SEMINAR/STUDIO ‘Y’ (WHY BOTHER?) - PROSPECTUS

Metaphysical Architectures(s) / Discursive-Aesthetic Territories

“The Philosophy of the (Ir)Real” …
See - http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/pdfs.html

PRECIS

Since Theodor Adorno, or the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Habermas, Benjamin, et alia) in specific, the very idea of metacritique implies a critical, rigorous assault on the exigencies and spectral doubling of instrumentalized (ideological) systems -- that is, cultural systems, totalizing, aesthetic (provisional), or otherwise. In the latter case of ‘doubling’, this critique includes the seemingly paradoxical, negative and catastrophic requirement of an ongoing production of a perhaps obviously unsustainable demolition of instrumentalizations of instrumentalizations; i.e., taking apart the half-shadowy justifications that hide the true agenda of incipient and/or rampant cultural hegemony -- paroxysms of contingency, in other words. While Adorno approached the metaphysical underbelly of such things (the philosophical truths or lies embedded in the apparatus of such cultural production), he also stopped short of the same for then good reasons. Today, with rampant technology advancing rapidly and rapaciously on the last frontier of subjectivity itself, resistance also requires proposing a positive critique, or the ‘Yes, Yes’ following on the ‘No, No’ of negative dialectics -- the former the Nietzschean double affirmation of creative jouissance as antidote to rote determinism.

In Architecture, today, such a critique implies a reworking/troubling of issues central to Modernity’s quest for authenticity, transparency, and objectivity -- an agenda, arguably, originating with Renaissance illuminism, but present anyway in all forms of architectural mimesis (production). The issues attendant to such a critique include searching for and applauding nascent, present, and past forms of heresy and insurrection, or positive queries of the architectural imaginary (the noumenal, architectural ‘thing in itself’), and, as a result, the positing of a possible radical re-alignment of Architecture’s formal-artistic merit with purely abstract, if not utopian (insurrectional) aspects of practice; the latter invoking the ‘futural’ (possible-impossible) ontological interior site of all architectural representation in and for itself, notwithstanding, however, claims, here and again, that such a site hides the murder of the Real, or, at the least, an elective-mythic nothingness. While revisiting the architectural imaginary resurrects the spurious idea of architectural autonomy, it does so to restore the primary coordinates of architecture as an edifying, intellectual discipline before production; i.e., a putative ‘before’ consistent with indestructible, irreducible a priori (Kantian, transcendental or purely ‘formal’) principles present in all acts of intellection.

As a variant of critical theory (a modern-day variant of the age-old, Platonic-Socratic questioning of assumptions, e.g., implicit and explicit forms of expression as determined by rote contingency, or the generation of contingent metaphors for/against Truth/the Real), the very notion of metacritique contains an implicit moral imperative, as does Philosophy, and has resurfaced (again) as a means of tackling corrupted structural and post-structural (linguistic and rhetorical) games in present-day architectures that appear to have all but capitulated to Late-Capitalist hegemony (i.e., Capitalism Triumphant, or the militant capitalism of empire). Such a critique today necessarily includes assaults on merely aesthetic architectural form-making, computer-generated or otherwise, and gorgeous but empty-headed architectures plugged straight into the dark heart of the capitalist city as deluxe real estate (e.g., signature, celebrity architecture for the new global elite, a renascent plutocracy without borders), plus the synthetic allure (allusionary, Deleuzionary, and illusionary) of so-called Landscape Urbanism; the latter an amalgam announcing almost nothing quite Real.

In disciplines that only appear unrelated to Architecture, there are signs that abstract, universalizing thought (as in the works of Alain Badiou and others of a decidedly post-Marxist persuasion) has returned with a vengeance to battle persistent/semi-tragic vestiges (fragments) of post-modern, nihilist posturing. Here is the passage through nihilism prophesized by Nietzsche and problematized by Tafuri and Cacciari, but a passage as yet unresolved. In philosophy, art, and photography, for example, signs exist that such rigorous and extreme precepts have produced exceptional works that both resurrect lost and announce new-found truths. As such, Architecture itself is poised once again at the precipice; that is, it is long overdue for a stringent metacritique of its very own, oftimes compromised or unknown (and unacknowledged) resources. Such a task invokes, therefore, the necessary (elusive/ineluctable) figure of the Angel of Architecture (after Klee, Kraus, Benjamin, Cacciari’s Angelus Novus).

Seminar/Studio Y will tackle these issues through highly-discursive acts of internal sabotage (self-analysis), investigations of parallel forms of ‘thought-praxis’, the pursuit and explication of project-based heresies and insurrections, and a sustained assault on the fashionable, but mostly questionable (hubristic) post-critical games currently masquerading as the new architectural avant-garde. 

BIBLIOGRAPHIES/DOSSIERS

Photography & Its Other (‘The Real’) - Cartier-Bresson, Giacometti, + Yves Bonnefoy ...
Photographie(s) - Struth, Ruff, Kenna, Henson, Sugimoto, Roversi ...
Poststructuralism as ‘Way Out’ - Lévinas, Derrida, Marion, Chrétien ... 
Heresies - Bataille, Blanchot, Klossowski ...
Post-Marxism(s) - Zizek, Badiou, Zupancic, Agamben ...
Psychoanalytical Anthropologies - Jacques Lacan, René Girard ...
Art & the Void - Yves Klein + Restany (Fire Works) ...
Art & Catachresis - William Kentridge (Magic Flute, Black Box/Chambre Noire) ...
Architecture(s) - Unauthorized Eisenman(s) (+ forms of Formalism) ...
Modernism(s) + Anti-Modernism(s) - Foster, Krauss, Bois, Buchloh ...
Cinema(s) - Godard, Resnais, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Greenaway, Angelopoulos ...

TANGENTS/OUTTAKES

Antinomies - Absolute/Contingent, Here/There, Now/Then, Before/After, Inside/Outside, Architecture/Ground, Self/Other ...

Topologie(s) - Knots, structures, complexes, folds, fields ...

Structuralism + Its Other ... Milieu(x) + Anti-Milieu(x) ... Times + Other Times: Diachrony, synchrony, teleological + eschatological gestures (moments) + the ‘Now’ (‘X’ as crossroads of representational systems) ... Metaphysical + Existential idylls (+ Truth as Event ...) ...

Formal Law(s) - http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/architectural_imaginary.rtf

GK/LANY (DRAFT 08/30/06)

CV - http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/cv2.html