Summary 750

It’s as if one composes a puzzle, the connection among pieces is not visible but there is an internal connection through similar lines and intersections. A theory how it is formed and applied to political, economic and cultural spaces conveys meaning of things in their historical context, within the frames of the two major ideologies, capitalist and socialist. There are times when it seems that “the present is the place to be” however it’s at once a fact of experience and repetition. The central figure is an artist (maybe an architect from the movie) who constructs an architectural space (Zaha Hadid) or reconstructed mixed verbal spaces (William S. Burroughs) in order to break the system of control. Here also could be traced civil rights movements among them youth and women movements that continue their course, not only in the former Third World countries but also in Western countries. The bias exists against women, and the younger generation who “clearly felt no desire for action or achievement, power or change”, this may be true at any time though the young always find ways to create a culture of their own. Now they are constructing a virtual social-networking out of a classical social space that transcends its boundaries for creating parallel reality.

This is one way to create an alternative world. There are also questions about an art and the artist in the present political set-up; but do the artists need to change society in order to produce “a work” of art? Or is it our way of thinking that needs to be changed? “It was not just a question of producing new literature or philosophy, but of inventing a whole new way of writing (Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida), to construct a new type of human being who would not just refrain from violence and exploitation, but who would be physically and morally incapable of it”. This clearly was not a Faustian man and this is linked with the problems of our world, war, destruction, poverty, and with the responsibility of the individual. If art is considered not to be “good”, demonic powers could be summoned to transform reality. The city which is the outcome of repetition resembles Las Vegas, and the difference between them can be assessed in money. They are unlike the city of Venice “a space which is fashioned, shaped and invested by social activities” of its citizens.  

The crisis of economic, political and culture systems, ecological crisis, and the catastrophe which was felt long before: “a final period of decay of our Western world, the predicament is clear. We live on an overcrowded and pillaged planet, and we must stop the pillage or perish” (Bernanrd James, 1973), this remains the same and more disastrous. There is also the same space of culture in the sense of its abstract idea, in which we can construct our own spaces and theories.

After Theory

Terry Eagleton, After Theory - one of the achievements of cultural theory has been the investigation into the new themes of gender and sexuality, popular culture and a post-colonial reality. Post-colonial theory marked the end of the Third world revolutions and shifted its focus from the existing socialist Marxist theory to culture; “socialism proved least possible where it was most necessary”.

The discourse about ethnicity (which meant margins and minorities) implied that norms and conventions were inherently oppressive, because they mould uniquely different individuals to the same shape. There were different approaches to the norms among liberals, its sanguine and pessimist representatives and postmodernists. Postmodernists had prejudice against norms, unities and consensuses thus reflected “the apparent disintegration of old-fashioned bourgeois society into a host of sub-cultures”.

The traditional middle-class “the solid, civilized, morally upright bourgeoisie which managed to survive the Second World War” were displaced by “the projectors and managers, auditors and janitors, administrators and speculators of contemporary capital”. The norm now was the money without any principles or identity of its own. The new cultural ideas had emerged in the reality of various movements of civil rights, student movement, women’s movement, anti-war and anti-nuclear campaigns, cultural liberation. By the 1960s and 70s  “the media, popular culture, sub-cultures and the cult of youth first emerged as social forces to be reckoned with”. Western Marxism turned to cultural values and human powers for which industrial capitalism had no time. In the postmodern 80s and 90s cultural studies replaced socialist thinking and culture had become “well-nigh indistinguishable” from capitalism.

Postmodernism and post-colonialism were real-life formations reflecting changes in their environment. For anti-theorists theory was “how you try to justify your way of life, but this was neither possible nor necessary, because theory was part of that way of life”. Modernism reflected that all the beliefs of the nineteenth-century middle-class society, like liberalism, democracy, individualism, scientific inquiry, historical progress were in crisis. There was the rapid development of technology, “capitalist society became increasingly dependent in its everyday operations on myth and fantasy, fictional wealth, exoticism and hyperbole, rhetoric, virtual reality and sheer appearance”. This was postmodernism which was dealing with the world as a matter of information to represent great invisible crisscrossing circuits of communication and multitude of signs that the contemporary society requested. The themes of postmodernism for the most part were such things as advertising and public relations, and there were sex, drugs and art free from any classes, and consumer-friendly.

cut-up and fold-in method

How to destroy the reality that exists and create new one? This is “Playback from Eden to Watergate”. The reality of Eden was destroyed, by William S. Burroughs who thought that the written word was a virus made the spoken word possible and it ultimately could destroy the cells in which they lived. The aim was to achieve complete freedom from past conditioning and to rearrange the reality. One way to do this is the cut-up and fold-in method used by the writer. The most interesting experience was the realization that the cut-up pieces meant something and often that these meanings referred to some future events (this is rather mystification of reality than rearrangement).

The control system is necessary to impose fear and prejudice. The word is one of the most powerful instruments of control as exercised by the newspapers and images. “If you’re absolutely bombarded with images from passing trucks and cars and televisions and newspapers, you become blunted and this makes a permanent haze in front of your eyes, you can’t see anything”, and to cut these up in order to rearrange them means breaking down the control system, the factors in mass media that are controlled and predicted: layout, the news, editorials and letters to the editor, which are selected in accordance with preconceived policy; advertisements. All control systems are basically similar, and according to the author the model system of a calendar of the ancient Maya throws light on modern methods of control. Any control system depends on precise timing. “The events, ceremonies, suggestions, pictures and planetary juxtapositions correlated with dates.”The controllers know what reactive commands they are going to re-stimulate in order to receive the desired consequence, they know what will happen.

To change something means to break down three basic formulas: one is the formula of a nation; the next is of course the family and finally, “the whole present method of birth and reproduction”. All people all over the world could communicate on certain fundamental levels, on sex, habits, drugs, pop music, a way of dressing, a way of life. There is not any substantial difference between Western and Eastern ways of thinking so we can make contact.

Faust

Marshal Berman’s Faust story is related with the processes that took place at the end of the eighteenth century and the start of the nineteenth, “When a distinctively modern world-system came into being”. Psychic liberation is linked with the historical process of modernization. But it is assessed as destructive, demonic powers and "only if Faust works with and through these destructive powers will he be able to create anything in the world”.

Faust as the developer connects his personal drives with the economic, political and social forces that drive the world. The world created by the Faust’s project, is socialist. Faustian visions express radical and utopian dreams of Goethe’s time such as socialism. At the same time, it is not linked with one historical moment or any particular historical situation, Faust is universal as “superman”. He brings material, technical and spiritual resources together in order to transform the reality. On the contrary, the pseudo-Faustian were the soviet projects during the Stalin years in that that they “retarded the reality of development”.

Air Guitar

Art is a problematic endeavor in “mercantile democracy”, according to Dave Hickey: Air Guitar, Essays on Art and Democracy. What does an art critic do when he thinks that the art has no intrinsic value or virtue and “it is a bad, silly, frivolous thing to do”? Analyzing of art’s essential “goodness”, he comes to conclusion, that “it is a political fiction that is employed to solicit taxpayer’s money for public art education and for the public housing of works of art.” Why? Because we love them “so well their existence is inseparable from the texture of the world in which we live”. When things stands and the function of an art critic is secondary and for     commercial galleries only, that means that artists subordinate their endeavors to the norms of “right-thinking” people and to the norms of regulation of civil society thus becoming “a steady-state hedge against change”.     

 I totally agree with him about what the art has become nowadays. Everything sums up to money, and if you really think about it, why art should be “good”? It makes it so easy when you just ignore the fact of “goodness” of it. No need to have a general “good” argument ready for your final tables and no need acting as you really believe in its goodness, it makes it so much easier.  I liked the comparison art to the sports. For instance, in Rugby, It’s a pure game till death. So much anger so much blood; but this is what it makes rugby so cool, it’s because it’s considered to be “bad” and silly game for physically developed people. Sadly in football you can’t see this anymore, everywhere where there is “good money” there is lot of acting and “goodness”.

Fear and Money

Mike Davis’s Fear and Money in Dubai retells a story about how the “former fishing village and smuggler’s cove” has become one of the world dream city. The Persian Gulf city-state of Dubai, the planet’s biggest building site after Shanghai, is building the world’s biggest buildings, the largest theme park, the biggest mall, the largest international airport, the biggest artificial island, the first sunken hotel, the domed ski resort – the megaprojects which are being accomplished because its emir Sheikh Mohammed al-Maktoum simply wants “to be number one in the world”. Having “learned from Las Vegas’ he thinks that “if Dubai wants to become the luxury-consumer paradise of the Middle East and South Asia, it must ceaselessly strive for visual and environmental excess”.  Dubai has already surpassed Las Vegas “both in sheer scale of spectacle and the profligate consumption of water and power”. But to compare it to Rome, the “Eternal City” or New York’s Manhattan, Dubai does not represent the socially and ideologically active center with its “ unitary code or common language of the city”.

When I visited Dubai first time I remember finding myself within the multitudes of shopping malls and skyscrapers, the city’s architectural spectacle (I agree that it is “a monstrous caricature of futurism”). I had the feeling that I was playing a GTA game and was sure that there was nothing behind all these “pharaonic” decorations. But behind them there is the city which is the hyper consumer of “art”, and here the art as well as the fear (“of unexpected supply disruptions”) are used to attract money; there is also a semi-slaveholding system that as we know from the history of our culture, is inevitably wanted to accomplish the megaprojects.

Social space

Henri Lefebvre’s Social space investigates into the concept of social space based on the Marx’s theory and materialist thought. The author applies the categories of “work” and   “product” to social space and considers the examples of Venice, a city-state and Tuscany, where a new representation of space emerged: the visual perspective shown by painters and formed by architects. He distinguishes the traditional representational spaces which have special significance for the individual: the body, the house, the land, the religious place and the graveyard, and a very different representation of space emerged as “a homogeneous, clearly demarcated space complete with horizon and vanishing point”. He brought the example of the urban piazza in Tuscany as a space produced through interaction between a newly engendered spatial relationship between rural and urban (town and country). Representational spaces are given shape by everyday life (types of food, kitchen utensils, the preparation and presentation of meals, clothing, and the building of houses, the materials and materiel). 

What is a social space? Social space contains a great diversity of objects, both natural and social, “including networks and pathways which facilitate the exchange of things and information.” But it is not always visible “where, how, by whom, and to what purpose is information stored and processed?” At the same time, there are spaces such as parks, dwellings or military places   which are marked by economic, technical and political activities, and appropriate social relationships. They are the visible products of these activities and are both “natural” and artificial.

It is also interesting to trace the history of space (not the same as the history of civilization) as social reality, “a set of relations and forms”. The author relates the emergence of a new awareness of space to the Bauhaus that took into account interrelationships between things and space and developed a new conception of it.

Formal elements of space include curved and straight lines, curved and straight forms, their repetition and difference, a rhythm of a space. The connection between the form and content is visible through spatial forms of assembly and concentration. For example, a quadrangular form characteristic of town’s architecture presents different urban realities in the ancient Roman military camp, in medieval bastides, in the Spanish colonial town and in the modern American city.

The principle of “a bird’s-eye view of a rice field” is used for the organization of a space, according to the Japanese philosopher. “Every group of places and objects (the house, the city, the whole world) has a center, which may be perceived from every side, and reached from every angle of approach”, thus everything could be controlled from “any vantage point”. An important side of the Eastern scheme is “difference within a framework of repetition”. For example the Japanese garden, this remains the same in many various contexts. It exemplifies the appropriation of nature, being at once natural and cultural. An appropriated space is a natural space modified in order to serve the needs and possibilities of a certain group. It can be a structure, a monument or building, but also a site, a square or a street. Private space is always appropriated while public space is dominated such as military buildings, fortifications, ramparts, dams and irrigation systems. Dominated spaces present the realization of a master’s project by means of new technological forms introduced into a pre-existing space.