The Failure of Performance-Arts Venues to construct a Communal Space
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2009-06-16 · 1:15:32 · 9,917 words
ideologycinema-art-culturecapitalismhegel-dialecticspsychoanalysishistorygeopolitics-warphilosophy-general
Žižek delivers a lecture on postmodern architecture, using it as a lens to analyze ideology, social antagonism, and the gap between inside and outside as a transcendental condition of space. He moves from Lévi-Strauss's analysis of Caduveo facial decorations and Jameson's concept of the political unconscious through a taxonomy of postmodern architectural strategies (Koolhaas, Libeskind, Gehry) to argue that contemporary performance arts venues materialize a 'democratic exclusivity', privately controlled public space that enacts an imaginary resolution of class contradiction. He concludes with Stephen Jay Gould's concept of exaptation borrowed from architectural spandrels as a model for how non-functional interstitial spaces in such venues might be subversively reappropriated.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 22
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
A shift in perspective directly inscribed into the object itself, such that the object materializes two incompatible structuring principles simultaneously, as seen in postmodern buildings by Libeskind or Gehry.
Implicitly operative in the discussion of the gap between inside and outside and of social antagonism that cannot be symbolized; architecture's mute staging of what ideology cannot say.
Jameson's concept, invoked here to describe how buildings encode social antagonisms and utopian/dystopian fantasies that cannot be openly acknowledged in official ideology.
Lévi-Straussian/Jamesonian formula for how cultural forms (facial decorations, buildings) symbolically resolve social antagonisms that cannot be resolved in reality.
Freudian concept used here to describe how Stalinist neo-Gothic architecture enacts the hierarchy and social distinction that the official egalitarian ideology cannot acknowledge.
as “ideology never lies”
Žižek's paradox: ideology does not simply falsify reality but stages its own truth in displaced, mute form, e.g., Stalinist architecture enacts the hierarchy that Stalinist text denies.
as “unheimlich / uncanny”
Applied to the end of Psycho: Norman's full identification with the mother as a finding of heim (home) in the uncanny, his architectural split between the motel and the Gothic house resolved in monstrous identification.
as “nation as zero institution”
Žižek's thesis that the modern nation functions as a zero institution: wherever one stands in the social hierarchy, national belonging is the empty level at which all are included, masking class antagonism.
Lévi-Strauss's mana, the term with no determinate meaning that signifies only the presence of meaning as such; the zero institution is its institutional counterpart.
as “inside-outside incommensurability”
Žižek's claim that the gap between inside and outside is a transcendental a priori of phenomenological experience, not a deficiency to be overcome: the outside as seen from inside is always minimally spectral, derealized, never fully real.
as “the sublime outside”
The outside when it is enclosed by the inside, not the raw exterior but the outside elevated into spectacle by being framed from within, as in the South Korean theater looking onto North Korea.
Žižek's architectural formula for postmodernism: the outer envelope of a building is decoupled from its interior functional structure, with no expressive correspondence between the two.
as “floating organs”
Koolhaas's own description of his buildings' interiors, adopted by Žižek: the internal functional spaces hang within an enormous neutral container with no organic relation to the outside.
Urban-regeneration ideology around Gehry-style sculptural buildings that claim to create vibrant public space in gray city centers; Žižek treats this as ideological mystification of privately controlled public space.
Non-functional excess space produced by the combination of multiple architectural structuring principles in postmodern venues; the site of potential subversive reappropriation via exaptation.
Sloterdijk's/Zaera-Polo's concept of a society organized around sealed spheres or bubbles of immunized space; Žižek uses it to show the political underside of sustainability discourse and performance venue design.
Deleuzian concept used by Zaera-Polo to celebrate postmodern nomadism; Žižek counters that deterritorialization always generates immunization and enclosure as its dialectical other side.
as “Junk Space”
Koolhaas's own concept, invoked via Zaera-Polo: the sanitized, climate-controlled, privately managed urban areas expanding across cities, presented as public but operated as private enclaves.
The paradox of contemporary performance arts venues: a multifunctional, ostensibly egalitarian open space whose access is nonetheless invisibly filtered and privately controlled.
Gould's evolutionary concept, adopted by Žižek for architecture: a non-functional structural excess (spandrel) that is subsequently reappropriated for a totally different purpose; model for subversive use of interstitial spaces in performance venues.
as “spandrel”
The structurally necessary but functionally empty triangular spaces produced when different architectural structuring principles combine (e.g., square nave and round cupola at San Marco); Gould's original example for exaptation, here made the key concept for architectural surplus.
Japanese art of designing practical objects taken to absurd extremes, the rule being that the object must function but be so ridiculous it cannot be commercialized; cited as model of purposeful uselessness analogous to spandrels.
Stories he reaches for 3
The Stalinist neo-Gothic style (Lomonosov University, House of Culture in Warsaw) enacts the return of the repressed of official egalitarian ideology: the fantasy of hierarchy and social distinction that cannot be stated in the official text is staged in the mute language of the buildings.
“I think that simply what is called postmodern architecture is closely related to the term that I use a lot the term of parallax”
Alphonse Allais, pointing at a woman in a café, says: 'What a shame, beneath her clothes she is totally naked.' Žižek uses this (citing Lacan's use of Allais) to illustrate how nakedness, like the 'view', only exists as seen-through-a-frame from within.
“beneath her clothes she is totally naked”
Norman Bates is split between the horizontal modernist motel (after Edward Hopper's motel paintings) and the vertical Gothic mother's house (also from Hopper). His endless running between the two stages the architectural antagonism of modernity; his final identification with the mother is his finding of 'home' in the uncanny.
“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.”
Works invoked 14
Psycho film
Called 'the greatest film about architecture'; used to illustrate architectural antagonism as the staging of modernist social contradiction, and the uncanny resolution of the inside/outside split.
Lord of the Rings film
The hobbit dwellings are cited as a cinematic example of terrain architecture, buildings squeezed between grass skin and earth.
Jameson's book is the main theoretical framework for the lecture's analysis of architecture and ideology; its Lévi-Strauss reading and concept of political unconscious are used extensively.
Tristes Tropiques book
Lévi-Strauss's account of the Caduveo facial decorations, quoted directly, is the foundational anthropological example of the lecture.
Lévi-Strauss's essay on Winnebago village spatial organization and the zero institution (mana); a key theoretical source for Žižek's concept of the nation and performance venues as zero institutions.
Beijing's egg-like metal-glass cupola over inner theater buildings; cited as example of 'minimal aestheticization' of the envelope, protective shell around the functional jewel inside.
Sydney Opera House artwork
Cited as the 'most obvious example' of postmodern skin-from-body separation in Australia; its ambiguous form (popularly interpreted as 'gay turtles' orgy') illustrates a building whose outside has no expressive relation to its inside.
Tate Modern artwork
Cited as the inverse case: keeping the old derelict industrial shell (Bankside Power Station) while totally renovating the inside, the complement to the Mariinsky cocoon strategy.
Yokohama Port Terminal artwork
Designed by Zaera-Polo; cited as the extreme case of terrain architecture where the building is squeezed between a green surface-skin and the earth, and where the intended naturalization produces the opposite: derealization of nature.
Bilbao Guggenheim artwork
Paradigmatic Gehry sculptural building; Žižek treats the 'Bilbao effect' (vibrant public space in a gray city) as ideological mystification of privately controlled public space.
Crystal Island, Moscow artwork
Norman Foster project; described as the climax of the single-envelope enclosure tendency (2.5 million sq m, five times the Pentagon); its sustainability rhetoric is treated critically as ideological.
Museum of Tolerance, Jerusalem artwork
Simon Wiesenthal Center project designed by Gehry, to be built over Jerusalem's main Muslim cemetery; Žižek reads it as the symptomatic embodiment of liberal tolerance's dependence on a constitutive intolerance.
Oriental Arts Center, Shanghai artwork
The 'giant teacups' structure; cited alongside the Beijing Grand Theatre as an example of the aestheticized protective envelope.
Author: Michael Hammond. Žižek says he does not advise buying it ('boring otherwise') but quotes it several times for its ideologically revealing propagandistic defense of performance arts venues.
People invoked 24
Called 'Austrian monster'; his case is briefly analyzed as an architectural problem, respectable family above, monstrous primordial father below, illustrating inside/outside incommensurability.
Norman Foster negative
His Crystal Island project in Moscow (2.5 million sq m under a single envelope) is cited as the climax of the enclosure-of-commons tendency, presented critically.
Kim Jong-il negative
Mentioned alongside Kim Il-sung in the Juche/sustainability comparison.
Claude Lévi-Strauss positive
Cited for his analysis of Caduveo facial decorations and of Winnebago village spatial organization; Žižek praises his 'wonderful' and 'crucial' reading, particularly the distinction between longing for real equality vs. proper appearance.
Oscar Niemeyer positive
Žižek reads Niemeyer's Brasília plan as a dream of proper appearance rather than a naively utopian or totalitarian project; credits biographical evidence that Niemeyer was aware of Brazil's failure to achieve liberal democracy.
Daniel Libeskind positive
His buildings are treated as paradigmatic examples of the parallax principle: combining incompatible structuring principles (horizontal/vertical and oblique cubes) within a single form.
Jacques Lacan positive
Cited for his use of the Alphonse Allais nakedness joke to illustrate how nakedness only exists as seen-from-within-a-frame; the broader psychoanalytic framework of inside/outside, the Real, and ideology structures the whole talk.
Frank Gehry positive
Treated as the limit case of postmodern architectural aestheticization, the sculptural Gehry building (Bilbao effect) is held up as ideologically suspicious, privately controlled public space; also commissioned for the Museum of Tolerance project over a Muslim cemetery.
Stephen Jay Gould positive
Called 'my favorite Darwinian biologist'; Žižek sides with Gould against Dawkins and Pinker on exaptation, credits him with the architectural spandrel example, and uses his framework as the key to subversive reappropriation of interstitial space.
Gilles Deleuze negative
Deleuzian deterritorialization is treated as only one side of the story; Žižek argues it dialectically produces immunization and enclosure, so the Deleuzian celebration of nomadism is ideologically complicit with the privatization of public space.
Jean-François Lyotard positive
Credited with giving the name 'postmodernism' to a complex of phenomena and thereby introducing a 'new order of intelligibility'; Žižek defends the term's usefulness in this elementary sense.
Edward Hopper positive
Both houses in Psycho have precise models in Hopper's painting: the modern motel and the Gothic house by the railroad; cited to enrich the architectural/aesthetic reading.
Steven Pinker negative
Listed as a 'vulgar Darwinian' who Gould triumphantly beats in the debate about language and exaptation.
Rem Koolhaas positive
Presented as the 'zero level of postmodernism': the neutral box with floating organs inside is Žižek's baseline example of the skin/body split; Koolhaas's own concept of 'Junk Space' is also cited approvingly.
Fredric Jameson positive
Žižek draws heavily on Jameson's concept of the political unconscious and his reading of Lévi-Strauss's Caduveo example; praises his insight as 'fully justified' and uses his framework as the backbone of the architectural ideology analysis.
Friedrich Engels negative
His account of language emerging from collaborative labor is called 'an incredible circular reasoning', a pseudo-Marxist game; used to illustrate what the exaptation account corrects.
Alphonse Allais positive
The French satiric writer's joke about nakedness under clothes is cited via Lacan as the 'best joke about nakedness' and used to illustrate inside/outside incommensurability.
Kim Il-sung negative
The Juche idea of self-reliance is compared to Western sustainability discourse; cited to satirize both.
Adolf Loos positive
Cited as originator of the modernist ideal, 'ornament is a crime', and of its racist formulation (ornament = primitive/degenerate); Žižek does not dismiss modernism but notes postmodernism at least brings out the antagonism.
Richard Dawkins negative
Mentioned as Gould's opponent in the exaptation/adaptation debate; implicitly grouped with 'vulgar Darwinians' Žižek rejects.
Peter Sloterdijk positive
His notion of spheres as immunization of cordoned-off space and 'global provincialism' / capsular society is deployed (via Zaera-Polo) to analyze the politics of the architectural envelope.
Alfred Hitchcock positive
Psycho is called 'the greatest film about architecture'; Hitchcock's work is used to illustrate the staging of architectural antagonism in modernist film.
Ludwig Wittgenstein positive
His motto 'what we cannot directly talk about it can be shown by the form of our activity' is cited as the key to how architecture stages ideology's unspeakable truth.
Alejandro Zaera-Polo positive
Described as 'very intelligent' and 'as close as you can come to a Deleuzian capitalist'; his writing on architectural envelopes, Sloterdijk's spheres, and the privatization of public space is used approvingly as theoretical scaffolding.
What it argues
architecture as ideology and the political unconsciousthe parallax gap between inside and outside as transcendental conditionpostmodern architecture's skin/body split and its social meaningperformance arts venues as 'democratic exclusivity'zero institution and the nation as empty signifierexaptation: non-functional excess repurposed subversivelythe Stalinist return of the repressed: hierarchy in egalitarian ideology
Dialectical moves 8
“The message of ideology is not a lie: Stalinist architecture tells the truth about hierarchy precisely where the official ideology is silent about it. Ideology never lies.”
Ideology stages its repressed truth in material/formal displacement rather than simply falsifying reality.
“What the Caduveo Indians long for is not real equality but a proper appearance — and far from being a mere semblance, the appearance is a social reality embedded in rituals and procedures.”
The demand is not for substance but for the form of equality, which is itself materially efficacious and not 'merely' formal.
“The outside as seen from inside is no longer simply outside; it is the sublime outside enclosed by the inside. The two outsides are radically non-identical.”
What appears to be a simple inside/outside binary splits into three: raw outside, inside, and the sublime outside produced by enclosure, reversing the usual assumption that outside simply contains inside.
“Postmodern architecture's sin is not that it is secretly elitist; it is that its very anti-elitism — its equation of great art with elitism — is false.”
The critique of elitism is itself the elitist move; great art is universal and the 'opening up' to popular taste is the real exclusion.
“In his full identification with the mother Norman Bates finally found his heim, his home — the uncanny is the home.”
The Unheimlich is not the opposite of the heimlich but its hidden truth: the monstrous identification is the only resolution of the architectural/psychic split.
“Deterritorialization always generates its opposite: autopoietic self-structuring, immunization, and enclosure. The Deleuzian poetry of fluid flows is just one side of the story.”
The celebration of nomadic openness dialectically produces the drive to seal and climatize space, freedom and fortress are the same gesture.
“The naturalization intended by terrain buildings produces the very opposite effect: nature is derealized and appears as an artificial skin concealing complex machinery.”
The attempt to make buildings disappear into nature makes nature itself appear as a building, the dialectical reversal of the naturalization aesthetic.
“A Museum of Tolerance needs a little intolerance to create its space — it is built, literally, over the victims of intolerance.”
The condition of possibility of the liberal tolerant gesture is the very exclusion it claims to overcome.
Claims 17
asserts
Postmodern architecture is closely related to the concept of parallax: the object materializes different structuring principles and different perspectives within a single form.postmodern architecture and parallax
asserts
What the Caduveo facial decorations express is not a longing for real equality but for a properly functioning social appearance — and this is the formula of ideology.ideology as longing for proper appearance
asserts
Architecture does not merely illustrate ideology but stages in mute form the repressed truth and inherent antagonisms that explicit ideology cannot acknowledge.architecture and ideology
asserts
Stalinist neo-Gothic architecture enacts the return of the repressed of official egalitarian ideology: the desire for hierarchy and social distinction.Stalinist architecture as ideological symptom
asserts
Ideology never simply lies; it always stages the truth of the antagonism it officially denies, displaced into the mute language of material form.the non-deceptive logic of ideology
asserts
Hitchcock's Psycho is the greatest film about architecture: Norman Bates is literally split between the horizontal modern motel and the vertical Gothic house, enacting the architectural antagonism of modernity.Psycho as architectural allegory
asserts
New Urbanism is architecture as ideology at its purest: it provides an imaginary, materially realized solution to a social deadlock that has nothing to do with architecture and everything to do with late capitalist dynamics.New Urbanism as ideological fantasy
asserts
The incommensurability between inside and outside is not a postmodern pathology but a transcendental a priori of phenomenological experience.inside/outside gap as constitutive
asserts
Performance arts venues attempt to function as architectural zero institutions: places whose conflicting meanings cancel out to produce the pure presence of meaning as such.performance arts venues as zero institutions
asserts
The envelope — the architectural skin separating inside from outside — is also a security device that privatizes public space, enacting an urban version of the enclosure of the commons.architectural envelope as privatization instrument
asserts
Contemporary performance arts venues embody 'democratic exclusivity': ostensibly open and egalitarian, but invisibly filtered and privately controlled.democratic exclusivity in contemporary cultural architecture
asserts
The failure of anti-elitist performance architecture is not that it is secretly elitist but that its equation of great art with elitism is itself false: great art is by definition universal and emancipatory.great art and elitism
asserts
Language is a product of exaptation and cannot be accounted for in direct evolutionary-adaptive terms; Engels's account of language evolving from collaborative labor is circular.origin of language and exaptation
asserts
Sustainability discourse is the Western capitalist equivalent of Kim Il-sung's Juche idea: a fantasy of self-reliance that masks its own class and resource dimensions.sustainability as ideological fantasy
reframes
Deterritorialization always generates as its dialectical counterpart a drive toward immunization and enclosure; the Deleuzian celebration of nomadism misses this.Deleuzian deterritorialization and its dialectical other
asserts
A progressive architectural response to the performance arts venue problem would be to abandon the prestige project altogether and focus on what can be done in ordinary buildings for ordinary people.progressive architecture
asserts
The Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem built over a Muslim cemetery enacts the hidden truth of multi-confessional tolerance: a little intolerance is needed to create the space for the museum of tolerance.Israeli Museum of Tolerance and ideological contradiction
Quotes 14
“Ideology never lies — that's my basic rule. It tells the truth. Just for example if you are in Moscow in the late thirties and say it's a fake equality — an intelligent guy will tell you of course, look at our buildings.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology stages its truth in material form
“What is missing here with these tribes is precisely this appearance itself — which of course is never only an appearance, it's an appearance embodied in very concrete social procedures, rituals and so on.”Slavoj Žižek · the reality of ideological appearance
“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.”Slavoj Žižek · architecture as the showing of ideology's unsayable
“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.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology's necessary symptomatic self-betrayal
“In his full identification with the mother Norman Bates finally found his heim, his home.”Slavoj Žižek · the uncanny as the return home / architectural resolution
“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.”Slavoj Žižek · inside-outside incommensurability as phenomenological fact
“You should always look at an implicit frame. Room with a view: the view is nothing in itself. The view is a view from the room.”Slavoj Žižek · the constitutive role of the frame in perception
“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.”Slavoj Žižek · democratic exclusivity as the ideology of performance venues
“To see Mozart and the rich crowd as belonging to the same space is an obscenity. If anything Mozart belonged to the poor in the upper stalls who spent their last dollars to see the opera.”Slavoj Žižek · great art is not elitist — it belongs to the poor
“It is not that performance arts venues are secretly elitist. It is their very anti-elitism — its implicit ideological equation of great art with elitism — which is false.”Slavoj Žižek · the false premise of anti-elitist architecture
“This idea of sustainability is our own version of the craziest idea of Kim Il-sung: the Juche idea. We are following their advice.”Slavoj Žižek · sustainability as Western Juche ideology
“The envelope which isolates a set of buildings is the urban architectural version of the enclosure of the commons.”Slavoj Žižek · architectural envelope as enclosure of the commons
“What materialism means is precisely reasoning against teleology: you see how teleology always presupposes some opportunistic bricolage, tinkering, chance.”Slavoj Žižek · materialism as anti-teleological exaptation logic
“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.”Slavoj Žižek · the return of the repressed / abjection as architectural uncanny
Transcript 1 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 shall 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 shall 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 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 real architectural edifice included how does it deal with social antagonisms? 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. Uh 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 a 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 this is Jameson's description. Uh 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 on. 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 balanced 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 wanted it's not how shall 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 on. What is missing here with these tribes is precisely this appearance itself which of course is never only an appearance it's 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 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 try 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 Brazil 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 on. 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 the 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 social 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 thirties. You 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 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 maybe probably I hope you know that these two houses both have precise models in painting. Know 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 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 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. This would have been a relief 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 but part here real-life occurrences as something which relies very much on its architectural background. For example I think that a year ago when I 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 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 the modern notion of nate 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'll 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 these performance art venues let me begin by the fundamental feature of postmodern architecture. The the end of the so-called expressive correspondence between the inside the division of buildings into rooms and spaces for 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 with their 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 derealized 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 theater building with a large screen-like window in front. It's simply a gigantic hall with a big screen but 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 theater 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 rationed 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 fantasmatic status elevated into a spectacle simply by being in front. 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 liter in 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 shall 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'm 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 a 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 uh is this me 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 as 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 famous French satiric writer Alphonse Allais from one hundred years ago who once in a cafeteria I will not be obscene okay you will be the victim. Sa- yeah yeah. showed 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 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 it all with this idea ornament is a crime. And he even put it in extremely racist terms he claimed that primitive degenerate people do ornaments and then the more civilization progresses the more you go to just lean and mean function and so on. Uh 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 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. I mean in a typical modernist way the meaning itself is ambiguous. What should should- what does- that you know that form which I will not describe it because I would already have to use metaphor what does it stand for? With my obscene mind I was very happy to learn that the predominant version is gay turtles' orgy okay or two big turtles anally penetrating each other. That that's considered the common architectural whatever. Uh 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 don't know which one postmodern stupid sorry I took the wrong one. 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 you of this this would be sorry 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 huge 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 set of buildings inside. Like the giant teacups of the Oriental Arts 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. The you remember I used in some of my books this disgusting example of chocolate eggs Kinder Surprise where we have the eggs I mean these are like for me if anything are these not are these 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 St. Petersburg. It is and it will be Leningrad. The functional box-like theater 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 at its purest. It's the building will be the same they will just kind of 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 it own of its own. The goal is to achieve the goal is to achieve what what usually people call the Bilbao effect to create a vibrant public space in the midst of the city's boring gray concrete jungle. So okay a couple just 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 hobbit's dwellings in the first you know it simply it looks just as a small hill 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 the grass the hill going on. But I think the effect is exactly the opposite one nature is derealized. It appears as if natural surface of grass is an artificial skin concealing complex machinery. And then 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 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 Theater the old inside building and wrap 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 boring story Frank Gehry of course. This vast complex will consist of a general museum children's museum theater 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 multi-confessional 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 turned 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 Israeli peace organization noted the plan 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 arts or religious whatever cultural multifunctional 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 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 of immunization of cordoning off part of space. According to Zaera-Polo far from advocating a return to pre-modern containment Sloterdijk was the first to propose what one can call the provincialism for the global era. 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 implication end of quote. So which are the political implications of this appetite for the envelope as a device of insulation and immunization? And I found 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 always generates a kind of autopoietic self-structuring which is immunization enclosure of 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 function protecting part of space. Envelope also 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 fateful 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 where the public realm is increasingly built and managed by private agents end of quote. So from the Deleuzian poetry of fluid deterritorializations 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 screen 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 ar 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 Junk Space 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 reaches 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 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 gray 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 rages as a holy grail for architects. A quote from a propaganda book for performance arts 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 you remember when already a month 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 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 it it's boring otherwise it's Michael Hammond Performing Architecture Opera Houses Theaters and Concert Halls for the 21st 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 theater 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 motive 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 performing 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 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 bankers Morgan family one of the opera's great patrons arrived she arrived half an hour late half an hour in for 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 guy 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 that you can 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 exclusivity. It is for everyone but how to filter it properly nonetheless. So is there anywhere here where is here a possibility if there is one 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 these famous abandoned factories in the suburbs and to make an an alternate performance art center but I don't I don't think it properly works. But so again for me the one should do a proper democratic thing and change the focus simply and ask what can be done in those of ordinary gray 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 opened. Here I would like to conclude with the 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 readapted for another new totally different for totally different purpose. Why is this so interesting? Because Gould goes here to the end and she and I am totally on his side here. He claims and I think he triumphantly wins against all those vulgar Darwinians 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 ha-ha 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. Uh 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'm an architect no? Please don't say this if yeah. 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 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 that San Marco church because of how the cupola is supported by square forms you have some kind of 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 explores 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 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. Uh here some interesting things are happening in these performance art venues. You know we 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're human. But they are the most intelligent the how shall I put it because you know Japanese know all about this paradoxes 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 you this one okay they treated yeah it's it's it's glasses with wipers you know so that you can walk safely in rain and no? Or for example you have butter butter as a lipstick so that you know if you buy them you can just as a lipstick put butter on. Or or for example fresh water it 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 and no wonder that I read that precisely in some of these Japanese performance art venues. Really maybe slightly subversive interesting things are happening when these interstitial spaces were occupied by either I don't know avant-garde leftist group 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 these 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 thank you very much and if you get some justice have mercy have mercy I was
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 shall 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 shall 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 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 real architectural edifice included how does it deal with social antagonisms? 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. Uh 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 a 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 this is Jameson's description. Uh 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 on. 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 balanced 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 wanted it's not how shall 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 on. What is missing here with these tribes is precisely this appearance itself which of course is never only an appearance it's 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 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 try 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 Brazil 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 on. 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 the 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 social 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 thirties. You 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 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 maybe probably I hope you know that these two houses both have precise models in painting. Know 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 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 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. This would have been a relief 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 but part here real-life occurrences as something which relies very much on its architectural background. For example I think that a year ago when I 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 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 the modern notion of nate 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'll 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 these performance art venues let me begin by the fundamental feature of postmodern architecture. The the end of the so-called expressive correspondence between the inside the division of buildings into rooms and spaces for 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 with their 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 derealized 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 theater building with a large screen-like window in front. It's simply a gigantic hall with a big screen but 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 theater 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 rationed 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 fantasmatic status elevated into a spectacle simply by being in front. 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 liter in 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 shall 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'm 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 a 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 uh is this me 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 as 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 famous French satiric writer Alphonse Allais from one hundred years ago who once in a cafeteria I will not be obscene okay you will be the victim. Sa- yeah yeah. showed 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 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 it all with this idea ornament is a crime. And he even put it in extremely racist terms he claimed that primitive degenerate people do ornaments and then the more civilization progresses the more you go to just lean and mean function and so on. Uh 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 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. I mean in a typical modernist way the meaning itself is ambiguous. What should should- what does- that you know that form which I will not describe it because I would already have to use metaphor what does it stand for? With my obscene mind I was very happy to learn that the predominant version is gay turtles' orgy okay or two big turtles anally penetrating each other. That that's considered the common architectural whatever. Uh 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 don't know which one postmodern stupid sorry I took the wrong one. 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 you of this this would be sorry 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 huge 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 set of buildings inside. Like the giant teacups of the Oriental Arts 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. The you remember I used in some of my books this disgusting example of chocolate eggs Kinder Surprise where we have the eggs I mean these are like for me if anything are these not are these 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 St. Petersburg. It is and it will be Leningrad. The functional box-like theater 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 at its purest. It's the building will be the same they will just kind of 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 it own of its own. The goal is to achieve the goal is to achieve what what usually people call the Bilbao effect to create a vibrant public space in the midst of the city's boring gray concrete jungle. So okay a couple just 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 hobbit's dwellings in the first you know it simply it looks just as a small hill 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 the grass the hill going on. But I think the effect is exactly the opposite one nature is derealized. It appears as if natural surface of grass is an artificial skin concealing complex machinery. And then 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 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 Theater the old inside building and wrap 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 boring story Frank Gehry of course. This vast complex will consist of a general museum children's museum theater 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 multi-confessional 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 turned 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 Israeli peace organization noted the plan 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 arts or religious whatever cultural multifunctional 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 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 of immunization of cordoning off part of space. According to Zaera-Polo far from advocating a return to pre-modern containment Sloterdijk was the first to propose what one can call the provincialism for the global era. 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 implication end of quote. So which are the political implications of this appetite for the envelope as a device of insulation and immunization? And I found 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 always generates a kind of autopoietic self-structuring which is immunization enclosure of 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 function protecting part of space. Envelope also 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 fateful 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 where the public realm is increasingly built and managed by private agents end of quote. So from the Deleuzian poetry of fluid deterritorializations 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 screen 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 ar 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 Junk Space 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 reaches 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 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 gray 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 rages as a holy grail for architects. A quote from a propaganda book for performance arts 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 you remember when already a month 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 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 it it's boring otherwise it's Michael Hammond Performing Architecture Opera Houses Theaters and Concert Halls for the 21st 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 theater 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 motive 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 performing 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 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 bankers Morgan family one of the opera's great patrons arrived she arrived half an hour late half an hour in for 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 guy 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 that you can 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 exclusivity. It is for everyone but how to filter it properly nonetheless. So is there anywhere here where is here a possibility if there is one 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 these famous abandoned factories in the suburbs and to make an an alternate performance art center but I don't I don't think it properly works. But so again for me the one should do a proper democratic thing and change the focus simply and ask what can be done in those of ordinary gray 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 opened. Here I would like to conclude with the 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 readapted for another new totally different for totally different purpose. Why is this so interesting? Because Gould goes here to the end and she and I am totally on his side here. He claims and I think he triumphantly wins against all those vulgar Darwinians 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 ha-ha 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. Uh 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'm an architect no? Please don't say this if yeah. 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 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 that San Marco church because of how the cupola is supported by square forms you have some kind of 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 explores 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 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. Uh here some interesting things are happening in these performance art venues. You know we 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're human. But they are the most intelligent the how shall I put it because you know Japanese know all about this paradoxes 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 you this one okay they treated yeah it's it's it's glasses with wipers you know so that you can walk safely in rain and no? Or for example you have butter butter as a lipstick so that you know if you buy them you can just as a lipstick put butter on. Or or for example fresh water it 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 and no wonder that I read that precisely in some of these Japanese performance art venues. Really maybe slightly subversive interesting things are happening when these interstitial spaces were occupied by either I don't know avant-garde leftist group 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 these 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 thank you very much and if you get some justice have mercy have mercy I was