Support

Here's a Berlin event worth attending just on account of their baroque sense of piling on the metaphors. I use a lot of them myself. Why settle for two, when eight will do.

18. Februar 2010 - 20:30

Support Structures

Bookpresentation with Celine Condorelli

Support Structures is a manual for what bears, sustains, props, and holds up. It is a manual for those things that encourage, give comfort, approval, and solace; that care for and provide consolation and the necessities of life. It is a manual for that which assists corroborates, advocates, articulates, substantiates, champions, and endorses; for what stands behind, underpins, frames, presents, maintains, and strengthens. Support Structures is a manual for those things that give, in short, support. While the work of supporting might traditionally appear as subsequent, unessential, and lacking value in itself, this manual is an attempt to restore attention to one of the neglected, yet crucial modes through which we apprehend and shape the world.

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Lost Theory

What a joy to find a long overlooked theory article! I know everyone writes that theory is over, but every now and then that old rush returns when I pick up an unfamiliar masterpiece written decades ago.

I had spent years reading Foucault and after relying on him to structure my dissertation turned into first book, I thought a break was in order. That first book was so thoroughly defined by my allegiance to Foucault. "The hand of the master is little too obvious," one of my writing group buddies said back then. Ok so I over compensated, avoided Foucault just as I had avoided Adorno and Benjamin after graduate school.

And then that little essay, really just a bunch of lecture notes, "Of Other Spaces," brought back all the old happiness. After nine years sitting in the wilderness, what a pleasure to read that old style intense language where every paragraph spawns a book. No more rambling current events blogs, no more unconnected contextualisations—no a short burst of closely packed ideas, strung together as assertions, almost commandments to reflect upon and critique.

Sure, I knew the essay was out there, sure lots of people give a passing footnote to his heterotopias. But those footnotes were always so pro forma, so empty of specifics, just a nod in the direction of Paris that I never felt drawn to the essay, until yesterday in the mad panic to construct a syllabus.

Boom, now I am loaded with a whole new terminology, all my geographical/spatial mutterings have a kick, that once upon a time surge of walking around the neighborhood packing, even its just my own basement study.

To read a fine essay, even as lecture notes published posthumously, brings to mind how dull things have become since the theory heads sailed away across the ocean of eternity.

Forever Young

Hey, Hey, My, My
Critical Theory will never die

Another bunch of disaffected academics who claim that they are “beyond theory” set up camp sometime around the turn of the millennium, this time in architecture, but the gripe is aimed at the usual suspects: Frankfurt School Marxists and French Post-Structuralists.

For lack of a clever name, people call it “post-criticality.” Its basic desire consists in wanting to make art while engaging in commerce, to give up the idea that artists and intellectuals are hostile towards money-making institutions. The suggestion is that all the talk of alienation and critique is the fault of philosophers who have convinced regular artists that they should not like mainstream culture, i.e. the place where the money is.

You can read about this cluster of post-critical thinkers in the hippest architecture journals. Last Year Harvard Design Magazine had a piece by David Hickey, called “On Theory: ‘Post-Criticality and Death by Academics.” Hickey is considered cool because he dropped out of academia in the 60s but knows all the theories and writes in a low-key chatty style, like an old philosophy professor having a seminar on the back deck before getting a beer.

The smartest, and most frustrating, aspect of post-critical writing is that it refuses to sound smart. A lot of the time, these guys summarize theory debates with laconic one-liners, Walter Benjamin is just “dopey.” We are all supposed nod and smile.

There is something deliberately down home American about these simple statements. It is also a hip, insider way of talking. German Marxists are just so uptight. You need to have seen the right movies and then you get it.

In Perspecta, another cool journal, Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting explain the difference between Critical and Post-Critical Architecture as the difference between Robert De Niro and Robert Mitchum as actors. De Niro is all intense Method-acting, always showing off how much work goes into his character, while Mitchum is utterly laid back in his bad-boy occupation of a role.

Cool, it’s cool to be cool. This is Facebook Theory. Like the guys in grad school who always have a running joke about this band and that movie. When you see the band, hear the movie, you realize that they are pretty cool, you like them, too, but you wonder if there is more to it.

And the point of theory, of every philosopher since Socrates, is that there is always more to the picture than meets the eye.