The Engineer’s Anxiety, or Rejecting the Goddess

“Architecture… the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction.”
Walter Benjamin

“One of the greatest problems of our own times is dealing with the uncontrollable acceleration of time, a process that began with 19th-century industrializations; it keeps continually disposing of things in expectation of the future, of the next thing. All avant-garde movements were in fact based on the continual destruction of preceding works in order to go on to something new. Implicit in this is the murder of the future.”
Manfredo Tafuri
Interview with Richard Ingersoll

“It’s no accident that puritanism, and the puritanical outlook, runs
absolutely parallel to the materialist, scientific outlook, because both oppose the whole world
of nature, which is of course what we have to live in, what we are part of, what we grow out
of. In other words these stories put us into a world that does not really exist, except within a
very narrowly puritan society.”
Ted Hughes

In the current issue of Uncube magazine, online, there is a short homage to Argentine architect Francisco Salamone. The photographer Estaban Pastarino Diaz photographed what remains of Salamone’s buildings for the Argentine architectural biennial in 1997, which served to revive interest in Salamone. Before discussing the architecture, these are remarkable photographs by Diaz, using long exposures at night and unearthing something inherently haunting about Salamone’s structures. The short but very good essay on Salamone, by Rosario Talevi, quotes Manfredo Tafuri at the very start. And this is a perfect place to begin examining Salamone’s work. And this in turn is a perfect continuation of what I wrote last time about Antonioni, and Bertolucci and Pasolini. For Tafuri saw that, as Talevi cites, the individual was being de-centered, and thus creating a new spatial order. In one sense this is what Antonioni was doing, or was reacting to, anyway. It is probably no accident that Salamone’s best work was in his design for cemetaries. In fact, a large measure of the best 20th century architecture (and 21st century) is found in cemetaries and crematoriums. The Uncube issue is devoted to just this and they mention the Celsing crematorium in Stockholm, which is a favorite building of mine.

“In order to be significant, architecture must be forgotten, or must present only an image for reference which subsequently becomes confounded with memories.”
Aldo Rossi

There is something in western culture, today, that has started to feel as if it has passed a tipping point. We are over the edge. Not just environmentally, although that is true, but culturally — the manufacturing of madness is now 24/7, there is a seemingly inexhaustible amount of material to testify to this. Looking back at the evolution of architecture in the 20th century, and the state of it today, it is not hard to see parallels to what has happened with fiction writing, with film art, with painting and theatre. If the psyche of the collective West began, after WW2, to be subjected more consciously and deliberately to conditions that engendered an escalating distraction from reality, this de centered frayed consciousness, a disunified consciousness, is reflected in the schizoid evolution of architectural practice after the war.

But looking back, it is easy to see the shift away from radical voices. By the 80s, the Reagan years, it is clear that the prophecies of Debord were exactly right. That Adorno and Horkheimer were right and Benjamin, too, really. Ergo, then, came the need to diminish their correctness from the establishment. There is an article at Jacobin this month on progress. I wrote at the time, on social media, that this article struck me as slightly sinister. And it is. More than slightly, in retrospect. But this idea of progress, see, is terribly confused in large swaths of the populations of the West. More, even on the left it has, at times, taken curious and regressive paths. In the Jacobin article, by Samuel Farber, the entire notion of what constitutes progress is hugely contradictory, but the confusion has a messianic caste to it. There was another debate I saw about an article in the Washington Post on ‘coddled’ college students. There was a rebuttal of sorts over at the much deteriorated Truth-Out. Both articles are very superficial and both are wrong. But both are linked implicitly to not just the crises in pedagogy, but to these assumptions about *progress*. One of the accusations in the Washington Post was that students are “not prepared for their working lives.” The Truth-Out piece seemed to focus on the actual physical danger of life in college — rape culture, and the dangers of attack. Its a very confused piece, which is the norm these days at Truth-Out. But of course the rape culture topic is, in fact, quite important and crucially connected to the very factors that this piece omits. But it serves as code for *progressive* in this particular case. And, yes, bashing millennials is a sort of indoor sport for reactionary corporate media. In fact the use of the word *millennial* is suspect onto itself. But, what neither article addresses at all is the intellectual vacuity of much University teaching today. And the focus on a ‘future working life’…the one that doesn’t exist because there are no jobs. But behind all of this lurks the unaddressed topic of what Universities are supposed to be doing in the first place. Preparing you for mindless toil, or preparing you for ecstatic reveries and intellectual revelation?

Before I discuss this further, it is also a week in which I noticed a new issue of the *leftist* zine Salvage is out. You can’t read it unless you buy it. A leftist and theoretically socialist magazine that demands payment before access. Here, from them, is their own breakdown of costs…

Of the £10,000:
£5000 will go on our first print run
£800 will pay our writers and artists
£3000 will pay our designer, Rupa, our accountant, Sylvia, and our videographer, Becky.
£1000 will pay the wages for a part-time admin assistant, John, at London living wage
£200 will pay for tote bags and merchandise
Anything we raise above £10,000 will help to pay for our launch and future events, and allow us to subsidise the next print run so that we can sell Salvage at the lowest price possible.

Now, if one is printing a quarterly, then yes, you have printing costs. But second, find a cheaper fucking designer. Third, I don’t get paid. I run this blog and its costs me very little. My IT guy gets a bit. I don’t advertise. Ever. So this is capitalism at work from a group of anti capitalists. Gosh, that makes sense. If that is not a clue to the integrity of this project, I don’t know what is. Fourth, what does a ‘part time assistant’ do? Whatever it is, do it yourself. I find this whole enterprise offensive and insulting.
(note: Salvage is a bad name. It reeks of minor marketing consensus. Like voting tallies in the back room at the Health Food store.)

“I do regret the passing of that intimacy. It was chipped away in increments, by cars, television, chain stores, fear—parental fears of children’s autonomy, “fear of crime,” et cetera—commercial and residential zoning, highway construction, urban renewal, escalating rents, the takeover by corporations of almost all the formerly owner-operated small businesses—groceries, drugstores, coffee shops, stationers, haberdashers, even bodegas. The last bastions of strictly neighborhood commerce are being rapidly decimated by chains these days. And then personal computers, which definitively drove people indoors. The single most jarring of all these changes for me, because so sudden and so absolute after millennia, is the disappearance of children playing in the streets—but then again that’s not confined to cities.”
Luc Sante
On the loss of intimacy in urban areas today.

How does architecture intersect with other arts, and with pedagogy, and philosophy in general?

In terms of architecture, it is fascinating to see comparatively minor figures like Ludwig Leo, or Salamone, Juan O’Gorman, or Lino Bo Bardi emerge and who seem to take on far greater stature than envisioned at the time. And partly this might be because none of them became institutions unto themselves. The intimacy that Luc Sante mentions above is also an aesthetic feeling, a quality embedded in form, and most of all in space. Architecture is always shot through the prism of finance. But if one puts that aside, at least for a second, there is an additional quality in architecture that has to do with the creation of an image of society. It is not simply that symbols are created in the form of buildings, although that happens, too, but more that we walk through architectural space, or inhabit it, or participate in social activities within it. Society is shaped in specific ways by the spaces we inhabit, but it is given allegorical meaning in architecture. The 20th century was a culmination of various trends that had been developing for maybe two hundred years. And as capitalism evolved, this sense of distance from the buildings people work and live in became more acute. One of the reasons that Lino Bo Bardi feels relevant now, more relevant, is because her work is felt to be interacting with and resisting the larger forces of society.

Architecture is elusive, however. For how we speak is effected by where we are. One is always in conversation with the architecture around us. I wrote last time about how loud modern culture has become. Visually loud, but also, literally loud. There are branches of modernist architecture that are prohibitive. An obvious example is how difficult it is to hear someone speak when in a mall. Or in a casino. Everything takes on the quality of an amusement park. Partly this accounts for the seductive quality of cemeteries and crematoriums. Death is silent. There is no conversation with death. There are only monologues before the dead. And this is directly linked to theatre. I have at times wondered if in theatre (and not film) there is a residue of audience as cemetery. In Universities now, the erasure of living allegorical learning feels dire. There is a banality to ideas of preparing students for ‘future’ working lives. It is a phantom future, an idea that is spoken about but rarely investigated. It is far easier to discuss the failures of the ‘present’, the failure to prepare for this abstract future. And classrooms are stunningly ugly, utilitarian in the way a suburban county municipal offices are utilitarian. How did the idea of learning become work prep?

“A military retiree turned analyst-lobbyist military would gain access to current inside information in the Pentagon, which would be useful for the private weapons contractors they served, and in return they would sell the administration’s talking points to the public. This is “connected” in the same way a totalitarian system is connected. Information presented to the public was often fabricated, exaggerated or otherwise distorted, to boost public support for the war in Iraq.”
Maximilian Forte

The daily reality of living in a state of siege is intentional. The architecture of modern life reflects this. The securitized landscape is one thing, but there are more subtle and probably more disturbing elements at work. The entire idea of selling ideas is insidious. I took part in a social media conversation about white privilege. The black man who posted a piece about institutional racism was answered by two white men. Not bad guys, but white men who simply could not let go of an idea of their voice being decisive. The decision maker, the white male. They asked what they could do. And the black man who had posted, pointed out that asking that question was itself a kind of privilege. This is very relevant here, for regardless of tone, that question is a kind of interrogation. When arts organizations *grant* you money that was applied for, they are exercising privilege. The one who answers is a supplicant. Stigma is attached to the position one finds oneself in, metaphorically. Now institutional racism is so deep that every word spoken contains racist linguistic DNA.

The architecture of contemporary society is predicated upon, in large measure, the creation of positions of authority. In many ways these remain the buildings of slave owners. And it occurred to me this week that capitalism itself is, in the imprint of exchange value, one in which all of human relations are positioned. By which I mean, the sense of visual authority is implied in very mystified ways, but ones that retain clear demarcations. So in modern cities there are always approaches. The space of approach. These are not new ideas, but their interconnectedness has an aesthetics. The Borremans painting above has a visceral truth that the viewer feels. The mimetic lingers uncomfortably. The feeling is in our body, and the memory of paralysis is re-stimulated. Not just physical paralysis, but spiritual restriction. When we approach a building, something far back in our sub-conscious reminds us of something, and our gait changes, imperceptibly perhaps, and our gaze shifts, because some trace of collective understanding is ignited. The narrative is a ghostly dream, silent, in our heads, but it likely partakes of what Max Forte writes about with ‘force multipliers’, the language of weaponry and aggression. The overt pacifist remembers too, and there is residual aggression in his or her pacifism, as well. Like the dry-drunk in AA, all pacifists feel, to me anyway, dangerously close to sadism. How much is simply the embedded history, the constellations of meanings that attach to words, to grammar, and more, to speech. We speak to ourselves, of course, and that is mimesis. So those positions of authority are fluid, and this is, in one way, an aspect of aesthetics. We capture something in artworks, something that reminds us of forgotten looks, or forgotten avoidance of looks, or often, I think, in dreams, of what we didn’t see. And great architecture is often touching on what we previously didn’t see. Salamone’s cemeteries are oddly experienced in that way. The brute concrete is ‘already dead’, it is the architecture of the afterlife, of gateways to purgatory, and the odd scale of his buildings makes an idea of an ‘approach’ suddenly unsettling. Architecture always implies a question; who is waiting beyond the wall, through the door, on the other side.

“…the shock of success often clothes something different. To children, the lighting of streetlamps after sunset appears to be quiet uncanny, artificial, and even insolent. The light that penetrates the night…in place of the sun’s…is one’s own, self generated, in violation of natural law. This very early feeling of dread, this particular, even incestuous, anxiety in relation to one’s courage may also echo in the mind of the engineer by virtue of his profession. He, too, penetrates Mother Nature with a creative and procreative aim, usurping the rights of the father, with sexual desire and deceit alike. Bad conscience, then, appears as the will to miss one’s aim.”
Ernst Bloch
The Anxiety of the Engineer

Bloch later in that same short essay writes; “To the socialist-concrete consciousness, filled with a world quite different than the one that has persisted up to now, the capitalist-technical emptiness provides exactly that nothingness wherein one hopes to discover everything. What is meant by this ‘everything’ are the real tendencies, the spaces of hope that open up once the false and illusionary stuffing has been pulled out, so that a hollow appears, free of terror and filled with a positive ferment…”

Bloch makes clear that the domestication of magic enclosed the shaman figure in a space shared with bureaucrats. The advent of ever more gratuitous technology meant the more it was experienced against the archaic backdrop of illegitimate magic and sorcery. The functional loss sort of conjured the oppositional historical. It is interesting that at the end Bloch evokes aesthetics as the illicit pathway of resistance to exchange value, to the hyper-rationality. He wrote that essay in 1929. He already feared what he labeled excessive industry. Contemporary life is awash in excessive technology, but perhaps the most disturbing to psychic maturation is actually the electric light. The disappearance of shadows, of mimetic night, is one that now so routine that it is barely considered anymore. And yet, I sense a return of the magic of night. In artworks, night appears more and more often and in photography, a very technically mediated medium, the strategy is increasingly one of extracting something forgotten in nightime, a kind of ritual, ancestral and atavistic.

All outdoor theatre performances, if at night, evoke unmistakable associations with dreams. The modern architect seems to contain and restrict dream inscription — the *fantastic* in Hadid or Gehry is more like the exhibitionistic. The exhibitionist can’t connect. But what is that difference? This is a question, partly, of what you call things? What you call things you make? For architects, calling a bridge a bridge is not really an act. Architecture exists in a far more socially mediated realm. When Dante called his poem a *comedy*, says Agamben, he was was bringing to consciousness one of the culture’s *secret thoughts*. The stoics saw the actor as hugely significant in tragedy because of the mask. The metaphor was completed in theatre when the actor put on the mask. The mask, the idea of adaptation to job description, to title, is that place where an unavoidable complicity with the domination occurs. The mass man, the robotic cog, the prole. The man marching silently to the slow death of tedium and purposelessness. But the mask also creates another space, one that negates all of the above. There are masks and there are masks. In theatre the mask is acknowledgement that there IS a secret. There is a line from a long poem by H.D.;

in the light of what went before

Robert Duncan wrote of a design in history, where Blake and Pharaoh, and the serpent (in the Zohar) form a continuum. And H.D. wrote more on on the Christ of Velazquez; whose eyes were ‘amber and fire’. That her words, as she said, were “indelibly stamped/on the atmosphere somewhere.” Ted Hughes study of Shakespeare posited the black of the storms becoming the black of the Moor, the black of robes in Macbeth, and then the blackness of Caliban. Ted Hughes I recall also spoke of writing poems being like capturing small animals, to later let them go. Murray Mednick said once that writing was like big game hunting. You learn better to follow the tracks. And in a way this is a developed sensitivity to felt-form in history. The wildness of following animals. I remember being followed by coyotes across a chunk of Joshua Tree — my car was in the shop. It was very, very hot. There was a sense, not of fear, none, but of collusion with the wild. They allowed me to feel the secret.

Hughes also wrote “When the mystical ecstatic adoration of the Divine Beloved streamed into eleventh and twelfth-century Europe from the Sufi poet-saints of Islam, it was appropriated, as a matter of course, for Mary, who had become the beneficiary of all the innate Goddess worship of the masses that had survived into the Christianized world.”

I’ve written before, a little, on Islamic architecture. I know far too little to write in much depth, but I know that to enter the countries of Islam is to enter a very specific architectual landscape, and a very quiet dialogue with the architecture itself. The courtyard are always the lungs of the body politic. The society breaths in the courtyards of the Maghreb. What Hughes suggests of the suppression of the Goddess mythology, which from another perspective is Dionysian, is that Puritanism was more responsible, really, than just Christianity. For in Mediterranean Catholicism the Mother is granted a role, but not in the north, not in Calvin and Luther, and not in Puritanism. As a semi side bar, it is an open question how much Spanish catholic mythology differs from Italian. For there is a clear sense in Spanish medieval architecture of something quite distinct from Italian building of the same era. Perhaps it is the role of Islam. In any event, the Puritan influence in the U.S. cannot be overemphasized. The entire masochistic psychic prostration of Puritan culture is written into the false appearance of fun and entertainment. All fun for Americans is either self destructive or it is punishment in some form or other. Or voyeuristic sadism. High school football is both, for example. The Puritan is always in conflict with himself. Puritans built stark horizontal houses, meeting halls (rather than churches) and that sense of sadism that is always felt in Puritanism, still manages to seduce at times. A comparison of Quaker building (or Shaker) with mainline Protestant building is worth taking. Quakers early focus on quietism (well, their quietism was itself reaction) and *conversation* with God is illuminating. But I digress, for the point here is that American self image never lost its Puritan harshness. The stoic and flinty eyed predator. In the 19th century U.S. the developing trend was toward not just pragmatism, for it was that, too, but more a kind of competitive pragmatism, a de-escalation of conversation of any sort..perhaps especially with God or Nature. The rise of the televangelist in the second half of the 20th century is a form of surrogate conversation. The pastor or reverend will talk with god so you don’t have to. You can go do the football game.

Pound, too, wanted art to “define for us the inner nature and conditions of man.” Pound sought the neo-pagan Renaissance, and elevated Pico della Mirandola, for example. And Arnaut Daniel, a favorite of Dante. The Christianity that has come down through that strange historical detour to the north is the preserving of the Inquisition. Pope John Paul, the most recent fascist Pope, was from that artery that would burn one at the stake. Dryer would have understood, and it is a fascinating thought experiment to trace backwards the repressive influence of Puritan aesthetics.

Now, I keep wanting to bring this all back to the an idea of architecture and speech. That where we are shapes how we listen, how we talk.
St. Thomas wrote (quoted by Agamben)…

“Whenever speech is the cause of the intellect, as in those things learned by instruction, what the intellect grasps is not the equal to the power of speech, and the intellect can then hear, but not understand the things spoken.{ } But whenever the intellect is the cause of speech, as in those things known by invention, then the intellect excedes speech, as in those things known by invention, then the intellect excedes speech, and many things are understood that cannot be spoken.” This is remarkably close to Benjamin in one respect, and it returns creative speech to magic, and hence to theatre. I am less sure Agamben quite grasps this, because I don’t really think St.Thomas is thinking about language exceeding the intellect in quite the way he says. But that’s too large a digression for now. The point is that speech is heard, and memorization is foundational here, if more than one person is being addressed. The conversation becomes a ritual.

I wonder if in a non-authoritarian communist ideal society anyone would ever ask someone a question? Or rather, ask a question that was at all unrelated to what was in front of one. There are Zen monasteries in which gossip is defined as talking aloud of anything not directly in one’s gaze.

“Justice is the ethical side of the battle; justice is the power of virtue and the virtue of power. Responsibility for the world we have is protected from the instance of justice.”
Gershom Scholem

One of the most mystifying of concepts is *communication*, at least in how its used today. A society of coercion sets up a default sense of demand, or interrogation, in the most simple question, and in social relations where hierarchies prevail, even answers become exercises of interrogation. In mass culture, the erasure of meaning by generalized abstractions, or even in much new architecture, where building cannot be read, where there is a hiding of purpose or function, much like all *entertainment*, the audience is issued a concealed command. The ethic of concealment runs throughout U.S. culture. Oil wells are disguised. Cell phone antennae are painted like palm trees. Why? It’s like the clear plastic sofa cover. Use value is treated as an obscenity. There is a new scent duplicating the smell of just opened new computer boxing. Car fresheners are scented with *new car smell*. Ironic? Perhaps, partly. But I suspect that line has blurred.

The privilege of race, of gender, and of class. The Capitalist cannot speak other than in the language of oppression. And there is now a strange ghost aura that lingers after each statement, and especially after each question. Ask which way is the train station, and regardless if the answer is ‘go fuck yourself’, the master/slave model is both correct, and changed today. Fanon said the black colonial subject had no memory of real freedom, but only white justice or white liberty — or the traces thereof. This Hegelian idea of recognition has under advanced capital, long been a process of misrecognition. Today, the conversation is distracted. If one were to push this idea, for the underclass, the oppressed, all identification is non-reciprocal — all conversation is with Capital, not even with the Master. As Fanon said, the master doesn’t want recognition from the slave, he wants work. There is no work, there is only the production of nothing. Today, the system, Capital, the state, from all directions the result is mediation in recognition. The entire bureaucracy implementing ‘multicultural’ programs are simultaneously stigmatizing the slave. The conversation is one of mis-direction, and of coerced recognition. And who is doing the recognizing? Where does recognition become appropriation? This gets a bit close to Althussar, actually. The interpolation of subjects in highly reified systems of class domination. But to bring this back a bit to speech and architecture; the practice of urban planning in the U.S. distills the invitation to the underclass to enjoy the spectacles of their own stigmatizing and marginalizing.

In mass culture, TV and film mostly, narratives increasingly circle around faux emotions. Fake hurt feelings. Characters take exaggerated, almost comical, offense at the smallest perceived slight or disrespect. White culture is depicted as identical to the social/psychology of the general population of a maximum security prison. And which metaphor, actually, is not far from the truth. Hollywood writers seem unable, in this generation, to step even a tiny bit outside this deep self involvement. Black characters talk like white characters mostly, women talk like men, the poor talk like the rich. There is a total inability to depict any segment of the working class because those voices are kept out of mass media.

“What Is of interest here is the precise Identification of those tasks which capitalist development has taken away from architecture.That Is to say, what it has taken away from ideological prefiguration. With this, one is led almost automatically to the discovery of what may well be the drama of architecture today: that is, to see archttecture obliged toreturn to pure architecture, to form without utopia; In the best cases, to sublime uselessness”.
Manfredo Tafuri
1976

Tafuri saw a decisive trend in modern architecture after 1960; that the incorporation of classical ideas were being first watered down to the most generic version of those ideas. A trivializing of classicism. Tafuri was of course highly critical of Fascist aesthetics in architecture, and in the monumentalizing of everything. But more than that, there was at the same time the seeds of this later quality of the generic. The sampling of classicism was resulted in that particular sense of vagueness one sees in Zaha Hadid, or Richard Meier. Or, really, a dozen other star-chatects. For vagueness is now overloaded with ideological baggage, and with kitsch loudness. With psycho-historical residue. Casa de Fascio, for all its elegance, also resembles a modern department store or residential loft complex (last I looked it was serving as a tax office in Como). There was a sterility in Italian fascist architecture, one subsumed in the Reich’s grand plans by the bombastic volk-mythologizing that appropriated German Romanticism. But this sterility is the story of the Enlightenment, too, on one level. Ted Hughes’ ideas on Shakespeare — which I’ve always found pretty convincing — imagined the ‘tragic equation’, as he called it, as the Puritan denial of the Goddess, of the Mother, of femininity, and of Dionysus.

The architecture of flash and volume is also the architecture of muffled screams. For that fascist aural extravagance, the sound of loudness, any loudness, is the better to hide the sound of boots kicking in doors. The visual flair is distracting, partly, from the natural inclination to ‘approach’ the entrance, all entrances, as if in prayer. I suspect in some register that prayer is the bi-product of architecture and place. For architecture encourages a natural respect for space, and a space of material location. The architecture of spiritual vagueness, the diluted rationalism one saw in Terragni migrated circuitously to much post modernism. The gestalt of ‘progress’, speed, rationality, and containment is the ideological backdrop of the dominated society. The car culture (and really, Hitler’s autobahn plans and part execution were a huge impetus to election) is one in which, again, the natural sense of space, and the ‘reading’ of buildings is rejected, or just erased. Find that good parking place (one persistent Hollywood fantasy is that of ALWAYS having the perfect parking space), rare is the presentation of the automobile as an instrument of aggression. The surge of that vague-classicism that accompanied fascism in the 1930s, in Paul Troost, and Speer, and Terragni and Geisler, was incorporated into North American space. The Haus der Deutschen Kunst by Troost looks like pretty much any midwestern city central post office of the last century. It is interesting to look at, for example, Adalberto Libera’s work that was not under the auspices of the Fascist government, for it is quite appealing art deco (not to mention Casa Malaparte in Capri, the location for Godard’s Contempt) and some of the detailing is just beautifully realized (see Palazzine a Ostia Mare, 1932). Still there lurks behind it a disquieting fraudulence, a kitsch taste. Hughes is correct (as was H.D. and Robert Duncan, and Empson) that Shakespeare’s theatre, the Elizabethan tragic stage was the site of of an eruption of radical poetics. Henry VIII had ransacked the monasteries. The palace throne room used to stage masques and as Duncan wrote; “In the reality of actual life, Christendom and Kingdom both fell. But the ‘original face’ remains, for just here, in the fall, Christendom and Kingdom fell into the imagination.” The architecture of the poem was secret, an elevated rhyme and measure unheard before. Again Duncan “it resembles the time of a dream…the impulse of dream or poem is to provide a ground for some future form beyond what we know.” Something of this poetry left architecture at the turn of the 20th century, and that departure was formalized by Fascism. The fascist aesthetic is associated with Triumph of the Will, and yet, despite the over-sized delirium, the core sense of taste was grudging and pinched, for such anality and cruelty is simply not expansive. So, the Nazi’s built grand pseudo mythic fantasies that were actually poetically constipated. The face of fascist art was a grimace.

The privileged classes today experience themselves under duress. That is the message of junk like Lena Dunham, or media hacks like Anderson Cooper, or new spirit of Il Duce, Donald Trump. The Bush family look stricken, gumming their hardening saliva. The Clintons are simply mad, beastial. The culture is awash in protracted and enervating racism and hatred of the poor, unable to contain their new colonial revanchist emotions. The architects no longer consider the prayers or hymns that invite in the crowd, they are like those University wonks who want to ‘prepare students for their future work life’, these builders want to prepare the crowd for future purchasing. But in each mis-recognition today there is an exhalation of aggression, and of anxiety. W.H. Auden wrote that “we mean a consciousness of the whole of the past in the present”. What Bloch called the hope to discover ‘everything’. I think its becoming clearer that the cult of science is soaked with a certain insanity. The insane dream of ‘totality’. The past is not the past, it is not traditional knowledge passed on through the community, the idea is that it is data to be stored by super computer brains. Aesthetics are algorithms fit for “engagement” with brands, with the building of brand loyalty. Except today the public is both too anxious, too broke, and too mis-directed to *engage*. They cultivate distraction. Endlessly, without tiring. Intimacy is gone. Replaced by distraction. Across all this is the new sound of the boot heel, the private security personel marching to guard water, or zombies, or new bio weapons to be used on the poor…genetic markers indicating the future poor. But the fascist ruling class is not happy. They are worried. Like in Kafka’s In the Penal Colony — when the Officer says:

“This procedure and this form of execution, which you now have the opportunity of admiring, currently have no open supporters left in our colony. I am their sole champion…”

The ruling privileged class have no supporters left, for they do not even support themselves, and are terriffied.

“Oedipus raised his axe again
The World is dark, he cried

The World is dark one inch ahead
What’s on the other side?”
Ted Hughes

In light of all that I have tried to document about art, our connectivity and sense of self, of history, personal and collective, the story of William Utermohlen serves as a, at the least, fascinating coda. http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/william-utermohlen-alzheimers-self-portraits