MATERIAL MATTERS/Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies : STRANGE TOOLS AND THE CONDITION OF POSTMODERNITY

STRANGE TOOLS
ART and HUMAN NATURE
ALVA  NOE

THE CONDITION OF POSTMODERNITY

DAVID HARVEY

As David Harvey argues in his seminal Condition of Postmodernity, architecture becomes one of the aestheticised products by which global capitalism and political regimes express themselves. It is with this realisation that we must reverse the equation. Not space and time in architecture, but architecture in space and time, in an  concepts of the former acceptance of Harvey’s conclusion that ‘neither time or space can be assigned objective meanings independent of material processes, and that it is only through investigations of the latter that we can properly ground ourselves’.

ARCHITECTURE IN SPACE AND TIME

Jeremy Till | Collected Writings | Architecture in Space, Time 1996

There is a feeling of intimidation for the architect faced with a broad cultural landscape, and so an understandable reaction is to look for stable elements. In this way architecture, fixed and permanent, shrugs off the ephemeral and the present, and enters into dialogue with the deeper structures which may condition culture. The language of traditional anthropology (mythic, ritual, cosmic, symbolic) is used as a vehicle for architectural exploration, with the intent that architectural will engage with enduring and stable cultural factors. The architect here reverses the role of the anthropologist. Where the latter may investigate and describe social practices through their inscription in space and time, the architect describes temporal spaces in which to set those practices. There is an emphasis on architecture as a setting for ritual and as the embodiment of archetypal human situations, all constituted within cultural tradition. At its worst this approach reeks of conservative nostalgia, at its best it is a project of interpretative re-visioning of an active tradition in which to set human action. It is an architecture that is firmly rooted in space and time, but in very particular interpretations of them. The space is one of concrete representation, informed by the search for authentic meaning. The time is one which combines the cyclic movements of cosmology and nature with a backward-looking naturalisation of history, both characterised by the sense of reinterpreted repetition. The implication is that time and space should stand outside the contingent forces of the present, and that production must resist immanent distractions in an attempt to ground architecture in a more profound cultural horizon. It is this detachment that is both the real strength of this approach but also its weakness, because in looking for the truth it bypasses the real.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/

Collage/Abstraction/Assemblage/Beyond Discourse : Architectural Plan/ Library/Victorian Corset/Blueprint/Spatial Frame

Postmodernity is no more than 'modernity' without illusions

Zygmunt Bauman

We are less interested in whether we are living in a critical or post-critical era, because these terms circle round each other. Indeed, it is the fate of all 'post' terms (postmodern, post-critical, post-theoretical) that they never escape the hold of the condition that they would wish to succeed.

On Discourse

From a sociological point of view, discourse includes all that a particular category of agents say (or write) in a specific capacity and in a definable thematic area. Discourse commonly invites dialogue, but discourse is not open to everyone, but based on social appropriation and a principle of exclusion.

Beyond Discourse : Notes on Spatial Agency. Tatjana Schneider and Jeremy Till.

Blueprint, Photogram and Collage

Collage : Diversions/Contradictions/Anomalies

Collage and Architecture

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/

a thousand plateaus
Deleuze, Guattari

http://www.rhizomes.net/issue5/poke/glossary.html

Assemblage

The beauty of the assemblage is that, since it lacks organization, it can draw into its body any number of disparate elements. The book itself can be an assemblage, but its status as an assemblage does not prevent it from containing assemblages within itself or entering into new assemblages with readers, libraries, bonfires, bookstores, etc.


Becoming
Body Without Organs
Nomad
Rhizome
Smooth Space
State
War Machine

Camera Obscura : Reflections and the dark room.

The Library : A Meditation on the Human Condition (Giacometti, artist-philosopher)

Books can step up to us- into us- in many ways.
Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich was for me that rare precipitate force which calls another book into being.

Mario Petrucci, Heavy Water, a poem for Chernobyl.

Paths and Boundaries : Stonehenge

Postmodern : Ever Changing, Fleeting, Positive, Nihilistic,

"There are no simple concepts. Every concept has components and is defined by them.
It therefore has a combination [chiffre]. It is a multiplicity, although not every multiplicity
is conceptual...
Not only do Descartes, Hegel, and Feuerbach not begin
with the same concept,
they do not have the same concept of beginning...
Every concept has an irregular
contour defined by the sum of its components,
which is why,
from Plato to Bergson,
we find
the idea of the concept being a
matter of articulation,
of cutting and
cross-cutting.
The concept is a whole because it totalizes
its components, but it is
a fragmentary whole.
Only on this condition can it escape the
mental chaos
constantly threatening it, stalking it, trying to reabsorb it."


-- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, pp. 15-16.

Footnote

Critical Modernism, where is post-modernism going?
The Garden of  Cosmic Speculation
Charles Jencks