Slavoj Žižek: Architecture as a Critique of Ideology
Lecture · Simon Gros Film Archive ·
2009 · 1:46:39 · 14,931 words
with Cathy Newman
ideologycinema-art-culturesubjectivityphilosophy-generalgeopolitics-warcapitalismcommunism-socialismeveryday-lifeecology-climate
Žižek argues that postmodern architecture materializes social antagonisms through a 'parallax' shift, where incompatible structuring principles (e.g., old/new, inside/outside) are combined to manage ideological contradictions. He analyzes specific buildings (Libeskind, Gehry, Brasília) and films (Psycho) to show how architecture stages the 'repressed truth' of ideology, such as the desire for hierarchy in Stalinist neo-Gothic or the split subject in Hitchcock. He concludes by linking Lévi-Strauss’s 'zero institution' to modern performance arts complexes, which function as neutral spaces of belonging amidst social deadlock. Žižek analyzes the architectural concept of the 'envelope' or 'skin' separating inside from outside, using examples from North Korea to postmodern architecture (Gehry, Koolhaas, Libeskind). He argues that this separation creates a 'third space' of excluded waste and anxiety, which functions ideologically to manage the antagonisms of public space, as seen in the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem and the 'Holy Basin' redevelopment. Žižek critiques contemporary architecture, specifically 'spherical envelopes' and performance arts venues, as mechanisms of 'democratic exclusivity' that privatize public space under the guise of sustainability and accessibility. He argues that these buildings materialize a liberal ideology of 'anti-elitism' that is actually exclusionary, contrasting this with the universal nature of great art. He concludes by applying Stephen Jay Gould’s concept of 'exaptation' (via architectural spandrels) to suggest that progressive politics should reappropriate the non-functional interstitial spaces of such buildings rather than building new monumental structures. Žižek discusses the architectural politics of modernism, Stalinism, and contemporary urban planning, arguing for the aesthetic value of Stalinist kitsch and the ecological necessity of dense cities. He analyzes Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Decalogue as an expression of possessive closure rather than despair, and critiques the passive-aggressive nature of modern museum-going, concluding with a personal anecdote about avoiding art to preserve authentic experience.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 38
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Architecture that combines incompatible structuring principles (e.g., horizontal/vertical) within a single object, reflecting social antagonism rather than just functional efficiency.
A shift in perspective directly inscribed into the object of our gaze; the object itself materializes different, incompatible structuring principles or perspectives.
The coded message in architectural formal play where the building’s mute signs deliver the 'return of the repressed' of the official ideology.
Not merely a false consciousness masking reality, but a 'longing for a proper appearance' or a 'zero institution' that provides a neutral space of belonging where social antagonism is obliterated.
The way architecture stages the repressed truth or antagonism (e.g., hierarchy) that explicit ideology cannot acknowledge.
The character of the film's end where Norman Bates, in identifying with the mother, finally finds his 'Heim' (home), resolving the architectural split.
An institutional counterpart to the empty signifier (mana); a specific institution with no positive determinate function, serving only to signal the presence of social order against chaos (e.g., the Nation, or modern performance arts complexes).
The traditional relationship where a building's interior division matches its exterior form; postmodern architecture breaks this, creating 'radical incommensurability' between inside and outside.
as “spectral reality”
The phenomenological experience of looking through a window: the outside appears 'minimally spectral' and de-realized, as if on a screen, until the window is opened and the shock of proximity occurs.
A representation of an interior (like a live feed of a toilet) that creates a paradoxical loop where the observer's action invalidates the representation, revealing the artifice of the frame.
The hidden, libidinally unacceptable space between walls containing waste and infrastructure, which is relied upon but phenomenologically ignored or repressed.
as “return of the living dead”
Žižek's metaphor for the traumatic return of the repressed intermediate space, specifically when waste (shit) comes back up through the toilet bowl.
The distinction between the raw, stupid exterior and the sublime exterior as framed by an interior perspective; the outside enclosed by the inside.
A postmodern architectural principle where the building's exterior skin is detached from its functional interior, creating ambiguity and antagonism rather than modernist transparency.
Rem Koolhaas's architectural formula where functional spaces 'float' inside a neutral, enormous envelope, highlighting the discontinuity between inside and outside.
The stage where the envelope becomes a protective, aestheticized shell (like an egg or teacup) around the functional box, such as the Beijing National Grand Theatre.
as “Bilbao effect”
The strategy of using sculptural, iconic architecture (Frank Gehry) to create vibrant public space and revitalize a city, which Žižek critiques as the culmination of the 'ugly' sculptural envelope.
Buildings where the skin is a direct continuation of the terrain (e.g., Yokohama Port Terminal), which Žižek argues de-realizes nature by making the grass appear as an artificial skin concealing machinery.
The 'house within a house' structure (container within a container) which acts as a symptom encoding the contradiction of public space being privately controlled.
Alejandro Zaera-Polo's term for a world of 'bubbles and balloons' (envelopes) that provides immunization and security, which Žižek links to political and psychological implications of insulation.
Zaera-Polo's concept, derived from Sloterdijk, describing the paradox of global deterritorialization resulting in local, insulated 'provincial' bubbles.
The political implication of the envelope as a device of insulation, controlling the environment within the bubble while excluding the outside.
Zaera-Polo's term for the protective, womb-like nature of the architectural envelope, which Žižek interprets as a security and immunization device.
A metaphor for contemporary architecture (e.g., Crystal Island) that encloses the outside world, creating a protected, climatized, and securitized interior that isolates occupants from the 'wild outside' and 'undesired presence of potentially toxic subjects.'
as “privatized public space”
Public spaces (like plazas or arts venues) that are owned and managed by private agents, offering the appearance of public access while enforcing private security and exclusionary norms.
as “Junkspace”
Rem Koolhaas’s term for the sanitized, homogenized, and endless sprawl of modern urban development, which Žižek links to the privatization of public space and the surrender of police duties to private security.
Žižek’s ironic comparison of Western 'sustainability' to North Korea’s Juche ideology of self-reliance, arguing that sustainable buildings are expensive, energy-intensive, and self-contained in a way that mirrors totalitarian isolation.
as “democratic exclusivism”
The paradoxical function of modern public buildings (like arts venues) which are open to all but filtered and controlled by private security and economic barriers, creating an 'open space which is cocooned, protected and filtered.'
A biological concept from Stephen Jay Gould describing how a trait or structure developed for one function (or as a non-functional byproduct) is reappropriated for a totally different function; Žižek applies this to architecture and politics.
In architecture, the triangular spaces resulting from the intersection of arches and domes; Gould used them as the primary example of exaptation, arguing they were structural byproducts later filled with statues, not designed for them initially.
A Japanese art form of 'unuseless inventions' that are functional but so ridiculous they cannot be commercialized; Žižek uses this as a model for how avant-garde groups might occupy interstitial spaces in buildings without being co-opted by the market.
The idea that architecture is not just a reflection of ideas but a structural social state; like food and faces, it embodies the social relations and antagonisms of its time.
as “fantasy at its purest”
The South Bank enclosure project, which creates a fake Mediterranean climate in London, exemplifies the construction of a fantasy space that replaces reality with a superior simulated version.
as “Stalinist kitsch Baroque”
Žižek’s preferred aesthetic for Stalinist architecture, characterized by bombastic, popular, and accessible ornamentation, which he contrasts with the 'horrible' late socialist modernism of steel and glass.
The desire to destroy one's own creation (as in The Decalogue) to prevent others from interfering with it, reflecting a jealous, assertive ownership of the aesthetic universe.
A hypothetical theme park in East Germany that recreates the hardships of the GDR (lack of meat, interrogations) as a tourist attraction, which Žižek finds preferable to the 'hell' of a Mediterranean beach.
The phenomenon where the institution (the gallery) performs the act of looking for the viewer, allowing the viewer to remain passive or distracted while believing they are engaging with culture.
as “authentic passive experience”
The difficult, rare state of truly opening oneself to be affected by art, which Žižek argues is suppressed by the modern museum's demand for active, witty consumption.
Stories he reaches for 6
Žižek compares the 'minimal aestheticization' of buildings (like the Beijing National Grand Theatre) to Kinder Surprise eggs: a chocolate shell protecting a 'jewel' (toy) inside, which he finds disgusting.
“I used in some of my books this disgusting example of chocolate eggs Kinder Surprise... a gigantic chocolate Kinder egg where the jewel is inside.”
Stalinist buildings (Lomonosov University, House of Culture in Warsaw) enact the 'return of the repressed' of socialist ideology: the hidden desire for hierarchy and class distinctions, which official texts claim to reject.
“This neo-Gothic architecture... enacts the return of the repressed of the official egalitarian emancipatory socialist ideology, the weird desire for hierarchy and social distinctions.”
A joke quoted by Lacan: A woman says, 'Look what a shame, beneath her clothes she is totally naked.' It illustrates that nakedness is defined by the frame of clothing.
“Look what a shame, beneath her clothes she is totally naked.”
A theatre building on the South Korean side of the DMZ features a large screen-like window, exemplifying the 'spectral' nature of reality viewed through an enclosure.
“On the southern side of the demilitarized zone that divides North from South Korea, South Koreans built a unique visitor's site. A theatre building with a large screen-like window in front.”
A collection of functional but ridiculous objects (e.g., glasses with wipers, butter as lipstick) designed specifically so they cannot be commercialized. Žižek suggests this logic could apply to using interstitial spaces in buildings for avant-garde art, keeping them non-commercializable.
“The rule is the following one: you should construct a small practical object which is feasible... but it must be so ridiculous that you are you should be sure that it will not be commercialized.”
The claim that the producers of King Kong modeled the giant ape on the unfinished Palace of Soviets project in Moscow, where planes could land on Lenin's statue.
“replace Lenin with ape and you get-”
Works invoked 26
Psycho film
Hitchcock’s film; called his 'masterpiece' and 'the greatest film about architecture,' used to illustrate the split subject and architectural antagonism.
Fredric Jameson’s book; cited for the analysis of Caduveo Indians and the concept of the 'political unconscious' in architecture.
Tristes Tropiques book
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s book; quoted for the description of Caduveo facial decorations and social structure.
Decalogue tv
Žižek reads this series as 'pretty optimistic' and 'pretty', interpreting the final explosion as possessive closure rather than despair.
Lévi-Strauss’s essay; analyzed for the concept of the 'zero institution' in Winnebago spatial disposition.
King Kong film
Used as an example of how the Palace of Soviets project influenced the visual design of the giant ape.
Sydney Opera House artwork
Used as an example of postmodern architecture where form is ambiguous; Žižek finds the 'turtle orgy' interpretation amusing but critiques the building's form.
Tate Modern artwork
An example of 'terrain buildings' or variation where the old outside (derelict power station) is kept while the inside is totally renovated.
Yokohama Port Terminal artwork
An example of 'terrain buildings' where the skin continues the terrain; Žižek argues it de-realizes nature by making grass look like artificial skin.
Beijing National Grand Theatre artwork
Described as 'ugly' and like 'giant teacups' or 'Kinder Surprise eggs'; an example of 'minimal aestheticization' where an eggshell protects the performance buildings.
Brasília other
Oscar Niemeyer’s city plan; analyzed as an architectural expression of 'longing for a proper appearance' in a hierarchical society.
Mentioned as the building that replaced the Palace of Soviets project, which was then replaced by a swimming pool.
A museum in Jerusalem designed by Frank Gehry, built over a Muslim cemetery; used to illustrate the ideological-political investment of the envelope and the 'symptom' of intolerance within tolerance.
Chindogu other
A collection of 'unuseless inventions' from Japan, used by Žižek as a model for non-commercializable, avant-garde use of interstitial spaces.
Crystal Island other
A proposed building project in Moscow by Norman Foster, used as the prime example of 'spherical envelopes' and democratic exclusivism.
Stalinist neo-Gothic building; cited alongside Lomonosov University as enacting the repressed desire for hierarchy.
Lomonosov University other
Stalinist neo-Gothic building in Moscow; cited as a favorite example of architecture enacting the 'return of the repressed' desire for hierarchy.
Mariinsky Theatre (Leningrad) artwork
A project where a black marble functional box is 'cocooned' by a freestanding irregular glass structure; cited as the 'purest' principle of the envelope.
Palace of the Soviets other
Referenced for its unfinished state and the 'Lenin statue' project, which influenced King Kong.
Described as 'boring' but quoted extensively to illustrate the ideological tensions in modern performance venues.
San Marco Church artwork
Used by Gould as the primary example of 'spandrels' and exaptation in architecture.
Senate House other
Žižek argues for its reappropriation and loves 'totalitarian buildings', rejecting calls for its demolition.
Shanghai Center artwork
Described as 'ugly' and like 'three teacups'; another example of the logic of protecting the jewel inside.
South Bank Complex other
Criticized for the 'transparent membrane' project, which Žižek sees as 'fantasy at its purest' and a fake Mediterranean.
Described as Žižek's 'favorite street in Europe', a 'high point of Stalinist kitsch Baroque' that mixes popular accessibility with grandeur.
Tenerife Auditorium artwork
An example of a Frank Gehry building, described as a 'sculpture from the outside of its own' and part of the 'Bilbao effect'.
People invoked 45
Transcript reads 'Zaera-Polo'. Likely refers to Francisco Mangado or a specific text. I will use 'Zaera-Polo' as the name in the text, noting it may be a transcription error for a specific architect or text author.
Franz Kafka positive
Referenced for the notion of destroying one's own work, which Žižek applies to Kieślowski.
Austrian monster whose house illustrates the split between the 'happy Christian family' and the 'monstrous primordial father' in the basement.
Kim Il-sung / Kim Jong-il negative
Used as a foil to criticize Western 'sustainability'; compares the self-contained nature of sustainable buildings to the North Korean Juche ideology of self-reliance.
Represented by the 'high society lady' who demanded the opera be interrupted; used to illustrate the obscenity of elite social posturing in spaces of great art.
Peter Zumthor (implied: Zaera-Polo) positive
The transcript says 'Zaera-Polo', likely Francisco Mangado or similar, but explicitly names Zaera-Polo. I will use the name as spoken.
Schoenberg / Webern positive
Cited as examples of difficult great art that is universal and emancipatory, not elitist.
Simon Jenkins negative
Criticized for calling for the demolition of Senate House as 'Stalinist architecture' to make London 'postmodern'.
Norman Foster negative
Cited as the architect of the Crystal Island project, which Žižek critiques as a peak example of 'spherical envelopes' and democratic exclusivism.
Kim Jong-il negative
See above.
Michael Hammond negative
Author of 'Performing Architecture'; Žižek calls the book 'boring' but quotes it extensively.
Umberto Eco positive
Cited for his concept of the 'hyperreal' Mediterranean, which Žižek uses to describe the South Bank fantasy.
Claude Lévi-Strauss positive
Cited for 'Tristes Tropiques' and 'Do Dual Organizations Exist?'; Žižek praises his reading of Caduveo faces and Winnebago zero institutions as crucial for understanding ideology.
Oscar Niemeyer positive
Architect of Brasília; Žižek reads his plan as a 'dream of a properly functioning appearance' rather than a utopia of justice.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Cited for his premonition that modern audiences are not passive consumers but struggle with true passive experience.
Daniel Libeskind positive
Architect whose buildings (Libeskind) are used as examples of postmodern architecture combining incompatible structuring principles (horizontal/vertical/oblique).
kibbutz positive
Cited as a naive but interesting attempt to limit private space and balance public/private life (shared kitchens, private sleeping spaces).
Jacques Lacan positive
Cited as the source of the Alphonse Allais joke about nakedness; Žižek uses Lacan to illustrate the relationship between inside (clothes) and outside (nakedness).
Frank Gehry positive
Architect whose work combines traditional houses with modern concrete/glass, illustrating the 'parallax' of incompatible principles.
Boris Johnson negative
Mentioned as not being behind the South Bank membrane project, which Žižek views as a 'fantasy at its purest'.
Stephen Jay Gould positive
Žižek’s 'favorite Darwinian biologist'; praises Gould’s concept of exaptation and his polemic against vulgar Darwinians like Dawkins and Pinker.
Gilles Deleuze negative
Referenced via 'Deleuzian poetry of fluid deterritorialization' which Žižek contrasts with the reality of enclosed private spaces.
Metropolitan Opera House positive
Used as the setting for the anecdote about the Morgan lady; represents the 'exclusive temple of high art'.
Jean-François Lyotard positive
Cited as one of the figures who applied the term 'postmodernism' to cover complex phenomena, providing 'intelligibility' to historical experience.
Edward Hopper positive
Painter whose works (motels, house by the railroad) serve as precise models for the two houses in 'Psycho'.
Steven Pinker negative
Grouped with 'vulgar Darvinians' against whom Gould triumphed.
Rem Koolhaas positive
Architect whose work exemplifies the 'zero level of postmodernism' with floating organs inside a box, showing the gap between inside and outside.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart positive
Used as an example of 'top of the top elite' art that belongs to the poor in the upper stalls, contradicting the social posturing of the rich audience.
George Orwell positive
Referenced regarding Senate House being modeled after his Ministry of Truth; Žižek treats this as a relevant historical link.
Fredric Jameson positive
Cited for 'The Political Unconscious' and his analysis of Caduveo Indians; Žižek claims Jameson is 'fully justified' but argues he missed the point about 'longing for proper appearance'.
Friedrich Engels negative
Cited for a 'pseudo-Marxist' circular reasoning about the origin of language (division of labor leading to language); Gould refutes this.
Starbucks negative
Used as an example of selling 'experience' (community/ecology) rather than just product or status.
Alphonse Allais positive
A French satirical writer from 100 years ago, cited by Lacan for a joke about nakedness.
Kim Il-sung negative
See above.
Paul Klee positive
Cited as an example of great art that is universal.
Adolf Loos negative
Criticized for the modernist idea that 'Ornament is a crime' and for using racist terms to claim primitive people use ornaments.
Richard Dawkins negative
Grouped with 'vulgar Darvinians' against whom Gould triumphed.
Peter Sloterdijk positive
Cited for 'politics of climatization' and the role of private agents (gardeners, security) in designing atmospheres.
Zaha Hadid positive
Cited for quotes on architecture and security; Žižek agrees with her critique of regeneration vs. takeover.
Krzysztof Kieślowski positive
Žižek offers a deep, sympathetic reading of The Decalogue, interpreting the destruction of the block as possessive closure rather than despair.
New Labour negative
Cited as 'official progressive ideology' that celebrates these architectural projects as revitalization, which Žižek rejects.
Alfred Hitchcock positive
Director of 'Psycho'; Žižek calls it his 'masterpiece' and 'the greatest film about architecture,' using it to stage the split between modern and Gothic forms.
Henry Ford positive
Described as 'almost a saint' to the early Bolsheviks for his efficiency, contrasting with his later anti-Semitism.
Ludwig Wittgenstein positive
Cited for the motto: 'What we cannot directly talk about, it can be shown by the form of our activity,' to explain how architecture reveals repressed ideology.
Alejandro Zaera-Polo positive
Described as a 'very intelligent architect' and 'Deleuzian capitalist' whose concept of the 'envelope' as immunization/insulation Žižek finds correct.
Transcript 44 turns
Slavoj Žižek
So, as I said yesterday, today it's architecture, tomorrow it's Wagner, music, opera. First, I would like to justify the term I will use a lot: postmodern architecture. I know that this term is half forgotten today, but I still think it has its use. And the criterion is simply one of, how should I call it, efficiency. I think that simply what Lyotard and others did is by applying the name to cover a certain complex great number of phenomena. Just to apply on all these phenomena, from economic phenomena to art phenomena to social phenomena and so on, to cultural phenomena, a name, postmodernism, it did provide some additional, how should I call it, intelligibility. It introduced a new order of intelligibility into the confused multiplicity of historical experience. So I think in this elementary sense the term is justified. My thesis will be that, to use terms from my own theory, what is called postmodern architecture is closely related to the term that I use a lot, the term of parallax. Parallax as a shift in perspective directly inscribed into the object of our gaze, the object itself. And already at the most immediate level, if you think about the best-known buildings by Libeskind or Frank Gehry, their work often appears as a desperate or joyous attempt to combine two incompatible structuring principles within the same building. In the case of Libeskind, it's usually horizontal or horizontal, vertical and oblique cubes. In the case of Frank Gehry, traditional house combined with modern concrete, corrugated iron, glass supplements, as if two principles are locked in a struggle of hegemony. Like again, the example is simple, that it cannot be simpler. This is a typical Libeskind. You see, it's as if, it's almost like, it's very primitive I know, my explanation not the building, I mean, it's as if, as if, as if, as if we look at the object from different perspectives, almost like in cubism, and the object tries to inscribe into its structure different perspectives. So it's, it's as if the object, the building, materializes different, here even clearer, materializes different perspective, different structuring principles. And of course, the first reaction of my Marxist mind is that this has something, has to have something to do with social antagonism. So how does an ideological edifice, a real architectural edifice included, how does it deal with social antagonism? I want to begin with an example which I often refer to, but I will not be repeating myself, I will give a totally different twist to it because recently I discovered that I simply missed the point the way I was dealing with what? With the famous example from Fredric Jameson's "The Political Unconscious" about the unique facial decorations of the Caduveo Indians from Brazil. They use, Caduveo Indians, I quote here Claude Lévi-Strauss from "Tristes Tropiques," they use a design which is symmetrical but yet lies across an oblique axis. A complicated situation based upon two contradictory forms of duality and resulting in a compromise brought about by a secondary opposition between the ideal axis of the object itself, the human face, and the ideal axis of the figure which it represents. So basically, it's the same structural imbalance as the one in the Libeskind buildings as I just showed you. It is as if there are two possible axes, one simple horizontal, sorry, rather vertical axis of the face, and then the building itself, an oblique axis. Why this strange tension in the structuring principle? Rather, combination of two incompatible structuring principles? Here is Jameson's comment, a quote: "Already on the purely formal level, this visual text has been grasped as a contradiction by way of the curiously provisional and asymmetrical resolution it proposes for that contradiction." So again, it's contradiction, a structural tension inscribed into the very formal fabric of the object. It's incidentally a little bit like a map of Manhattan where as you know you have horizontal, vertical, and then oblique Broadway. Then in the next crucial move, Lévi-Strauss interprets this formal contradiction as not a reflection but as a symbolic act, a transposition or displacement of the basic social imbalance or asymmetry or antagonism of the society of this Latin American Indian tribe, Caduveo. Here is the crucial description: "Caduveo are a hierarchical society and their nascent hierarchy is already the place of the emergence, if not of political power in the strict sense, then at least of relations of domination. The inferior status of women, the subordination of youth to elders, and the development of hereditary aristocracy. Yet, whereas this latent power structure is among the neighboring Guana and Bororo tribes masked by a division into moieties which cuts across the three castes and whose exogamous exchange appears to function in a non-hierarchical, essentially egalitarian way, it is openly present in Caduveo life as surface inequality and conflict. The social institutions of the Guana and Bororo, on the other hand, provide a realm of appearance in which real hierarchy and inequality are dissimulated by the reciprocity of moieties and halves of the tribe, and in which therefore asymmetry of class is balanced by the symmetry of these moieties, of these halves." End of quote from, end of quote from, from this is Jameson's description. Is this also not our predicament? Do we have, do we not have in our societies exactly the same tension? We are split between formal legal equality sustained by the institutions of democratic state and class distinctions enforced by the economic system. We live the tension between politically correct respect for human rights and so on and the growing inequalities, gated communities, exclusions, and so on and so forth. And here, this is the point I missed, here Lévi-Strauss deserves a precise and close reading. What he is saying is not that simply and directly the Caduveo facial decorations formulate an imaginary resolution of real contradictions. It is rather that they supplement the lack of a properly functioning appearance which would have been inscribed into their very social institutional organization. In other words, we are not dealing with a longing for real equality but with the longing for a proper appearance. And I think this is the formula of ideology. It's a very nice distinction. You got it. They are a society where we have all the usual stuff of emerging class distinctions: women are less than men, elders rule, aristocracy, all that stuff and so on. Other tribes mask this with some complicated intergroup relations exchange so that what really are class distinctions, already hierarchical, are masked by the symmetries of horizontal exchange. So that at least the appearance is maintained, the appearance of equality and so on. Here, the appearance is missing. So that's what I like so much that, you know, it's not "we are not equal, we want it," it's not, how should I put it, it's not as in ordinary bourgeois democracy and so on where you say real inequality is masked through the appearance of democratic, sorry, of democratic equality and so on and so forth. What is missing here with these tribes is precisely this appearance itself, which of course is never only an appearance, it is an appearance embodied in, I'm not dismissing this appearance as only an appearance, it's an appearance embodied in very concrete social procedures, rituals, and so on. Which is why, as we all know, nonetheless, we shouldn't follow the simplistic Marxist line of just formal democracy. Formal democracy means a form, a form which is a social reality, and this form, even if it is just a form of equality, at least gives you as it were an Archimedean point of support from where to start bombarding society with demands for real equality. So again, what is missing in this tribe is the proper appearance. The idea is that other tribes are so, again, this is the beauty of Lévi-Strauss's reading. What this strange asymmetry of face expresses is not a longing for real equality but for a proper socially functioning appearance. And I think the same goes, that would be my reading. I tried to think about an architectural equivalent. If you know Oscar Niemeyer's plan of Brasília. Usually it's read just as some kind of egalitarian, okay, for our tastes today a little bit totalitarian, not for my tastes, utopia of a city. But I think that Niemeyer, and I read some biography of him, he was well aware that Brazil is even far from a truly functioning liberal bourgeois democracy. It's more a longing for a proper appearance. The city Brasília, the city, the capital, is more the architecture of the city is a dream of a properly functioning appearance. This is why Jameson is fully justified to talk about the political unconscious. There is a coded message in an architectural formal play, and the message delivered by a building often functions as the return of the repressed of the official ideology. Recall Wittgenstein's motto: "What we cannot directly talk about, it can be shown by the form of our activity." What the official ideology cannot openly talk about can be shown by the mute signs of a building. And this brings us to an unexpected result. It's not only if we are leftists, our first reaction would have been of course we live in a hierarchical society, the dream, the utopian dream is the one of more justice, equality and so on and so forth. Jameson points out that quite often we get the opposite paradox, that the fantasy embodied in the mute language of buildings is not necessarily the utopia of justice, freedom, equality betrayed by actual social relations. This fantasy can also articulate a longing for inequality, for clear hierarchy and class distinctions. I think this is, it's a very simplistic reading but I think it's a moment of truth in it, this is how we should read the famous Stalinist neo-Gothic architecture. I mean even at a very primitive level, you know with all those, my favorite buildings of course, from Lomonosov University in Moscow to Home of Culture or that House of Culture in Warsaw and so on, all this neo-Gothic architecture. It in a way enacts the return of the repressed of the official egalitarian emancipatory socialist ideology, the weird desire for hierarchy and social distinctions. So it is not simply that ideology also permits the alleged extra-ideological strata of everyday life. This materialization of ideology renders visible inherent antagonisms which the explicit formulation of ideology cannot afford to acknowledge. It is as if an ideological edifice, if it is to function normally, must obey a kind of imp of perversity and articulate its inherent antagonism in the externality of its material existence. Social oppression and hierarchy concealed in the explicit Stalinist ideological text, which talks about equality and justice, social oppression and hierarchy are thereby acted out, staged if not stated. You see, this is for me the wonder of ideology, that ideology never lies, that's my basic rule. It tells the truth. Just for example if you are in, let's say you visit Moscow in the late '30s, you will say oh but it's a fake equality, there is a new hierarchy and so on. I mean an intelligent guy will tell you, of course we all know this, look at our buildings I mean. The mystery is how the system not only tolerated it but even required it. Why? I think that this was the only way for the people to accept hierarchy. It had to be remarked, you know, so that the message that the entire Stalinist ideology, official explicit in texts and ideology embodied in architecture, the message you get is a precise image of reality. It's officially we are an egalitarian society but effectively hierarchy, but hierarchy which remains mute, which it's not allowed to articulate it. In this sense, I claim, architecture often not only illustrates ideology in this simplistic sense that if you have a technocratic society architecture will try to repeat this utilitarian functionalist vision and so on, no, architecture does more. It brings out its stages in a mute way the repressed truth, the repressed antagonism of it. Which is why, if I may repeat, it's my favorite from the old Hitchcock book which is in any case now out of print that I did. In this sense I think one should read "Psycho," Hitchcock's masterpiece, as the staging of an architectural antagonism. I always thought that "Psycho" is the greatest film about architecture. Norman Bates is split precisely between the two houses: the modern horizontal motel and the vertical Gothic mother's house. He is literally split between the two, remember forever running between the two up and down, never finding a proper place of his own. And probably I hope you know that these two houses both have precise models in painting, no? So that the motel is Edward Hopper, all those motels, and the other one, mother's house, is also Hopper but this early Hopper house by the railroad I think. In this sense the *unheimlich*, uncanny character of the film's end means that in his full identification with the mother, Norman Bates finally found his *Heim*, his home. In modernist works like "Psycho," this split is still visible, while the main goal of today's postmodern architecture is in a way to obfuscate it. Let's just recall the so-called New Urbanism, with its return to small family houses in small towns, with front porches recreating the cozy atmosphere of the local community. Clearly, this is the case of architecture as ideology at its purest, providing an imaginary although real, materialized in the actual disposition of houses, an imaginary solution to a real social deadlock which has nothing to do with architecture and all with late capitalist dynamics. A more ambiguous case of the same antagonism is the work of Frank Gehry. He takes as the basis of one of the two poles of the antagonism: either the old-fashioned family house or a modernist concrete and glass building, and then either submits this let's say old-fashioned family house to a kind of cubist anamorphic distortion, curved angles of walls and windows, or combines the old family home with a modernist supplement. So here is my final hypothesis: if the Bates's motel from Hitchcock's "Psycho" were to be built by Frank Gehry directly combining the old mother's house and the flat modern hotel into a new hybrid entity, there would have been no need for Norman to kill his victims. He would have been relieved of the unbearable tension that compels him to run between the two places. He would have a third place of mediation between the two extremes. And again, it would be interesting to read many of modern, not only works of art but here real-life occurrences as something which relies very much on its architectural background. For example, I think that a year ago when we already talked about it here, that Austrian monster Josef Fritzl, you know who, again, it's the whole problem is the problem of architecture. The first floor, happy Christian family, beneath the monstrous or even the monstrous primordial father, symbolic law, symbolic father, the monstrous father. Now let's make a crucial step further. Lévi-Strauss himself applies this same type of analysis that he did with Caduveo faces also to urbanism and architecture. In his wonderful short essay "Do Dual Organizations Exist?" where he deals with the spatial disposition of buildings in the Winnebago, one of the Great Lake tribes. I want to focus here on another aspect that I neglected in my reading, I repeat it a couple of times in my book, of this Lévi-Straussian example. Lévi-Strauss makes here an additional crucial point: since the two subgroups of the tribe form one and the same tribe living in the same village, this identity somehow has to be symbolically inscribed. How? By what Lévi-Strauss ingeniously calls the zero institution, a kind of institutional counterpart to the famous mana, the empty signifier with no determinate meaning since it signifies only the presence of meaning as such in opposition to its absence. A specific institution which has no positive determinate function, its only function is the purely negative one of signaling the presence of social institutions as such in contrast to pre-social chaos. It is the reference to such a zero institution which enables all members of the tribe to experience themselves as such, as members of the same tribe. This zero institution is then for me ideology at its purest, the direct embodiment of the ideological function of providing a neutral, all-encompassing space in which social antagonism is obliterated, in which all members of society can recognize themselves. And my hypothesis is that big, okay, I develop in one of my books as one function of this zero institution, namely the modern notion of nation, of sorry of nation. Nation is precisely this kind of a zero institution in the sense of wherever you are in social edifice there is a zero level of belonging where we all belong, our nation. My hypothesis now is that big performance arts complexes, the paragon of today's architecture, try to impose themselves as this kind of architectural zero institutions. Their very conflicting meaning: amusement and high art, profane and sacred, exclusive and popular, cancel themselves mutually so that the outcome is the presence of meaning as such as opposed to non-meaning. Their meaning is to have meaning, to be islands of meaning in the flow of our meaningless daily existence. In order to provide to provide a brief insight into the parallax nature of this performance art venues, let me begin by the fundamental feature of postmodern architecture: the end of the so-called expressive correspondence between the inside, the division of buildings into rooms and spaces or different activities, and the outside of a building. With postmodern architecture, this correspondence breaks down, we move towards radical incommensurability. The functions, that is to say the rooms, the interior, the inner space, the inner structure of a building, the interior rooms hang within their enormous container like so many floating organs. Look, this is a typical Rem Koolhaas where you have this at its purest. This is the zero level of postmodernism. It's just a box and you see the gap between inside and outside. It's like floating organs, no express- no relation of expressivity there. However, one should not misunderstand this emphasis on the incommensurability between outside and inside. One should not misunderstand it as a critique relying on the demand for some kind of non-alienated continuity between the two. The incommensurability between outside and inside is, I claim, a kind of transcendental a priori in our most elementary phenomenological experience. The reality we see through a window when we look outside from inside 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 we perceive the reality outside in a strange de-realized state, as if one is watching a performance on a screen. When you open the window of a car, the direct impact of the external reality always causes a minimal shock; you are overwhelmed by the proximity of the outside. This is also why when we enter the closed space of a house we are often surprised. It seems that the inside is larger than the outside, as if the house is larger from the inside as from the outside. And you get my point. My point is that the moment we have this minimal enclosure architectural, the moment there is a division between inside and outside, the two are radically incommensurable. If I am this voice, I hate it. Now let me give you an extreme example that I want to make. On the southern side of the demilitarized zone that divides North from South Korea, South Koreans built a unique visitor's site. A theatre building with a large screen-like window in front. It's simply a gigantic hall with a big screen, but the screen opens up on what? Not on a stage, not on a on a movie screen, but onto reality itself towards north. Because this is the only point where from the south, because it's up on a hill, you can see a small North Korean town. So I like this idea that people gather there and pay to see reality as it were. The spectacle people observe when they take seats and look north through the window is reality itself. The barren demilitarized zone with walls and beyond a glimpse of North Korea. Now comes the comedy. As if to comply with the fiction, North Korea has built in front of this theatre a pure fake, a model village with beautiful houses and so on. What North Korea did is that they painted all the houses, but only the side which looks towards south, with colors. You know that the the dresses also are with coupons ration there. Inhabitants there got special rations to get better dresses. Electricity which is strictly rationed is provided for hours every evening. But the local people there have the obligations to walk every evening nicely dressed. The whole reality itself is staged. So a barren zone is given a phantasmatic status elevated into a spectacle simply by being in frame. We thus have to distinguish between two outsides: the direct outside and the inside outside. The two are not the same. In the second case, the outside is no longer simply the unity which contains the inside but is enclosed by the inside. North Korea which is something miserable is sublime when you look at it through the frame of South Korea. There can also be, so you got my point. My point is that we have outside which is simply stupid outside of nature. But what it can be developed in literary, sorry, in art theory very nicely how what all romantics are doing when they select part of outside, a waterfall whatever, is that there is this outside is already seen from some imagined inside. You should always look at an implicit frame. There can also be a false redoubled inside. For example, it happened to me when I was at ZKM, this modern digital art complex in Karlsruhe in West Germany. There is in a TV screen in front of the entrance to the main toilet area which shows continuously on it black and white screen the inside of a small toilet cube with the empty toilet bowl. And I, total idiot as I am, I found myself in this stupid situation where I had to go to the toilet so my first reaction was, oh so nice that they give you information, you know the toilet is free in there. But I said, wait a minute, but when I enter it it will no longer be free and people will see me or what? Then okay, I'm an idiot, it took me some ten seconds to get it that of course this is an running old old shot and so on. But it works, how should I put it, no? What this mutual encroaching of inside and outside indicates is that inside and outside never cover the entire space. There is always an excess of a third space which gets lost in the division into outside and inside. In human dwellings, buildings, there is an intermediate space I claim which is disavowed. We all know it exists but we don't really libidinally 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 narrow spaces between walls or floors. We of course know very well 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 netherworld out of our sight and out of our world. This is why one of the most unpleasant experiences is to observe the shit coming back from the hole in the toilet bowl. It is something like the return of the living dead, I think. We rely on this space but ignore it. Now you will say, "But you are dreaming, this is your your anal obsession." Ah, I claim no, because just remember how in science fiction, horror films, and techno-thrillers precisely this dark space between the walls is the space where horrible threats lurk. From spying machines to monsters, contagious animals, cockroaches, rats, and so on and so on. Recall also in science fiction architecture the mysterious topic of an additional floor or room which is not in the building's plan and where of course terrible terrible things dwell. So you got my point here that the way we, of course, reality is one flat reality. And of course in immediate reality inside is as it were, sorry, outside encompasses inside. But what I am saying is that in our libidinal perception relation to reality things always get more complex. Inside and outside are radically incommensurable. Which is what you can easily experience for example when you are inside the house and then this house is ruined, half the wall blown off. It's not the same inside, somehow it changes, it's simply part of the outside. The magic disappeared. But again, even more interesting for me is is this is this precisely because they are incommensurable inside and outside, the incommensurability again can be proven by this double redoubling. There is outside, a simple outside, and there is the sublime outside seen from the inside. Which is why, you know, you should never forget when you say "room with a view" that the view is nothing in itself, the view is a view from the room. In exactly the same way as goes with nakedness. The best joke about nakedness is for me still the one quoted often by Lacan, he refers to that famous French French satirical writer Alphonse Allais from one hundred years ago who once in a cafeteria, I will not be obscene, okay, you will be the victim. So yeah yeah. So as a woman and said, "Look what a shame, beneath her clothes she is totally naked." I mean, that's how it works. Okay, now let's go on. So based on all this, how can you, yeah yeah. So back to postmodern architecture. I claim that postmodern architecture I don't dismiss it, here I'm not a modernist. While modernism played this game of you know Adolf Loos started with it all, with this idea "Ornament is a crime." And he even put it in extreme racist terms, he claimed that primitive degenerate people do ornaments and then the more civilization progresses the more you go to just lead and mean function and so on. The if the modernist ideal is this total transparency of function, total continuity between inside and outside, what postmodernism does is at least it brings out the antagonism, the antagonism the gap between inside and outside and so on. Or the terms that are usually used recently by architects: the skin is separated from the body. The skin of a building wrapping it is separated from the body. This then opens the space for the ambiguously meaningful forms into which buildings are wrapped. Often a primitive mimetic symbolism, like the entire building resembling an animal, a turtle, a bird, a bug, which this outside is not an expression of its inside but literally just imposed onto the stuff. Like since I was in Australia to give this talk, of course in Australia you find the most obvious example: the Sydney Opera House. I mean in a typically modernist way the meaning itself is ambiguous. What should you know that form which I will not describe it because I will really have to use metaphors, what does it stand for? With my obscene mind I was very happy to learn that the predominant version is gay turtles' orgy. Or big turtles anally penetrating each other. But that's considered the common architectural whatever. So let me now again give you a simple example. This is then what I am talking about. This is skin, skin separated from the body and the body is not just the inside, the body can be buildings of their own. This is one of these boring, I even don't know which one, postmodern stupid, sorry I took the wrong one, let's say this is what I'm talking about where you have skin covering up the inside, that's what I'm talking about. Okay, so let's go on. The link between form and function is cut, there is no causal relationship between the skin, the form, and what is inside. Which are the basic architectural versions of this gap? The zero level is presented by what I already showed you, Koolhaas' buildings, Rem Koolhaas. His formula is the envelope is simply a neutral enormous box. In its interior, its interior houses the multiple functional spaces which hang, this is his own description of his own architecture Koolhaas's, hang within their enormous container like so many floating organs. So again, sorry. This is the zero level of postmodernism. The container, organs, rooms whatever other buildings floating inside, discontinuity between inside and outside. Then this would be for me somehow the zero level, just the separation of skin from surface. Then as in some especially Daniel Libeskind projects, the gap between the protective skin and the inner structure is reflected into skin itself. The same external form, an enormous box, is multiplied relying on the contrast between let us say straight vertical horizontal lines and the diagonal lines of external walls. You remember, just to remind of you, this would be like the minimal reflection where a tension, the gap is inscribed into the external skin itself. 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 on different axes. A weird tension and imbalance, a conflict of principles are thus directly inscribed into the form, as if the actual building lacks a single anchoring point and perspective. 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 this kind of contrast, the contrast between the roundness of the skin and the straight lines of inner structures. A round envelope, an egg-like cupola, envelops a box-like vertical, horizontal, horizontal set of buildings inside, like the giant teacups of the Oriental Art Center in Shanghai or the National Grand Theatre of China in Beijing with its giant metal glass cover, an eggshell protecting the performance buildings. This would be then again not just the zero level, remember just a cube, not just the pure inscription of an antagonism, but the minimal aestheticization, a kind of a protective protective cup. This is the the Beijing thing to get an idea. Inside there are buildings you can see but it's the minimum aestheticization, and this is even uglier for my taste, this is the this is the Shanghai Shanghai Center like three teacups and so on. Do you remember I used in some of my books this disgusting example of chocolate eggs Kinder Surprise, where you have the eggs. I mean these are like for me if anything are these not isn't this not a kind of a gigantic this chocolate Kinder egg where the jewel is inside and so on. This logic of protecting the jewel inside reaches its climax in the project for the new Mariinsky Theatre in Leningrad. I kill you if you pronounce the name Saint Petersburg, it is and it will be Leningrad. The functional box-like theatre building in black marble, it's simply an 18th-century palace, is as it were cocooned by a freestanding irregular glass structure. You see here you have as it were the principle in its purest. It's the building will be the same, they will just kind of a cover it up in a cocoon-like way. Then the last step, the aestheticization of the skin culminates in the so-called, they are the ugliest for me, sculptural Frank Gehry buildings, where the outside shell envelop- enveloping the functional inside is no longer just a shell, even a slightly aestheticized shell, but a meaningful sculpture of its own, of its own. The goal is to achieve what usually people call the Bilbao effect, to create a vibrant public space in the midst of the city's boring grey concrete jungle. So okay, a couple of to get you an idea of this, like this is I think in from Chicago one Frank Gehry building, again a sculpture from the outside of its own. This is Tenerife Auditorium in Santa Cruz, another of these whatever you want buildings. Then 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. A little bit like if you saw Lord of the Rings the hobbits' dwellings in the first, you know, it simply it looks just as a small hills countryside and the building is simply as it were between the grass skin and the earth itself. Okay, the most famous architectural example is here the Yokohama Port Terminal. It can be seen as the extreme case where in a way the whole inside of the building is reduced to the 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. You know the architects, what they want to do is to say our building should organically fit into natural environments, not break the continuity. You, from if you are outside, you just see the grass the hill going on. But I think the effect is exactly the opposite one: nature is de-realized. It appears as if natural surface of grass is an artificial skin concealing complex machinery. And then I okay, to give you an example I didn't find a good one, this would be something coming close to this skin surface that it's just goes on with the round but it's, you know, it is as if imagine earth itself as a living body and imagine the surface of the earth conceived as skin and imagine squeezing in between living space. Then okay, to conclude all the variations, there is maybe another version of the relation between inside and outside so that we turn it around as here in London with Tate Modern where the outside is a decaying old abandoned derelict megalith, power station or whatever, so that you know you don't keep as in Mariinsky Theatre the old inside building and wrap it on, you keep the old outside but you totally renovate, totally change the inside. Okay, so much for description. Now a little bit of interpretation. The ideological-political investment of such venues becomes clear when they are raised in a town caught into a political and not only political battle. Two examples from Israel. On October 28th, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the Simon Wiesenthal Center can build its long-planned Center for Human Dignity, Museum of Tolerance, that this museum can be built on a contested site in the middle of Jerusalem. Who will design it? Of course, it's a boring story, Frank Gehry of course. This vast complex will consist of a general museum, children's museum, theatre, conference center, library, gallery, lecture halls, cafeterias, and so on. The museum's declared mission will be to promote civility and respect among different segments of the Jewish community and between people of all faiths. The only obstacle, overrun by the Supreme Court ruling, was that the museum site served as Jerusalem's main Muslim cemetery until This dark spot wonderfully enacts, I think, the hidden truth of this multiconfessional project. It is a place celebrating tolerance open to all but protected by the Israeli cupola which ignores the subterranean victims of intolerance, as if one needs a little bit of intolerance to create the space for a Museum of Tolerance. And as if this is not enough, there is another even vast more vast project going on in Jerusalem. Israel is quietly carrying out a one hundred million dollars multi-year development plan in the so-called Holy Basin, the site of some of the most significant religious and national heritage just outside the walled old city. It's part of an effort to strengthen the status of Jerusalem as Israeli capital. A good part of the execution of this plan is outsourced to private to a private group which is simultaneously buying up Palestinian property for Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem. As part of the plan, garbage dumps and wastelands are being cleared and turn into lush gardens and parks, now already accessible to visitors who can walk along new footpaths and take in the majestic views along with new signs and displays that point out significant points of Jewish history and conveniently many of the unauthorized Palestinian houses had to be erased to create the space for the redevelopment of the area. This whole area is an infinitely complicated landscape dotted with shrines and still hidden treasures of three major monotheistic religions, so the official argument is that its improvement is for everyone's benefit: Jews, Muslims, and Christians, since it involves restoration that will draw more visitors to an area of exceptional global interest. However, as people from Peace Now, the Israel peace organization, noted, the planning aims to create an ideological tourist park which will determine Jewish dominance in the area. So back to my main line. The central semiotic mystery of this kind of performance art or religious whatever cultural multi-functional venues is the mystery of formal redoubling. Why a house within a house? Why does a container itself have to be contained? Does not this sometimes freakish display of inconsistency and excess, does it not cry out lightly loudly, functioning as a symptom, a message encoded in this mess? 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? A close analysis of the envelope that encompasses buildings brings us I think to the same result. Here I refer to a very intelligent architect who is also a writer, he was the key person in doing that Yokohama Port Terminal, the Spanish Alejandro Zaera-Polo, who writes wrote a lot about the concept of architectural envelope as the border between outside and inside. He defines envelope as the membrane which separates the inside of a building from the outside. And although Zaera-Polo is very pro-capitalist, he is as close as you can come to a Deleuzian capitalist. He claims that we live in this Deleuzian terms deterritorialized postmodern capitalism and he tries to draw consequences from it. His main reference apart from Deleuze interestingly is Peter Sloterdijk. Sloterdijk's notion of spheres, spheres in the sense of immunisation of cordoning off part of space. According to Zaera-Polo, far from advocating a return to premodern containment, Sloterdijk was the first to propose what one can call the provincialism for the global era. A quote from Zaera-Polo: "The world as a foamy space filled with bubbles and balloons of different scales and qualities. 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 buildings but of its political, their political, social, and psychological implications." End of quote. So which are the political implications of this appetite for the envelope as a device of insulation and immunisation? And I find this again quite a correct insight into how this Deleuzian praising of nomadism deterritorialization etc. is just one side of the story. The it's crucial that this deterritorialization that always generates a kind of autopoietic self-structuring which is immunisation, enclosure spaces and so on and so on. Apart from the relative aesthetic and political autonomy it provides, the envelope provides and the obvious environmental function, protecting part of space. Envelope also serves Zaera-Polo makes this clear as a security device. A 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 faithful difference is that the envelope secured a privatized public space. Another quote: "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 deterritorialization, 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 architecture 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 the urban architectural version of 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. The last quote from Zaera-Polo: "Sloterdijk's politics of climatization points to a process in which growing sectors of urban space are given to private agents to develop and maintain: gardeners, event managers, 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. This tendency reached its peak for the time being in the so-called Crystal Island project in Moscow, recently announced by Norman Foster, with two and a half million square meters under a single envelope. It will be the world's largest building, five times the size of Pentagon. The project is described as an example of sustainability, able to improve the environmental performance of the building by swallowing ever larger areas of the city under a single envelope designed to enhance natural ventilation and daylight and so on and so on. Incidentally all this I think this there is a strict class dimension in all this favorable topic today of sustainability. You know like everything should be sustainable at no ecological costs and so on and so on. Buildings should be sustainable of course then the the amount of energy material money you spend for such a sustainable building of course it costs ten times more than the building full being would pollute and so on. I simply think that that this idea of sustainability is I don't have time to develop this is our own version of the craziest idea of Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, you know this idea of Juche idea, you know that they have. This is they call sustainability this kind of a self-reliance and so on. So it's easy to laugh at North Korea, we are following their advice. The official progressive ideology and politics like the New Labour here in the UK, they like to celebrate such projects as models of the revitalization of the decaying city centers. However, I think 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. And I think again this is the truth of all these performance arts venues and so on. You have the ordinary city grey ordinary people and then you have this secured immunized air-conditioned public spaces, that's crucial. Not private, privatized public spaces. This brings us to the social antagonism these buildings try to resolve. On the one hand, to build a performing arts venue rates as a Holy Grail for architects. A quote from a propaganda book for performance art venues, quote: "Unlike the more conventional types of buildings such as offices, housing, even civic architecture, which have to conform to the streetscape, a performing arts venue can afford to be bold and unusual to stand out." End of quote. So again, here you don't have to be functionalist, here you can let your imagination run wild and so on. However, this space for creative freedom is counteracted by the demand for the building's multifunctionality. Venue managers cannot, another quote from that propaganda book, cannot 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 and so on and so on. So remember when already months ago I developed this idea how we have today a specific type of publicity which is no longer utilitarian quality of the product but also not its symbolic value like I signal my status, but the experience provided. Like you drink Starbucks coffee's experience of community, participating in ecological projects and so on and so on. Here also it's a nice example they focus on this like the point is how you as a visitor will how you will experience it. This demand I claim is not only financial but profoundly ideological, here we come at the ideology beneath this performance arts venues. It reflects a cultural tension. Again I quote from the book, incidentally the title of the book if you are interested in I don't advise you to buy this boring otherwise it's Michael Hammond, "Performing Architecture: Opera Houses, Theatres and Concert Halls for the Twenty-First Century," London Okay. Here is the last quote. "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 had 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." You notice here this incredibly disgusting patronizing attitude, like the theatre only would have been only for the elite, to get stupid ordinary people you must offer cafeteria and so on. This constant effort to counteract the threat of elitism signals a series of oppositions within which performance arts buildings operate: public-private, open-restrained, elite-popular, all variations on the basic motif of class struggle, which we are told no longer exists today. The space of these oppositions delineates the problem to which performance arts buildings are a solution. How does the anti-elitist architecture of perform- performance arts venues fit these coordinates? Its attempt to overcome elitist exclusivity fails since it reproduces the paradoxes of the upper-class liberal openness. Its falsity, the failure to achieve its goal, is the falsity and limitation of our tolerant liberal capitalism. The effective message of the political unconscious of these performance arts venues 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 normality 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, which is false. Difficult as it may sometimes be for the broad public to get into, to really enjoy Schoenberg or Webern or in paintings Paul Klee or whomever, there is I claim nothing elitist about great art. Great art is by definition universal emancipatory potentially addressing at us all. When in elite places like the old Metropolitan Opera 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 if there is a composer who is top of the top elite it's Mozart, to see Mozart and the rich crowd as belonging to the same space is an obscenity. There is a well-known story from the early years of Metropolitan Opera when a high society lady, I think one of the Morgan of a bankers Morgan family, one of the opera's great patrons arrived she arrived half an hour late half an hour into the first act. She demanded that the performance be interrupted for a couple of minutes and the light turned on the opera performance so that she could inspect the dresses of other ladies with her binoculars. And of course she got it. 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 of elitist. You see my simple point I think it's exactly the opposite. My God poor guys students spare just to go to the opera, it's the rich guys who occupy that space which is allegedly here to make it more popular and so on and so on. So again I think that although you can give as you always can a whole series of these factual utilitarian reasons, we live in global warming we need to be protected and so on or whatever, it's clear that I think this that for me performance arts venues precisely materialize in all this redoubling of space publicly controlled space and so on this tension of let's call it democratic exclusivism. It is for everyone but how to filter it properly nonetheless. So is there anyone here where is here a possibility if there is one a a possibility to make something out of this? What would a progressive I ask a very naive question, what would a progressive architect have done with all this? Okay my basic notion would be drop the project itself, do something for ordinary people. I mean I I I saw in Zurich for example in a suburb of Zurich or in many cities some attempts for even counterculture rock and so on to occupy this famous abandoned factories in the suburbs and to make an an alternate performance art center but I don't I I I don't think it properly works. But so again for me the the one should do a proper democratic thing and change the focus simply and ask what can be done in those of ordinary grey buildings. Something should be changed there. But nonetheless there is an interesting phenomenon going on here in these buildings where maybe some kind of creative space is open. Here I would like to conclude with a reference to of course my favorite Darwinian biologist Stephen Jay Gould. Maybe you know about Gould's great polemic with Dawkins apropos of of so-called notion of exaptation. Gould's idea that the fundamental mechanism of evolutionary choice is not direct adaptation but exaptation. Exaptation in many different two main meanings. One meaning is that an organ which originally developed for a certain function is then reappropriated for a totally different function and then much more interesting is another meaning although it resembles the first one where you have something which develops not so much as a certain for a certain function but as a kind of a necessary byproduct for this function and then this kind of a non-functional excess can then be exapted, that is to say adapted for another new totally different for totally different purpose. Why is this so interesting? Because Gould goes here to the end and he and I'm totally on his side here, he claims and I think he triumphantly wins against all those vulgar Darvinians like Steven Pinker and so on, he claims that language itself is a product of exaptation, that you cannot account for language in evolutionary terms. You cannot play any of these pseudo-Marxist late Friedrich Engels games, you know that people when people were collaborating with division of labor as Engels put it in an incredible circular reasoning, people discovered that in order to collaborate they have many things to tell each other so they invented language, you know but haha to invent this you already have to have language and so on. So of course language is of great use but this is all secondary. And he even specializes in what way something to do with with horizontal posture the use of arms and so on developed excess brain and jaws and so on. He has a very nice explanation of how language emerged so that something which the the form the position of the head which developed for totally different reasons was readapted to this use. Why am I mentioning Gould? What has this to do with architecture? Ah here comes the beauty. If you read some Gould, and you should, you will discover that his original he took the very idea from architecture. His original example is so-called spandrels in architecture. He takes the example of San Marco Church in Venice. The idea is that when the way they were doing churches, but now the term is generalized, when you especially when you combine different structuring principles, now I'm talking as it is obvious to some of you I'm ashamed I will kill myself if some of you will tell me I am an architect no. Please don't say this if you are that, but the idea is that especially when you use different structuring principles in the very elementary way like you have a church which is basically square forms but then you have a cupola or a tower or whatever which is round that always when you combine different structuring principles there are places which are here of no use at all just for example he shows in a wonderful way Gould how in the San Marco Church because of how the cupola is supported by square forms you have some kind of a empty triangle forms and then they were used to put in statues. But in a proper logical form it's clear that it was not meant to be a statue, it was a kind of a necessary structural excess with no function but you can exapt it in the Gould sense reappropriate it for a totally different version. And then it's interesting how Gould himself at some point explodes into different architectural uses. He even goes in a too simple way often claiming how for example I don't know one of the in Paris at least proverbial places for homeless people to stay beneath the bridges. I mean beneath the bridges it wasn't meant for homeless people to stay but you know that you this and I think and here maybe a materialist and I really mean materialist analysis because what materialism means is precisely reasoning against teleology that you see how teleology always presupposes some some opportunistic bricolage tinkering chance. Here some interesting things are happening in these performance art venues. You know with all this interplay of multiple buildings and so on there are great interstitial spaces which are totally non-functional. And I was told that especially in Japan, and don't underestimate the Japanese, on the one hand I'm a racist, Japanese I doubt if they are human but they are the most intelligent, how should I put it? Because you know Japanese know all about this paradox with bringing utilitarian function to its absurd. You know like I already mentioned it here years years ago you remember that I forgot the name, I think Chindogu, but I'm not sure, that it was more popular some years ago when I was younger, that high art of bringing functional products to their extreme which is ridiculous. It was a big fashion, I have some five six volumes, the rule is the following one: you should construct a small practical object which is feasible, it shouldn't be nonsense, it should function, but it must be so ridiculous that you are you should be sure that it will not be commercialized. The moment it can really be commercialized you are out. For example, I don't know, I even bought one but it broke down, this one okay they cheated yeah, it's it's glasses with wipers so that you can walk safely in rain and you know. Or for example you have butter butter as a lipstick so that if you know if you want you can just as a lipstick put butter on. Or also for example fresh water, sounds even practical for me, it's an inverted umbrella and a small glass so you can walk in the rain and always drink fresh and so on. You know so along this Japanese way I no longer that I read that precisely in some of these Japanese performance art venues really maybe slightly I wouldn't say subversive interesting things are happening when these interstitial spaces were occupied by either I don't know avant-garde leftist groups whatever and then they were first tolerated a little bit like they thought oh perfect we will integrate them and so on but then at some point the focus shifted they noticed that more people are coming to enjoy this alternate versions than and so on. So maybe this is this is this is one way. This is one way to do it, that to simply to to to invest to reappropriate this excessive non-functional interstitial spaces. Okay I today I tried to be not too long, tomorrow it will also be like one hour and a quarter and then on on Thursday and Friday it's long boring Marxism again. So thanks very much and if you have some mercy please have mercy have mercy I was. I'm now trying to think like Chinese, you know what I always liked how you did the Japanese now you do the Chinese. Yeah, yeah, in the sense of, you know I always like with Chinese how they quantified. You know when I was young and there was a break between Soviet Union and China, they said this break will last years at least. Then a couple of years later the relations got a little bit better, you know how the Chinese signaled it, the it was still anti-Khrushchev Soviet propaganda, they said the the break between Soviet Union and China is a long-term break, it will last at least years, you know like in this Chinese sense I would say percent I was bluffing. How should I put it, no? I did my honest stuff to read some architecture and so on, I could have bluffed more but again, what I basically wanted to do is something very honest and please don't project into me again what I didn't say. I consciously didn't want to play this politically correct game to give you some big examples of progressive architecture and so on. I also don't- all I say is how we should be aware how not only as Claude Lévi-Strauss said, food, faces, but architecture also is frozen embodied ideology. Not in the sense of some primitive reflection of predominant ideas but in the sense that how we structural social state, it is and that we should simply be aware of it. So nonetheless to give some link to my task, along these lines one of the big tasks of communism is, and we don't have to wait for the end of capitalism, is precisely to find new modes. There were attempts which were all too naive, you know, from kibbutz I know too of partially at least limiting private space. Like this kibbutz idea which the kibbutz at least that I visited I like because I'm lazy, this how should I put it, the kibbutz that I visited of course it was probably a tourist fake already no, but what I liked is nonetheless this nice balance between private and public there. That it is a public kitchen, you share the meals and so on, but nonetheless you do have your space sleeping. And I claim that here communism will begin if new forms of this very concrete family life, and by new forms I mean precisely the most elementary spatial disposition. We should become aware a little bit of historicity of all this, of how for example corridors the way we know them were invented from what I know only in the early modernity, before you simply passed from one to another room and so on and so on. So again it's just an idea to become a little bit aware of this dimension and also for the need to re- to reinvent spaces. Now I really okay, good. Good. As Slavoj was speaking I was thinking of two things which are not far from here and I think quite relevant to his discourse. The first is of course Senate House right next door. And as you may know a number of influential commentators including Simon Jenkins in the Guardian wrote last year that it should be razed to the ground because it represents Stalinist architecture. Of course others say that it represents Hitler- I mean you know Nazi architecture. And of course this is an international style. And Jenkins's point was that in order for London to become a proper postmodern and globalized city, those kind of landmark buildings of the international style should be demolished. But there is another even more relevant example not far from here. You may know that about four or five years ago the government decided that the whole South Bank complex should be covered with a transparent membrane, an envelope as it were. Indeed. And that at the minute Boris apparently is not behind the project but it is still a decision. And here you have fantasy at its purest to use Zizekian terms because if you remember at the time the argument in favor of that enclosure of the South Bank complex was that as now we have so many continentals and Europeans in London, and also as now we go to the Mediterranean for our holidays, we have all become continental and Europeans but our weather does not work that well. So what we're going to do is to enclose the space, have a permanent temperature of about degrees, have olive trees and grapevines and other such Mediterranean plants in this space so we can all feel Mediterranean. And of course in Umberto Eco's terms this would be a Mediterranean even better than the Mediterranean because I just came back from Greece and the temperature there was degrees. So if you get a permanent degrees in the center of London, London will become the most Mediterranean place in the world. So that extent you will have fantasy at its purest, all of us here in London will be Mediterranean. But anyway so that is for something to add. But I want to add to what you said, I agree because you know problem with the Senate House no? You know first you must know this elementary education even me from the primitive ethnic cleansing raping Balkan knows it that that this was the model for the Ministry of Truth no? From room room Orwell worked in room basically as a spy and of course he modeled you know, don't you have a sense of tourism to make it a tourist symbol room and if you pay additionally you get that guy who is Richard Burton in the second movie version comes to question you a little bit. Okay but what I wanted to say is that do you know about fast- do you know no you didn't tell me this I read in a history of World War II all those Nazi German plans for the invasion of England, you know that Senate House was meant to be the German headquarters. Yeah that's why it was not bombed that is the that is an urban myth but it's a great myth. But nonetheless I must say I am horrible here, I think it can be reappropriated, I'm for it. I'm absolutely for it, I love this kind of totalitarian buildings and what is so interesting is what you exactly say, you know when they say this is typical Stalinist totalitarian and so on, what people forget is that the first thing to do is to relativize it by drawing attention to the obvious fact that also in United States in that at that time in the 30s exactly the same thing was going on. Go to New York and see all those public buildings like the Post Office and so on, it's exactly the same monumental style. Monumental style. So but this is of course the international style and indeed speaking about the progressive architecture that was indeed the prototype of socialist architecture in the 20s and the 30s, the idea of building huge big buildings of social housing will be relatively cheap and creating a kind of prototype little village that could live together, to that extent you know this is a major architectural but also social experiment because the leaders of that group of course believed through that architectural restructuring of space equality social equality you know sort of would emerge. There is another irony here which followed the modernist the artistic this very idea of Stalinist neo-Stalinist kitsch Baroque, you know these levels inside no? I don't know it's true I can tell you what my architecture friends in New York told me that the origin of this is not some obsession with Gothic medieval time, it's the Stalinist admiration of America. The crucial factor of Bolshevism of the 20s was the absolute cult of American Fordist efficient Ford was almost a saint, Ford, the before the anti-Semitic Henry Ford I mean of the cars was celebrated so this was for them imitating New York. And what's at the origin of this in New York, it was explained to me it's again total contingency basically. It is so it was explained to me that after Manhattan was all built, the only way to develop was up. Now the problem with up was that first they simply added levels. The problem was that because of static problems and so on some of the buildings collapsed. So they passed a law if you want to go up you should go in. Every for purely then I love this logic of how out of totally external contingent necessity a style a style develops. Okay enough, let's open it to the public. Any questions, comments, criticisms, particularly from architects, do we have any architect or art students here? Yes. I know that you talk a lot about the the building in Kieslowski's Decalogue. Yeah. Um and I'm wondering about sort of this talk of modernist structures and the fact that at the end of the Decalogue it appears it has to be destroyed within itself, you know the bomb is- Did it? Because I think that he planned it but he didn't do it. I read somewhere that in the original scenario the idea was some gas leaking explosion the entire block should crumble but it doesn't happen as far as I remember. Right. But it should have. Yeah but even the projection of it happening yeah, I mean is there something to be read into this that about architecture is never egalitarian that it always has to be destroyed as soon as you get too close to it or you know? Yeah yeah okay you got me here because now I don't have any I agree with you but I don't have any deep funny or whatever reaction to what you say all I'm saying is that I think that from the very beginning a certain idea of egalitarian architecture was always patronizing. I'm almost more in sympathy with this primitive lower class idea of let's imitate the rich, let's do it like them, you know which is why I I'm quite serious in claiming that my favorite street in Europe is this maybe in the entire world high point of of Stalinist kitsch, the Stalinallee, now it's called Frankfurter Allee unfortunately in East Berlin. It's like two three miles of pure Stalinist kitsch Baroque and again you know it mixes in a wonderful way popular accessibility, popular mass mass apartment with nonetheless this this Baroque Baroque and so on. I mean like what why shouldn't ordinary people have this Baroque bombastic kitsch and so on? I'm in a way I'm in a way I'm for it. But I'm for the- you know what's my my attitude towards Stalinist architecture? Here I'm for ruining that block, because what I really hate is the late Stalinist more modern architecture, this communist architecture from the sixties, like if you go to East Berlin the new Alexanderplatz, this kind of a steel concrete and so on, that's horrible. I like authentic from the third from the 40s and early 50s this kitsch Baroque architecture. I hate these building blocks with glass and so on, I I hate this Stalin- this late okay not even Stalinist, late socialist, late socialist modernism and so on. But on the other hand you know I have a- now this would have been a much more nice reading which I cannot provide now, I think that the reason this idea came that it should all explode I claim it's more it's something much deeper there. And in one of his interviews which is not so well known Kieslowski develops it. It's not so much this horror at this apartment blocks they should be destroyed, it's that he desc- it's a kind of a jealous possessiveness, that he created such a perfect enclosed universe because all the stories in Decalogue people live in the same apartment block, that as if now I finish it I will destroy it no one else will mess with it. It's more this kind of assertive possessive pleasure you know I did something so beautiful no nobody else will play. It's more this kind of assertion of some kind of a possessive possessive closure. Because I think that I think that even you know why do people read Decalogue as some kind of a desperate or whatever? I think it's not so desperate, it's basically pretty I always read it as a pretty optimistic series. And I think the communists were very intelligent, I was recently in Poland and asked some friends and they confirmed this to me. You know that this this is very ironic because in the West it's usually seen as a devastating critique, it shows the greyness of grey nature of the desperate daily life. But you know that this was the great state TV project in the era of Jaruzelski dictatorship Decalogue. He got all the top actors, he got all the money, which is why incidentally I was told many
So, as I said yesterday, today it's architecture, tomorrow it's Wagner, music, opera. First, I would like to justify the term I will use a lot: postmodern architecture. I know that this term is half forgotten today, but I still think it has its use. And the criterion is simply one of, how should I call it, efficiency. I think that simply what Lyotard and others did is by applying the name to cover a certain complex great number of phenomena. Just to apply on all these phenomena, from economic phenomena to art phenomena to social phenomena and so on, to cultural phenomena, a name, postmodernism, it did provide some additional, how should I call it, intelligibility. It introduced a new order of intelligibility into the confused multiplicity of historical experience. So I think in this elementary sense the term is justified. My thesis will be that, to use terms from my own theory, what is called postmodern architecture is closely related to the term that I use a lot, the term of parallax. Parallax as a shift in perspective directly inscribed into the object of our gaze, the object itself. And already at the most immediate level, if you think about the best-known buildings by Libeskind or Frank Gehry, their work often appears as a desperate or joyous attempt to combine two incompatible structuring principles within the same building. In the case of Libeskind, it's usually horizontal or horizontal, vertical and oblique cubes. In the case of Frank Gehry, traditional house combined with modern concrete, corrugated iron, glass supplements, as if two principles are locked in a struggle of hegemony. Like again, the example is simple, that it cannot be simpler. This is a typical Libeskind. You see, it's as if, it's almost like, it's very primitive I know, my explanation not the building, I mean, it's as if, as if, as if, as if we look at the object from different perspectives, almost like in cubism, and the object tries to inscribe into its structure different perspectives. So it's, it's as if the object, the building, materializes different, here even clearer, materializes different perspective, different structuring principles. And of course, the first reaction of my Marxist mind is that this has something, has to have something to do with social antagonism. So how does an ideological edifice, a real architectural edifice included, how does it deal with social antagonism? I want to begin with an example which I often refer to, but I will not be repeating myself, I will give a totally different twist to it because recently I discovered that I simply missed the point the way I was dealing with what? With the famous example from Fredric Jameson's "The Political Unconscious" about the unique facial decorations of the Caduveo Indians from Brazil. They use, Caduveo Indians, I quote here Claude Lévi-Strauss from "Tristes Tropiques," they use a design which is symmetrical but yet lies across an oblique axis. A complicated situation based upon two contradictory forms of duality and resulting in a compromise brought about by a secondary opposition between the ideal axis of the object itself, the human face, and the ideal axis of the figure which it represents. So basically, it's the same structural imbalance as the one in the Libeskind buildings as I just showed you. It is as if there are two possible axes, one simple horizontal, sorry, rather vertical axis of the face, and then the building itself, an oblique axis. Why this strange tension in the structuring principle? Rather, combination of two incompatible structuring principles? Here is Jameson's comment, a quote: "Already on the purely formal level, this visual text has been grasped as a contradiction by way of the curiously provisional and asymmetrical resolution it proposes for that contradiction." So again, it's contradiction, a structural tension inscribed into the very formal fabric of the object. It's incidentally a little bit like a map of Manhattan where as you know you have horizontal, vertical, and then oblique Broadway. Then in the next crucial move, Lévi-Strauss interprets this formal contradiction as not a reflection but as a symbolic act, a transposition or displacement of the basic social imbalance or asymmetry or antagonism of the society of this Latin American Indian tribe, Caduveo. Here is the crucial description: "Caduveo are a hierarchical society and their nascent hierarchy is already the place of the emergence, if not of political power in the strict sense, then at least of relations of domination. The inferior status of women, the subordination of youth to elders, and the development of hereditary aristocracy. Yet, whereas this latent power structure is among the neighboring Guana and Bororo tribes masked by a division into moieties which cuts across the three castes and whose exogamous exchange appears to function in a non-hierarchical, essentially egalitarian way, it is openly present in Caduveo life as surface inequality and conflict. The social institutions of the Guana and Bororo, on the other hand, provide a realm of appearance in which real hierarchy and inequality are dissimulated by the reciprocity of moieties and halves of the tribe, and in which therefore asymmetry of class is balanced by the symmetry of these moieties, of these halves." End of quote from, end of quote from, from this is Jameson's description. Is this also not our predicament? Do we have, do we not have in our societies exactly the same tension? We are split between formal legal equality sustained by the institutions of democratic state and class distinctions enforced by the economic system. We live the tension between politically correct respect for human rights and so on and the growing inequalities, gated communities, exclusions, and so on and so forth. And here, this is the point I missed, here Lévi-Strauss deserves a precise and close reading. What he is saying is not that simply and directly the Caduveo facial decorations formulate an imaginary resolution of real contradictions. It is rather that they supplement the lack of a properly functioning appearance which would have been inscribed into their very social institutional organization. In other words, we are not dealing with a longing for real equality but with the longing for a proper appearance. And I think this is the formula of ideology. It's a very nice distinction. You got it. They are a society where we have all the usual stuff of emerging class distinctions: women are less than men, elders rule, aristocracy, all that stuff and so on. Other tribes mask this with some complicated intergroup relations exchange so that what really are class distinctions, already hierarchical, are masked by the symmetries of horizontal exchange. So that at least the appearance is maintained, the appearance of equality and so on. Here, the appearance is missing. So that's what I like so much that, you know, it's not "we are not equal, we want it," it's not, how should I put it, it's not as in ordinary bourgeois democracy and so on where you say real inequality is masked through the appearance of democratic, sorry, of democratic equality and so on and so forth. What is missing here with these tribes is precisely this appearance itself, which of course is never only an appearance, it is an appearance embodied in, I'm not dismissing this appearance as only an appearance, it's an appearance embodied in very concrete social procedures, rituals, and so on. Which is why, as we all know, nonetheless, we shouldn't follow the simplistic Marxist line of just formal democracy. Formal democracy means a form, a form which is a social reality, and this form, even if it is just a form of equality, at least gives you as it were an Archimedean point of support from where to start bombarding society with demands for real equality. So again, what is missing in this tribe is the proper appearance. The idea is that other tribes are so, again, this is the beauty of Lévi-Strauss's reading. What this strange asymmetry of face expresses is not a longing for real equality but for a proper socially functioning appearance. And I think the same goes, that would be my reading. I tried to think about an architectural equivalent. If you know Oscar Niemeyer's plan of Brasília. Usually it's read just as some kind of egalitarian, okay, for our tastes today a little bit totalitarian, not for my tastes, utopia of a city. But I think that Niemeyer, and I read some biography of him, he was well aware that Brazil is even far from a truly functioning liberal bourgeois democracy. It's more a longing for a proper appearance. The city Brasília, the city, the capital, is more the architecture of the city is a dream of a properly functioning appearance. This is why Jameson is fully justified to talk about the political unconscious. There is a coded message in an architectural formal play, and the message delivered by a building often functions as the return of the repressed of the official ideology. Recall Wittgenstein's motto: "What we cannot directly talk about, it can be shown by the form of our activity." What the official ideology cannot openly talk about can be shown by the mute signs of a building. And this brings us to an unexpected result. It's not only if we are leftists, our first reaction would have been of course we live in a hierarchical society, the dream, the utopian dream is the one of more justice, equality and so on and so forth. Jameson points out that quite often we get the opposite paradox, that the fantasy embodied in the mute language of buildings is not necessarily the utopia of justice, freedom, equality betrayed by actual social relations. This fantasy can also articulate a longing for inequality, for clear hierarchy and class distinctions. I think this is, it's a very simplistic reading but I think it's a moment of truth in it, this is how we should read the famous Stalinist neo-Gothic architecture. I mean even at a very primitive level, you know with all those, my favorite buildings of course, from Lomonosov University in Moscow to Home of Culture or that House of Culture in Warsaw and so on, all this neo-Gothic architecture. It in a way enacts the return of the repressed of the official egalitarian emancipatory socialist ideology, the weird desire for hierarchy and social distinctions. So it is not simply that ideology also permits the alleged extra-ideological strata of everyday life. This materialization of ideology renders visible inherent antagonisms which the explicit formulation of ideology cannot afford to acknowledge. It is as if an ideological edifice, if it is to function normally, must obey a kind of imp of perversity and articulate its inherent antagonism in the externality of its material existence. Social oppression and hierarchy concealed in the explicit Stalinist ideological text, which talks about equality and justice, social oppression and hierarchy are thereby acted out, staged if not stated. You see, this is for me the wonder of ideology, that ideology never lies, that's my basic rule. It tells the truth. Just for example if you are in, let's say you visit Moscow in the late '30s, you will say oh but it's a fake equality, there is a new hierarchy and so on. I mean an intelligent guy will tell you, of course we all know this, look at our buildings I mean. The mystery is how the system not only tolerated it but even required it. Why? I think that this was the only way for the people to accept hierarchy. It had to be remarked, you know, so that the message that the entire Stalinist ideology, official explicit in texts and ideology embodied in architecture, the message you get is a precise image of reality. It's officially we are an egalitarian society but effectively hierarchy, but hierarchy which remains mute, which it's not allowed to articulate it. In this sense, I claim, architecture often not only illustrates ideology in this simplistic sense that if you have a technocratic society architecture will try to repeat this utilitarian functionalist vision and so on, no, architecture does more. It brings out its stages in a mute way the repressed truth, the repressed antagonism of it. Which is why, if I may repeat, it's my favorite from the old Hitchcock book which is in any case now out of print that I did. In this sense I think one should read "Psycho," Hitchcock's masterpiece, as the staging of an architectural antagonism. I always thought that "Psycho" is the greatest film about architecture. Norman Bates is split precisely between the two houses: the modern horizontal motel and the vertical Gothic mother's house. He is literally split between the two, remember forever running between the two up and down, never finding a proper place of his own. And probably I hope you know that these two houses both have precise models in painting, no? So that the motel is Edward Hopper, all those motels, and the other one, mother's house, is also Hopper but this early Hopper house by the railroad I think. In this sense the *unheimlich*, uncanny character of the film's end means that in his full identification with the mother, Norman Bates finally found his *Heim*, his home. In modernist works like "Psycho," this split is still visible, while the main goal of today's postmodern architecture is in a way to obfuscate it. Let's just recall the so-called New Urbanism, with its return to small family houses in small towns, with front porches recreating the cozy atmosphere of the local community. Clearly, this is the case of architecture as ideology at its purest, providing an imaginary although real, materialized in the actual disposition of houses, an imaginary solution to a real social deadlock which has nothing to do with architecture and all with late capitalist dynamics. A more ambiguous case of the same antagonism is the work of Frank Gehry. He takes as the basis of one of the two poles of the antagonism: either the old-fashioned family house or a modernist concrete and glass building, and then either submits this let's say old-fashioned family house to a kind of cubist anamorphic distortion, curved angles of walls and windows, or combines the old family home with a modernist supplement. So here is my final hypothesis: if the Bates's motel from Hitchcock's "Psycho" were to be built by Frank Gehry directly combining the old mother's house and the flat modern hotel into a new hybrid entity, there would have been no need for Norman to kill his victims. He would have been relieved of the unbearable tension that compels him to run between the two places. He would have a third place of mediation between the two extremes. And again, it would be interesting to read many of modern, not only works of art but here real-life occurrences as something which relies very much on its architectural background. For example, I think that a year ago when we already talked about it here, that Austrian monster Josef Fritzl, you know who, again, it's the whole problem is the problem of architecture. The first floor, happy Christian family, beneath the monstrous or even the monstrous primordial father, symbolic law, symbolic father, the monstrous father. Now let's make a crucial step further. Lévi-Strauss himself applies this same type of analysis that he did with Caduveo faces also to urbanism and architecture. In his wonderful short essay "Do Dual Organizations Exist?" where he deals with the spatial disposition of buildings in the Winnebago, one of the Great Lake tribes. I want to focus here on another aspect that I neglected in my reading, I repeat it a couple of times in my book, of this Lévi-Straussian example. Lévi-Strauss makes here an additional crucial point: since the two subgroups of the tribe form one and the same tribe living in the same village, this identity somehow has to be symbolically inscribed. How? By what Lévi-Strauss ingeniously calls the zero institution, a kind of institutional counterpart to the famous mana, the empty signifier with no determinate meaning since it signifies only the presence of meaning as such in opposition to its absence. A specific institution which has no positive determinate function, its only function is the purely negative one of signaling the presence of social institutions as such in contrast to pre-social chaos. It is the reference to such a zero institution which enables all members of the tribe to experience themselves as such, as members of the same tribe. This zero institution is then for me ideology at its purest, the direct embodiment of the ideological function of providing a neutral, all-encompassing space in which social antagonism is obliterated, in which all members of society can recognize themselves. And my hypothesis is that big, okay, I develop in one of my books as one function of this zero institution, namely the modern notion of nation, of sorry of nation. Nation is precisely this kind of a zero institution in the sense of wherever you are in social edifice there is a zero level of belonging where we all belong, our nation. My hypothesis now is that big performance arts complexes, the paragon of today's architecture, try to impose themselves as this kind of architectural zero institutions. Their very conflicting meaning: amusement and high art, profane and sacred, exclusive and popular, cancel themselves mutually so that the outcome is the presence of meaning as such as opposed to non-meaning. Their meaning is to have meaning, to be islands of meaning in the flow of our meaningless daily existence. In order to provide to provide a brief insight into the parallax nature of this performance art venues, let me begin by the fundamental feature of postmodern architecture: the end of the so-called expressive correspondence between the inside, the division of buildings into rooms and spaces or different activities, and the outside of a building. With postmodern architecture, this correspondence breaks down, we move towards radical incommensurability. The functions, that is to say the rooms, the interior, the inner space, the inner structure of a building, the interior rooms hang within their enormous container like so many floating organs. Look, this is a typical Rem Koolhaas where you have this at its purest. This is the zero level of postmodernism. It's just a box and you see the gap between inside and outside. It's like floating organs, no express- no relation of expressivity there. However, one should not misunderstand this emphasis on the incommensurability between outside and inside. One should not misunderstand it as a critique relying on the demand for some kind of non-alienated continuity between the two. The incommensurability between outside and inside is, I claim, a kind of transcendental a priori in our most elementary phenomenological experience. The reality we see through a window when we look outside from inside 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 we perceive the reality outside in a strange de-realized state, as if one is watching a performance on a screen. When you open the window of a car, the direct impact of the external reality always causes a minimal shock; you are overwhelmed by the proximity of the outside. This is also why when we enter the closed space of a house we are often surprised. It seems that the inside is larger than the outside, as if the house is larger from the inside as from the outside. And you get my point. My point is that the moment we have this minimal enclosure architectural, the moment there is a division between inside and outside, the two are radically incommensurable. If I am this voice, I hate it. Now let me give you an extreme example that I want to make. On the southern side of the demilitarized zone that divides North from South Korea, South Koreans built a unique visitor's site. A theatre building with a large screen-like window in front. It's simply a gigantic hall with a big screen, but the screen opens up on what? Not on a stage, not on a on a movie screen, but onto reality itself towards north. Because this is the only point where from the south, because it's up on a hill, you can see a small North Korean town. So I like this idea that people gather there and pay to see reality as it were. The spectacle people observe when they take seats and look north through the window is reality itself. The barren demilitarized zone with walls and beyond a glimpse of North Korea. Now comes the comedy. As if to comply with the fiction, North Korea has built in front of this theatre a pure fake, a model village with beautiful houses and so on. What North Korea did is that they painted all the houses, but only the side which looks towards south, with colors. You know that the the dresses also are with coupons ration there. Inhabitants there got special rations to get better dresses. Electricity which is strictly rationed is provided for hours every evening. But the local people there have the obligations to walk every evening nicely dressed. The whole reality itself is staged. So a barren zone is given a phantasmatic status elevated into a spectacle simply by being in frame. We thus have to distinguish between two outsides: the direct outside and the inside outside. The two are not the same. In the second case, the outside is no longer simply the unity which contains the inside but is enclosed by the inside. North Korea which is something miserable is sublime when you look at it through the frame of South Korea. There can also be, so you got my point. My point is that we have outside which is simply stupid outside of nature. But what it can be developed in literary, sorry, in art theory very nicely how what all romantics are doing when they select part of outside, a waterfall whatever, is that there is this outside is already seen from some imagined inside. You should always look at an implicit frame. There can also be a false redoubled inside. For example, it happened to me when I was at ZKM, this modern digital art complex in Karlsruhe in West Germany. There is in a TV screen in front of the entrance to the main toilet area which shows continuously on it black and white screen the inside of a small toilet cube with the empty toilet bowl. And I, total idiot as I am, I found myself in this stupid situation where I had to go to the toilet so my first reaction was, oh so nice that they give you information, you know the toilet is free in there. But I said, wait a minute, but when I enter it it will no longer be free and people will see me or what? Then okay, I'm an idiot, it took me some ten seconds to get it that of course this is an running old old shot and so on. But it works, how should I put it, no? What this mutual encroaching of inside and outside indicates is that inside and outside never cover the entire space. There is always an excess of a third space which gets lost in the division into outside and inside. In human dwellings, buildings, there is an intermediate space I claim which is disavowed. We all know it exists but we don't really libidinally 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 narrow spaces between walls or floors. We of course know very well 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 netherworld out of our sight and out of our world. This is why one of the most unpleasant experiences is to observe the shit coming back from the hole in the toilet bowl. It is something like the return of the living dead, I think. We rely on this space but ignore it. Now you will say, "But you are dreaming, this is your your anal obsession." Ah, I claim no, because just remember how in science fiction, horror films, and techno-thrillers precisely this dark space between the walls is the space where horrible threats lurk. From spying machines to monsters, contagious animals, cockroaches, rats, and so on and so on. Recall also in science fiction architecture the mysterious topic of an additional floor or room which is not in the building's plan and where of course terrible terrible things dwell. So you got my point here that the way we, of course, reality is one flat reality. And of course in immediate reality inside is as it were, sorry, outside encompasses inside. But what I am saying is that in our libidinal perception relation to reality things always get more complex. Inside and outside are radically incommensurable. Which is what you can easily experience for example when you are inside the house and then this house is ruined, half the wall blown off. It's not the same inside, somehow it changes, it's simply part of the outside. The magic disappeared. But again, even more interesting for me is is this is this precisely because they are incommensurable inside and outside, the incommensurability again can be proven by this double redoubling. There is outside, a simple outside, and there is the sublime outside seen from the inside. Which is why, you know, you should never forget when you say "room with a view" that the view is nothing in itself, the view is a view from the room. In exactly the same way as goes with nakedness. The best joke about nakedness is for me still the one quoted often by Lacan, he refers to that famous French French satirical writer Alphonse Allais from one hundred years ago who once in a cafeteria, I will not be obscene, okay, you will be the victim. So yeah yeah. So as a woman and said, "Look what a shame, beneath her clothes she is totally naked." I mean, that's how it works. Okay, now let's go on. So based on all this, how can you, yeah yeah. So back to postmodern architecture. I claim that postmodern architecture I don't dismiss it, here I'm not a modernist. While modernism played this game of you know Adolf Loos started with it all, with this idea "Ornament is a crime." And he even put it in extreme racist terms, he claimed that primitive degenerate people do ornaments and then the more civilization progresses the more you go to just lead and mean function and so on. The if the modernist ideal is this total transparency of function, total continuity between inside and outside, what postmodernism does is at least it brings out the antagonism, the antagonism the gap between inside and outside and so on. Or the terms that are usually used recently by architects: the skin is separated from the body. The skin of a building wrapping it is separated from the body. This then opens the space for the ambiguously meaningful forms into which buildings are wrapped. Often a primitive mimetic symbolism, like the entire building resembling an animal, a turtle, a bird, a bug, which this outside is not an expression of its inside but literally just imposed onto the stuff. Like since I was in Australia to give this talk, of course in Australia you find the most obvious example: the Sydney Opera House. I mean in a typically modernist way the meaning itself is ambiguous. What should you know that form which I will not describe it because I will really have to use metaphors, what does it stand for? With my obscene mind I was very happy to learn that the predominant version is gay turtles' orgy. Or big turtles anally penetrating each other. But that's considered the common architectural whatever. So let me now again give you a simple example. This is then what I am talking about. This is skin, skin separated from the body and the body is not just the inside, the body can be buildings of their own. This is one of these boring, I even don't know which one, postmodern stupid, sorry I took the wrong one, let's say this is what I'm talking about where you have skin covering up the inside, that's what I'm talking about. Okay, so let's go on. The link between form and function is cut, there is no causal relationship between the skin, the form, and what is inside. Which are the basic architectural versions of this gap? The zero level is presented by what I already showed you, Koolhaas' buildings, Rem Koolhaas. His formula is the envelope is simply a neutral enormous box. In its interior, its interior houses the multiple functional spaces which hang, this is his own description of his own architecture Koolhaas's, hang within their enormous container like so many floating organs. So again, sorry. This is the zero level of postmodernism. The container, organs, rooms whatever other buildings floating inside, discontinuity between inside and outside. Then this would be for me somehow the zero level, just the separation of skin from surface. Then as in some especially Daniel Libeskind projects, the gap between the protective skin and the inner structure is reflected into skin itself. The same external form, an enormous box, is multiplied relying on the contrast between let us say straight vertical horizontal lines and the diagonal lines of external walls. You remember, just to remind of you, this would be like the minimal reflection where a tension, the gap is inscribed into the external skin itself. 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 on different axes. A weird tension and imbalance, a conflict of principles are thus directly inscribed into the form, as if the actual building lacks a single anchoring point and perspective. 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 this kind of contrast, the contrast between the roundness of the skin and the straight lines of inner structures. A round envelope, an egg-like cupola, envelops a box-like vertical, horizontal, horizontal set of buildings inside, like the giant teacups of the Oriental Art Center in Shanghai or the National Grand Theatre of China in Beijing with its giant metal glass cover, an eggshell protecting the performance buildings. This would be then again not just the zero level, remember just a cube, not just the pure inscription of an antagonism, but the minimal aestheticization, a kind of a protective protective cup. This is the the Beijing thing to get an idea. Inside there are buildings you can see but it's the minimum aestheticization, and this is even uglier for my taste, this is the this is the Shanghai Shanghai Center like three teacups and so on. Do you remember I used in some of my books this disgusting example of chocolate eggs Kinder Surprise, where you have the eggs. I mean these are like for me if anything are these not isn't this not a kind of a gigantic this chocolate Kinder egg where the jewel is inside and so on. This logic of protecting the jewel inside reaches its climax in the project for the new Mariinsky Theatre in Leningrad. I kill you if you pronounce the name Saint Petersburg, it is and it will be Leningrad. The functional box-like theatre building in black marble, it's simply an 18th-century palace, is as it were cocooned by a freestanding irregular glass structure. You see here you have as it were the principle in its purest. It's the building will be the same, they will just kind of a cover it up in a cocoon-like way. Then the last step, the aestheticization of the skin culminates in the so-called, they are the ugliest for me, sculptural Frank Gehry buildings, where the outside shell envelop- enveloping the functional inside is no longer just a shell, even a slightly aestheticized shell, but a meaningful sculpture of its own, of its own. The goal is to achieve what usually people call the Bilbao effect, to create a vibrant public space in the midst of the city's boring grey concrete jungle. So okay, a couple of to get you an idea of this, like this is I think in from Chicago one Frank Gehry building, again a sculpture from the outside of its own. This is Tenerife Auditorium in Santa Cruz, another of these whatever you want buildings. Then 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. A little bit like if you saw Lord of the Rings the hobbits' dwellings in the first, you know, it simply it looks just as a small hills countryside and the building is simply as it were between the grass skin and the earth itself. Okay, the most famous architectural example is here the Yokohama Port Terminal. It can be seen as the extreme case where in a way the whole inside of the building is reduced to the 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. You know the architects, what they want to do is to say our building should organically fit into natural environments, not break the continuity. You, from if you are outside, you just see the grass the hill going on. But I think the effect is exactly the opposite one: nature is de-realized. It appears as if natural surface of grass is an artificial skin concealing complex machinery. And then I okay, to give you an example I didn't find a good one, this would be something coming close to this skin surface that it's just goes on with the round but it's, you know, it is as if imagine earth itself as a living body and imagine the surface of the earth conceived as skin and imagine squeezing in between living space. Then okay, to conclude all the variations, there is maybe another version of the relation between inside and outside so that we turn it around as here in London with Tate Modern where the outside is a decaying old abandoned derelict megalith, power station or whatever, so that you know you don't keep as in Mariinsky Theatre the old inside building and wrap it on, you keep the old outside but you totally renovate, totally change the inside. Okay, so much for description. Now a little bit of interpretation. The ideological-political investment of such venues becomes clear when they are raised in a town caught into a political and not only political battle. Two examples from Israel. On October 28th, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the Simon Wiesenthal Center can build its long-planned Center for Human Dignity, Museum of Tolerance, that this museum can be built on a contested site in the middle of Jerusalem. Who will design it? Of course, it's a boring story, Frank Gehry of course. This vast complex will consist of a general museum, children's museum, theatre, conference center, library, gallery, lecture halls, cafeterias, and so on. The museum's declared mission will be to promote civility and respect among different segments of the Jewish community and between people of all faiths. The only obstacle, overrun by the Supreme Court ruling, was that the museum site served as Jerusalem's main Muslim cemetery until This dark spot wonderfully enacts, I think, the hidden truth of this multiconfessional project. It is a place celebrating tolerance open to all but protected by the Israeli cupola which ignores the subterranean victims of intolerance, as if one needs a little bit of intolerance to create the space for a Museum of Tolerance. And as if this is not enough, there is another even vast more vast project going on in Jerusalem. Israel is quietly carrying out a one hundred million dollars multi-year development plan in the so-called Holy Basin, the site of some of the most significant religious and national heritage just outside the walled old city. It's part of an effort to strengthen the status of Jerusalem as Israeli capital. A good part of the execution of this plan is outsourced to private to a private group which is simultaneously buying up Palestinian property for Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem. As part of the plan, garbage dumps and wastelands are being cleared and turn into lush gardens and parks, now already accessible to visitors who can walk along new footpaths and take in the majestic views along with new signs and displays that point out significant points of Jewish history and conveniently many of the unauthorized Palestinian houses had to be erased to create the space for the redevelopment of the area. This whole area is an infinitely complicated landscape dotted with shrines and still hidden treasures of three major monotheistic religions, so the official argument is that its improvement is for everyone's benefit: Jews, Muslims, and Christians, since it involves restoration that will draw more visitors to an area of exceptional global interest. However, as people from Peace Now, the Israel peace organization, noted, the planning aims to create an ideological tourist park which will determine Jewish dominance in the area. So back to my main line. The central semiotic mystery of this kind of performance art or religious whatever cultural multi-functional venues is the mystery of formal redoubling. Why a house within a house? Why does a container itself have to be contained? Does not this sometimes freakish display of inconsistency and excess, does it not cry out lightly loudly, functioning as a symptom, a message encoded in this mess? 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? A close analysis of the envelope that encompasses buildings brings us I think to the same result. Here I refer to a very intelligent architect who is also a writer, he was the key person in doing that Yokohama Port Terminal, the Spanish Alejandro Zaera-Polo, who writes wrote a lot about the concept of architectural envelope as the border between outside and inside. He defines envelope as the membrane which separates the inside of a building from the outside. And although Zaera-Polo is very pro-capitalist, he is as close as you can come to a Deleuzian capitalist. He claims that we live in this Deleuzian terms deterritorialized postmodern capitalism and he tries to draw consequences from it. His main reference apart from Deleuze interestingly is Peter Sloterdijk. Sloterdijk's notion of spheres, spheres in the sense of immunisation of cordoning off part of space. According to Zaera-Polo, far from advocating a return to premodern containment, Sloterdijk was the first to propose what one can call the provincialism for the global era. A quote from Zaera-Polo: "The world as a foamy space filled with bubbles and balloons of different scales and qualities. 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 buildings but of its political, their political, social, and psychological implications." End of quote. So which are the political implications of this appetite for the envelope as a device of insulation and immunisation? And I find this again quite a correct insight into how this Deleuzian praising of nomadism deterritorialization etc. is just one side of the story. The it's crucial that this deterritorialization that always generates a kind of autopoietic self-structuring which is immunisation, enclosure spaces and so on and so on. Apart from the relative aesthetic and political autonomy it provides, the envelope provides and the obvious environmental function, protecting part of space. Envelope also serves Zaera-Polo makes this clear as a security device. A 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 faithful difference is that the envelope secured a privatized public space. Another quote: "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 deterritorialization, 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 architecture 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 the urban architectural version of 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. The last quote from Zaera-Polo: "Sloterdijk's politics of climatization points to a process in which growing sectors of urban space are given to private agents to develop and maintain: gardeners, event managers, 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. This tendency reached its peak for the time being in the so-called Crystal Island project in Moscow, recently announced by Norman Foster, with two and a half million square meters under a single envelope. It will be the world's largest building, five times the size of Pentagon. The project is described as an example of sustainability, able to improve the environmental performance of the building by swallowing ever larger areas of the city under a single envelope designed to enhance natural ventilation and daylight and so on and so on. Incidentally all this I think this there is a strict class dimension in all this favorable topic today of sustainability. You know like everything should be sustainable at no ecological costs and so on and so on. Buildings should be sustainable of course then the the amount of energy material money you spend for such a sustainable building of course it costs ten times more than the building full being would pollute and so on. I simply think that that this idea of sustainability is I don't have time to develop this is our own version of the craziest idea of Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, you know this idea of Juche idea, you know that they have. This is they call sustainability this kind of a self-reliance and so on. So it's easy to laugh at North Korea, we are following their advice. The official progressive ideology and politics like the New Labour here in the UK, they like to celebrate such projects as models of the revitalization of the decaying city centers. However, I think 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. And I think again this is the truth of all these performance arts venues and so on. You have the ordinary city grey ordinary people and then you have this secured immunized air-conditioned public spaces, that's crucial. Not private, privatized public spaces. This brings us to the social antagonism these buildings try to resolve. On the one hand, to build a performing arts venue rates as a Holy Grail for architects. A quote from a propaganda book for performance art venues, quote: "Unlike the more conventional types of buildings such as offices, housing, even civic architecture, which have to conform to the streetscape, a performing arts venue can afford to be bold and unusual to stand out." End of quote. So again, here you don't have to be functionalist, here you can let your imagination run wild and so on. However, this space for creative freedom is counteracted by the demand for the building's multifunctionality. Venue managers cannot, another quote from that propaganda book, cannot 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 and so on and so on. So remember when already months ago I developed this idea how we have today a specific type of publicity which is no longer utilitarian quality of the product but also not its symbolic value like I signal my status, but the experience provided. Like you drink Starbucks coffee's experience of community, participating in ecological projects and so on and so on. Here also it's a nice example they focus on this like the point is how you as a visitor will how you will experience it. This demand I claim is not only financial but profoundly ideological, here we come at the ideology beneath this performance arts venues. It reflects a cultural tension. Again I quote from the book, incidentally the title of the book if you are interested in I don't advise you to buy this boring otherwise it's Michael Hammond, "Performing Architecture: Opera Houses, Theatres and Concert Halls for the Twenty-First Century," London Okay. Here is the last quote. "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 had 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." You notice here this incredibly disgusting patronizing attitude, like the theatre only would have been only for the elite, to get stupid ordinary people you must offer cafeteria and so on. This constant effort to counteract the threat of elitism signals a series of oppositions within which performance arts buildings operate: public-private, open-restrained, elite-popular, all variations on the basic motif of class struggle, which we are told no longer exists today. The space of these oppositions delineates the problem to which performance arts buildings are a solution. How does the anti-elitist architecture of perform- performance arts venues fit these coordinates? Its attempt to overcome elitist exclusivity fails since it reproduces the paradoxes of the upper-class liberal openness. Its falsity, the failure to achieve its goal, is the falsity and limitation of our tolerant liberal capitalism. The effective message of the political unconscious of these performance arts venues 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 normality 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, which is false. Difficult as it may sometimes be for the broad public to get into, to really enjoy Schoenberg or Webern or in paintings Paul Klee or whomever, there is I claim nothing elitist about great art. Great art is by definition universal emancipatory potentially addressing at us all. When in elite places like the old Metropolitan Opera 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 if there is a composer who is top of the top elite it's Mozart, to see Mozart and the rich crowd as belonging to the same space is an obscenity. There is a well-known story from the early years of Metropolitan Opera when a high society lady, I think one of the Morgan of a bankers Morgan family, one of the opera's great patrons arrived she arrived half an hour late half an hour into the first act. She demanded that the performance be interrupted for a couple of minutes and the light turned on the opera performance so that she could inspect the dresses of other ladies with her binoculars. And of course she got it. 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 of elitist. You see my simple point I think it's exactly the opposite. My God poor guys students spare just to go to the opera, it's the rich guys who occupy that space which is allegedly here to make it more popular and so on and so on. So again I think that although you can give as you always can a whole series of these factual utilitarian reasons, we live in global warming we need to be protected and so on or whatever, it's clear that I think this that for me performance arts venues precisely materialize in all this redoubling of space publicly controlled space and so on this tension of let's call it democratic exclusivism. It is for everyone but how to filter it properly nonetheless. So is there anyone here where is here a possibility if there is one a a possibility to make something out of this? What would a progressive I ask a very naive question, what would a progressive architect have done with all this? Okay my basic notion would be drop the project itself, do something for ordinary people. I mean I I I saw in Zurich for example in a suburb of Zurich or in many cities some attempts for even counterculture rock and so on to occupy this famous abandoned factories in the suburbs and to make an an alternate performance art center but I don't I I I don't think it properly works. But so again for me the the one should do a proper democratic thing and change the focus simply and ask what can be done in those of ordinary grey buildings. Something should be changed there. But nonetheless there is an interesting phenomenon going on here in these buildings where maybe some kind of creative space is open. Here I would like to conclude with a reference to of course my favorite Darwinian biologist Stephen Jay Gould. Maybe you know about Gould's great polemic with Dawkins apropos of of so-called notion of exaptation. Gould's idea that the fundamental mechanism of evolutionary choice is not direct adaptation but exaptation. Exaptation in many different two main meanings. One meaning is that an organ which originally developed for a certain function is then reappropriated for a totally different function and then much more interesting is another meaning although it resembles the first one where you have something which develops not so much as a certain for a certain function but as a kind of a necessary byproduct for this function and then this kind of a non-functional excess can then be exapted, that is to say adapted for another new totally different for totally different purpose. Why is this so interesting? Because Gould goes here to the end and he and I'm totally on his side here, he claims and I think he triumphantly wins against all those vulgar Darvinians like Steven Pinker and so on, he claims that language itself is a product of exaptation, that you cannot account for language in evolutionary terms. You cannot play any of these pseudo-Marxist late Friedrich Engels games, you know that people when people were collaborating with division of labor as Engels put it in an incredible circular reasoning, people discovered that in order to collaborate they have many things to tell each other so they invented language, you know but haha to invent this you already have to have language and so on. So of course language is of great use but this is all secondary. And he even specializes in what way something to do with with horizontal posture the use of arms and so on developed excess brain and jaws and so on. He has a very nice explanation of how language emerged so that something which the the form the position of the head which developed for totally different reasons was readapted to this use. Why am I mentioning Gould? What has this to do with architecture? Ah here comes the beauty. If you read some Gould, and you should, you will discover that his original he took the very idea from architecture. His original example is so-called spandrels in architecture. He takes the example of San Marco Church in Venice. The idea is that when the way they were doing churches, but now the term is generalized, when you especially when you combine different structuring principles, now I'm talking as it is obvious to some of you I'm ashamed I will kill myself if some of you will tell me I am an architect no. Please don't say this if you are that, but the idea is that especially when you use different structuring principles in the very elementary way like you have a church which is basically square forms but then you have a cupola or a tower or whatever which is round that always when you combine different structuring principles there are places which are here of no use at all just for example he shows in a wonderful way Gould how in the San Marco Church because of how the cupola is supported by square forms you have some kind of a empty triangle forms and then they were used to put in statues. But in a proper logical form it's clear that it was not meant to be a statue, it was a kind of a necessary structural excess with no function but you can exapt it in the Gould sense reappropriate it for a totally different version. And then it's interesting how Gould himself at some point explodes into different architectural uses. He even goes in a too simple way often claiming how for example I don't know one of the in Paris at least proverbial places for homeless people to stay beneath the bridges. I mean beneath the bridges it wasn't meant for homeless people to stay but you know that you this and I think and here maybe a materialist and I really mean materialist analysis because what materialism means is precisely reasoning against teleology that you see how teleology always presupposes some some opportunistic bricolage tinkering chance. Here some interesting things are happening in these performance art venues. You know with all this interplay of multiple buildings and so on there are great interstitial spaces which are totally non-functional. And I was told that especially in Japan, and don't underestimate the Japanese, on the one hand I'm a racist, Japanese I doubt if they are human but they are the most intelligent, how should I put it? Because you know Japanese know all about this paradox with bringing utilitarian function to its absurd. You know like I already mentioned it here years years ago you remember that I forgot the name, I think Chindogu, but I'm not sure, that it was more popular some years ago when I was younger, that high art of bringing functional products to their extreme which is ridiculous. It was a big fashion, I have some five six volumes, the rule is the following one: you should construct a small practical object which is feasible, it shouldn't be nonsense, it should function, but it must be so ridiculous that you are you should be sure that it will not be commercialized. The moment it can really be commercialized you are out. For example, I don't know, I even bought one but it broke down, this one okay they cheated yeah, it's it's glasses with wipers so that you can walk safely in rain and you know. Or for example you have butter butter as a lipstick so that if you know if you want you can just as a lipstick put butter on. Or also for example fresh water, sounds even practical for me, it's an inverted umbrella and a small glass so you can walk in the rain and always drink fresh and so on. You know so along this Japanese way I no longer that I read that precisely in some of these Japanese performance art venues really maybe slightly I wouldn't say subversive interesting things are happening when these interstitial spaces were occupied by either I don't know avant-garde leftist groups whatever and then they were first tolerated a little bit like they thought oh perfect we will integrate them and so on but then at some point the focus shifted they noticed that more people are coming to enjoy this alternate versions than and so on. So maybe this is this is this is one way. This is one way to do it, that to simply to to to invest to reappropriate this excessive non-functional interstitial spaces. Okay I today I tried to be not too long, tomorrow it will also be like one hour and a quarter and then on on Thursday and Friday it's long boring Marxism again. So thanks very much and if you have some mercy please have mercy have mercy I was. I'm now trying to think like Chinese, you know what I always liked how you did the Japanese now you do the Chinese. Yeah, yeah, in the sense of, you know I always like with Chinese how they quantified. You know when I was young and there was a break between Soviet Union and China, they said this break will last years at least. Then a couple of years later the relations got a little bit better, you know how the Chinese signaled it, the it was still anti-Khrushchev Soviet propaganda, they said the the break between Soviet Union and China is a long-term break, it will last at least years, you know like in this Chinese sense I would say percent I was bluffing. How should I put it, no? I did my honest stuff to read some architecture and so on, I could have bluffed more but again, what I basically wanted to do is something very honest and please don't project into me again what I didn't say. I consciously didn't want to play this politically correct game to give you some big examples of progressive architecture and so on. I also don't- all I say is how we should be aware how not only as Claude Lévi-Strauss said, food, faces, but architecture also is frozen embodied ideology. Not in the sense of some primitive reflection of predominant ideas but in the sense that how we structural social state, it is and that we should simply be aware of it. So nonetheless to give some link to my task, along these lines one of the big tasks of communism is, and we don't have to wait for the end of capitalism, is precisely to find new modes. There were attempts which were all too naive, you know, from kibbutz I know too of partially at least limiting private space. Like this kibbutz idea which the kibbutz at least that I visited I like because I'm lazy, this how should I put it, the kibbutz that I visited of course it was probably a tourist fake already no, but what I liked is nonetheless this nice balance between private and public there. That it is a public kitchen, you share the meals and so on, but nonetheless you do have your space sleeping. And I claim that here communism will begin if new forms of this very concrete family life, and by new forms I mean precisely the most elementary spatial disposition. We should become aware a little bit of historicity of all this, of how for example corridors the way we know them were invented from what I know only in the early modernity, before you simply passed from one to another room and so on and so on. So again it's just an idea to become a little bit aware of this dimension and also for the need to re- to reinvent spaces. Now I really okay, good. Good. As Slavoj was speaking I was thinking of two things which are not far from here and I think quite relevant to his discourse. The first is of course Senate House right next door. And as you may know a number of influential commentators including Simon Jenkins in the Guardian wrote last year that it should be razed to the ground because it represents Stalinist architecture. Of course others say that it represents Hitler- I mean you know Nazi architecture. And of course this is an international style. And Jenkins's point was that in order for London to become a proper postmodern and globalized city, those kind of landmark buildings of the international style should be demolished. But there is another even more relevant example not far from here. You may know that about four or five years ago the government decided that the whole South Bank complex should be covered with a transparent membrane, an envelope as it were. Indeed. And that at the minute Boris apparently is not behind the project but it is still a decision. And here you have fantasy at its purest to use Zizekian terms because if you remember at the time the argument in favor of that enclosure of the South Bank complex was that as now we have so many continentals and Europeans in London, and also as now we go to the Mediterranean for our holidays, we have all become continental and Europeans but our weather does not work that well. So what we're going to do is to enclose the space, have a permanent temperature of about degrees, have olive trees and grapevines and other such Mediterranean plants in this space so we can all feel Mediterranean. And of course in Umberto Eco's terms this would be a Mediterranean even better than the Mediterranean because I just came back from Greece and the temperature there was degrees. So if you get a permanent degrees in the center of London, London will become the most Mediterranean place in the world. So that extent you will have fantasy at its purest, all of us here in London will be Mediterranean. But anyway so that is for something to add. But I want to add to what you said, I agree because you know problem with the Senate House no? You know first you must know this elementary education even me from the primitive ethnic cleansing raping Balkan knows it that that this was the model for the Ministry of Truth no? From room room Orwell worked in room basically as a spy and of course he modeled you know, don't you have a sense of tourism to make it a tourist symbol room and if you pay additionally you get that guy who is Richard Burton in the second movie version comes to question you a little bit. Okay but what I wanted to say is that do you know about fast- do you know no you didn't tell me this I read in a history of World War II all those Nazi German plans for the invasion of England, you know that Senate House was meant to be the German headquarters. Yeah that's why it was not bombed that is the that is an urban myth but it's a great myth. But nonetheless I must say I am horrible here, I think it can be reappropriated, I'm for it. I'm absolutely for it, I love this kind of totalitarian buildings and what is so interesting is what you exactly say, you know when they say this is typical Stalinist totalitarian and so on, what people forget is that the first thing to do is to relativize it by drawing attention to the obvious fact that also in United States in that at that time in the 30s exactly the same thing was going on. Go to New York and see all those public buildings like the Post Office and so on, it's exactly the same monumental style. Monumental style. So but this is of course the international style and indeed speaking about the progressive architecture that was indeed the prototype of socialist architecture in the 20s and the 30s, the idea of building huge big buildings of social housing will be relatively cheap and creating a kind of prototype little village that could live together, to that extent you know this is a major architectural but also social experiment because the leaders of that group of course believed through that architectural restructuring of space equality social equality you know sort of would emerge. There is another irony here which followed the modernist the artistic this very idea of Stalinist neo-Stalinist kitsch Baroque, you know these levels inside no? I don't know it's true I can tell you what my architecture friends in New York told me that the origin of this is not some obsession with Gothic medieval time, it's the Stalinist admiration of America. The crucial factor of Bolshevism of the 20s was the absolute cult of American Fordist efficient Ford was almost a saint, Ford, the before the anti-Semitic Henry Ford I mean of the cars was celebrated so this was for them imitating New York. And what's at the origin of this in New York, it was explained to me it's again total contingency basically. It is so it was explained to me that after Manhattan was all built, the only way to develop was up. Now the problem with up was that first they simply added levels. The problem was that because of static problems and so on some of the buildings collapsed. So they passed a law if you want to go up you should go in. Every for purely then I love this logic of how out of totally external contingent necessity a style a style develops. Okay enough, let's open it to the public. Any questions, comments, criticisms, particularly from architects, do we have any architect or art students here? Yes. I know that you talk a lot about the the building in Kieslowski's Decalogue. Yeah. Um and I'm wondering about sort of this talk of modernist structures and the fact that at the end of the Decalogue it appears it has to be destroyed within itself, you know the bomb is- Did it? Because I think that he planned it but he didn't do it. I read somewhere that in the original scenario the idea was some gas leaking explosion the entire block should crumble but it doesn't happen as far as I remember. Right. But it should have. Yeah but even the projection of it happening yeah, I mean is there something to be read into this that about architecture is never egalitarian that it always has to be destroyed as soon as you get too close to it or you know? Yeah yeah okay you got me here because now I don't have any I agree with you but I don't have any deep funny or whatever reaction to what you say all I'm saying is that I think that from the very beginning a certain idea of egalitarian architecture was always patronizing. I'm almost more in sympathy with this primitive lower class idea of let's imitate the rich, let's do it like them, you know which is why I I'm quite serious in claiming that my favorite street in Europe is this maybe in the entire world high point of of Stalinist kitsch, the Stalinallee, now it's called Frankfurter Allee unfortunately in East Berlin. It's like two three miles of pure Stalinist kitsch Baroque and again you know it mixes in a wonderful way popular accessibility, popular mass mass apartment with nonetheless this this Baroque Baroque and so on. I mean like what why shouldn't ordinary people have this Baroque bombastic kitsch and so on? I'm in a way I'm in a way I'm for it. But I'm for the- you know what's my my attitude towards Stalinist architecture? Here I'm for ruining that block, because what I really hate is the late Stalinist more modern architecture, this communist architecture from the sixties, like if you go to East Berlin the new Alexanderplatz, this kind of a steel concrete and so on, that's horrible. I like authentic from the third from the 40s and early 50s this kitsch Baroque architecture. I hate these building blocks with glass and so on, I I hate this Stalin- this late okay not even Stalinist, late socialist, late socialist modernism and so on. But on the other hand you know I have a- now this would have been a much more nice reading which I cannot provide now, I think that the reason this idea came that it should all explode I claim it's more it's something much deeper there. And in one of his interviews which is not so well known Kieslowski develops it. It's not so much this horror at this apartment blocks they should be destroyed, it's that he desc- it's a kind of a jealous possessiveness, that he created such a perfect enclosed universe because all the stories in Decalogue people live in the same apartment block, that as if now I finish it I will destroy it no one else will mess with it. It's more this kind of assertive possessive pleasure you know I did something so beautiful no nobody else will play. It's more this kind of assertion of some kind of a possessive possessive closure. Because I think that I think that even you know why do people read Decalogue as some kind of a desperate or whatever? I think it's not so desperate, it's basically pretty I always read it as a pretty optimistic series. And I think the communists were very intelligent, I was recently in Poland and asked some friends and they confirmed this to me. You know that this this is very ironic because in the West it's usually seen as a devastating critique, it shows the greyness of grey nature of the desperate daily life. But you know that this was the great state TV project in the era of Jaruzelski dictatorship Decalogue. He got all the top actors, he got all the money, which is why incidentally I was told many
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more radical dissidents considered Kieslowski practically a collaborator with the with the regime. So again I think this idea to destroy it at the end it's more this kind of it's such a nice universe that I wanted to myself I did it it should disappear with me. I think it's fine. I just like to respond to that. I think it's not- Ah you are from Poland no? Oh my god. Now I even more now I feel sorry for that. Now I feel like remember at the beginning of Annie Hall where the two debate McLuhan and then McLuhan comes no? Now I feel like McLuhan is here but- It happens in real life. Yeah but I think there is a nice passage in Baudrillard's Seduction on the space when he writes about seduction of the space, like a kind of imaginary kind of Machiavelli type of prince seduces the space and therefore holds social structure in a way because in his palace he has the miniature of the city itself he seduces it. And he gives this idea of Baudrillard of seducing the space rather than than trying to revitalize it et cetera et cetera. So I think that what happened in Poland basically I'm from the House of Blox from this you know prefabricated houses and I hated it for for the most of my life and now I'm praising it because what happened by Decalogue by the such pieces like Decalogue and then hip hop culture let's say we seduced the the power tried to seduce us at the beginning with this utopian projects but then as we all know game no play with seduction is a kind of challenge so it's like both ways they are playing this game both sides are playing this game. So in a way society have seduced the the power itself and the mainstream discourse et cetera et cetera. So that happens- In what sense? I don't get it maybe you also not in what sense? Apropos
more radical dissidents considered Kieslowski practically a collaborator with the with the regime. So again I think this idea to destroy it at the end it's more this kind of it's such a nice universe that I wanted to myself I did it it should disappear with me. I think it's fine. I just like to respond to that. I think it's not- Ah you are from Poland no? Oh my god. Now I even more now I feel sorry for that. Now I feel like remember at the beginning of Annie Hall where the two debate McLuhan and then McLuhan comes no? Now I feel like McLuhan is here but- It happens in real life. Yeah but I think there is a nice passage in Baudrillard's Seduction on the space when he writes about seduction of the space, like a kind of imaginary kind of Machiavelli type of prince seduces the space and therefore holds social structure in a way because in his palace he has the miniature of the city itself he seduces it. And he gives this idea of Baudrillard of seducing the space rather than than trying to revitalize it et cetera et cetera. So I think that what happened in Poland basically I'm from the House of Blox from this you know prefabricated houses and I hated it for for the most of my life and now I'm praising it because what happened by Decalogue by the such pieces like Decalogue and then hip hop culture let's say we seduced the the power tried to seduce us at the beginning with this utopian projects but then as we all know game no play with seduction is a kind of challenge so it's like both ways they are playing this game both sides are playing this game. So in a way society have seduced the the power itself and the mainstream discourse et cetera et cetera. So that happens- In what sense? I don't get it maybe you also not in what sense? Apropos
Slavoj Žižek
this building- Those blocks yeah we just praising now the- So rather than destroying you would put a membrane around them. Yeah there's a kind of very progressive idea with adapting all of this architecture to I don't
this building- Those blocks yeah we just praising now the- So rather than destroying you would put a membrane around them. Yeah there's a kind of very progressive idea with adapting all of this architecture to I don't
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know to the new style can appear because we are so much more
know to the new style can appear because we are so much more
Slavoj Žižek
wise than you know people without communist experience. Uh-huh. You know what I'm saying? It's like kind of some kind of nobility what we achieved being- But again to what- But as you said it's second is like what is said he wanted to destroy. I think it's kind of Kafka notion of destroying his own work, you know? Yeah yeah yeah. And as we know because he discovered that bureaucracy is something very seductive. Absolutely. Yeah that's why and that's what Kieslowski probably discovered and we are society you know. Do you notice speaking about this and to be sorry to bore you with this but I think it's a wonderful detail. The most beautiful detail that I read in that interview short film about Kieslowski "I'm so-so," so-so that's yeah. There you have an interview with a woman who is now in her fifties, but to be vulgar it's
wise than you know people without communist experience. Uh-huh. You know what I'm saying? It's like kind of some kind of nobility what we achieved being- But again to what- But as you said it's second is like what is said he wanted to destroy. I think it's kind of Kafka notion of destroying his own work, you know? Yeah yeah yeah. And as we know because he discovered that bureaucracy is something very seductive. Absolutely. Yeah that's why and that's what Kieslowski probably discovered and we are society you know. Do you notice speaking about this and to be sorry to bore you with this but I think it's a wonderful detail. The most beautiful detail that I read in that interview short film about Kieslowski "I'm so-so," so-so that's yeah. There you have an interview with a woman who is now in her fifties, but to be vulgar it's
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obvious that thirty years ago she was well more or less beautiful. And you no no you will see why this is important. And you learned from the interview that she was his censor. He had to submit scenarios and so on to her you know in the communist controlling system. But the paradox is and then when I was in Poland I asked some friends who knew Kieslowski and they confirmed this, of course they slept together this is what interested me no? Not only this that a kind of a miracle of genuine friendship her advices were so
obvious that thirty years ago she was well more or less beautiful. And you no no you will see why this is important. And you learned from the interview that she was his censor. He had to submit scenarios and so on to her you know in the communist controlling system. But the paradox is and then when I was in Poland I asked some friends who knew Kieslowski and they confirmed this, of course they slept together this is what interested me no? Not only this that a kind of a miracle of genuine friendship her advices were so
Slavoj Žižek
good. She simply was it happened by miracle aesthetic aesthetic advice. Yeah yeah that that my God she she became Kieslowski very much dependent on her. He came to her you think this would work, he was absolutely reli- no I find this such a beautiful obscenity: you have a dark communist censor and you go there to ask her and so on and you have an affair with a dark communist censor and so on I mean no? Last question. Chinese moving? Or Chinese movies? Any more questions? I was going to ask about like architecture and the and the future. And how do you think it I mean the percent of anonymous in Africa in Asia. I am from Israel so I think part of the war because it's so hot and we hate ourselves and the the warmth you know it's now starting and building in Greece it's degrees in Israel. So people are pissed off you know. So
good. She simply was it happened by miracle aesthetic aesthetic advice. Yeah yeah that that my God she she became Kieslowski very much dependent on her. He came to her you think this would work, he was absolutely reli- no I find this such a beautiful obscenity: you have a dark communist censor and you go there to ask her and so on and you have an affair with a dark communist censor and so on I mean no? Last question. Chinese moving? Or Chinese movies? Any more questions? I was going to ask about like architecture and the and the future. And how do you think it I mean the percent of anonymous in Africa in Asia. I am from Israel so I think part of the war because it's so hot and we hate ourselves and the the warmth you know it's now starting and building in Greece it's degrees in Israel. So people are pissed off you know. So
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how no so how do you think it the other percent should look like for the future for the popu- population
how no so how do you think it the other percent should look like for the future for the popu- population
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that grows. If you ask me my solution I I have to give you only one advice at some ecological conference I was recently in the United States where there were some my style of this anti-intuitive ecologists, you know
that grows. If you ask me my solution I I have to give you only one advice at some ecological conference I was recently in the United States where there were some my style of this anti-intuitive ecologists, you know
Slavoj Žižek
who, they told me you know our ordinary idea of ecology is you must live in sustainability in a small house in the middle of forest, green and so on.
who, they told me you know our ordinary idea of ecology is you must live in sustainability in a small house in the middle of forest, green and so on.
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They told me if we do this we will ruin all forest, it's crazy. They told me that the best thing from ecological standpoint
They told me if we do this we will ruin all forest, it's crazy. They told me that the best thing from ecological standpoint
Slavoj Žižek
is are big cities, megacities. Because of course they are polluted but the pollution is so condensed there that first you spend much less energy for transport and so on, pollution is controlled limited there and so on. Like Japan is doing there I think. What Japan is doing from what I heard is that, you know this image of Japan that we have totally crowded megalopolises, they strict basically I simplify it, Japan adopted in a very communist state-controlled way the rule percent of the land is allowed to be developed, percent is off. Only farmers not even with too much machinery, forests and so on and so on. And I think this is the best thing to do. It's eco- it's from the social point I think we should reinvent crowded apartments, people living in this promiscuous confused way. That's the best that's the only thing that ecologically really works. The worst thing is this idea of spread around we all live in green, yes but then then everything is over. No, really, it convinced me even at the level of for example how if you crowd people together, how much less energy you need for transport, for heating and so on, or the other way around for cooling or whatever. I mean so again I think that and there are already signs I even read that this tendency which started when did it start, already years ago, this decay of the city centers, which are now either occupied by banks or whatever, these dead downtowns especially in United States. Like if you want to kill yourself but lack motivation I don't know go to Buffalo or to Detroit and go to the downtown and you will kill yourself it's so dead, boring. But now the tendency is again to to bring alive downtown. I like crowded cities, many you know I mean okay I don't I'm not saying I would like to live in in Bombay or whatever no? But- Do you think that you have a future as a town planner? You know like how should I put it, maybe, but if you want to survive without being imprisoned I advise you to leave the town one day before I take power. Talking about crowded cities um in I think in Hong Kong it's already happening this conflict between private and public that you mentioned with the shell design but in open spaces because it's such a crowded city that um even squares, open squares are managed by private builders right? So um and there has been a conflict uh what kind of conflict? That interests me, what is the conflict? Well uh I think the security guards didn't allow the Filipino maids to to occupy those spaces. Ah you see this is it, yeah. And it
is are big cities, megacities. Because of course they are polluted but the pollution is so condensed there that first you spend much less energy for transport and so on, pollution is controlled limited there and so on. Like Japan is doing there I think. What Japan is doing from what I heard is that, you know this image of Japan that we have totally crowded megalopolises, they strict basically I simplify it, Japan adopted in a very communist state-controlled way the rule percent of the land is allowed to be developed, percent is off. Only farmers not even with too much machinery, forests and so on and so on. And I think this is the best thing to do. It's eco- it's from the social point I think we should reinvent crowded apartments, people living in this promiscuous confused way. That's the best that's the only thing that ecologically really works. The worst thing is this idea of spread around we all live in green, yes but then then everything is over. No, really, it convinced me even at the level of for example how if you crowd people together, how much less energy you need for transport, for heating and so on, or the other way around for cooling or whatever. I mean so again I think that and there are already signs I even read that this tendency which started when did it start, already years ago, this decay of the city centers, which are now either occupied by banks or whatever, these dead downtowns especially in United States. Like if you want to kill yourself but lack motivation I don't know go to Buffalo or to Detroit and go to the downtown and you will kill yourself it's so dead, boring. But now the tendency is again to to bring alive downtown. I like crowded cities, many you know I mean okay I don't I'm not saying I would like to live in in Bombay or whatever no? But- Do you think that you have a future as a town planner? You know like how should I put it, maybe, but if you want to survive without being imprisoned I advise you to leave the town one day before I take power. Talking about crowded cities um in I think in Hong Kong it's already happening this conflict between private and public that you mentioned with the shell design but in open spaces because it's such a crowded city that um even squares, open squares are managed by private builders right? So um and there has been a conflict uh what kind of conflict? That interests me, what is the conflict? Well uh I think the security guards didn't allow the Filipino maids to to occupy those spaces. Ah you see this is it, yeah. And it
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went
went
Slavoj Žižek
on for you know so they had the government had to go back to reinterpreting the contract when they build those buildings and they had to again force the the managers of those private buildings to respect the rights of the people. Ah so at
on for you know so they had the government had to go back to reinterpreting the contract when they build those buildings and they had to again force the the managers of those private buildings to respect the rights of the people. Ah so at
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least this, at least here the Chinese authorities- Well the Hong Kong- Yeah but okay, Chinese in the sense of a prototype at least they retained the minimum of dignity like they didn't totally sell out to business. They they wanted at least to retain some kind of openness or what. Yeah I guess so yeah. No I'm not trying to praise them it just interests me in what exactly- Yeah I think they are trying to defend the rights I mean the the legality in the contract it says that we allowed you to build this square together with your building which is very common in in Hong Kong right? Public spaces even built by private. It's the freest economy in the world, by freest where there is no minimum wage- But that's absolutely clear today that only the communist rule
least this, at least here the Chinese authorities- Well the Hong Kong- Yeah but okay, Chinese in the sense of a prototype at least they retained the minimum of dignity like they didn't totally sell out to business. They they wanted at least to retain some kind of openness or what. Yeah I guess so yeah. No I'm not trying to praise them it just interests me in what exactly- Yeah I think they are trying to defend the rights I mean the the legality in the contract it says that we allowed you to build this square together with your building which is very common in in Hong Kong right? Public spaces even built by private. It's the freest economy in the world, by freest where there is no minimum wage- But that's absolutely clear today that only the communist rule
Slavoj Žižek
can guarantee literally unfortunately a totally free
can guarantee literally unfortunately a totally free
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economy
economy
Slavoj Žižek
because they take
because they take
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care of trade unions and all that stuff that can- no no but uh this this this this aspect fascinates me very much how how should I put it nonetheless there is a good aspect in it, it is that
care of trade unions and all that stuff that can- no no but uh this this this this aspect fascinates me very much how how should I put it nonetheless there is a good aspect in it, it is that
Slavoj Žižek
a new the the task would have been nonetheless
a new the the task would have been nonetheless
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to, you know something is emerging which is neither private nor public, obviously there is a need for a new type of communities and
to, you know something is emerging which is neither private nor public, obviously there is a need for a new type of communities and
Slavoj Žižek
precisely
precisely
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the problem is how to how to change it. So I think I'm again I'm not here
the problem is how to how to change it. So I think I'm again I'm not here
Slavoj Žižek
I'm not here a total I'm not here a total pessimist no. I have a question to you as a future town planner, let's say, of Moscow. Remember that story of the Palace of the Soviets, so they pulled down the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow to build the Palace of the Soviets with this enormous Lenin statue where planes could land on his hand or whatever. Yeah but they did build it or they wanted to, they wanted to? They wanted to they didn't, so then they build a huge public swimming pool. Ah I didn't know that. What I know is that that Lenin, that Palace of Soviets with Lenin statue you know this is my old joke this was you know that this was literally the model for for for King Kong. No no literally literally. The producers of King Kong movie in the late 20s just before doing the movie visited Moscow, they already had the movie in mind and they were shown the project and they said "Oh my God replace Lenin with ape and you get-" that's literally the origin of course. No I don't
I'm not here a total I'm not here a total pessimist no. I have a question to you as a future town planner, let's say, of Moscow. Remember that story of the Palace of the Soviets, so they pulled down the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow to build the Palace of the Soviets with this enormous Lenin statue where planes could land on his hand or whatever. Yeah but they did build it or they wanted to, they wanted to? They wanted to they didn't, so then they build a huge public swimming pool. Ah I didn't know that. What I know is that that Lenin, that Palace of Soviets with Lenin statue you know this is my old joke this was you know that this was literally the model for for for King Kong. No no literally literally. The producers of King Kong movie in the late 20s just before doing the movie visited Moscow, they already had the movie in mind and they were shown the project and they said "Oh my God replace Lenin with ape and you get-" that's literally the origin of course. No I don't
unknown
know what you want to say but maybe you know what fascinated
know what you want to say but maybe you know what fascinated
unknown
me when I was in Moscow? I thought I was dreaming. When I approached the city from the airport I saw three four Lomonosov Universities, new. And they told me that it's very fashionable among the new rich to build exact replicas
me when I was in Moscow? I thought I was dreaming. When I approached the city from the airport I saw three four Lomonosov Universities, new. And they told me that it's very fashionable among the new rich to build exact replicas
Slavoj Žižek
of that building as very expensive new homes for for the rich people and so on and so on no? But my question- Yeah sorry yeah. Sorry. Um so they they had the swimming pool for about years and then they pulled that down to rebuild the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour uh about years ago so what would your ideal solution be I mean what's best, the Cathedral, the public swimming pool for the ordinary people, or the Palace of the Soviets? I'm a vulgar guy the answer is clear. The postmodern one. A swimming pool but from the outside the cathedral you know. Then you can jump from the tower down and so on and I'm totally for this obscene obscene combination. I think it's a nice idea, big cathedral and it should work because usually Orthodox cathedrals are more wide round no? It can be a nice swimming pool and like and so on no I mean. No no no but you know you never know, I mean people can be so crazy today that maybe somebody will do it. For example I was really told that they abandoned the project but they really want to do it in East Germany, in some small town, one street to restore it to its communist glory and to make it a kind of a Stasi Communist Disneyland. You go there you you must cook but you only get twice a week a little bit of meat, there is always a lack of cigarettes then that if you pay that's what I like if you pay an additional price you are every second night awakened and taken to the police to be interrogated and so on no? I would in I mean it certainly much better for me than what is my idea of hell: to be burning on some stupid Mediterranean beach no?
of that building as very expensive new homes for for the rich people and so on and so on no? But my question- Yeah sorry yeah. Sorry. Um so they they had the swimming pool for about years and then they pulled that down to rebuild the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour uh about years ago so what would your ideal solution be I mean what's best, the Cathedral, the public swimming pool for the ordinary people, or the Palace of the Soviets? I'm a vulgar guy the answer is clear. The postmodern one. A swimming pool but from the outside the cathedral you know. Then you can jump from the tower down and so on and I'm totally for this obscene obscene combination. I think it's a nice idea, big cathedral and it should work because usually Orthodox cathedrals are more wide round no? It can be a nice swimming pool and like and so on no I mean. No no no but you know you never know, I mean people can be so crazy today that maybe somebody will do it. For example I was really told that they abandoned the project but they really want to do it in East Germany, in some small town, one street to restore it to its communist glory and to make it a kind of a Stasi Communist Disneyland. You go there you you must cook but you only get twice a week a little bit of meat, there is always a lack of cigarettes then that if you pay that's what I like if you pay an additional price you are every second night awakened and taken to the police to be interrogated and so on no? I would in I mean it certainly much better for me than what is my idea of hell: to be burning on some stupid Mediterranean beach no?
unknown
I would definitely I would definitely yes. But speaking about architecture if you want to see a true horror that's what I would really like
I would definitely I would definitely yes. But speaking about architecture if you want to see a true horror that's what I would really like
Slavoj Žižek
to visit, you know that it's now open,
to visit, you know that it's now open,
unknown
it's no longer how do they call this,
it's no longer how do they call this,
unknown
prohibited military area the greatest the greatest Gulag complex no? Magadan Kolyma. Now it's open. And it's why it's open because it's still working as mine for diamonds and so on and there is even some American capital, which
prohibited military area the greatest the greatest Gulag complex no? Magadan Kolyma. Now it's open. And it's why it's open because it's still working as mine for diamonds and so on and there is even some American capital, which
Slavoj Žižek
means you have American Western standard hotels, but I was told that it's a nightmare like you have then so-called Kolyma Highway about miles a U-turn and everything is there the way it was just abandoned with some old people living there and it's a
means you have American Western standard hotels, but I was told that it's a nightmare like you have then so-called Kolyma Highway about miles a U-turn and everything is there the way it was just abandoned with some old people living there and it's a
unknown
nightmare. What
nightmare. What
Slavoj Žižek
makes it so nightmareish is this total coldness of it, coldness in the sense that you know places, different camps or small cities, they don't even have names, their names are the distance in kilometers. It's Place Place and in minutes. That that's what I would like to see. I think every leftist today who wants to be a leftist should see that and then remain a leftist if he wants. Final question? Yeah please. I'd just
makes it so nightmareish is this total coldness of it, coldness in the sense that you know places, different camps or small cities, they don't even have names, their names are the distance in kilometers. It's Place Place and in minutes. That that's what I would like to see. I think every leftist today who wants to be a leftist should see that and then remain a leftist if he wants. Final question? Yeah please. I'd just
Cathy Newman
like to- it's a comment really. Um the experience that were promised
like to- it's a comment really. Um the experience that were promised
Slavoj Žižek
in these big public performance arts
in these big public performance arts
Cathy Newman
spaces. Um
spaces. Um
Slavoj Žižek
do you think it's um an interpassive one in the way that you've talked about interpassivity, in that especially somewhere like Tate Modern, you're kept moving all the time, not only with the kind of installations that they have in the big turbine hallway. You go down
do you think it's um an interpassive one in the way that you've talked about interpassivity, in that especially somewhere like Tate Modern, you're kept moving all the time, not only with the kind of installations that they have in the big turbine hallway. You go down
unknown
slides, climb up towers and so
slides, climb up towers and so
Slavoj Žižek
on, but even in the other gallery spaces, you're always moved along. Yeah but you know in what sense interpassivity? I claim that the way these galleries who mostly which mostly target kind of enlightened public, public which largely thinks it knows what they are to see there. It's no longer
on, but even in the other gallery spaces, you're always moved along. Yeah but you know in what sense interpassivity? I claim that the way these galleries who mostly which mostly target kind of enlightened public, public which largely thinks it knows what they are to see there. It's no longer
Cathy Newman
you know in the old times it was the curator should know you just go there to enjoy. Now nobody enjoys, as you said you just quickly run through. I think the curator is today the only one who is supposed really to slowly look at
you know in the old times it was the curator should know you just go there to enjoy. Now nobody enjoys, as you said you just quickly run through. I think the curator is today the only one who is supposed really to slowly look at
Slavoj Žižek
the painting, to really enjoy no? You just run through it and the whole point is will you make a funny remark, will you know point a- I think that the way actually these galleries function are more spaces for witty conversation, I don't know kind of intellectual stimulating and so on and so on. I think that people effectively do not really patiently slowly observe the works of art. Here I agree with Adorno who says he already had this premonition against this most boring and wrong pseudo-Marxist dogma that you know we are turned into passive consumers etc. No the problem is exactly the opposite today. The most difficult thing to do is a true authentic passive experience of opening yourself to be affected. We don't this
the painting, to really enjoy no? You just run through it and the whole point is will you make a funny remark, will you know point a- I think that the way actually these galleries function are more spaces for witty conversation, I don't know kind of intellectual stimulating and so on and so on. I think that people effectively do not really patiently slowly observe the works of art. Here I agree with Adorno who says he already had this premonition against this most boring and wrong pseudo-Marxist dogma that you know we are turned into passive consumers etc. No the problem is exactly the opposite today. The most difficult thing to do is a true authentic passive experience of opening yourself to be affected. We don't this
unknown
is not really the reason we go to galleries. We go there because you heard that it's good to make some witty remarks whatever and then mostly to sit in the cafeteria so to be quite
is not really the reason we go to galleries. We go there because you heard that it's good to make some witty remarks whatever and then mostly to sit in the cafeteria so to be quite
Slavoj Žižek
frank and to finish with my own confession I just bring this to the end whenever I go with my son I went yesterday I simply remained in the cafeteria. I mean you go around and you tell me if it's really as it says in the catalog. Okay. Thanks.
frank and to finish with my own confession I just bring this to the end whenever I go with my son I went yesterday I simply remained in the cafeteria. I mean you go around and you tell me if it's really as it says in the catalog. Okay. Thanks.