OK- this is something I keep coming up against.
It's to do with carnival and the bigger problem of 'tactics versus strategies' (DeCerteau). The Carnival as pre-selected 'Safety valve' set against Carnival as popular self-organised uprising. Also, where and how do you act? It goes back to situationist cultural tactics and how effective are they really? By concentrating our energies on the 'culture industry' or the cultural milieu are we not just playing at politics? Partaking in the spectacle of political action while making no real dents against power structures. It's a question I'm really interested in and while I cannot agree with the extremity of the Unabomber’s Year-Zero-type action (in my book, killing people is wrong!). What Theodore Kaczynski does raise is the problem of extreme disenfranchisement and how do you get yourself heard in any real sense of the word. His issues are extremely applicable to the next technology module too.
Ute also mentioned the classic (and very relevant) question: “what if Hitler went to Art School?”
Check out the manifesto:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Kaczynski
Following the lecture yesterday, i thought it might be useful for me to post this paper. Bakhtin at the Seaside by Darren Webb is an insightful reading of the british seaside resort as a site of the carnivalesque.
Ed Soja’s angle on Lefebvre. Really helpful, from ‘Introduction to Thirdsace’.
Talking about ‘The Production of space’:
‘ I dutifully recommended this apparently badly-planned book to my planning students, but told them, quite uncomfortably, to read seriously only the introductory chapter and browse the rest with a sense of caveat lector.’
He then goes on to explain why: 8-9 of Thirdspace
Urban Space and Representation (a paper written by Iain Borden author of Skateboarding, Space and the City) highlights the similarity of skateboarding to the practices of the Situationists:
Skaters’ representations thus have more in common with the Situationist tactics of the dérive, détournement and psychogeography – "maps" composed from the opportunities offered by the physical and emotional contours of the city, and, above all, enacted through a run across different spaces and moments......Skateboarders’ representational maps are thus always situated through a continual re-living of the city – "an open mind always seeking out new lines and possibilities." (Pullman, Sidewalk Surfer, 1995) Skaters attempt neither to "see" the city or comprehend it as a totality, but to live it as simultaneously representation and physicality...
...Another distinction from conventional maps concerns temporality. In the aerial form of map, the entire city is understood simultaneously within a single glance – but in skateboarders’ cognitive mapping the time is that of the run, composed of a disparate objects in a sequence (linear time), with some objects "read" once (isolated time), others encountered several times (repeated time) and still others returned to again and again on different occasions (cyclical time).
This pulls out the idea that maps can be performed - citys become through the action of bodies within space.
This is the course blog for the MA Design: Critical Theory and Practice and the MRes in Design at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
