Contingent Space: musings when I should be working

The constituencies of contingencies. The modern condition rests firmly on a foundation of conditionality, a new normal of abnormality, displaces the expected. The schism between a constituency under the flag of predetermination which requires a smooth cognition in constant flux to mold the relationship of the individual of the nation of continuity to an permanently diachronic environment is at odds with the constituency of the contingent, where the constancy of  the cognitive process is in it's flux.

This is supposed to be some kind of post-modern poetics or something about a personality that expects that the world is constant and through the sheer force of their will are able to continue to see their environment in the terms that they want to see (something like republicanism) but which requires their mind to be constantly changing to allow the metaphor of the environment to stay constant, and a contrary personality that expects contingencies and as such the mind is static because the abnormal is normal.

I'm really more interested in my tomale to clear this up.

Whatevs.

Decent with Marginalization

A quick note on American Christianity:

The particular contemporary manifestation of Christianity popular in capitalist systems is perhaps the best evidence of evolution one could ask for.

1) The first artefact in the type can be traced to the current collection of traits that are still identifiable as the same species.

2) The two examples of the type are taxonomically similar only in that they are monotheistic universal organizing systems, virtually all other compenents, including the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth have changed

3) The original was a populist system aimed at justice through the mechanism of peace and universal rights, popular in with a majority population opressed by an alien minority. The current is 1) splintered in type as in the finches in Darwin but 2) is largely a power consolidation and maintenance system aimed at promoting the primacy of a select membership through fear and tribalism popular with an opressing minority.

I Do Not Think This Means What You Think It Means...

Note to minion: This post was saved as a draft back in November. It's incomplete, but still more insightful than most of my posts so whatevs....

This week I'm into the mechanisms by which signs lose their meaning, and how new meanings take thier place. Contemporary cultural practicioners can access ample discussions of the topic trough Eisenman, or directly through Derrida or Chomsky, but the conceptual notion of the mutability of linguistic units in the practice of everyday life is typically overlooked.

From Eisenmans experiments (and successes) in semantic architecture we get the question when is a column not a column. Most of the time...and never. Both are correct. To clarify, how about another question: What is the role of a column? Technically columns are the vertical components of the structural system of an architectural artifact. In practice most columns in this country are pices of wood, like a 6x6 wrapped in some venner of stone, brick, more wood, etc. The point being, you don't even see the technical column, it's hidden by the sundry layers of stuff which are intended to look like a column. Why then would the column in its technical capacity need stuff to make it look more column like? Because the role of a column is not simply the technical requirement that it transfer the load of architectural elements above to the foundation and ultimatly to the ground, columns have a cultural and linguistic role.

The cultural role involves expressing a particular message about the architectural composition the column is engaged in. Houses in Tyler, TX with ionic columns are not greek temples. They have greek columns in the style of the ionian period, but, and I cannot stress this enough, they are not greek temples. So there is another reason to make them look like they are greek columns. An expression of permanence or small r republicanism, or the logo which represents some brand which I cannot access or understand, and hope not to. Capitol buildings. Same thing. How many contemporary capitol buildings do you see? NONE!!! THAT'S HOW MANY!!!! Okay, Scotish parliament, Utrecth and Austin city halls excepted. The myriad reasons columns are made to look like super fancy columns is not that important here. We're all going to agree on this point and move on.

Socialist. Democratic. Fascist. Communist. Capitalist.

Let's start by saying these signs are mostly innacurately used in relationship to thier appropriate signified meanings. We use democratic to desrcibe the american system which is actually a republic. There are specific meanings of these two words and to very easily slip into using the word democratic which actually maintains some relationship to its original meaning. This sad fact is based on the fundamental ignorance of the american people who believe they live in a democracy.

Homework:

There is a fantastic series of letters between Pierre Jeaneret and his mentor Perret which is essential to the when is a column not a column debate. The Jeanerate/Perret debate is over windows, but the lessons are the same.

George Lakoff's most recent book "The Political Mind" discusses the biological component of cognition and how the physical nature of the mind predetermines an individual's ability to rationalize the cultural environment. The interaction of the mind rationalizing in a particular way and the structural preconditions of the cultural system lead an individual toward what would be labeled (also by the cultural system, by the way) conservative or liberal.

de Saussure

Sign, Signifier, Signified

Lakoff

embedded mind

subonscious rationalle

constituencies

are fractured populations

rorschoch

subconscious rationalle

upper ontologies

conflict

conflicting semantic interoperability

dominant ink blot

Hi Mom.

I talked to Reba and Dennis today on the phone and said I'd mention them in today's blog.

The Archetypal Postmodernity of Mrs. Palin

The White Rider of the Appocolypes (maybe Red), William Kristol

[Note: cross posting today at www.plf-news.blogspot.com]

This week the prevailing framing from Democratic media outlets is that National Review founder and grand wizard of douschbaggery William Kristol is responsible for the nationalizing of Sarah Palin. It seems facile in the least to suggest one dillhole, no matter how mightely he might suck, could be responsible for pandemic platitudes, but let's continue under the assumption that he could. Further, lets allow that there is ample evidence to substantiate the claim that the beacon of the retardation can represent to a constituency their tribal ideal.

There have been numberous left leaning writers from

Scott Horton to Andrew Sullivan are suggesting that the talented Mr. Kristol culled the G.I.L.F. not in spite of her empty suitness, but specifically for her vacuity.If her uncharacteristic character were cardianal among her endowments Bill Kristol's douschbaggery is tendind toward absolute truth. However, beyond the obscene anti-republican power to control such decisions the effect of political burlesque in this style represents either mastery of postmodernity with the cool menthol taste of deconstructionism or a rorschoch test which I'm sorry to say is going to lead to many more sessions, maybe bringing in some other members of the family, but let's do a couple more sessions one on one and see how it goes.

Peter Eisenman, Bill Kristol and Jacques Derrida. What do these characters from history have in common? They are all masters of the semantic school of the deconstructivist wing of the postmodernist party. (I think I've used that "wing of the party" gesture before...damn you Howard Dean and your lyrical word smithing)

The post Derrida-Eisenman break up to me signals the begining of the end of proper pomo, but in a way is the deconstruction of deconstruction. Somol-ien cool moves into or crafts the intellectual vacuum left by the collapse of criticality cum disciplinarity, and injects a theory of the thing dripping with faux zeitgeist optics and yearning for a criticcality of the uncritical. All this as a lyrical pathway toward expressing that postmodernism was shown to be a characture of itself, cliche and dogma dependant, stagnant and referential not of a historically crafted embeded system of knowledge but of a means of practice and a mode of product.

Damnit. I have to start writing these things earlier in the day. I've been absolutely wasting precious blogging time with this working that's been going around.

Cliff's Notes: She has substance and meaning and she is a symbol of her meaning. The meaning, sign and symbol are the same. there is no collapse of the meanings and valent representations, they develop in space coincidentally. The sign must then be emptied of it's meaning, the sign refilled with new meaning, and the sign becomes signifier of new meaning.

Anyhoo, the homework for if I decide to comeback to this: Notes Around Conceptual Architecture, The Seven Crutches of Modern Architecture, Notes Around the Doppler Effect, Christy Canyon Unleashed (the Anabolic one not the Vivid Video release), Simulations (Buadrillard), The Myth of the Red and the Brown

Screw Flanders

The Virtuosity of The Virtuoso

The Little Street, Johannes Vermeer, 1658

In pouring over many volumes of forgotten lore in the fortnight just past, Benjamin and Peter Berger to name a few, a nostalgia for virtuosity is creeping into both the artifactual production I control and my argumentation. From Benjamin (whose marxist bona fides we should all feel comfortable calling shinanigans on) I none the less take away from the Benjamin experience the intended lessons on authenticity and craft, something about the workers uniting...I'm bored with myself already.

The Berger history of cultural production is always at the forefront of establishing a narrative from which all maner of production can be associated. The timeline Berger establishes though should not be seen as reflective misty watercolouring, however. The timeline represents the identification of identifiable synchronisities where a particular relationship of cultural production gains prominence and subsequently is overtaken in popularity by another new or recycled relationship of art producers to art consumers and art capitalizers.

When the Benjamin analysis of the means of production is overlaid on the Berger excavation of the punctuations in the history of that production the tendency for any of the types of producer, consumer, capitolizer relationships are in vogue the influence of the technological environment necessarily unwieghts the balance of power in the production/consumption rochambo with the breaking point being new moods within the forward guard. At the nexis of the imbalance producers are given the choise to pursue the now kitsch mode of production in exile nee primary demand method or initiate work introspective of the medium. 

Through this wobbly meniscus the origins of the avant guard become reactive events rather than catalytic agents. 

Okay, now I've confused myself ...I don't even know what I was trying to say anymore.

There was going to be a whole thing comparing 17th century dutch artist Johannes Vermeer to street baller Skip-to-my-lou, this thing about the loss of virtuosity and investigating that through the Benjaminian authenticity model but I've bored myself with my Steinbeckian insistence on not getting to the G.D. point already. 

Whatever. Just for fun let's close the coffin on this corpse by for no good reason paraphrasing Homer Simpson in his introductory essay as food critic for the Springfield Shopper and say:

Screw Chaney...I mean Flanders

The Work of Mechanical Reproduction in the Age of Art

“Not that I have to be at this range, but I'm a fucking surgeon with this shotgun.”
Karen Kim, Not, As it Turns Out, the Hotel Hospitality Manager. Kill Bill, Vol. 2



The producer of culture and cultural products is beset on all sides by the inequities of the kitsch and the tyranny of the avant-garde. Three score and nine years ago Greenbergian cultural cladistics created very little overlapping property in the kitsch nee avant-garde ven diagram. The ven diagram aside, the zen of the diagram is now no less than apotheosis of critical architecture.

Particular among agents of the cultural evolution architects engaged in the production of the architectural artifact command aggregates of wealth compatible to the control of summer interns working the credit default swap desk at AIG. Maybe not that much, but still, a lot of money. Trusteeship of such vast princely capitol reserves requires the work of mechanical reproduction tattoo a narration of it's own chronistic appropriateness in the thinnest supportable veneer. Don we now our Whiting and Somol, and call upon Perspecta 33, the corrective to the corrective. Their minifestette was the undoing of a generation of mandatory criticality and the codification of a positive project for zeitgeistians who cherish criticality.

There may easily be a condition of the spirit we could agree to call post-hegelian. Post-hegelians will automatically find contraction in the notion of the critical zeitgeist. To counter post-hegelian premature de-narration the narrow band of the popular and the critical is the cool. The critical zeitgeist is a cucumber indifferent to popular demand and with a unending desire to be diagrammed in felt pen and prose.

Damit!!! Now I'm tired and ready for bed before I finish again. Let's end with this: The critical architect wields a scalpel with the weight of a freight train. He is a surgeon with a shot gun