[melodramaticarchitecture]

[melodramaticarchitecture]

A civilisation which rests upon the constant daily threat of mutual extermination is a barbarism.

Edward Palmer Thompson (on nuclear weapons)

[melodramaticarchitecture]

The only way to be master of desire - which is what the ideal father is supposed to be - is to be either impotent or dead.

Joan Copjec, Read my Desire: Lacan against Historicists, 1994

[melodramaticarchitecture]

http://www.body-of-work.org/

[melodramaticarchitecture]

“That which survives in the archives does so by chance. Disappearance is the rule. Annihilation is the fate of whole cities, obliterating far more of the human record than is preserved. Wars and disasters of nature are indifferent destroyers. Human intention is at work as well. Heresy, degeneracy, blasphemy, treason, disbelief—these are just some of the threats to orthodoxy that call for destruction of the historical record.

Texts and images are both vulnerable to attack. Precisely which objects  are  available  from  the  past,  whose  written  and  visual  sources are saved, is astoundingly arbitrary. Only a confirmed believer can be sanguine about their providential arrangement.”

Emily Jacir & Susan Buck Morss        on Ephemeral Archive

[architectureofdoom]

Ljubljana’s Alexandra Road Estate in Koseze, Viktor Pust, 1974

View this on the map

[melodramaticarchitecture]

[crimson-compass]

Citizen tax collector! Forgive my bothering you… Thank you… don’t worry… I’ll stand…

My business is of delicate nature: about the place of the poet in the workers’ ranks.

Along with owners of stores and property I’m made subject to taxes and penalties.

You demand I pay five...

[melodramaticarchitecture]

looking awry

For sorrow's eye, glazed with blinding tears,

Divides one thing entire to many objects; Like perspectives, which rightly gaz'd upon

Show nothing but confusion; ey'd awry

Distinguish form: so your sweet majesty,

Looking awry upon your lord's departure,

Find shapes of grief more than himself to wail;

Which look'd on as it is, is nought but shadows

of what it is not.

Shakespeare, Richar II, II/1

[melodramaticarchitecture]

Marx and Engels on common property

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

[melodramaticarchitecture]

'organized irresponsibility', nucleocrats, epistemocratic power

The exclusion from public debate of artists, writers and scholars is the result of the conjoined impact of several factor: some grow out of the internal evolution of cultural production - like the increasingly narrow specialization which leads researchers to give up the wider ambitions of the intellectual in earlier days - whereas others are the result of increasingly strong grip of a technocracy which, with the often unconscious complicity of journalists (themselves caught in the game of competition), puts citizens on extended intellectual vacation by favouring 'organized irresponsibility', in the words of Ulrich Beck, and which finds an immediate ally in a technocracy of communication - more and more present, via the media, in the universe of cultural production. One would have to develop, for example, the analysis of the production and reproduction of technocratic power or, better, epistemocratic power, in order to understand the almost unconditional delegation, founded on the social authority of educational institutions, which the great majority of citizens grant, on the most vital issues, to the 'state nobility' (the best example being the almost unlimited confidence which those who have been called 'nucleocrats' enjoy, notably in France).

Bourdieu, Pierre, THE RULES OF ART: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1995)

[melodramaticarchitecture]

This fear that we are controlled in the very act of taking control, and that we lose autonomy in the very process of self-determination, expresses the tension of political action itself and the capacity to experience it would have to enter into any explanation of what it is to be a political being.

On Human Needs: Open and Closed Theories in a Marxist Perspective, Kate Soper, 1981

[melodramaticarchitecture]

MY HOUSE

"I am to build a house of ice

Because it is more liquid."

Kurt Schwitters, 15 II 1945

[melodramaticarchitecture]

Established knowledge has closure or at least aims for it, even if this is by way of an artificially enforced boundary or set of undisclosed or unexamined assumptions. Critical theory is destined to be constantly ‘on the move’, unlike the owner but like the dispossessed. This metaphor works only while property is regarded as an exclusive and closed terrain: it becomes more difficult to sustain once we start thinking that perhaps property is itself not proper, closed, or certain.

[jpleary]

A New York Times op-ed written by Jayne Merkel, an architecture critic, argues that the New York City Housing Authority could address its vast backlog of unfinished repairs—caused by the long-term cuts in federal funding—by training residents to make their own repairs. She calls this “A DIY Fix...

[melodramaticarchitecture]

sublimation

Whenever he conducts research, the scholar must exclude from his research findings the basis in fantasy that moves him; he must dilute and domesticate the reasons for which he has become active as a scholar. If he mobilizes this foundation for his activities, he must also curb these rational mechanisms of exclusion, and thus mitigate the rigidity of his intellectual approach. A merely unstable connection between drive-base and labor emerges. The intellectual labor that emerges as if in a hothouse thus possesses a particular structure of production whose individual components and bonds are extremely weak and sensitive. This organizational structure therefore seeks the contact of competitive and commodity relations because of the strong potential for concurrence they contain.

[melodramaticarchitecture]

Human Production

A spider conducts operations which resemble those of a weaver, and a bee through the construction of its wax cells puts many a human architect to shame. But what above all distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that he has already built  the cell in his head before he builds it in wax. At the end of the labor process a result comes about which was already present ideally in the representation of the labourer at its beginning. He not only works a change in form on something natural; he at the same time actualises in something natural his own purpose, and he knows this purpose as determining the kind and mode of his action, and as something to which he must subject his will.

Karl, Marx, Das Kapital, (Mew 23/193)