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Anything pertaining to current events.

A threefold apology

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In view of some of the justified anger that has recently been directed toward me for not having deleted a post from a few months back, I think a public apology is in order. The post itself was deeply problematic in some of its insinuations, and moreover contained a number of hateful comments left by trolls directed against an organization to which I formerly belonged and disparaging someone I used to date. Additionally, in my own responses to these awful comments I thereby ended up reprising, stupidly but unwittingly, much of what made them so problematic in the first place.

So I hereby apologize, unconditionally, for the three following reasons: Continue reading →

Recommended reading: An article on identity politics and a review of Art and Class

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A couple updates. To start, an article by Michael Rectenwald has finally been published over at The North Star under the title “What’s wrong with identity politics (and intersectionality theory)?” It’s yet another response to Mark Fisher’s polemic, “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” but is addressed equally to his critics. My hope, probably naïve, is that Rectenwald’s piece will be seen as the final word on the debate. Of course, anyone who’s still itching to pen a rejoinder and join in the fray is invited to do so. The uproar can hardly last forever, though.

Either way, I’d like to draw attention to one passage by Rectenwald in particular, one that I feel makes the connection between intersectionality and identity politics explicit. Now that I think of it, I never got around to spelling out what ties them together. Instead, I left it implicit. Rectenwald fills in this lacuna in two succinct paragraphs:

Fisher never explicitly refers to intersectionality theory, but it lurks just beneath surface of his contempt in “Exiting the Vampire Castle.” Developed in the 1970s and 1980s within feminism, intersectionality seeks to understand how power intersects identities along various axes, including those of race, gender, sexuality, or sexual preference, etc. It aims to locate the articulations of power as it traverses various subordinated peoples in different, multiple ways. Suggestive of a radical critique of patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy and other forms of domination, it complicates any sense of gender, sex, class, or race as homogenous wholes. And it problematizes any hierarchy of one categorical determination over others. As such, it appears to serve as a method of analysis for opposing oppressions of all kinds. Intersectionality should, it seems, work to deepen our understanding of the composition of class society, and to add to the means for overcoming it.

But operating under the same schema as a more simplified identity politics, intersectionality theory serves to isolate multiple and seemingly endless identity standpoints, without sufficiently articulating them with each other, or the forms of domination. The upshot in political practice is a static pluralism of reified social categories, each vying for more-subaltern-than-thou status on a field of one-downsmanship. While it may be useful for sociologists attempting to describe groups and their struggles with power, as a political theory, it is useless, or worse. This is because, by ending with the identification and isolation of its various constituencies, it in fact serves to sever the connections that it supposedly sought to understand and strengthen. The practical upshot of intersectionality theory is the perpetual articulation of difference, resulting in fragmentation and the stagnation of political activity that Fisher bemoans.

This explains the kind of “race to the bottom” mentality that tends to accompany intersectionality and identity. In fact, here’s a graph I found that illustrates exactly their relationship, with binaries emanating radially from the center in either direction, showing relative degrees of privilege vs. oppression:
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oppression1

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Logically, I suppose identity would thus be a subordinate or constituent component of intersectionality, with each category of identification counting as a sort of token that signifies a form of oppression. Continue reading →

NYC book release: Architecture and capitalism (2013)

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Storefront for Art
and Architecture
November 5, 2013
7:00-10:00 pm

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Sammy Medina and I will be attending this event tonight at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in Manhattan, on two of subjects of which we never tire of talking: architecture and capitalism. Check it out if you’re in town, and hope to see you there. The event description and details about the book are reproduced below.
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Architecture and/or capitalism

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Let me tell you a wonderful, old joke from Communist times. A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends: “Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say. If it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: “Everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theaters show good films from the west. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.” This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom — war on terror and so on — falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here. You are giving all of us red ink.

— Slavoj Žižek, Sept 17, 2011
Liberty Square, New York

Over the last few decades, capitalism has entered every single aspect of culture. If we fantasized about postmodernism being the end of capitalism in its lateness, it seems that today, on the contrary, capitalism is as agile as ever. As Žižek argues in his joke about the red ink, we do not have the tools to start imagining alternatives.

Faced with this impossibility, on the occasion of the book launch of Architecture and Capitalism edited by Peggy Deamer, Storefront presents a forum where some of the book contributors and other leading figures in the discourse around politics, economy, architecture and the city present and discuss some historical and contemporary references on how alternatives have been articulated in the past and how we might be able to articulate them today.

Participants include:
Thomas Angotti,
Peggy Deamer,
Quilian Riano
and Michael Sorkin,
among others.

If you are a Storefront member and would like to reserve a seat at the event, please send your RSVP. Not a member? Join now. Also, tell your friends and RSVP on Facebook.
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About the book

Architecture and Capitalism:
1845 to the Present
Edited by Peggy Deamer

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Architecture and Capitalism tells a story of the relationship between the economy and architectural design. Eleven historians each discuss in brand new essays the time period they know best, looking at cultural and economic issues, which in light of current economic crises you will find have dealt with diverse but surprisingly familiar economic issues. Told through case studies, the narrative begins in the mid-nineteenth century and ends with 2011, with introductions by editor Peggy Deamer to pull the main themes together so that you can see how other architects in different times and in different countries have dealt with similar economic conditions. By focusing on what previous architects experienced, you have the opportunity to avoid repeating the past.

With new essays by Pier Vittorio Aureli, Ellen Dunham-Jones, Keller Easterling, Lauren Kogod, Robert Hewison, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, Robin Schuldenfrei, Deborah Gans, Simon Sadler, Nathan Rich, and Michael Sorkin.

Peggy Deamer is a professor of architecture at Yale University, New Haven, USA.

Publisher: Routledge
NYC, English, 2013 
Paperback: $40
ISBN: 978-0-415-53488-8 
Hardback: $150.00
ISBN: 978-0-415-53487-1 

Limited copies will be available
for purchase at the event. Continue reading →

Architecture: Theory, history, politics

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So I’ve started a group called Architecture: Theory, history, politics on Facebook to act as a kind of decantation chamber for some of the discussions I’ve been involved in lately. Its main areas of focus are architectural theory, the history of architecture, and the relation of architecture to politics. We’ll see where it goes.

The group’s tentative description runs as follows:

This group aims to serve as a space for dialogue, discussion, and debate on the theoretical, historical, and political dimensions of architecture. Related fields — such as engineering, urbanism, and design — are also included under this rubric (though this itself is open to contention).

So long as posts pertain to these subjects and themes, all sorts of sources, input, and materials are welcome. A few additional guidelines might be appended in order to prevent spam and keep comment threads from being derailed, but these should be minimal.

Otherwise, membership is open.

Feel free to join if you’re interested, invite people who you think might be, or share it elsewhere. You can check it out by clicking the link above.

Persona non grata

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So it’s finally happened. I’ve been officially declared a “persona non grata” by the elected leadership of the Platypus Affiliated Society — the Organizational Committee or OrgComm, if you prefer (in a delightfully Soviet portmanteau). An e-mail was sent out earlier today specifying that I’m no longer to be invited to any of its functions or events, and even actively discouraged from attending. Of course, this proclamation was circulated “internally,” on the Platypus listserve, but as everyone knows these things are never that secret anyway.

For many of you, this will come as quite a surprise, considering my outspoken support for the group in the past and repeated arguments against calls to boycott or shun it. Now, it would appear, I myself am to be shunned by the very group I’ve publicly defended on numerous occasions. Let it be known that I do not rescind any of these arguments, as I still consider most of the motions that counsel disengagement with the organization either pointless or unprincipled. In fact, despite the advice of the many who’ve told me I’m “better off without them” or assured me that “Platypus is just holding [me] back,” I continue to find the stated goals of the organization honorable and most of its methods unobjectionable, whatever complaints may be made regarding its needlessly vituperative internal rhetoric. Also, though some others treat the entire outfit as some kind of sad joke — and find its various panels, fora, and publications overwrought, if not simply boring — I stand my past statements that I often find them illuminating and insightful. Continue reading →

Cubo-futurist rendering of Trotsky, uncredited (probably Annenkov, 1922)

Trotskiana

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1920s Trotsky memorabilia

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Back in 2008, Mansur Mirovalev wrote a piece for NBC News on a curious leftover from the late Cold War era:

The Soviet Union may be in the dustbin of history, but there’s one place the socialist utopia lives on: cyberspace.

And no, Mirovalev wasn’t talking about this blog, or Richard Seymour’s Lenin’s Tomb, Roland Boer’s Stalin’s Moustache, or Martin Gittins’ magnificent Kosmograd website.

He had something quite different in mind. Continue reading →

Has #Occupy entered “Phase Three”?

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Part of the Platypus contingent at May Day in New York, 2012

I do wonder: Do the coordinated international May Day marches signal a kind of end to the so-called “second phase” of #Occupy, and perhaps the beginning of a “phase three”? My suspicion is that they do, but I’d like to hear other people’s opinions.

Generally speaking, I would mark this second phase as lasting from roughly either the November 15th sequence of evictions or the N17 demonstrations, through “the winter of our discontent” (i.e., decentralization, the breakdown of the chronically dysfunctional GA/Spokescouncil models, and the shift to planning for International Workers’ Day), all the way up to its culmination in the May 1 marches.

The first phase, of course, I’d date from September 17th-November 15th actual large-scale occupation of physical spaces. There was a prehistory to the occupation of Zuccotti Park that was not insignificant, certainly. Not just the Arab Spring or the European anti-austerity protests, but also the actual planning committees throughout August.

Participating in the May Day march in New York two days ago, my hope was that it marked more of a new beginning than a definitive end.  It is perhaps too early to tell what the future may bring.  But I remain somewhat hopeful.

Platypus signs at May Day in New York, 2012

Continue reading →