Animism / Sternberg Press
Spurious / Lars Iyer
Leaving Atocha Station / Ben Lerner
On Intelligence / Jeff Hawkins
The Prince and the Wolf: Latour and Harman at the LSE / Zero Books
The Unlimited Dream Company / JG Ballard
Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy / Manuel De Landa
The Ecological Thought / Timothy Morton
Diffusion Studies / Line & dot works from early 2011.
11 Fictions Are, new graphical works based on digital renders of contemporary architectural projects.
H & I gifted each other fiction this Summer. Brian Dillon's Sanctuary (Sternberg Press, 2011) is a short novel of sculpted prose which details the evolving ruin of a modernist building through the research of an architectural historian and his scotoma afflicted lover. There are overlaps, as much in sensibility, formal execution, as in subject, with the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet, George Oppen, Andrei Tarkovsky or Patrick Keiller. Dillon's uncompromising materialism, his observational faculty and precision of language, proves an antidote to the gratuitous ruinporn that's been spreading of late. A work that takes the better part of two pages to detail the chemical and physical processes undermining the structural integrity of aging béton brut is a work I'm ready to engage with.
Questions of preservation and ruin remained on my mind as, whilst reading the novel, I kipped a night at Le Corbusier's Unite d'Habitation in Marseille, a building which will soon be pending tentative listing, along with many of Corb's works in Chandigarh, for UNESCO World Heritage status [1][2]; as sure a sign as any that modernism is on the brink of achieving a historicity its exponents, were they alive, would likely feel uncomfortable with.
On the third floor of the building I found the (still functioning) postbox of L'Esprit Nouveau itself, and photographed it [1]. I took this photo as OMA embarked on a CRONOCAOS Preservation tour, a critical account of the "climax of preservation". The exhibition states,
Preservation and modernity are not opposites. Preservation was 'invented' as part of a groundswell of innovation between the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution in England. In a maelstrom of change, it is crucial to decide what will stay the same...
Rem talks of "an incredible increase in nostalgia and decrease in memory... [as] the field in which preservation currently takes place".
Modernism is engaged in this ironic cultural endgame, finding itself preserved — mummified to meet the needs of global tourism. A betrayal of l'esprit nouveau, whose attitude, after all, could be distilled down to the ethic of beginning anew, an ethic of erasure, rupture, of discontinuity. The spirit of modernity itself.
It's this spirit we find ironically assimilated into yet another legislated nostalgia. Shorn of all social content by powerful heritage industries, permitted to endure as aesthetic artefact, emptied of its unifying vision but retaining the powerful circus pull, grotesque and exotic, of the magnificently failed project, its legacy restrained to its formal - standardisation, glass façades, béton brut - rather than social content.
And yet, I can't help but feel there's more to our resurgent fascination with architectural modernism, be it through the touring exhibitions, recent publication and exhaustive documentation of early Soviet projects (photographed by Richard Pare, amongst others), or a reclaiming of its militant political ground. The binding theme driving this renewed interest is for me to be found in our new forms of networked publics, the resuscitation of the public, perhaps an esprit nouveau of our own, of which more in a future post.
The legacy 'crisis' facing these buildings stems, of course, from the fact that modernist architecture was in ideological ruin long before its material degradation was complete. The dynamism of late capitalism out-manouvered the static concrete, fixed relations in space designed and built, in some instances successfully, to last hundreds of years.
It's to this contemporary condition of modernist architecture that Dillon's novel speaks, detailing the parallel evolution of that architecture not deemed worthy of preservation, as it succumbs to neglect, decay, structural degradation, collapse and eventual ruin.
The poetry, as always, is in the material.
"Conspiracy, one is tempted to say, is the poor person's cognitive mapping in the postmodern age; it is the degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter's system, whose failure is marked by its slippage into sheer theme and content."
- Fredric Jameson, Cognitive Mapping
Adam Curtis begins talking about networks and self-organisation in the second episode of Machines Of Loving Grace [ep1] [ep2], and his claims range from muddled to misinformed and at worst misleading. It's become painful to watch him cherry-pick events and paradigms from different social periods in history, while linking his dubious trajectories with fascinating archive footage.
Take one example: He offers experimental west coast communities of the late sixties as proof that self-organising networks are not an apt model for human society, because they can't deal with the emergence of power. He claims that this vision had flawed egalitarian aims (true). He extrapolates this conclusion to recent global uprisings, effectively saying that all self-organising movements are doomed to failure, because, you know, humans like power, and our belief in self-organising systems is based on misplaced notions of equilibrium (false since about 1970). An equilibrium which we mistakenly believe in as the result of a gross simplification of nature enshrined in computer models (false since about 1970).
Modern science does not tell us that self-organising systems are about steady state equilibrium. It tells us the opposite: that they are complex, and that these complex systems have many (fragile) stable states which break down into chaos easily. He seems to be in denial about the fact that cybernetics was superseded by complexity as a paradigm for understanding non-linear dynamics in the 70s. We can see this in the body of discourse, which the machine will now illustrate for us:
The intersection of complexity and cybernetics in the 70s reflects the discourse, which affected economics, ecology, and the social sciences. That's 40 years ago, long before any of the uprisings he talks about and at about the time of the experimental communities he depicts. Clearly, economic theory was no longer concerned with steady state solutions by the Clinton era (Episode 1).
In fact, as early as 1925 ecology had begun to explore the fragility of equilibria (Lotka-Volterra's logistic population equations, which break down into multi-stable states through bifurcations at certain points in the parameter space), whilst my own colleagues (Wilson, Batty) were already looking at complexity in human society by the late 70s.
So we know very well that self-organising networks in human society are not a means of creating equality or a steady state stability. Even a cursory understanding of a self-organised network like the web (Barabasi) will show you that node degree distributions fall into power laws, with small numbers of powerful hubs and long tails of less influential nodes. But basing a social critique of self-organisation on this is flawed for anyone but a die-hard Marxist (who believes in an egalitarian society) or an early systems theorist (who believes in a stable society). This does not discredit self-organisation as a way of say, creating a participatory democracy, or creating a global information network, because these projects are not explicitly about creating equality or stability, they are about making society inclusive, making information accessible, and connecting people. These are laudable social goals for a complex age. These projects have an implied emergent order to them, a complex order, not 'stable' in any naive meaning of the term.
What Adam in his retronautical trajectories hasn't grasped is that we are living in an age of complexity, not a failed cybernetic society. It is an 'age' of complexity because we are beginning to digest the paradigm into our popular consciousness, including our social structures. Few people have developed a good critique of complexity (Castells might be trying, figures like Luhmann and more recently De Landa have produced some of the theory), whereas a critique of early systems theory is just far too easy. The social sciences demolished it in the 80s. By contrast, his attack on self-organisation fails because he has no convincing body of social theory to fall back on. Self-organisation is a feature of our complex age, not of a bygone cybernetic utopia. I wonder if he will deal with this in his concluding episode.
In his latest cognitive mapping exercise, Curtis comes across as everything Jameson feared, his map appears to be out to debunk anything that isn't true Marxism as 'unrevolutionary', and quickly descends into either conspiracy or pastiche. Machines are generally cast as a controlling force acting on humanity in ways we can't affect, as we are mere nodes (the tired, reductive discourse of techno-determinism), so it follows that techno-utopians aren't proper revolutionaries. He's then peppered this with some David Harvey lite.
Ultimately the work's distinctive aesthetic (typography, soundtrack, editing) triumphs over its attempts at a coherent argument, confirmation of its "slippage into sheer theme".
Everywhere, the world is divided into these two opposed poles: tool and broken tool, invisible action and obtrusive presence... This does not hold true only for those relatively rare cases in which objects literally "break". For Heidegger, the same reversal is found wherever objects are perceived, revealed by theoretical investigation, or simply located in a specific region of space. In each of these cases, he says, the veiled reality of equipment-in-action is torn loose from the all-devouring system of the world, and set on display "as" what it is.But the very term "tool" can be seriously misleading. For it has led most interpreters to suppose that Heidegger is talking about one limited kind of object among others: as if the analysis held good only of hammers, drills, keys, and windows, and not for other objects with a less utilitarian status. But in fact equipment in Heidegger's sense is global; beings are tool-beings. To refer to an object as a "tool-being" is not to say that it is brutally exploited as means to an end, but only that it is torn apart by the universal duel between the silent execution of an object's reality and the glistening aura of its tangible surface. In short, the tool isn't "used"; it is. What saves the bridge from being a mere pile of iron and asphalt is not the fact that people find it convenient, but the fact that any pile of anything exerts some sort of reality in the cosmos, altering the landscape of being in some distinct way. If this reality happens to be useful for people, so much the better. But natural mountain passes and other obstacles have no less equipmentality than an artificial tunnel.
Withdrawing into its cryptic efficacy, equipment neccessarily remains to a large degree a mystery, hidden from the crusading theorist and the tinkering civil engineer to an equal degree. Tool-being cannot be clarified by human-praxis, which always relies upon it or is embedded in it. The key to tool-analysis is not that it undermines the notion of solid Newtonian blocks with a people-centered analysis of plans and projections. The key is that it shows us that descriptions of the object as solid material and descriptions of it as functionally useful are derivative. More fundamental than both of these is the inscrutable empire of equipment from which all individual beings emerge. This empire is loaded with surprises.
Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism, p 97-98, Zero Books.
The cosmos, such as the Greeks conceived it, was the totality of being imagined under the form of a great, perfectly symmetrical bubble. Aristotle and his followers were responsible for this idea of a cosmos composed of concentric, celestial spheres of increasing diameters, the majority consisted of a hypothetical material they called ether. For us, this model of the world is obviously no longer operational.Microspherology begins as a theory of shared, animated space, and speaks of how reciprocal possession creates the bipolar and multipolar space known as the couple (or the primary group). Bubbles, the first volume of Spheres, is thus a general theory of the structures that allow couplings.
The "atmosphere" that envelops the ball we inhabit is the only cosmic sphere spoken of by the Ancients that has preserved a certain meaning for the moderns. The term (literally: "fog ball") designates this gaseous layer...
It was necessary to re-tell the whole story of our fundamentally changed relation to this atmospheric envelope.
Sloterdijk, Peter., Foreword to a Theory of Spheres.
Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness. It is that modernized, unhappy consciousness, on which enlightenment has labored both successfully and in vain. It has learned its lessons in enlightenment, but it has not, and probably was not able to, put them into practice. Well-off and miserable at the same time, this consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology; its falseness is already reflexively buffered."Enlightened false consciousness:" To choose such a formulation seems to be a blow against the tradition of enlightenment. The sentence itself is cynicism in a crystalline state.... Logically, it is a paradox, for how could enlightened consciousness still be false? ....
To act against better knowledge is today the global situation in the superstructure; it knows itself to be without illusions and yet to have been dragged down by the "power of things." Thus what is regarded in logic as a paradox and in literature as a joke appears in reality as the actual state of affairs. Thus emerges a new attitude of consciousness toward "objectivity."
Sloterdijk, Peter., Critique of Cynical Reason, translation by Michael Eldred; foreword by Andreas Huyssen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 5-6. (Theory and History of Literature; v. 40) Original: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft, 1983.
I'm finally picking up some Sloterdijk in English, courtesy of Semiotext(e); Neither Sun nor Death. While we wait for Spheres, there's also interviews in Frieze & Bookforum, and this article from Latour in E-Flux.
Stephan Tillmans' cathode rays.
The full, profusely illustrated transcript of my talk at Cognitive Cities in Berlin is now online. It's called The Living City, and includes a range of urban visualisations I've produced over the last year. One of the most welcome aspects of research life has been the time afforded to work on such speculative projects.
It was a diverse conference, opening with a thought-provoking and measured keynote from Adam Greenfield of Urbanscale on the politics of public networked objects, and ending with a gothic account of ghost hunters, RFID orbs and urban electro-magnetic fields from Warren Ellis.
Neukölln was good to me. Visits to Brunnenstraße 9, which was showing Barbara Hammer works, and DAM, which has a superb collection of early computer art (viewable by appointment), topped it off.
Thanks to Third Wave et al for putting the event together.
One morning I woke early to wander Berlin's Tempelhof airport, now re-opened as a municipal park. It was cold, about -3°C. I came by the section facing the district of Neukölln, my home for the duration of my stay. The airport's infrastructure spilt out into the surrounding city parks and cemeteries there.
Recycled infrastructure. Recycled not from an airport but from a wound, perhaps, and into a void. Tempelhof is an expansive void, surrounded on all sides by districts of Berlin. Inside its vast perimeter, the occasional jogger tackles the psychological effect that is an open horizon.
Few public urban spaces are so large and contiguous as to be practically indigestible in a single view. I paused to consider this, thinking it might be a luxury Berliners take for granted. Perhaps, I thought, we could import a salt flat to Central London.
Implant it.
I watched two mothers with prams urging their children to venture out to play on the runway. It was otherwise strangely quiet. Only the sparse, intermittent sound of birds.
Marius Watz's arc drawings, printed by Studio Mode using a CNC plotter.
More from Marius over at Code & Form.
A man who wants the truth becomes a scientist; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity will become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
Image: Aggregation study 4 / Andy Lomas
The year that was: the social life of cities, curating an international sonic art exhibition, urban flowprints, graphical phenomes, reaction-diffusion supersurfaces, and an incumbent thesis.
Some words impressed. Schild's Ladder, Naive Set Theory, Desert Islands, In The Labyrinth, Number and Numbers and Sync.
Some sounds recurred. Multistability, Splazsh and Last American Hero.
Wishing you unstable aggregations, strange loops, novel niches, emergent constellations and above all, precious singularities, in the new year.
Title: Mayakovsky et al [full].
