Wednesday, 20 February 2013
High density Beirut
Saturday, 12 January 2013
History & Theory #8: Ayn Rand 'The Fountainhead'
The Fountainhead seems to me to be a polemic on the evils of 'the collective' rather than a realistic statement of what Ayn Rand expected, or really wanted, from the individual. Despite saying that Roark's characteristics were truly what she aspired to, the real blood and guts and human empathy of the story comes from the characters who Rand sets up to be despised or feared - the weak, derivative Peter Keating and the evil, Machiavellian Ellsworth Toohey - although even they too become merely two dimensional ciphers at points.
Written during the war, and coming from an American-Russian writer, it is unsurprising that she should have a polarised view on the politics of what she termed 'collectivism'. The Fountainhead creates a platform for her mouthpiece, the architect Howard Roark, to explain Rand's philosophy in a climatic court scene. Roark, accused of being an egotist and a traitor to society because of his unwillingness to conform, successfully argues that the human spirit and its inquiring, creative mind cannot be subsumed to any collective will, and its creations will always be owned by its creator. Set in juxtaposition to the terrors of Nazi Germany and the corruption of Communist Russia, it is completely understandable why this was an incredibly popular sentiment at the time, and it chimes in very nicely with the the American idyll of the independent man, free to own, roam and do as he will on the frontier. The complete individualism that Rand champions seems to work better in some nostalgic vision of the pioneer past, than it would in actuality in the present, urban world.
The two very distinct positions set out in the book (Roark/individuality/freedom/integrity/striving for the best vs. Toohey/collective/compromising/enslavement/meekness) leave the reader / viewer with no choice but to agree with Roark's closing statement - who in their right mind would choose Toohey's debasing mob-minded enslavement to collective will? But the book entirely fails to answer what might happen should men of Roark's extraordinary will to power succeed in exercising their full range of abilities, and if they weren't so terribly nicely balanced as Mr. Roark. It also fails to answer where this 'Truth' that drives Roark comes from - at the beginning he has not even studied architecture, and yet he knows what a building wants to be, how to build it. What if the person was mistaken? What if this perfect idea he is so convinced by, that the masses don't like, really IS crap?
Rand basically skips this by making the character of Roark completely unconcerned with anyone else opinion or needs and always inherently RIGHT - he is completely selfserving, an egotist as he proudly says. When Toohey begs for some recognition, even in terms of an insult, Roark replies, "but I don't think of you." For Rand, following on from Nietzsche, these talented individuals, ubermensch, who would be completely self-interested, would create things for their own needs and as a by-product of the good they do themselves, the rest of society would benefit, but it would not be done FOR society - that was enslavement. This idea of Rand's relies on the talents of the individuals concerned to be in some productive areas - Roark loves to build, to make, so he does, and it is just lucky for the people who live in his buildings that he happens to have designed them. Rand's philosophy here relies on these people always being in the right, and knowing the true course to follow.
What this fails to address is that not all people are so talented, nor so well adjusted. In a society that glorifies the talented individual, what happens to the people who exhibit talents in areas such as charismatic manipulation for instance, like Hitler and Stalin? Rand feared the tyranny of the collective, the Nazis and the Communists, but her alternative was the rise of the totalitarian, the Hitlers and Stalins - two sides of the same coin.
Written during the war, and coming from an American-Russian writer, it is unsurprising that she should have a polarised view on the politics of what she termed 'collectivism'. The Fountainhead creates a platform for her mouthpiece, the architect Howard Roark, to explain Rand's philosophy in a climatic court scene. Roark, accused of being an egotist and a traitor to society because of his unwillingness to conform, successfully argues that the human spirit and its inquiring, creative mind cannot be subsumed to any collective will, and its creations will always be owned by its creator. Set in juxtaposition to the terrors of Nazi Germany and the corruption of Communist Russia, it is completely understandable why this was an incredibly popular sentiment at the time, and it chimes in very nicely with the the American idyll of the independent man, free to own, roam and do as he will on the frontier. The complete individualism that Rand champions seems to work better in some nostalgic vision of the pioneer past, than it would in actuality in the present, urban world.
The two very distinct positions set out in the book (Roark/individuality/freedom/integrity/striving for the best vs. Toohey/collective/compromising/enslavement/meekness) leave the reader / viewer with no choice but to agree with Roark's closing statement - who in their right mind would choose Toohey's debasing mob-minded enslavement to collective will? But the book entirely fails to answer what might happen should men of Roark's extraordinary will to power succeed in exercising their full range of abilities, and if they weren't so terribly nicely balanced as Mr. Roark. It also fails to answer where this 'Truth' that drives Roark comes from - at the beginning he has not even studied architecture, and yet he knows what a building wants to be, how to build it. What if the person was mistaken? What if this perfect idea he is so convinced by, that the masses don't like, really IS crap?
Rand basically skips this by making the character of Roark completely unconcerned with anyone else opinion or needs and always inherently RIGHT - he is completely selfserving, an egotist as he proudly says. When Toohey begs for some recognition, even in terms of an insult, Roark replies, "but I don't think of you." For Rand, following on from Nietzsche, these talented individuals, ubermensch, who would be completely self-interested, would create things for their own needs and as a by-product of the good they do themselves, the rest of society would benefit, but it would not be done FOR society - that was enslavement. This idea of Rand's relies on the talents of the individuals concerned to be in some productive areas - Roark loves to build, to make, so he does, and it is just lucky for the people who live in his buildings that he happens to have designed them. Rand's philosophy here relies on these people always being in the right, and knowing the true course to follow.
What this fails to address is that not all people are so talented, nor so well adjusted. In a society that glorifies the talented individual, what happens to the people who exhibit talents in areas such as charismatic manipulation for instance, like Hitler and Stalin? Rand feared the tyranny of the collective, the Nazis and the Communists, but her alternative was the rise of the totalitarian, the Hitlers and Stalins - two sides of the same coin.
Friday, 30 November 2012
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...
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.
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.
Wednesday, 7 November 2012
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.
Monday, 29 October 2012
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...
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...
Tuesday, 23 October 2012
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?
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?
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