Scapegoat: Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy journal, No. 2: Materialism, No. 3: Realism (2011-2012)
Filed under journal | Tags: · architecture, capitalism, city, design, landscape, materialism, philosophy, political economy, politics, urbanism
“This issue arose out of a series of reflections on the contemporary meaning of realism in the representational strategies of the design disciplines. Realism, in this context, departs from the nineteenth century preoccupation with presenting environments and subjects typically excluded from pictorial representation. Today, while the ‘realistic’ is favoured and celebrated in student and professional renderings, it seems closer to a contemporary naturalism, at times verging on mannerism: for instance, impossibly lit buildings at dusk, exaggerated perspectives which amplify the speed toward a vanishing point, or, at its most intense, landscapes populated by ghostly figures simultaneously performing every possible cliché of ‘leisure’. While the ‘realistic’ is a recurring theme within both design education and professions, there seems to be a lack of realism. This issue attempts to set up a conversation between both terms by bringing together a series of reflections and practices hinged on both contemporary and historical usages of realism, situating conflictng accounts of its meaning side by side.” (from the Editorial Note)
Issue 3: Realism
Summer 2012
Issue Editors: Adrian Blackwell, Adam Bobbette
42 pages
“Materialism continues the commitment of our first two issues on Property and Service to examine foundational yet overlooked concepts in architecture and landscape architecture. In our estimation, these disciplines are haunted by materialism. We see its specular presence invoked in design research’s emphasis on large-scale flows and sites of material production, in the renewed focus on ‘performance’ and the rehabilitation of functionalism, in the centrality of ‘material’ as an expressive layer of tectonics, and through the import of non-human actors into discussions about spatial design. Each of the above invokes matter as its base.” (from the Editorial Note)
Issue 2: Materialism
Winter 2011
Issue Editors: Adam Bobbette, Jane Hutton
Publisher Scapegoat Publications, Toronto
40 pages
Thomas Streeter: The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · arpanet, capitalism, computing, history of computing, history of technology, internet, neoliberalism, technology
This book about America’s romance with computer communication looks at the internet, not as harbinger of the future or the next big thing, but as an expression of the times. Streeter demonstrates that our ideas about what connected computers are for have been in constant flux since their invention. In the 1950s they were imagined as the means for fighting nuclear wars, in the 1960s as systems for bringing mathematical certainty to the messy complexity of social life, in the 1970s as countercultural playgrounds, in the 1980s as an icon for what’s good about free markets, in the 1990s as a new frontier to be conquered and, by the late 1990s, as the transcendence of markets in an anarchist open source utopia.
The Net Effect teases out how culture has influenced the construction of the internet and how the structure of the internet has played a role in cultures of social and political thought. It argues that the internet’s real and imagined anarchic qualities are not a product of the technology alone, but of the historical peculiarities of how it emerged and was embraced. Finding several different traditions at work in the development of the internet—most uniquely, romanticism—Streeter demonstrates how the creation of technology is shot through with profoundly cultural forces—with the deep weight of the remembered past, and the pressures of shared passions made articulate.
Outstanding Academic Title from 2011 by Choice Magazine.
Publisher NYU Press, 2011
Critical Cultural Communication series
ISBN 0814741169, 9780814741160
221 pages
review (Yuenmei Wong, International Journal of Communication)
Comment (0)Fredric Jameson: The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (1992)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, capitalism, cinema, film, film theory, narrative, philosophy, politics, postmodern
Taking contemporary films from the United States, Russia, Taiwan, France, and the Philippines, The Geopolitical Aesthetic offers a reading of some of the most interesting films of the last decade and a general account of filmic representation in the postmodern world. Fredric Jameson poses some essential questions: How does representation function in contemporary film? How does contemporary cinema represent an ever more complex and international social reality? Jameson’s sophisticated and theoretically informed readings stress the ways in which disparate films—for example, Godard’s Passion, Pakula’s All the President’s Men, Yang’s The Terrorizer, Tahimik’s The Perfumed Nightmare, Tarkovsky’s Andrei Roublev—confront similar problems of representation. The solutions vary widely but the drive remains the same—the desire to find adequate allegories for our social existence.
The Geopolitical Aesthetic, a refinement and development of the arguments put forward in Jameson’s seminal work The Political Unconscious, is crucial reading for everyone interested in both film analysis and cultural studies.
Publisher Indiana University Press, 1992
Perspectives Series
ISBN 0253330939, 9780253330932
220 pages