Posting: Palace Blues

This global village is the place to be
white picket fences and an apple tree
Consumerism is what we praise
who can deny there’s enough space

When you want to, and you need to
just look through the glass and see
what you want
You know you will get it, you will get
if you want it bad enough

Debts are for losers
well I guess that makes me one
I can’t get this exclusion, forever in the dumps
But I live in a palace
and I don’t need to see the sun

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?

Posting: Blog on Being Homeless

Ever wanted to know the advantages of being homeless?

Here’s a how-to-be-homeless blog:
http://guide2homelessness.blogspot.com/

‘No matter where you go, there you are.’

Anonymous Quote

Mapping Home Workshop [Feb 9]

Mapping Home Workshop

The workshop consisted of various exercises in movement theatre, improvisation and conceptual development. A key component to the workshop is the geographical and conceptual mapping of home.  The workshop culminated in a short improvisatory performance.

Tags: photos, workshop

Posting: Visa territory

Below is an exerpt that I took from an article about being in Visa territory. It is a personal story. The website is also very nice for all kinds of articles about our postmodern times:

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-02-22-goncharova-en.html

“I recall the events and procedures that accompanied all those stamps I was
accumulating in my passport, the time wasted on filling out forms, queuing in
consulates, collecting the necessary references; weeks and sometimes
months of wearisome uncertainty. Then there was the subliminal feeling of
guilt about my vagabond spirit, as if my intention to cross the borders of my
homeland was suspicious in itself. I get this vague guilt feeling every time I
appear before a functionary of a consulate or immigration office. I back up my
answers to their questions with countless documents. Every such meeting is
pregnant with the suggestion that you are a violator – if not of borders, then of
some intuitive notion of normal human life.
In the Middle Ages, a wanderer or person unattached to one place was as
normal. Jacques Le Goff has described such chaotic migration along the
roads of Europe:
On the roads, knights and peasants would meet clerics who were either on a
journey prescribed by the rules, or who had severed their connections with
their monasteries […] They would meet students travelling to renowned
schools and universities (was it not said in a twelfth century poem that exile,
the terra aliena, is the lot of the scholar?), as well as pilgrims and all kinds of
vagabonds. The Middle Ages, the epoch of travels on foot and horseback,
came to an end after the fourteenth century, when travellers became tramps,
or accursed people.
People began to value their lives according to standards of the place in which
they lived. Exceptions to this rule, such as merchants or missionaries, only
emphasised the norm of a settled life. Today, the norm remains in effect. The
right of EU citizens to unhindered, visa-free travel throughout Europe is
another kind of exception. Not only does it fail to change the norm, but it
reinforces it, adding new importance to the connection between a person and
his or her abode. That place has now become an additional indicator of one’s
economic and political status. The country that issues your passport, its
image, and its international geopolitical status now determines the extent of
your freedom, your right to travel, and the number of visas in your passport.
Europeans’ exemption from the need for visas has only strengthened the rigid
norm of individual existence – that of possessing one’s own place on earth.
“You belong wherever you were born”

Tags: travel

Day-to-Day Admin: Guidelines for the blog

Hi yOu! yOu! yOu! and yOu!

our blog’s objective

-to create a virtual space for our ‘home&homeless’ community: to share, post, comment, develop, discuss ideas and/or concepts in a beneficial contributory manner towards the progress of our project.

We will use this blog to:

1. Documentinf performance process

2. Reflections from discussions, workshops, meetings, etc

3. Posting video/songs/clips/short films/documentaries/ performances/whatever etc

4. Checking admin board where all practical info such as rehearsal schedule, appointments, itineraries, etc will be posted.

5. Sharing the process/ development of each ofour own approach towards the concept.

**WHEN YOU POST/UPLOAD SMTH UP, PLS MAKE SUTE THAT YOU’VE STATED CLEARLY IN THE HEADING WHAT IS IT ABOUT BY USING THESE KEYWORDS:

DOCUMENTING/ REFLECTION/ POSTING/ DAY-TO-DAY ADMIN/ CONCEPT

the golden rule of this blog:

Keep it active and dynamic !!!!!!

Posting: welcome dwellers of the home&homeless society!

welcome dwellers of the homeless society!

well…just to take it off as the beginning of our exploration of home & homelessness, I would like to share these different meanings of homelessness with you all…

“Homelessness is an inadequate experience of connectedness with family and or community.” -Social Worker and Director of Rebeccas Community, Mr. Dominic Mapstone-

“A person is homeless if, and only if, he or she has inadequate access to safe and secure housing” -Australia

“One who does not have his/her own dwelling or is not living in someone else’s home permanently and must resort to living in temporary placements” -Sweden

Homelessness ~ Connectedness

Some definitions of homelessness which take into account the need for connectedness:

Homelessness carries implications of belonging nowhere rather than simply having nowhere to sleep.

Homelessness is a condition of detachment from society characterised by the absence or attenuation of the affiliative bonds that link settled persons to a network of interconnected social structures (Caplow, Bahr and Sternberg, 1968: 494).

Homelessness – an inadequate experience of connectedness with family and or community (Dominic Mapstone, Director – Rebeccas Community).

Houselessness – an inadequate experience of shelter, ranging from a complete lack of shelter at one end of the continuum to severely inadequate housing conditions at the other.

Physicalization Workshop [Feb 04]

Physicalization Workshop

Posting: poem

Home

I wanted to go

Home

My friends and family
Were all lost at sea
But I kept my silence like a golden plaque
Commemorating what I wanted to be

Home

Is a sailless ship
A wreck of memories
A breeze of wind rustling leaves of trees
– I want to leave

Home

No compass or compassion in me though
I left a long time ago
That wreck that seemed a family tree

Home

Rooting me into a turbulent sea
of memory

– Apollonia 4 Feb. 2009