Drinking Upstream

Dwelling, etc.

‘The House is Past’ (Part 4 in the Philosophy of Dwelling series) is here! (and so is the pile of ‘real’ work on my desk).

…The classic example of Adorno’s critique would be those who cleverly see through the illusion of the suburban lifestyle and opt instead to live in factory buildings turned into lofts in city centers everywhere. As if they had escaped the problem of dwelling without walking right into another one, i.e., gentrification.

The often cited conclusion to this collection of dead-ends for dwelling was ‘Wrong life cannot be lived rightly’. My feeling is that Adorno’s dead-end conclusion should be the beginning of any worthwhile philosophy of dwelling…read more…

Downsize: What We Can Do To Cope With Recession AND Live Better

…We have to reinvent the culture of dwelling in America. We need new values and new habits, a new vernacular of habitat. We need a new social imaginary of home and happiness that places worth on sustainability over size, community over consumption, durability over disposability, and goodness over growth…read more…

On Heidegger, Dwelling, TV, and the Internet

…There’s been an institutionalized triumph of the public over the private … in the great suburban estrangement, our tracks through the mass-produced and market-driven Levittown floorplans identical to that of our neighbors, but separate and walled, and inhibiting dwelling…read more from blogger Caterina…

Adorno, Craft, and the American Countryside

…What is missing in the American landscape is not so much the absence of historical memories, as the romantic illusion has it, as the fact that no hand has left a trace in it…It is as if no-one had combed the landscape’s hair…read more…

Orion Magazine / Sanctuary and the Modern Metropolis: More incredible, ethereal, urban aerial photographs from David Maisel. Someone please tell me why I’m so mesmerized by them.

…In his book Warped Space, the architectural theorist Anthony Vidler speaks of the “paranoiac space of modernism,” a space which is “mutated into a realm of panic, where all limits and boundaries become blurred.” These words come to mind when considering the urban aerial images of Los Angeles and its periphery shown in Oblivion…

Sprawl and Infrastructure Spending:

Dean Baker writes: …it doesn’t make sense to pay money to develop more fuel-efficient cars so that they can go further on each gallon of gas, and then go out spend tens of billions of dollars building highways that encourage people to drive more…

Kafka’s America and Spaces of Hope (Part 3 in the Philosophy of Dwelling series). This time we follow them to the dustbowl of Oklahoma. Yeah, I know, right?

…Adorno and Kafka viewed America precisely as theater, as a vast stage for congested and contrasting allegories of loss and hope, despair and redemption…

Call for Papers: Recreate, Replace, Restore: Exploring the Intersections Between Meanings and Environments.

ReadyMade Magazine’s Homage to the WPA:

…Steven Heller suggests that as we seem to be entering Depression-like times, perhaps we should not only revisit the bare-bones lifestyle strategies that got people through them (buying less, reusing, repairing, growing locally, etc). We might also revisit the artwork that was produced as part of the government’s initiative to generate jobs for artists and promote progressive, economically sustainable values…read more…

The Ownership Society: Is Marx Relevant?

…In time, this association between property and individuality congealed into the present-day fascination with the single-family home, repeated ad nauseum in tract developments whose promise of freedom and individuality can barely conceal the glaringly mass produced quality of the lives they afford their inhabitants…read more…

Victor Burgin, “The Separateness of Things”, from Tate Papers (2005 copyright Victor Burgin).

I’m reproducing Burgin’s essay about his own photographs here because I’m working on a post about them. Burgin taught in the department that I earned a doctorate from. I didn’t really know him but I’ve come to admire his work. I’m going to be examining his use of Edward Hopper’s paintings, and I’m going to be talking about space, place, work, NBC’s The Office, and more. Stay tuned and in the meantime, check out Burgin:

…Office at Night may be read as an expression of the general political problem of the organization of Desire within the Law, and in terms of the particular problem of the organization of sexuality within capitalism – the organization of sexuality for capitalism…read more…

Part 2 of the series on the philosophy of dwelling: Adorno, Kafka, and the Between Spaces.

…Gregor’s movements and gazes are ordered by the positions and impositions of the window, the door, the hallway and various rooms of the house. Vladimir Nabakov had things to say about the layout of the apartment and the way it, too, ‘encloses’ Gregor.

Odradek ‘lurks by turns in the garret, the stairway, the lobbies, the entrance hall’. It has ‘no fixed abode’ and suffers the miserable fate of being unable to die…read more…

Shane’s Reflections on The Christmas Story as a Dwelling Fable.

…The stable becomes an allegory of living when and where one cannot live, where living is not possible, where, as Adorno put it, residence has been annihilated. I believe Christianity has always harbored this theme, and that Adorno, in spite of his Jewishness, also channeled it. It is the theme of homelessness as a model of dwelling: ‘we are not of this world’…read more…

Going Home for Christmas, in Texas. It’s so much cooler than you think.

…This year we’ve decided to spend a couple of days in San Antonio. Now, to our hipster friends this is a slap in the face of all-hail-St. Austin, where just a year ago we stumbled upon a fantastic place called Beerland and an equally fantastic little band called Chili Cold Blood. Check out this and this and this…

Drinking Upstream is currently featured on Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, a fantastic site and online store that you should definitely check out (watch their hip video: Art In The Age Fall 2008 Lookbook).

“An awesome and insightful article from Drinking Upstream : Real clear thoughts on the philosophy of dwelling really got me thinking. Shane Waggoner writes…”

Philosophy of Dwelling Series, Part 1: On Interior Life and Interior Decorating

…Benjamin and Adorno portrayed nineteenth century dwelling as a kind of unwitting self-imprisonment within the emptiness that haunts middle class society. Dwelling, they said, came to be about trying to stave off a looming sense of meaninglessness…read more…

Foreword to the New Series: ‘Philosophy of Dwelling’

…Benjamin and Adorno would have assumed that a particular experience of subjectivity, which is to say, of one’s life defined heavily in terms of an ‘interior life’ (corresponding to the form of the novel, for example), bears some relationship to the ‘mode of production’ of that historical moment. So, in the late 1800s, the well-to-do who benefited from Western industrialism, those whom Marx would have called the ‘ruling class’, developed aesthetic categories, styles and trends, most of which featured an enhanced sense of the private or interior life, separate from the messy, dirty, outside world…

Designed to Sell plus, a note to bewildered readers about the changing appearance of this blog.

Call for Papers, Association for Political Theory is a stand-up group of academics open to discussing urbanism, cities, space and place, philosophy etc. etc. If you’re interested in cities, architecture, development, and/or Continental thought you should give some thought to submitting a proposal.

Call for Papers, Design Philosophy Papers

This is a nice on-line journal trying to develop the field of the philosophy of design. They manage two sites: Design Philosophy Papers and Design Philosophy Politics.

“Theodor Adorno on the Annihilation of Possibilities for Dwelling” is part of my on-going series of key texts in the philosophy of dwelling.

adorno

…“It is one of my joys, not to be a house-owner,” wrote Nietzsche as early as The Gay Science. To this should be added: ethics today means not being at home in one’s house…There is no right life in the wrong one…

“Towards a Philosophy of Dwelling” finally gives this thing some coherence.

It seems obvious enough that there has been a philosophy of dwelling, that philosophy has, historically, concerned itself with the matter of dwelling. Heidegger viewed dwelling as a fundamental human activity, and some would say that dwelling is the most important concept in Hegel’s writing, once you get right down to it (the subject coming home to itself viz the world, and so forth).

And yet there is not, today, any sort of developed field or community of scholarship associated with the philosophy of dwelling…

Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism”.

…It is in the realm of architecture, however, that modifications in aesthetic production are most dramatically visible, and that their theoretical problems have been most centrally raised and articulated; it was indeed from architectural debates that my own conception of postmodernism … initially began to emerge…

Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking”. Where thinking about dwelling begins.

In what follows we shall try to think about dwelling and building. This thinking about building does not presume to discover architectural ideas, let alone to give rules for building. This venture in thought does not view building as an art or as a technique of construction; rather it traces building back into that domain to which everything that is belongs. We ask:
1. What is it to dwell?…

Call For Papers: The Politics of Space and Place

In a world where inequality and poverty are growing remorselessly, where you are, and where you happen to have been born, continue to determine, how, and in indeed whether, you live. From the urbanization of the human species and the burgeoning of slums to the rise of the modern gated community; from ‘Fortress Europe’ and the Israeli ’security wall’ to land reform in South Africa; questions of space and place are central to some of today¹s most bitterly contested political issues…

“I Said, I Want You To Hit Me: What Blogs Can Learn From Fight Club”

…Sometimes, when I’m having conversations with my blog, it says to me “Hey, you created me. I didn’t create some loser alter-ego to make myself feel better. Take some responsibility!”

A few minutes later my blog says to me “Go ahead, Cornelius, you can cry”.

And I say to my blog “Why do people think that I’m you? Why would anyone possibly confuse you with me?”

“Because we’re the same person.”

My blog was jack’s smirking revenge…read more…

“Urban Planning in the New American West” has arrived!

…Train travel is so much more humane than plane travel, as I see it. And its integration into the fabric of cities, with street-accessible stations and railroad tracks and crossings, all of this urban paraphernalia is, to me, so much more friendly and intimate than the modern fortress that is the ‘airport’…

“Gordon Matta-Clark: The Aesthetic of Mutilated Social Space” will tear you a new one.

…Matta-Clark’s gesture was not just negative and destructive, but neither did it aspire to anything as grand as the many manifestos his modernist mentors promoted in the decades before. Rather, its strategy was the insurrection of mutilated social spaces, the misproduction of derelict interiors…

“The Broken Home: Napoleon Dynamite, The Brady Bunch, and the Split-Level Ranch House” catches a delicious bass just for you.

…In the ‘seventies, ‘The Brady Bunch’ depicted two families sutured by the conciliatory space of the split-level house. It ‘was the story’ of the reconciliation of a sexualized rupture.

The force of the show was its hard-working symmetry – a woman and four girls paired up with a man and four boys, all with corresponding ages, tidily placed and positioned by narrative and physical space. The dropped den of their split-level house acted as a visual model of mended domesticity.

Book-ending my generational experience – in step with our commodity-culture’s habit of nostalgically recycling the past – was the indie hit, ‘Napoleon Dynamite’. Napoleon’s split-level ranch house staged another take on the attachment fantasy, consciously parodying the idealism of those earlier shows…

“Homeowners, Foreclosures, and The Matrix” welcomes you to the desert of the real estate crisis.

…The owner-individual has become the prop for a bewildering network of lending products and finance circuits entangled in complex abstractions. Like the spec house, the speculative individual in an opportunistic housing market structured by uneven exchange relations is constituted as a risk, a speculation, a future asset that may or may not pan out…

“Big Love and the Suburbs” calls a meeting of the families and wants to know which one of the wives keeps blowing the budget on pumpkin spice lattes?