Birmingham workshop

(output from Joao’s exercise)

A significant text on an insignificant medium

Ok. It’s just a wall. I am aware of that. What do we do with walls? Do we use them? They’re just there, like immobile, unchangeable obstacles in our life-world. But they are not. They are media. They carry meanings and force them on is with the stone-hearted willpower they possess.                                                                                                                                                         Lit on this wall is an apple, the symbol of ultimate temptation, the greatest marketing tool – now that I think of it: the snake laid the foundations for the business school. The word next to it is ‘Adam’s’. But the apple is not his. It was Eve’s. The clothes in the store are for him, to cover up the original sin. So, this text is made out of envy? For Eve?                                       Let’s all shop and forget about original meanings, cover them up and change who we are – never mind the motivation.

1 Gigantic Detail

The boys trousers are down. Here he stands, unknowing what he resembles. Is there someone with a sick mind in this store? Selling sick jokes out of boredom? Or is the precise neatness falling apart? The elastic waistband giving way to gravity, pieces of decency falling to the floor. And I stand and wonder: is this the state of all of us here, following the rules of flow, following eachother, following our paths home into someone’s arms, never sure. Even in the purest space there is sin, on the most proper shining glass an improper speck of dust will gather by invisible forces of static electricity. Or by the elasticity of our morals giving way – to what?

Fascilitating Architecture

Busses go aroung and around in a neverending race to get to a place and transport everyone to nowhere as everything begins again the next morning. Through the night the taxis take over the bustle of people goes around and around the buildings they go. Buildings that wait restlessly in the coloured lights blue and red, no moonlight but horns honking, stoplights switching around. And around they go.

Unfascilitating Architecture

The walls are of glass but you can hardly see through them. Steel rods make up the skeleton but the inside of the construction is empty. Light exudes our of nothingness from the outside of the glass, inside there remains darkness. I could go around it. Without my scrupules I would rather crash into it and shatter the glass, break it’s steelen bones and thrust through it to be free of the chains of building.

Tags: workshop

Concept: The Crystal Palace

The Crystal Palace as a tool
Sloterdijk is rather cynical and Eurocentric. We don’t have to agree with him, at all. But his concept of a Crystal Palace can provide a valuable tool to focus our practical and creative research. It can be seen as a mechanism of in- and exclusion (where, for whom, how?). If we ask the questions:

How can we tell who’s in and who’s out?
Is the Crystal Palace a home? -> if not, what is it then?

Some imagery & brainstorms:
– the historical crystal palace, world exhibitions.
– glass (mirrors, semi-transparant, greenhouses, breaking glass, danger)
– posh, white-picket fenced neighbourhoods (when you are heavily in debt to afford this living in the crystal palace, are you at home or homeless?)
– the people who live on the outside, living on the wasteland of the crystal palace (or are they still inside?)
– mimicking and replication -> Bourdieu: whoever is ‘in’ understands the rules as embodied knowledge (cultural capital), whoever mimicks the rules is not truly ‘in’.
– What is real and what is false about the crystal palace? does it exist at all?

Relationship to other theory:
Sloterdijk uses Dostojevski, Heidegger and Walter Benjamin, among others, to position his theory of the crystal palace in a context.
Concerning Ingold, who could be a primary theorist for us, Sloterdijk relates in the following way, I think. Ingold provides insight in the individual’s natural capacity and drive to dwell and – following from that – to be in the process of home-making. Sloterdijk provides a more socio-critical philosophical standpoint, where he takes the world as driven by people who are in turn driven by mechanisms larger than themselves. This connects, for example, to consumerism (the behaviour in malls) and the psychogeography of the city (how cityplanning and individual architecture shapes our actions and thoughts). The two theories of Ingold and Sloterdijk are not contradictory, but complementary. In the phenomenological view an individual constantly adapts himself to influences and obstacles and in turn reshapes his environment, while the Crystal Palace can be seen as one of those obstacles/environments to which we adapt ourselves, a more global structure. Please discuss!

My own summary of ‘The Crystal Palace’ (in: Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals)
33. The Crystal Palace
(185) Dostojevski first to use the term Crystal Palace as a metaphor for western society. [see below] With the crystal palace the word ‘interior’ did not mean a ‘bourgeois or aristocratic house or the projection of that in the regions of the city’s shopping streets – the goal was more to house the outside world as a whole in a magical, luxurious and cosmopolitan glorified immanence.’ Although it was not meant for it, after a while it served for special musical performances.
(186) ‘The building of the crystal house palace can only lead to crystallisation of all relations – with this forbidding statement Arnold Gehlen follows Dostojevski on foot.’
(187) ‘Dostojevski was convinced that the eternal peace in the crystal palace would lead to physical exposure of its inhabitants. The relaxation, according to the christian psychologist, would definitely lead to the emergence of the evil in man.’ eg. sadomasochism, tying your partner to the bed, or esthetic snobism, fads. Heideggers Sein und Zeit (1927) describes ‘the fenomenological revolt against the demands of staying in the technical housing’. ‘Where everyone is the other and no-one himself, man is robbed from his extase, his loneliness, his own decision, his direct connection
(188) with the absolute outside, death. Massculture. humanism, biologism are the bright masks behind which the deep boredom of existence without challenge hides according to the philosopher. Therefore it is the task of philosophy to shatter the glass roof above our own head, to immediately make the individual into something amazing again.’
(189) Walter Benjamin’s accounts of the Parisian passages: architecture and it’s relation to capitalism. ‘Benjamins interpretation was inspired by the realistic, but trivial marxist insight that behind the shiny outsides of the tradeworld an unpleasant and sometimes even desolate workersworld is hiding; it was bent by the suggestion that the capitalist worldorder is a hell, inhabited by damned who unfortunately don’t draw political lessons from their damnation.’
(190) If Benjamin’s ideas would be put to use now, ‘they should be applied to the architectonic models of today: the shopping malls [..] the faircomplexes, the big hotels, the sportsarena’s and the indoor attractionparks.’  (191) ‘This more abstract and bigger interior cannot be made visible with Benjamin’s method, searching for treasures in libraries.’ Capitalism ‘Implies the project to harbour all forms of labour, desire and expression of the people that are trapped in it’s system, in the immanence of buyers’ capacity (koopkracht).’

The chapters before and after The Crystal Palace:
32. Posthistory
(180) In this post-colonial period history is nothing more than
Capitalism and democracy can exist separately from eachother (eg. China). We might be going to a world system of authoritarian capitalism. However, the illusion of still ‘being in history’ will be kept, by writing history of everything. Histories of nations, cultures, companies are created and re-affirmed by their being written. It is a self-referential system of autoplastic (self-forming) communication, which does not mean that there actually is a history. The character of the contemporary ‘flows of events’ is posthistorical.
(182) Unlike the US and Russia, Europe has never had the need for a collective plan to conquer the world, and therefore needed no centralised inspiring story of how this collective should act.  There is only ‘a worldhistory of Spain, a worldhistory of England, a worldhistory of France, a worldhistory of Portugal, maybe also a worldhistory of Holland’. Europe is a postcolonial fiction; that’s why a criticism of Eurocentrism leads nowhere.

34. The closed world and the secundary disinhibition: terrorism as romance of the pure attack.
(I haven’t summarised this chapter fully, but it’s essence is about fear induced by the so-called safe existence in the crystal palace world, with the media playing a big part)
(192) The globality is a condition of forced neighbouring with countless coexistents, which are there by chance. This situation is best described by the topological term of density. When talking about density one describes the degree of coexistention-pressure between particles and players. This term is a tool to stay away from mythologies of alienation (as if we were once one big family that are estranged by some catastrophe); it also adds to conquer the romanticism of proximity and being open to one another.
(199) The ‘historical existence’ is being part of a movementspace (beweginsruimte)
where the venting out of inner residue and the making of history means the same.
(202) ‘The by the media carefully cherished climate of fear guarantees that the large majority of the spoiled western safetyconsumers voluntarily plays their role in the comedy of the inevitable.’

——————
The Crystal Palace as metaphor in Dostojevski’s novel:
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aantekeningen_uit_het_ondergrondse (my own translation&summary):
‘Dostojevski visited London in 1862 and used the crystal palace as a symbol for the glass cage of social positivism and utilitarianism, for man who strives for physical health, work and reasonable material wealth, without awareness of the depth of the world outside the cage. When man realises that the cage is keeping him prisoner, he will flee to the underground, to contemplation. Rather no light than fake light, rather a fully irrational but integral underground existence than a very rational mutilated existence.
In his basement, his hole, he is a ‘ecce homo’, aware of his own bewilderment, according to him at the same time an awareness of the lie and so a break out to truth. The wall of the scientific law doesn’t communicate anything to him, but he damns it, because it surrounds him. Nevertheless this basement existence is higher in value to him than a life above ground.’

A new image: what is the basement of the crystal palace?

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