Re: forward from Mark Shepard Re: [-empyre-] Catherine Ingraham

[cingraha@pratt.edu]

>>Mark:  Thanks for the questions--I can give a response right now but
will do more tomorrow morning due to today's schedule.  Architecture is
cut off, cuts itself off, from other art practices because of its very
complex commercial status; the scale is also vastly different at the
very least.  Criticality is also (mistakenly of course) considered a
luxury in the practice and discipline of architecture...something you
indulge in when you don't have enough work in the office. Having said
that, I also think the crisis in criticality is part of a much bigger
picture, particularly in western countries right now.  Since critical
work, at least in the Derridean of Foucaultian tradition, was tactical
in the extreme--concerned with working its way around the corner of the
frame in order to operate from without and within simultaneously--it
matters that many of us who were schooled in these techniques of
catching out the glance of power or the play of desire in texts or
objects are slow to absorb some pretty radical changes going on in
critical paradigms and in a very intricate retooling of power structures
now operating at global levels.  It is not surprising, for example, that
terrorism has become aligned with climate change--both are occasions for
imagining disruptions that affect habits of living in a particular way,
disruptions that would come from the incomprehensibly massive scale of
climate systems (it is more or less impossible for anyone to remember
the weather from last week, so climate change, a turbulent and almost
completely unpredictable system, is, in fact,incomprehensible except at
some statistical level) or some equally massive and incoherent place of
terrorism.  Since the 1950s, in the west, we have not associated the
possibility of "aliveness"--and everything now becoming attached to its
ongoingness, global resources of every kind--with the status and
possibility of critical discourse.  Now we do. I think this is very
different from the biological metaphors used by the Metabolists, for
example.  Sorry, this is going on longer than I thought and, also, I
haven't said much about architecture specifically.  This all seems a bit
dire...   Catherine


Catherine,
>>
>>To what extent would you say this crisis vis-a-vis criticality in
>>architecture is both symptom and product of its persistent claims for
>>disciplinary autonomy? Are you suggesting the "eco-ego" is an
>>alternative? How would you differentiate current work on "the living"
>>in architecture from the interest in biological and cybernetic
>>organizational systems of the '60s (Archigram, Cedric Price,
>>Metabolism)?
>>
>>Mark
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>empyre forum
>>empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>>http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
>
> --
> Timothy Murray
> Professor of Comparative Literature and English
> Director of Graduate Studies in Film and Video
> Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
> 285 Goldwin Smith Hall
> Cornell University
> Ithaca, New York  14853
>
> office: 607-255-4086
> e-mail: tcm1@cornell.edu
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>