The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture by Lahiji Nadir

Author:Lahiji, Nadir.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472509826
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2014-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Gentri-fiction and our (e)states of reality

On Saturday mornings the mail slot swings open and a free newspaper arrives. It’s an excerpt from the conservative Stockholm based SvD Magisinet, and because it is Saturday morning the content is all about lifestyle, human interest and real-estate. What the real-estate pages communicate are the reified interior images of our immanent existential territories, perfectly curated; ‘Photoshopped’ so that living rooms are slightly stretched to exaggerate a quality of spaciousness, and the image brightness pushed up the scale so as to produce effects of light that are especially important in these Northern regions. What I see across these pages is that desiring production has fixed on received notions of the designerly home, and don’t forget the obligatory Eames dining chair, or the Isamu Noguchi coffee table, or the quintessentially Nordic Bruno Mathsson’s Pernilla lounge. Every Saturday morning the same series of images are further reiterated; they all own a family resemblance and contribute in this way to securing a spatial imaginary of the any-space-whatever of inner-city life, over-determining how it should look and how it should operate, and how hegemonic forms of subjectivation place us squarely in this scene, which is nonetheless abstracted from specific states of affairs. Is it possible to remain immune from a sensation of swooning when confronted with the curated and framed fantasy images of real-estate, especially when in search of a new home? (Tonkiss, p. 92). Welcome to your local taste community, which I perform here through the concept of gentri-fiction and how it manufactures our (e)states of reality, more often than not with our willing co-operation.

Here is my situated knowledge formation (Haraway, 1991), captured by what I want to call a contemporary ‘gentri-fiction’, and although I want to be wary of writing with my memories, of my travels, loves, griefs and fantasies, I do want to frame a point of view upon a specific urban landscape assemblage (Deleuze, 1998, pp. 2–3).9 I assert that the point of view operates in the reverse direction from what architectural convention determines, positioning the architect as omnipotent authority organizing a world from their privileged point of view. The point of view does not so much affirm or commence from the secure position of a self-same subject capturing a landscape of affects and percepts, instead, the human subject comes to be fleshed out in reciprocal exchange with a milieu that enfolds them; the subject comes to the point of view, they do not, per se, construct it (Deleuze, 1993, p. 19). Put simply, my point of view does not come first, and is not privileged in relation to the milieu, field, or landscape it surveys; I arrive at a point of view that is shaped and given contour by joyful and sad encounters, and then I can attempt to make the best possible account of what has happened as I aim to make the best of things. Assuming the differential relation or variation between point of view and environment-world, I only ever perform my

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.