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Presentation at Crossing Lines

Crossing Lines is an on-going collaboration between the Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR) and London Independent photography (LIP).

My presentation slides on the dialectic between the spaces of representation and the representation of spaces in the context of the regeneration of the Greenwich Peninsula is available here. The final part shows some of my pictures of the ‘rim’ in-between neighbourhoods (the infamous A102M), as well as the rim between interior and exterior of residential housing.

The presentation is a Pdf file created in Open Office. The photographs have been edited with The Gimp, free and open-source photo editing software. I run both programmes on Ubuntu system.

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2010 02 16 pa_card Blogging the City Comments (1)

Pineal Eye

The pinnacle was the cupola of the temple in Jerusalem, notably a hole in order to allow the symbolic ascension of Christ. For Bataille, the pineal eye will mark the hole at the top, the highest point not only in the panorama but also in the hierarchy: pinea derives from pine cone, cupola. ‘The pineal eye is not an organ but a “fantasy” or a “myth”: it is neither a model, nor a copy: it is an image with no resemblance. According to this reading of Battaile, then, the pineal eye cannot be made object of communication, and as a result, it is inscribed ‘outside the the structures of transmission of knowledge whose rules imply that only the repeatable can be thought’ ((D. Hollier, The writings of George Bataille, 121)) . Moreover, this image occupies a phallic position produced by the dialectic erection/castration: on one hand, the human form lends itself to complete erectness; on the other, the panoramic view, the eyes on the horizon are excluded from the movement of vertical erection. In his own words “Man’s gaze is emasculated”. There is in fact a premium for the positions at the edge, or for the taller ones, from which the view is not obstructed by other office buildings, it is unconditionate on the city as abstract, from above and at distance: ‘The demand for a long view means that the symbolic capital of a building is linked not only to its site but also to the tower as a building type with a service core surrounded by a rim of rentable space…corporate culture seeks to inhabit tall buildings in lower rise districts. The towers grow ever upwards and outwards, the quest is for both height and dispersal’ (Dovey, cited; 115-119).

‘It is this failure of virile verticality that the pineal eye would come to fill in for [as experience of] castration, which therefore is not an absence of virility. It is rather something that constitutes virility. Sexual emasculation comes to atone for the emasculation of the gaze…Although it menaces the phallus in reality, castration, thus, is what constitutes symbolic phallocentrism’ ((D. Hollier, cited: ‘Castration, no doubt, makes the phallus disappear, but at the same time this disappearance provides its real status, because it is the very essence of the phallus that it be lacking. The phallus is produced by that which it denies it. It is only a reappropriation of the negative)) .

So, how does this symbolic element manifest itself? More pragmatically, Kim Dovey applies discourse analysis to 72 brochures, phamphlets, and advertising spots, about office towers and tall storeys, as an entry point into global corporate culture. If towers above 10-20 storeys started exceeding their functional efficiency and the dominant views are lost as more towers occupy the skyline, she asks, how can we justify in economic terms their erection (lapsus)? Drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic capital, in fact, we can make up for the difference, that sense of distinction given by the symbolic (literally power, hierarchy, fertility, height), aesthetic (uniqueness of form, landmarks), or mythological ‘aura’ (timelessness: past and future are magically blend together): signs which need to be built in a chain of signifiers by way of, for instance, reflecting the primary values of those towards whom they are directed, that is the corporate elite. Advertising is in fact the primary circuit through which the symbolic capital manifests itself. Again, as Bataille before, there is a need of decoding the myths of advertising as ideology, to articulate the experience into which the corporate executive is induced. On this there are a few pictures in my photoblog, a series called “You Can”.

‘The advertising portrays an ideal rather than a reality; it distorts as it mythologizes. Distorsions are also indications of the ideals and values that may be driving the image-making process’ ((K. Dovey, Framing Places, 1999: 108, Routledge))

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2009 02 25 pa_card Dreaming the City
Framing the City
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Framing the City

‘To Frame’ is an ambiguous term with at least two meanings: a) enclose, box in, case, encase, mount, surround and; b) formulate, conceive, establish, create, plan, map out, plot, sketch, draw up, draft, shape, form, model, fashion, mould, forge, assemble, put together, build, set up, erect, construct, set in context.

According to Kim Dovey (1999), ‘architecture and urban design ‘frames’ space, both literally and discursively. In the literal sense, everyday life ‘takes place’ and action is structured and shaped by the decision of designers. As a form of discourse, built form constructs and frames meanings. Places tell us stories; we read them as spatial text’. Famous artist and architect Victor Pasmore said:

‘Artist and architect speak the same language…Urban environment is an artificial landscape so the process of constructing it is nor unlike making a pictorial composition through which you move imaginatively…Space is a function of feeling’.

But, it is in the interplay between the literal and discursive meanings of ‘framing’ that architecture re-produces, mediates, and constructs power relationships. Remember Benjamin’s idea that we experience architecture dis-attentively: we take the built environment for granted, we walk through, gaze about, even touch around, without noticing any more. More precisely, he writes:

“The condition of consciousness in its multiple patterns of sleep and awakening has only to be transferred from the individual to the collective. To the latter of course many things are internal that are external to the individual: architecture, fashion, yes, even the weather are in the interior of the collective what organ sensations, feelings of illness or health are in the interior of individual. And so long as thay persist in unconscious and amorphous dream form, they are just as much natural processes as the digestive process, respiration, etc. They stand in the cycle of the ever-identical until the collective gets its hands on them politically, and history emerges out of them” ((W. Benjamin, V, p.492 [K l, 5]))

Dovey, again:

‘This relegation of built form to the unquestioned frame is the key to its relation to power. The more that the structures and representations of power can be embedded in the framework of everyday life, the less questionable they become and the more effectively they can work. This is what lends built form a prime role as ideology. It is what Bourdieu calls the ‘complicitous silence’ of place as a framework to life that is its deepest associations with power’ ((Kim Dovey, ‘Framing Places: Mediating Power in the Built Form’, 1999, London, Routledge)) .

The challenge is then the necessity to unpack this relationship, because built form seems to frame both action and representation simultaneously.

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2009 02 06 pa_card Framing the City Comments (0)

A place for art in place-making?

[keywords: art integrated in urban design, modernist art, permanent features of the landscape, agents and commissions]

There is a sense in which the extensive use of arts in public development helps to marginalise communities rather than regenerate them. Urban development for instance has been increasingly creating ‘sharply delineated (geographic and conceptual) zones of success which define counter spaces of failure, and separate monolithic corporate culture, which increasingly stands for the city, from the diversity of street culture…set up an adversarial social model: good affluence against defiling deprivation’ ((M. Miles, ‘Arts, Space and the City’, 1997, Routledge)) . The issue of the audience is of course central, so it is the question of who might feel as part of it (remember J. Jacob’s New Urbanism and S. Zukin’s ‘pacification by cappuccino’?). Besides, arts-led regeneration has often the side effect of increasing property prices, and further  can cause residual residents to be priced-out (gentrification). Finally, arts can provide a helpful hand to the problem of image, recently associated to mega projects (e.g. Canary Wharf), in which the ‘beautiful’ is often mixed up with the ‘opportune’ and the ‘good’. Professionals of the place-making, art experts, space designers, are often brought in, increasing the sense of detachment of locals.

‘Art in development aids this socially divisive process by aestheticizing it, in ignoring the social impact of development, art is complicit in the consequent social fragmentation’ (cited: 106).

Generally speaking, most of the commissions are given either to make a place or a community (sometimes even give them a heart!), or to give a sense of visual cohesion to the whole: in this context, art is used as instrument of pacification, filtered by funding structures and their sanitizing effects. ‘No one seems to propose art as adding difference, or what Sennett terms ‘disorder’, to a site’ (Miles, cit: 127). There would be no funding, no commission, no residency! Imagine that!

‘Art in urban development is a case of hegemony [in Gramscian terms] in which the status quo, that is, freedom for capital to increase and the unfreedom for the majority of the population to determine the conceptualization of the city, is preserved, it locates art in a domain which is outside political contantion…perhaps this is exacly the kind of function for which modernist art is suited’ (Miles, cit: 131).

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2009 02 04 pa_card Framing the City
Imaging the City
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Space, time, and…architecture

Is architecture a three dimensional space? Nobody would really argue with this at first glance. But what about ‘time’? Isn’t it an intrinsic element of place-making? And what if we add the mental projection of the unconscious? But, at the end of the day, isn’t it the body which inhabits and sets in motion the architectural space? And what ‘to inhabit” means? To dwell, for sure, but also to cover and protect, an almost tangible status of the body (from the Latin, habitare, and the Italian abito, both dress and address, in German wand, wall and screen, and gewand, garment and clothing. But also, abitudine, that is, habituation, practise, what people do without paying too much attention to. They all have the same root). As film theorist Giuliana Bruno ((G. Bruno, Public Intimacy’, 2007, MIT Press)) writes:

‘We inhabit space tactilely by way of habit, and tangibly so. A haptic bond links sheltering to clothing the body. To occupy a space is to wear it. A building, like a dress is worn and wears out’.

What are other links between Fashion and Architecture? I think also of Benjamin’s Thesis XIV in which ‘Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s leap into the past. This jump, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class give the commands’.

Anthony Vidler insists that ‘Architecture now operates as a psychic mechanism, constructing its subjects in time and space’. Drawing from Jacques Lacan, and his intuition that ‘architecture is organized around a void’, it’s that hidden reality attempting to encircle emptiness, Vidler (2005) writes:

‘Architectural space, in its role as a stimulator of mental introjection (memory) and physical and psychical projection (event), still retains its primordial power to capture the body’.

But we could try to push this discourse a little bit further, focusing on the spatial products in Teflon format: space of entertainment, consumption, and logistics. These spatial products ‘act not only as a glyph or monument to an overt political text, but as heavy information that becomes a nuanced, unexpressed subtext of action or practice’ ((Keller Easterling, ‘Enduring Innocence’, 2005, MIT Press)) . Moreover,

‘Logistic spatial products make vivid the fact that architecture is a theatre of activity – consequential sequencing of organizations, activities, claims, and exchanges. Architecture is a technology, the medium of an open platform storing both structure and content. The information it stores, as both data and persuasion, is literally a product, property, or currency’ (cited: 2-3, my emphasis).

Similarly, George Battaille writes that architecture is a sort of religion which brings forth the power it represents, the event it celebrates, the space it encircles, the performance it stages, ‘it is identical to the space of representation; it always represents something other than itself, from the moment that it becomes distinguished from mere building…this extends to language where architectural metaphors are very common. These metaphors seem for us too inevitable to see them as sought-after literary effects. Their cliché’ nature and their anonymity are, however, an indication that they are not innocent, but rather surreptitiously accomplishing some ideological tasks for which they are the instruments. The term ‘structure’ itself it is not the least of evidence. That it is used today to describe practically all organizations and all systems shows just how far the domination extends’ ((Denis Hollier, ‘Against Architecture: the writings of George Battaile’, 1998:32-34, MIT Press )) .

‘This metaphore provides the system’s form in every area where it appears. Which results in the repression of anything resembling play, exteriority, or alterity. Otherness is excluded; it has no other place than outside. In an exterior which, reduced to silence, has no voice in the matter…the ideology function of architecture: it does not produce copies, but models. It does not imitate an order, but constitutes it: whether the order of the world or of society. In its most accomplished stage, architecture ‘imitates’ nature itself, it ‘reproduces’ the armonious system of cosmic laws’ (ibidem).

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2009 01 31 pa_card Framing the City
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Photographer and the City

‘Indeed, almost every characteristic Walter Benjamin associates with the flaneur might be associated with the film director [and photographer] with little or no distortion. An eye for detail, for the neglected and the chance; a pendant for joining reality and reverie; a distanced vision, apart from that distracted and unselfconscious existence of the crowd; a fondness for the marginal and the forgotten: these are the traits of flaneur and filmmaker alike’ (A. Vidler, ‘Warped Space’, 2001: 116).

Anthony Vidler is an internationally recognized scholar, theorist and critic of modern and contemporary architecture widely known for his essays on the most pressing debates in the field today.

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2008 11 20 pa_card Framing the City
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