AUGUSTE BLANQUI’S BARRICADING MANUAL
Léopold Lambert pointed out to me Auguste Blanqui’s Instructions pour une prise d’armes (1866), which explains in detail how to build barricades and fortify city blocks against the military. There’s an English translation of the introduction here.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE WOULD FAIL YOU FOR ROLLING YOUR EYES.
Because critical reading and prose fiction are such hard, weird things to try to study, a stupid-seeming comment or question can end up being valuable or even profound. I am deadly-serious about creating a classroom environment where everyone feels free to ask or speak about anything she wishes. So any student who groans, smirks, mimes machine-gunning or onanism, chortles, eye-rolls, or in any way ridicules some other students in-class question/comment will be warned once in private and on the second offense will be kicked out of class and flunked, no matter what week it is. If the offender is male, I am also apt to find him off-campus and beat him up.
David Foster Wallace sets his expectations for class discussions in the Syllabus for his “English 102—Literary Analysis: Prose Fiction Fall ’94”.. (Comment by Katie Roiphe at Slate). This could be read as swagger, I guess, but I don’t think it is. I think Wallace just wanted to stand up for the ideal represented by a university classroom in the plainest possible terms, uncouched in institutional argot. (via John Gruber).
We’re used to seeing crisp white surfaces as a marker of urbane essentialism—c.f. O.M. Ungers’ Haus 3, or Loos’s Müller House—so it’s a little disorienting to remember that what we talk about as ‘clean’ and ‘modern’ has had quite different connotations in the past. For J.M Gandy (see this profile by Christopher Woodward) in 1805, for example, it was a matter of rustic humility. In his book Designs for Cottages, Cottage Farms, and other Rural Buildings; including Entrance Gates and Lodges (London: John Harding) we find these stark white boxes: windows punched, untrimmed and horizontally oriented; surfaces unornamented; and with minimal overhangs. The images are somewhat surprising, given the sensitivity to materials, light, massing, and detail in his more famous images for John Soane.
Joseph Gandy, Cottage, 1805 (Plate V.)
Joseph Gandy, Cottage, 1805 (Plate XVII.)
Hyperobjects can be partially mapped or traced out as networks of effects—as transformational spaces. The relationship between horizons and the transformational space of hyperobjects is neatly articulated by Gregory Bateson, who gives the example of a blind man making prosthetic use of a cane:
“Where do I start? Is my mental system bounded at the handle of the stick? Is it bounded by my skin? Does it start halfway up the stick? But these are nonsense questions. The stick is a pathway along which the transforms of difference are being transmitted. The way to delineate the system is to draw the limiting line in such a way that you do not leave things inexplicable. If what you are trying to explain is a given piece of behaviour, such as the locomotion of the blind man, then, for this purpose, you will need the street, the stick, the man; the street, the stick, and so on, round and round. But when the blind man sits down to eat his lunch, his stick and its messages will no longer be relevant — if it is his eating that you want to understand.” (Bateson, 2000: 465)
The network of transformations is continuous, and the drawing of a horizon, a “limiting line” is necessarily a severing of some connections. Horizons are provisional, belonging to a particular encounter with a network of transformations. There is no ultimate horizon, because there is no end to the effects and transformations that could be included in the network.
Auckland: Wednesday May 25th, 10.30-12pm, Lecture room WS 114, City Campus AUT University, 34 St Paul Street
How do we sense and make sense of immense phenomena, such as climate change, or radiation, which are real, but real in ways which most of us do not directly experience? As ecotheorist Timothy Morton puts it, “It is very hard to get used to the idea that the catastrophe, far from being imminent, has already taken place”.
Morton, together with media arts historian Douglas Kahn, will discuss ways in which we can think about the challenges to humanity of nonsentient entities, like climate change and radioactivity, phenomena Morton calls ‘hyperobjects’. They ask, how can we productively respond to these challenges with the energies available to us? How do we radically question the ways in which we understand and interact with what used to be known as ‘nature’?
Douglas Kahn is Professor of Media and Innovation at the National Institute of Experimental Arts (NIEA), University of New South Wales. Until recently, he was Professor of Science and Technology Studies at University of California, Davis. He is the editor of Source: Music of the Avant-Garde. and the author of Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, which has been highly influential and remains the benchmark text concerning sound-based art. Forthcoming books include Mainframe Experimentalism, a collection on early computing and the arts, and Earth Sound Earth Signal, on the geophysical trade of acoustics and electromagnetism in communications, science and the arts. www.douglaskahn.com
Timothy Morton is Professor of English (Literature and the Environment) at UC Davis. His interests include literature and the environment, ecotheory, philosophy, biology, physical sciences, literary theory, food studies, sound and music, materialism, poetics, Romanticism, Buddhism, and the eighteenth century. His two most recent books, The Ecological Thought (Harvard UP, April 2010) and Ecology Without Nature (Harvard UP, 2007; paperback 2009), have had a wide and transformative impact on how ecology is conceived within the arts and humanities. Tim blogs at www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com
Brought to you by Now Future, in conjunction with Dunedin School of Art, Otago Polytechnic, AUT University, the ADA Network, Dunedin Public Art Gallery and the National Institute of Experimental Arts, UNSW, Sydney.
Spent today trying to formulate my PhD proposal. Didn’t get very far. Appreciated Timothy Morton’s series of posts on how to plan a PhD, particularly this one on archives. I’m going to be doing design research, however, so there is a bit of translating to be done regarding the concept of the archive. I think perhaps a site could serve as an archive in this sense, along with some bodies of material to be approached analytically: for example, a set of drawings or projects by another person. My view on design research is founded on the idea that design is a mode of thinking, not just a mode of applying thinking. In the same way that we might write to explore hypotheses, we can design to explore them. One of the difficulties I face is that currently I read and write a lot more than I design (myself – I spend a lot of time helping others to design). I see a design research PhD as a gesture of faith in the native language of my field. The other problem I have is that I tend towards what Morton called the eagle’s view, rather than the mole’s. But I’m an eagle eager to be a mole, face down in a pile of contingencies. I tried to draw a bit – its a drawing I’ve made probably fifty times, through which solidity occurs as a residue of collision and interference of patterns. Less blank-page abstraction needed next, I think.
Diffusive Architectures 
