Filed under: Boston, Everyday Life | Tags: Boston, Moods, Quotidian, Rain, Summer 2009, Weather
All anyone seems to be discussing here in Boston is how lousy the weather has been: overcast, wet, and gloomy. It’s the first thing that comes up in any conversation, whether it be at work, in casual chit-chat, or with loved ones. Nearly everybody agrees that the weather sucks.
Blakets of thick grey clouds have presided over skies during the month of June, already assuring us that at least a third of Boston’s brief, transitory summer will be without sun. For a city that lives and dies by the seasons, even the most hardened Bostonian is cursing the skies for the meteorological misfortune and pleading for more than just a short break to let the sun in.
The consistently lousy weather is cramping styles around here. Beach trips are being put off and otherwise vibrant neighborhoods are suffering because, really, who wants to frolic against a pallid background? Even local business are making the attempt to entice the area’s notoriously finicky shoppers to come out and buy, lowering their prices in an attempt to make it worth the effort. Yet, establishments who do most of their business indoors (and probably don’t rely on foot traffic) seem to find themselves with unseasonably good business. Something’s just not right.
The recently purchased bike (see photo above, far right) sits at the base of the stairwell, waiting to be used; but it’s not worth sullying the new wheels in the foul weather. As much as the machine is meant for commuting, I want to take a few joyrides first. At some point, the bici will get its time in the water, but not now. So as I walk, thunder rumbles overhead, constantly on the verge of freaking me out with the threat of a bolt slapping the ground nearby with a deafening crack. Recent developments only confirm that my fears are not unfounded.
With such a wet summer, it seems that Tlaloc has been vacationing in New England, with little intention of taking off anytime soon. All we can think of in light of all the rain is how Mexico City could sure use some of the water that’s getting dumped on Boston. It’s not fair for anyone, really.
Ya con la pinche lluvia!!!!
Filed under: Latinos, Music, Places to Go | Tags: Music, Events, DJing, Rare Grooves, Sound is Blog
Radio silence could best describe the recent state of affairs here at tirado/thrown headquarters. Your staff has been negligent in its thinking and typing duties, and instead brushing up on high school algebra, cramming vocabulary, and learning strategies to tackle the monster known as the Graduate Record Examination. All this preparation, of course, is in the service of mounting a pending graduate school application campaign in the fall.
However, we’ve managed to cut through the thick wall of static generated by anxiety, study, exhaustion, and the repeated multiple choice questions to assemble some tracks and offer them up for the listening pleasure of the kind people who come to River Gods. On Monday June 29, as a part of the Weekly Wax series, DJ Tirado (yes, of this here tirado/thrown) will be teaming up with fellow traveler DJ Manny to showcase rolas from America Latina and Latino America spanning the decades. Inspired by the efforts of L.A.’s unparalleled Mas Exitos, we’ll be dispatching sounds like descargas, ballads, cumbias old and new, funk, psychedelic, and perhaps some electronic. All of it will come from Nuestra America.
Do come and join us for the dinner, drinks, and beatdowns that River Gods promises its patrons on Monday nights. The fare and the bar’s offerings are outstanding, and the locale is the perfect venue for a listening party. The sounds start at 8 p.m. and go on until midnight. Feel free to hit us up in the comments section for more information.
*Image: Hat tip to Joseph Franko at supersonido.net for the amazing pic. We couldn’t pass up using it for the flyer.
Filed under: Anthropology, Cultural Studies, L.A., Politics, Video | Tags: Anthropological Materialism, Crips and Bloods, Death and Life of American Cities, Documentary, Film, Gangs, Los Angeles, Marginal Affinities, Race, Stacy Peralta, Tribes
While caught onto relatively late here at tirado/thrown, we were moved by Baron Davis’s and Stacy Peralta’s astounding documentary Crips and Bloods: Made in America. What we first thought to be a historical reappraisal of urban unrest in Los Angeles unfolded into as comprehensive a survey of L.A. gang violence in South Central that a two-hour documentary could offer.
Immediately, the film took us back to the Los Angeles that we grew up beside and had a tangential relationship to: Sundays with family at the Slauson Swap Meet, occasional forays into South Central to visit friends, the sensationalized coverage of gang life that frightened the affluent but did not do any justice to the daily tales of suffering, tragedy, and strife in afflicted neighborhoods. The civil disturbances in 1992 in the wake of the Rodney King acquittals were pivotal events that could not escape the attention of any Angeleno living there at the time. Crips and Bloods captured the parts of the southland that at times felt so removed from the San Fernando Valley or even Hollywood.
Part of what makes this film noteworthy was that Peralta, the creator of Dogtown and Z-Boys and the Bones Brigade videos, stepped outside of making lifestyle films about surfing or skating to produce what is probably the most profound treatment on the creation of the most noted street gangs in contemporary American life.
Or is it that much of a stretch? If the 80s and 90s showed us anything, it was that gang bangers in the city and skater kids in the suburbs, beaches, and valleys were near-simultaneous occurrences of group cultures at the margins of institutional life: the family, education, workforce, church, and state. While the stakes of their activities could not be any more disparate, they would each have a profound impact on American cultural expression in late capitalism. **
Peralta’s documentary potently cites racism (institutional and otherwise), post-war demographic shifts, police brutality, economic stagnation, geographic isolation, and outright state repression as the sources of social arrangements that have wrought uncounted amounts of human tragedy.
The film’s most lucid insight grasped the relationship of gang violence to a hegemonic state, one where those who stand to most to lose from oppression perform the work of oppression, acting out and generating an exponentially vacuous cycle. Multiple commentators in the documentary noted how the disruption of community building and self-determination on the part of authorities, the introduction of a cheap and highly addictive narcotic, mass incarceration, and a social climate bereft of economic opportunity generated the perfect environment for a self-destruction that folded very readily with hegemony’s maintenance of social immobility. It performed a task more effectively than state repression was able to perform, since it did not require the National Guard to perform the violence it did in quelling the Watts rebellion. Bloods and Crips shows how these broader lines and vectors intersect in the existence of gang members themselves, their families, and community activists. It deftly demonstrates the human toll exacted by a complex interaction of personal actions, social situations, and psychological exigence.
Among the documentary’s most distressing scenes were aerial shots of the L.A. basin, with its districts, neighborhoods, and development tracts- not so much for the scattering and dispersion of peoples it implied, but for the way that those distributions of space resembled camps organizing life into some form. If anything, the helicopter shots give occasion to reflect on the thesis that the camp is the biopolitical law of modernity. They lead to ask how similar or different are cities than concentration camps? In certain parts of LA, simply responding the question of where one is from can easily be the cipher encoding one’s life or death.
Peralta’s film left us wondering, however: who will tell the stories of the Latino gangs that have developed since the 1930s? Who will tell of how clicks and maras such as 18th Street, White Fence, Florencia, and the Mara Salvatrucha were born and mutated in response to multiple waves of immigration, how they continue to be shaped by the forces of globalization and political upheaval in Mexico, Central America, and the United States? Such a sequel would be worth the wait.
**Strangely enough, The Serach for Animal Chin takes up as leitmotifs the creation narrative of skateboarding, its co-opting by commercial interests, and a marginalized community whose members are bound by their affinity for skateboarding’s originary ethos.
Filed under: Mexico, Philosophy, Politics | Tags: Agamben, Biopolitics, fascism, Health, Mexico, Security, State Power
The recent eruption of swine flu that ignited in Mexico has provoked a massive global response on the part of governments. In turn, it has prompted reflection here at tirado/thrown on biopolitics. The surrepetituiously unfolding events afforded an object lesson in how biopolitics, state power, government, and everyday life intersect. The phenomenon’s global scale makes this is an interesting case to examine how the administration of biopower effects social and political life.
Governments and public health ministries the world over are mobilizing at a frenzied clip. Mexico, Spain, the United States, New Zealand, Germany, China were at the vanguard of a growing list. At least in Mexico, the epidemiological situation was (and remains to be) treated as a state of exception. There, President Felipe Calderon issued a decree giving government expanded powers defined only by a vague reference to the epidemiological emergency. Surrounded by relativlely anodyne general public health policy directives, the decree’s second article grants the government powers to:
- isolate and limit the movements and activities of infected people,
- inspect passengers who “may be viral carriers”,
- enter “all type of place or dwelling house for the fulfillment of activities directed to controlling and combatting the epidemic”,
- regulate maritime, air, and ground transport, as well as giving government free use the means of transport and exchange, including, roads, telecommunications, and the mail.
Moreover, the terms of the decree are indefinite. The decree offers no criteria for defining what resolves the crisis other than a tautological one. That is, only the government could declare the crisis resolved, without stating (or even having to state) what a return to a non-exceptional situation would entail.
Legal scholar John Ackerman of Mexico City’s Universidad Autonoma Nacional de Mexico (UNAM) has already pointed out how the government of Felipe Calderon is resorting to the state of exception as an unconstitutional means to strengthen his grip on power and to extend his capacity to declare a state of emergency without legislative consent. Ackerman writes that “[Calderon's] response to the flu epidemic only exacerbates” the “authoritarian tendencies” he has shown in Mexico’s current campaign against the narcotics cartels.**
In the United States, the Department of Homeland Security (which controls immigration and customs agencies), the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been at the forefront of the American response to the outbreaks, highlighting the biopolitical nexus between governmental power, national security, and public health. As of yet, no generalized state of emergency in the United States has been invoked for the government’s assumption of extraordinary powers.
In Mexico City, Daniel Hernandez notes how the drastic, seemingly sudden change in conditions has activated a generalized state of fear and suspicion that he describes thus:
…the fear is changing our lives in dramatic ways.
Mexico City prides itself on holding strongly to its social customs, despite the arrival of American-style Wal-Marts and Starbucks. But suddenly, Mass was canceled. Soccer matches were played to empty stadiums. Suddenly, the bars and clubs shut down. And suddenly, that warm customary greeting of a handshake and a kiss on the check was replaced with a friendly yet uneasy nod.
A culture built on physical contact has become a culture muted by fear, by suspicion, a distrust of others and even ourselves.
What has changed, and we will wait to find out how permanently, are the gestures which are our unmarketable political currency bearing the truth of our lives together. In their being gagged, arrested, and halted, we also notice how now (temporarily) absent gestures shaped a form of life, politics is now suspended by decree.
Just as interesting, and perhaps no less coincidental in this case, has been the general public response to the outbreak: the donning of surgical masks. While not an unusual device to use when airborne pathogens proliferate, the surgical masks’ rapid and widespread use alongside the state’s alacrity in regulating life on a mass scale for public safety gives an occasion to reflect on the ties binding a sovereign authority to the citizens it subjects to its power.
Masks render faces opaque and impenetrable. The swatches of sterile fabric covering the nose and mouth make expressions more inscrutable, more difficult to decode. They also inhibit the act of communication. Fear and distrust are further heightened by ambiguously peering eyes that show the absence of otherwise more full and radiant expressions. The masquerade seems to make our presence to each all the more obscure. In the manner of a photographic negative or an x-ray, the masks illuminate the how the faces they cover are the locus of the truth of ourselves. Giorgio Agamben notes in Means Without End,
Language…transforms nature into face… The face is at once the irreparable being-exposed of humans and the very opening in which they hide and stay hidden. The face is the only location of community, the only possible city. And that is because that which in single individuals opens up to the political is the tragicomedy of truth, in which they always already fall and out of which they have to find a way…
We may call tragicomedy of appearance the fact that the face uncovers only and precisely inasmuch as it hides, and hides to the extent to which it uncovers… Precisely because the face is solely the location of truth, it is also and immediately the location of simulation and of an irreducible impropriety. This does not mean, however, that appearance dissimulates what it uncovers by making it look lke what in reality it is not: rather, what human beings truly are is nothing other than this dissimuliation and this disquietude within the appearance…
State power today is no longer grounded on the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence…rather it is founded above all on the control of appearance (of doxa).
The state’s issuing of masks to cover faces becomes, then, an accidental, though no less important, metaphor for the glory of state’s reign: the de-politicization of citizens and the production of bare life by quaratine and separation. Gestures and faces alike are blocked; politics and truth are potentially suppressed, in part through the control of their appearances. These are among the political dimensions of the crisis worth adverting to.
Images: Felipe Calderon speaking at hospital opening, April 25, 2009, photo by Alfredo Guerrero, Latin American Herald Tribune; Our dear Citoyen du Monde riding the first wave out in DF; David De la Paz, Xinhua.
**tirado/thrown highly recommends the near-daily coverage of the swine flu crisis over at Daniel Hernandez’s blog, Intersections for reflections and analysis.
Filed under: Autobiographical, Ideas, Latinos, Philosophy, Politics | Tags: Slavoj Zizek, Liberation Theology, Kaibil, Christ, Theology, Autobiographical, Authoritarianism
A comment of Slavoj Žižek’s at his talk in Cambridge a few weeks ago brought to mind a harrowing memory.
In an aside during a meandering, though no less interesting lecture (tangentially related to his new book The Monstrosity of Christ), Žižek mentioned CIA documents from Latin America noting that liberation theology was perceived as a greater threat than communism.
On the one hand, such an assertion seems entirely unsurprising. Liberation theology threatened the legitimacy of Empire, Church, and State alike, to the point that officials at the highest levels of the Catholic Church ardently labored to suppress it, in an apparent collusion with neo-liberal and authoritarian interests (with a few exceptions). The State, with imperial support, did the less savory work, carrying out the infamous atrocities on laity and clergy alike. That much is well-known.
On the other hand, his comment brought to mind a discussion with my stepfather during Christmas of 1998. In the 70s and early 80s he had spent time in Guatemala as an officer, training and fighting alongside the most lethal of Latin America’s elite forces: the Kaibiles.** To note his fervent anti-communist almost goes without saying. To his mind, a liberationist eucharist would probably have resembled the scene below.
During my last year of undergraduate education and my first years of graduate stuidies in philosophy, I was enthralled by Catholicism and struggled with the idea of becoming a Jesuit. That I attended Jesuit institutions during those years only made my questioning more palpable and immediate to me at the time.
On my first night back from Boston for winter break, my step-father and I stood by the Christmas tree in the modest Calabasas apartment he and my mother shared with my younger brother. Within five minutes of our conversation he asked me, “So, are you still thinking about becoming a Jesuit priest?”
“Well, I’m still not sure. I’ve thought about it, but…”
“You know, some of those Jesuits died with AK-47s in their hands…”
I couldn’t adequately, nor quickly, respond at the time. From what I knew about my stepfather, I could only sense that he would not have hesitated to deal a fatal shot were I a cleric at the other end of his rifle muzzle. Žižek’s comment only made that episode almost eleven years ago that much more vivid- and chilling. Perhaps the most monstrous fantasy of Christ an authoritarian could imagine was one whose wrath was directed at the oppressors of the poor or the abusers of power who did a shabby job of justice.
** Since the end of the nearly four-decade civil war in Guatemala, the Kaibil have come upon relatively slim times. Still in existence, their numbers have been curtailed to some extent, but their fate has mirrored the fortunes of post-dictatorial Latin America. Active Kaibil continue to work in various capacities: mired in the fight against drug trafficking, taking on projects against “juvenile delinquency”, and taking part in UN peacekeeping and combat missions. Some ex-Kaibiles have found work leveraging their skills as security or muscle for narco cartels, recruited into groups such as Los Zetas. Still others have entered into private security industry as mercenaries. Spanish-language video reportage of the Kaibil are available here, here, and here.
Filed under: Books, Philosophy, Politics | Tags: Add new tag, Agamben, Editorials, Julien Coupat, Philosophy, Political Thought, Politics, Thought, Tiqqun
[Ed note: This post was initially meant to publish sometime in the dead of winter, around January of 2009. For a variety of reasons (procrastination, laziness, business, preoccupation with other matters, reservations, etc.) the post has sat around in a mostly-completed state in the 'Drafts' folder for a long time. Maybe the post has its own schedule, or its publication is not really meant to come out in quite this fashion. (In retrospect, there were probably three or four separate blog posts just waiting to be made out of the compendium below.) At any rate, they are words coming from an exigence that was ultimately frustrated and arrested, leaving you with a post whose timeliness is at best ambiguous.]
The last couple of months of 2008 have been busy on news regarding Giorgio Agamben and work being done on his thought. Usually some piece of information ocasionally drifts in, or a new, nearly inaudible video on YouTube of Agamben’s lectures catches my attention. But I don’t remember there being such a relative volume of Agamben-related news since he protested the U.S.’s policy of ‘biopolitical tattooing’ under provisions of the US-Visit act and consequently turned down an appointment at NYU. Maybe it’s just that my antennae are more finely tuned to pick these kind of things up now than they were before. Be that as it may, though, the news is welcome. Some bits follow:
- The final installment of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer tetralogy was published in Italy in late 2008. Entitled, Il Sacramento del linguaggio: Archeologia del giuramento (The Sacrament of Language: Archeaology of the Oath), it comes quickly on the heels of Il Regno e la gloria: Per una genealogia teologica dell’economia e del governo (The Kindgom and the Glory: For a theological geneaology of the economy and government), published in 2007. Roughly paraphrasing, the publisher’s website describes the The Sacrament of Language as an inquiry seeking to offer reasons for the strategy and functioning of an institution that has encroached its way into religion, politics, and law- the oath. Agamben places the oath as a decisive anthropogenetic gesture at the threshold between language and power. At a quick blush, the work treats themes that Agamben takes up in a chapter from The Time That Remains entitled, “The Sixth Day.” David Kishik at Notes for the Coming Community offers a rough translation from an excerpt for a sampling. [Notes for the Coming Community].
- In May 2009, Stanford University Press will be publishing a very short collection of Agamben’s essays under the title, What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays. consisting of the title essay, and works on friendship and contemporaenity rounding out the tiny, 80 page book. Frankly, I’m a little disappointed, as seeing a relatively larger text like Il Regno e la Gloria come out in translation before such a short collection of texts would be more desirable. But it’s a trivial complaint. Jason Adams’ translation of the title essay (which will not appear in the collection, David Kishik’s translation will), originally entitled Qui est une dispositif? What is a Dispositor? is a good place to start for a glimpse of what the book will offer. [Stanford University Press/Notes for the Coming Community]
- Lacan.com and Notes for the Coming Community have published translations of a recent editorial that Agamben wrote for France’s Liberation, calling for the release of Julien Coupat* and the Tarnac 9. In the process he challenges a significant feature political life in our time: the concentration of state power that has made dissent a suspect activity by appealing to security (whether real or perceived) as a basis for governance. A outstanding blog with updates and documents on the Tarnac 9 situation is can be found here. [Lacan.com/Notes for the Coming Community/Support the Tarnac 9]
- Leyland de la Durantaye’s recent work on Agamben, “Homo Profanus: Giorgo Agamben’s Profane Philosophy” appears in the most recent edition of the journal boundary. At a cursory glance, it appears to be an in-depth treatment bringing ideas developed in Profanations to bear as part of Agamben’s philosophical and political projects. Namely he places Profanations in proxmity to works outside of the Homo Sacer series- The Coming Community, Means Without End, The Idea of Prose, and The Time That Remains. The article holds out the possibility of reading Agamben’s work systemtically to present some possible prospects and directions for Agamben’s thought, especially in relation to ideas discussed in Walter Benjamin’s work. Interestingly, he alludes to the Flamen Diale as an example of a profane figure. Could this counterpart to the sacred [hu]man be a hint pointing towards the next phase of Agamben’s thinking? Next May, Stanford University Press will be publishing de la Durantaye’s text Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction. [Duke Journals/Stanford University Press]
- Adam Kotsko’s essay, “On Agamben’s use of Benjamin’s Critique of Violence” appears in the latest issue of Telos. Only a short excerpt serving as an abstract is available online, so it’s either to the library or to forking over $15 for an issue.
- Infinite Thought, a tirado/thrown favorite, posted this little item with a link on ”How to Write Like Agamben”** from a blog that is the latest addition to the blogroll, No Useless Leniency. Worth checking out is a commentary on Agamben’s essay “In Praise of Profanation”, in the style of another of Agamben’s essays, Notes on Gesture. It’s called Notes on the Image. [Infinite Thought/No Useless Leniency]
*As it happens, Coupat is the editor of the French-based journal Tiqqun. For a sample of work featured in the journal, Soft Targets published some excerpts from a piece entitled Introduction to Civil War. Very Roughly speaking, these fragments throw situationism, Agambenian philosophy, and samplings of Hardt-Negri’s autonomism into the mix, offer offer a response to neo-liberal imperialism and preventive counter-revolutionary politics. The Support the Tarnac 9 site also has additional texts from Tiqqun and the Inoperative Collective available. [Soft Targets Journal/Support the Tarnac 9]
**As a rejoinder to IT, another possible way to score a Warburg Institute fellowship is to write like Richard Rodriguez, whatever the Chicanada may think of him. This here one finds Rodriguez to be essential reading on the dynamics of mestizaje and subject formation.
Image Credit: Reiner Gahnal, Seminar/Lecture, Giorgio Agamben, Filosofia teoretica,istituto universitario di architettura di Venezia, 6/5/2007, 20 x 24 inches. 51 x 61 cm
Filed under: Blogs, Ideas, Philosophy, Publishing | Tags: Jamaica Plain, Flaneurie, cultural criticism, Josh Glenn, New Blogs, Matthew Battles, critical attitudes, dispositions, Barrios
A number of weeks ago, a blip on the feed reader caught our attention at tirado/thrown: blog posts authored by Josh Glenn and Matthew Battles, a couple of fellow Bostonians from the JP barrio whose acquaintance we made while shilling ads for Glenn’s amazing periodical Hermenaut in the late 90s-early 00s. A little more digging outside the confines of the feed reader’s data stream revealed the existence of a new entity on the blogging landscape: HILOBROW.
From the looks of a number of the posts, hilobrow promises to be an exciting exploration of modes of (dis)engagement with cultural phenomena which advance a particular disposition. Its editors argue against the snobbishness attitude of the highbrow, the well-intentioned dishonesty of the lowbrow, and the middlebrow’s toxic sarcasm. Instead, hilobrow seeks to approach matters through a camp sensibility, which the editors identify as
…a manifestation of engaged irony. (When the cast of John Waters’s 1998 movie Pecker toast the “death of irony,” they’re toasting the death of middlebrow sarcastic hipsterism.) The engaged ironist is a hilobrow.
This, of course, continues Glenn’s long-standing interest in cultivating philosophic attitudes towards the phantasmic saturation of late capitalist existence. In the late 90s, Glenn devoted a double-issue of Hermenaut (#11/12) to the theme of “Camp”, which lays out the terrain he’s treading. The introductory essay and excerpts from that issue still live at the Hermenaut website (under “Print”).
We here at tirado/thrown couldn’t be more excited for hilobrow’s debut!
Filed under: Anthropology, Architecture, Ideas, Philosophy | Tags: Philosophy, Politics, Architecture, Biopolitics, capitalism, Sloterdijk, Latour, Design
That was the philosophical catchphrase proclaimed by the self-described “Sloterdijkian” Bruno Latour during his portion of a public lecture with Peter Sloterdijk at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design a couple of weeks ago.
Taking as its theme, “Networks and Spheres: Two Ways to Interpret Globalization”, the tandem lectures and discussion was a sweeping journey through very basic issues of space, dwelling, and modes of design required to meet the demands our current socio-spatial conditions.
Peter Sloterdijk quietly approached the lectern after being introduced by GSD Dean Moshen Mostafavi and lectured with a measure of understatement and modesty. In the form of a self-colloquy, Sloterdijk introduced listeners to the main features of his three-volume Spharen (Spheres) project, citing VonUexkull, Benjamin, LeCorbusier, and a view of psychedelic capitalism as exemplified by the structure heralding the birth of mass culture: London’s Crystal Palace. Taking seriously the notion of space as a key anthropological category, Sloterdijk develops a heuristic questioning the home or the dwelling as the primary philosophical space in a context of profoundly fragile spatial and social complexity.
In the sense that ethos designates a habitat or “accustomed space”, the home is the site western philosophy and ethical thinking. Instead, Sloterdijk proposes the flexible, structures of spheres and foams as structuring spatial relations (whether biological or interpersonal) noting that the task of architecture is to understand its place between biology (dealing with atmosphere or environment) and philosophy (whose inquiry is oriented towards the world). Sloterdijk’s lecture hinted at architecture’s biopolitical vocation in the design and construction of habitats organizing space in dynamic constellations of spheres and islands.
Sloterdijk concluded his portion by noting architecture’s contribution to scientific discovery. He cited the early biologists’ use of the architectural terminology used in the design of monasteries to inspire their study of microscopically experienced structures, saying that “the real owner of the use of the cell is the community of architects…”
An energetic Bruno Latour followed. Drawing upon Sloterdijk, he announced at the very beginning of his lecture, “I was born a Sloterdijkian!” To test out the ideas of spheres and networks in his proposed thought experiment, he took to task contemporary internet-based notions of networks against his understanding of networks as inspired by Leibniz’s monadology and Diderot. Latour equally takes to task Heidegger’s ontological enterprise, which he claims, superficially considers the atmosphere of the world at its peril. Biopolitics again reared its head, this time in the midst of a critique of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. In Latour’s words,
The Dasein is thrown into the world, but so naked that he doesn’t stand much chance to last. …the respective relations between death and superficiality are suddenly reversed. There’s not the slightest chance to understand being when it has been cut off from the vast numbers of apparently “trifle” [sic] and “superficial” “little beings” that make it exist from moment to moment…In one stroke, the philosopher’s quest for being as such, looks like an antiquated research program.
Latour’s lecture simultaneously glossed on Sloterdijk’s and challenged philosophic thought to re-think itself by diving into the material conceptions and conditions of our dwelling and recast the split between nature and culture in terms of spheres and networks. This provocation calls on us to consider justice and equality as operative in environments where space is needed, spherically structured, and mediated by circuits of networks. In a parody of Heidegger, “Tell me what is your position on space, and I’ll tell you who you are…” he proposes a dead-serious litmus test for philosophers and architects alike to consider. Towards the end of the lecture, his reverie along theological, economic, political, spatial, and historical lines illustrated the urgency of such a project.
Additional Materials:
- Last week’s coverage of the event from The Harvard Gazette can be found here.
- The GSD has video of the lecture here.
- A special issue of Environment and Planning dedicated to Sloterdijk has a pair of essays by Sloterdijk and a number of commentaries.
Image: From left, Bruno Latour, Peter Sloterdijk, and Moshen Mostafavi at the “Networks and Spheres” discussion at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, February 17, 2009. Photo by Stephanie Mitchell, Harvard University News Office.
Filed under: Photos, editorial meta-blogging | Tags: inclement weather, snow, Writing
Today’s a much-needed (and appreciated) snow day, thanks to the winter storm that left a foot of snow in the Boston area over the late night and morning. Trudging along in windy squalls, avoiding foot-high snow banks, and hitting the trains and buses for an hour and change on five hours of sleep just seemed cruel and unpleasant.
The snowblowers, plough trucks, and shovels are hard at work outside as this entry is being written.
Posting has been a little slow, and will likely be so for a couple of months. Your dedicated tirado/thrown staff of one is working on some academic research and writing in preparation for a grad school admissions bid. Fret not, however. Some posts are in the works.
Image: From the last snowstorm that hit Boston, February 18, 2009. Greenough Street, Jamiaca Plain, MA. Taken by tirado/thrown.
Filed under: Architecture, Ideas, Music, art | Tags: Animation, Architecture, Experience, Music, Sea and Cake, Sound and Vision, Video
Here at tirado/thrown, we heartily anticipate the end of the winter. With the clear light and the cold air, we’re slowly attempting to shed the frozen snow that stubbornly sticks to the ground here in Boston (but not before the upcoming Agamben post, though).
The Sea and Cake’s cover of David Bowie’s “Sound and Vision” is the perfect song for this time of year. They take on Bowie with a blast of cold Chicago air and fashion a tempered interpretation that does not threaten the original version’s excitement and buoyancy.
In an issue of loud paper a number of years ago, The Sea and Cake’s lead singer Sam Prekop professed his love for the work of Mies Van Der Rohe. Lines, glass, light, and steel, Van Der Rohe’s architecture trades in the very basic terms of experience and dwelling.
It’s not entirely surprising then, that the video above marshals high-modern experimental animation to offer a visual expereince well-coordinated with a song that is about experience, broadly conceived: wonder, awakening, anticipation, becoming alive, the senses sparkening and opening to the world. The above video is vitalism wrapped in the guise of a collected, though vibrant, formalism. Here’s to ushering the end of Winter.
UPDATE: A far better version of the video is up on Pitchfork.tv, which I recommend over the video I posted above.
