DRUMMING ABOUT DRUMMING

Aureli:

“The “silence” of Mies’s architecture has often been interpreted by historians and critics as reflecting and incorporating the uprooting nature of modernity while defining a critical distance from it.

He gathers a mob of writers who make this proposition about Mies: Tafuri, Cacciari, Hays, Mertins, Wallenstein. I find it completely implausible to see Mies as a critical, ironic or even subversive figure. What exactly is this ‘critical distance’ Mies maintains from modernity? Was Mies actually critical of modernity? I was reminded of this from Graham Harman:

“there are those who remain especially intrigued by artworks about art, films about filming, self-referential cabaret shows, fireworks that explode into shapes of themselves, dog biscuits in the form of dogs, and drummers who drum songs about drumming – a kind of ‘drumming at the limit.’ In each case, the supposed cleverness comes from the fact that the activity in question not only happens, but also refers to itself ‘as’ what it is. But this fashionable trend only represents the worst of metaphysics in the old-fashioned sense, since it declares self-reflexivity to be a privileged moment in the relation between the two faces of being” (p. 75).

Being critical is one possibility of architecture, but the attempt to make criticality the defining characteristic of architecture, as Aureli does, is just strange.

KRAUSS/EISENMAN VS. LATOUR/HARMAN ON OBJECTS

Peter Eisenman on the “autonomy” of architecture:

[Rosalind] Krauss has said that to preserve the singularity of objects we must cut them off from their previous modes of legitimation. This idea will be seen to be important to any project of autonomy (p. 90).

This is completely counter to Bruno Latour’s description of objects (he calls them “actants” to remove the connotation of passivity), which is that they become progressively more singular as they increase their attachments. Harman describes Latour’s position:

Actants are always completely deployed in their relations with the world, and the more they are cut off from these relations, the less real they become (p. 19).

Krauss’s statement (and Eisenman’s use of it) seem naïve to me. Overcoming oppressive modes of legitimation and authority is great, but to extend this to the general claim that objects are more themselves by being more cut off is essentialism.

Aureli:

“It is precisely within the rise of the space of urbanisation that architecture as the project of the finite, and thus separated, form(s) can be read as critical” (p. x)

The idea that architecture should be primarily critical is to me like saying that all writing should be critical. In my experience, it’s always accompanied by the argument that architecture is and should be a privileged subset of building—an exclusive art.

AURELI ON THE CITY VS. URBANISATION

Pier Vittorio Aureli, in The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (2011), distinguishes between the city, “the political dimension of coexistence”, and urbanisation, “the economic logic of social management” (p. x). The city is a political space, and urbanisation is an economic space. He claims urbanisation is managerial, driven by private concerns, oriented towards infrastructural functions, and tending towards a totalitarian whole. The city, by contrast, he characterises as agonistic, public, self-critical, and immune to totalitarianism.

Aureli justifies this distinction by appeal to the Greek one between polis, governed by technē politikē and oikos, governed by technē oikonomikē. He finds this reflected (through a little semantic gymnastics) in the Roman civitas and urbs. This appeal-to-the-wisdom-of-the-ancients isn’t convincing. It’s far from clear that Greek or Roman cities provide a good model for contemporary cities or politics.

To my mind, distinguishing between politics and economics is wrong and completely artificial. If that’s all Aureli’s distinction between cities and urbanisation rests on, then I think that’s wrong too.

Levi Bryant is one of the most interesting philosophers writing at the moment, in my opinion. Like Harman, Bennett, and Morton, he rejects ‘correlationism’: the belief that whenever we talk about anything, we are only talking about how humans relate to that thing. He is a realist:

[Ontological realism] is the thesis that the world is composed of objects, that these objects are varied and include entities as diverse as mind, language, cultural and social entities, and objects independent of humans such as galaxies, stones, quarks, tardigrades and so on. Above all, ontological realisms refuse to treat objects as constructions of humans. (p. 18)

I think a perspective like this is essential for thinking about cities, infrastructures and public space. His The Democracy of Objects has just been published (2011). You can download a digital copy from the Open Humanities Press, or purchase a hard-copy. Great cover art by Tammy Lu.