ads without products

NYT on a new and enormous Koolhaas project in Dubai. (We’re all going to have to start thinking and talking about Dubai one of these days, aren’t we?) Apparently, though we don’t have all that much to work on and Ouroussoff gives us very little, this is meant to be something like an materialization of the “generic city” idea from Koolhaas’s S/M/L/XL.

I know I have a lot to say about this “generic city” business, which is a concept as complex and ambiguous as the ad without products (whatever that is…) and in perhaps just the same ways. But my copy of S/M/L/XL is in storage and won’t be available to me till I move into my fractional piece of this not-quite-generic place where I am now. Soon enough…

From the NY Times today:

About a year and a half ago, Mr. Cruz received an unexpected call from David Deutsch, an artist who runs a nonprofit foundation that sponsors arts programs in Hudson, N.Y. Mr. Deutsch was worried about the effects of gentrification on the town’s poorest residents, many of whom live in decaying neighborhoods just out of view of the transplanted New Yorkers and weekend antique shoppers ambling down its main strip.

Together Mr. Cruz and Mr. Deutsch set in motion an unconventional redevelopment plan aimed at reintegrating the poor and the dispossessed into Hudson’s everyday life. (The plan, which is being supported by the city’s mayor, Richard Scalera, is scheduled to go before the city council in the next few weeks.)

Looks really lovely, this. Let’s hope it makes it through the city council….

NYC is about to start installing new newsstands around the city like this one. Now, right from the start, there’s a lot about the situation that I really don’t love. From what I can tell, these stands are the fruits of a public-private partnership (hate those) where the city gets them for “free” in exchange for the corporation in exchange for the company that installs them being allowed to collect ad revenues for the huge ad frames on the back of the box (not pictured here, obviously)… So thumbs-down on that score.

But putting that issue to the side (which doesn’t make any sense, I know, but just play along), figuring out what I make of these new stands aesthetically leaves me tangled in knots. On the one hand, I like the clean cool looks of the things a lot better than the old ones. I don’t even hate the Ikea glass, its color (even if it is sure to become dated very swiftly…) Taking care of your street furniture, having swift looking bus stops and newsstands and even public toilets, to my mind, is like a continual living advertisement for publicness, for public, common space itself. Which, in this nation, even in New York, is constantly in dire need of a good marketing campaign. On the other hand, isn’t it the small-scale humanity, the human mess, of the newsstand, as an institution, that makes it such a special place? The overstocked profusion of cheap goods and reading materials (from what I recall from a conversation with a newsstand guy at a subway station near my old place, one of those guildish NYC laws mandates that the newsstands can sell nothing that costs more than a certain price - $10? What was I trying to buy from him that yielded me this information?), the compact bazaar feel of the things - I’m sure that we will miss it, on some level, when it disappears…

The comment thread on the article behind the first link above contains some interesting amateur discussion about the aesthetics of urban life.

And this post is meant to be a forerunner to a long-plan post forthcoming entitled (probably) Ikea Socialism. 

It’s no surprise that the folllowing fliers from The Camp for Climate Action (who seem to be running the Heathrow protests…) would appeal to me:

Excellent piece today on opendemocracy by Richard Barbrook which recounts the strange history of the internet as a US project that arose in reaction to Soviet advances toward cybernetic communism. The most interesting thing - something I’d definitely like to hear even more about - is the way that what would become the internet took its shape in a certain sense under the influence / the pressure of a non-capitalist sense of what it should or might be (The story is rather telegraphic in the piece - I’ve ordered Barbrook’s book tonight to see if it gets more thoroughly fleshed out there…) and then had to be, only afterwards, properly commoditized. Or perhaps it would be better to say that the difficulty it has had in properly commoditizing itself derives from an initial formal insistence on openness, gift-structure, and non-proprietariness.

More to come, from me, I hope, on parallel topics. I’m thinking about writing a longer piece on, what to call it, the persistent intimations of socialist culture in our benighted world.

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I am so lucky that exactly three weeks from today, I am going to be in Amsterdam, just a short train ride away from this. (If I need you to, would you be willing to write my wife to explain exactly why it is so absolutely necessary for us to pack up the kiddo and leave gorgeous Amsterdam - where we’ll only be as of now for two full days - to head to Den Haag?)

I learned of it via an excellent article today on metamute by Marina Vishmidt, which gets quite a lot succinctly right about Neurath:

Although the classical logitical positivist statement remains Wittgenstein’s ‘the world is everything which is the case’ , the Vienna Circle was not always confined to the ideological quietism that could be deduced from that statement. Neurath’s work combined pragmatism with a utopian orientation, a drive to represent ‘things as they are’ in the hope that revolutionary progress would make out of them things of the past. The Marxist ethics behind the ISOTYPE project complemented the kinds of formal innovations – images built of numbers, standard templates, seriality – that structure the internet, another vision of universal information, albeit one without a clear ideological mission. The disambiguation of social contradictions as a premise for a materialist design practice is one of the questions that After Neurath: Like Sailors on the Open Sea tries to address in the format of an exhibition but also of a year and a half-long programme of research, symposia, and smaller exhibitions. The allure and shortcomings of a universal grammar is another, with the connotation that it is both a dream of reason and a bold proposition for engineering social change.

UPDATE: Oh for christ’s sake. The exhibition is off - ended in April. Whatever. Glad I figured this out before I got on the train to Den Haag….

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From wikipedia (via an excellent post at design observer)…

Hugo Boss established his company in Metzingen, Germany, in 1923, only a few years after the end of World War I, while most of the country was in a state of economic ruin.

Before and during World War II, Mr. Boss’s company both designed and manufactured uniforms and attire for the troops and officers of the Wehrmacht as well as for other governmental branches of Nazi Germany.

Boss died in 1948, and the company then languished in relative obscurity until the 1950s, when, in 1953, Hugo Boss released its first suit design for menswear.

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Of course, even the ad without products has been pressed into service from time to time, and ever more often of late.

There is so much to say about this one. I’m thinking about using a whole bunch of ads this semester when I teach, this one, the ikea lamp. I finally found a utility that allows me to rip them out of youtube and keep them warm and safe on my hard drive…

Anyway, telegraphically: a picture perfect example of the perverse fetishization of banality itself, warm eroticization of the stupid office plant, the breathless building. A smackdab of “love at last sight” - where the “un éclair… puis la nuit” of the exchanged glances rhymes with, really encapsulates, the ever the same / ever new temporality of the rest of the commercial - and is in turn sublimated into the car itself.

Benjamin said, at the end of the Work of Art essay, that mankind’s “self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” Here, we’re not quite dealing with the destruction of mankind in the flames of fascism - not quite, and lots of that to be had elsewhere - but there is something to be said about the sexiness of this officespace and this officelife in this ad that of course would be entirely absent in real life.

Compare: Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera… Which, yes, exposes the apparatus, massifies the everyday life in question, but actually, in a sense, is up to something similar enough to be interesting - save without the product, or almost-product in this case, at the end.

The ELO song, appropriately enough, was featured in the trailer for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, though I can’t remember (ha!) whether it made it into the film itself.

It couldn’t be something as simple as an unconsciously prophetic sense that these office jobs, they’re not staying forever. A future perfect nostalgia for what only will have been, not be. As I stalk and smoke around the modernist office park where I teach, I am struck intermittently with the strange knowledge that this job can’t possibly last a lifetime. I’m not talking about tenure, not talking about moving on, I mean the humanities itself, the university. I am young to be an assistant professor - I have about 40 years to do before social security kicks in (ha, again! that’s another thing…) There’s no way it will last that long. It, like everything else, will be rationalized, auctioned off, streamlined, offshored, outsourced, rightsized, done away with in the interest of efficiency. I can see myself now with the eyes of the year after next. The phenomenology of precarité, the erosive geology of late-but-not-getting-any-later capitalism. And my business is far more insulated from the vicissitudes of the weather called creative destruction than, say, our office worker’s in the VW ad.

The car, in other words, is not the only thing that is convertible. Things move quickly: ask yourself if they would make the same ad today… Instead, stuff like this, in which a gnawing banality no one even bothers to aestheticize meets with the catastrophic, emptily.

(Confession: my fascination with the first ad, the Bill Briggs one, is probably what led me to buy my own VW. Not a beetle convertible of course - what do you take me for? But a zippy Jetta wagon, turbo and everything.)

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I agree with kottke: very nice infographic:

Much better, anyway than yesterday’s disinfocapiton on the cover of the Evening Standard.

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In addition to wanting to develop my work into the shape of a giant wiki, complete with multimedia links and a three-plus-dimensional structure vs. the linear mode of the traditional book, I have a much more mundane and realistic request: I’d like to teach in classrooms with projectors that I can connect my laptop too. I’m at an underfunded state u - at my grad institution this would be fully doable, but not necessarily here.

I need it to show my students stuff like this:

Fantastic, no? Spike Jonze directed it, and yes, I know what it’s in service of so shush. But what an absolutely stunning performance of multiple logics of modernism. “Make it new,” of course - the “you will become your parents if you don’t chuck your parents’ furniture” meme that is always operative withe Ikea, not to mention a very true psycho-genealogical finding about Americans. But then, also, there is the mimed perspectival shift - we “see” the ad from the perspective of an entity which has no perspective - and the perspectivelessness of the lamp is the point. (This is the old Portrait of the Artist trick, where we identify with Stephen only to find him emptied out by the end, full only of trope, a machine that makes bad poetry and false epiphanies…)

It’s all there: the pastiche of obsolete forms, the opening in medias res, the minimally marked “everydayness” of the setting. And of course the shocking turn at the end which, true to form, is not immanent but comes from an interruption from without, and brings not peripeic catharsis but Brechtian estrangement and consciousness. All in the service of selling you a new lamp, encouraging you to fill the landfills with the old one…

So many of the dangers, so much of the promise, of modernism, right here in a thirty second ad. It’s not an ad without products, for we see the new lamp, if only through a wet window brightly. And we see it only, after the change of perspective, in order to laugh at the misery of the passé, the obsolescent, the nostalgically outmoded. An anti-fetishistic solicitation for anti-fetishistic fetishism.

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Design Observer on Kafka and Typography:

We get the word “koan” from Zen Buddhism, where in Japanese it translates literally as “a matter for public thought,” sort of an open-source philosophy for ancient times. Koans often demonstrated the inability of logical reasoning to produce enlightened thought, and, as a trained lawyer and insurance clerk throughout his life, no one knew the deadening effects of logic better than Franz Kafka.

Yes, and that slip from “we” to “they”… Go look…

(Image above: “Walbaum, typeface design by Justin Erich Walbaum, 1804. Kafka’s favorite typeface and the original used for Meditation.”)

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As I work on my “real” writing, I increasingly find myself looking to embed images within my text, just like when I’m tapping away at adswithoutproducts. (Obviously, I could insert images - like, I know how to do that in Word - but I work in a field, literature, that doesn’t let you get away with gratuitous illustration.

And then there’s the burgeoning world of video. No one gets to put that in their book…

For instance, I am working today on this famous passage from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

He turned to the flyleaf of the geography and read what he had written there: himself, his name and where he was.

Stephen Dedalus

Class of Elements

Clongwoes Wood College

Sallins

County Kildare

Ireland

Europe

The World

The Universe

That was in his writing: and Fleming one night for a cod had written on the opposite page:

Stephen Dedalus is my name,

Ireland is my nation.

Clongwoes is my dwellingplace

And heaven my expectation.

He read the verses backwards but then they were not poetry.

And at one point as I worked on it, I found myself momentarily thinking that I would embed this into my text ((Via here):

But of course I did not, I could not. I will have to make do with a footnote and a link that will assuredly look strange to anyone who is not a blogreader. Blogreaders, I think, would get the not quite non-sequitur-ness of the gesture.

Now see, if was writing for an appropriately electronic medium, a freeform one that’s not, say, just a repository of print-type articles, the stub of a new book might have grown out of this right-angle point of contact with my first. The Joyce material might have proceeded along down the page while a new line of thought, taking up the topic of these particularly modern anti-narrative narratives like Stephen’s list, like the Eames’s film, these synchronic stories which gesture at a new fictionality both impossible and absolutely necessary, dictated by changing world conditions, the erosion of forms, technological emergences, etc…

Perhaps I would have dropped what I’ve been doing with the work that includes the Joyce chapter and taken up this new line. Or maybe both at once. Working in this fashion - a fashion that’s a bit closer to blogging than the academic mongraph, or perhaps would be a hybrid of both, would give a whole new meaning to the notion of scholarly oeuvre. One work per life time, branching 2 dimensionally, and then 3, and so on. And it would end up - or start out - looking something like this:

(which is a visualization of adswithoutproducts, from here, via here)

So while this might sound like a circa mid-1990s paean to the radical new possibilities of HTML for criticism and imaginative works, it’s not. That has all been said before, many, many times. Rather for me this youtube epiphany makes me realize that the technology is already getting old - we are getting used to it, it’s becoming second nature. And it’s starting to show, as is bound to happen, in the way that I work, but more importantly the way that I think.

UPDATE: It dawned on me only after posting this that the issue I’m working through with the Joyce quote above actually has quite a lot to do with the issues I’m working through in this post. The subtle registration of the important question very young Stephen has asked about the “poem,” the experiment that he has conducted, and what his author’s ultimate answer to that question will be… Stephen’s question is about the limits of conventional form and the conventional temporalities that these forms drag along with them…

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What began as a shocking development, as unsettling as it was enlivening -

La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.

Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,

Une femme passa, d’une main fastueuse

Soulevant, balançant le feston et l’ourlet;

Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue.

Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant,

Dans son oeil, ciel livide où germe l’ouragan,

La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.

Un éclair… puis la nuit! — Fugitive beauté

Dont le regard m’a fait soudainement renaître,

Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l’éternité?

Ailleurs, bien loin d’ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être!

Car j’ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,

Ô toi que j’eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais! (translations)

- becomes the fix that we missed, what we’ll move mountains and monuments to have again. We’ll pay handsomely for it, this love at last sight. We will, we say, plan contingency into our plans.

Diventity: Identity, Density and Diversity

I propose one simple caveat urban design should strive to implement:

“Good urban space optimises Diventity” *.

Diventity is a concept that links diversity, density, and identity, and I define it as such:

Diventity allows identity to recursively emerge from the density of diversity, when that density reaches a critical mass.
[snip]

A city is much more than its stones, a city is memories and relationships and friendships and fears and ambitions; it is stories and histories interacting in the society-space-time continuum.

We form these subjectivities only if the city provides us the right opportunities, because a city is first and foremost our memory-forming medium. We remember our first kiss through who we kissed and when and where we were when we kissed.

[snip]

A place with enough differentiated identities (spatial, social, etc), distributed in the right proximity (or density) to allow them to interact without obliterating one another, might create enough such moments to allow for identity-shaping memories to emerge. We can say that such a place has Diventity.

It is worth remembering that Les fleurs du mal was published during the early years of Haussmann’s transformation of Paris. An anti-”diventity” plan if there ever was one…

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Owen Hatherley, at The Measures Taken (one of the best blogs going, btw), on just what’s so disturbing about the Victoria & Albert Museum’s new exhibition, Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-1939.

Rather, what disturbs here is what Jenkins, quite rightly, calls politics in the guise of art. One scribbled comment in the book asks why the connection between modernism and Nazism wasn’t emphasised (well, that would be because there wasn’t one), others use phrases like ‘cold’ or ‘brutal’…what the detractors have noticed is that much of this essentially comes from, or supports, the possibility of a system other than the one we are perpetually told is the only possible. Whether it’s the photos of militant stronghold siedlung Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna, a huge model of the Vesnin’s Pravda building, Rodchenko’s oddly alluring workers’ overalls, Corbusier taking a pen and scribbling out the centre of Paris…there are hundreds of possibilities dotted around these Victorian corners.

UPDATE: And today there’s more, complete with a very provocative quotation from Stalin:

“The combination of the Russian revolutionary sweep with American efficency is the essence of Leninism in Party and state work.”

Joseph Stalin, Foundations of Leninism, 1924

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One place to look for Benjamin on Loos is “Experience and Poverty.”

A complex artist like the painter Paul Klee and a programmatic one like Loos - both reject the traditional, solemn, noble image of man, festooned with all the sacrificial offerings of the past. They turn instead to the naked man of the contemporary world who lies screaming like a newborn babe in the dirty diapers of the present.

This is a fantastic piece. Interesting stuff on an architectural theorist and novelist Paul Scheerbart, whom I’m going to look into when I get back to the library. A bit more:

Poverty of experience. This should not be understood to mean that people are yearning for new experience. No, they long to free themselves from experience; they long for a world in which they can make such pure and decided use of their poverty - their outer poverty, and ultimately also their inner poverty - that it will lead to something respectable. Nor are they ignorant or inexperienced. Often we could say the very opposite. They have ‘devoured’ everything, both ‘culture and people,’ and they have had such a surfeit that it has exhausted them. No one feels more caught out than they by Scheerbart’s words: “You are all so tired, just because you have failed to concentrate your thoughts on a simple but ambitious plan.”

(What comes next, about Mickey Mouse, actually, is fantastic as well. But I’ll leave you to find it on your own…)

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