Week 7 - Allen Ginsberg 'Howl'

Ok, so I can't say Howl was an interesting read but it certainly got my attention. The outcry of anger towards the abusive and destructive society. It is graphic, scary, explicit and I guess honest for the world it describes. I'm not surprised that the publisher was arrested following its publication the obscene content was not what I was expecting and held me in shocked silence. 

Ginsberg introduces cultures that many would never experience and his ability to share cultures was carried on throughout his life in his other works and organising of events such as “Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In,”. I do struggle to see how somebody who can write such violent (rubbish) text can also be an advocate for 'flower power' though.. This does not come across as the writing of someone who uses smiles and love to mend problems.

I didn't like or approve of the content of his text at all but I can appreciate his writing style. Once I got over the content I found it easy to read through and digest. Reading poetry was a big change on the other texts though and perhaps this is where it challenged me the most. The language provided a very clear and strong mental imagine of this social space and also introduced glimpses of the physical space. 

I think his idea of Moloch isn't from the traditional sense of god but the idea of the physical space or structure as the god of people controlling their actions and lifes. Is it the buildings or is it society that he is talking about I'm not sure. Is it Moloch as society he is talking about who has designed the prisons and factories and caused the blood and the pain. Moloch is everything and yet seems man made. Social spaces and society can be man made or elected so is this control he is explaining from mans control of self? Is it the cross over to a different culture that shocks.. The introduction into an otherwise unknown, underworld culture of dirt and promiscuity?

Ginsberg mixes the 'street's' with skyscrapers and factories with the madhouse. He describes people at their worst yet he walks with the angels. He talks of soul searching and soul destroying... Perhaps reading it from context, from my experiences in todays society I am taking a different feel for the poem but I guess the basics of how communism, need, judgement or denial can run our lifes is evident whichever decade you are from.....

Week 6 - Marshall Berman 'All that is solid melt into Air'

The more I read of 'All that is solid melt into air' by Marshall Berman the more I think that this is more a diary, it is deeply personal to the author growing up and watching the world change around him. Berman took in everything around him and in his book Berman distinguishes between three key ideas:

Modernisation - being the constant changes that go off around us every day.

Modernity - the way in which such changes are experienced and lived through.

Modernism - the reflection and representation of these changes.

Berman wants to make modernists of his readers; he wants them to feel at home in the world for which they live in. For this very reason, he argues that it's crucial to understand contemporary modernism as the product of two earlier modern periods, represented by Goethe and Marx and many others.

He uses Marx, Dostoyevsky, Baudilare,Goethe, Bely etc. to try and show how the quality of being able to appreciate and respond to modernity itself has developed largely out of literature, and how we can see that sensibility at work in our own age with issues of geography and city planning. Not only does he offer examinations of those thinkers and their works, he places them in a different context with an intense, deep look of their work in order to develop and back up his own assertions of modern life.

Faust is the idea of going together cultural self-development and the real social movement towards economic movement to help bring about mans modern development. For a transformation to take place changes need to happen in both areas to make changes to the moral, social and physical world. Further in he goes even further to say that to create anything new he must let everything go. That for modern man to move forward everything already needs to be destroyed. I think this is a bit drastic, I mean to me as humans we build on what we already have and learn from our mistakes. If we destroyed everything we already have and rebuilt then there would be no record of mistakes and so man would repeat them again and again. Thats not developing thats going in a circle....

Week 5 - Colin Rowe 'The mathematics of the Ideal Villa' & 'La Tourette'

In the 1947 text 'the Mathematics of The Ideal Villa' Rowe compares Palladio's and Le Corbusier's work particularly Villa Foscari and the Stein Villa at Garches. The essay offers little introduction to the text before jumping in with room dimensions, scales and layouts. This makes it a bit disorientating when first reading the essay and I had to do a fair but of other research just to understand what he was trying to explain. To look at these buildings they do not have much in common but Rowe argues that mathematically they are similar. He highlights areas like the Piano Noble on the first floor giving access through the terrace to the garden, the portico, steps and the general proportions of the building. He also talks about the Garches upper balcony and compares it to the prominent portico of the Villa Foscari.

Although he does touch on some differences its almost like he feels there is a supernatural power before th similarities rather than just being coincidence (or possibly imaginery). This supernatural power could be simply mathematics. Le Corbusier's Golden ratio of A : B = B : (A+B) and Palladios 3 : 4 to 2 : 3 both being mathematic ratio will show similarities. However it kind of feels he is grasping at straws and trying to explain a connection which may or may not be there. Maybe I just couldn't visualise what he was trying to say and so I was missing something but although I can see how buildings based around mathematic designs could be similar to me it kind of ends there.

When talking about La Tourette ( Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis) in the 1961 test 'Dominican Monastery of La Tourette', Rowe is, for me a slightly better read. I could visualise what he was trying to describe. La Tourette is a closed community for its users and Rowe breaks this down quite clearly. He also does quite a good job of describing the cold bleak approach and aesthetics of the building. Rowe seems to spend a lot of time describing what La Tourette looks like and how it feels compared to in 'The Mathematics of an Ideal Villa' where he seems to be trying to explain why they look like they do rather than what they look like. 

When talking about La Tourette, Rowe sets the stage, describes the scene and even introduces the characters. Its a much easier read than when he was writing about Palladio and Le Corbusier but it still feels a bit bitty. It still feels like he is writing perhaps so passionately that he is forgetting to write down the joints in his thoughts to help the reader make sense of what is in his head. However is it better to learn about a piece of architecture from somebody else experience or opinion of it or by analysing the facts and looking at the physical space? 

Week 4 - Henri Lefebvre 'The Production of Space'

In ‘After Life’ Lefebvre tries to make sense of the complexity of the capitalist contemporary city and attempts to define a “unitary theory of space”. In Chapter 2 he focuses on social space and his idea is that there are multitudes of spaces which all overlap on each other. He has the idea that absolute space is nowhere and has no place because it holds all places and has a symbolic existence. 

My understanding is that social space is the analysis of everyday life and the urban reality. It is the beginning of space where basic needs are met and political space grows. Then the political space, religious space become bonded in an absolute space which holds them together. His idea tha everyday life has been capitalized and as a result so has the location of everyday life. i.e. the ‘social space’. 

Then when he goes on to talk about social space which is a social product which takes mental space and physical space to bring them together as a social space. This social space holds the actions of people, the thoughts, people grow in this space, they suffer and eventually they die. Lefebvre seems to think that his idea of social space has no boundaries. 

Does Lefebvre sees space as a form of power? I think so. He talks about the social space being a social product so then the space produced is a production where new space is created which then becomes where powers and control lays. He also talks about the split between professionals when dealing within the space of a city particularly mentions Venice. Where the macro and micro levels within the space of the city have allowed it to improve, change and grow.

He talks about nature that it does not produce because it does not labour. It doesn't know what its doing, it just does!. People do produce though because they do labour and they do know what they are doing. Its on these social spaces the natures doesn't produce and people do produce which give us the production of daily life. 

I particularly like his idea of horizontal space meaning submission, I took that to be residential types of housing where we are just going about our daily life. Vertical space being about power which holds try for the skyscrapers when business is conducted and the decisions to affect a national are made and subterranean space meaning death. A graveyard is underground… Underground is dark, its cold and all live is held out. 

I think I like some of his ideas and themes but as he jumps around I’m not sure I followed him completely. He seems to constantly be creating spaces out of space so it was difficult to keep track of all these spaces. Interesting read but it should come with a warning that your brain might end up disorientated and lost in another space to one you started in!

Week 3 - Terry Eagleton 'After Theory'

What is true now vs what was true in the past? He seems to be holding an argument about truth and the idea that something cannot be truth and can be at the same time. That is one of the ideas I got from Eagletons writing. His ideas jump all over the place so it is difficult to grasp one topic and follow it through. 

Eagleton seems to have two main aims in After Theory to 1) sketch a history of cultural theory and its evolution from the 1960s to the 1990s where he tries to highlight what he thinks were its achievements and defects and 2) uses the Bible and Das Kapital to construct an alternative kind of theory which addresses the important issues that he believes are ignored by recent cultural theorists. These are things like truth, objectivity, morality, revolution, and fundamentalism.

It was a difficult article to read because he seems all over the place and so I barely made it through the first 50 pages. I’ve got lots of thoughts or topics flying round my head but no main theme for his writing really.

I can grasp his breakdown of the history of cultural theory in the 20th century and his ideas of what worked and what failed. Then in some way I can see he is trying to explain his idea for cultural theory coming into the new century. 

I can understand his take on Marxism and how he explains the breakdown of class, ideology, and power but these ideas are difficult to pick out in the multitude of other ideas which are competing for attention. Post-modernism, Marxism, Post-structualism and lots of other concepts used by Eagleton and in some cases he has made his point clear so the book has a unique viewpoint and an introduction to lots of ideas, personally I’d prefer less ideas and more explanation as rather than introduce me to many topics he has confused me on many topics!