Final Session

As you can see I can't be here for the final session due to re-lapse. I hope the notes below might help on Waugh and Rand, they follow pretty much the way I would have directed the session.

We never did get to study Dos Passos's USA, but I recommend it all to you anyway. Find your own way to read it, but if you want a directed start, begin with the chapters 'Tin Lizzie', 'The Bitter Drink' and 'Architect'.

With that you should be able to look back on a century of critical thought with renewed interest. Collect your blogs together, making sure there are no omissions, the write a concluding blog to round it all off from your personal perspective, hopefully seeing the connections and noting curiosities. Put it together in hard copy and submit for Belinda's deadline and she'll forward them on to me. No submissions by e-mail please.

Very best, it's been a pleasure meeting you all, and good fortune.

Paul

Waugh and Rand

Evelyn Waugh isn’t that funny? Well, the motor race in Vile Bodies is, but nothing in Decline and Fall seems to reach above the comically tragic. So what is the tragic message? Perhaps it is when Professor Silenus turns up in Corfu, apparently destitute, but still a man of splendid isolation, to finally explain the meaning of life to Paul Pennyfeather. Why he should be the one to do this, with the message ‘some people should really not to join in such a spinning wheel of absurdity (sic)’, explaining that the odds are stacked against some people from the beginning and that they should have the grace to sit it out. Of course, Silenus is a good parody of the modern architect; detached, dissatisfied, aloof, alone, unlikeable and seeing himself at the centre of the spinning wheel, but you would expect better closing moments to come from Captain Grimes, who of course, thanks to his utterly spurious education and capacity to roll with life’s punches, always climbs out of ‘the soup’. That would be more comforting. Waugh’s Prof Silenus is definitely not comforting, either in his work, or his demeanour and neither is the world Waugh depicts, where only sardonic amusement gets you through the day.

Howard Roark isn’t likeable either, but he embodies a certain virtue. Try to find virtue in Waugh? That’s impossible. Roark’s virtue is certainly attractive, but it is played out against the most vulgar of melodramas where all issues are black and white, and surely reeking of the McCarthyism (note the power of the press and the menace represented by Elseworth Tooey as an ‘undercover’ political activist, the ranting of the mob and so on). In the Fountainhead nobody stands a chance either, that is unless they stand very close to the mast, or is it mask, of truth and probity, amidst a world of deflowered opportunity. How very American… how very obviously American. Perhaps here we can see why Zizek ‘admires’ Rand for her overt orthodoxy, an orthodoxy which is almost embarrassing, and one perfectly suited to melodrama, or the rhetoric of the Tea Party.

Howl

The texts this week are the poem Howl and William Burrough's 'The Job'. 'The Job' is a compilation of material, so it can be skimmed for the salient issues. Burroughs of course, does not hold back. The issues we will be addressing are those of 'the machine' (both physical and metaphorical) and paranoia, plus of course, the sixties revolution in general.

Henri Lefebvre's Social Space

Henri Lefebvre's approach to 'social space', a term we continually abuse, deserves repeated reading. Where with Goethe's Faust, we see the transcendental nature of man, the powers he can employ and abuse, as central to a 'tragedy of development' here Lefebvre attempts a more materialist analysis of compromise and ambiguity, starting with a discussion of the difference between a work and a product. When you read this piece, it might be a good idea to watch Gardeners World or Autumn Watch, followed by Grand Designs, since while you note they appear to employ the same language, that of things being 'beautiful' it should be clear to you that a 'beautiful' petunia is not the same as a 'beautiful' kitchen. Lefebvre would undoubtedly be startled by contemporary kitchen design, with it's inherent division of labour, it's obsession with hygiene and invisibility, of the relationship between the 'natural' food stuff and and the artificially satisfying 'clunk' of a drawer, the exacerbation of the perfection in the machine.

Thank you all for your very lovely best wishes. I'm really sorry for the interval. There are no classes I believe next week, so we are going to kick back off again big with you reading

'Social Space' from The Production of Space by Henri Lefebvre AND from All that's Solid Melts in to Air' , the legend of Faust chapters, by Marshall Berman

If you state on your blog 'this is something I have to do once a week so that can pass history and theory you will......you've guessed it, Fail.

If you are not sure what you are doing right re-assurance, you must immediately get over it and just get on and publish what you have, you can always edit the blogs later. It is the growth process we are looking for.

There are some things which are absolutely forbidden; layering of imagery- keep that for driving your studio crazy and no soppiness.

Make sure you do not do the typical AA student thing an just just about anything you bloody welll like. It will bring you no credits and much pain later in life. Imposing rigour in your thinking now will provide more freedom later- not that there is going to be much of that around in the near future.

I noted this morning that the phrase 'Fix You' represents in itself the pinnnicle of emotionality due to bloody Cold Play, that they now slip the phase in to an advert for Green Flag roadside rescue.

How the fuck do you skipe? (Don't worry i do know what it is- but seeing as I'm sittting here naked except for a 'fun' nazi helmet......no of course I'm not, but you might be. The medium is the messsage!

Try to focus on the pleasure of language, language beyond just stating things, but how you state them.

Make sure you keep your posts relevant to the texts

Lady Gaga running a sociology department is a fabulous examplar of the dilema TE tries to address in After Theory. After a while, after explaining the whole thing, he would prefer to retire a pint of warm beer, but is he 'Nostaligic?'

I'm wondering just how many of you have an understanding of what Cultural Theory might be, for instance, with the perspective of Cultural Theory, you could,'t compare Dubai with The Great Pyramids, beacause Anciwnt Egypt was a DEATH CULT- or could you?

Terrry Eageton loves simile, write it like dream, making everything accesible, discussable, arguable. What did Meades make of Zaha's inability to use simile? What do you make of it?

I said it wouldn't kill me....

But we end up in hospital from time to time. Thankfully I'm now simply confined to the couch, surrounded by pills and potions. I might occasionally raise a smile at Great Military Blunders and throw a book at the tv during Autumn Watch, and all the time I'm waiting for Greece to blow up. It's getting alarmingly Weimar Republic.

So 'Hi' from the couch, open your laptops, and send me, via the comments button, the address of your personal theory750 blog. I've had a terrible time trying to access these, but it gets very easy if, next to 'Sites I Follow' we find a 'Link' to this particular personal blogsite of your own.

Then think about what you'd like to say about Terry Eagleton. Make those comments also by using the comment button.

You can talk about broarder issues to do with the relationship between the texts as we move forward.

2pm start

Session 19th October

This is your read for next weeks session. I enjoyed todays session, and hope you did also, I'm encouraged we now have a decent cohort of followers, and please go ahead and blog at will.

It was good to meet you all today. We started with our present situation, many conundrums of course- what would you expect! For next week please read Mike Davis on 'Fear and Money in Dubai' and Dave Hickey 'At Home in the Neon' from the fabulous 'Air Guitar'. Of course the title 'air guitar' refers to the function of the critic, who has to understand something without actually doing it.

I want you to read and mentally digest an essay from this 'little red book'. The essay is easily found on the web as long as you search for Alain Badiou This Crisis Is the Spectacle: Where Is the Real? It's one of those modest pieces of writing that could blow your socks off. Often Badiou, whilst frighteningly clever, is a bit dense, but this piece is written for a newspaper, hence is more readable.
Please read Jonathan Meades on Zaha Hadid in combination with this text.

Also, please each of you set up your own individual Theory750 blogs via blogspot.com

Discussion: It's difficult to gain a perspective on Badiou at this stage. His introduction at this point was to highlight our necessary confrontation with the question 'What is the Real?' This of course implies we are 'living in a lie', as evidenced by our highly theatrical (and highly nuanced) media and politics where vested interests, not the benefit of all, are paraded before us in a clear period of global crisis. If you are wondering what this global crisis might be, four corners of the discussion might be: Climate Change, Increased National and Global Inequality, Financial Iniquity and the challenges of the Bio-technological.

Theory 750

A 750, just fast enough to kill you, but big enough to have some real fun. It takes a while to get to ride a 750, you might start at 250, move up to 500, then graduate to the real thing. That's my first bike up there, a Honda G5 250 and I was 22.
Theory can fuck you up, it's a well known means to stop you doing anything. The purpose of this course is to talk theory as if it's almost common sense. It won't fuck you up, it might just make you angry.
We go backwards from today. Start by reading Jonathan Meades on Zaha Hadid from the (absurdly titled) 'Intelligent Life' magazine and Alain Badiou's 'If this is the Spectacle, where is the Real' both available via the net.
The books you will need to study from then on, in sequence, are:

Mike Davis: Evil Paradises
Terry Eagleton: After Theory
Dave Hickey: Air Guitar
Marshall Berman: All that's Solid Melts in to Air
Henri Lefebvre: The Production of Space
Evelyn Waugh: Decline and Fall
Ayn Rand: The Fountainhead (film)
John Doss Passos: USA

Please join up as followers to this site, and we'll start it up.