becomes the Lover - absorbing and then destroying the innocent in the passage of his own development, full of passions - a whirlwind.

Only to become his final phase, the Developer, at the height of his powers to change and manipulate the world, and in doing so, to become monolithic, the stream roller, that wipes away the vestiges of the old world (the old couple) and brings in the new.  But this immediately becomes outmoded, almost as soon as it is conceived and so is necessarily destroyed in the endless pursuit of some unattainable goal - this is like Sisyphus, but rather than the punishment of the endless job of pushing the rock, it is a choice.

This image of the Modern Man, the developer, is just like a replacement for God.  The power to create, and make the world anew.  It must've been an incredibly attractive idea - rationality kills God, and sets Man in his place.  "Hey guys, WE could do this!"...  The old world - the remains of the feudal system seemed to hang on to them and slow them down, and that is why people such as Nietzsche wanted to take these ideas about humanity's power and set him 'free'.  Old bonds, social structures, morals... they all came under scrutiny and Nietzsche wrote about the ubermensche, a very Faustian bunch - in fact mentioned in Faust I think - and later corrupted by the Nazi et al, who was able to see through these strictures and act 'without morals'.  The will to power, the internal drive that could strike through conventional social bonds, and propel this person to new heights.  Whether this person destroyed some people on the way to the top didn't seem to matter too much... the point was, that as he would act entirely for his own self interest, the overall effect on society would be good.  Development would flow down from this supreme (but very human) being, in some kind of social multiplier effect.  All a bit whacky now, but the train of thought from Faust to here is clear.

The complexity of the story is obviously immense, but seems to have almost unlimited amounts of examples today, whether it be acting as the Dreamer, the Lover or the Developer.  Maybe there have been times when parts of society have become 'post-Faustian', rejecting the ideas of development and forward thrusting Modernism, but these seem small in comparison to the overall grand project of the modern world and its rapid change.  Even 'post-Faustian' things seem to be a development, a phase, of the overall Faustian project.

History & Theory #5: Ginsberg 'Howl' and Burrough's 'The Job'

Moloch from Metropolis (1927)

Fuck the Man!

Let's just cut up these texts like Burroughs would do and get right down to punchy protest slogan...

Howl was literally just that - a howl of anguished frustration at the invisible strictures that society was placing on people in the US after the Second World War.  The freedoms that were integral to the idea of the US were being squeezed by ideas of what was normal and what was acceptable, restricting them.  Howl was at the cutting edge of the Beat generation and these guys were furiously frustrated and angry, howling at the Man, or worse the invisible Machine that society had become, gathering you up and spitting you out.  A lot of it came from the turmoil of the war - the new generation had had the veil lifted on what other humans were capable of.
Burroughs came later, after Watergate when the corruption could finally be seen to have reached the highest levels even of American society, and so with it cynicism, but the Machine was even more entrenched, and so had become better hidden, more pervasive.

After Lefebvre and all the rest, the spitting energy of Howl is exhilarating to read but even better to listen to.  Its polemical, and needed to be performed.  It is an unrelenting vomit of words poring out from Ginsberg who said afterwards that he thought it would never be made public, so felt totally unrestricted to write what he felt.  And that was the success of the piece, as it tuned perfectly with the times, as young people were looking for that unrestricted honesty and a break from the tightly bound up rules of society.  Ginsberg did a pretty good job of smashing most of those up.

At first he describes the new Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac and all his friends, amazing people, but trapped in a society that ostracised them for their sexuality, lifestyle, drug taking... none of which harmed others, but was seen as dangerously subversive in McCarthy's America.  In the middle section he talks about Moloch, as the society which devours everything and this goes back to that early black and white film Metropolis which brilliantly shows the Moloch as the God/Machine, devouring the working citizens of the underworld, while the free upper classes played around in pleasure gardens above.  This rings even more true in the horror following the discovery of all that happened with the Nazi holocaust.

Finally he talks about Carl Solomon and being 'with him in Rockland' - this is the final uplifting bit, and there is hope here, after the frustration and the horror.  Here they can plot revolution, even if its a weed-hazed kinda plot which will probably end in a game of pingpong at 4am.

What is brilliant about Howl though, is its lack of cynicism.  Ginsberg was discovering anger and frustration with the 'system', but he still had hope.  He thinks things can really change.  I'm re-reading Catch 22 again at the moment which was written just four years later.  By this time, the early 1960's, but writing about the Second World War, Heller's central theme is the implacable and impossibly paradoxical nature of this system.  He was saying that the you're not just going to get into conflict with the system if you try and do something different like Ginsberg, but that the system was rigged, and you're screwed whatever you do.

Burroughs seems cynical of the system to say the least, and it's not surprising, following the Watergate Scandal.  His criticism of society's structure goes much deeper, beyond the up-front rules and visible aspects of its structure, to saying that language itself is a tool used by the Man to limit and control people and hold them down.  Its a virus, harming us from our natural state.  Some of this maybe exaggerated, but the point holds and, a bit like Heller, he is resorting to mocking sarcasm, although a lot more bitter, while Ginsberg I think thought there was some hope for change.  And clearly, for the changes Ginsberg saw since Howl was written, he was right.  For Burroughs, I'm not sure he will have seen any resolution.... its probably got worse.

History & Theory #4: Lefebvre

Product / Work
Production
Labour
Commodification

and social space - something in between

Lefebvre didn't disappoint: I was expecting something incomprehensible from a 1970's French philosopher and that was pretty much what we got.  Grinding through the passages, paragraph by paragraph, I think I established some of the points he was making, but it was not until the fourth or fifth attack I finally breached through to his conclusion.  Those guys didn't like being succinct did they?  Did the publishers pay by the word?

Presumably some of what he has written has lost its power over time.  I think some of the struggle to comprehend the overall point he was trying to make is due to the time he goes to expand upon points which were probably revolutionary at the time, but are now fairly widely understood and accepted.  For instance, a large portion of the text goes into trying to convince the reader that the production of social space should not be purely understood through economic (Marxist and er... post-Marxist?) interpretations of "Production" ie too narrow a definition.  If that was the point he was trying to make, it seemed a fairly obvious one now, but possibly it was radically different from the prevailing view at the time of writing.  Having said that, maybe I think it is widely accepted now, but there is a lot of evidence to the contrary.  Isn't the world we live in increasingly produced and defined along economic lines?

He goes on to define the conception of a "work" and a "product", and to say that these two concepts are not so far apart as they must have seemed in the 1970's.  Again, I found this confusing, as for me there is a definite grey area between what is a work and a product, but maybe that wasn't understood to be the case in the 1970's.  I found myself repeatedly thinking "Well, DUH..." (a la Bart Simpson) at the conclusion of his long constructions to explain something. 

He uses the example of Venice to show how the unique set of circumstances could create Venice as a work, but then it must have been built also with the characteristics of a product (repetition, labour, capital etc).  His conclusion seems to be that the city is neither a product nor a work, but something more.  Again, I found myself thinking, "Yes, obviously," but maybe this was against the prevailing orthodoxy of the day?
Space is not abstract - it is a physical entity -  but our understanding of, our idenitification of it, has an abstract element.  A complex set of variables, including the material nature of the place, but also external factors such as the historical context (for instance with Venice's place in a Mediterranean trading web) blend together to form our understanding of the social space.  Because of the 'coming together' of these factors, including a temporal element, places such as Venice are unique, and are more closely associated with "works".  The situation that brought those variables together could never be repeated.  However, globalisation and the increasing spread of commodification of abstract ideas and space, as well as physical objects, is homogenizing these variables, so that space is becoming less differentiated, more repetitious and therefore, more of a 'product'.  This is a problem because it limits creativity and ingenuity.  As he suggests with the example of Tuscany, the new social space created by a combination of co-operative farming (workers with a vested interest), physical change (cypress trees) and increased overall wealth generated as a result, created the situation where artists could observe and speculate on this new situation, thereby 'discovering' perspective.  This suggests that differentiated space can be the source of social change and discovery.

One element of his text that I disagreed with though, was his definition and assumptions regarding nature.  It's a bit Rousseau-Noble-Savage sort of thing isn't it?  "Consider the rose" and all that... He says nature does not produce, that it creates simply, without any self-consciousness.  "To say 'natural' is to say spontaneous."  (He goes on to say that Nature is gradually drawing away from us, that 'anti-nature' is killing it off.)  I agree that globalisation and the increasingly 'networked' world is creating a place which has no true 'wild' - a big problem not just environmentally, but for our own psyche I think.  But I don't agree that there is such a clear delineation between 'natural' things and products, or works, made by man.  What about milk cows?  They are about as 'produced' as anything is possible to be, carefully managed and selected for generations to be walking milk factories, far from anything that would have roamed any pre-historic grassland.  But would you then call them unnatural?  This could be applied to many more complex areas of modern biology, but he was writing before genetics had really made these definitions so blurry.

There are many elements in the text, enough for now though I think, I'm off to my local zinc-topped bar for a Gauloise and a Pernod, and a rumination on the esoteric blah blah blah...

History & Theory #3: Terry Eagleton vs. the Vampires

Terry Eagleton, After Theory

I think a bullet-point list of statements may well have been an alternative way of presenting a lot of this work, so fast and furious were they flung out.  Trying to cover the what/why and wherefore of all Western contemporary thought in the first forty pages just creates a blur of opinion that you can't react to.  Your only choice is to go with the flow, assuming the statements are correct, because before you have had a chance to stop, assimilate and react you have already met another vast, swingeing statement in the next sentence.  Qualifying all the assumptions he makes would be an impossible task, unless you fancy taking a lot longer and a forensic line by line analysis of each and every field of study he refers to.

So, taking what he says with a pinch of salt... In the first chapter, he broadly sets out the idea that a great generation of thinkers has been and gone since the Second World War, and we are left with scrapping over the bones of what remains, but not thinking up anything new, apart from analysing Jack Nicholson's toe nail clippings.  While he doesn't exactly want to 'live in interesting times', he recognizes that the turbulent times through the 1940's, feeding into the socially climatic '50's and '60's, caused a revolution in the way we look at the world and deal with one another.  Maybe, he thinks, a new generation of 'gurus' will appear to create a new wave of thinking, but its pretty clear that he thinks the big stuff has all been covered, and he hungers for the old clarity of modernist truth and linear cause and effect - although he can be pretty disparaging about people who pretend to practice them today ie. politicians and corporate execs.  He reserves his most vitriolic statements for the characteristics of post modernism.

As the 'big' ideas of modernist theory gave way to post-modernism, coupling with rampant capitalism, he see the loss of power of broad social movements and the creation of a world where it is required to attempt to be an individual, but it is impossible to do so.  In striving to move away from a collective identity, we lose the power of group support and so become marginalised, voluntarily.  I do agree with that, and I think the examples of such are everywhere - from the big, serious aspects such as a lack of cohesive labour power to defend adequate pay to the current geek fashion - big 1970's NHS specs couldn't be more in vogue.  (En vogue?)  No American TV or film represents the middle class successful football jock as the good guy - its not John Wayne who's the hero anymore.  It is aspirational to be the quirky outsider.  Take the Twilight vampire thing as your perfect example - teenage angst writ large against the whole of society.

That might really start to annoy Eagleton actually... an essay entitled "After Theory and its contemporary relevance to vampirism".

I'm running out of steam - from a barrage of statements about the cause and effect of post-colonial nationalism on Marxist theory, the impact of Derrida, the rise of neo-ethnicity versus capitalism... blah blah, the validity of which I struggle to verify, I agree with his gist of what he is saying.  And yet, I struggle to find a conclusion.  He has presented a view on past events, a perspective I tend to agree with.  "We have achieved affluence without fulfilment".  But where do we go from this?

I have been trying to boil down all the content to one or two questions, and (I think) I remain unsatisfied as to this:  What can we draw from the conclusion that this period of High Theory is over?  Have these theories had the impact that he praises them so highly for?  If they have, is the world such a good place now?  If they haven't, what has stopped them from having the impact that he thinks they should have had?  And if they haven't had such a big impact, are they all that important in the end anyway?

Confusion reigns supreme (for me, anyway) - I feel my education has let me down in understanding what he wrote.  I have never come across the theory he is talking about.  Is that my fault or the system?  Am I a coke snorter or a oboe listener?

Coincidence?

See the photo from the previous post... taken from the heart of the evil empire apparently.

Tech: 3D printing possibilities

the 'democratization of vice' apparently... print-maggeddon.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenkotler/2012/07/31/the-democratization-of-vice-the-impact-of-exponential-technology-on-illicit-trades-and-organized-crime/


print yourself a handgun

http://haveblue.org/?p=1321


print yourself a new species

http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-chemputer-that-could-print-out-any-drug?utm_source=KurzweilAI+Weekly+Newsletter&utm_campaign=b60382892c-UA-946742-1&utm_medium=email

ubiquitous TED talk on it all

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E97Kgi0sR4&feature=player_embedded

History & Theory #2: Hickey & Davis

 Dave Hickey, "At Home in the Neon" from Air Guitar and Mike Davis, "Fear & Money in Dubai" from Evil Paradises.

The Burj going up in 2007, from the hotel room.  

With the Dubai exchange in the bottom of the picture above

I don't agree with everything Dave Hickey writes about Vegas, but I'd definitely be willing to kick back on his porch and talk it out over a beer.  He writes with such a down to earth friendly affection for the place that it is hard at points to disassociate the childhood memories from the social theory he is gently rolling out.  Davis though, I can just see him furiously stalking the airport as he waits for  the first plane outta there, glaring angrily at all the happy shoppers lashing out their petro-dollars on Hermes and Mont Blanc.  He would find Jebel Ali International hell on earth.  I don't think anything he could've found in Dubai would have altered the preconceived notions he already had about the place.  I don't really want to have a beer with him.

This isn't going to be a direct comparison about the two chapters, they're too different.  They have loose juxtaposing threads of ideas, but the main body of each text too wide to try and pin down too hard.

Vegas can romantically be seen as the epitome of the American dream - you could be a lucky sonuvabitch and hit the jack pot, going from a down and out roady musician to a highroller, a place where anything is possible, somewhere to strike gold.  The architecture isn't the only thing that is Disney about the place - its the story after the story, the silhouettes walking into the sunset, happy ever after.  Its the potential for the Cindarella ending, the ultimate draw of rags to riches chance.  The city is a built on the possibility of a fairytale - that's why people like to see all the crazy buildings.  They desperately want it to be real, but its just a pipedream that lasts as long as the weekend.

Unless you live there like Hickey - he's found all this... hope... intoxicating, I think.  A bit of rose-tinted spectacles from his childhood maybe, but who can blame him, writing in the bland Clinton mid nineties?  Look at the rest of America at that time.  Nirvana didn't come out of nowhere, they were just saying how desperately fucking boring everything was.  So bored, lets just kill ourselves.

But not in Vegas, baby.  In Vegas, there is a chance something might change.

Which is the opposite of Dubai.  Dubai isn't about chance, and it isn't about making it big - or losing it all. Dubai is about getting there, and being big already.   And then showing everyone that you are the richest guy in the room.  The problem with Evil Paradises, is that Davis just can't accept the human element.  His righteous anger against the profligate tourists who flock in for this hyper-real superficial world, just makes me think of the mad old man outside the station, foaming at the mouth and screaming, "the end is nigh!" as everyone rushes passed having a good time.  He isn't wrong  though, its just that he writes like he expects moral indignation and principles to define how people act - he sounds a bit naive.  He just can't relate to how these people are so fascinated by shopping and showing off their status.  He can't really believe people are ACTUALLY like that.  He mentions that soon there will be 15 million people visiting Dubai as tourists per year... with the intention of making you think "Isn't it disgraceful!" but what you actually conclude is, "Well, 15 million people can't be wrong" (although they probably are).  I don't agree it's what people should do, but clearly, it is what an awful lot of people WANT to do.  There's no accounting for taste.  For people's habits, and their motivations, he should stay quiet - the way he writes exposes his own prejudices about consumption in the face of overwhelming counter evidence.

However, where Davis is most compelling is where he describes the segregation between the imported working labour and the locals, or the service industry expat community.

I went there a few years ago, for some random business jaunt.  I am told it is ridiculously hot - I couldn't tell you though, as I didn't step outside the chilling envelope of the air conditioning the whole time I was there.  From airport to limo to hotel to office and back and forth for three days - everything was controlled and monitored so I didn't have a moments discomfort from the pounding heat outside.  Yellow air heavy with sand.  On the way back to the airport, sitting stationary in 5 lanes of traffic ("you're not stuck in traffic, you ARE traffic"), I watched two Indian guys working on the road, in standard issue heavy boiler suits (stripped to the waist, against the workers regulations which control how they appear when you DO see them), wearing unregulated T-shirts wrapped around their heads to protect them from the sun.  Until that moment, EVERY single thing I had seen had been sheet-glass-hi-tech-computer-controlled-luxury.  These guys were digging up the road with one pickaxe between them.  The readout of the temperature in my limo said 51C.  A sense of the strictest hierarchy pervades the whole place, and you are reminded everywhere, even by the air temperature.

Walk to the office?  Fuck that, lets take the limo.

Its like my definition of whether you're a northerner or a southerner in England (do you think Bovril is a spread or a drink?)... in Dubai, if you don't have air con you are fucked.  If you do, life is pretty great.  Air con is the broadest class indicator, and then they continue exponentially on upwards.

Dubai is all about class, exclusivity and money.  Vegas is the same, but recognises the ultimate levelling factor of chance.  You can be small and make it big or, just as importantly, you can be big and lose it all.  Losing it all isn't what Dubai is about - they only know how to deal with the winners, and the winners are guys who have money, already. The feudal societies of the Emirates and Saudi Arabia that have bankrolled the place are more than happy with that status quo - lets not just gamble it all away, eh?

History & Theory #1: Zaha & Badiou

This has taken some mulling over.  Looking at two articles, one from Badiou's Communist Hypothesis, a chapter entitled 'This Crisis is the Spectacle; Where is the Real?' and an Intelligent Life interview by Jonathan Meades, with Zaha Hadid from 2008 (http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/zaha-hadid)

These two pieces are not directly comparative.  The interview with Zaha is loosely about her work, her methods and her position within the architectural community, while Badiou's chapter concerns itself with who is really bearing the brunt of the financial crisis and how politics needs to reset itself to the grass roots level; but they both shine a light on how the two people view the world in broader terms and how it functions.  As Badiou says, where is the real?

I'll kick off with Badiou, the old Marxist.  Gasp.  (Marxism?? Isn't that dead and buried?)

Or is he a Maoist?  I don't know enough about the finer points of the doctrine to decipher, but the final paragraph of his chapter essentially refers to grass roots organisation and mobilisation outside the established centres of power... something that Che and Mao would definitely have approved of to win their wars.

Either way, it is impossible for me to read Badiou and not be washed over by a flood of competing sensations.  Growing up in the 80's, in commuter-belt Surrey, being a Marxist wasn't something one did, and anyway, we all saw that side lose when the Wall came down didn't we?  Marx was like the Emperor, and the Reagan/Thatcher's Luke & Leia Star Wars programme was definitely the side to be on.  If I was ever going to be a Marxist, the primary reason would have been to piss of my Dad.

Badiou is the one in the paper

Dissembling all these associations is difficult, but I'll try.  Badiou's premise is that the world is essentially fairly simple.  There is US, and THEM.  This is really going back to the old Marxist definitions of capitalists and the proles, the haves and the have-nots.  He basically says that we should disregard all the spectacle, cut through the shit, and get down to the nitty-gritty of what life is like for the mass of disenfranchised poor.  "They" have pulled the wool over our eyes for a long time and use various crises to distract us from the fundamental poverty inwhich we find ourselves.  (I'm speaking as one of 'us', when to be honest, I'm probably more of one of 'them'.)  They need to be 'up against the wall, motherfucker' so that we can get back to the 'real' job of making everyone's life more fair, more just and more on a flat level.  Equality, and the communist spirit.  Unambiguous, plain, and direct.  Cause and effect.

I think this is far to simple as a premise and ignores the very "real" that he is looking to return to.  The world is not black and white, there are infinite shades inbetween.  The biggest investors in the stock markets, the speculation that Badiou dislikes so much, are the pension funds for ordinary working people.  'Workers' can be 'bosses' at the same time.  Maybe there are an increasingly small number of very rich people, but there are also millions and millions of people who have vested interests in those rich people's companies, and WANT to see them make profits.  The world is not divided into the actors and audience as Badiou suggests, it is a massive net of complex interests and interractions.

Thats a sentiment that I think Zaha would approve of...

I don't think Zaha fits neatly into the opposite slot... a 'Capitalist' sounds far too archaic a term for her.  For Zaha, the world is complex and ambiguous.  Her language in the interview is completely obscure, a deliberate vagueness for a variety of reasons.  Ambiguity is important in modern art.  Without it, you couldn't sell anything.  There is a certain sense of the Emperor's new clothes about a lot of modern art and the value that is thereby attached to it - if you don't get it, you must be stupid, or uncultured, or worse, old.  If you define it, you diminish its value, because it loses it exclusivity.

art or brand?

So without trying to bring on images of dark Satanic mills and stove pipe hats, Zaha functions as a supreme capitalist entity, gliding around the globe selling designs everywhere.  Without principle, capitalism becomes "frictionless", so don't hamper your business by boxing it in, saying what it means.  You will only lose clients.  And this is another reason for the ambiguity.  Where you are dealing with vastly differing ideologies (China/Taiwan economically or the Gulf states/northern Europe in terms of permissive liberality) how do you avoid being put on a 'side'.  You obfuscate. You have to be vague.  It allows the client to put on whatever meaning they like to the project, and you can move on and sell elsewhere, to the enemy, if you like.

"They still talk about contextual. Ha!" She dismisses consideration of context as 'sops to popularism'.  Its easy to simply look at this viewpoint purely architecturally - the image of the powerful all knowing artist/architect is an attractive one to the architectural community.  It flatters us, and it allows her to fit a sleek spaceship into a suburban neighbourhood.  But it disguises a potential lack of principle.  'Context' doesn't have to just be the local colour of the bricks.  It could be the political record of the local government, lack of rights for the inhabitants displaced by the project, or whose money the client is actually spending... (see the now bankrupt Spanish regional governments whose billions have all been wasted on new museums and airports without planes).  I'm not saying Zaha does all these things, but the concept that 'context' doesn't matter directly leads to these things.

Zizek (apologies for the missed accents on his name) writes a brilliant chapter in his book Living in the End of Times called 'Architectural Parallax'.  The parallax part is relevant to this discussion, as he talks about a triad of the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary.  One would think that Badiou would favour the Real, while Zaha would leave it up to you to decide on the Symbolic (as long as the invoices get paid.)   I won't get into that, but it could be a further thread.

He (Zizek) goes on to talk about a strata of Russian society "the new Russian capitalist elite which sees itself as ideologically indifferent, "apolitical", caring only about money and success, despising all great Causes... all ideologies are equal, equally ridiculous..."

---------

A direct, linear, cause and effect view of the world is seems old fashioned.  It makes things black and white, and open to a lack of adaptability.  But it allows for principles.
An ambiguous, net-work, flexible system allows for great success, and adaption - equals survival, but where nothing is fixed, you can have no definite principles, and the rights of the individual are lost.  This way is evolution, and it is red in tooth and claw.

Architecture Post Grad Week 1 - A little light reading

BBC's Marxism / relevance to the contemporary world documentary

After yesterday's discussion on Badiou and Zaha, and the ability of TV programmes to maintain a decent level of conversation with its audience, this seemed fairly relevant

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01n6z4s/Masters_of_Money_Marx/