Recent Activity.

An great article by Hugh Pearman on Jim Stirling's Runcorn Housing, yet another seemingly cursed work of his, demolished around the turn of the 1990s. There's a lot of Stirling around at the moment - I recently got hold of the book on the 'red trilogy', which is excellent (see Owen's review), and there is a forthcoming show of his work at Tate Britain. I've been recently fascinated with the buildings from the end of the 1970s, such as the Olivetti Training Centre and Runcorn, both of which seem to be simultaneously Brutalist, Postmodern and also Hi-Tech, an eclecticism that is strangely thrilling. Musing about this, we came up with the new, stupid term 'Brutalomo', to be used for those strange buildings from that period that defy easy classification, with the new material and referential palette still being expressed through modernist formal arrangements.


How about this creepy video of Bill Hicks standing outside Waco? As seen on Found Objects


Which is where I also found this, essentially a propaganda video for the new town of Stevenage. It makes me rather sad to watch.

Levi Bryant has posted up an essay on Derrida from an OOO perspective. I must say I'm quite excited by the prospect of an extension of Derrida's work out into the world of stuff. I thought that there was something similar when I read bits of Harman's work on withdrawal, and so it's interesting to see it being pushed further. A development to watch.


This, Adam Curtis' most recent blog, has been getting all sorts of coverage, and rightly so. He really does have one of the best blogs around, scurrying away in the BBC archives, digging out all sorts of conspiracies. It's really impressive.

There's a really interesting piece at Spillway on Gavin Stamp's 'Britains Lost Cities'.

And this, this is really something. Paul Mason over at the BBC, blogging about the current conjuncture. "The world looks more like 19th century Paris"...

On the Ephemeral in Photography

Right now there is a rather excellent exhibition at the Hotshoe Gallery, which is on until the 5th of March. It's a mix of contemporary and historical photography, curated by Daniel Campbell Blight and Brad Feuerhelm. I also had something to do with it, so this post counts as a bit of a plug, but I'd be impressed with the show even if I wasn't marginally involved, so there! My contribution is a text in the show catalogue / newspaper, which I've posted below with kind permission from the gallery.

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Sigmund Freud's short essay of 1915, 'On Transience', offers us what might be described as a formula for the ephemeral: "Transience value is scarcity value in time". By this he means to assert that decay and disappearance need not be a source of anguish, indeed, he suggests that the perishable nature of objects makes them all the more valuable and worthy of our contemplation. Freud states that even though we are able to comprehend and fear that there will come a time when there is no longer any human consciousness remaining to comprehend anything whatsoever, this should only increase our enjoyment of what we create and what we examine. If we are to contemplate the ephemeral qualities of photography, we could do worse than to begin with Freud's assertion that the veridical fact of disappearance makes objects of desire all the more valuable.


David Maisel, 'Library of Dust',

But we must admit that things are perhaps not quite as simple as this - the ephemeral haunts our being more profoundly than just through our admiration for the preciousness of fleeting beauty. At a fundamental level, self-consciousness is the simplest quality of human life, the perception of a totality of thought, the singular there-ness of being. But we are constantly alienated, not only by our bodies, subject to the dragging weight of matter in time, but also by knowledge, or more particularly the awareness of the inevitability of things that are also impossible to imagine. Think of Samuel Beckett's famous statement at the end of 'The Unnameable' - "I can't go on, I'll go on." - our undead drive mocks us, whispering to us that we are everlasting. As humans, we find transience both inevitable yet simultaneously unthinkable.


Mikael Gregorsky, 'Untitled',

Things are complicated even further by the fact that we make marks, we create. We mark because we are subjects to the will, it is our very vitality exceeding us, but as soon as a mark has been made it is filled with death - it belongs to its maker but it is independent of them, it makes them both more than they were and less than they were. It creates a ghostly body of knowledge, an archive which depends upon consciousness for its ability to mean but is capable of existing beyond it, without us. Derrida once argued that "the structure of the archive is spectral", meaning that the marks we make are inextricably bound up with a logic of ghosts, that representation is in itself haunted, as in the ghostly trace of human presence, but also that our own haunted finitude is made clear in the making of the mark. In short, our history is the history of our own haunting. Derrida - as a thinker of the archive or of the 'body of knowledge' - argued that the ghost was a more appropriate figure for our being than any fully present human subject: instead of ontology, he proposed a hauntology.


Rut Blees Luxemburg, 'Black Sunrise', 2010

But this was not an entirely abstract or poetic observation; it describes a concrete condition. We can expand upon Derrida's statement thus: all media, in some way, are spectral. All marks made create a fragmented image of the human who inscribes them. All forms of media, or representation in general, proliferate spectral images and resonances that create fragments out of single identities. All media evolve as methods of recording, of externalising our memory. The archive begins when a mark or an image is stored in some way that it becomes repeatable. We write because our memory degrades at a faster rate than an imprint in inert material, for example. But all forms of media are still subject to that fragmentary condition that defines memory - as mentioned before, all material is still transient, prone to disappearance, even the archive itself is made up of ephemera.

So against an naïve romantic notion of transience, whereby a decayed object is a simple memento mori, aestheticised and thus somewhat neutralised (we could say sublimated), and beyond Freud's notion that the knowledge of its disappearance multiplies the pleasure one can take in an object, even in its perfect condition, 'spectrality' is the dual and simultaneous process whereby the marks humans make both extend their memory and rob them of their very presence.


Julian Stallabrass, 'Untitled'

Each medium or technique necessarily has its own particular spectral characteristics. Writing might be thought of as the petrified voice, the setting of speech into stone and symbol. A psychoanalyst might tell you that speech itself is evidence of a phantom, both irreducibly personal and somehow alien. The introduction of the phonograph and recorded sound is perhaps one of the more perfect examples of spectral media - the disembodied and projected voice is inherently uncanny, in the sense that its repetitions occupy space and time in almost perfect fidelity to their original occurrence.

But what of photography?

To return to Derrida, he notes -

"It is the modern possibility of photography (whether art or technique matters little here) that combines death and referent in the same system […] the immediate proof given by the photographic apparatus or by the structure of the remains it leaves behind are irreducible events, ineffaceably original." - Derrida, 'The Deaths of Roland Barthes'.

For Derrida, after Barthes, the photograph haunts us with its effortless likeness. This perception of photography as brute, unadulterated representation is what allows it to work as an archival process - the strength of photography qua document or evidence testifies to this quality. But at the same time, photography and its mute realism freeze at an irreducible, irretrievable point. Compared to cinema (once described by Derrida as "the art of ghosts"), which unfolds as both sound and image in time, the stasis of photography has a different phantasmic quality. Photography's arrested likenesses provokes in thinkers such as Derrida and Barthes a pierced experience of death in its very impossibility, but simultaneously the infinite weight of the present in all its reality. Or, to put it another way, the spectrality of photography is not only that of seeing a ghost, but of seeing the ghost in oneself.


Jefferson Hayman, 'More Unfortunate than Criminal', 2009

But of course, photography is not half as 'truthful' a process as it might appear. If anything, however, its artefacts only make it more spectral. For example, it is worth recalling that among the very first to make intentional use of the flaws of the photographic process were mediums and ghost hunters, who were able to play games with exposure to create the illusion of semi-present spectres on film (in fact; ghosts are perhaps the most enthusiastic pioneers of each new communication technology!).


Roger Schall, 'Soho', 1935

The material substrate of archival material also creates its own distortions. Fading, scratching, these distortions upon the surface of historic material alienate us from the image depicted, they veil it - they become figures in their own right. This is where 'spectrality' becomes an aesthetic quality in itself, when the degradations of material become figures for work.
An example, a vulgar one at that: consider that the attraction of the degraded image may be found in the applications that mimic Polaroid photography for digital cameras. This process does indeed use spectral qualities as an aesthetic condition, but it is born of dull nostalgia, the attraction of the 'vintage'. It is a reactionary manoeuvre, the equivalent of having an old-fashioned telephone sound emanating from one's state of the art mobile telephone.


Roger Schall, Nuremburg Cathedral of Light, 1936

But this fuzzy, cuddly, aesthically lukewarm effect is indeed a symptom of a genuinely critical aspect of digital culture. As I have mentioned, each medium is spectral, and almost none is so in a more troubling way than digital media. In fact, we might say that digital media tends towards a limit condition of spectrality. Digital media and storage are fast approaching a point where the archive is effectively absolute. Of course, this absolute condition is impossible, insofar as all material is guaranteed to disappear eventually, but when compared to the cognitive capabilities and comprehensible timescales of the human observer, the minimal decay of digital material, its functionally infinite reproducibility and its functionally infinite capacity for storage spell the practical end point for our own capacity to experience the decay of the archive, which is what connects it to our own experience of memory - a perfect and unchanging body of past knowledge is by no means the same thing as history. But at the very same time, the immateriality of digital media is the very experience of this ephemerality taken towards its limit. Digital media is the both the end and the triumph of spectrality, in that the digital is both the most immaterial yet faithful reproductive apparatus.


Rut Blees Luxemburg, 'Faith in Infrastructure', 2010

This full spectrality of digital culture - the end of the ephemeral - is a deferred promise of modernity. Recall Marx & Engels’ description of capitalist abstraction: “All that is solid melts into air.” The digital archive is the latest, perhaps one of the last stages of this process of spectralisation, and its effects are complex. One can trace this spectral abstraction in the forms of media themselves, but also in how artistic works relate to these processes. The last decade has seen great critical focus on 'haunted' practices in experimental and art music, with the sounds of decayed media being brought into the foreground of the work, or with references being drawn from half-remembered utopian histories, phantasmagorias of other futures. To trace this out within photography: moving on from the digitally simulated fake ‘vintage’ aesthetic, we might consider the attraction of the obsolete, which can be witnessed in the fascination with superseded equipment, which are minor monuments to a different regime of materiality. We might see it in the attraction of ephemera (in the historical sense), lost postcards and trivia, fragments in the Benjaminian sense, like withered corpses, testaments to disappearance, while simultaneously totems to ward it off. Jefferson Hayman's images are testament to this mood, slyly inhabiting the historical garb of the 19th century. But if we can take this dialectic further, it is possible for work to further abstract these qualities; one approach might be to introduce decay into photography. This could be abstracted in a narrative sense - the lurid colours of David Maisel's 'Library of Dust' take on an unbearable weight when one learns of their provenance. But decay here might be a controlled and abstracted figure – take Mikael Gregorsky’s photography, with its dusty phantasms. Gregorsky's portraits, although entirely contemporary in terms of setting, dress, character, technique, cannot but help to bring to mind Victorian ghost photography, as the dust introduced into the development process becomes akin to the ectoplasmic expulsions of a channelling medium. And we might find also think of ghosts of history, whether that be images of long lost objects, buildings, places, or the mute horror of scenes of historical tragedy - this spectral sublimity can be witnessed in the image of the 'Cathedral of Light', Albert Speer's horribly stunning climax to the Nuremburg rallies of 1933, the ultimate point of modern architecture as a dematerialized space of communion. But spectrality also deals with the ghosts of the future, which we can understand through the fixation on resonant utopias that we see in Rut Blees Luxemburg, whether that be in the post-war architecture of the welfare state, transfigured by long exposure to the night, or in the encounters with the skeletons of World Expositions, temporary monuments to the future, now dilapidated; left behind. They represent material promises of a different, better modernity, haunting in their very refusal to vanish.


Steffi Klenz, 'Untitled', 2010

To think of media in this spectral fashion is to attempt a synthesis of approaches to history, psychology, memory and technique that is undeniably post-modern, but offers the chance to escape the trap of irony that this might normally suggest. The figure of the ghost identifies an aspect of human existence that can be traced variously through space, the individual, the collective, and time. It is compelling way of theorising mediation and our relationships to the labyrinthine archive of human work that we are always lost within.

Up n Coming

Here are a few things that are happening now/soon, or are just worth looking at:

-Mark Fisher and Nina Power will be talking at the ICA on Saturday the 22nd, and it's free. The press release describes the event as "A public discussion on how the dissemination of artwork and information on blogs’ and websites has altered the way that artists distribute and discuss their practice."


-Between Channels is posting a wonderful series of photographs of UK towns in 1968 that they found. They're gorgeous in their own way, and in the words of Mr/Ms Channels: "This is just everyday life as it once was, and never will be again."

-A really rather terrifying post from City of Sound regarding the Australian floods.

Trailer – The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: an Urban History from the Pruitt-Igoe Myth on Vimeo.

-There is a film that has just been made about the reality behind the architectural myth of the Pruitt Igoe flats. Hopefully there will be showings in the UK at some point in the future.


-A post on 'We Make Money Not Art' highlighting some fine art photography of 'La Vela' in Napoli, one of the most notorious housing estates in the world.

-If you're into philosophers who have spies telling them when you've sarcastically mentioned them on twitter, or even if you're just into some of the most interesting young thinkers currently active, then there is a new collection of essays, 'The Speculative Turn' which can generously be downloaded from here.


-There is a little exhibition down at the Nunnery in Bow, where artist Simon Terrill has created a massive photograph of Balfron Tower and its residents. There is a symposium on Thursday the 20th of January with Edward Colless, Nigel Warburton and Owen Hatherley.


-And finally; I will be giving a talk and taking part in a panel with Rut Blees Luxemburg at the London Art Fair. The theme of the talk and the accompanying show is 'the Ephemeral', so I'll be cracking open a can of 'spectrality' and discussing representative media, ghostliness and probably a bit of politics as well.

More from the vaults.

This is probably one of the first pieces of music that I recorded when I moved to London. At this point I was listening a lot to the music of Colleen, and was discovering the world of low-key improv that used to be based around the Sound 323 shop that used to sit up in Archway.

Around that time I recorded quite a few of these improvised drone-pieces, which were made by looping up tiny little guitar gestures which would coalesce into a much larger aggregates of sound. Listening back to this recently, and generally thinking about the time of my arrival in the 'Great Wen', what has changed since then and what hasn't; it's quite a painfully nostalgic feeling. And what with the sense that this whole country is currently being driven over the edge of a cliff, then it's quite a difficult time to be feeling enthused about the problem that is London.

(It's also interesting to me that I had an interest in poor quality recording and decayed media for quite a while before ever reading about sonic hauntology, although I was already reasonably well versed in Derrida by that point).

Metaphysics of Crackle

Dear reader, tonight I have been mostly listening to Mark 'K-Punk' Fisher's mix for Pontone. I really cannot recommend it enough. It's stuffed with tracks from the likes of the Caretaker, Black to Comm, William Basinski and Philip Jeck, and it features a track by Asher, who I had never heard of before tonight but now am VERY interested in.

I suppose you might want to listen to this alongside the mix that Kode9 and Burial did for Mary Anne Hobbs' last show at the BBC a week ago, which, if you can find it, is excellent. Mark's mix is of course firmly within the aesthetic of hauntology, but if anybody is allowed to do hauntological mixes then it's the very man who resurrected(!) the term... Here's what he has to say:

What you hear in a recording is not there. It is a spectre. You always hear more and less than was ‘there’ at the time and place of the recording. With vinyl records, the more that you often hear is crackle, the sound of the material surface of the playback medium. When vinyl was ostensibly superseded by digital playback systems – which seem to be sonically ’invisible’ - many producers were drawn towards crackle, the material signature of that supposedly obsolete technology. Crackle disrupts presence in multiple ways: first by reminding us of the material processes of recording and playback, second by connoting a broken sense of time, and third by veiling the official ‘signal’ of the record in noise. For crackle is of course a noise in its right, a ground become a figure. Listen to it for a while and you start to hear patterns; you become susceptible to audio hallucinations.

Back around to the Orbit

Not that long ago (6th of April to be precise), I wrote a short piece poking fun at the ArcelorMittal Orbit, that contemptuously half baked excuse for an Olympic landmark. Recently, the planning applications for the 'Mittalintestine' were submitted, which of course gave us more information than we had before (You can have a look through here...) I won't go into too much detail, because there's very little revelation of poor design concepts and half-baked aesthetic justification that wasn't abundantly clear from the outset of the project.


But actually, there are a couple of things that made me laugh in a mixture of pride and shame, at my having predicted so thoroughly the mindset of those involved. I made a couple of mentions in the previous post to the 'napkin sketch' and the notion that Anish Kapoor provided his ideas only at the very beginning of the process, before it got taken over by the wibble engineers. And lo and behold, the concept sketches as revealed in the Design and Access statement are the sort of piss-poor doodles that would be torn off the wall at any review in any art school, anywhere in the world, for wasting your tutor's time, your fellow students' time and of course your own bloody time. But no, in this case they reveal genius at work. Of course.


The other thing, which I find even more appalling, is that I basically preempted their whole rationalisation spiel. Here's what I wrote about my 20 minute cock'n'balls redesign, as seen above:

I think it not only provides an iconic structure that we can all admire from anywhere around London, but it also wryly subverts, deconstructs, if you will, the priapic certainty of the conventional tower-structure.

And here's the genius artist & genius engineer:

The design for ‘Orbit’ evolved out of a dialogue between Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond. They have been working together for over 10 years. The Artists started their creative investigation by looking at the idea of the tower in the 21st century. It should be a landmark sculpture and to be defined as such, it will provide panoramic views over London. Post London 2012 Games, it should retain its iconography against the London skyline. It should make an iconic statement about ‘Tower-ness’. They looked at epoch making towers such as the Eiffel, Tatlin, Empire State and even the Pyramids.
They could see that all conventional or classical structures want to accumulate strength and are thus stable ground based structures. Furthermore all towers are continuous in the vertical plane. This was a premise which Kapoor and Balmond wished to unravel and to destabilise.

The ghost of shit sub-Derridean thought continues to haunt aesthetics. Damn them all, the fools.

Conference

23rd–24th June 2010

The Hole in Time: German–Jewish Political Philosophy and the Archive

University of Westminster, Portland Hall, 4–16 Little Titchfield Street, London W1W 7UW

A Workshop Co-Organised by Sas Mays (University of Westminster), and Leena Petersen and Nitzan Leibovic (Sussex), as part of the research project ‘Archiving Cultures’ led by Sas Mays at the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster.

Left discussions of politics and history owe much to German-Jewish theories of temporality that emerged in response to the political crises of twentieth-century Europe. Such theories problematized both the life of the individual and how the state perceived it. Given the rise of bureaucratisation, surveillance and control defining the modern state, and the concommitant rise in theoretical interest in ‘the archive’, the workshop ‘German-Jewish Political Philosophy and the Archive’ brings together interested parties to engage with German-Jewish conceptions of temporality, history, and crisis in terms of their archival dimensions, and to open discussion of German-French dialogue in critical philosophy in this context.

Speakers:

Howard Caygill (Goldsmiths): ‘Paul Celan’s Visual Archive’ / Matthew Charles (Middlesex): ‘The Snow Line of the Archive: Benjamin On the Trail of Old Letters’ / David Cunningham (Westminster): ‘Abstract Times: Benjamin, Kafka and the Modernism of Tradition’ / Rebecca Dolgoy (Montreal/ FU Berlin): ‘The Work of Art as Archive: Examining Adorno’s Zeitkern as Time Capsule’ / Andy Fisher (Goldsmiths): ‘‘Quiet Life’: History, Pathos & the Archive in Friedrich’s Kriege dem Krieg’ / Sami Khatib (FU Berlin): ‘The Messianic and the Archive: Walter Benjamin’s ‘Politics of Time’’ / Veronika Koever (Queen Mary): ‘Reversing the Irreversible: Jean Améry’s ‘ressentiments’ & the Moralisation of Time’ / Nicholas Lambrianou (Birkbeck): ‘Figures of Interruption: Philosophical Dramas of Temporality & History in Benjamin and Rosenzweig’ / Nitzan Lebovic (Tel Aviv/Sussex): ‘Paul Celan: Language of Loss at the Heart of Time’ / Manu Luksch (London): ‘Moonwalking in Real Time’ / Andrew McGettigan (Central Saint Martins) “Archive & Idea: Walter Benjamin’s Experiences of Time’ / Reut Paz (Humboldt University Berlin): ‘The Legal Transcendentalism of Hans Kelsen as a Hole in Time’ / Leena Petersen (Sussex): ‘Messianic Libertarianism and Linguistic Philosophies of History in Benjamin and Related Writings of His Time’ / Shela Sheikh (Goldsmiths): ‘The Wounded Archive: Derrida Reading Celan’ / Tommaso Speccher (FU Berlin): ‘The Hole in Space: Fragmenting and Re-piecing the Archive between Walter Benjamin and Daniel Libeskind’ / Elina Staikou (Goldsmiths): ‘Vigil of the Archive: On Derrida Dreaming Benjamin’

Chairs:

Christian Wiese (Sussex) / Esther Leslie (Birkbeck) / Leena Petersen (Sussex) / Keston Sutherland (Sussex) / Nitzan Lebovic (Tel Aviv/Sussex) / John Roberts (Wolverhampton).

Admission is free, but, since places are limited, please contact the organisers to book a place – at theholeintime@live.com – by the 17th of June.

Needless to say, this is exactly the sort of thing I'm interested in.

xavecy

This would be a particularly brutal caricature, yet it nevertheless contains a grain of truth: there is indeed an undeniable respect in which Derrida (along with Heidegger) and to a lesser extent Deleuze (along with Nietzsche) provide the most immediate reference points for understanding Laruelle’s thought, in which the negative characterization of philosophy provides the precondition for the positive creation of ‘non-philosophical’ concepts.

Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound, p.134

This reminds me slightly of that trope of the synthetic construction of new cultural material, common in film (Alien as 'jaws-in-space' etc) and music (xband sound like yband meets zband) and seemingly accelerated or concentrated in the current cultural climate of hyper-information, epitomised by the 'mash-up'.

Ads has an interesting post about this, porn and modernism, and Evan(who with every post makes me embarrassed to be pretending to write at the same time as him) has had a mini-project on this for a while.

I know it's stupid but I quite like the idea of imaginary cultural artifacts defined by their being explicable in terms of a dyadic synthesis. Think of it as perhaps a kind of Borgesian fiction for the internet age, or something banal like that. More seriously I do think it is symptomatic of a greater relinquishing of novelty, for the fallacy "nothing new under the sun" is ever-increasingly taken for granted...

ps- the main reason for this post is to ask if anyone strongly recommends or discourages reading Laruelle. Should I bother investigating? Is it worth the effort? There's an ironically entertaining debate between Derrida and Laruelle that has been translated online, which consists mostly of Derrida raising objections to Laruelle's non-philosophy, to which the response is usually "Aha! You're doing it again!"...

He's come about the reaping..?

I’m reading Christopher Belshaw’s Annihilation at the moment, a hearty jaunt through the philosophies of death. It seems that most (or at least a lot of) contemporary thanatology seems to come from that strange section of Anglo Saxon philosophy that deals in no-nonsense, common sense language, useful perhaps in ethics and for lawmakers, dealing with cases of comas, persistent vegetative states and so on, but often infuriatingly complacent with norms and full of assumptions and simplifications about what makes a subject.

In works like this, or the more entertaining Better Never to Have Been by David Benatar, the writers often struggle with words like ‘harm’ or ‘asymmetry’, attempting to cram subjectivity into charming little logic tables with columns and rows entitled ‘Unsatisfied (bad)’, ‘Absence of pain (good)’, or ‘Presence of sickness (bad)’, and other laughably inadequate descriptions of states of being.

When Belshaw discusses the possibility of ‘defining’ death, a definition being necessarily true in all cases, he (rather charmingly, and not entirely ignorantly) blunders across the field of aesthetics in an attempt to stress the inadequacy of absolute definitions; a passage which includes the following sublime nugget:

“We know that the Mona Lisa is a work of art, that bombing Fallujah is not, and we know these things even while being uncertain what to say about a number of problem works. Perhaps if we discovered certain further facts – Leonardo copied, Fallujah was planned by the Chapman brothers – then these judgements would need to be revised.”

At which point I nearly spat out my coffee.

Clumsy rhetoric notwithstanding, Belshaw is quite right when he points out that death cannot be reduced to a definition based on organisms, functioning and irreversibility, although his dealing with each of these cases lacks thoroughness: his difficulty with defining ‘organism’ (how much can you remove from an organism to change its identity? Can there be organisms within organisms?) puts me in mind of DeLanda’s New Philosophy of Society (not a great work by any means, but it does at least present an attempt at working through this problem), his definition of functioning – a thing doing what is supposed to – is inadequate, leading to him making statements such as;

“you and I are functioning organisms; Tutankhamen and Lenin are not”

when we could just as easily say that Lenin is the most functional out of the four of us, in terms of how much the organism effects other organisms or networks of organisms. But of course that is a bit too meta... Eventually Belshaw admits;

“it is beginning to look as if we cannot define anything unless we can define everything”

which sounds a bit like a desperate cry for phenomenology.

Perhaps it’s just the angle of approach I’m making towards this branch of thought, perhaps I’m too used to psychoanalytical or ‘Continental’ (ewww…) philosophy to really feel comfortable with the style, but one often feels that a bigger scope would be better for this kind of subject. Here’s some early Lacan, in a rare discussion of death, basically hitting the nail on the head – the problem of death is not death, the problem is life. Everything is dead, apart from these heaps of matter that somehow decide that they are selves.

“That is what life is – a detour, a dogged detour, in itself transitory and precarious, and deprived of any significance. Why, in that of its manifestations called man, does something happen, which insists throughout this life, which is called a meaning? […] A meaning is an order that suddenly emerges. A life insists on entering into it, but it expresses something which is completely beyond this life, since when we get to the root of this life, behind the drama of the passage into existence, we find nothing besides life conjoined to death.”

Of course, this is part of a discussion of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and comes at an early point before Lacan fully developed his concept of drive, but it thinks in the same direction that (oh here we go again) Derrida thinks spectrality: life and death are not opposites – there is death in everything, and if we are to deal with extinction as truth, the misrecognition of being, the concatenation of life-meanings as generated and perpetuated by the Symbolic (Lacan) or traces, archives, writing (Derrida) is already dead also. All being is haunted matter.

Anyway, I’ve got a little more Belshaw to read, perhaps the last chapters are on Meillasoux, Brassier and Metzinger, although I reckon that’s distinctly unlikely.

These are fragile papers, that are now ground to dust...

On the 3rd of March an archive in Cologne, Germany collapsed, killing two people. The collapse may also have destroyed vast amounts of archive documents that were stored there, one of the largest collections in Europe.

Documents up to a thousand years old may have been lost, including the municipal archives of Cologne itself, archives of the Hanseatic league, five hundred thousand photographs, one hundred thousand architectural drawings, and original manuscripts by Heinrich Böll, Marx and Engels, Jacques Offenbach and Albertus Magnus.


One of the reasons that this is such a terrible event is that not many of the collections have been properly copied. Apparently a rather poor quality microfilm exists of much of the pre-1945 collection, but a huge amount of the material has not been ‘backed up’ at all, destroying a large amount of human knowledge forever.

This raises a few questions, however. There is an accelerating process of the digitisation of archives, storing and protecting material precisely for this eventuality. If the fragile material has been duplicated and entered into the immaterial digital realm, then although not in an absolute sense, the knowledge contained within the material has at least become as safe as it can possibly be; it has the potential to be endlessly circulated.


The fact that many of these documents had not been safely dematerialised means that it the loss is not just a question of the fetish value of the documents as objects. Access to information has been historically tied to the physical object and its scarcity. Slowly, our archiving practices are tending towards the immaterial; once an object has been accurately digitised it becomes divorced from its capacity to hold human knowledge. The archive object enters into a strange new role – its only value is in its capacity for destruction.

What would have happened if one of the British Library’s archives of ‘zero use’ material was destroyed? Every year their shelves grow by twelve and a half kilometres, leading them to have to build vast warehouses to hold the collections of books that nobody will ever read, but that we as a culture find impossible to throw away. We are addicted to archiving.


In fact, it can even be said that archiving is one of the things that most makes us human. As we learn more about the capabilities of our animal relatives to communicate, think abstractly and experience emotion, we are left with little that actually makes us unique as a species. Haunted by our uncontrollable tendency to forget, we developed ways of storing knowledge in non-corporeal ways. This desire-for-archiving is an exponential process, giving us the (theoretical) potential to know anything that has ever been documented by anybody, and this changes the relationship between our intelligence and the minds which constitute it.


This world of language proliferated and constituted a symbolic field, dependent upon our minds to exist but not reducible to them. The exponential process of archiving is surely as much a part of the coming to be of this Symbolic as the proliferation of meanings as spoken language deepened and thickened over time. To be a subject is to inherit a position within the Symbolic, a position characterised by what the later Derrida would call the ‘spectral’; not only immaterial, but also origin-less, out-of-joint, never whole. Archives represent an attempt to regulate the Symbolic, inasmuch as they materialise knowledge and ‘freeze’ speech. They attempt to impose orders onto knowledge, artificial and ideological orders, and to regulate the relationship that any one subject can have with knowledge. Yet the archive also has the tendency to proliferate the conditions for speech, an ever –growing background of knowledge. Archives both regulate and proliferate the Symbolic.

It looks as if we are on the edge of a new condition for the archive. We can imagine achieving, although not without struggle, a (near) total archive, freely available across the world, and totally immaterial. This would obviously mean a new level of freedom for the intellect, but also the potential for new methods of controlling access to this information. Is it healthy to banish forgetfulness? Is it inevitable, for that matter? Will the architectural presence of an archive become nothing but ruin, a building that serves to remind us of nothing more than that objects have the capacity to be destroyed, monuments to what Freud called ‘Transience Value’?

UPDATE - see this also, a bit less theoretical; ebb of memory (scroll down), as seen at things.

McDerrida

I was sorry to miss Owen’s paper at HM the other day, so am unable to tell how it went down. His paper is typically excellent, but we feel compelled however, to if not exactly contradict, at least muddy the waters a little.

I will take Owen’s theses to be thus – that there is currently an architectural moment that can be described as Pseudomodernism, which is identifiable as ‘postmodernism’s incorporation of a Modernist formal language’. This Pseudomodernism is understood to be the architectural manifestation of the current form of neoliberalism. At one extreme of this system is the Iconic building, and Owen states that this has more in common with Googie, a crass American form of architecture than the modernism it would claim to be descended from.

1. Ever decreasing circles.




If we understand Po-mo to be the architectural discourse whose language was found most suitable for expressing neo-liberal messages in the built environment, then it is not too difficult to understand the current form of expression’s turn towards a language drawn from modernism. Owen is right to point out that, just as New Labour Thatcherism speaks a more socially aware public language than the did the original Thatcherites, so the architecture is expressed in less dominating terms. This raises a few questions, however; part of the original reason for the rise of Pomo is the perceived inhumanity of Modernism. An architecture of ‘sign’ was supposed to create a semantic bridge between the public and the institution embodied in the built form, thus lessening the dominating effect. The abstraction of form (despite its self and intra-movement referentiality, Il n'y a pas de hors-texte, after all) was seen as lacking accessibility, and the materialistic expressions were considered inhumane. Never mind that a large part of the reason for Modernism shearing itself of ornament was the complicity with inhumane exploitation that bourgeois, classical architecture represented. Pomo faltered for a few reasons, for example; the hegemonic success of British Hi-Tech, which suited a desire for ‘transparency’ in the world of shady business has been very influential in making a ‘modern’ style appropriate for institutions. As has the reaction to the shoddy quality of a lot of Pomo work. It is not exaggerating to say that most architects are ashamed of that period, and its ‘loadsamoney’ vacuousness. To reinvigorate architecture, a new modernism was sought, shorn of the inhumanity of the monolithic Corbusian legacy (I certainly saw posters in school decrying Corb for ‘crimes against architecture’). For this young architects looked to Aalto, Barragan et al, architects known for their ‘regional’ attempts at the international Modernism, as well as the Team X renegades (at least the more cuddly ones, like Van Eyck and Herzberger). This attitude of Modernism with a human face has coincided perfectly with the ideology of Nu Labour, if perhaps approaching each other along different vectors.

2. the meaninglessness of architecture




Unfortunately, it is not as if all the Pomo architects were born in the mid 70’s and died in 1997. Owen points out Farrell as an example, but the sorry fact is that an ideologically consistent architectural practice is an extreme rarity. Some of the original British Pomo was brought over from the U.S, in the form of one time arch modernists like SOM (Unilever Building?) or KPF. Most architects above a certain age have a few pedimented skeletons in their closet, and if you look a little further back, most of the Brutalism in the UK that Owen might imbue with transformative potential was designed by architects who then happily switched to Pomo, and then more than happily switched to pseudo-modern, decorating the outside of the office blocks with barcode facades and 3m high lettering that they saw in a copy of BD focussing on the latest in Dutch.
Both British Hi-Tech and Decon are both styles that found themselves in vogue, after lean periods. The French gamble on Rogers & Piano led to Lloyds, the most avant-garde building in Britain containing one of the most reactionary typologies. The large success of Gehry has led to more intellectual ‘decon’ architects being accepted, but only after their florid conceptualising is dropped as so much baggage, merely useful for gaining academic promotions and book publishing deals.

3. Googie: the architectural insult.



I am still unconvinced that Googie is the answer to Iconic architecture. Yes, of course it allows us to see just how far Iconic architecture is from having any high-minded or moral quality when it unwittingly shares the logic of outré form=logo with Californian pap, but this is not the whole story. Googie seems to me to be part of the ‘outsider architect’ tradition, from FLW and Bruce Goff in the US, individualists who have a particularly ‘American’ take on praxis, who have affinities with turn of the twentieth century expressionism – Gaudi, Mackintosh, Guimard, etc… Perhaps this works, except the particular thing about the current period is how this individualism can be so very homogenous. Altogether now – “We are all different!!!”

4. Victoriana

If I can make a couple of points regarding the revenge of Victorianism; let us not forget the ideological battles of eclecticism. Look at the Houses of Parliament – a classical building dressed in gothic garb. What about the museums of Albertopolis? The train stations up and down the UK (on which more in a second)? A century and a half ago the same problem existed; architecture was semantically drained. A plethora of approaches could be taken, and none would express a different code (despite what Pugin would say). Perhaps this is a potential that Modernism had - to set up a language of authentic communication, a powerful yet vulnerable idea. It was a project of Thatcherism to make sure that Modernist architecture became coded in the correct way – as cold, brutal, unforgiving, monstrous, carbuncular etc… a project which, it has to be said, was almost entirely successful. Nu-Labour arrives, and instead of changing the paradigm, it merely expresses it with smiles and caring rhetoric. Cameron is soon to arrive, and with him a return of philanthropy and 'giving something back' from what has been cruelly taken.

5. Brunelesque-y



One of the most exciting discoveries in my own work on Victorian architecture was just how much and in what way the iron and glass developments have been coded. Ever since 1851, the Crystal Palace has been understood generally as a remarkable achievement of engineering, and also the origin of the ‘Plan Libre’. These two points are correct, but it is far more complex. This purely material point of view is often accompanied by a qualification about the over-celebration of empire, and how this is BAD, but the cultural consideration usually doesn’t go much further. However, from a viewpoint at the beginning of the 1900’s, the train stations of the previous 50 years would be understood as marvels of science and ingenuity, although requiring a classical disguise to hide their shed-ness, but the Crystal Palace typology would be looked at as glorious follies: for every glasshouse or people’s palace that survives now, there were countless more that opened and closed dejectedly, the optimism of their birth unmatched by the income they generated. As Benjamin said; ‘The light that fell from above, through the panes between the iron supports, was dirty and sad’. This legacy of failure and melancholy, admittedly marginal, has disappeared in favour of an inherited rhetoric of structural progress; Brunel is the figure that most haunts British Hi-Tech, more than any other.



This has been a long way of coming round to the point that one pernicious idea in architecture has been the engineer’s interpretation of Modernism; a new technology must be used, because, well, it’s a new technology. The Decon crowd may have started plying their trade pre-computer, but the advance of computer technology has been one of the main factors in the acceptance of ‘Iconic’ architecture. Eisenman started reading Deleuze when computer-literate students entered his office; the vanguardism of the US scene, developing digital skills and tools led to the short lived late ‘90s ‘Blob’ phase of architecture, where hi-tech digital tools were coupled with nomadic / folded rhetoric to postulate a semi-virtual hybrid form of future information womb-space. The truth of an idea, though, is what happens when idiots start using it. Greg Lynn is not the truth of digital design, Ken Shuttleworth is. Right now we have a great many intelligent people developing ways to remove the architect from the design process. This may seem, in the academic environment, to provide myriad possibilities for opening up the discourse of architecture, reinvigorating the field of potentialities, but if past form is anything to go by, all the parametric revolution will give us are cheaper, quicker buildings that signify even less.
This, I think, is the hauntological problem of architecture.

Bill Morrison - Decasia

That the majority of cultural artefacts described as hauntological consist of sound is linked to the ease with which sound lends itself to conceptions of spectrality and present non-presence. However, this is not to say that there is not the potential for hauntology in other media. In anticipation of the haunto-porn which will soon be taking over the cultural world courtesy of E&V; and IT, it is appropriate to turn our attention to Decasia, a film directed by Bill Morrison that bridges the gap between the sonic hauntology so often discussed and the hauntological punctum of the photograph. The punctum is a concept introduced by Roland Barthes in his melancholy meditation on photography, Camera Lucida. As opposed to the studium, which is the objective content of the photograph, the punctum is that which strikes the spectator, that which pierces them, and in Derrida’s words;

‘it is never inscribed in the homogenous objectivity of the framed space but instead inhabits or, rather, haunts it […] We are prey to the ghostly power of the supplement, it is this unlocatable site that gives rise to the Spectre.’

Decasia itself consists of a series of sequences of footage obtained from aged film stock that Morrison himself collected. All of the stock that has been included in the film has undergone severe decay, whether that be scratches, burns, water damage, or simply the disintegration of the acids in the film itself. Now it is obvious here that the work runs the risk of plunging into in some sort of eschatological jouissance, revelling in the ‘beauty of decay’, which functions as a symptom – by investing our knowledge of finitude and disappearance into a ‘ruined’ artefact we make it easier to perpetuate the lie of attainment and ambition. Now of course it cannot transcend it, but Decasia resists the picturesque through a number of methods; it is accompanied by a screechingly dissonant symphony by Douglas Gordon, which sounds like Part's Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten as if it, itself had disintegrated. The hour long film persists; the images keep on appearing, they are never intact but are always refusing to be destroyed, between life and death, suspending time by displaying it all at once. Effects that have been discussed in relation to sonic hauntology are deployed here; there is not a single sequence that unfolds at a recognisably realistic speed, ‘uncannifying’ the footage. Sufi dancers slowly twist around, their joyful worship becomes agonisingly lugubrious, nuns drift slowly in and out of a haze of sunlight which is ever-darkening and in the most celebrated sequence a boxer interminably does battle with an amorphous torrent of visual noise, locked in battle with as close to a positive visual depiction of ‘the void’ it is possible to come. Throughout all of the film cycles keep reappearing, from dancers to spinning wheels, to carousels, to ferris wheels, to film spools. This can be said to be a symbol of rebirth in all death and decay, but I think a more appropriate reading is that these cycles are drive.



In fact, Morrison selectively chose footage that depicted humans engaging in defiantly productive acts, dancing, training, exercising, orating, etc. There are no tears and no mawkish imagery, the point being to stress the disappearance inherent to every last moment of presence. This is almost precisely in tune with Derrida’s messianicity without messianism: the minimal persistence that opens outward in the face of all that is oppressive, that forever insists. This seemingly interminable depiction of drive is what sets Decasia apart from ‘ruininlust’.
The visual hauntology of decasia could be thought of as a way of generating or perhaps even arresting the punctum, conjuring it out of the materiality of the artwork. In fact, I would go so far as to assert that all hauntological production is engaged in a certain séance, attempting to bring forward the punctum, solidify its particular spectra, make it apparent, to diminish the body of the work and allow it to be possessed entirely by the spectre; the impossible limit-condition of hauntological production is creating a work that is entirely punctum.

Krapp's Ghosts

By now, we should all know that the hauntological is concerned with the voice, and its inherent disembodiment. One’s voice is always uncanny, and never more so than when it is reproduced. Ghosts have always used the latest technology when communicating from beyond the grave – before the telephone became ubiquitous, séances were more likely to involve written correspondence. Proust, referring to the first time he speaks to his grandmother over the phone, writes;

‘I cried out, “Grandmother! Grandmother!,” and I wanted to kiss her; but all that I had beside me was her voice, a ghost as bodiless as the one that would perhaps come back and visit me when my grandmother was dead.’

Derrida notes the alienation, or specifically, the spectralisation of the subject as it is replicated through what he calls ‘tele-technological media’. We shouldn’t forget that photographs ‘steal the soul’, as well. The reproduction of the image or the sound of a subject are ubiquitous now, but always spectral, and these concerns we have with ‘the voice’ as an uncanny part of us serve to highlight problematic points of subjectivity, where the illusion of singularity cannot be maintained. Specifically, hauntology is, of course, the fact of being-as-ghost, being as not-present presence. Perhaps we can understand this as an effect that is generated by the friction of our material mortality against the un-dead drive.

This spectral encounter with the disembodied voice is expertly examined in Samuel Beckett’s 1958 play; ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’. The play has one character, Krapp, visiting his special place at some unspecified birthday towards the end of his life, designated as being in the future. Krapp is a splintered character, spread across numerous temporal locations, his physical presence before the audience accompanied by various recordings of his voice made at different stages of his life. He searches out these recordings from drawers full of labelled spools, he listens to them and engages in cross-temporal conversations, mocking and cursing his past self for his arrogance, his ambitions, and his hope in the power of art;

Krapp: Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that. Thank God that’s all done with anyway.

Some of the experiences described by the past Krapp are identifiable as actual events from Beckett’s life, and he uses them as vehicles to investigate the familiar tropes of memory and its uncontrollable nature. Krapp listens to himself describing his awaiting the death of his mother, and how the most vivid memory of the scene is the inconsequential black ball in the mouth of a small dog that he played with as the curtain was drawn in his mother’s death chamber. He also describes a revelatory episode upon a sea cliff, when he understood what the true direction of his art was to be. Old Krapp is disgusted by the fervour with which the past Krapp speaks here, and speeds past in search of something else, a moment of calm with a past lover, drifting upon a boat.

The hauntology of Krapp’s Last Tape is primarily a system of memory, dyschronia and nostalgia. When Krapp listens to his previous tapes we see him encountering two versions of the memory; the memory as recounted by his past self and that same memory as altered by the intervening time between the recording and the listening. Desperately engaging in a synthetic Proustian search, trying to voluntarily grasp at memory but finding it ever elusive, shifting and ghostly, dissipating in his grasp and mocking him interminably. The multiplicity of the voice, with directions that the recorded voice should be ‘strong, pompous, clearly Krapp’s at a much earlier time’ attests to the technological uncanny, as the audience sit listening along with an actor whose lips are motionless to the actor’s own disembodied voice. In amongst this out-of-joint-ness, Beckett tests the power and purpose of nostalgia. When Krapp recalls from amongst the bitterness a moment of love he is struck dumb, his ‘present’ voice is annulled;

-we drifted among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing, before the stem! [Pause.] I lay down beside her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.
[Pause. Krapp’s lips move. No sound.]
Past midnight. Never knew such silence.

What is happening here as Krapp is silenced by himself, the voice that cannot but go on is momentarily struck dumb. This is such a rare occurance in Beckett that it’s worth trying to understand a little better. At first it seems that the only thing that can silence Krapp, that can break his incessant speech, spread across time and across his spectralised subjectivity is an encounter with the Other, represented by the figure of Love. This is Badiou’s reading: The encounter with Love permits access to the pure multiplicity of being, if only momentarily, freeing the subject from the ‘tortuous cogito’. This would be an example of what we could call a ‘Love Event’, the Beckettian subject freed from speech for a moment. This is tempting, but I’d like to hazard another, slightly different reading; Badiou doesn’t clarify at what temporal level this event occurs, is the silence itself the fidelity to a previous event, or is it the event itself as nominated through the act of a critical nostalgia? But is the dumbfounded silence that Krapp leaves himself in at the end of the play not a similar but opposite aporetic condition to the inability to stop speaking? For that moment Krapp encounters the realisation, by passing through nostalgia, by exhausting the memory, that the voice, the incessant voice doesn’t even belong to him anyway. By this I mean that his scouring of the past leads him to the understanding that the original tortuous aporia, ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’, of course involves the stability of the ‘I’. By engaging with his own ghosts, I think that Krapp is silenced by encountering the ghostly core of his own subjectivity; He is haunted by himself.

Nun Will Die Sonn' So Hell Aufgehn

There was one particular moment in Haneke's The Seventh Continent, watched at the incomparable Kino Fist on Sunday, that strikes the viewer immensely. It occurs minutes from the end, in the bathroom, as the mother of the family swallows down all her sleeping pills. She swallows them with difficulty, fills up her glass, drinks some water to make sure they stay down, then looks at herself in the mirror, turns and leaves, the deed is done. As she walks out of the bathroom, however, she switches off the light.

Now, as the film itself dwells interminably on the mundanity of the objects and habits in the protagonists' lives, it could be seen that this gesture represents just the persistence of habit to the end, its inescapability. This would go against, say, the Proustian system whereby suffering and habit are in opposition, never concurrent. Against this, we could say that the ennui that has driven her to this point has become total, that the objects in her life may have been destroyed but the habits that are the extension and complement to these objects can only be destroyed with her death.

But that is not, I think, the real power of that gesture. I am reminded of Derrida's line on death : "chaque fois unique, la fin du monde"; Death is the end of the world, unique each time. Essentially, once the pills are down her throat, she is dead, walking dead, a zombie. To switch this light off requires her to make a massive investment in the persistence of the world outside of her being, so much so that one wonders if it could be read as an utterly reduced grain, the tiniest fragment of universal behaviour.

Perhaps it is just drive, unsatisfied even by death itself, perhaps it represents that even at the ultimate extreme there is no 'outside' to escape to, but the gesture worked magnificently as a cinematic punctum, pricking me; a subject who, just like everybody else is always already dead.

ooof...

"What is it, now, to chew carrots? Why this plural? Could there ever be more than one of them? Could this question even have meaning? Could one even speak of the chewing of a carrot, and if so how, why, to whom, with what onto-teleo-theological animus?"
- Eagleton 'haunts' the prose of Derrida, in Marxism without Marxism from Ghostly Demarcations.