Spinoza’s Two Existences
Prima facie, proposition 2P7 in Spinoza’s Ethics presents the counter-intuitive claim that there can be no ideas without extended objects accompanying them. That is, ideas cannot exist without correlative bodies. However, Spinoza offers 2P8 to address the possibility of singular things that do not exist, while preserving his mind-body parallelism. 2P8 states: The ideas of [...]
Borromini’s Bricks: Matters of Immanence in the Roman Oratory
And if you think of Brick, for instance, and you say to Brick, “What do you want Brick?” And Brick says to you, “I like an Arch.” – Louis Kahn [1] A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window. [...]
Tearing Real Images from Clichés: Edward Burtynsky’s Industrial Landscapes
Such a voyage does not necessarily imply great movements in extension; it becomes immobile, in a room and on a body without organs—an intensive voyage that undoes all the lands for the benefit of the one it is creating. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 319) Edward Burtynsky’s manufactured landscapes – large-format, photographic compositions of industrially-transformed [...]
James Stirling and the Post-War Crisis of Movement: An Architectural Model of the Smooth and the Striated
Gilles Deleuze transitions between the two volumes of his cinema project by identifying a crisis of movement in post-War cultural and aesthetic practices. As film liberates itself from causal logic and linear displacements, introducing a differential subjectivity to replace static identity, space and time are (re)conceptualized to accommodate incompossible worlds. In establishing these late modern [...]
Spaces in Becoming: Jacques Rancière and Pedro Costa
In The Emancipated Spectator, Jacques Rancière challenges traditional theatrical and conceptual binaries separating spectator and actor, active and passive, seeing and knowing, experience and thought, action and reaction, acting and thinking, teaching and learning. Where Brecht and Artaud, despite their differences, assume a pre-constituted subject to be molded, challenged and incorporated within discourses, Rancière assumes [...]
Architecture between East and West: The Emergent Practices of Arbeitsgruppe 4 in Cold War Austria
The Third Man immortalized post-war Vienna, creating the architectural images most closely associated Austria’s geopolitical position at the time. Physical destruction served as a constant reminder of Austria’s immediate past and its bleak outlook for the future. The decay also served as a material manifestation of the guilt and repression associated with Austria’s role in [...]
Stan VanDerBeek: The Culture Intercom
Stan VanDerBeek: The Culture Intercom at the MIT List Visual Arts Center from February 4 to April 3, 2011 Moving through Stan VanDerBeek: The Culture Intercom, the current exhibition at the MIT List Visual Art Center, one experiences a sudden encounter, turning a corner between the entrance space and the large primary space of the [...]
Simulacrum in the Tableaux Vivants of Thomas Demand
How the ‘True World’ Ultimately Became a Fable: Simulacrum in the Tableaux Vivants of Thomas Demand Friedrich Nietzsche introduces a chapter of Twilight of the Idols entitled “How the ‘True World’ Ultimately Became a Fable: A History of an Error” with six concise points that purport to overturn Western philosophy by replacing representation with simulacra.[1] [...]
Matthew Barney’s “Hoist” and the Desiring-Production of Space
There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons. -Gilles Deleuze Destricted has finally been released on DVD in the U.S. While I have not watched this version, I have previously seen the one produced for the UK market. The only two films in that series worth recommending are [...]
On the Death and Life of Cities
Only by enlisting the movements of a building and accounting carefully for its “tribulations” would one be able to state its existence: it would be equal to the building’s extensive list of controversies and performances over time, i.e. it would be equal to what it does, to the way it resists attempts at transformation, allows [...]
The Preservation of Banksy
There is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of the historical sense, through which something living comes to harm and finally perishes, whether it is a person or a people or a culture. -Friedrich Nietzsche “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life” Banksy has been on a graffiti tour of the United States [...]
David Lynch’s “Lady Blue Shanghai”
David Lynch’s latest film, “Lady Blue Shanghai”, is a 16-minute advertisement for Dior. Apparently Lynch was given creative license to create any story as long as it featured Marion Cotillard, the bag, a blue rose and Old Shanghai – relatively minor constraints for Lynch. However, it might have been a nice change if Lynch had [...]
The Ethics of Dust as Sheets of the Past
“You may at least earnestly believe, that the presence of the spirit which culminates in your own life, shows itself in dawning, wherever the dust of the earth begins to assume any orderly and lovely state.” -John Ruskin, The Ethics of Dust (XVIII, 346) I recently visited The Ethics of Dust, an experimental approach to [...]
The Limits of Control as Machinic Opera
If a quality has motifs and counterpoints, if there are rhythmic characters and melodic landscapes in a given order, then there is the constitution of a veritable machinic opera tying together orders, species, and heterogeneous qualities. What we term machinic is precisely this synthesis of heterogeneities as such. Inasmuch as these heterogeneities are matters of [...]
