(RE)THINKING THE COMPLEX

RED, GREEN, BLUE: A PROSEMINAR

"That which fire has shone upon retains as a result an ineffaceable color. That which fire has caressed, loved, adored, has gained a store of memories and lost its innocence." --Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938)

SUBLIME AESTHETICS?: MILIEU(X) & ANTI-MILIEU(X)

"What philosophy tries to articulate are contingencies: potential relational modulations of contexts that are not yet contained in their ordering as possibilities that have been recognized and can be practically regulated. Philosophy’s back-flow is to a point of pre-possibility. It is a form of contingent reason whose ‘(non)-object’ is the practically impossible. The impossible is not the opposite or simple negative of the possible. It is the indeterminate but positive potential for possibilities to be added to particular contexts." --Brian Massumi, "Too-Blue: Colour-Patch for an Expanded Empiricism", Cultural Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2 (2000), p. 204

SYLLABUS 1.0 - AN IMPOSSIBLE-POSSIBLE WAY OUT
Aesthetics - "n. 1. the branch of philosophy dealing with such matters as the beautiful, the ugly, the sublime, the comic, etc., as applicable to the fine arts, with a view to establishing the meaning and validity of critical judgments concerning works of art, and the principles underlying or justifying such judgments." --Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary (1996)

I. SUI GENERIS?

TRAJECTORY 1: THE WORLD-SOUL (THE SUBJECT/OBJECT SYRRHESIS) - Wordsworth’s Self/Other (The Prelude), Kierkegaard’s immanence of Self, Emerson’s Oversoul (World-Soul) and Monism, Hegel’s dialectical historicism (The Phenomenology of Spirit), Nietzsche’s Emersonian Superman, Heidegger’s House of Language (hauntings and moods of Becoming), Post-Contemporary Nothingness (nihilism) from Antonioni’s trilogy to the return of the ‘Oversoul’ in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky ...

TRAJECTORY 2: RELATIONAL JOUISSANCE - Radical empiricism, radical phenomenology, radical immanence - The rhizomatic universe versus the paradigmatic ‘world’ (ideologies and anti-ideologies) - Neo-vitalism(s), neo-Bergsonisme, Surrationalisme (Surréalisme), Situationisme - Architecture(s) of différ(a)nce(?) - The affective sublime in post-contemporary media arts ...

TRAJECTORY 3: DISCOURS NATUREL (PAYS DE TENDRE) - Remembrance of Things Past (Proust) - Scudéry and Rousseau - Topographical and topological (subjective) territories - Ontologies / Ipseity & Alterity - Forms of alienation and forms of formalism (as antidote) - Types of topology (literary, cinematic and architectural) - Gesturalism: A Way Out ...

II. SUB SPECIES AETERNITATIS?

"The simplest, most elementary mark, the cross, was interpreted by Mondrian in a mystical sense before Le Corbusier saw in it, minus by minus, the sign of positivity; this mark brings together the masculine and feminine elements in the coitus of vertical and horizontal." --Hubert Damisch, "Toward a Tomb for Adolf Loos", Grey Room 01 (Fall 2000)

SECTION 1: THE SONIC SUBLIME (‘ICELAND’) - Music and Media Arts - The figure of ‘Iceland’ in trip-pop music and new media, as situated at ‘the edge of the world’, and, therefore, an impossible-possible site for something else altogether. The so-called ‘waste-place’ as the site for a return to natural (and affective) grammars, linguistic and sonic signifiers. / Some names: Bjork, Emiliana Torrini, Sigur Ros and Floria Sigismondi.

SECTION 2: MILIEU(X) & ANTI-MILIEU(X) - Formalisms and Anti-Formalisms - The disputed terrain of formalism(s) as it confronts various concepts of milieu, performative and otherwise. Formalism as an elective (and cyclical) type of answering the call ‘that calls’ from outside of (‘beyond’) depleted and/or bankrupt forms of representation and ideology. / Some names: Henri Bergson, Karel Teige, Roman Jakobson, Georges Canguilhem / Roger Caillois, Henri Focillon, Yves Klein, James Turrell.

SECTION 3: IDEOLOGICAL VARIANTS (‘CONTESTED SITES’) - Sublime Scare Tactics (Passim) - A tour of the onto-political ground beneath our feet surveying the Lacanian critique of representational orders and the late-modern (and synchronized) works of Zizek and Badiou in particular. Sounding the depths ‘after theory’, including the curious case of the ‘theological turn’. Some names: Descartes / Pascal, Immanuel Kant, Jacques Lacan, Pierre Bourdieu, Günter Grass, Milan Kundera, Vilém Flusser / Susan Sontag, Edward O. Wilson / Richard Rorty, Slavoj Zizek / Alain Badiou.

SECTION 4: LANDSCAPE + ARCHITECTURE = WHAT? - Ground and Its ‘Other’ (Dialectical Diversions) - The always-already established war between disciplines founded on supposed autonomous ground (after Kant?), and the emergent synthesis arguably underway in present-day manifestations of a renascent aesthetics of architecture (under the sign of Architecture as fine art). Symbolic and discursive orders (architectural and otherwise). Some names: Rem Koolhaas, Field Operations, Room 4.1.3, Raoul Bunschoten (Chora), Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Foreign Office Architects, Herzog & de Meuron, Peter Eisenman, Arakawa & Gins.

SECTION 5: INTERTEXTUALITY (THE REAL REAL THING?) - Ontologies / Fields (The Mirror, Distortions, and Deconstructions) - The discursive payload of various structuralist and post-structuralist agendas, not the least of which is the critique of linguistic conventions (semiology and its analogues). Some names: Martin Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida / Hélène Cixous / Julia Kristeva, Umberto Eco.

SECTION 6: PHENOMENOLOGY & RADICAL CONTINGENCY - Oppositions / Alignments - The somewhat conflicted emergence of radical phenomenology and radical empiricism as it comes to reside in the production of environments and the critique of cultural ‘space’. Some names: Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Marion, Brian Massumi / Sanford Kwinter, Liane Lefevre / Alexander Tzonis, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Arakawa & Gins.

SECTION 7: OBJECTS OF ARCHITECTURE - Buildings / Sites / Gardens (The Fusion Thing) - The summary condition of architecture in the modernist era as a pseudo-science versus a fine art (or an aesthetical art) and the recourse to the architectural object in various types of neo-modernism, plus dissenting practices. Some names: Arata Isozaki / Hans Hollein, Richard Serra, Richard Meier, Raimund Abraham, Kenneth Frampton, Daniel Libeskind, Jean Nouvel, Ettore Sottsass / Borek Sipek / Philippe Starck, Hélène Binet / Peter Zumthor.

SECTION 8: URBANISMS - Forms of Space / Landscape Urbanism (/LU/) - The troubled ‘nature’ of urbanism and its recent reification as Landscape Urbanism. Inclusive of Olympic urbanisms, infrastructural and architectonic biases in the production of urban environments and the forever problematized ‘nature’ of ecology (plus its discontents). An analysis of insistent instrumentalities and conditions ‘on the ground’ within the post-industrial city. A survey of datascapes, capital flows, virtualities, dematerializations … ‘Imaginary’ cities: Barcelona / Singapore / Prague / New York / San Francisco. Corporate service bureaus and/versus boutique design firms. A swerve into the back ‘catalogue’ of the AA, Harvard GSD, and Columbia SOA, Princeton SOA, Yale SOA (plus some seminal recent design competitions (e.g., Downsview / Fresh Kills / The World Trade Center). Some names: Peter Eisenman / Jeffrey Kipnis (at Harvard GSD), M. Christine Boyer / William Mitchell (cybercities), George Hargreaves, Peter Walker, Zaha Hadid, Hubert Damisch, Eduardo Bru, Field Operations, Tom Leader / FOA, Koolhaas / Mau, West 8, Room 4.1.3.

SECTION 9: SYNAESTHETIC VOYAGES - Music / Art / Architecture / Photography / Literature (Intertextualities) - The amalgam otherwise known as ‘The Total Work of Art’. An affective landscape of signs, figures, gestures toward synthesis normally co-opted by paradigmatic (superstructural) agencies and/or marginalized in contingent (horizontal) forms of expression, colonization, and -- perhaps -- institutionalized anomie. Some names: André Breton / Giorgio de Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, Eero Saarinen, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Aldo Rossi, John Hejduk, Nick Cave (and the Bad Seeds), Michael Sorkin, Marco Frascari, Kurt Gebauer, Ken Smith, Allen S. Weiss, Georges Descombes, Gilles Tiberghien, Josef Koudelka, Hubertus Amelunxen, Helmut Newton, Struth / Ruff (and Houellebecq).

SECTION 10: DISCOURS NATUREL (CARTE DE TENDRE) - Philosophical Aesthetics - An apparent ‘age-old(e)’ approach to extracting and liberating an affective discourse within natural orders. Nostalgia notwithstanding, an expressionistic mélange of maneuvers aimed straight at structural distress institutionalized under the banner of the paradigmatic, the Absolute, and the Abstract. Des cartes, après Descartes. Some names: Blaise Pascal, Madeleine de Scudéry, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ralph Waldo Emerson / Henry David Thoreau, Gustav Mahler, Erik Satie, Marcel Proust, Martin Heidegger, Ian Hamilton Finlay / Stephen Bann, Massimo Cacciari, Giorgio Agamben, Svetlana Boym.

SECTION 11: EVERYDAY NOTHINGNESS - "The Sphere and the Labyrinth" and no way out? - The purported endgame of history and aesthetics insofar as nothingness (nilhilism) is an intentionally created condition utilized to de-fang, re-route, and/or demolish all possible acts of resistance to the machinic nature of cultural production. Pointing toward Tafuri’s caustic summary judgment regarding the evacuation of all utopian premises within modernist architecture to merely service the market, such a critique also locates within Tafuri’s negative dialectic an impossible-possible Way Out in the form of singularly resistant strains of architectural discourse (and critique) both productive of critical analysis and environments (landscape + architectural milieux) that access the ‘other side of the mirror’ of representation (the problematic of the ‘real Real’) by going through the mirror itself (representation itself). Based on the syrrhesis (the roiled, problematical interdependence) of abstract (‘objective’, positivist) histories and forms of subjectivity. Samples of architectural criticism (and ‘journalism’). Some names: Antonin Artaud, Adolf Loos / Karel Teige, Walter Benjamin, Michelangelo Antonioni, Manfredo Tafuri, Robert Smithson / Michael Heizer, Isamu Noguchi / Louis Kahn, Gordon Matta-Clark, Andrei Tarkovsky / Theo Angelopoulos / Aki Kaurismäki, Werner Herzog, Giuliana Bruno, Richard Serra, Kaja Silverman, Erminia Passannanti, Rosalind Krauss / Yve-Alain Bois / Hal Foster, K. Michael Hays.

Gavin Keeney (07/28/04)

POSTSCR(Y)PTS

"[T]he judgement 'this is beautiful' is only one type of aesthetic judgement. We must examine the other type; 'this is sublime'. In the Sublime, imagination surrenders itself to an activity quite distinct from that of formal reflection. The feeling of the sublime is experienced when faced with the formless or the deformed (immensity or power). It is as if imagination were confronted with its own limit, forced to strain to its utmost, experiencing a violence which stretches it to the extremity of its power." --Gilles Deleuze, Kant's Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984)

The above seminar is taught using slide (and Power Point) lectures, ‘bundled’ illustrative and discursive essays (with tangents and outtakes), hyperlinked (on-line) dossiers, multiple forms of media (film, music, video), as available, and in-class presentation by students of tangents and constellations embedded within the trajectories, sections, and documents provided en passant, as above. The course is designed as a topological knot, indicative of the various exigencies and contingencies present in present-day design and criticism (inclusive of the allied arts). Architecture is presented, as such, as part and parcel of the humanities. The seminar represents the Michelin Green Guide to architectural aesthetics (what to ‘see’ and ‘hear’), versus the Red Guide (what to ‘eat’ and where to ‘stay’/’shop’).

LETTER TO NO ONE / THOUGHT ITSELF 
http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/thought_itself.rtf

THIS DOCUMENT (ON-LINE W/ HYPERLINKS)
http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/map_2004.1.html