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.
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.
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.
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.
