Anti-anti-utopianism

On the analogy to "anti-anti-communism" (Sartre):

... even if we can no longer adhere with an unmixed conscience [!] to this unreliable form [of Utopia], we can now have recourse to that ingenious [!] political slogan Sartre invented to find his way between a flawed communism and an even more unaccaeptable anti-communism. ... for those only too wary of the motives of its critics [!?], yet no less conscious of Utopia's structural ambiguities, those mindful of the very real political function of the idea and the program of Utopia in our time, the slogan of anti-anti-Utopianism might well offer the best working strategy.

Jameson,  Archaeologies of the Future, p. xvi

 Noteworthy for its moral, political, and cultural defensiveness -- the siege mentality of the contemporary Left. Akin, in this, to the replacement of "socialism" with "anti-capitalism" among the lumpen "masses".

Underlying it is also a rather bizarre notion of a separation between "art and culture" and "the social" -- "a separation that inaugurates culture as a realm in its own right and defines it as such". But then 

... that very distance of culture from its social context which allows it to function as a critique and indictment of the latter also dooms its interventions to ineffectuality and relegates art and culture to a frivolous, trivialized space in which such intersections are neutralized in advance.

p. xv

But, amid the confusions, bad faith, and special pleading involved in such contortions, you can feel a real pathos in such passages. And perhaps a certain courage, in facing the loss of belief, unaccompanied by any foundational alternative.

The idea of narrative

Imagine a great matrix of characters, events, places, scenes, conversations, causes and effects, motives, emotions, purposes, actions, etc. -- continual, pervasive. The raw material of narrative everywhere, in huge quantities. How then do you turn that material into actual narrative?

You need to add a structure. And, I think, you can do that with anything, literally. Just today, e.g., think of the young dad in the Blenz coffee shop with his bright, laughing, 3 year old daughter, who likes going up to the counter by herself asking for a napkin, head barely able to see over its edge, but who knows how to order a decaf lattay, the dad striking up a conversation with the young woman with her shopping bags sitting by herself with a picked up give-away tabloid, her starting it though, bringing up her niece and nephew.

Or the two boys maybe about 8 with the young mom in the Wendy's, the boys all "Dude! You're still afraid of the roller coaster!?" "Yeah," from the other off-handedly, no hint of chagrin, the mom with her iPhone, but which she's at least partly using to play some sort of guessing game with the boys, only one of whom I think is her son, and that one going at one point,"How did I live when I was in your belly?" (no idea what brought that up), and the mom saying, "Okay, you know your belly button? Right? Your belly button?" "Yeah," goes the boy, a little puzzled, "Well," says the mom, "that's where you had a tube that connected you with my uterus, which is a sack that held you and fed food to you through that tube".

Consider either as incidents that could seed a narrative -- at the start or middle or end or even climax. But those are the parts of the structure that's needed to turn raw material into narrative product, which is what's meant by the "arc" -- traditionally at least that arc is built out of tension, requiring some kind of conflict, that rises to a climax and then falls away. Like music.

The main point being that story is dense, thick, a plenitude, but in the raw or seedling form -- what realizes it as narrative is tension, that provides the possiblity (though not in itself the reality) of structure. And that's what requires invention.


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Artistic politics/Political art

"Decolonizing architecture" -- description of a talk:

Decolonizing Architecture seeks to use spatial practice as a form of political intervention and narration. Their practice continuously engages a complex set of architectural problems centered around one of the most difficult dilemmas of political practice: how to act both propositionally and critically within an environment in which the political force field, as complex as it may be, is so dramatically skewed.

The people involved (see the "imaginary denizens", overlaid on real people) :

Organized in conjunction with exhibition, a panel discussion co-presented by REDCAT and MAK Center for Art and Architecture will bring together Alessandro Petti, founding member and director of Decolonizing Architecture/Art Residency; Iain Boal of RETORT, the Bay Area collective of writers, activists and scholars, and co-author of Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War;architect and UCSD professor Teddy Cruz whose work centers around urban research/design within context of the U.S.-Mexico border; and Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG. Moderated by director of MAK Center Kimberli Meyer on Wednesday January 26 at 7:30pm at REDCAT.

Caption: "How to re-inhabit your enemy's house" (2009)

Thanks to BLDGBLOG

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Data/Information/Art/Structure

visual complexity -- e.g.:








See also information aesthetics blog on right.

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"The opaque civilization"

That's the name of an exhibition at the Guggenheim back in 1984, by a "theoretical" architect named Will Insley. From the review in the NYTimes:

''ONECITY,'' the chief project in the show, has, the artist says, ''very little to do with advanced planning theories of the present'' or with the ''utopias of the future, but rather with the dark cities of mythology, which exist outside of normal times in some strange location of extremity.''

An imaginary labyrinth 650 miles square, symbolized by a floor plan that paces off at about 30 feet, it is ''situated'' between the Mississippi and the Rockies and consists of many 2 1/2-mile-square structures, each divided into an ''Over-building'' and an ''Under-building'' and each containing nine arenas. Like the ''Star Trek'' scripts, the artist omits the logistical nuts and bolts, making paraphrase difficult.

It's clear, however, that the city's inhabitants are segregated into day people, wholesome types who study at home with their children by means of electronic devices, and night people. ''Tattered ghosts in phosphorescent clothing,'' the night people sound a lot like the more Felliniesque denizens of the Lower East Side, being given to masks and elaborate makeup; they ''mutter a lot'' and ''often carry around personal abstract structures'' that they exchange ''according to mysterious rituals.'' And while they have homes in the Over-building, they frequently sleep in the cubby holes of the Under-building, ignored by day people going about their business.

Alluding to New Yorkers' apparent obliviousness to bag ladies, Insley makes plain that while he himself may be without morals, his fantasy is replete with them as well as with ironic wit. Criminals, by the way, are sequestered in the ninth arena (Dante's?), where they are free to do what they will, including playing team sports like football.

Here's an example taken from the BLDGBLOG:



Which goes on to say:

Courtesy of a comment left a while back on the sorely-missed site The Nonist, we learn that Insley once quipped: "what was absent from the ruin is often less marvelous than we imagine it to have been. The abstract power of suggestion (the fragment) is greater than the literal power of the initial fact. Myth elevates.’"

And finishes:

ONECITY is a "masonite labyrinth," the article concludes, complete with "Wall Fragments" that have been "gridded with white or yellow lines and shaped like garment sections waiting to be sewn together." It's the city as dystopian clothing that we tailor to fit our future selves. Imagine a dusty third-floor walk-up in the Garment District of Manhattan, where precise plans for megastructures are produced on massive looms, needles and yawn moving to a hypnotic drone in semi-darkness. Architectural invention by way of sewing diagrams.

More images, expandable, are available at the nonist (a moribund blog/site).

Intrigued by the gridlines particularly -- the rectilinear characteristic of the architectural/engineering drawing, of the blueprint, the draught. These are not maps, partly in that they have a different purpose, partly in that they refer always to the made, the consciously willed, as opposed to the so-called "natural". But, like maps, they are a representation of information. (Contrast maps/blueprints with knowledge of any kind, which is not a representation of anything.)

With the Game, looking to fuse various forms of visual information, including both map-type and blueprint-type. Interesting to think of being able to adopt different forms or instances of forms as one would put on clothes....

Think too of the idea of an imaginary architecture overlaid on a real city -- an imaginary complete with imaginary denizens, like "day people" and "night people". Overlaid, themselves, on the real people? "Unreal city", mythical city, ....

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What this is about

Some themes:

• Utopia, of course
• Which includes Dystopia
• and which includes all other bullet points
• and contains an inherent ambiguity:
• on the one hand, the impossibility of utopia and the folly/evil of utopian attempts
• on the other, the Nozick/Rand utopia
• and on the third hand, the imaginative reach for a New People (see Cherneyshevsky, Gibson's "Blue Ant" trilogy, even possibly Pynchon, and see the Inversion theme below)

• Conspiracy -- the concept, as distinct from the plot (see Art-narrative below)

• The inversion and its consequences
• Epistemological ontology -- this is the central idea (if Utopia stands for the encompassing idea, this is the core): that what is is determined by what's known, not the other way around (and "what's known" is determined by what works -- i.e., a relational as opposed to a representational epistemology)
• "Inversion" describes the switch from let's say a "realist" ontology to the epistemological ontology noted above -- that is, from reality being something out there that we can only painstakingly discover to reality being, literally, right before our eyes (and nose, and ears, and touch, etc.)

• Art
• and religion
• and Utopia
• and narrative
• Elementory
• Conspiracy as plot (see below)
• The plot, as distinct from the concept (see above)
• the notion of "revelation" 
• as distinct from "epiphany" -- i.e., it's exogenous
• also as distinct from "solution" (of a mystery) -- this is a change in your understanding of the world
• A multipart series (say, 5) -- larger revelations at the climax of each?
• Space fiction
• 3000 AD (the 1000-year future)
• The Utopia Project itself
• architecture/urban design/planning
• The game
• of Utopia
• board/screen design
• layers
• fractal depth
• and the social network
• avatars

• Space colonization
• and utopia
• Getting off the planet
• the moon
• Mars
• Open space
• Commercializing space

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