Quiz #7


1) Consider this thought experiment: You are a Poet, and although you cannot imagine it, you are always in a diorama. The diorama is inside a museum. The museum is located in a city. The city is in a 21st century country. The diorama changes according to the scheduling of exhibits: Savannah plains, Arctic ice, Rainforest verdure, Academic conference... Unaware of your placement, (for your reality has always been *here*) the limits of your Poetic world are obviously the limits of your diorama. Assuming this scenario, what is the spatial relationship of cutting-edge Theories of Space to your spatial predicament? Now close your eyes. Explain. This is a good question. If cutting-edge theories existed that weren't simply old metaphors distorted, then presumably it would be possible for the fly to find his way out of the fly-bottle. But that doesn't mean there would be a way to write about it.
2) Please think of professional wrestling: Are the sounds the wrestlers make (the grunts and yells and body-against-canvass sounds) to the hoaxed fight as theory is to poetry? Alas. If so, is architectural theory, when quoted by poets, a kind of theatrical scream of pain? If not, why not? Yes, but denying theory can also be a cry of pain.
3) Let's assume that Western accentual-syllabic prosodies are a kind of white stucco wall: a paradigm of a will to order, a thin layer of periodically bumped plaster that hides the real materiality of the wall so as to produce a simulacrum of ideality and cleanliness uncontaminated by the foul fullness of history. The conceit drawn here is full of holes. Deconstruct it. Rhythm fights the fear of chaos. But it is less a barrier than a patterned path through, like marching. There are times when it is necessary to march. But one cannot build a pleasure dome out of marchings.
4) Please consider Lenin. In 1920, in the midst of raging civil war, and shortly after a Social Revolutionary wounded him in an assassination attempt, he spoke before a Moscow conference of revolutionary architects, poets, and Constructivist artists, including Mayakovsky, Rodchenko, and Tatlin. It is dangerous, comrades, he said, to believe that Soviet art and architecture in the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat can outstrip the present and model the future. It is rumored that many of the petit-bourgeois intellectuals in the audience snickered at the ironic obviousness of such a remark. Mayakovsky, drunk, opened his trousers and produced his flaccid penis, saying, with a dead-pan matter-of-factness, Look, it is a cloud. Christian Rakovsky, later to become a leader in Trotsky's Left Opposition, laughed, and so did Brik and Mandelstam and Lunarcharsky (the latter who, in democratic spirit, had chosen to sit among the artists). Stalin, sitting across the aisle, two rows back, inhaled, blew smoke, and took note. It is said that Lenin was unusually lethargic and hesitant in this speech, perhaps due to his recent gun wounds. Taking the above scenario as starting point, make up a relevant question relating to Poetic Architecture, and then answer it. Great anecdote. The question becomes, when regular prosody is mandated by law, will only outlaws write free verse?

   Quiz #8

[This Quiz contains only one question. Therefore, your answer should be four times as long as usual.]

1) Derrida has said, in speaking of deconstructive architecture (Tschumi, Eiseman, Johnson, Steven Holl, COOP Himelblau, and others): "First of all, they do not only destroy, they construct, effectively, and they construct by putting this architecture into a relation with other spaces of writing: cinematographic, narrative (the most sophisticated forms of literary narration), finally experimentations with formal combinations... all of this is something other than a restoration of architectural purity, even though it is also a thinking of architecture as such, that is, architecture not simply in the service of an extrinsic end. So, I am now increasingly tempted to consider this architectural experience to be the most impressive deconstructive audacity and effectivity. Also the most difficult because it is not enough to talk about this architecture; one has to negociate the writing in stone or metal with the hardest and most resistant political, cultural, or economic powers... It is these architects who come up against the resistances, which are the most solid ones in some way, of the culture, the philosophy, the politics in which we live." Doesn't this quote suggest to you that as soon as Derrida leaves the ethereal sky of Continental philosophy and enters into discussion about matters concerning everyday technology, that he comes across as a banal blabbermouth? Yes, but--.

In any case, consider, because he has a point: As long as innovative poets do not bring the imagination solidly up against the category of Authorship, that hardest and most resistant of ideological powers in the cultural field, will they ever succeed in constructing a truly new poetic architecture? Answer and speculate, in Piranesian fashion, what a revolutionary Archi-texture might be.
I know what you're getting at, but at the same time, it privileges one orthodoxy over all the rest. The Book, the Page, the Act of Reading itself--these can be examined (not that we have to do away with them). And after we examine them, perhaps we will decide that we like them the way they are fine. But i think the result of such an examination will be the creation of new forms, rather than the abolition of the old. See what happened to painting after photography. Similarly, a new kind of appropriative-ironyless ironic writing--based on computer operations, advertizing, &c--is now being practiced on the internet, though we await the emergence of a true audience for it.