October Site Updates

I added the following books to my library:



Unlike the following, this book is a fairly easy read on the topic of the role of architecture in regards to rampant capitalism. Should architects actively consider their work as "product" or "holistic branding" (ie sell out like Kevin Erwin Kelley) or maintain a more skeptical view of the carnival of commodification while attempting to position the concrete elements of the built environment in opposition to unchecked consumption? BONUS: Great introduction by Kenneth Frampton




I tend to read multiple books at the same time. One advantage of this is it helps me to draw serendipitous parallels between divergent texts. Another advantage is it allows me to take a mental break after running my cerebrum at a wall for a hundred pages. Like Henri LeFebvre's Urban Revolution this is one of those books. Two essays written a period apart by Negri, referring to earlier writings, many of which were written while he was in jail in Italy, (some are non-existant) this writing examines the importance of time in Marxist thought within the framework of Italian post-Marxism. Difficult enough perhaps to begin with the sheer prolixity and demanding concepts ensure that I will probably be nursing this one through New Years but I have gained some valuable insights so far... BONUS: Sexy cover that has no relation whatsoever to the thought inside!



The classic mental gymnastics of one of the most original thinkers of the past century, this collection of essays uses the paintings of the surrealist Réné Magritte to argue that, within the system of Modern thought, people falsely equate mere visual representation with reality. I find this question quite pertinent in these current times of War received by video feed and government by dubious proxy. Perhaps the scandalous antics of the present administration are just the defining culmination of modern systems of thought in action? Terrifying! BONUS: confuse the hell out of fellow passengers on the metro/bus/plane etc who are convinced that there is indeed a pipe on the cover!

I'm aware that most of you have probably read this already... we'll I haven't so cut me some slack!


Also, if there are any books you would like to recommend please leave them in the comments section as I love a new read.


In addition I added the following blogs and journals to the links bar:

Freedom of Spoke

A good friend from high school is riding over 3,000 miles from California to St. Augustine Florida on his bike to raise money for research into Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. This is his blog.

Abstract Dynamics

Adam Ash

AnArchitecture

Street Use

Architecture (establishment) as totalitarian dystopia

I've been busy with a lot of petty annoyances (more on that in a future post) and projects, so I just ran across a fascinating part by part comparison of the architectural establishment and Oceania in George Orwell's 1984. Leave it to Norman Blogster over at Part IV to break it down like this:

“‘The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.’

Orwell divides society into three segments - the Inner Circle, the Outer Circle and the Proletariat. The Inner and Outer Circles are different levels of membership of the Party. The Party is quite clearly the architectural establishment, not the RIBA as you might think. The following quotes are taken from Part 1, Chapter 7.

‘Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that the Party was trying to achieve. Great areas of it, even for a Party member, were neutral and non-political, a matter of slogging through dreary jobs, fighting for a place on the Tube... The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering - a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons - a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting...’

You can think of the proles as the general public - those who are unfettered by the brainwashing of architectural education:

‘...the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules. In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance... To keep them in control was not difficult.’

The Outer Circle are the architects and the students of architecture. They tow the Party line, not really questioning why, just happy to be members in a privileged position (last paragraph of Part2, Chapter 5):

‘In the ramifications of party doctrine she had not the faintest interest. Whenever he began to talk of the principles of Ingsoc, doublethink, the mutability of the past, and the denial of objective reality, and to use Newspeak words, she became bored and confused and said that she never paid any attention to that kind of thing... Talking to her, he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.’

Finally, the Inner Circle. This is where the real power lies and is composed of the starchitects, the architectural press, the RIBA (FAIA) and the architectural academics. There is an implicit agreement between this set who direct the Party.
In 1984, we learn most about the Inner Circle and its relation to the Outer Circle when the hero Winston Smith starts to read a smuggled copy of "The theory and practice of oligarchical collectivism" - the book of the Party. It's online here. I'm quoting from Chapter III - War and Peace:

‘In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. By the standards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private motor-car or helicopter -- set him in a different world from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call 'the proles'’

...and...

‘War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war... In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world.’

It is this inert orthodoxy of power and intellectual control that causes those outside the status quo to either lose faith and crumble or, otherwise, become ridiculous characters of themselves through their advocacy of their own position. I was present at a lecture recently by one of these "outsider" thinkers who was hellbent on convincing everybody that his position was the way of the future. After the lecture finally ended somewhere past the three hour mark an influential member of the audience was heard to comment "the longer he tried to convince us of his intelligence, the less I believed it." If unyielding self-advocacy becomes a parody then how is one to fight the entrenched mass of the overlords establishment?


That is a question I may address in the future, but until then I remain open to suggestions.


Read more here:
Part I: The Party
Part II: Doublethink and Duckspeak
Part III: Hate Week, Hangings and More

On the subject of torture...

Time I weighed in on the political events of last week:

Back in 1996, a vote for the War Crimes Act, which passed both houses with overwhelming support, could have been considered a vote for the U.S. to follow the Geneva Conventions to the letter. When a House Judiciary Committee panel first considered the War Crimes Act in June 1996, John McNeil, then a senior deputy counsel at the Department of Defense, testified that the bill was "an opportunity for members of Congress to endorse the idea that the United States, as a political matter, should be seen as fully in conformity with its international obligations in this very sensitive area."

But at the time Republicans were really focused on making sure U.S. courts would be able to prosecute war crimes committed against American citizens, not by them. Inhofe took to the Senate floor that August to say the War Crimes Act would protect "our young troops" in the event "a crime is perpetrated against them."

It was unthinkable back then that it might be the United States that was systematically violating the Geneva Conventions. "There was never any hint or clue that this might be applied to us," stated Gary Solis, an expert on the law of war at Georgetown University. Elisa Massimino, Washington director of Human Rights First, explained, "No one ever questioned that the U.S. would comply with the full range of the Geneva Conventions obligations."

That is, no one doubted the U.S. would comply until early this month...

So, therefore, when being part of the international community will help protect the lives of our soldiers the Geneva Convention is our friend, but when we are busy killing our own troops through incompetence and negligence and we justify torture as being a good PR tool that will help Joe Sixpack wrongly believe that the actions of this administration (and its war on a philosophical construct) have made us safer, then it is perfectly acceptable to pull a bigger about face than Lieutenant Kerry ever perpetrated.

Torture, as so many have noted, is simply in the worst interests for our country by not only inspiring (and rightly so) hatred around the world, but by also empowering out darkest motivations:

Granted such liberty in dealing with prisoners, some officers started to enjoy themselves. They made up games, forcing prisoners to dance, smearing glue on their heads, stripping them naked, pouring frigid water over them. Sometimes guards had too much fun and a prisoner died. Then prison-appointed doctors, who often participated in the interrogations, wrote up fictive autopsy reports.

America?
No. This passage describes Soviet Gulags.

Taken from an interview in Harper's historian Kate brown notes that

Declassified FBI and U.S. Army files detailing abuses of detainees in U.S. detention centers uncannily echo Soviet NKVD reports. They recount late-night roundups of civilians and describe prisoners held in chambers of extreme heat or cold, chained naked to the floor without food and water for days on end, defecating on themselves, beaten (some to death), forced to dance, to lick their shoes and body parts, to crawl around, and to bark like dogs. American doctors and psychiatrists helped devise methods of inflicting pain and fear to elicit confessions, and they signed false reports when detainees died in custody.

Frightening.

But as Paul Rieckhoff (an infantry officer who served in Iraq) explains the new stance on terror has soldiers, well, terrified:

IN 2002, I attended the Infantry Officer Basic Course at Fort Benning, Ga. At “the Schoolhouse,” every new Army infantry officer spent six months studying the basics of his craft, including the rules of war.

I remember a seasoned senior officer explaining the importance of the Geneva Conventions. He said, “When an enemy fighter knows he’ll be treated well by United States forces if he is captured, he is more likely to give up.”

A year later on the streets of Baghdad, I saw countless insurgents surrender when faced with the prospect of a hot meal, a pack of cigarettes and air-conditioning. America’s moral integrity was the single most important weapon my platoon had on the streets of Iraq. It saved innumerable lives, encouraged cooperation with our allies and deterred Iraqis from joining the growing insurgency.

But those days are over. America’s moral standing has eroded, thanks to its flawed rationale for war and scandals like Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and Haditha. The last thing we can afford now is to leave Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions open to reinterpretation, as President Bush proposed to do and can still do under the compromise bill that emerged last week...

But the fight over Article 3 concerns not only Al Qaeda and the war in Iraq. It also affects future wars, because when we lower the bar for the treatment of our prisoners, other countries feel justified in doing the same. Four years ago in Liberia, in an attempt to preserve his corrupt authority, President Charles Taylor adopted the Bush administration’s phrase “unlawful combatants” to describe prisoners he wished to try outside of civilian courts. Today Mr. Taylor stands before The Hague accused of war crimes.

via Adam Ash
More in the LA Times

But what do I know?
I'm just a useless architecture student not an omnipotent congressman...

...and we must be safer sine we red-stamped torture last week because today liquids have been allowed back on planes