On Architecture and Aesthetics
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2010-06-10 · 1:06:36 · 8,578 words
ideologypsychoanalysiscinema-art-culturecapitalismhegel-dialecticsecology-climateeveryday-lifephilosophy-general
Žižek delivers a lecture on architecture (likely to a design/architecture audience) organized around the dialectical formula 'less is more' and its reversal 'more for less.' He moves from aesthetic theory, how incompleteness in art or commodities generates surplus meaning and surplus enjoyment, to a sustained analysis of contemporary performance arts complexes, whose skin/structure split he reads as an ideological symptom of privatized public space and democratic exclusivity. He closes with reflections on toilets as national-ideological objects, sustainability as ideology, Stalinist architecture's 'unknown knowns,' and a call for architects to recognize the political unconscious inscribed in their buildings.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 14
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The gap between one's prestigious symbolic title (professor, president, father) and one's immediate, miserable self-experience; invoked here via Žižek's own introduction.
The paradox that subtraction, truncation, or incompleteness generates additional meaning, aesthetic depth, and surplus enjoyment, deployed across art, commodities, sexuality, and architecture.
Implicit in the toothpaste argument: the 'full product at round price' is a fiction that never exists materially yet structurally determines the commodity's presentation.
Lacan's mechanism whereby the very renunciation of pleasure or the regulation meant to block enjoyment itself becomes a new source of pleasure, illustrated by the obsessional masochist and by bureaucratic eroticism.
as “skin and structure”
Žižek's architectural version of the inside/outside gap: the aesthetic envelope of a building (skin) and its functional internal organization (structure) are incommensurable, and this gap is a symptom of social antagonism.
Žižek's critical label for Zaera-Polo's stance: endorsing the global market as the primary architectural milieu and translating Deleuzian flow-aesthetics into a legitimation of privatized envelopes.
as “de-territorialization”
Deleuzian concept used via Zaera-Polo to describe globalization's dissolution of fixed borders, which paradoxically generates new demand for envelopes, bubbles, and containers.
Sloterdijk's concept of a world organized as foamy bubbles and balloons of different scale; Žižek invokes it to frame the architectural appetite for the envelope as insulation and immunization.
as “enclosure of the commons”
Žižek applies the political-economy concept to contemporary architecture: the envelope that privatizes and climatizes not just a building's interior but its exterior public space.
An emerging American ideological category that collapses heterogeneous threats, exploitative relatives, diseased immigrants, terrorists, fundamentalists, under one label, legitimating private security and spatial enclosure.
The defining paradox of contemporary performance arts venues: they construct an ostentatiously open, egalitarian, multi-functional space whose very access is invisibly filtered and privately controlled.
as “political unconscious of buildings”
Architecture materializes not only public ideology but its obscene supplement, what the ideology must presuppose but cannot openly avow, as illustrated by Stalinist neo-Gothic.
The fourth term missing from Rumsfeld's epistemological grid: things we know but do not know that we know, our unconscious prejudices and the obscene secrets that public ideology cannot state openly but that architecture materializes.
Borrowed from Stephen Jay Gould (who borrowed it from architecture): non-functional spaces that open up between structural principles and can be repurposed as zones of freedom and imagination.
Stories he reaches for 11
Donald Rumsfeld enumerated known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns to justify the Iraq invasion. Žižek identifies the missing fourth term: unknown knowns, things we know but do not know that we know, i.e. the ideological unconscious.
“What is missing is unknown knowns. Things that we know, but we don't know that we know them... our unconscious prejudices that determine us but we don't know about them.”
A Lacanian analyst's patient accidentally said 'Bed for two' instead of 'Table for two' at a restaurant. The Lacanian reading: not that his true desire emerged, but that he was reminding himself not to enjoy dinner so much that he forgets the real task upstairs.
“This slip of tongue was rather a reminder—as much as I will enjoy eating here, I should not forget that my true task is later upwards.”
The chocolate egg with a plastic toy inside is the commodity form of 'less is more': you get less chocolate (void in the middle) but more via the surplus toy, mirroring Lacan's surplus enjoyment.
“You obviously get less, the void in the middle. But that to fill in that less you get more, the surplus.”
Soviet communist architecture, officially egalitarian, adopted an extreme neo-Gothic hierarchical style, materializing in stone the hierarchical desire the regime had to deny publicly, the paradigm case of 'unknown knowns' in architecture.
“If you just look at their typical architecture, you see out there in the mute language of buildings the extreme hierarchical spirit clearly embodied.”
A poll found men prefer Cindy Crawford to the more conventionally perfect Claudia Schiffer because of Crawford's birthmark; perfection causes anxiety, imperfection is the necessary supplement that makes the object desirable.
“Claudia Schiffer is too perfect. It caused anxiety. You need a sign of imperfection.”
South Korea built a theater whose screen-window frames the real North Korean border zone; North Korea responded with a fake model village whose lights and promenading inhabitants are staged. Reality is elevated into spectacle; barren zone acquires phantasmatic sublimity.
“The spectacle people observe when they take seats and look through the gigantic screen window is reality itself... barren zone is given a phantasmatic status, elevated into a spectacle.”
Yugoslav censors cut Ben-Hur immediately after the chariot race, removing the Jesus Christ miracle ending as Christian propaganda. The accidental truncation transformed religious kitsch into a desperate existential drama where triumph coincides with loss.
“This reduction made out of a kitsch religious propaganda almost a work of art. Instead of simplistic story celebrating religion, we get a kind of desperate existential drama.”
The Guggenheim is essentially a giant circular staircase you ascend to descend; Žižek jokes this is like skiing, going up a mountain only to come down, and asks why not stay at the bottom and read a book.
“We have such a building, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, where basically it's one big staircase. You go up so that you go later down.”
The obsessional represses guilty pleasure by self-punishment, but the punishment itself becomes pleasurable. Žižek offers a comic solution: treat sex as a bureaucratic task with a written checklist, the non-erotic procedure becomes an additional source of sexualization.
“Sit down with your partner and treat it as a complex bureaucratic task... all of a sudden you will get caught into this totally non-erotic bureaucratic procedure. It will become a source of additional sexualization.”
Hitchcock's Psycho can be read as a film about architecture: Norman Bates is split between the Gothic mother's house on the hill and the modern flat motel below. Žižek jokes that a Frank Gehry building incorporating both would have saved Norman.
“What if we read this pathological figure of Norman Bates as a character split between two architectural house, the old Gothic mother's house on the hill and the flat motel beneath closer to the highway?”
Toothpaste tubes always advertise one-third more for free in a differently colored section; the punchline is that you can never buy just the base amount at a round price, the full baseline is fictional.
“The catch is of course that the full product, which sets the standard for this more or less, is fictional. We never get to see a toothpaste without this surplus.”
Works invoked 7
Psycho film
Proposed as a film about architecture: Norman Bates as a character split between Gothic and modern architectural poles, with a joke about how Gehry might have saved him.
Communist Manifesto essay
Marx's famous passage on de-territorialization ('all that is solid melts into air') quoted approvingly to frame globalization's dissolution of fixed structures.
Lord of the Rings film
Hobbit dwellings briefly invoked as an analogy for terrain/landscape architecture where the building surface continues the surrounding terrain.
Spheres book
Sloterdijk's monumental trilogy on bubbles and foam; invoked for the concept of capsular society, global provincialism, and the politics of climatization that underlies contemporary envelope architecture.
The Killers paper
Hemingway's short story (fewer than ten pages) used as the positive example of productive mystery and ellipsis; the unexplained resignation of the marked man generates depth.
Ben-Hur film
Described as 'Hollywood religious kitsch'; but its censored Yugoslav version, truncated at the chariot race, is used positively as the paradigm example of less-is-more and censorship as accidental aesthetic generator.
John Berger's book; the observation that Picasso's blue period is a favorite of the rich used to argue that aestheticized poverty flatters bourgeois taste and that ascetic design is a class-marked ideology.
People invoked 23
His New Acropolis Museum in Athens cited for the effect of framing the Parthenon through a glass window, enhancing its sublime appearance.
His buildings cited as examples of reflecting the skin/structure gap into the external form itself via asymmetrical cubes.
Arnold Schoenberg positive
Mentioned alongside Webern, Paul Klee, and Kandinsky as examples of great art that is demanding but not inherently elitist.
Jacques Lacan positive
Primary theoretical resource: surplus enjoyment, objet petit a, the slip-of-tongue analysis, and the opera staircase reading all draw on Lacanian concepts.
His sculptural buildings (e.g. Bard College Performing Arts Center) cited as the culmination of skin-aestheticization; jokingly proposed as the architect who could have saved Norman Bates.
Stephen Jay Gould positive
His concept of spandrels (non-functional spaces that become repurposed) borrowed from architecture and applied to evolution; Žižek re-applies it back to architecture as zones of freedom.
Gilles Deleuze negative
Deleuzian de-territorialization and flow-aesthetics invoked only to be critiqued as co-opted by neo-capitalist architectural ideology via Zaera-Polo.
Donald Rumsfeld positive
His known knowns/known unknowns/unknown unknowns epistemological grid is used ironically as a genuine philosophical tool, but Žižek critiques it for suppressing the fourth term: unknown knowns (the ideological unconscious).
Anton Webern positive
Cited as an example of demanding great art that is universal in principle, not elitist.
Rem Koolhaas positive
His Library of France project and concept of 'Junkspace' are used as examples of the inside/outside gap and the sanitization of urban space.
Ernest Hemingway positive
The elliptical ten-page story 'The Killers' used as a positive example of less-is-more, whose mystery Hollywood destroyed by filling in the gap with flashbacks.
Fredric Jameson positive
Quoted on the incommensurability of inside and outside in Koolhaas's Library of France ('the functions, the rooms, the interior... sank within their enormous container like so many floating organs').
Architect of the Oriental Art Center in Shanghai and National Grand Theatre of China; cited as exemplars of the eggshell skin/structure type.
John Berger positive
Cited for the observation in Success and Failure of Picasso that Picasso's blue period has always been a favorite of the rich because it aestheticizes poverty, used to ground the critique of ascetic design ideology.
William Butler Yeats positive
Closing quotation ('I have spread my dreams under your feet / Tread softly because you tread on my dreams') applied as a warning to architects about political-ethical responsibility.
His Juche (self-sufficiency) ideology cited as the structural analogue to Western sustainability ideology.
Peter Sloterdijk positive
His Spheres trilogy and concept of capsular/bubble society / politics of climatization used (via Zaera-Polo) to frame the architectural appetite for insulating envelopes.
Darian Leader positive
Described as 'my English friend, a Lacanian analyst'; provides the 'bed for two' slip-of-tongue anecdote and its Lacanian interpretation.
Bill Gates negative
Cited as an instance of the rich imagining that the poor need simple functional solutions (a water pump) while the actual poor would embellish it with kitsch decorations.
Walter Benjamin positive
His observation about the Palais Garnier Opera's true focus being the oval staircase (social display) rather than the performance hall is used to illustrate surplus enjoyment in cultural life.
Alfred Hitchcock positive
Psycho invoked as a film about architecture: Norman Bates's pathology read through the split between the Gothic maternal house and the modern motel.
Karl Marx positive
The Communist Manifesto passage on 'all that is solid melts into air' quoted to frame globalization's de-territorialization.
Alejandro Zaera-Polo negative
Extensively quoted on architectural envelopes and Deleuzian flow-aesthetics; Žižek critically labels his stance 'neo-capitalist Deleuzianism' and shows that his theory of the envelope reverts to privatizing public space.
What it argues
less is more / more for less as aesthetic and libidinal principlesurplus enjoyment and the mechanism of excessperformance arts venues as ideological symptomskin/structure gap and privatization of public spacedemocratic exclusivity and class antagonism in architectureunknown knowns: architecture as materialization of what ideology cannot saysustainability as ideological myth
Dialectical moves 9
“Less is more: the very incompleteness, the truncation, the gap, generates additional meaning—so the loss is the source of the gain.”
Subtraction from a work produces surplus meaning rather than deficit, making aesthetic truncation structurally equivalent to Lacanian surplus enjoyment.
“The very renunciation of pleasure turns into the pleasure of renunciation; the regulation of pleasures turns into a pleasure of regulation.”
The mechanism of surplus enjoyment shows that attempts to block enjoyment themselves become new sources of it, prohibition is always already eroticized.
“It costs much more to make a building look imperfect; you have to pay more to introduce signs of imperfection.”
Apparent naturalness and imperfection in architecture are themselves costly, manufactured supplements, the natural is already artificial.
“The actual effect of terrain buildings is the very opposite of the intended naturalization: nature itself is de-realized, appearing as an artificial skin concealing complex machinery.”
The attempt to dissolve the architecture/nature boundary produces the inverse effect, nature becomes uncanny artifice.
“Far from making the exclusive temple of high art more accessible, it is the very surrounding of expensive cafeterias and so on which is effectively exclusive and elitist.”
The anti-elitist gesture of surrounding high art with populist amenities is itself the new form of exclusion, the inversion of the stated intent.
“It is not that they are secretly elitist—it is their very anti-elitism, its implicit ideological equation of great art with elitism.”
The critique of performance venues should not be that they hide elitism, but that their anti-elitism presupposes the equation of greatness with exclusivity.
“Outside only becomes outside viewed from the inside—we can never have a meta-language position from which we see it all.”
The inside/outside distinction is not neutral or symmetrical; inside is always the primary constitutive position, so there is always a third excess space that escapes the division.
“From Deleuzian poetry of fluid de-territorialization we are back to the task of how to enact and protect the private enclosure of public spaces.”
The emancipatory-sounding vocabulary of flows and de-territorialization secretly serves the logic of capitalist enclosure.
“Only the rich like modesty; the poor prefer luxury.”
Ascetic simplicity in design is a class privilege masquerading as universal good taste, while the actual poor invest in ornamentation and kitsch.
Claims 13
asserts
Incompleteness or subtraction in a work of art generates additional meaning and aesthetic depth that completeness destroys.aesthetics / less is more
asserts
The commodity logic of 'more for free' (toothpaste surplus, Kinder Surprise toy) is a structural illusion: the full baseline product never exists, so the 'more' is always already built in.commodity fetishism / consumerism
asserts
All authentic human sexual pleasure is excess pleasure; there is no zero-level sexuality, making surplus enjoyment definitive of being human.sexuality / surplus enjoyment
asserts
The inside/outside gap is a transcendental a priori of architectural experience, not a contingent stylistic choice.architecture / phenomenology
asserts
Contemporary performance arts venues produce democratic exclusivity: their ostentatious openness and anti-elitism conceal invisible filtering and private control of access.performance arts venues / ideology
rejects
The anti-elitism of performance arts venues is itself ideological because it implies that great art is inherently elitist, when in fact great art is by definition universal and emancipatory.cultural populism / anti-elitism discourse
asserts
The architectural envelope functions as an urban version of the enclosure of the commons, privatizing not just interiors but exterior public space.architectural envelope / privatization
asserts
Sustainability is an ideological myth modeled on the Juche idea of self-sufficiency; per-capita, dense cities are ecologically superior to the sustainable country house of the enlightened rich.sustainability / ecology ideology
asserts
Only the rich prefer modesty and asceticism; the poor prefer luxury and kitsch ornamentation, so the praise of simple functionality in design is itself a class-marked ideology.class / design aesthetics
asserts
Stalinist neo-Gothic architecture is the return of the repressed of egalitarian communist ideology—it materializes the hierarchical desire that the official discourse had to disavow.Stalinist architecture / ideology / unknown knowns
asserts
Architecture is the exemplary case of ideology at work precisely where it seems absent—in purely functional objects, even toilet structures encode national-ideological attitudes.ideology / everyday objects / architecture
rejects
Rumsfeld's epistemological grid (known knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns) is missing the crucial fourth term: unknown knowns—things we know but do not know that we know, i.e., the ideological unconscious.Rumsfeld's epistemology / ideology critique
asserts
Nature itself is not sustainable but is a massive waste-producing process; sustainability only makes local sense at the cost of its larger environs.ecology / sustainability
Quotes 18
“The safest way to ruin a work of art is to complete it, to fill in the gaps.”Slavoj Žižek · less is more / aesthetic incompleteness
“The very renunciation to a pleasure turns into the pleasure of this renunciation. The regulation of pleasures turns into a pleasure of regulation.”Slavoj Žižek · surplus enjoyment / Lacan
“Eroticism and bureaucracy are intimately connected.”Slavoj Žižek · surplus enjoyment / regulation as sexualization
“Only animals maybe, even there I doubt, have direct sexuality... with us humans, sexual pleasure is always a pleasure in excess. There is no zero level sexual pleasure.”Slavoj Žižek · surplus enjoyment defines humanity
“The reality we see through a window is always minimally spectral, not as fully real as the closed space where we are.”Slavoj Žižek · inside/outside phenomenology / architecture
“The National Grand Theatre of China is a gigantic Kinder Surprise egg.”Slavoj Žižek · architecture / skin-structure gap / commodity analogy
“If traditional architecture was an attempt to enclose the inside from the outside, today it often tries to enclose the outside itself, to create a protected, screened outside separated from the wild outside.”Slavoj Žižek · privatization of public space / architectural envelope
“It is not that they are secretly elitist—it is their very anti-elitism, its implicit ideological equation of great art with elitism.”Slavoj Žižek · democratic exclusivity / anti-elitism as ideology
“Great art is by definition universal emancipatory, potentially addressing all of us.”Slavoj Žižek · universality of art / against cultural populism
“To see Mozart and the rich crowd as belonging to the same space is I claim an obscenity. If anything, Mozart belonged to the poor in the upper stalls who spent their last dollars to see the opera.”Slavoj Žižek · class and high art / opera elitism
“Only the rich like modesty, the poor prefer luxury.”Slavoj Žižek · class ideology / aesthetics of simplicity
“Sustainability effectively I claim is our version of the infamous Juche idea of North Korea's founding leader Kim Il-sung.”Slavoj Žižek · sustainability as ideology
“Nature is definitely not sustainable but one big crazy process of producing waste where sometimes this waste is exhapted, used in some locally emerging self-organizations.”Slavoj Žižek · ecology / nature is not sustainable
“There are unknown knowns—things that we know, but we don't know that we know them... our unconscious prejudices that determine us but we don't know about them.”Slavoj Žižek · unknown knowns / ideological unconscious
“When you are building houses you are also materializing not only public ideologies but... the obscene secret as it were of the public ideology.”Slavoj Žižek · architecture as materialization of ideological unconscious
“I have spread my dreams under your feet. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”Slavoj Žižek · architectural responsibility / Yeats warning to architects
“A lot of blood had to be spilled so that you can create the open space.”Slavoj Žižek · liberal openness built on violence / democratic exclusivity
“Shit disappears into some netherworld out of sight and out of our world... the return of the living dead.”Slavoj Žižek · architectural third space / excrement and the Real
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
The paradoxical relationship between less and more. What has this to do with this generous introduction? I must say frankly that the description that was given of me, all those titles, books, professorships, in my miserable existence, I found it difficult to recognize myself in that figure of me. I felt a gap between that complex symbolic identity, professor and so on, and simply me. In psychoanalysis, we call this gap, gap between your symbolic title and your miserable real existence, symbolic castration. So thanks very much for a castrating experience. This is what you do to friends. Thank you. Now what has this to do with more and less? You know, here already in this tension between symbolic title, identity, a father, a professor, and your immediate miserable self-experience, we have a tension between more and less. First fact is that you are never up to your title. You are always by definition less. No father is a full father, no president is a full president, no wife is a full wife. But at the same time, this less is more, because it adds a so-called personal touch. Like you know, as they say, and this is I think the main form of ideology today. As they say, you are not only what your title is, professor, president, you are much more. You are also a concrete unique human being. So again, less can be more. I would so I would just like to begin with some improvisation of this on this topic, supplementing wonderful remarks in the previous intervention. How does it function, this more for less? I think the fundamental idea is that if we abstain from adding any superficial ornaments, if we do not fill in all the gaps, or if we even truncate what would have been the completed form of our product, this very loss will generate additional meaning and create a kind of depth. I think this kind of more for less is perhaps even one of the definitions of art. The safest way to ruin a work of art is to complete it, to fill in the gaps. Just recall how we relate to ancient Greek statues, like Venus of Milo. We perceive them as white and truncated, you know, the hands missing and so on. So that if someone were to restitute them the way they were in their own ancient times, complete and don’t forget colored, ancient Greeks colored their statues, we would perceive this as unbearable kitsch. Incidentally, I read somewhere that an Arab billionaire did this in his villa in Beverly Hills. He painted an ancient statue and the media made fun of his vulgarity. But he just restituted it the way it was. My point is that this is for me the base of this formula, more for less. How you can even, I will now make a mental experiment, create maybe a work of art or something almost like a work of art out of commercial kitsch not by adding more, but by taking something away. You literally create more. An example that I like to use of this, it’s an incredible example I think, from my own youth when I was still living in what was Yugoslavia. There in the sixties, seventies, we had censorship of films. Not too harsh a censorship, but a little bit. Like direct anti-communist politics or too direct Christian propaganda was usually censored. So I remember when I saw for the first time that big Hollywood religious kitsch, *Ben-Hur*. Something incredible happened. Direct religious propaganda was prohibited. So you know the story, Ben-Hur, conflict with the Roman consul of in conflict, then his wife and sorry his sister and mother are got plague, are there in a camp, and he in the famous race, he beats the evil Roman who tells him at the end, "Yeah, you may have won here, but your mother and sister are there [unintelligible] and so on." Then we see him desperate alone on the stadium, then the story goes on, Jesus Christ, he gives him water on the way of the cross, and at the end the miracle, mother and sister are cured, come back to him. Now what the censor did is that immediately after the most famous scene of the film, the great horse race, when Ben-Hur confronts his enemy who tells him, "You think you won but at the same time you lost, your mother, sister are still alive," we see Ben-Hur walking alone desperate on the stadium. End of the film. It was just censorship because what happens afterwards is directly Jesus Christ, this was prohibited. But then something miraculous happened. This reduction made out of a kitsch religious propaganda almost a work of art. Instead of simplistic story celebrating religion, we get a kind of desperate existential drama where the moment of your triumph is the moment of your loss and so on and so on. I think it’s a wonderful example of this less is more. Of course, without intending it, but by his censorship, less, the stupid censor added something more. And the opposite example since we are here in the city where Hemingway was often, you remember the ultimate kitsch, the famous Hollywood film *The Killers*, which is based on a Hemingway short story of the same name. There Hollywood did the opposite. You know, in Hemingway’s story, which is just less than ten pages, two killers come to a city to kill one of their gang who escaped from them, and it’s a total mystery, it remains totally open in the short story why was this guy, who was tracked down to be killed, so desperate that he even didn’t want to escape the murderers. He simply accepts his death. Why? What Hollywood did is then added one hour and a half flashback, femme fatale, it fills in the gap. I claim ruining the story. But this is the good aspect of it, in what sense more for less, we get it in art. But surprisingly, or not so surprisingly, we find a similar logic of more for less also in the consumerist universe of commodities where less is the proverbial one cent subtracted from the full rounded price. You know, for example, products always cost never five. That magic one cent is the less. And more the no less proverbial surplus that we get for free. Known for example to all of us who buy toothpaste. You know how usually the top quarter of the toothpaste tube is painted in a different color with large letters announcing you get one-third more for free. Well my idea is, can I get only that top third for free? The catch is of course that the full product, which sets the standard for this more or less, is fictional. We never get to see a toothpaste without this surplus and with the price simply full five. A clear sign that the reality of this more for less is less for more of course. So how does this commodity logic function? Let me evoke another product, which in incidentally reminds me of many postmodern famous works of architecture, a very modest product, so-called Kinder Surprise. You know it, empty chocolate eggshells wrapped up in colored paper, and after you unwrap the egg and crack the chocolate shell open, you find in it a small plastic toy or something like to confront. I think this is a nice example of more. You obviously get less, the void in the middle. But that to fill in that less you get more, the surplus, the surplus. That’s I think how commodities work. You always get more for less. Less, not full of chocolate, but more the stupid toy. As a psychoanalyst, I can offer you an easy and I think convincing explanation of this reversal. That is to say of how less can produce more. It is what Jacques Lacan called the surplus in the mechanism of surplus-enjoyment. Take a typical obsessional masochist. You have a certain desire or indecent illicit that makes you guilty that you experience as illicit desire pleasure and you want to repress it, to punish yourself for it. For example, when you have certain dirty thoughts, I don't know, you start to pinch yourself or if you are more fanatic to whip yourself. But then you immediately see what happens. These measures of repression of self-punishment themselves become a source of new pleasure. You cannot escape it. All of a sudden you start to enjoy the enjoy the very measures which were destined to thwart, to block your enjoyment. Or to put it in more theoretical terms, the very renunciation to a pleasure turns into the pleasure of this renunciation. The regulation of pleasures turns into a pleasure of regulation. Everybody knows that in this sense eroticism and bureaucracy are intimately connected. This is always my advice, not that I’m good at this, to my friends who claim I’m too shy and this renders me impotent when I have to perform in a sexual act. I tell them just don't believe that Buddhist bullshit, you know, be spontaneous just do it. I propose them the solution is the bureaucratic solution. Sit down with your partner and treat it as a complex bureaucratic task. Just write down: first you kiss me here, then you put the finger there, and then you have a debate. The lady says: no, I want your finger there and so on. And all of a sudden you will get caught into this totally non-erotic bureaucratic procedure. It will become a source of additional sexualization. So again, referring to the to Mark, the previous speaker, I would say that the whole point of human sexuality is that all truly authentic human sexual pleasure that we get is this kind of excess pleasure. There is no zero, I would even extend this logic of ground and excess to sexuality. I mean only animals maybe, even there I doubt, have direct sexuality. You see your partner, you just boom, maybe if needed with a with a stone hammer on the head, you just do it. Maybe animals can do like this. But with us humans, sexual pleasure is always a pleasure in excess. There is no zero level sexual pleasure. Again, in this sense, it’s a mechanism which even defines being human, this less is more. Every form of more, transcendence up to divinity is grounded in a less. In order to have the experience of the divine, you have to experience as every good Christian will tell you, the abjection, the finitude of your mortality. So only the experience of less opens up the space for more. Of course, relations get here very complex. Because precisely as what was said by previous speakers, very nice example of how the some architects don’t want to erase traces of imperfection in a product. Like in concrete there should be still traces of production flaws, failures should be visible. True, but even here I think things get complex. Because the problem is that if you imagine modern industrialized production, it is much easier to build a perfect surface building without flaws. So I think it’s a nice paradox, probably every architect knows it, that it costs much more to make a building look imperfect. You have to pay much more to introduce signs of imperfection. It’s again we are back into eroticics. I remember years ago when they were both on the market of modeling, I remember a big opinion poll which supermodel men prefer, Claudia Schiffer or Cindy Crawford. Cindy Crawford won and when they asked the people why, they large majority of them gave the same answer, because you remember Cindy Crawford has this birthmark here and the idea was Claudia Schiffer is too perfect. It caused anxiety. You need a sign of imperfection. So again, what I will try to do today is to look for such signs of imperfection, to look for less in what today from what I know is the most exemplary form of more in architecture. The paragon of today’s architecture, big performance arts complexes. Their very conflictual meanings, they are try to unite amusement and high art, profane and sacred, exclusive and popular. These meanings cancel themselves so that the outcome is some kind of zero presence of meaning. How? What is the less, the imperfection, structural imperfection in these buildings? Let me begin by a brief remark on Rem Koolhaas's Library of France, the enormous box that houses the library. Here, the expressive correspondence between the inside, the division of a building into rooms and spaces for different activities, and the outside of a building is is destroyed. We have radical incommensurability or to quote Fredric Jameson, "the functions, the rooms, the interior, the inner spaces sank within their enormous container like so many floating organs." This formal shifts in the relation between and inside reincorporate the paradoxes of private property after the end of civil society by way of the classic antinomy of a public space that is privately owned. End of quote. However, one should not misunderstand this emphasis on the incommensurability between outside and inside. I don’t ask, I don’t demand the continuity between the two. I think that the incommensurability between outside and inside is a kind of a transcendental a priori of architecture. In our most elementary phenomenological experience, the reality we see through a window is always minimally spectral, not as fully real as the closed space where we are. This is why when driving a car or looking through a window of a house, one perceives the reality outside in a strangely de-realized state, as if one is watching a performance on a screen. When one opens the window, the direct impact of the external reality always causes a minimal shock. We are overwhelmed by its proximity. At least this happens to me, you know, in a car, you open the window and all of a sudden you are shocked how close, how real is the outside. This is also why when we enter the closed space of a house, we are often surprised. It seems that the inside volume is larger than the outside frame, as if the house is larger from the inside than from the outside. How does this effect work? Let me take an extreme example, DMZ which I visited with love. On the southern side of the demilitarized zone, which divides North Korea from South Korea, South Koreans built a unique visitors site. A theater building with a large screen-like window in front opening up onto the north. The spectacle people observe when they take seats and look through the gigantic screen window is reality itself, the demilitarized zone and beyond a glimpse of North Korea. Because from there you get a view of one small town, that’s why they build this theater there, of North Korea. Then as if to comply with this fiction, North Koreans built in front of this theater a pure fake, a model village with beautiful houses. In the evening, the lights in all the houses are turned on at the same time, people are given good dresses, but they are obliged to take a stroll every evening. So, barren zone is given a phantasmatic status, elevated into a spectacle. So North Korea becomes sublime viewed from the safe spot in South Korea. Now you will say this is typical of totalitarian regimes. But I claim Bernard Tschumi's New Acropolis Museum built in Athens in front of the mountain with Parthenon realizes on a similar effect. When one reaches the third floor, one can see through the glass partition of the window frame the thing itself, Parthenon. Seen through the frame, not directly, enhances its sublime appearance. There can also be something even more paradoxical, a false inside, like in the house of the ZKM, that technological art institute in Karlsruhe, there is a TV screen in front of the entrance to the main toilet area showing continuously on its black and white screen the inside of a small toilet cube with the empty toilet bowl. After the first moment of release when I was running for the toilet, thanks God the toilet is free, I cannot wait, I become aware that it will no longer be empty when I will enter it. So maybe I will be seen defecating. It took me some time before the obvious truth did strike me. It was of course a pre-recorded tape that I saw, not the actual inside of the restroom. What this mutual encroaching of the inside and the outside indicates is that inside and outside never cover the entire space. There is always an excess, a third space which gets lost in the division between inside and outside. In human dwellings, there is an intermediate space which is disavowed. We all know it exists but we do not really accept its existence. It remains ignored and mostly unsayable. The main content of this invisible space is excrement, canalization. But also the complex network of electricity, digital links and so on. All this is contained in the narrow spaces between walls or floors. We of course know well rationally how excrements leave the house, but our immediate phenomenological relation to it is a more radical one. It is as if shit disappears into some, when we flush the toilet, into some netherworld out of sight and out of our world. This incidentally I think is why one of the most unpleasant experiences is to observe when the toilet gets blocked, the shit coming back from the hole. It is something like the return of the living dead. We rely on this space but we ignore it. No wonder that in science fiction horror films and techno-thrillers, this dark space between walls is the space where horrible threats lurk, from spying machine to most monsters or contagious animals like cockroaches or rats. Recall also in science fiction architecture the mysterious topic of an additional floor or a room which is not in the building's plan and where of course terrifying things dwell. So again, this is my first purely abstract point but which I think it’s crucial to to take into account actual experience of architecture. Not only do we have the gap between inside and outside, but this gap is by definition incommensurable. It’s of course rationally we know first that there was the original outside, then we carved out isolated part as inside. But again, to refer again to Mark, outside only becomes outside viewed from the inside. So we never can have a position of meta-language up there when we can see it all. When we think we draw a line, we don't see that third mysterious space. So back to performance arts complexes. This gap between inside and outside and the third space, they exemplify it perfectly I claim with their famous gap between skin what some architects call skin and structure. What are the basic architectural versions of this gap? The zero level is presented in some of Koolhaas buildings, like the above-mentioned project for the Library of France. The envelope is simply a neutral enormous box which in its interior houses multiple functional spaces which hang within their enormous container like so many floating organs. Then some of Libeskind's projects reflect the gap between the protective skin and inner structure into the skin itself. The same external form, enormous box is multiplied, relying on the contrast between the straight vertical horizontal lines and the diagonal lines of external walls. The result is a hybrid effect, as if the same building is a condensation of two or more asymmetrical cubes, as if the same formal principle, a cube box, was applied along different axes. A weird tension and imbalance, a conflict of principles are thus directly inscribed into the form. The next step is the minimal aestheticization of the external container. It is no longer just a neutral box but a round shell protecting the jewel inside. Formally, the contrast between outside and inside is usually the contrast between the roundness of the skin and the straight lines of inner structures. A round envelope, an egg-like cupola, envelops the box-like vertical horizontal building or buildings inside. Like the giant teacups of the Oriental Art Center in Shanghai, or by the same architect Paul Andreu, the National Grand Theatre of China in Beijing with its giant metal glass cover, an eggshell protecting the performance buildings. One can effectively claim that the National Grand Theatre of China is a gigantic Kinder Surprise egg. The aestheticization of the skin culminates in the so-called sculptural Gehry buildings, where the outside shell enveloping the functional inside is no longer just a shell but a meaningful sculpture of its own. Like for example the Performing Arts Center in Bard College north of New York City, whose skin is a curved aluminium bug, cockroach form. There is yet another variation on this gap between skin and content. The so-called terrain buildings where the building's surface skin is constructed as a direct continuation of the surrounding terrain with undulations of a hill covered by grass and so on. Something like incidentally the hobbit dwellings in *The Lord of the Rings*. The Yokohama International Port Terminal is exemplary of these terrain buildings. An open public space whose roof functions as an open plaza continuous with the surface of the nearby park. Rather than enveloping the building as an object or figure on or figure, the project is produced as an extension of the urban ground. The Yokohama Terminal can thus be seen as the extreme case where, in a way, the whole inside of the building is reduced to a kind of interstitial space between the skin envelope, the green or wooden surface, and the body of the earth, squeezed in the flattened domain between the two. Not surprisingly, the actual effect of such buildings is the very opposite of the intended naturalization, seamless immersion into natural environments. Nature itself is de-realized. It appears as if natural surface of grass is an artificial skin concealing a complex machinery. The central mystery of performance arts venues is for me the mystery of this redoubling. Why a house within a house? Why does the container itself have to be contained? Does this sometimes freakish display of inconsistency and excess not cry out loudly, functioning as a symptom? What if this redoubling renders the contradiction of public space which is privately controlled, of a sacred space of art which should be open to profane amusement? Alejandro Zaera-Polo's ongoing work on the concept of architectural envelope is focused on the border between outside and inside instead of the internal organization of the inside. Polo defines envelope as the membrane which separates the inside of a building from its outside. As such, envelope is the oldest and most primitive architectural element which again materializes the division between exterior and interior and is therefore automatically charged politically. Zaera-Polo grounds the notion of envelope in a very precise idea of late capitalist dynamics based on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Peter Sloterdijk. His starting point is what I’m tempted to call neo-capitalist Deleuzianism. One should drop all, according to Zaera-Polo, all anti-market ideological utopianism and fully endorse the fact that the global market is the primary milieu of contemporary architectural politics. One should operate within the system of global capitalism. How? The main feature of globalization is the unheard of unleashing of the powers of de-territorialization. The process described long ago by Marx in the famous passage of the Communist Manifesto, quote: "All fixed, fast-frozen relations with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away. All new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned." End of quote. This however does not mean that everything is gradually turning into a formless social slime. De-territorialization itself creates the need for new modes of delimitation, which are no longer the old hierarchic fixed walls but the multiplicity of envelopes, bubbles, containers of liquid reality. A quote from Zaera-Polo: "Globalization has propelled a set of spatial typologies primarily determined by the capacity to conduct flow. Architects have tried to engage with this borderless space, the space of flows by dissolving the envelope as an obstacle to flow and spatial continuity and presenting an image of the world as a chaotically flowing magma. However, a new picture is emerging in the form of bubbles and containers of liquid reality." End of quote. Here enters Peter Sloterdijk with his monumental trilogy *Spheres*. Far from advocating a return to pre-modern containment, Sloterdijk was the first to propose what one can call the provincialism for the global era. The world as a foamy space filled with bubbles and balloons of different scale and quality. This capsular society and its phenomena such as global provincialism, the politics of climatization, and the social uteri describe a new paradigm that requires not just a reconsideration of the technologies and economics of the building envelope but of its political, social and psychological implications. So which are the political implications of this current appetite for the envelope as a device of insulation and immunization? Zaera-Polo is well aware that the interior of a building is thoroughly determined by the demands for efficiency, functionality and so on. His wager is that the envelope in its independence from the functional inside can function as a potential space of freedom, of aesthetic autonomy, purveying its own message. However, as Zaera-Polo has to admit, apart from the relative aesthetic and political autonomy it provides and the obvious environmental function, envelope also serves as a security device, quote: "The design of spherical envelopes has consequently focused recently on the construction of the surface itself both as an environmental and security device and as the locus of symbolic representation." End of quote. The security task is here not the same as that of the traditional building walls protecting the inside from external dangers. The fateful difference is that the envelope secures a privatized public space, a quote from Zaera-Polo of course. "A more permeable definition of the property boundary is more likely to effectively accommodate a fluid relationship between private and public in an age when the public realm is increasingly built and managed by private agents." End of quote. So from the Deleuzian poetry of fluid de-territorialization we are back to the task of how to enact and protect the private enclosure of public spaces. If traditional architecture was an attempt to enclose the inside from the outside, today it often tries to enclose the outside itself, to create a protected, screened outside separated from the wild outside. The envelope which isolates a set of buildings is thus the urban architectural version of a process long known in political economy as the enclosure of the commons. Not only the interior of a house, its exterior itself is cordoned off and climatized. Not only with regard to heat and air quality, but also with regard to the undesired presence of potentially toxic subjects. Because I don’t have time to develop it, but I think to understand all this double skin envelope we should link it to a very interesting phenomenon emerging recently in the United States. I looked on the net by putting codewords and so on at bibliography. You know that there are a couple of dozen books today in the United States about this new concept which is ideology at its purest on toxic subjects. The idea is that the other as such can be potentially toxic. And then what is ideological about this notion is that it encompasses phenomena from totally different levels. A toxic subject can be someone close to you who like a vampire exploits you, an evil father, mother, parent and so on. It can be literally a toxic subject, immigrants entering the country but having some viruses dangerous diseases. It can be of course a terrorist, it can be a religious fundamentalist whatever. The point is precisely again how these totally different spaces are covered by the same category, toxic subject. Again, a quote from Zaera-Polo here. "Sloterdijk's politics of climatization points to a process in which growing sectors of urban urban space are given to private agents to develop and maintain. Gardeners, event managers and private security agents are part of the design of these atmospheres. Koolhaas's Junkspace is another description of the same phenomenon of sanitization of ever larger areas of the city, providing a safe environment assuming we are prepared to surrender police duties to private security services." End of quote. So of course the official progressive ideology and politics likes to celebrate such projects as models for the revitalization of the decaying city centers. However, Zaera-Polo is right to ask the question whether this is actually a regeneration of the urban centers or whether it is the takeover of the inner cities by a sort of alien organization with air conditioning and private security. End of quote. This brings us to the social antagonism these buildings try to resolve. On the one hand, to build a Performing Arts venue ranks as a Holy Grail for architects. A quote from a book on the performance centers: "Unlike the more conventional types of building, such as offices, housing and even civic architecture which have to conform to the streetscape, a Performing Art venue can afford to be bold and unusual, to stand out." End of quote. However, this space for creative freedom is counteracted by the demand for the building's multi-functionality. Venue managers cannot quote "simply rely on performances themselves to provide a sufficient attraction. The building must create an experience and a sense of place for its increasingly demanding audience. It is with such intangibles that events can really win against home entertainment. Thought must be given to all aspects of a visit, from the foyer and bars to the facilities and ease of access." End of quote. This demand however is not only financial but I claim profoundly ideological. It reflects a cultural tension. The last quote from this book on performance arts venues: "The perception that public funds are being spent on elitist buildings has always been an Achilles' heel for these projects, leaving them open to attacks from all quarters, and in today's more transparent and politically correct society, it is the issue of inclusion more than any other that has influenced the design of contemporary performing spaces. As a result, the Performing Arts venue has to be redefined for the 21st century. The new generation of buildings must be part of the public realm with access to only the core areas being restricted by the requirement for a ticket. These venues include public activities within and around the complex attracting a wider range of visitors." End of quote. This consistent effort to counteract the threat of elitism signals a series of oppositions with which performance arts buildings deal. Public-private, open-restrained, elite-popular, all incidentally variations on the basic motive of class struggle, which we are told no longer exists in our societies. The space of these oppositions I claim delineates the problem to which performance art venues are attempted solutions. Their attempt to overcome elitist exclusivity fails since it reproduces the paradoxes of the upper-class liberal openness. Its falsity is the falsity and limitation of our tolerant liberal capitalism. The message of the political unconscious of these buildings is democratic exclusivity. They create a multifunctional egalitarian open space but the very access to this space is invisibly filtered and privately controlled. In more political terms, performance arts venues try to enact civic normalcy in a state of emergency. They construct an open space which is cocooned, protected and filtered. This brings us to what is false about the anti-elitism of performance arts venues. It is not that they are secretly elitist, it is their very anti-elitism, its implicit ideological equation of great art with elitism. Difficult as it may sometimes be for the broad public to get into Schönberg, Webern, Paul Klee, whatever Kandinsky, there is nothing elitist about great art. Great art is by definition universal emancipatory, potentially addressing all of us. When in elite places like the old Metropolitan in New York, upper classes were meeting for an opera performance, their social posturing was in blatant contradiction with the works shown on the stage. To see Mozart and the rich crowd as belonging to the same space is I claim an obscenity. There is a well-known story from the early years of the old Met in New York when a high society lady, one of the opera's great patrons, arrived half an hour into the first act. She demanded that the performance be interrupted for a couple of minutes and the light turned on so that she could inspect the dresses of other ladies with her binoculars. And of course her demand was granted. If anything, Mozart belonged to the poor in the upper stalls who spent their last dollars to see the opera. Far from making the exclusive temple of high art more accessible, it is the very surrounding of expensive cafeterias and so on which is effectively exclusive and elitist. Recall what Walter Benjamin wrote about the Palais Garnier Opera Palace in Paris. The true focus of the opera is not the performance hall, but the wide oval staircase on which high society ladies display their fashion and gentlemen meet for a casual smoke. This social life was the true focus of opera, what visiting opera really was about. Or in the terms of Lacan's theory, if the play on stage was the enjoyment which made the public come, the social game which went on on the staircase before the performance and during intermissions was the foreplay which provided the surplus enjoyment, which made it worth to come there. And of course the whole game of pretense, again the same game of less and more, was that one shouldn't admit this directly. You know, although I would almost have admired it, this would have been for me a true elitist attitude, when you say, "Screw the opera, let's just meet on the stairs and have a nice talk." This is here again we are back in psychoanalysis to to to delineate the paradox here. Let me tell you a story that my English friend, a Lacanian analyst Darian Leader told me. He once had a patient who told him of a strange slip of tongue that happened to him. He invited a lady to a restaurant which was on the ground floor of a hotel with obvious intent after dinner to take the lady to a room up. But he made a mistake. When he entered the restaurant, instead of saying, "Table for two, please," he said, "Bed for two, please." Now here comes the true Lacanian spirit. Darian Leader told me no, this doesn't mean, oh, his true desire emerged, his mind was already with what will happen later. No, it was a much more refined libidinal economy. The guy liked to eat. So he was afraid that he will enjoy eating so much that he will be too tired or or not able to do the second thing up there. So this slip of tongue was rather a reminder as much as I will enjoy eating here, I should not, as a kind of ethical duty, I should not forget that my true task is later upwards. I mean something the same I think goes in the in the Paris Opera. Bringing this logic again to its absurd extreme, one can imagine a building which would consist only of a gigantic circular staircase with elevators taking us to the top, so that what is usually just a means, a path to the true goal, would become the main purpose. One goes to such a building to take a slow walk down the stairs. If this appears to you as a nonsense, remember that we have such a building, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, where basically it’s one big staircase. You go up so that you go later down. I cannot do it because for the same reason that I hate even if it’s national sport in my country, that I hate skiing. You know, the problem of skiing is for me, you go up a mountain to come down. Well, why not stay down and read a good book? I have some problems there. Okay, but so again, just to recapitulate and finish now briefly. My point is that you can read such a phenomenon the point of pride of today’s architectural, big performance venues, you can nonetheless detect in them traces of social antagonisms, the basic falsity, tension of our society, tension between its false openness pretending to create an open space accessible to all, and the exclusions on which this openness is founded. This is why this is again my explanation of this paradoxical redoubling, you know, you have sometimes even directly like what I heard they plan to do now with that great Mariinsky Theatre or what in Saint Petersburg. You will have a building and the whole building will be cocooned, isolated by another cupola. Again the mystery is why this redoubling. Or to give you very briefly another example before passing to my conclusion. In Israel, in East Jerusalem, I read they are now they plan to build a big multicultural religious center kind of a large domain with many historical documents dedicated to all not only to Jewish religion but to Islam, Christianity, a kind of a religious tourist theme park, and they proclaim it you see in this in this part of the world where there is usually just madness, war, terrorism, you will have here a place to reflect where all religions coexist, an open space where all of us can meet. Yeah, but the problem is that in order to build it, they had to displace I don't know how many Palestinians from and so on and so on. I like this paradox of a lot of blood had to had to be spilled so that you can create the open space. So to conclude, the basic message it's very modest one, I’m not sure that I know a lot, no, I’m sure that I don’t know a lot of architecture is nonetheless what interests me in architecture. It’s how architecture is for me the exemplary case of how of how ideology is at work precisely where you don't think you will find it, even in in in buildings or not only buildings in the larger sense houses but even house appliances and so on, where you think we have just pure functional objects. That even the most ordinary everyday objects can be objects not only to use them but to think with them. So to approach the conclusion a couple of points critical points to create enemies. First I want to repeat, I’m sorry some of you already know it, but it’s my big royal example to make this point. Maybe you can correct me if I’m wrong. It always interested me the paradox of I already mentioned them obviously I have some anal fixation here I don't want to go into it, toilets. Did you notice if you traveled around the world how different they are? I simplify to the utmost but this doesn't invalidate the analysis I think. If you go, I don't know how it’s here, I just will mention three big civilizations nations like France, the whole of the toilet bowl is in the back so that when you produce excrements they quickly disappear in the hole. The German toilets, the old type, now they are disappearing, but you still find them, it’s the opposite. The hole is in front so that when you produce excrements, they are there displayed in the back, they don't disappear in water. This is the German ritual, you know, you should every morning sniff, inspect your shit for traces of illness. It's high hermeneutic, I think the original meaning of hermeneutic for Germans maybe this. Then in Anglo-Saxon world, United States, you get, you know, the toilet bowl which is full of water so that shit floats in it before it disappears. And then I asked many of my friends, architects, interior designers why these differences? I they they gave me two books on the structure of toilets. Nowhere did I get an explanation. And then a wild speculation came to my mind. Do you know that from the late 18th century we have in Europe the idea of European Trinity. It’s a racist idea, you are not in it, Italy is not in it. But the idea is that the three crucial European nations are France, Germany, England. Each of them standing for a certain level of social life and for a certain politics. France is politics, is the privileged domain and politically left revolution. England, middle of the road, liberal, moderate and economy. Germany, metaphysics and poetry and conservative. And my God, it did strike me, isn't this the key? In France, revolutionary approach, hole for the shit in the back, it should quickly be liquidated like a kind of a guillotine. Anglo-Saxon pragmatic, let it float, let's be rational. German metaphysics and poetry, you observe it, you think and so on. Okay, this maybe madness, but you see what’s my point, is that something like this had to be at work to account even for such a common thing like the structure of toilets. So because of this, because I claim meaning is always there, I also oppose the architecturally correct opposition between pure authentic function and so-called vulgar display of useless material. As they like to put it, a simple water pump against a gold tap, a simple object satisfying a vital need versus the excessive display of wealth. However, one should always be careful in such cases to avoid the trap signaled by John Berger in his book *Success and Failure of Picasso*, where he tartly notes that Picasso's blue period, quote, "because it deals pathetically with the poor, has always been the favorite among the rich." End of quote. Anyone who knows real slums, like the Latin American favelas and I did visit them, couldn't help noticing how the improvised slum buildings, even if made of remainders of corrugated iron and wooden patchwork, are full of often ridiculously excessive kitsch decorations, up to fake of course gold taps. It is mostly poor people who dream about gold taps, while rich people like to imagine the simple functionality of household equipment. A simple lean water pump is how Bill Gates sees the way to help poor Africans, while the real poor Africans would probably embellish it as soon as possible with kitsch decorations. It's indeed as a saying popular among the poor who participate in carnivals in Brazil goes: only the rich like modesty, the poor prefer luxury. Always remember this when you hear all that stuff about ascetic sustainability and so on. So I’m not even afraid of denouncing sustainability itself, the big mantra of ecologists from the developed country. I think it’s an ideological myth mostly based on the idea of self-enclosed circulation where nothing is wasted. Sustainability effectively I claim is our version of the infamous Juche idea of North Korea's founding leader Kim Il-sung, vaguely translatable as spirit of self-sufficiency, self-reliance. The problem is that nature is definitely not sustainable but one big crazy process of producing waste where sometimes this waste is exhapted, used in some locally emerging self-organizations, like humans using oil, a gigantic waste of nature as their energy source. Upon a closer look, we can always establish that sustainability refers to a limited process which enforces its balance at the expense of its larger environs. Think about the proverbial sustainable house of a rich ecologically enlightened manager, located somewhere in a green isolated valley close to a forest and lake with solar energy, use of waste as manure, windows open to natural light and so on. The costs of building such a house to the environment, not only financial costs, make it prohibitive to the large majority of people. For a sincere ecologist, the optimal habitat are big cities where millions live close to each other. Although such a city produces a lot of waste and pollution, its per capita pollution is much lower than the one of a modern family living in the countryside. How does our manager reach his office from his country house? Probably with a helicopter to avoid polluting the grass around his house and so on and so on. So this brings us now really to conclude to an unexpected result. It is not only that the fantasy embodied in the mute language of buildings can articulate the utopia of justice, freedom and equality, betrayed, denied by actual social relations. This fantasy can also articulate a longing for inequality, for clear hierarchy distinctions. Recall the Stalinist neo-Gothic architecture. Does it not enact the return of the repressed of the official egalitarian emancipatory communist ideology, the weird desire for hierarchy and social distinction? The utopia enacted in architecture can also be a conservative utopia of regained hierarchic order. In this sense, I would love to read Hitchcock's *Psycho* as an as a film on architecture. Namely, what if we read this pathological figure of Norman Bates as a character split between two architectural house, the old Gothic mother's house on the hill and the flat motel beneath closer to the highway? So the paradox is that again it’s split between Gothic traditions and modernity. So we can well imagine, that would be my ironic version, how the problem of Norman Bates could have been saved if someone like Frank Gehry would have built his model incorporating mother's house into a modern building, so the poor Norman Bates would not have to run up and down all the time. So again, to really conclude now, just one page don't be afraid. What I tried to do is simply to apply a little bit in a very amateurish way on architecture what I ironically like to refer as Donald Rumsfeld's theory of knowledge. You remember who he was, the Minister of Defense, Secretary of Defense under the first George Bush presidency, who when announcing the attack on Iraq engaged in a very interesting philosophical speculation. He says justifying the American intervention literally, I quote him, "There are known knowns, there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns, that is to say there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns, there are things we don't know that we don't know." I mean it's very simple. Known knowns are thing we know and we know that we know them, like in his case Saddam is was the president of Iraq and we know that. Then there are there are known unknowns, things we know that we don't know. Like his point was weapons of mass destruction. We don't know if Saddam has them, but we know that we don't know this. And to raise the level of scare, he wanted to add there are also unknown unknowns. There are things that we even don't know that we don't know them, like what if Saddam has some ultra weapons we don't have any idea of. But if you are a little bit of a philosopher, did you notice how something is missing here? A fourth term: known knowns, known unknowns, we know what we don't know, unknown unknowns, total other. What is missing is unknown knowns. Things that we know, but we don't know that we know them. Like to put it simply of course it’s not true knowledge, our unconscious prejudices that determine us but we don't know about them. And here it’s for me the beauty of authentic architecture, not authentic in any sense of artistic greatness. For example, again let me return to my example of Stalinism. Of course, Stalinism Soviet communism pretended to be a just egalitarian society. But the paradox is that if you just look at their typical architecture, you see out there in the mute language of buildings the extreme hierarchical spirit clearly embodied. I hope you appreciate this paradox. The paradox is how if you were just to say publicly what these buildings are saying, well, you would have disappeared next day and never be seen again. But you see the paradox is that nonetheless the social system, how should I put it, felt a pressure to articulate its truth. I mean, it was nothing subversive to do a building which clearly embodies hierarchical spirit. You had to do it even, it was the official style as it were. This and this was of course their unknown sorry their unknown known. They all knew it but of course for the public discourse they had to pretend not to know it. So this is why for me architecture has a great politico-ethical responsibility which is grounded in the fact that much more is at stake in architecture than it may appear. Remember when you are building houses you are also like the unfortunate Soviet architects, you are also materializing not only public ideologies but you go often without knowing maybe or maybe not yourselves architects, you you write there in stone even more not just public ideology but what the public ideology cannot say publicly, the obscene secret as it were of the public ideology. To understand what went on in Soviet Union, it wasn't enough just to read official ideology. You read the official ideology and then you looked at the house. Like you go to Lomonosov University to hear a talk and then you step out and you see the house and the house tells you. Or today again, you go to a performance art center and you just think about how it is structured, this difference between skin and the house inside. Now I’m not saying that this is some kind of a totally enclosed situation where you can't do anything. No, there is always open space for struggle. For example what I tried to develop is the idea which Stephen Jay Gould to explain evolution took from architects, the so-called notion of spandrels, these empty non-functional spaces which open up when you apply different structuring principles. And the idea is that this empty spaces which have no function, you can use them as a space of freedom, imagination and so on. So there is always a space for struggle. But just remember and let me what remember what? Let me quote just two lines from William Butler Yeats, very known romantic poem, a romantic poem, quote: "I have spread my dreams under your feet. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams." End of quote. I think these lines also refer to architecture. So my warning to architects is: when you are making your plans, tread softly because you tread on the dreams of the people who will live in and look at your buildings. Thank you very much.
The paradoxical relationship between less and more. What has this to do with this generous introduction? I must say frankly that the description that was given of me, all those titles, books, professorships, in my miserable existence, I found it difficult to recognize myself in that figure of me. I felt a gap between that complex symbolic identity, professor and so on, and simply me. In psychoanalysis, we call this gap, gap between your symbolic title and your miserable real existence, symbolic castration. So thanks very much for a castrating experience. This is what you do to friends. Thank you. Now what has this to do with more and less? You know, here already in this tension between symbolic title, identity, a father, a professor, and your immediate miserable self-experience, we have a tension between more and less. First fact is that you are never up to your title. You are always by definition less. No father is a full father, no president is a full president, no wife is a full wife. But at the same time, this less is more, because it adds a so-called personal touch. Like you know, as they say, and this is I think the main form of ideology today. As they say, you are not only what your title is, professor, president, you are much more. You are also a concrete unique human being. So again, less can be more. I would so I would just like to begin with some improvisation of this on this topic, supplementing wonderful remarks in the previous intervention. How does it function, this more for less? I think the fundamental idea is that if we abstain from adding any superficial ornaments, if we do not fill in all the gaps, or if we even truncate what would have been the completed form of our product, this very loss will generate additional meaning and create a kind of depth. I think this kind of more for less is perhaps even one of the definitions of art. The safest way to ruin a work of art is to complete it, to fill in the gaps. Just recall how we relate to ancient Greek statues, like Venus of Milo. We perceive them as white and truncated, you know, the hands missing and so on. So that if someone were to restitute them the way they were in their own ancient times, complete and don’t forget colored, ancient Greeks colored their statues, we would perceive this as unbearable kitsch. Incidentally, I read somewhere that an Arab billionaire did this in his villa in Beverly Hills. He painted an ancient statue and the media made fun of his vulgarity. But he just restituted it the way it was. My point is that this is for me the base of this formula, more for less. How you can even, I will now make a mental experiment, create maybe a work of art or something almost like a work of art out of commercial kitsch not by adding more, but by taking something away. You literally create more. An example that I like to use of this, it’s an incredible example I think, from my own youth when I was still living in what was Yugoslavia. There in the sixties, seventies, we had censorship of films. Not too harsh a censorship, but a little bit. Like direct anti-communist politics or too direct Christian propaganda was usually censored. So I remember when I saw for the first time that big Hollywood religious kitsch, *Ben-Hur*. Something incredible happened. Direct religious propaganda was prohibited. So you know the story, Ben-Hur, conflict with the Roman consul of in conflict, then his wife and sorry his sister and mother are got plague, are there in a camp, and he in the famous race, he beats the evil Roman who tells him at the end, "Yeah, you may have won here, but your mother and sister are there [unintelligible] and so on." Then we see him desperate alone on the stadium, then the story goes on, Jesus Christ, he gives him water on the way of the cross, and at the end the miracle, mother and sister are cured, come back to him. Now what the censor did is that immediately after the most famous scene of the film, the great horse race, when Ben-Hur confronts his enemy who tells him, "You think you won but at the same time you lost, your mother, sister are still alive," we see Ben-Hur walking alone desperate on the stadium. End of the film. It was just censorship because what happens afterwards is directly Jesus Christ, this was prohibited. But then something miraculous happened. This reduction made out of a kitsch religious propaganda almost a work of art. Instead of simplistic story celebrating religion, we get a kind of desperate existential drama where the moment of your triumph is the moment of your loss and so on and so on. I think it’s a wonderful example of this less is more. Of course, without intending it, but by his censorship, less, the stupid censor added something more. And the opposite example since we are here in the city where Hemingway was often, you remember the ultimate kitsch, the famous Hollywood film *The Killers*, which is based on a Hemingway short story of the same name. There Hollywood did the opposite. You know, in Hemingway’s story, which is just less than ten pages, two killers come to a city to kill one of their gang who escaped from them, and it’s a total mystery, it remains totally open in the short story why was this guy, who was tracked down to be killed, so desperate that he even didn’t want to escape the murderers. He simply accepts his death. Why? What Hollywood did is then added one hour and a half flashback, femme fatale, it fills in the gap. I claim ruining the story. But this is the good aspect of it, in what sense more for less, we get it in art. But surprisingly, or not so surprisingly, we find a similar logic of more for less also in the consumerist universe of commodities where less is the proverbial one cent subtracted from the full rounded price. You know, for example, products always cost never five. That magic one cent is the less. And more the no less proverbial surplus that we get for free. Known for example to all of us who buy toothpaste. You know how usually the top quarter of the toothpaste tube is painted in a different color with large letters announcing you get one-third more for free. Well my idea is, can I get only that top third for free? The catch is of course that the full product, which sets the standard for this more or less, is fictional. We never get to see a toothpaste without this surplus and with the price simply full five. A clear sign that the reality of this more for less is less for more of course. So how does this commodity logic function? Let me evoke another product, which in incidentally reminds me of many postmodern famous works of architecture, a very modest product, so-called Kinder Surprise. You know it, empty chocolate eggshells wrapped up in colored paper, and after you unwrap the egg and crack the chocolate shell open, you find in it a small plastic toy or something like to confront. I think this is a nice example of more. You obviously get less, the void in the middle. But that to fill in that less you get more, the surplus, the surplus. That’s I think how commodities work. You always get more for less. Less, not full of chocolate, but more the stupid toy. As a psychoanalyst, I can offer you an easy and I think convincing explanation of this reversal. That is to say of how less can produce more. It is what Jacques Lacan called the surplus in the mechanism of surplus-enjoyment. Take a typical obsessional masochist. You have a certain desire or indecent illicit that makes you guilty that you experience as illicit desire pleasure and you want to repress it, to punish yourself for it. For example, when you have certain dirty thoughts, I don't know, you start to pinch yourself or if you are more fanatic to whip yourself. But then you immediately see what happens. These measures of repression of self-punishment themselves become a source of new pleasure. You cannot escape it. All of a sudden you start to enjoy the enjoy the very measures which were destined to thwart, to block your enjoyment. Or to put it in more theoretical terms, the very renunciation to a pleasure turns into the pleasure of this renunciation. The regulation of pleasures turns into a pleasure of regulation. Everybody knows that in this sense eroticism and bureaucracy are intimately connected. This is always my advice, not that I’m good at this, to my friends who claim I’m too shy and this renders me impotent when I have to perform in a sexual act. I tell them just don't believe that Buddhist bullshit, you know, be spontaneous just do it. I propose them the solution is the bureaucratic solution. Sit down with your partner and treat it as a complex bureaucratic task. Just write down: first you kiss me here, then you put the finger there, and then you have a debate. The lady says: no, I want your finger there and so on. And all of a sudden you will get caught into this totally non-erotic bureaucratic procedure. It will become a source of additional sexualization. So again, referring to the to Mark, the previous speaker, I would say that the whole point of human sexuality is that all truly authentic human sexual pleasure that we get is this kind of excess pleasure. There is no zero, I would even extend this logic of ground and excess to sexuality. I mean only animals maybe, even there I doubt, have direct sexuality. You see your partner, you just boom, maybe if needed with a with a stone hammer on the head, you just do it. Maybe animals can do like this. But with us humans, sexual pleasure is always a pleasure in excess. There is no zero level sexual pleasure. Again, in this sense, it’s a mechanism which even defines being human, this less is more. Every form of more, transcendence up to divinity is grounded in a less. In order to have the experience of the divine, you have to experience as every good Christian will tell you, the abjection, the finitude of your mortality. So only the experience of less opens up the space for more. Of course, relations get here very complex. Because precisely as what was said by previous speakers, very nice example of how the some architects don’t want to erase traces of imperfection in a product. Like in concrete there should be still traces of production flaws, failures should be visible. True, but even here I think things get complex. Because the problem is that if you imagine modern industrialized production, it is much easier to build a perfect surface building without flaws. So I think it’s a nice paradox, probably every architect knows it, that it costs much more to make a building look imperfect. You have to pay much more to introduce signs of imperfection. It’s again we are back into eroticics. I remember years ago when they were both on the market of modeling, I remember a big opinion poll which supermodel men prefer, Claudia Schiffer or Cindy Crawford. Cindy Crawford won and when they asked the people why, they large majority of them gave the same answer, because you remember Cindy Crawford has this birthmark here and the idea was Claudia Schiffer is too perfect. It caused anxiety. You need a sign of imperfection. So again, what I will try to do today is to look for such signs of imperfection, to look for less in what today from what I know is the most exemplary form of more in architecture. The paragon of today’s architecture, big performance arts complexes. Their very conflictual meanings, they are try to unite amusement and high art, profane and sacred, exclusive and popular. These meanings cancel themselves so that the outcome is some kind of zero presence of meaning. How? What is the less, the imperfection, structural imperfection in these buildings? Let me begin by a brief remark on Rem Koolhaas's Library of France, the enormous box that houses the library. Here, the expressive correspondence between the inside, the division of a building into rooms and spaces for different activities, and the outside of a building is is destroyed. We have radical incommensurability or to quote Fredric Jameson, "the functions, the rooms, the interior, the inner spaces sank within their enormous container like so many floating organs." This formal shifts in the relation between and inside reincorporate the paradoxes of private property after the end of civil society by way of the classic antinomy of a public space that is privately owned. End of quote. However, one should not misunderstand this emphasis on the incommensurability between outside and inside. I don’t ask, I don’t demand the continuity between the two. I think that the incommensurability between outside and inside is a kind of a transcendental a priori of architecture. In our most elementary phenomenological experience, the reality we see through a window is always minimally spectral, not as fully real as the closed space where we are. This is why when driving a car or looking through a window of a house, one perceives the reality outside in a strangely de-realized state, as if one is watching a performance on a screen. When one opens the window, the direct impact of the external reality always causes a minimal shock. We are overwhelmed by its proximity. At least this happens to me, you know, in a car, you open the window and all of a sudden you are shocked how close, how real is the outside. This is also why when we enter the closed space of a house, we are often surprised. It seems that the inside volume is larger than the outside frame, as if the house is larger from the inside than from the outside. How does this effect work? Let me take an extreme example, DMZ which I visited with love. On the southern side of the demilitarized zone, which divides North Korea from South Korea, South Koreans built a unique visitors site. A theater building with a large screen-like window in front opening up onto the north. The spectacle people observe when they take seats and look through the gigantic screen window is reality itself, the demilitarized zone and beyond a glimpse of North Korea. Because from there you get a view of one small town, that’s why they build this theater there, of North Korea. Then as if to comply with this fiction, North Koreans built in front of this theater a pure fake, a model village with beautiful houses. In the evening, the lights in all the houses are turned on at the same time, people are given good dresses, but they are obliged to take a stroll every evening. So, barren zone is given a phantasmatic status, elevated into a spectacle. So North Korea becomes sublime viewed from the safe spot in South Korea. Now you will say this is typical of totalitarian regimes. But I claim Bernard Tschumi's New Acropolis Museum built in Athens in front of the mountain with Parthenon realizes on a similar effect. When one reaches the third floor, one can see through the glass partition of the window frame the thing itself, Parthenon. Seen through the frame, not directly, enhances its sublime appearance. There can also be something even more paradoxical, a false inside, like in the house of the ZKM, that technological art institute in Karlsruhe, there is a TV screen in front of the entrance to the main toilet area showing continuously on its black and white screen the inside of a small toilet cube with the empty toilet bowl. After the first moment of release when I was running for the toilet, thanks God the toilet is free, I cannot wait, I become aware that it will no longer be empty when I will enter it. So maybe I will be seen defecating. It took me some time before the obvious truth did strike me. It was of course a pre-recorded tape that I saw, not the actual inside of the restroom. What this mutual encroaching of the inside and the outside indicates is that inside and outside never cover the entire space. There is always an excess, a third space which gets lost in the division between inside and outside. In human dwellings, there is an intermediate space which is disavowed. We all know it exists but we do not really accept its existence. It remains ignored and mostly unsayable. The main content of this invisible space is excrement, canalization. But also the complex network of electricity, digital links and so on. All this is contained in the narrow spaces between walls or floors. We of course know well rationally how excrements leave the house, but our immediate phenomenological relation to it is a more radical one. It is as if shit disappears into some, when we flush the toilet, into some netherworld out of sight and out of our world. This incidentally I think is why one of the most unpleasant experiences is to observe when the toilet gets blocked, the shit coming back from the hole. It is something like the return of the living dead. We rely on this space but we ignore it. No wonder that in science fiction horror films and techno-thrillers, this dark space between walls is the space where horrible threats lurk, from spying machine to most monsters or contagious animals like cockroaches or rats. Recall also in science fiction architecture the mysterious topic of an additional floor or a room which is not in the building's plan and where of course terrifying things dwell. So again, this is my first purely abstract point but which I think it’s crucial to to take into account actual experience of architecture. Not only do we have the gap between inside and outside, but this gap is by definition incommensurable. It’s of course rationally we know first that there was the original outside, then we carved out isolated part as inside. But again, to refer again to Mark, outside only becomes outside viewed from the inside. So we never can have a position of meta-language up there when we can see it all. When we think we draw a line, we don't see that third mysterious space. So back to performance arts complexes. This gap between inside and outside and the third space, they exemplify it perfectly I claim with their famous gap between skin what some architects call skin and structure. What are the basic architectural versions of this gap? The zero level is presented in some of Koolhaas buildings, like the above-mentioned project for the Library of France. The envelope is simply a neutral enormous box which in its interior houses multiple functional spaces which hang within their enormous container like so many floating organs. Then some of Libeskind's projects reflect the gap between the protective skin and inner structure into the skin itself. The same external form, enormous box is multiplied, relying on the contrast between the straight vertical horizontal lines and the diagonal lines of external walls. The result is a hybrid effect, as if the same building is a condensation of two or more asymmetrical cubes, as if the same formal principle, a cube box, was applied along different axes. A weird tension and imbalance, a conflict of principles are thus directly inscribed into the form. The next step is the minimal aestheticization of the external container. It is no longer just a neutral box but a round shell protecting the jewel inside. Formally, the contrast between outside and inside is usually the contrast between the roundness of the skin and the straight lines of inner structures. A round envelope, an egg-like cupola, envelops the box-like vertical horizontal building or buildings inside. Like the giant teacups of the Oriental Art Center in Shanghai, or by the same architect Paul Andreu, the National Grand Theatre of China in Beijing with its giant metal glass cover, an eggshell protecting the performance buildings. One can effectively claim that the National Grand Theatre of China is a gigantic Kinder Surprise egg. The aestheticization of the skin culminates in the so-called sculptural Gehry buildings, where the outside shell enveloping the functional inside is no longer just a shell but a meaningful sculpture of its own. Like for example the Performing Arts Center in Bard College north of New York City, whose skin is a curved aluminium bug, cockroach form. There is yet another variation on this gap between skin and content. The so-called terrain buildings where the building's surface skin is constructed as a direct continuation of the surrounding terrain with undulations of a hill covered by grass and so on. Something like incidentally the hobbit dwellings in *The Lord of the Rings*. The Yokohama International Port Terminal is exemplary of these terrain buildings. An open public space whose roof functions as an open plaza continuous with the surface of the nearby park. Rather than enveloping the building as an object or figure on or figure, the project is produced as an extension of the urban ground. The Yokohama Terminal can thus be seen as the extreme case where, in a way, the whole inside of the building is reduced to a kind of interstitial space between the skin envelope, the green or wooden surface, and the body of the earth, squeezed in the flattened domain between the two. Not surprisingly, the actual effect of such buildings is the very opposite of the intended naturalization, seamless immersion into natural environments. Nature itself is de-realized. It appears as if natural surface of grass is an artificial skin concealing a complex machinery. The central mystery of performance arts venues is for me the mystery of this redoubling. Why a house within a house? Why does the container itself have to be contained? Does this sometimes freakish display of inconsistency and excess not cry out loudly, functioning as a symptom? What if this redoubling renders the contradiction of public space which is privately controlled, of a sacred space of art which should be open to profane amusement? Alejandro Zaera-Polo's ongoing work on the concept of architectural envelope is focused on the border between outside and inside instead of the internal organization of the inside. Polo defines envelope as the membrane which separates the inside of a building from its outside. As such, envelope is the oldest and most primitive architectural element which again materializes the division between exterior and interior and is therefore automatically charged politically. Zaera-Polo grounds the notion of envelope in a very precise idea of late capitalist dynamics based on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Peter Sloterdijk. His starting point is what I’m tempted to call neo-capitalist Deleuzianism. One should drop all, according to Zaera-Polo, all anti-market ideological utopianism and fully endorse the fact that the global market is the primary milieu of contemporary architectural politics. One should operate within the system of global capitalism. How? The main feature of globalization is the unheard of unleashing of the powers of de-territorialization. The process described long ago by Marx in the famous passage of the Communist Manifesto, quote: "All fixed, fast-frozen relations with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away. All new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned." End of quote. This however does not mean that everything is gradually turning into a formless social slime. De-territorialization itself creates the need for new modes of delimitation, which are no longer the old hierarchic fixed walls but the multiplicity of envelopes, bubbles, containers of liquid reality. A quote from Zaera-Polo: "Globalization has propelled a set of spatial typologies primarily determined by the capacity to conduct flow. Architects have tried to engage with this borderless space, the space of flows by dissolving the envelope as an obstacle to flow and spatial continuity and presenting an image of the world as a chaotically flowing magma. However, a new picture is emerging in the form of bubbles and containers of liquid reality." End of quote. Here enters Peter Sloterdijk with his monumental trilogy *Spheres*. Far from advocating a return to pre-modern containment, Sloterdijk was the first to propose what one can call the provincialism for the global era. The world as a foamy space filled with bubbles and balloons of different scale and quality. This capsular society and its phenomena such as global provincialism, the politics of climatization, and the social uteri describe a new paradigm that requires not just a reconsideration of the technologies and economics of the building envelope but of its political, social and psychological implications. So which are the political implications of this current appetite for the envelope as a device of insulation and immunization? Zaera-Polo is well aware that the interior of a building is thoroughly determined by the demands for efficiency, functionality and so on. His wager is that the envelope in its independence from the functional inside can function as a potential space of freedom, of aesthetic autonomy, purveying its own message. However, as Zaera-Polo has to admit, apart from the relative aesthetic and political autonomy it provides and the obvious environmental function, envelope also serves as a security device, quote: "The design of spherical envelopes has consequently focused recently on the construction of the surface itself both as an environmental and security device and as the locus of symbolic representation." End of quote. The security task is here not the same as that of the traditional building walls protecting the inside from external dangers. The fateful difference is that the envelope secures a privatized public space, a quote from Zaera-Polo of course. "A more permeable definition of the property boundary is more likely to effectively accommodate a fluid relationship between private and public in an age when the public realm is increasingly built and managed by private agents." End of quote. So from the Deleuzian poetry of fluid de-territorialization we are back to the task of how to enact and protect the private enclosure of public spaces. If traditional architecture was an attempt to enclose the inside from the outside, today it often tries to enclose the outside itself, to create a protected, screened outside separated from the wild outside. The envelope which isolates a set of buildings is thus the urban architectural version of a process long known in political economy as the enclosure of the commons. Not only the interior of a house, its exterior itself is cordoned off and climatized. Not only with regard to heat and air quality, but also with regard to the undesired presence of potentially toxic subjects. Because I don’t have time to develop it, but I think to understand all this double skin envelope we should link it to a very interesting phenomenon emerging recently in the United States. I looked on the net by putting codewords and so on at bibliography. You know that there are a couple of dozen books today in the United States about this new concept which is ideology at its purest on toxic subjects. The idea is that the other as such can be potentially toxic. And then what is ideological about this notion is that it encompasses phenomena from totally different levels. A toxic subject can be someone close to you who like a vampire exploits you, an evil father, mother, parent and so on. It can be literally a toxic subject, immigrants entering the country but having some viruses dangerous diseases. It can be of course a terrorist, it can be a religious fundamentalist whatever. The point is precisely again how these totally different spaces are covered by the same category, toxic subject. Again, a quote from Zaera-Polo here. "Sloterdijk's politics of climatization points to a process in which growing sectors of urban urban space are given to private agents to develop and maintain. Gardeners, event managers and private security agents are part of the design of these atmospheres. Koolhaas's Junkspace is another description of the same phenomenon of sanitization of ever larger areas of the city, providing a safe environment assuming we are prepared to surrender police duties to private security services." End of quote. So of course the official progressive ideology and politics likes to celebrate such projects as models for the revitalization of the decaying city centers. However, Zaera-Polo is right to ask the question whether this is actually a regeneration of the urban centers or whether it is the takeover of the inner cities by a sort of alien organization with air conditioning and private security. End of quote. This brings us to the social antagonism these buildings try to resolve. On the one hand, to build a Performing Arts venue ranks as a Holy Grail for architects. A quote from a book on the performance centers: "Unlike the more conventional types of building, such as offices, housing and even civic architecture which have to conform to the streetscape, a Performing Art venue can afford to be bold and unusual, to stand out." End of quote. However, this space for creative freedom is counteracted by the demand for the building's multi-functionality. Venue managers cannot quote "simply rely on performances themselves to provide a sufficient attraction. The building must create an experience and a sense of place for its increasingly demanding audience. It is with such intangibles that events can really win against home entertainment. Thought must be given to all aspects of a visit, from the foyer and bars to the facilities and ease of access." End of quote. This demand however is not only financial but I claim profoundly ideological. It reflects a cultural tension. The last quote from this book on performance arts venues: "The perception that public funds are being spent on elitist buildings has always been an Achilles' heel for these projects, leaving them open to attacks from all quarters, and in today's more transparent and politically correct society, it is the issue of inclusion more than any other that has influenced the design of contemporary performing spaces. As a result, the Performing Arts venue has to be redefined for the 21st century. The new generation of buildings must be part of the public realm with access to only the core areas being restricted by the requirement for a ticket. These venues include public activities within and around the complex attracting a wider range of visitors." End of quote. This consistent effort to counteract the threat of elitism signals a series of oppositions with which performance arts buildings deal. Public-private, open-restrained, elite-popular, all incidentally variations on the basic motive of class struggle, which we are told no longer exists in our societies. The space of these oppositions I claim delineates the problem to which performance art venues are attempted solutions. Their attempt to overcome elitist exclusivity fails since it reproduces the paradoxes of the upper-class liberal openness. Its falsity is the falsity and limitation of our tolerant liberal capitalism. The message of the political unconscious of these buildings is democratic exclusivity. They create a multifunctional egalitarian open space but the very access to this space is invisibly filtered and privately controlled. In more political terms, performance arts venues try to enact civic normalcy in a state of emergency. They construct an open space which is cocooned, protected and filtered. This brings us to what is false about the anti-elitism of performance arts venues. It is not that they are secretly elitist, it is their very anti-elitism, its implicit ideological equation of great art with elitism. Difficult as it may sometimes be for the broad public to get into Schönberg, Webern, Paul Klee, whatever Kandinsky, there is nothing elitist about great art. Great art is by definition universal emancipatory, potentially addressing all of us. When in elite places like the old Metropolitan in New York, upper classes were meeting for an opera performance, their social posturing was in blatant contradiction with the works shown on the stage. To see Mozart and the rich crowd as belonging to the same space is I claim an obscenity. There is a well-known story from the early years of the old Met in New York when a high society lady, one of the opera's great patrons, arrived half an hour into the first act. She demanded that the performance be interrupted for a couple of minutes and the light turned on so that she could inspect the dresses of other ladies with her binoculars. And of course her demand was granted. If anything, Mozart belonged to the poor in the upper stalls who spent their last dollars to see the opera. Far from making the exclusive temple of high art more accessible, it is the very surrounding of expensive cafeterias and so on which is effectively exclusive and elitist. Recall what Walter Benjamin wrote about the Palais Garnier Opera Palace in Paris. The true focus of the opera is not the performance hall, but the wide oval staircase on which high society ladies display their fashion and gentlemen meet for a casual smoke. This social life was the true focus of opera, what visiting opera really was about. Or in the terms of Lacan's theory, if the play on stage was the enjoyment which made the public come, the social game which went on on the staircase before the performance and during intermissions was the foreplay which provided the surplus enjoyment, which made it worth to come there. And of course the whole game of pretense, again the same game of less and more, was that one shouldn't admit this directly. You know, although I would almost have admired it, this would have been for me a true elitist attitude, when you say, "Screw the opera, let's just meet on the stairs and have a nice talk." This is here again we are back in psychoanalysis to to to delineate the paradox here. Let me tell you a story that my English friend, a Lacanian analyst Darian Leader told me. He once had a patient who told him of a strange slip of tongue that happened to him. He invited a lady to a restaurant which was on the ground floor of a hotel with obvious intent after dinner to take the lady to a room up. But he made a mistake. When he entered the restaurant, instead of saying, "Table for two, please," he said, "Bed for two, please." Now here comes the true Lacanian spirit. Darian Leader told me no, this doesn't mean, oh, his true desire emerged, his mind was already with what will happen later. No, it was a much more refined libidinal economy. The guy liked to eat. So he was afraid that he will enjoy eating so much that he will be too tired or or not able to do the second thing up there. So this slip of tongue was rather a reminder as much as I will enjoy eating here, I should not, as a kind of ethical duty, I should not forget that my true task is later upwards. I mean something the same I think goes in the in the Paris Opera. Bringing this logic again to its absurd extreme, one can imagine a building which would consist only of a gigantic circular staircase with elevators taking us to the top, so that what is usually just a means, a path to the true goal, would become the main purpose. One goes to such a building to take a slow walk down the stairs. If this appears to you as a nonsense, remember that we have such a building, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, where basically it’s one big staircase. You go up so that you go later down. I cannot do it because for the same reason that I hate even if it’s national sport in my country, that I hate skiing. You know, the problem of skiing is for me, you go up a mountain to come down. Well, why not stay down and read a good book? I have some problems there. Okay, but so again, just to recapitulate and finish now briefly. My point is that you can read such a phenomenon the point of pride of today’s architectural, big performance venues, you can nonetheless detect in them traces of social antagonisms, the basic falsity, tension of our society, tension between its false openness pretending to create an open space accessible to all, and the exclusions on which this openness is founded. This is why this is again my explanation of this paradoxical redoubling, you know, you have sometimes even directly like what I heard they plan to do now with that great Mariinsky Theatre or what in Saint Petersburg. You will have a building and the whole building will be cocooned, isolated by another cupola. Again the mystery is why this redoubling. Or to give you very briefly another example before passing to my conclusion. In Israel, in East Jerusalem, I read they are now they plan to build a big multicultural religious center kind of a large domain with many historical documents dedicated to all not only to Jewish religion but to Islam, Christianity, a kind of a religious tourist theme park, and they proclaim it you see in this in this part of the world where there is usually just madness, war, terrorism, you will have here a place to reflect where all religions coexist, an open space where all of us can meet. Yeah, but the problem is that in order to build it, they had to displace I don't know how many Palestinians from and so on and so on. I like this paradox of a lot of blood had to had to be spilled so that you can create the open space. So to conclude, the basic message it's very modest one, I’m not sure that I know a lot, no, I’m sure that I don’t know a lot of architecture is nonetheless what interests me in architecture. It’s how architecture is for me the exemplary case of how of how ideology is at work precisely where you don't think you will find it, even in in in buildings or not only buildings in the larger sense houses but even house appliances and so on, where you think we have just pure functional objects. That even the most ordinary everyday objects can be objects not only to use them but to think with them. So to approach the conclusion a couple of points critical points to create enemies. First I want to repeat, I’m sorry some of you already know it, but it’s my big royal example to make this point. Maybe you can correct me if I’m wrong. It always interested me the paradox of I already mentioned them obviously I have some anal fixation here I don't want to go into it, toilets. Did you notice if you traveled around the world how different they are? I simplify to the utmost but this doesn't invalidate the analysis I think. If you go, I don't know how it’s here, I just will mention three big civilizations nations like France, the whole of the toilet bowl is in the back so that when you produce excrements they quickly disappear in the hole. The German toilets, the old type, now they are disappearing, but you still find them, it’s the opposite. The hole is in front so that when you produce excrements, they are there displayed in the back, they don't disappear in water. This is the German ritual, you know, you should every morning sniff, inspect your shit for traces of illness. It's high hermeneutic, I think the original meaning of hermeneutic for Germans maybe this. Then in Anglo-Saxon world, United States, you get, you know, the toilet bowl which is full of water so that shit floats in it before it disappears. And then I asked many of my friends, architects, interior designers why these differences? I they they gave me two books on the structure of toilets. Nowhere did I get an explanation. And then a wild speculation came to my mind. Do you know that from the late 18th century we have in Europe the idea of European Trinity. It’s a racist idea, you are not in it, Italy is not in it. But the idea is that the three crucial European nations are France, Germany, England. Each of them standing for a certain level of social life and for a certain politics. France is politics, is the privileged domain and politically left revolution. England, middle of the road, liberal, moderate and economy. Germany, metaphysics and poetry and conservative. And my God, it did strike me, isn't this the key? In France, revolutionary approach, hole for the shit in the back, it should quickly be liquidated like a kind of a guillotine. Anglo-Saxon pragmatic, let it float, let's be rational. German metaphysics and poetry, you observe it, you think and so on. Okay, this maybe madness, but you see what’s my point, is that something like this had to be at work to account even for such a common thing like the structure of toilets. So because of this, because I claim meaning is always there, I also oppose the architecturally correct opposition between pure authentic function and so-called vulgar display of useless material. As they like to put it, a simple water pump against a gold tap, a simple object satisfying a vital need versus the excessive display of wealth. However, one should always be careful in such cases to avoid the trap signaled by John Berger in his book *Success and Failure of Picasso*, where he tartly notes that Picasso's blue period, quote, "because it deals pathetically with the poor, has always been the favorite among the rich." End of quote. Anyone who knows real slums, like the Latin American favelas and I did visit them, couldn't help noticing how the improvised slum buildings, even if made of remainders of corrugated iron and wooden patchwork, are full of often ridiculously excessive kitsch decorations, up to fake of course gold taps. It is mostly poor people who dream about gold taps, while rich people like to imagine the simple functionality of household equipment. A simple lean water pump is how Bill Gates sees the way to help poor Africans, while the real poor Africans would probably embellish it as soon as possible with kitsch decorations. It's indeed as a saying popular among the poor who participate in carnivals in Brazil goes: only the rich like modesty, the poor prefer luxury. Always remember this when you hear all that stuff about ascetic sustainability and so on. So I’m not even afraid of denouncing sustainability itself, the big mantra of ecologists from the developed country. I think it’s an ideological myth mostly based on the idea of self-enclosed circulation where nothing is wasted. Sustainability effectively I claim is our version of the infamous Juche idea of North Korea's founding leader Kim Il-sung, vaguely translatable as spirit of self-sufficiency, self-reliance. The problem is that nature is definitely not sustainable but one big crazy process of producing waste where sometimes this waste is exhapted, used in some locally emerging self-organizations, like humans using oil, a gigantic waste of nature as their energy source. Upon a closer look, we can always establish that sustainability refers to a limited process which enforces its balance at the expense of its larger environs. Think about the proverbial sustainable house of a rich ecologically enlightened manager, located somewhere in a green isolated valley close to a forest and lake with solar energy, use of waste as manure, windows open to natural light and so on. The costs of building such a house to the environment, not only financial costs, make it prohibitive to the large majority of people. For a sincere ecologist, the optimal habitat are big cities where millions live close to each other. Although such a city produces a lot of waste and pollution, its per capita pollution is much lower than the one of a modern family living in the countryside. How does our manager reach his office from his country house? Probably with a helicopter to avoid polluting the grass around his house and so on and so on. So this brings us now really to conclude to an unexpected result. It is not only that the fantasy embodied in the mute language of buildings can articulate the utopia of justice, freedom and equality, betrayed, denied by actual social relations. This fantasy can also articulate a longing for inequality, for clear hierarchy distinctions. Recall the Stalinist neo-Gothic architecture. Does it not enact the return of the repressed of the official egalitarian emancipatory communist ideology, the weird desire for hierarchy and social distinction? The utopia enacted in architecture can also be a conservative utopia of regained hierarchic order. In this sense, I would love to read Hitchcock's *Psycho* as an as a film on architecture. Namely, what if we read this pathological figure of Norman Bates as a character split between two architectural house, the old Gothic mother's house on the hill and the flat motel beneath closer to the highway? So the paradox is that again it’s split between Gothic traditions and modernity. So we can well imagine, that would be my ironic version, how the problem of Norman Bates could have been saved if someone like Frank Gehry would have built his model incorporating mother's house into a modern building, so the poor Norman Bates would not have to run up and down all the time. So again, to really conclude now, just one page don't be afraid. What I tried to do is simply to apply a little bit in a very amateurish way on architecture what I ironically like to refer as Donald Rumsfeld's theory of knowledge. You remember who he was, the Minister of Defense, Secretary of Defense under the first George Bush presidency, who when announcing the attack on Iraq engaged in a very interesting philosophical speculation. He says justifying the American intervention literally, I quote him, "There are known knowns, there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns, that is to say there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns, there are things we don't know that we don't know." I mean it's very simple. Known knowns are thing we know and we know that we know them, like in his case Saddam is was the president of Iraq and we know that. Then there are there are known unknowns, things we know that we don't know. Like his point was weapons of mass destruction. We don't know if Saddam has them, but we know that we don't know this. And to raise the level of scare, he wanted to add there are also unknown unknowns. There are things that we even don't know that we don't know them, like what if Saddam has some ultra weapons we don't have any idea of. But if you are a little bit of a philosopher, did you notice how something is missing here? A fourth term: known knowns, known unknowns, we know what we don't know, unknown unknowns, total other. What is missing is unknown knowns. Things that we know, but we don't know that we know them. Like to put it simply of course it’s not true knowledge, our unconscious prejudices that determine us but we don't know about them. And here it’s for me the beauty of authentic architecture, not authentic in any sense of artistic greatness. For example, again let me return to my example of Stalinism. Of course, Stalinism Soviet communism pretended to be a just egalitarian society. But the paradox is that if you just look at their typical architecture, you see out there in the mute language of buildings the extreme hierarchical spirit clearly embodied. I hope you appreciate this paradox. The paradox is how if you were just to say publicly what these buildings are saying, well, you would have disappeared next day and never be seen again. But you see the paradox is that nonetheless the social system, how should I put it, felt a pressure to articulate its truth. I mean, it was nothing subversive to do a building which clearly embodies hierarchical spirit. You had to do it even, it was the official style as it were. This and this was of course their unknown sorry their unknown known. They all knew it but of course for the public discourse they had to pretend not to know it. So this is why for me architecture has a great politico-ethical responsibility which is grounded in the fact that much more is at stake in architecture than it may appear. Remember when you are building houses you are also like the unfortunate Soviet architects, you are also materializing not only public ideologies but you go often without knowing maybe or maybe not yourselves architects, you you write there in stone even more not just public ideology but what the public ideology cannot say publicly, the obscene secret as it were of the public ideology. To understand what went on in Soviet Union, it wasn't enough just to read official ideology. You read the official ideology and then you looked at the house. Like you go to Lomonosov University to hear a talk and then you step out and you see the house and the house tells you. Or today again, you go to a performance art center and you just think about how it is structured, this difference between skin and the house inside. Now I’m not saying that this is some kind of a totally enclosed situation where you can't do anything. No, there is always open space for struggle. For example what I tried to develop is the idea which Stephen Jay Gould to explain evolution took from architects, the so-called notion of spandrels, these empty non-functional spaces which open up when you apply different structuring principles. And the idea is that this empty spaces which have no function, you can use them as a space of freedom, imagination and so on. So there is always a space for struggle. But just remember and let me what remember what? Let me quote just two lines from William Butler Yeats, very known romantic poem, a romantic poem, quote: "I have spread my dreams under your feet. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams." End of quote. I think these lines also refer to architecture. So my warning to architects is: when you are making your plans, tread softly because you tread on the dreams of the people who will live in and look at your buildings. Thank you very much.