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0:09
I'm going to start with a few introductory remarks in both-- in the name of Michael and I. So just to remind you, what this event is and what it's not. So it's something based on dabble concern. The first is to discuss a number of issues we consider as important today regarding the role of theory and history in design school. This role is changing rapidly because of external factors, such as the growing place of digital technology, the changing studio curriculum. But also an internal one--
0:44
and I'm thinking here of the evolution of the disciplines in the past years. Themes and method have changed. A second idea, a bit Utopian, is really to have a discussion event. We have a lot of opportunities to present at conferences, seminars. We more rarely take the time to exchange within our respective schools. And so this explains the relatively non-conventional form of this event. Instead of a series of a traditional presentation, I've asked the participant to present short arguments
1:20
to provoke debate. And then, really, you are supposed to make the show-- the rest of the room. And discuss and throw ideas and say you are against or you are for-- or whatever. This is really about having a conversation. So we've chosen four topics that correspond to a question, once again, that we consider as relatively urgent. The first is really about what is, today, what are the object of theory and history? Is it objects, really, agency, mediation, et cetera?
1:53
The second issue will be about teaching history in the digital age. I've prepared a scathing critique of groups. The third revolves around the must discuss issue of global history versus canon. And finally, theory, history, and also teaching. This is an event. One of the ideal-- so we heard the format is that it's-- I'm supposed to share a bizarre a thing called a platform in theory/history. Took me a while to figure out what this was. But I think it's about having a conversation.
2:27
So this is sponsored by the platform in theory/history. And this is cosponsored by the PhD program in architecture-- landscape architecture and urban planning-- with the support of the Harvard University Graduate School of Art and Science and the Gochman Fund. We have quite a number of our PhD students with us and authors, who are also welcome. And I do count on the active participation of everyone. Let me just remind that this is the 10th anniversary
2:55
of our annual PhD conference, the Cambridge Talks. And this event is in a way a celebration of how a vibrant community we are. We don't even need to make a conference every year to look smart. So this is the idea to celebrate, in a way, the constant involvement of the doctoral students in the intellectual life of the school. So most of the participant come from the GSD, because we wanted really it to be a conversation about where we are at the GSD, et cetera. But we have a number of guests.
3:28
And I would like to thank them. As [? Roxanne, ?] who's not yet-- oh yes good. You made it. You survived? Not too bumpy? It was bumpy, but I made it. Because when I saw the wind this morning, I just had a whoops. Seven hours away. Oh my. Oh, my god. What? Seven? Still on time. Seven hours away? Oh, my god. Well. From Ithaca. Thank you, really, for making it. We have Mary Lou Lobsinger from the University of Toronto. And, finally, Timothy Hyde, who had to really make the longer
4:01
distance, coming from MIT. And we know this is almost impossible to cross this divide. So, thank you, Timothy, for being here. Thank you for all the GSD faculty-- John, Jorge, [? Aved, ?] Sonya-- I don't know where she is? Right here. Hello, I can't see. And everyone-- I certainly have forgotten someone. So I promise to be brief. This is it. Thank you, all. And we start. Good afternoon, all. Antoine asked me to be brief, so I produced these notes. I said, brief.
4:35
And he said they're too long, so I'm cutting them. So let me get directly to the point. It's my task to introduce Mary Louise Lobsinger, who is the associate professor at the University of Toronto at the JH Daniels Faculty School of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. And in my prepared statements-- which I am now forgoing-- I was going to make a case for why media discourse analysis began in the City of Toronto. Specifically, in the month of October 1939,
5:07
with some events having to do with Eric Havelock-- but I will skip over those in preference for drawing your attention to a recent writing, by a very illuminating piece by Mary Lou, called, "Architectural History-- the Turn from Culture to Media," that appeared under the rubric of field notes and the JSH. Chilean dialogue, with our own Michael Hays, who is the Eliot Noyes Professor of Architecture Theory at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
5:38
And with regard to media discourse analysis I referred to moments ago-- where Mary Louise even refers to as a post-Kittlerian climate of opinion-- Michael has enjoyed a certain form of ubiquity as founding editor of Assemblage, the critical journal of architecture and design culture, which ran from 1986, which, in fact, was the year of publication of Kittler's Gramophone, Film, and Typewriter, through 2000, on his millennial bookmark. This is what we might call legacy media.
6:10
It was a print journal. He was also, quite notably, the author of Modernism and the Postmodernist Subject-- The Architecture of Meyer Hilberseimer. And, finally, [? Purpura ?] Latour-- about whom I'm sure we'll hear a great deal about today and tomorrow. And his statement that we never were modern, so perhaps should we not be surprised at the collapse of the subject and object distinction. Which is simply to say that the subject, perhaps, yielded to the opposition at some point along the way,
6:39
while the object still remains in view. Or at least how it's pitted as an arguable entity or integrity against the study of agency and media, which appears in the heading of today's discussion. So with that, Mary Lou, welcome, and I look forward to your comments. Thank you, and thanks to Antoine and to Michael for inviting me. And I'm not sure how to handle the title, as it was delivered a couple of weeks ago. So I'll just dig in by kind of skipping over it, and getting
7:16
to the thrust of an argument, which continues from the piece that I published in JSAH at the last part of that piece. But to begin with, should we give precedent to the built work to history of objects? Yes, immediately, we need to ask, what are the ways of doing history of objects? What are the materials of architectural history? Should we give-- should we study agency and media? Yes, immediately, we must ask what are the strategies for study? What are the materials and techniques
7:40
of the study of agency and media? Can we study agency or media without objects, or by means of the old objects of traditional architectural history? The same examples over and over again, so readily at hand for every occasion. My interest is more is in-- my interest is in the how to, rather than the difference between subject and object, which has been brought up so far. I'm interested in the methods that can engage a process of coming into object form of the
8:08
built environment-- the how to of how-to-do history. The how to-- the dexterity and nimbleness of how-to-do historicize and how to teach. And these are linked-- how you historicize, and how you teach. Especially when confronted with that. How to talk about this drawing? Is this an object? Where does it fit within the history of objects-- a medium or more? It is an object, a graphic, a writing, an aesthetic, a device, a technique, evidence, technicity
8:39
in foregrounds media in a field of material relations? Or this? How to engage what appears outside the cultural? How to analyze? How to direct attention to noncultural elements of the technological regime? When we confront-- and we should recognize these, especially in present history-- the timeliness of these historic objects. How do we study them? Or this-- oops. Sorry, this is up. Sorry, this should be next. This is a diagram for technological transfer. If you are teaching in the city--
9:13
and I did teach this last week in my survey course-- it's a drawing presented, or a set of diagram is presented, the RAND Corporation to Mayor Lindsay, and this is Los Angeles. And one is presented also to Mayor Lindsay in New York for the organization and management of the city. And I'm sure the students would prefer to have been taught Colin Rowe. They're from the same time period. How do we historicize, teach, and learn from lessons long ago? So the lessons long ago-- let me go back one.
9:50
As lessons long ago, Nietzsche's untimeliness is, in the case, our subject matter. Those oppose traditional objects of study can appear untimely in the present. Just as the images I just showed you appeared completely untimely as historical objects in the 1960s or 70.
10:10
Their supposed traditional objects of study hold dispositives objects of history should not be overlooked, disparaged within pedagogy. Even if they have entered into, in this time, a state of nostalgia. Not these, but what we would consider objects of history. We are in a sort of a moment of the state of nostalgia-- a future that is past that never really was, so we have to be wary of this. So the [? Paderies ?] think about, again, these evidences, these drawings, if you will,
10:42
are evidences of material communications. What is the excluded of the late 1970s? And I'm going to return to the 1970s again. The major part of the argument is around a discourse or a conversation, then. These disappeared under the theoretical burden of cultural critique at that time. They disappeared for quite a long time, and only recently reappear as being of historic interest, of being relevant to the present history of architecture. So what we need to ask, then, is what has disappeared?
11:12
Or what I'm interested in asking-- in this context and at the end of the essay I wrote on methods for the JSAH-- is what disappeared within the so-called cultural turn of the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s? With a mention of assemblage, I would also mention, of course, there's the key article by Fredric Jameson that is now collected in the cultural turn. Come back to that later. So which of the-- that Antoine's invitation to participate today's conversation
11:45
came by way of that essay? It might be interpreted as staking out a claim for media theoretical modes of inquiry for architecture as the medium-- as an infrastructural mechanism, as a technical object. As an apparatus, in its full, that were, in its fullest implications, as a technical object. Comprised of components, but not limited, or merely, the visible parts. In support of a processual style of research, as elements modes associated with media archeology, or media
12:15
theoretical ways of doing history. And I'd have to say, even though that article might seem to announce that I'm on that side, I'm not really totally there. So I think I'm at halfway now. I hope I have a bit more time. I know I wrote way too much to get it in 15 minutes, so I'm trying to get through. In the remaining time, I want to take up where I left off with that little essay on method, and quickly present a historical context for the reception of Foucault's discourse methods.
12:46
Because-- and this may seem like a leap-- but a lot of these conversations, rather it be Latourian or Kittlerian, whether it be the cultural turn, whether it be Tafuri, or as I just mentioned, Teso. It's around a reception, an interpretation, or a misinterpretation of Foucault. I'm not going to go to that. I'm going to give you some of the interpretations. So his discourse analysis is somewhere in the background of most strategies associated with agency and media.
13:13
And I'm not sure that that inquiry into those strategies has been taken to the fullest. So in this turn-- though, this is a turnaround of few events from the late 1970s-- I think I have a slide.
13:31
And this is just to provoke. Because it stands there-- because I don't have the others. So-- and to do this, I have to skip over a bunch of things if you'll. So this is a turn around a few events of the late 1970s-- is Bennett School, among others, interrogating, culture-- capital C-- on the brink of the so-called cultural turn. And the failure to grapple, [INAUDIBLE], with the materiality of techniques and technology. With the tension between the cultural and the technical
13:57
is alleviated through words, resolved through discourse. Those works, drawings of gears, gadget, network systems and schedules, which I showed you, rendered empty, to be about something other than architecture, or merely dumb communication techniques and strategies. Rather than techniques evidencing the materiality of communications. The pieces and parts, visible and invisible, in technicities, left in the shadows of architectural history and theory. So I'm first going to quote--
14:28
to give us a kind of point of departure for the word, culture. I'm not going to use Jameson. I'm going to use Gilbert Simondon, from Culture and Technics of 1966. So quoting, I thought, would be the easiest way. I hope it comes across. Quote, "The word culture entails a value judgment. And to a certain extent it relates to an axialogical type of content. When used with reference to human culture its primary meaning is metaphorical." And it's around the metaphorical and the analogical,
14:58
but I think we have trouble with the Foucault and other interpretations. "Since it looks to the techniques of grain production," for example, "in gardening for a paradigm of improvement and transformation, a paradigm that might have been found in a domain closer to human reality, notably in the example of animals transformed by breeding and farming." So that's from a book called Culture and Technics of 1960. And that's very important, as a philosopher,
15:24
trying to put together culture and techniques. Then will be split again later. And you have to note the relationship between exchange, recursively, of culture and technique, and a step away from human culture. How am I doing? It's fine. Where's her? You still have five more minutes. Good. Now I want to turn to Carlo Ginzburg, which is not this, for michrohistory. Now I'm in the 1970s, but his work begins on microhistory in the 1960s. His first book-- and where he discovers the evidence
15:56
in the archive of a stray piece as quotation that prompts him to respond to Foucault. He will say that in the introduction to The Cheese and the Worms, [SPEAKING FRENCH] of 1976-- [SPEAKING FRENCH] of 1976. And it's really important here, to understand that that word's been, or that strategy's been used in many different ways. But it is not adhering to what originally microhistory was thought to be about, or how it was argued, in terms of Ginzburg's own work.
16:26
So I'm going to use quotes again, for this too. "The diffidence of the historians usually approaches these kinds of materials, the stray, the outside, the excluded, undoubtedly due to widespread persistence of an aristocratic conception of culture. That culture is a matter of upper classes, the diffusion of a matter of mechanical circulation." He means through texts that are published through citations and the word. "But the diffidence of historians
16:55
has another more understandable reason of methodological," and this is where my concern lies, "rather than ideological order. In contrast to anthropologists and students of popular traditions, historians obviously begin with a great disadvantage. Even today, culture of subordinate class is largely oral, and it was even more so in centuries past." I'll draw you right to the critique that is embedded in this. "It's a critique of Foucault's words and things and a critique
17:26
of Foucault's history of madness, for being interested in the acts of exclusion, but not be excluded, not the materiality of the excluded." He's interested in the discourse and the play of discourses, but not in the actuality, the materiality of them. There's another important lesson. And I think it's important to this day to take from microhistory from that point. Is that you can take a singular case-- and this is his argument for Menocchio,
17:59
the miller in The Cheese and the Worms-- is you take a case, and through your mode, your means of analyzing, you can produce generalizations. It would be my critique of some of the ways that are being used around Latourian-- and other ways of systems and mappings in architectural history-- is you never produce a generalization out of the case.
18:26
So it's about method, as he would argue, the culture dichotomy circular, reciprocal influences between subordinate and higher classes or ruling classes. That's especially intense, and they must be tracked outside of the word alone. So we are obliged to ask here, the history of objects, what does it impose on culture, on tradition, on evidential materials? Does a study of agency and media alleviate or provide a corrective to this imposition? Can we see a relationship between how
18:55
I describe Ginzburg in some of the ways of working today? Now I need to quickly move, to get to the heart of the matter then, after I set this up a couple of different ways of working through these three books. Because this is where I think it's very important to locate because he will be important to the kinds of theories that are up today in history and theory. But also, in some ways, are interpreted in this particular way within the English language context
19:22
through the 1980s and 90s, and were very different at their time. So the first two publications-- or the first publication is the Foucault-led research in France. And it is the kind of ghost in this. It's published in 1976. And the other two, this dispositif of Foucault is in 1977, [SPEAKING FRENCH] is 1980. Although the conferences were at the same time, so let me get back to the text. Two publications from seminars at Venice, in very different ways, make up discursive mode
19:53
of research and critique that mode as useful for architecture. That's what they are investigating at these seminars. They're taking on Foucault's mode of research, or strategy, as they called it. So the first is in April 1977 and begets this-- it becomes the dispositif of Foucault published in the same year. And the contributors [SPEAKING FRENCH].
20:19
We all know those names from its particular period in architectural history and theory. The aim of the seminar was explicit. To test the potential of Michel Foucault's strategy. They called it a strategy. The usefulness of dispositif, or the device or the apparatus-- as we call it in English-- for architectural history and historiography. They want to know if it's useful mode for doing history? Was this device useful for history? Second publication is the one from the conference in October
20:50
1977 and published three years later. [SPEAKING ITALIAN] And it's George Tezzo and Paolo [? Morquielo ?] who were the editors of that volume. The third publication, I said, is the-- I'm going to mess this up. I'm sorry. The French-- Les machines a guerir--
21:13
I'm sorry. It coincides in time, and apparently thematically because it's 1970s. But it's a ghost because Foucault is no longer actually working this way. He's moved on. As we all know from the [SPEAKING FRENCH] he's working on biopolitics. He's working on security in governmentality. And yet the publications can play if you only read them as visually and as being sychronic in terms of same time of publication. But it's his students, Bruno Forte,
21:44
for example, who ask that they engage in architecture if they're going to make these critiques of the institutions. And that's what it's produced in this book. I want to quickly focus on a list of specific aspects of the architectural historians' critique of Foucault's strategy. They call it talkative tactics. [SPEAKING FRENCH] or an analysis of mute discourses, mute strategy. First, they approve the assertion that history is discontinuous, and acknowledge
22:15
the legacy of Nietzsche's genealogy of morals-- the pitting of the genealogy against traditional history in Foucault's work. Second, in general, the scholars agree that Foucault's strategy of analysis fails to grapple with the materiality of the techniques. The technology of architecture that comprise discursive practices specific to architecture, and, therefore, could not address specific instances of a physical cohesion of power in space or in architecture. Third, they call it a flight--
22:47
and I'm putting them all together, but the various is mostly [? Rela ?] [? Teso ?] and Taufori who take this on. They call it a flight from any definition of a theory of power. It's a method, but it's not a theory. It's an analysis of power. It's a staging across of various forms of texts-- the words, power, showing through words and text. Or the contribution of the device or the apparatus is described as a strategy that arrives at the rupture of an epistemes I set that aside.
23:20
But epistemes have real historical thicknesses, and they question the real historical thickness of Foucault's work. The main and repeated fault is found in the reliance of words. And this is particularly true in [? Teso ?] and Tafuri's contributions. The discourse is about texts. The critique appears in this critique appears in both [? Teso's ?] and Tafuri's contribution. [? Teso, ?] they draw attention to the need to move beyond text, beyond the method of analysis.
23:56
I'm at the wrap up. For Tafuri, it is a mode of analysis of practice that puts into discourse languages and traces of history. However, what parishes, or are lost, within this method of analysis is a space of confrontation, the real conflict of politics. It is a game without rules. That's what he calls discourse analysis. "That falls apart and can be reassembled. It could lead to a new metaphysics." [? Teso ?] says, "Foucault outlined a strategy of analysis, but he relies
24:27
on concepts that aren't words. And he confuses words, words privileged over things as concepts for the carrying of concepts. When the material can carry concepts. Technology should be able to carry a concept or evidence it. And this leaves us with," he says, "an abstract conception of power on an indefinite plane for the theatre of battle." That last sentence, it's a quote I read because it's missing from the English translation. Completely-- it's at a particular point
24:59
at the endpoint in the [FRENCH] version that becomes the circulated version. And it's a pretty interesting statement. The abstract concept of power. So [? Teso ?] and his collaborators pursue less abstract technologies and techniques in the research published in [SPEAKING FRENCH]. These techniques precede architectural form, or the material consequences of law, inventions, machines, administration, waterflows, and such. They use the plural dispositive techniques of various machines
25:30
prior to architecture as machine analogy. Prior to the engagement of urban or and expand the engagement to the urban into the urban territory. Now there's a few other things to say about it from Tafuri's He is quite damning of the use of text and word as pretext in advance of an analysis. But I leave it there. I want to just briefly, as I close up there to this. This is an elaborate-- [ITALIAN]
26:02
I'm sorry, I'm fighting a cold. So I'm a little-- And from the first page, where-- and this shows another context for it. So this is what Tafuri is working on at the time. It's published in 1980 also. And his opening statement is to Ginzburg and microhistory. But Ginzburg, who I actually interviewed on this-- you know, I know he quoted us. And it was [INAUDIBLE] Levy of the series editor, who edited the book, not Ginzburg. I don't think he quite understood microhistory
26:36
in his playing through this chapter. He does take the Foucaulian critique in it, but the case that can lead to generalities and back is kind of overtaken by the political views in it. That's not to change it, yes? Oh time sorry. It was like I was back in teacher mode. Yes, do you have a question? Is that right at time? Can I add the other little part of this puzzle? One more thing? If it's a small thing. It's very short. It's a small short thing. You can ask-- because--
27:09
and I don't think there's an image that goes with it. OK, here, I can only have an image on this. So who else is working on the critique of discourse and discourse analysis at this time in another language? Frederick Kittler. He publishes in 1984 and '85. And if it's not immediately evident here, and these are from the sites their from-- it's easier from gramophone film typewriter to take it-- is he also takes to task the method of analysis for its reliance on text and word.
27:40
It's like a material of the course. He will take it in a completely other direction and elaborate it in a way that becomes labeled determinist. We have more of a conversation about that later. But I want to leave that hanging in it. If we look at a particular five or six years, we have a critique of something that has come to underpin, transform, media strategies. I can't speak to Latourian. I haven't worked on it in awhile. But the kinds of theories that are now influencing methods
28:13
that come from that appeal to agency and media investigations. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE] So the visitors should know that in these sort of moments where the program reflects on itself, sometimes we, who teach here, feel like we are sort of playing ourselves, playing our own roles. And my students would be disappointed if I didn't start with a quotation from Theodor Adorno. So here it is for you. This is a letter that Adorno wrote to Walter Benjamin
28:57
after he had read a draft of a Benjamin's "Paris Capital of the Nineteenth Century." And that was the working-- there was an essay of that title, but it was actually a working title for a project, the big project-- whose aim was nothing less, and here I'm quoting from Benjamin. "Nothing less than to recover a prehistory of modernity by excavating dream worlds." Or sometimes he would say, "wish images that are incarnated in the material fabric and cultural artifacts of the nineteenth century."
29:35
It's 1935. It's an amazing statement that sounds very like material culture and media studies. And Adorno, when he read this, said to Benjamin-- and he puts the word mediation in quotations because media, the word, doesn't exist yet. But he says, "the 'mediation' that I'm missing, and find," in other words, you've talked about a lot of different mediations of artifacts and mediating cultural wish images in dream worlds. "But the 'mediation' in which I'm missing and find obscured
30:11
by your materialist history graphic invocation is nothing other than the theory, which your study omits. One could say that your study is located at the crossroads of magic and positivism. That spot is bewitched," that crossroads. "Only theory can break the spell." You know how much I love that.
30:39
And in the work of my, some research colleagues, and I assure you, I'm not talking about anybody in the room. Nobody is in the room, OK. Well, I feel the lure of that bewitched spot. And I'm really oversimplifying, I realize, because we were supposed to provoke. But read is a parable of the situation of architecture history as a present-- that quotation is a kind of a parable-- the bewitched spot might well be some version of what we might call descriptive cultural studies
31:14
or material culture or media studies. It might be related to what, sometimes, seems like-- on the part of architectural historians-- a kind of insecurity in the face of disciplines like anthropology, or techniques like ethnography, or more recently and more technical, like data mining. And architecture history is experimenting with and touring with and sometimes intimidated by all these. I'm not condemning these fields or techniques. And I'm not asking for any kind of consensus
31:52
about modes of working. What I want to ask is what Adorno's recommendation might mean? What might it mean against that only theory can break the spell? Just note, it seems to me-- and this is the way I would understand a lot of what's going on in architecture history that reaches into media studies and material culture-- what's assumed, as I understand it, is that a history of graphical progress would be won by the suppression of theory. Some people are pretty explicit about that.
32:31
And especially by eliminating or omitting the formalist readings that theory usually brings with it. Usually, theory in architecture brings close readings of form. And there have been recent statements that progress would be made by suppressing that. And moving toward the pragmatics of history, the idea of context, or multiple contexts, the everyday so-called-- and, of course, the move toward the everyday architecture represents the elite-- the not everyday.
33:09
Identity politics is one of the older ones. The more recent ones, as I've said, this notion of a technical a priori that there is a technology or a network of operations that is prior to any architecture. And that architecture can be reduced to-- so these networks of technologies and institutions network. It's a big word. And these recursive change of operations that reduce architecture into a kind of horizontal feel that we call material culture or media culture.
33:45
To break the spell then, for us, for me, as I would interpret it, would be moving away from-- remember, he says, "the intersection of positivism and magic." And there is a kind of, for me, mesmerizing pretense that the empirical description of context has a social and an ontological import all its own. That just describing what is happening is the work of the historian. And that that's enough. That's the intersection part of it that I would see between magic and positivism.
34:23
And as I said, it involves both the everyday and the technical-- the tracking of sequences and operations that supposedly precede and do without theoretical discourse and framing.
34:41
Let me give a quick example. And I'm sorry to a little bit personalize this, if I haven't already. But there's a very good example that happens to be about-- and I also am doing this for the students. All the students, I talk about the Seagram building all the time, as a-- [LAUGHTER] --But as a model for how one can do deep readings and interpretations of architecture. And as a rebuttal to that-- and it's actually a very good rebuttal. So I treat the Seagram building as kind
35:19
of emerged in mass culture, in developing mass culture. Immersed in the everyday, but resistant to it. Resistant to cultural consumption. And this is the response to the essay that I wrote, from someone who's interested in the media studies. "Hays claims to discern the degree to which a general crisis of the subject associated with modern media find its architectural articulation in the curtain wall. Yet, despite the cogency of Hays' use of Adorno,
35:56
this crisis in architecture bears little resemblance to Adorno's dividing aesthetic experience from practical life and securing the autonomous abstraction as the basis of both. No, this crisis does not issue from a confrontation between architecture and mass media. It issues from that fearful moment when architecture recognizes itself reflected in the curtain wall as one among many medium." Now that's exactly and concisely and powerfully the point
36:33
that people turning to media studies and material culture make. That architecture is not distinct, but is only one among many media. And, therefore, can have no resistance, no pushback, no difference from the context in which it has been situated, which is the work of the historian. That seems fair. It defuses architecture. So a couple of things-- and now I'll end with a recommendation. And this recommendation, I realize, is going to be too unformed to maybe even to understand.
37:18
But maybe that's part of what the discussion can try to pull out because-- We're used to not understand you, Michael. Well, no, but this is actually quite clear here.
37:30
It's a provocation. So what I would argue, of course, is that there is a distinction between architecture and everyday life, obviously. So what would the invocation of theory do-- what might an invocation of theory do to break this spell? First of all, I think it's recognizing-- and this seems very simple, but it's often not recognized-- that the everyday is not the real [NON-ENGLISH] And it's not earth. In Heidegger's sense, it's not the [? architraves ?] in Derrida' sense.
38:06
And so far is that the everyday life cannot ground itself without-- the notion of everyday, or of context, cannot ground itself without some theoretical frame or metaphor or figure or artifice or ideology or whatever you want to call the kind of tropological, or system of metaphor, that you ground and frame in order to describe. Architecture not only recognize-- the study of architecture-- has to not, as such, would not only recognize that you can't ground it outside its own system.
38:47
Architecture as an art is what reveals just that fact. I think the material culture people and the media studies people forget how artificial architecture is. How constructed architecture is, but also how it's the vocation of architecture to reveal its constructedness. And all of the column wall manipulations from Alberti forward do just that-- reveal themselves as ornament, as fiction, as construction, as artifice. But because of that, architecture can never be contained by its context.
39:29
It is always shifting. It is always open to reinterpretation. One day, somebody else will reinterpret the Seagram building. And it's open to that. It's emphatically open to that in the way that, let's say, a technical invention, as such, might not be, or a pot might not be treated that way. So it's never sufficient merely to unmask or indite architecture. Because all such a critique manages to do-- all in ideology critique as architecture being elite or constructed or this way or that--
40:16
manages to do is to substitute one tropological system for another because there are no systems that don't rely on tropes or metaphors or ideologies. However, what I propose is that architecture-- the study of architecture-- can construct one. And here I'm following-- and just to make it-- try to make it because I do it quickly. I'm following people like Paul de Man, who looks at the possibility of sort of a non-rhetorical pre-figural, a pre-tropological, hypothetical condition
41:05
against which we can then evaluate different ideologies. So you can gauge and compare only by hypothesizing-- not in origin-- but a virtual. And I'm claiming that what another thing that we claim is what media studies, cultural studies don't have that architecture, history, and theory does is a notion of an architectural virtual or say, diagram or say, generating matrix that is not a template, but is the condition of possibility for being in the world. And that's the fundamental distinction
41:45
that I want to make is that there are certain human postulates for Derrida, rising is one. For Paul de Man, what he calls inscription, marking. That there are ways that humans territorialize their place of being here, of being now and mark that or assert that. And that those marking vocations, that architecture should be thought of as among those marking vocations, which distinguish it from one media among others. Now one can-- quickly, I see Brian looking, raising his eyebrows--
42:30
one can make an ontology, as Brian reminds me, of anything. What I'm suggesting is not that one can't make an ontology of chairs, but that one hasn't. And one has made an ontology-- we don't have a historian yet who's done an ontology of chairs. That's all I'm saying. They treat them as material things that as if they weren't fundamental. That's-- We are not very interested in the history of chairs. I was sitting in one. It's the only reason I used it as an example.
43:07
This virtual that I'm talking about, if it's, whatever it is, it evokes an interiority. It evokes an interiority that is not really the-- it's the Lacan real. It's the Heideggerian earth. It's the condition of possibility of things. And then so the move toward inscription in the pre-figural is-- and those of you that know Judith Butler, so open when Judith Butler talks about that she disarticulates sex and gender by talking about inscription. That gender is an inscribe.
43:46
That's exactly what I'm talking about. But to posit that, you have to posit that there is a condition of possibility for that inscription. I will stop with one more interesting thing that maybe we can talk about.
44:09
In the wake of this kind of post-theoretical turn, throughout the period associated with this march toward a kind of empiricism, there has also been a steady return to a more and more conservative politics in the general society-- within both the university and in global society. You don't have to be a Hegalian to be bothered by that. That somehow, the turn against theory and form has taken place in a march toward a more conservative politics in the university. I'm not saying it's causal.
44:56
I'm just saying it seems to be the case, thank you. [APPLAUSE]
45:07
Yeah, I'll just-- it's written here that I am the chair. [LAUGHTER] I always forget what ontology means, so I'm doubly at a loss.
45:24
I want to leave the discourse analysis dimension of this to the assembled group here, and just make some comments specifically and precisely to do with the format that Antoine recommended for us, which is a discussion. So I just wanted to say some comments about Michael and Mary Lou's comments. And I'll begin with the beginning and I'll end with the spell that Michael was talking about, which is nothing else but a word formula. It's an incantation. It's a way of speaking, which induces
46:00
a beguiled way of being. So to begin with the beginning, Michael began with a quote, which I thought was interesting because it speaks to me some way of the indurability and the portability of text as much as how we want to enact all of these forms of evasion. Or enact various tropes or turns or tropes or catastrophes by any other name, and pay our attention to other forms of inscription. So it begins with a quote from Adorno. And I thought this echoed in a way--
46:34
and I use that term advisedly because the extent to which this discourse is predicated on some historical description of a turn from orality to inscription as such. But the beginning with the quote, I just draw attention to Mary Lou's use of air quotes in our talk twice. She said I'm going to use, and she [CLICK] like this, which is a reversal. It's kind of making visible a typographical trait, which reproduces a form of orality. But then, and she said, uses quotes.
47:05
And we should be mindful of what use is made of use. When we use things, they wear out. They wear down. They lose their meaning. And we have to reinvigorate them by putting them into circulation in these kind of contexts, which further threatens their becoming worn down. So the use of quotes in both of these contexts on one hand is a kind of a grounding thing, to make us familiar with Michael's discourse. And the other case in Mary Lou's to give us an instruction about something I think
47:33
we're all having difficulty with, which I think was the premise of her talk. She said, I want to talk about how to. How to, and she didn't quite specify how to what? Right, so I'm going to put this in the context of questions that are very familiar to all of us because many of us read the same text. A--how to do things with words, or how to do words with things? And, finally, how to deploy quotes in that way, and make wise use of them without wearing them out, or using them up?
48:08
So those are some of the terms I wanted to put out there by way of introducing a conversation, which in polite company, is a form of taking turns in speaking and attending to the cues your interlocutor gives you to when to shut up, which I will do presently. But I invite, just maybe to begin, Michael and Mary Lou to just kind of distress on discourse as such-- it's place or it's displacement. And what that augers at this cultural moment? Which as Michael said, could be potentially quite dire
48:47
in a non-Hegelian sense. Can we go ahead and point it to the room? Immediately. Yeah, that's-- it's yours. I think we can begin to shoot on the speakers.
49:01
I would like to shoot a new Michael. Because where, why the chair? Why the chair is not allowed? You know, I didn't get completely your thing about the chair. I can't understand the critique of not dealing faultily with the object, I mean physical object, and dissolving it in a field, in a series of condition, et cetera. But then, why specify the architectural object as so unique, et cetera, was, for me, a little bit of a question?
49:37
Without, by the end, or don't you run into the risk of producing a kind of-- again and again-- a kind of professional doctrine just epitomizing how unique is the architectural object. I think-- Which might be, my question then could be isn't that, by the end, perhaps, the function of architectural theory? To tell architects how great they are? Yeah.
50:07
I'm provoking. No, I think in-- In case you didn't get it. There's-- let me try this. Oh. Matthew, did you want to join in? No no. I will, but-- I'll just say one thing real quickly to maybe, to try to be more to-- try to be clear than to defend. And I think this is-- you'll see something in this. There's-- I've been very taken recently with this. I learned this book by Wordsworth called-- now I've forgotten the name of it. Theories of Epigraphs, or something.
50:48
And the first line in the book, which is not a poem-- it's not a Wordsworth poem. It's actually an analysis. He says, "epigraphs presuppose a monument upon which they will be written." And it's the presuppose-- now monument doesn't mean in the context of a monumental building. It means-- it just means a thing. It means, monument. It's very-- in the context, monument's very inert and available. It's just a thing. It's a stone. But it's the idea that an epigraph presupposes a monument
51:29
on which it will be written. What is that presupposition? I think the presupposition that architecture also has, like writing-- and by the way, and this is the moment, of course, the monument and the inscription aren't separated. It's the moment that architecture and writing are still together. And it seems like, to me, that's the, I say, distinction rather than privilege that I want to give practices that worry about their own condition of possibility. In a way that I think other--
52:10
Chairs don't do. Well, chair may be a singularly bad example of something. Because maybe a chair does in a way. Do you mind if I do jump in? You know getting back to this Adorno quote, what he's saying is presupposed is not at all the monument. He's talking about the social totality as the medium in which all these artifacts-- That's right. --exist. That's right. And it seems to me that what that, let's say, media studies would take off from exactly that same point of view.
52:52
It's a, what, Marxist, sort of, materialist point of view? Thinking of let's say a technical a priori. I don't know. The technical or the let's say techno social as a sort of medium in which these things appear. Hm-hm. It's the pre-- I mean I think that's not totally separate. And I mean, just on this sort of ontological point. I read stuff in computer science. And there's maybe nobody who's taken ontology further. I could look at Brian, but I know-- where is he over here?
53:32
Ontology is a very serious thing for computer science because they need to specify these virtual objects and their being as a very serious thing for them. And there's reams and reams on ontology of virtual objects. I mean, so I-- well, OK, so that's just two things to throw out there. And maybe, I could back away just a moment to say that architects use of media studies. Not that media studies could not become philosophical. And maybe there are media theories-- They are superflous sometimes.
54:16
But I think what I'm talking about is the work that I know in architecture history that tries to become media studies, tend not-- well. And it is the case that in architecture, theory and form have been quite explicitly rejected lately.
54:38
Might I jump in for a second? I think one of the really interesting things is that people-- a lot of my fellow scholars of my fellow generation-- we mean this kind of emerging scholars architectural history, urban history, and so forth have turned to media studies as a means by which to understand architectural practice. Whether it's happening in the School of Architecture, or it's happening out beyond it because of how much similarity there are--
55:13
how many similarities there are in the different practices of different medias. And so I'm curious as to how your take on the role of media studies in architectural history is challenged or affirmed by your understanding of architectural practice?
55:37
Atia? Can I get the mic? I had a question for Mary Lou. I was thinking about these diagrams that you had. And sometimes, they're diagrams. Sometimes, they're models. And talking about ontology, models tend to-- models, in constructing models, there is a question of what they are modeling, which can be seen as an ontological question. And so that's one thing I would love to hear what you had to say about that. But the other thing is that these diagrams that you have,
56:10
they may not be called andro, but they're still attached to architects. What do we do with the diagrams that aren't attached to architects? How do we study those? Because I have a lot of those in my work. [LAUGHING] How to? But actually-- Yeah, but you know, the granary is like a chair. And I think that's actually-- I'm going to set aside the ontology question for now. The how to is an open question. That's what I'm interested in pursuing. If not through media studies-- and I'm getting a sense
56:42
I have a different understanding of the kind of battle of this and that. That it's--and it's not a kind of wholesale taking on. I'm trying to figure how to-- and it doesn't exclude Adorno do history or teach topics. So those are very different and I-- and Matthew will know that I misrepresented exactly what was out there because most people don't read computerise stuff or systems drawings. And some of them are just kind of fake drawings. They're not really system drawings.
57:16
But they often come to stand or represent a set of prices, or Philip Steadman's-- In fact, I had Philip Steadman take me to task. He says, that's just a one, two, one, two, one, two. That's like kid's grammar. What are you doing with it? I'm like, OK. But the fact that it was about a architecture, but is bigger than that, trying to explain something that is maybe not even architectural in our sense-- is really important to the present. Even if it's from the 1960s.
57:41
And I'm not sure I can point to exactly why. But I'm sure if you go up to studio here, we're always looking at these things that are probably first determined by aesthetics. Maybe afterwards by their numbers or something else. But I think we need to know the technicity the techniques for theorizing them. If they have explanatory value, a theory is that. And for understanding them other than some changing graphics software. And I think that's really crucial. In my little-- what I was trying to do
58:11
with that all those quotes, really quickly, was that there was a moment, where something went to culture, rather than actually going deeper. What was wrong with that price? Why did not-- what happened to the guys at the Cambridge School? You're going to answer that. I didn't. Why did they all lose their job when Joseph [INAUDIBLE] got tenure. That's historic. I mean that's a huge-- We all don't deserve it. So that's kind of like a little like side. Not a surprise.
58:35
But I think, that you can go-- and I think that maybe that I know that-- Mary Lou, if I may just jump in? I'm wondering, sometimes, if the real question is not how to but why are we doing this? Yeah. Because you just mentioned, I do think the evolution of design practice and what students have on their board, et cetera, or rather computer screen, is also responsible for the shift. I think there is a-- and I think-- That's Fallon's point. And I think it's actually a really--
59:10
and I'm really struck by how [? we decoded. ?] I was also quite struck in how the question of discourse is still with us. It always come back, and we never can get rid of it. In a way-- We need to think about it too. It's surprising because we never killed Foucault in some ways. No, and it's not about dismissing. Sorry. It was not just about the quote. Yeah. No. Yeah yeah. It was all sorts of discourse that had absolutely-- I agree. --nothing to do with the theories
59:34
that we import in design school and design education that have much more to do with bringing underrepresented voices and narratives into the history. I think that's right. So this is where I took to Ginzburg. And I quoted, very quickly. And there are two things about that. In that case, it's looking at the rejected, the refused, the outside-- not just being interested in the institutions. And that was one way of looking at Foucault's early work.
1:00:02
He's just interested in, that was one way, the text. But also, what's important to take from that-- and this would be my-- if I was going to do anything semi-personal about around the use of media studies and media theories is that there's a case. You can work from the object case. And you can use media. And you can come to a generality, rather than the infinite mapping-- the playing out that you never come to in theory in evaluation of [INAUDIBLE].
1:00:29
I think that's the crisis, in some way with some of the historical work, for projects that trace infinitely steel or something like that. So it's very particular. Sorry. No one wants to jump in? Yeah. Oh, but don't-- no.
1:00:52
Just so you guys know, the reason we have to use mics is because we're videotaping not because you don't have a big voice. Loud voice. I was going to kind of rip off of what you were saying, and this sounds a lot more [INAUDIBLE]. than in needed to be. Yeah, people [? make it up. ?] That's part of the idea. I'm curious about what the points of capture are for different disciplines? I mean, in this case, architecture. I don't have a reason for this, but I do find it fascinating that sort of when
1:01:27
we discuss things like theory, we do these sort of leaps. Like a sort of a Benjamin Adorno sort of moment. We do like a little Derrida, Paul de Man-- this moment when you know all writing could be subjected to the same sort of methodologies. And we leap in that kind of way. But media studies, for instance, has a-- media and performance studies-- have a variety of scholars. Not just like Judith Butler, but Shackner, for instance, that have been working not just
1:02:04
done in a contemporary way but have been working and operating on Foucault, in a very sophisticated way. In a way that is significantly more sophisticated than what Tufori was doing vis a vis Foucault. And so my question is like what are the points of capture for architecture history theory? Like at what point do we say, we're not talking about media studies at all? Or if we are, we're talking about media studies when media was an Atari 5400. Can I tell a personal story this time? Sure.
1:02:45
It all begins, long ago, in New York. So I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago. And we were talking about the Chicago school. And there were some kind of sociologist types there. And someone showed Worth's diagrams of Chicago and the kind of distribution of various races. And the sociologist said, oh, look. That's spacial. And I looked at her and I said, that ain't spacial. What is that? And I said that it's an illustration of statistical data, according to [FRENCH] He said,
1:03:22
one could look at various forms of media and understand the tropes and the ambitions and the labor of collecting media. And it's-- one has an alibi by calling it spacial and bringing in toward discourse. But I think there's a lot of forms we deal with-- or at least this historian deals with-- that I consider media and have a complicated and rich history that are embedded in our discourse as such. And I wouldn't be an avowedly media studies person as such. So I'm just trying to say, where we
1:03:51
situate these objects we work with is part of the question. I have to say I-- my own experience is, initially, I hated the media study people. Because usually you have these crappy everything is in everything. And you know read Kittler and you have an idea of clarity in the world sometimes. And then I do think, by the end, it's a real question today. It's a real question because I'm not against the Seagram. But can we forever teach the Seagram? Shouldn't we actually enlarge it?
1:04:28
How do we construct from the Seagram in understanding of [FRENCH]. It has become for me a real question. And you know the chair probably because I am not interested in technology. But still is there really an ontological difference? Is that interesting to reconduct an ontological difference between art and non-art, et cetera, is, for me, has become a completely problematic question. What I don't like sometimes with media studies is that you can read 200 pages, and you're still wondering where's
1:04:57
the concrete stuff, sometimes? Not always, and that's a little bit what I miss sometimes is that everybody-- a little bit like the actor-network theory, in which it's all going to be about concrete agency. And by the end, there is a lot of discourse and little concrete agency. But that's more the-- But I find it interesting today to be disturbed, which is one of the reasons we have this panel. I think this is very important. And I'm sorry. I just want to get this out, and then I'll stop.
1:05:28
But that is that-- and I agree with that. But it's the specificity. It's being specific about the way different media organize or territorialize that to me would be important. So some of you were, yesterday, we had a very interesting pair of presentations by Lucia, Leia, and John May. And one of the things that both of them were trying to do is to look very carefully and very deeply and formally at the different ways digital media and drawing-- hand drawing-- organize their knowledge or.
1:06:06
Oh, there you are. Or organize their-- the world. And I think the specificity of that that a lot of people are being searched, that-- I think that's really important. And to go back to Fallon's point, which is an important one, for me, it's precisely that an-- and I'm not asking that everybody work on objects. What I'm asking is that to recognize that even things like the Seagram-- --have a right to exist. Well, that they are themselves nothing more but nothing less
1:06:40
than a kind of coagulation of all sorts of practices. And that, of course, economics should be primary. Of course, labor studies-- the tools that were used, the areas that the steel was extracted from-- all these, as far as I'm concerned, are in the object and are part of the object that a close reading should do. That what I was objecting to was what's forgotten is the specificity of media and the different ways ways they organize the world. Mary Lou, to you. I would agree wholly with that.
1:07:18
And I would say, there are a few examples. And maybe there are some dissertations on the way, or some articles on the way that do this. And one of the articles I come back to is one by Lawrence Stodler of ETH on the threshold. And he can take you through the idea of the threshold that we all sort of get mesmerized about with whether we're phenomenologists. But he will take it apart through the revolving door to the airport system this way. And he uses this phrase that I really like.
1:07:45
Medium as continually resolving into moments of coherence, so he can make it material. He can make the threshold. And he can shift you from looking at just the object. But he has objects and concrete moments. And he can open them up again and close them down again. I think that's what has to happen. There are some examples. I've viewed papers or listened to papers where it's infinite spinning of stuff that are pages of representing media. And I think maybe that's what you're speaking about.
1:08:15
And I to find those impossible-- the infinite regress into what. But there are others that are on the way that are really wonderful too. Some of these looking at the slice in Brazil of, it's a section-- it's a really wonderful section. I saw it in a paper, I think you did too, Daniel Barbra's work on the [FRENCH]. And that as a threshold and a medium, and it does all these technical things. But it also engages a wide range of things around climate and building and population.
1:08:42
And I think that would be one that would begin, if not to engage in the way that you're asking-- and that I would ask-- of any sort of theoretical enterprise or mode of interpretation that is based on architectural history. That would be the how to. As chair, can I exercise my prerogative to continue this question of specificity as such? And just this one footnote. Mary Lou, I was very impressed by your insistence on the idea of the general and the particular. It's really important.
1:09:14
I would think of in terms of the precept and the example. And just to note that when Ginzburg wrote about the actual origin, in the term microhistory, and he was writing about Stuart's work on Gettysburg, which was the first book to have microhistory in the title. He called it an almost unimaginable mass of detail, which shouldn't yield any kind of reasoning or meaning at all, so we always run the risk. But in service of specificity, I want to address something
1:09:43
that Antoine put, I think, very interestingly, equivocally, in terms of the goals of this meeting. He says, last but certainly not least, should we rethink the relationships among lecture courses, seminars, and studio? And-- We're going to talk about that tomorrow. Later tomorrow. That's very much-- we're going to deal with a digital, and what the mooks are doing. And we have actually and John and Jorge will be addressing the question of the relation to studio. That's part.
1:10:14
Because I do think, actually, what Fallon said, I think, is very important for us to realize that actually on the desk, reality has changed. Yeah. And I think also, to go back to another thing. I think your real problem is the reconstruction by the end of the totality of the object. Because in some ways, the standard piece that does not reconstruct an architectural object at the end, it takes a theme like a threshold, and follows it. And did also the window, as far as I remember, et cetera.
1:10:44
And we're into something, which is close to elements. And I think, today, the question of the reconstruction of the totality is actually questionable. And that's because what we used to do in architecture, because we always study it, in some ways, revolving doors, and a lot of. But it was subsuming to the transcendent presence, the overarching presence of the object. I think what's happening today is that is no longer granted. And even going further, it's no longer interesting, sometimes,
1:11:16
for people emerging to decide. I may be wrong, but I have that impression sometimes. Well, maybe we should recognize that that opens up a kind of possibility in that if we're not taking elements and relentlessly then recategorizing or reconstituting the totality of the object, we don't then put ourselves in this position of creating a single class of comparable things. If we constitute building objects, all we are doing is comparing one building to another building
1:11:45
to another building to another building endlessly. And this is in part the kind of deoxygenated version of architectural history theory. And part of the exhaustion of theory and the need to reconstitute-- not get rid of theory, but reconstitute in some different term-- is that its explanatory power has become kind of self-reflexive Right. It's about other buildings. And so Loren's piece or the possibility of looking through techniques or cultural techniques.
1:12:12
And maybe we can use that term and not just media theory. Because as you said-- It would be my preferred that's-- Yeah, because then we're not distracted by media in it's other senses. Then you create the possibility of a different set of correspondences. And you might be able to realize architecture in totality in different places. You're not assuming this class of comparable objects in advance. So in other words, you don't already assume that you're describing one of 1,000 Seagram buildings
1:12:38
and try and articulate its differences. We might see that in cultural technique, there is a possibility to move sideways or kind of different orientation back in. Recursively is the way they speak about it. Process you recursively, yes. And, maybe, just this is a smaller point. But I would point out with the Adorno quote, that, maybe, perhaps in this discussion, it's telling that he talks about a crossroads, which is a cultural technique-- the road is a cultural technique.
1:13:03
It's not an architecture. So he doesn't talk about a monument and then unfold a metaphor about theory based on a monument. He bases it precisely on a cultural technique, like the road, in a specific kind of aspect of the cultural technique, which is the crossroads. So we could think maybe that these two things are not so oppositional. But kind of moving back and forth, opportunistically, in a how-to way, to think about how to discuss architecture-- In that way, you're very selective,
1:13:30
as you move through, you just the how then to a mode or model, which I'm getting the sense, media seems to be taking over in some way. By the way it's discussed it, so what's really key too, what Tim says is-- the Timothy says is difference in Bernette Segerd and work by the group around [? Weymar ?] on that it's about creating differences. So there's a set of conditions. Well I have to say because of Matthew, I read the book. And the introduction is great.
1:14:00
The case study, I completely disappointed. Because they are so classic. It's almost history of ideas, sometimes, the old-fashion sense. It feels old fashioned, doesn't it? I'm glad you said that. Because-- Yeah, the introduction is great, and the way position Kittler versus what came before after, et cetera. And then you read the map both of the grid, et cetera. It's super boring. I had actually a question for you, Timothy. In a design school, aren't we, almost
1:14:26
because of ideological question of the profession, obliged at some point to reconstruct a category of objects, which are equivalent or not? I'm asking because we have-- I don't know. So you think it's-- The profession is not designed and built. That's not where the architectural profession is going. So no. Good point. So no. If-- I mean, you can ask-- That might be, actually, the central point. Well, even outside of that, I don't think there's an obligation to coordinate
1:14:57
every aspect of our historical work to [INAUDIBLE] program. But if to the extent that we do, than, no, because the design of objects is no longer the direction. And isn't that what-- I mean, landscape's studies, cultural studies with a lowercase c-- these were all efforts, I think, to also capture these other architectural practices and bring them back into the fold of architectural history. But, somehow, that path was derailed. Largely because of this question of the ontology
1:15:32
of this comparable set of objects. And I think, I mean, the rigor and vibrancy of landscapes studies here at the GSD, I think, is one of these possibilities maybe that-- --that's true, absolutely. --speak of that could be an avenue towards, maybe, back towards some of these older debates around how do the-- all these things that weren't categorized as architecture, that are just like as heritage or as bureaucratic objects. Like what's on the screen there, that is there mentioned.
1:16:10
Like these things that don't usually get incorporated into the canon or into the set of objects that we consider. How-- I think that landscape studies has kind of given those conversations new breath. But I don't think that that should now eclipse the value of those other epistemological conversations. So, yes, the media studies debate still needs to happen-- as does the cultural studies one and the discourse studies. But they are discourse analysis--
1:16:42
cultural analysis to be more accurate from my perspective, but I think that they-- The one thing I would add-- and this is not a disagreement-- it's an addition to what Timothy and Fallon is saying is that, also, when we look at different sorts of things, to remember that things don't stay the same forever. That they-- that there's a kind of vibration. And that-- well, no, it's not a vibration. It's an instability of the role of different sorts of agents
1:17:15
and things in a network is constantly shifting. And I think we should learn to write in such a way-- I'm looking if the dissertation people-- that allows for kind of difficulty and uncertainty. Or at least acknowledges that a positivist settling of the network to refer to Mary Lou's mapping. A positive mapping and a fixing is not necessarily the thing we should be after. But a fixing-- a kind of temporary strategic fixing-- acknowledging that things fight back.
1:17:55
That everything in the network fights back at the network. Resistance to. There's a resistance, yeah. This would be-- Yeah, it's precisely-- theory is the one practice that understands that it has to undo itself to be adequate to its subject matter. Theory undoes itself in that way. And this is where the value the Adorno quote will be recognized a difference between his moment and ours. So he is saying where the magic is effect with no cause. That's what magic is.
1:18:30
Positivism is cause, regardless of the fact because that's not determined in advance. So what he's saying, we need some moment where cause and effect are coupled once again. But in a-- not in an indeterminate way-- but in a flexible way that changes over time. But for him, that was called theory. And I think for us, the question were hashing out is that it's theory and it's historical as well. As for a Adorno, the positivism was history. History was positivism. Well yeah.
1:18:59
And it's no longer for us-- That's right. --positivist discipline. That's right. So we can use history and theory-- those terms together-- Together. --in slightly different collaborations. Where he was able to reproduce that moment of the crossroads of the cause and effect being linked. Described but not reapplied. Before you say it, Matthew, I just want to say, I very much appreciate your image of crossroads. But let's just have a Bartean moment, and think that crossroads could be also trivial.
1:19:31
They're not merely bisecting. There could be more promiscuous opportunities for, let's say, three roads meet, then we can transgress in a way. I mean, I play, the devil's advocate, which is the following-- if we follow that track. OK, there are no category, et cetera. But history, the way it has preceded, was always by taking a set of canonique-- we're going to talk about canon tomorrow. But so I don't-- but let's say there is in history, also, the need
1:20:02
to have a recognizable configuration that you can critique, et cetera. The problem, for example, if everybody was doing an endless ANT, actor-network theory kind of approach, by the end, the problem is-- apart from worshipping the semigods who created ANT-- you don't have much to do. You see what I mean? You can not progress because there is never a corpus on which that may enable you to advance. Because I was thinking, if we dissolve completely, and we are endlessly in revolving door,
1:20:37
there is still a moment in most architecture school in which you need to address some canonique work of this or that, or canonique analysis, et cetera. If we completely flexiblize, makes everything flexible, how do we do in all these fluidity? I don't have the answer. That's a very naive question, but that's for me a question. Because we still teach Palladio in many school. We teach [? Steal, ?] which is-- so actually if we were really follow your program,
1:21:04
we would teach, actually, a number of case studies of these complex web et cetera. And why privilege Palladio. And that we're going to deal with that tomorrow. But that's a fundamental question because the problem when you don't deal with Palladio is that you say something, and then learn something else, et cetera. And you never have a way to base yourself. Because in some ways, you take the aggregates, for example, if you hadn't had the classic history of architecture to criticize, you
1:21:32
would be completely in a swamp. You see what I mean? Because you need actually as a countermeasure. You need it in some way to dynamite the building because you have in a way the building. But once everything is in flux, atoms, networks, et cetera, how do you do? How do you imagine the post-aggregates? Are they going to return to Palladio? This is a similar succession. You didn't have theory without the positivists who preceded you. Right. I needed the positivists. Yeah.
1:22:07
Yeah, but it was easier because there was a set of things that had been interpreted in such in such a way. You see what I mean? Yes, I see what you mean. I don't know that that was easier. I'm not saying that it was easy, but I'm just-- I mean, I just don't think those things were so similar. The chart that Mary Lou showed, the random corporation chart. That at that moment, that's the positivists that then produced the kind of moment in theory following them.
1:22:33
That's not a new set of canonical things. So we-- I mean, we're thinking in a narrow bandwidth of what did a few architectural history in courses teach from 1900 till now? Now what was happening in architecture schools from 1900 to now? So architecture school in 1970 has a ranked consultant talking about the weoponization of the inner city. That's nothing new. It's [? Branch. ?] It's [? Branch. ?] Pardon? It's the [INAUDIBLE] diagram you showed us.
1:23:02
No, it was produced for LA, and it's about understanding watts. It was very, very [INAUDIBLE]. It was-- Yeah, I use it too. Could I, Matthew, I just also want to speak to my wallflower essence and make sure people on the outer perimeter get a chance to speak, someone. Someone in the back. My fellow wallflowers. We have seven minutes left.
1:23:29
Well, I wanted to know-- No, after you. [LAUGHING] It's going to have to be-- say-- behind you. Can I give you a personal anecdote in Michael's ear? No no no. So in-- it's a long time ago. In 1996, when I was a PhD student in a first year here, I went to the I knew Cedric Price. I went to the Cedric Price archive, and I found all these things that looked like that. But it wasn't worthy of dissertation material. [LAUGHING] So Matthew, you can say something else since you are ready?
1:24:03
I instead wrote on Italy because I have languages, I suppose. But this is actually funny, interesting, but also the moment of blindness within-- and not this as much-- within a theoretical paradigm. When you can't see. That's what part of what I'm interested in looking at. When you can't see. So if we can't see what was interesting theoretically, you could kill that diagram with Adorno, with cultural critique, with all of it, it was like just technical instrumentality, poof gone right.
1:24:32
And so that was actually really interesting to me when I was a doctoral student. I did that probably because I come from history of technology, initially-- You weren't-- [INAUDIBLE] I didn't have all these problem. Always the material for me is almost less boring than what I dealt very often. But it was an interesting point of, for me, in my education, it's like, oh, why isn't this? Why doesn't it feel? Why does it disappear? Why does this work disappear under the lenses of frames,
1:25:04
the kind of critiques we're using, which I'm totally involved in? I would write about them. So that's, I think, a crucial question we have to ask ourself all the time. I think we've all become more tolerant, I think, in some ways. It's not about tolerance. No, no, no, but I'm serious. I think in a PhD program, to be honest, the problem is that you always, by definition, have new generation of scholars, who arrive with very different take on the discipline.
1:25:32
And I think probably PhD program have evolved from very, in a way, it was very doctrine producing when it started. But I think there is now-- I'm always surprised by the object students can bring. When [? Atai ?] came with her silos in India, for example, and was looking at that stuff. And, no, I think what this is actually what has become fun in PhD program that you see a generation coming with new and very strange things. And it's true that new objects are shown.
1:26:04
But it's also a question of questioning your own theoretical propensity. What you see and what you don't see. Oh yeah. It's true. We all-- I mean us, not just-- yeah. I may as well say the point I've been holding for so long. I think you may have given up a little bit too quickly in a way, Michael, that I think there's a-- I mean there's a-- I didn't mean to give up. No no. I-- Oh no. Didn't look there. I think if we're talking about, maybe social totalities or social context as something
1:26:39
we're kind of agreeing on, in a way, as for Adorno that was what preceded everything. Right. I mean, that was what was known that would then let you know about architecture, maybe. In the-- I mean, not just in cultural techniques or media studies, but everything since Foucault, that's precisely what is constructed. I mean cultural construction-- and this would be the, I mean, this is the starting point of media studies that you look at the materiality. Because you assume that out of that
1:27:18
is going to come its own unique totality. And so you can't presuppose the medium in the way that Adorno did. Hm-hm. Right. And there's a-- there's a kind of radical difference there. No, I think this idea of this how we understand totality and what Marxists call totalization-- which is not a thing, it's a process-- would be another kind of divide between. I think it's, for me, what I retain is finally two questions. One is precisely how do we reconstruct?
1:27:57
Do we reconstruct or not in totality or a category of similar object, et cetera? The second question, which is still unanswered, but I don't think we can answer it, is why do we write history in design school, which is [INAUDIBLE] be still? Because I think behind that, one of the answer I heard, for example, why do we do that today? It's because the practice is evolving. I found it quite interesting because, actually, what people, their practice of architecture
1:28:23
has changed, which I think is an interesting question. I think I need to wrap this up. I just wanted to express my-- how impressed by Antoine's expression of his newfound tolerance. [LAUGHTER] And to, let us recall that-- I'm a scary tolerant person. The Edict of Nantes was given, and then it was revoked. So, I want to thank Michael. I want to thank Mary Lou, and all our various participants in the conversation. [APPLAUSE]
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