- Power/Knowledge, Michel Foucault
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Great Moments in Social Climbing: King Kong and the Human Fly
Meaghan Morris
- The Sphere and the Labyrinth, Manfredo Tafuri
"the arrangement of forms such as found in a painting by Kandinsky is in fact very low in content, unless we attribute to these forms some system of conventional meanings not inherent in the forms themselves. His thesis is that physiognomic forms are ambiguous, though not wholly without expressive value, and that they can only be interpreted within a particular cultural ambience. "
Gombrich illustrates this by reference to the supposed inherent affective qualities of color exemplified in traffic signals; and Colquhoun cites the recent adoption by the Chinese of the color red for go, indicating action and forward movement, and of green for stop, indicating inaction and caution-this easy reversal itself indicating the triumph of convention over physiognomy in our understanding of the meaning of form.”- Learning From Las Vegas, Robert Venturi Denise Scott Brown Steven Izenour
“In short, the utopic cradles in the force field composed of several vectors: its “strange attractors” are triangulated through three processes or systems: (1) the forces and energies of bodies, bodies that require certain material, social, and cultural arrangements to function in specific or required ways, and which in turn, through their structuring and habitual modes, engender and sustain certain modes of political regulation; (2) the pull or impetus of time, which grants a precedence of the future over the past and the present, and which threatens to compromise or undo whatever fixity and guarantees of progress, whatever planning and organization we seek in the present; and (3) the regulation and organization, whether literary or phantasmatic or pragmatic, of urban and rural spaces of inhabitation.
This triangulation has been rendered less compli- cated by the common move of dropping out or eliding one of these three terms—usually that represented by time and becoming. It is significant that the question of the future in and of the Republic, the future of the Utopians, remains unaddressed; utopia, like the dialectic itself, is commonly fantasized as the end of time, the end of history, the moment of resolution of past problems. The utopic organiza- tion is conceived as a machine capable of solving foreseeable problems through the perfection of its present techniques. This is the image of an ideal society in which time stops and, as Plato recognized, the timeless sets it. If we explore the plethora of other utopic visions, from Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, to the general project of the social contract theorists in the eighteenth century, to Voltaire, Rousseau’s The New Héloïse and The Social Contract, through to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, we see that the ideal society, society in its perfection, is represented as the cessation of becoming, the overcoming of problems, a calm and ongoing resolution.” - Architecture from the Outside, Elizabeth Grosz
“Climbing onto the stage, the
"baby Don Quixote" forces himself to enumerate his own cruel, destruc tive impulses. Exposing himself stark naked, he is forced to admit what Sade and Piranesi, in different ways, had announced to the world: that where the logic of assassination has taken over, the greatest pleasure is in being simultaneously torturer and tortured; that it is useless to wander through the city looking for the guilty one, inasmuch as "guilt" is found in the flesh and blood of the prisoner as well as the imprisoner; that the devastation wreaked on linguistic institutions appears first as grotesque farce, then as tragedy. By making a code of such infractions, mountains of rubble will be obtained. I can limit myself to heaping these fragments into piles, to manipulating them into assemblages poised between utopia and heterotopia, to forcing once communicating signals to react to the incon gruous juxtaposition to which I oblige them; but the very fact that I express this desire to assume the guise of the executioner"represents," and only represents, the fiction of my fabulations. Cruel as they may be, they remain within the enclosure where I keep them. The space separating them from the chain of events that, despite everything, transforms each deconstruction into a new universe of discourse is infinitesimal.
Why should we be surprised, then, if, in the early 1920s, there was an attempt to confront with institutional structures the logic, perfect in itself, of the illogical? If the attempt was made, that is, to transform the "bridge" uniting the devastated language with the reality that reduced it to such a state into a "door," suddenly thrown open onto the extreme boundary that divides and rejoins object and subject?” - The Adventures of Avant Garde, Manfredo Tafuri
https://donorbox.org/flight ✈️. “Traveling—it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.”- Ibn Battuta
“It is the Hollywood musical of the thirties that realizes the dream of the historical avant-gardes : here, even the scenic mechanism of constructivism is translated into the imaginary. In the musicals of Busby Berkeley, the "chorality" of the dance is the absolute protagonist and is enriched with symbolic values. In Forty-second Street, the chorus girls are once again disguised, as in Parade or The Triadic Ballet.But here their mask is cre ated by urban reality : the outlines of the skyscrapers of New York dance optimistically-in the very midst of the Depression-along the inevitable staircase, inviting the audience to enter into the collective celebration prof fered by a metropolis that is intended to negate the crisis.so
Here, truly, montage of the attractions and symbolic universe, artifice and narration, instruments of information and technological knowledge converge. The mechanical equipment no longer needs to exhibit itself: in the film, its laws are entirely incorporated by the product. Furthermore, the Berkeley musicals are "political" spectacles; Warner Brothers directs them explicitly at the masses who support F. D. Roosevelt and the New Deal.
The collective dance in the Hollywood musical is not mere escapism : a synthesis of precision and bodily liberation, of the surreal and of kitsch, it is even capable-as in the "Forgotten Man" sequence in Gold Diggers of 1933-of reminding American society of its own responsibility regarding the Great Depression and the grave unemployment.
Theatrical constructivism was to have a further result, tragically ironic. In the penguins' pit at the London Zoo (1932-33), Berthold Lubetkin used, almost as a literal citation, the spiral ramps designed by Lissitzky for Mey erhold. The enclosed space is used for a zoo : here the penguin is enclosed, while the man on the other side of the net is given the role of passive spectator.”- The Sphere and the Labyrinth, Manfredo Tafuri
Political Ground-Swell
“Hence it assumes a material figure defined within a narrower compass; it organises itself as the child's immediate environment, tending increasingly to become its basic framework for survival and growth. This leads to an effect of tightening, or at least intensification, of the elements and relations constituting the restricted family (the group of parents and children). It also leads to a certain inversion of axes: the conjugal bond no longer serves only, nor even perhaps primarily, to establish the junction of two lines of descent, but to organise the matrix of the new adult individual. No doubt it still serves to give rise to two lineages and hence produce a descent, but it serves also to produce-under the best possible conditions-a human being who will live to the state of adulthood. The new 'conjugality' lies rather in the link between parents and children. The family, seen as a narrow, localised pedagogical apparatus, consolidates itself within the interior of the great traditional family-as-alliance. And at the same time health, and principally the health of children, becomes one of the family's most demanding objectives.”- Power and Knowledge, Michel Foucault