The Tragedy of Social Space

Henri Lefebvre's chapter 'Social Space' in his weighty "The Production of Space" disappointed me. Henri kicks the chapter off by saying that he was interested in reconciling the mental space where architecture is imagined with that where it is built, but then forgot to directly discuss this. I mean, it's dense with thought that I'm sure is so insightful that he has developed a near impenetrable language to communicate his ideas… but it is something of a paradox that this makes him appear obscurely didactic in his praise of easy going attitudes to design that accommodate phenomenological and cultural dimensions to crafting sensitive architecture and space.

Don't get me wrong, it was good shit: just biblically tough to feel like you're understanding it correctly. I didn't know whether to feel stupid or judgmentally critical of his abstractions of Venice's archaeology when he dissects the practical notions of the work and the product. If "regardless of its devaluation or relativisation, the space of philosophers continues to depend on the absolute", then why does Lefebvre retreat to abstractions, albeit concrete to invent the opposition of the work and the product!? I suppose that's its strength though; through being so bloody tough on the reader it invites their imaginations' generosity to understand, or misunderstand it. Bit of a one liner though Henri ,if you're planning on getting all 'meta' in your discourse though and it's ironically my generous perception of the writing that projects that idea onto his work. Or product. Or whatever.

Berman's 'All That's Solid Melt Into Air's' discussion of the tragedy of development piggybacked onto a run through of Goethe's Faust as more accessible but much more restrictive and definite in its content and argument. There's perhaps more for the reader as an individual to relate to in the discourse, what with the Faustian stages of development's inclusion of more human concepts. I think it's a valid contrast to draw, seeing as both articles are about the individual's ways of thinking about producing and developing architecture, infrastructure, space and their internal consciences.

Berman finishes with a discussion on the idea of the developers inbuilt, ultimate redundancy: "Now, by virtue of his very successes, Faustian man has rendered himself historically obsolete… in the creation of an economy of abundance". Clearly untrue, as if treated as piece of history the 'extinct' developer if what Berman's written solely about: Faust as a character is reanimated in his interpretation and the lessons that subsequent developers can learn from him and thus he maintains his value. Lefebvre as an author however is someone of whom I get the impression that is only read at the request of professors of architecture wishing to scare their students: A whole lot of rhetorical references that can be found out to say very little that is actively deployable in the messy world that dis-empowered architects live in and have to make. Bridging the gap between practise and discourse is something that those caught between the two poles are always trying to do, and Lefebvre only ironically compounds the problem whereas the tradition of Faust and his tragedy would a better road map to use to reconcile the social space of the imagination with those that can be inhabited by a self aware society.

Addendum: 15.11.11

Right, I've got all that bullshit off of my chest, now time for some proper chat. In the seminar discussion we talked about other tragedies of development, and I was ridiculed for suggesting that the creative process in itself was a tragedy in as much as it is inescapably the death of ideas that live in the chora, Plato's imagined space where forms are first materialised in one's imagination.

Excuse the weak joke, but that was a tragedy of development right there for me, as I think that in being labelled the constipated designer ("there's so many ideas that could come out that none do!", when I was aiming for something more Howard Rourke) I got more of a handle on the proper nature of what this course is about: Not critique for its own sake, or epistemological teleology and self referencing but spanning the gap between what we see in the real world and the words we use to describe and analyse it in a way that gets as close to the essential as possible.

I guess rather selfishly, I found it hard to get past the whole that "human development comes at a human cost" thing. However, let's apply the Faustian condition to some of the things discussed in before. All the previous readings, from Badieu to Davies on Abu Dhabi, have sort of hummed along to the sheet music provided by Goethe: Boy meets devil, gets some mad skills, meets girl, drives her to destruction, drives himself to a point of power from where he will be forever isolated and unsatisfied.

Surely Hickey's is exception though: it seems that in his analysis of Las Vegas he finds a space of comfort, albeit nostalgic. Whilst the other writers seem to bemoan injustices in the developing role of the critic, a la Eagleton, feudalism's ironic resurgence in the context of oil fuelled development, like Davies, et cetera, Lefebvre seemed to align closer to Hickey in the lack of emphasising the crisis of the present, whenever it was for the respective others and himself. Apologies to Henri for the following godawful translation of his esoteric garblings: "Yeh" he starts, "There are these things called works, and these things called products. They're different, but I'm not going to play the role of moral arbiter as both are essential for the development of society and its culture regardless of how they come about". It seemed more analytical, and less influenced by the projected belief system that leads one to conclude that Abu Dhabi/current financial system is a bad place/thing as its government/traders have built their monuments and economy on the blood of disempowered slaves and ignoramuses, as one might gather from only a brief skimming of the opinionated Davies and Badiou.

Anyway, I'm off now to indulge myself in the beautiful scribblings of Julian Barnes. For all of Henri's discussion of works/products of beauty, if only he were to craft his writings as such... I mean, why is that the only way academics think that they can really nail an understanding of the quotidien is to machine-gun it with esotericism. Take a lesson from fiction why don't you... after all, surely what motivates critics is the fact that they can monumentalise themselves in the everyday stuff of life through their own literature?

Julian summed it all up rather nicely early on in his latest booker prize winner: "That was another of our great fears: that life wouldn't turn out to be like literature. Look at our parents - were they the stuff of literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which real, true, important things could happen. Like what? The things Literature was all about: love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God. And barn owls. Of course, there were other sorts of literature - theoretical, self-referential, lachrymosely autobiographical - but they were just dry wanks"