Given her investment in thinking about options for sustaining lives that confront the obstacles of an unpropitious present … (Berlant and Edelman, 2014)
Document080924-page007 or thinking about options for sustaining lives
Tag: scribus
Learning from Las Vegas
Fifty Years of “Learning from Las Vegas” by Christopher Hawthorne. New Yorker, January 27, 2023.
The cool appraisal of Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi’s revolutionary book has a lot to inspire the architects of today.
Most architecture students over the years have read the shorter second edition of the book, a paperback published in 1977, but the 1972 large-format hardcover version is the livelier and more revealing document, if also the more contentious editorial product. It is divided into three parts. The first largely reproduces the Architectural Forum essay and includes a close study of the Strip’s architecture, signage, and street furniture. The second provides an analysis of how trends visible in Las Vegas relate to larger developments in architecture and urbanism. This section is anchored by a tribute to “ugly and ordinary” architecture, including a now famous distinction between buildings that are “ducks,” which is to say, commercial structures that take the shape of what they’re selling—a Mexican-food shop in Los Angeles resembling a giant tamale, for example—and those that are “decorated sheds,” or expediently made buildings that gain energy from signage and ornament. In short, the duck is a symbol; the decorated shed applies symbols to a more conventional architectural frame.
[…]
twenty-first-century readers tempted to brush off “Learning from Las Vegas” as a neutral travelogue risk missing the real power of its analysis—and the ways in which its approach might make today’s architecture of activism and political urgency sharper and more effective. We forget it now, perhaps because the effort was so entirely successful, but the book’s larger goals went far beyond understanding the quickly growing cities of the American West. Scott Brown and Venturi also wanted to accelerate a changing of the guard in architecture. In that sense, the smoke screen of non-judgment allowed them to plausibly claim a kind of “Who, me?” innocence as they worked to make room for their own generation to start running things.
After all, their frustration wasn’t with the revolutionary nature of the modernist project so much as with how it had grown stagnant and pleased with itself. As they write in the acknowledgments of “Learning from Las Vegas,” “Since we have criticized Modern architecture, it is proper here to state our intensive admiration of its early period when its founders, sensitive to their own times, proclaimed the right revolution. Our argument lies mainly with the irrelevant and distorted prolongation of that old revolution today.”
Document080924-page007 or lucid overlay
L’imaginaire de mon lieu … [naturally] dans le grand camouflage.
[Suzanne] Césaire in “Le grand camouflage” reads the Caribbean as interconnected space rather than as a series of discrete islands. Blurring both spatial and temporal boundaries, her authorial voice situates itself simultaneously in Haiti, Martinique, and Puerto Rico. “Le grand camouflage” is best characterized in Césaire’s own words as “le grand jeu de cache-cache,” a text that almost playfully weaves between veiling and revealing the geography, history, and social reality of race relations in the Antilles. Césaire deftly juggles the images of lucidity and what Keith Walker, in his introduction to the English translation of her collected works, describes as “the wilful blindness . . . the work it takes not to see.” It is in “Le grand camouflage” that Césaire finally fully takes on the role of the seer, that quality of the poet as voyant that she had until now only admired in others.
Beyond the Great Camouflage: Haiti in Suzanne Césaire’s Politics and Poetics of Liberation
Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel, Small Axe July 2016.
Labor makes things useful
Both production and circulation are essential to capitalism: as Marx puts it, “Circulation is just as necessary as is production itself.”
[…]
Production is the “hidden abode” of value, the often-invisible employment relation in which labor receives a wage in exchange for pouring its power into the making of commodities; circulation is the unhidden, manifest abode of value, the exchange sphere where “an immense collection of commodities” emanates value.Labor makes things useful, while exchange and its hypostasis in the concept of value and the medium of money is the activity that generates value qua value. This is why, for Marx , value as such only becomes the ruling idea in a society of widespread commoditization. Barter economies have concepts of “need” and of “use,” while commodity economies, where production is undertaken for the purpose of exchange and accumulation, have concepts of “value.”
Immediacy, Anna Kornbluh
Kornbluh, in Parapraxis, on Freud’s death drive as not a program that can explain ecocidal climate change (Carbon capitalist autocracy, a highly specific and contingent mode of resource management and power monopoly, is the cause.), but speculative, creative, with “the will to create from zero, to begin again . . . to make a fresh start.” (Lacan) [It] persists,” in “the bourgeoning of creativity . . . [leading] beyond survival to something more life affirming.” (Mari Ruti)
To read: The Order of Forms (U Chicago, 2019)
In literary studies today, debates about the purpose of literary criticism and about the place of formalism within it continue to simmer across periods and approaches. Anna Kornbluh contributes to—and substantially shifts—that conversation in The Order of Forms by offering an exciting new category, political formalism, which she articulates through the co-emergence of aesthetic and mathematical formalisms in the nineteenth century. Within this framework, criticism can be understood as more affirmative and constructive, articulating commitments to aesthetic expression and social collectivity.
Kornbluh offers a powerful argument that political formalism, by valuing forms of sociability like the city and the state in and of themselves, provides a better understanding of literary form and its political possibilities than approaches that view form as a constraint. To make this argument, she takes up the case of literary realism, showing how novels by Dickens, Brontë, Hardy, and Carroll engage mathematical formalism as part of their political imagining. Realism, she shows, is best understood as an exercise in social modeling—more like formalist mathematics than social documentation. By modeling society, the realist novel focuses on what it considers the most elementary features of social relations and generates unique political insights. Proposing both this new theory of realism and the idea of political formalism, this inspired, eye-opening book will have far-reaching implications in literary studies.
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for us, to …
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Scribus 1.4.0
…released; I’ll be designing a few book/zine/print projects, this year. (wiki.scribus.net)