Introduction: We Construct Collective Life by Constructing Our Environment

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Notes

1. Hannah Arendt, “Introduction into Politics [1955], ” in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 93.

2. Badiou and Slavoj, “Thinking the Event,” in Philosophy in the Present (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2009), 45.

3. Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea Casson, Semiotext(E) Foreign Agents Series (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), 78.

4. The split, divided, barred subject is diffused throughout Lacan’s text: see eye and gaze in Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis trans. Alan Sheridan. ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton Press, 1981), 67–78; ego and unconscious in Jacques Lacan, “The Freudian Thing or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis” [1955], in Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English (New York: W W Norton, 2006), 334–63; enunciation and statement in Jacques Lacan, “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power [1958],” in Ecrits, 489–542. Lacan’s split subject is a reading of Hegel’s split spirit, for which see the excerpts from “The Preface” [paras 1–72] and “Introduction” [paras 73–89] to Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit in Mark C. Taylor, ed., Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

5. Donna Haraway is an early user of the term post-human, for which see Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York: Routledge, 1991). We defer to Wikipedia. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posthuman) accessed 13 January 2021.

6. François Cusset, How the World Swung to the Right: Fifty Years of Counterrevolutions, trans. Noura Wedell (Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e); MIT Press, 2018), 160.

7. We are thinking of recent philosophical developments like the new object ontologies, for which see Graham Harman, “Speculative Realism,” in Collapse: Philosophical Research and Development, III (2007), 367–88. Or Harman, The Quadruple Object (Washington and Winchester: Zero Books, 2011).

8. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition [1958] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

9. For position within a syntactic world, see Mario Gandalsonas, “From Structure to Subject: The Formation of an Architectural Language,” in Oppositions (1979), 6–29. For Beckett’s vibrating tympanic subject, see Samuel Beckett, “The Unnamable,” in Molloy; Malone Dies; the Unnamable (London: 1966), 352 “…I don’t feel a mouth on me, …, perhaps that’s what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that’s what I am,… I’m the partition, I’ve two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that’s what I feel, myself vibrating, I’m the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don’t belong to either,…” a sentence that runs for more than a page. For the dividual, see Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992): 3–7, in which Deleuze argues that the individual with an identity is the smallest indivisible unit of a society; Deleuze replaces it with a dividual that is a cluster of numeric codes in a digital matrix (DNA, bank card numbers, etc.). For Lacan’s split subject, see endnote 4. Marx’s social individual, a unity of opposites, Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy [1857–58], trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), 706. Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea Casson, Semiotext(E) Foreign Agents Series (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004). Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon (London: Verso, 2012), 113; and for Dean’s treatment of the crowd as drive and desire, Crowds and Party (London and New York: Verso, 2016), 214.

10. Victor Fleming, Dir., The Wizard of Oz (MGM, 1939). The recuring image in Rossi’s drawings of the hand of San Carlone, Arona, for which see Rossi, A Scientific Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 4.

11. Penny Lewis, Sandra Costa Santos, and Lorens Holm, eds, Architecture and Collective Life (London: Routledge, 2021).

12. See https://ahra2019.com/.

13. Cf. Aldo Rossi, Architecture of the City. trans. Diane Ghirardo and Joan Ockman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), a text we have referred to a number of times in this essay. For anarchitecture, cf. one of the great catalogues of Matta-Clark’s work: IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez, ed., Gordon Matta-Clark (Valencia: IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez, Valencia, 2020).

14. Vitruvius: On Architecture, books I-V (Cambridge: HUP, 1998) transl. Frank Granger, 79.

15. Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, trans. Timothy Campbell (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). See the ‘Introduction: nothing in common’ pp. 1–19. P.1 “Nothing seems more appropriate today than community: nothing more necessary, demanded, and heralded by a situation that joins in a unique epocal knot the failure of all communisms with the misery of new individualisms.” P.19 “How are we to break down the wall of the individual while at the same time saving the singular gift that the individual carries?”

16. Cf. Sigfried Giedion, The Eternal Present: The Beginnings of Architecture: A Contribution on Constancy and Change, vol. 2 (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 495–526. And Koolhaas argued that the Manhattan grid functions as the prop for capitalist fantasy for which see Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1978/1994), 236ff.

17. Wikipedia defines the intelligentsia as, “a status class of educated people engaged in the complex mental labours that critique, guide, and lead in shaping the culture and politics of their society.” See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligentsia#:∼:text=The%20intelligentsia%20(%2F%C9%AAn%CB%8C,and%20politics%20of%20their%20society. Accessed today.

18. There is a substantial line of critique of capitalism by psychoanalytic discourse (Slavoj Žižek Incontinence of the Void (2017); Samo Tomšič, The Capitalist Unconscious (2015)), one of the most trenchant being Pierre Bruno, Lacan and Marx: The Invention of the Symptom, trans. John Holland, Cfar Library (London: Routledge, 2020). Cf. ‘Translator’s Preface,’ pp. vii-xix, in particular the section beginning p.xi. on the discourse of the capitalist.

19. We refer to proclamations of the end of theory that come from within as well as outwith the discourse of architecture. See the survey of positions on theory and criticality by George Baird, “Criticality and It’s Discontents” in Harvard Design Magazine 21: Rising Ambitions, Expanding Terrain: Realism and Utopianism (2004). And Michael Speaks, “Design Intelligence and the New Economy,” in Architectural Record (January 2002), 72–79; and “Design Intelligence: Part 1, Introduction” in A + U (December 2002), 10–18. See also Terry Eagleton, After Theory (2003) the chapter ‘The Rise and Fall of Theory.’ Parallel claims appear in economics, as for instance Richard Bookstaber, The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction (PUP, 2017). The assertion that big data has torpedoed science and scientific theory seems to be an internet topic, in response to a position paper by Chris Anderson, ‘The end of theory: the data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete’ in Wired (06 23 2008) (https://www.wired.com/2008/06/pb-theory/ accessed 07 January 2021) and was picked up by Mark Graham, “Big Data and the End of Theory?” in The Guardian (Friday 09 March 2012).

20. For thoughtful reflections on the pandemic see David Harvey, “Anti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of COVID-19,” 2020, http://davidharvey.org/2020/03/anti-capitalist-politics-in-the-time-of-covid-19/; Alain Badiou, “On the Epidemic Situation,” 2020, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4608-on-the-epidemic-situation.

21. Neoliberal orthodoxies – the privatisation and financialisation of everything, flexibility of labour, endless expansion, manic consumerism – have either been abandoned or collapsed. Airports, hotels, restaurants, cultural and sports events closed, cancelled or postponed. Massive state intervention implemented overnight with rent and mortgage holidays, pledges to pay the majority of wages of furloughed workers, moratorium on evictions, state-led coordination of manufacturing such as for PPE and ventilators. The question of a universal basic income was debated by the UK parliament, and the US implemented a stimulus package involving payment of checks to individual citizens.

22. Skype was rolled out in 2003; Zoom in 2011. The press is full of accounts of the rise of the use of digital media during lock-down, too numerous to record here. A recent one, describing the ascendency of ZOOM: Tom Lamont, “Are you Ready for Your Close-up?” in The Guardian Weekend 01 08 20, pp. 12–19.

23. In the Politics, Aristotle puts the head of state in opposition to the head of the family. Pier Vittorio Aureli transposes this opposition onto politics and economics in The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).

24. Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962. Sir Frank Fraser Darling gave the Reith Lectures, Wilderness and Plenty, on BBC 4 in 1969. Greenpeace was founded in 1971. At about the same time, Rowan and Martin’s Laughin did a skit in which road companies starting on the east and west coasts meet in the middle after having completely concreted over America. An inconvenient Truth was released in 2006. In 2015, a team of RSPB researchers discovered that the beaches of one of the most remote islands in the South Pacific was covered in plastic debris. It made international news in 2017, for which see Ellen Hunt, ‘38 Million Pieces of Plastic Waste Found on Uninhabited South Pacific island’ in The Guardian (Monday 15 May 2017).

25. Ernst Neufert, Neufert: Architects’ Data (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 3rd ed., 2002).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lorens Holm

Cameron McEwan Cameron McEwan is an architectural theorist and educator at University of Central Lancashire Institute of Architecture, and a trustee of the AE Foundation. Cameron’s research focuses on the relationship between architecture, representation and subjectivity to engage the city as a critical project. Cameron’s work is published in arq, Building Material, Drawing On, JAE, LoSquaderno, MONU, Scroope, the Venice Architecture Biennale and elsewhere. With Samuel Penn he edited Accounts (Pelinu, 2019). Cameron is writing a book entitled Analogical City.

Cameron McEwan

Lorens Holm is Reader in Architecture and Director of the Geddes Institute for Urban Research at the University of Dundee. Lorens teaches architecture at the University of Dundee where he runs a design research unit called rooms + cities. His teaching/research focuses on reconciling Lacanian thought on subjectivity with contemporary architectural/urban practice. Publications include Brunelleschi Lacan Le Corbusier: architecture space and the construction of subjectivity (Routledge 2010) and, with John Hendrix, Architecture and the Unconscious (Routledge 2016). His papers have appeared in arq: Architecture Research Quarterly, The Journal of Architecture, Perspecta, Critical Quarterly, Architecture Theory Review, and Assemblage.