I suffered throughout the week, not eating, just drinking. · 5 December 06 by Ray Crowley
Extract from:
Henri Lefebvre on the Situationist International
Interview conducted and translated 1983 by Kristin Ross
Printed in October 79, Winter 1997
K.R: You even wrote an article entitled “You Will All Be Situationists.”
H.L: Oh yes, I did that to help bring about the replacement of Arguments by the Internationale Situationniste. Guy Debord accused me of having done nothing to get it published. Yes, it was Herval who was supposed to publish it. Lucky for me that it didn’t appear because afterwards they would have reproached me for it. But there’s a point I want to go back to — the question of plagiarism. That bothered me quite a bit. Not a lot, just a little bit. We worked together day and night at Navarrenx, we went to sleep at nine in the morning (that was how they lived, going to sleep in the morning and sleeping all day). We ate nothing. It was appalling. I suffered throughout the week, not eating, just drinking. We must have drunk a hundred bottles. In a few days. Five . . . and we were working while drinking. The text was almost a doctrinal resume of everything we were thinking, about situations, about transformations of life; it wasn’t very long, just a few pages, handwritten. They took it away and typed it up, and afterwards thought they had a right to the ideas. These were ideas we tossed around on a little country walk I took them on. With a nice touch of perversity, I took them down a path that led nowhere, that got lost in the woods, fields, and so on. Michele Bernstein had a complete nervous breakdown, she didn’t enjoy it at all. It’s true, it wasn’t urban, it was very deep in the country.
tags: debord, lefebvre, philosophy, process, theory
from Henri Lefebvre: The Production of Space (1974) · 1 December 06 by Ray Crowley
Chapter 6, from the Contradictions of Space to Differential Space, XXI
As an extension of dominated space, leisure spaces are arranged at once functionally and hierarchically. They serve the reproduction of production relations. Space thus controlled and managed constrains in specific ways, imposing its own rituals and gestures, discursive forms, and even models and modulations in space. Hence, this space too is made up of ‘boxes for living in’, of identical ‘plans’ piled one on top of another or jammed next to one another in rows. Yet, at the same time, the body takes its revenge – or at least calls for revenge. It seeks to make itself known – to gain recognition – as generative.
tags: lefebvre, space, theory, urbanfrom Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction · 1 December 06 by Ray Crowley
VI
[..] as man withdraws from the photographic image, the exhibition value for the first time shows its superiority to the ritual value. To have pinpointed this new stage constitutes the incomparable significance of Atget, who, around 1900, took photographs of deserted Paris streets. It has quite justly been said of him that he photographed them like scenes of crime. The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance. They demand a specific kind of approach; free-floating contemplation is not appropriate to them. They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new way. At the same time picture magazines begin to put up signposts for him, right ones or wrong ones, no matter. For the first time, captions have become obligatory. And it is clear that they have an altogether different character than the title of a painting. The directives which the captions give to those looking at pictures in illustrated magazines soon become even more explicit and more imperative in the film where the meaning of each single picture appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones.
tags: philosophy, photography, simulacra, theoryfrom Henri Lefebvre: The Production of Space (1974) · 30 November 06 by Ray Crowley
Chapter 1, XVI
“A conceptual triad has now emerged from our discussion, a triad to which we shall be returning over and over again:
Spatial practice, which embraces production and reproduction, and the particular locations and spatial sets characteristic of each social formation. Spatial practice ensures continuity and some degree of cohesion. In terms of social space, and of each member of a given society’s relationship to that space, this cohesion implies a guaranteed level of competence and a specific level of performance. (c.f Chomsky)
Representations of space, which are tied to the relations of production and to the ‘order’ which those relations impose, and hence to knowledge, to signs, to codes, and to ‘frontal’ relations.
Representational spaces, embodying complex symbolisms, sometimes coded, sometimes not, linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life, as also to art which may come eventually to be defined less as a code of space than as a code of representational spaces.
tags: lefebvre, space, theory, urbanfrom Henri Lefebvre: The Production of Space (1974) · 30 November 06 by Ray Crowley
Chapter 2, XI
In language as in space, there is a before and an after, while the present dominates both past and future. The following, therefore, are perfectly legitimate questions:
- Do the spaces formed by practico-social activity, whether landscapes, monuments or buildings, have meaning?
- Can the space occupied by a social group or several social groups be treated as a message?
- Ought we look upon architectural or urbanistic works as a type of mass medium, albeit an unusual one?
- May a social space viably be conceived of as a language or discourse, dependent upon a determinate practice (reading/writing)?
The answer to the first question must, obviously, be yes.
The second calls for a more ambiguous ‘yes and no’: spaces contain messages – but can they be reduced to messages? It is temoting to reply that they imply more than that, that they embody functions, forms and structures quite unconnected with discourse. This is an issue that calls for careful scrutiny.
As for the third and fourth questions, our replies will have to include the most serious reservations.
tags: lefebvre, space, theory, urbanfrom Henri Lefebvre: The Production of Space (1974) · 30 November 06 by Ray Crowley
Chapter 6, XIX
“Innumerable groups, some ephemeral, some more durable, have sought to invent a ‘new life’ – usually a communal one. With their trials and errors, successes and failures, such communal experiments have so many denigratiors and champions that we can get a fairly clear picture of them. Among the obstacles that they must have run into and the reasons for their failure when it occurs must certainly be numbered by the absence of an appropriated space, the inability to invent new forms.
[...]
In the end, the invention of a space of enjoyment necessarily implies going through a phase of elitism. The elites of today avoid or reject quantitative models of consumption and homogenizing trends. At the same time, though they cultivate the appearance of differences, these elites are in fact indistinguishable from one another. The ‘masses’ meanwhile, among whom genuine differences exist, and who at the deepest (unconscious) level seek difference, continue to espouse the quantitative and the homogeneous. The obvious reason for this is that the masses must survive before they can live.
[...]
There should be therefore be no cause for surprise when a space-related issue spurs collaboration between very different kinds of people, between those who ‘react’ and those who ‘rebel’. Such coalitions around some particular counter-project, promoting a counter-space in opposition to the one embodied in the strategies of power, occur all over the world.”
Current Reading List · 25 November 06 by Ray Crowley
Baudrillard, Jean. L‘échange symbolique et la mort, Englsih; translated by Iain Hamilton Grant. London: Sage. 1993
Lechte, John. Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers. London: Routledge. 1994
Lefebvre, Henri. Production de l’espace, English; translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. 1991
Zielinski, Siegfried. Archaologie der Medien, English; translated by Gloria Custance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2006
tags: lefebvre, philosophy, research, space, theory, zielinskiIMKE course response: 5.10 Postmodernism · 11 October 06 by Ray Crowley
Mauri Kaipainen asks ‘What could follow postmodernism?’
post.postmodern worldviews might derive their absolute_truths through the swarming of individual opinions into a critical mass. The forces which give the swarms shape, direction and velocity may tend to derive energy from the corporate producers of the technologies which allow the virtual community to exist. These absolute_truths are the most efficient manifestation of the capitalist algorithm i.e. marketing & advertising become redundant because eachactant in the swarm feels empowered by making a ‘free choices’ with respect to his/her brand/tribe.
Mauri Kaipainen asks ‘What arguments are there against postmodernism?’
The question of the canon: postmodernism by its nature accepts any text or image as being worthy of equal value analysis. An analysis of Samuel Beckett’s dramatic techniques Vs. the semiotics of a McDonald’s Menu? The Aesthetics of Mondrian Vs. MTV branding. One might argue along the lines of Harold Bloom and George Steiner that the ‘public audience’ requires guidance with respect to what has cultural value in the interest of an developing of maturing society.
Mauri Kaipainen asks ‘How will interactive bottom-up media and new forms of participation change culture and philosophy?’
As can be already seen, the process of cultural production will continue to be devolved into the hands of the time-rich ‘prosumers’ (YouTube, Blogger, Flickr, YourGallery ). When this is combined with the continuing rise of internet based social-networking ( delicious , myspace) exclusive cultural worth and philosophical values may be generated solely through tribes thus making the agencies such as Public TV, National Press, Academics, Cultural Commentators, who were once perceived as semi-objective, redundant. It is worth considering that this uploaded cultural production may generate vast revenues for the providers of the distribution platforms such as Google, Microsoft & Yahoo and the soon to come Venice Project
tags: digitality, philosophy, theory