Was bedeuten diese Hauser? or "eigenegeschichteblindheit"
what do these houses mean? verily, no great soul put them up as its likeness! might an idiotic child have taken them out of his toy box?... and these rooms and chambers- can men go in and out of them?
Hyperreality is the word to throw around when traveling in urban areas in the Gulf. The scenario is Borgesian: take the absolute historical anonymity of the desert, add two parts Islamic ressentiment, three parts idle capital from oil revenues, and one part total lack of aesthetic tact. It is like waking up in a dystopia of condom spires, blinking funnels, and glass witch fingers.
The urban built environment is not merely an ephemeral superstructure corresponding to the mode of production that drives its expansion. It plays an active dialectical role as a productive force. I really like Lefebvre's historical typology of cities: moving from the political city, to the mercantile city, the industrial, to now the "critical zone". (It reminds me of something just as nascently theoretical as Shari'ati once said about the dominant theme or mode of different civilizations, in fact in their respective carnivalesque 'volcano-spewing' approach to Marxism might explain why I enjoy reading them,
despite being goofy iconoclasts) As I sat reading Lefebvre talk about Urbanism in a cafe in Brooklyn, just before setting off for the land of the urban non-sequitur, for the first time I felt viscerally that the built environment of an American city was directly related to past and present historical economic functions which determined its structure and aesthetic. The streets I bike down, the subway I ride, weren't built to be intentionally unintentional, but are a palimpsest of former factory housing, pre-automobile formations of public transportation, repurposed store fronts and organic social classes with predictable roles in the mode of production. It feels real in that elusive sense that has haunted little suburban me, the objet petit a or urban integrity and "richard scary busyness." It's hard to explain, to put my finger on, what about the cookie cutter metropolis of San Antonio, big box retail proportioned to each dismal coral reef of cul-de-sacs, felt so treacherously inhuman. Maybe because of how it worked like an insular machine against reference to the world or maybe because of all the shitty places in the World to live, it was my shitty place in the World. Each day brooklyn is a new day in the healing process. And really, San Antonio is an innocuous hispanic-lite of cities, beautiful and cultural on post-adolescent revisits. I watched footage from the documentary "the pruitt-igoe myth" which were startling: a St. Louis full of Manhattan style buildings, a tightly packed Urban core. exhibit A
Which gave me a startling realization. That so much of the historical heritage of built environments in American cities were torn down. Cities that seem like strip mall galaxies would look impressively historical if it weren't for the all-american penchant for out with the old in with the parking lot. I'm sure in their own time Mayan neighborhoods were torn down. my self-loathing for the New World might be due to my own lack of historicizing!
Which also reminded me of something Valerie Miner told me at a literary conference in 2010, how to look past your own immersed-in-your-own-history blindness to the historicity of your own moment (there must be a great German term for that (how about eigenegeschichteblindheit)). Every city in America was built under a historical process of capitalist development. Suburban housing developments are specific commodities, a social/economic formation corresponding to market motivations, relations to municipal government, Alas! even determined by topographical and geographical factors. My teenage urban studies angst turns out to be unfounded through the negation of the negation of thinking about Marxist geography.
But then you go to places like Kuwait city.
places that are immaculate, invoke some Ali baba and the forty thieves approach to Islamic architecture, skyscrapers that so blublaciously disobey the rules of function and economic logic, random weird shit built like alien cathedrals to fictitious capital. And although you can work through the economic dynamics of real estate speculation, oil revenue, cheap south Asian labor, buckle down and do your research as to why the fuck they needlessly built a skyline on the shore of a desert, it is tempting to slip back into emo-marxism, Baudrillard-bawling, boo hoo it's all hyperreal. I feel like I'm growing up.
Hyperreality is the word to throw around when traveling in urban areas in the Gulf. The scenario is Borgesian: take the absolute historical anonymity of the desert, add two parts Islamic ressentiment, three parts idle capital from oil revenues, and one part total lack of aesthetic tact. It is like waking up in a dystopia of condom spires, blinking funnels, and glass witch fingers.
The urban built environment is not merely an ephemeral superstructure corresponding to the mode of production that drives its expansion. It plays an active dialectical role as a productive force. I really like Lefebvre's historical typology of cities: moving from the political city, to the mercantile city, the industrial, to now the "critical zone". (It reminds me of something just as nascently theoretical as Shari'ati once said about the dominant theme or mode of different civilizations, in fact in their respective carnivalesque 'volcano-spewing' approach to Marxism might explain why I enjoy reading them,
despite being goofy iconoclasts) As I sat reading Lefebvre talk about Urbanism in a cafe in Brooklyn, just before setting off for the land of the urban non-sequitur, for the first time I felt viscerally that the built environment of an American city was directly related to past and present historical economic functions which determined its structure and aesthetic. The streets I bike down, the subway I ride, weren't built to be intentionally unintentional, but are a palimpsest of former factory housing, pre-automobile formations of public transportation, repurposed store fronts and organic social classes with predictable roles in the mode of production. It feels real in that elusive sense that has haunted little suburban me, the objet petit a or urban integrity and "richard scary busyness." It's hard to explain, to put my finger on, what about the cookie cutter metropolis of San Antonio, big box retail proportioned to each dismal coral reef of cul-de-sacs, felt so treacherously inhuman. Maybe because of how it worked like an insular machine against reference to the world or maybe because of all the shitty places in the World to live, it was my shitty place in the World. Each day brooklyn is a new day in the healing process. And really, San Antonio is an innocuous hispanic-lite of cities, beautiful and cultural on post-adolescent revisits. I watched footage from the documentary "the pruitt-igoe myth" which were startling: a St. Louis full of Manhattan style buildings, a tightly packed Urban core. exhibit A
Which also reminded me of something Valerie Miner told me at a literary conference in 2010, how to look past your own immersed-in-your-own-history blindness to the historicity of your own moment (there must be a great German term for that (how about eigenegeschichteblindheit)). Every city in America was built under a historical process of capitalist development. Suburban housing developments are specific commodities, a social/economic formation corresponding to market motivations, relations to municipal government, Alas! even determined by topographical and geographical factors. My teenage urban studies angst turns out to be unfounded through the negation of the negation of thinking about Marxist geography.
But then you go to places like Kuwait city.
places that are immaculate, invoke some Ali baba and the forty thieves approach to Islamic architecture, skyscrapers that so blublaciously disobey the rules of function and economic logic, random weird shit built like alien cathedrals to fictitious capital. And although you can work through the economic dynamics of real estate speculation, oil revenue, cheap south Asian labor, buckle down and do your research as to why the fuck they needlessly built a skyline on the shore of a desert, it is tempting to slip back into emo-marxism, Baudrillard-bawling, boo hoo it's all hyperreal. I feel like I'm growing up.
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