Gentle Manifest | To live is to be haunted

For most of its adult life, this blog has experimented with forms* of critical investigation of Rilindje (R), mostly because, after almost three decades of what was deemed a ‘transitional’** period in Albania —rightly or wrongly so, but certainly one of fast-paced transformation without much of the democratic progress it was first thought to be — R promised to fix both, democratic failure and cultural progress, under a unified vision for the future of the country; something along the sentiment «Albania, the ‘beautiful’: unleashing beauty to tame the beast.»

What did R thought of as ‘beauty’ and what did it thought of as ‘beast’?

It promised to develop a ‘western’ democracy, or at the very least to design a place attractive enough to seem renewed. In short, a seemingly new life.

For whom, though? 

Freedom was always implied. During this time, no one spoke of (the lack of) it publicly — in general or specifically about the ‘beauty’ (e.g. urgency) of having rights — the right to free speech, to affordable housing, to outstanding education, to public space and amenities, to fair laws, to uncensored artistic expression (i.e. not that of the ‘artist-in-chief’), and to so many other necessities — mental, individual or communal autonomy. 

Why would anyone? 

The country was not being invaded. It remained ‘at peace’.

Unity did not mean a single or total vision — at first. It just meant ‘beautifully, at piece’ — only later it was understood (maybe, still, not yet) that just was by design, a designation for the unjust(ified).

Hence, through experimental critiques — in the form of graspings 1 and scrypts 2 —  the blog has been trying, at the very least, to understand the forms of freedom implied by the name Rilindje and those deployed by it — how its politico-aesthetic act of (re)designing Rebirth (as a fix-it-all dogma) was already shaping perceptions and practices of freedom. 

How and what was (it) needed the most, though? 

The questions central to the blog’s quest had (and continue to have) everything to do with Rebirth as the design dogma and practice of R. 

What did it considered valuable and of value? 

What did it kill? 

What did it presume dead? 

What had died that it was giving some of it enough life and privilege to come back on again? 

What kind of a new life was it now breathing? 

At the beginning, without knowing much about R’s motivation (its scrypt), nor fully grasping how it would translate in a lived experience (deeds), the blog was quietly rooting for a truer birth, for a much needed awakening that c(w)ould’ve changed previous forms of governing so deeply rooted in both corruption and totalitarianism — one that c(w)ould’ve totally revamped its (public and private) institutions; one that c(w)ould’ve delivered and cheered on all the different forms of possible (and those not yet imagined) freedoms; one that c(w)ould’ve really made a difference within the country, and in the eyes of those outside forces whom R was so eager to impress (i.e. EU). But, what the blog and many others got instead was largely cosmetic, a rebirth in name only, a facelift to hide the long and deep-seated depression from persistently insignificant and precarious changes — that truly capitalist existence of going on a shopping spree one can’t afford to subdue (suppress) their blues — the feeling of being (care)free, in debt. 

Even though, at times, the blog goes hard on ‘but what does R mean’ and ‘can we figure out what R means by what R does’, it has always thought of R as an (missed) opportunity for Repair. Henceforth, the better approach and questions to ask, may be to confront, challenge and renegotiate R’s Realm, its unity of/and vision, its narrative of beauty, from one of Rebirth to one of a much needed Repair.  

Demanding repair every time R alludes to rebirth is a position of resistance. Redefining R’s beauty within its own narrative of it, is a position of beauty.   

    

R’s roaming caravan keeps redrawing the line between life and beyond-life, that self-induced pseudo-rebirth that makes existence precarious, at least in this blog’s eyes. As the blog itself ponders on its own existence, it’s starting to look closely at the existence of those it was brought up with (about ~ 7yrs ago, though R’s origin can be traced to at least a decade earlier), and that occupies itself with now. 

Maybe it was the time in which R came on — a time out of joint, of ‘transition’ from dead(ly) living to living dead(ly) or vice versa — that gave R probable cause to walk this line and play it with such precariousness all the way to becoming dead-ly. 

Maybe R was birthed by this realm of back and forths, in order to render it more legible, to legitimize it, thus to repeat it, in order to ensure its own existence. 

No matter what though, the illusory life that R reverberates through rebirth has disillusionized many, this blog included. Its insistence on such rebirth, and ultimately its own renewal, only reaffirms R’s hubris and disregard for the inherent spectrality of the process its name implies and warns of — it remains aloof to the specter that now lingers heavier than ever. 

The spatial is indeed a duration. Thus, the longer this blog lives, the more it entertains the thought of existing solely as a hauntological form of resistance.

“Our problem … is not so much that we are seduced by our memories of long ago, but that we cannot produce new memories.” 3

Citing Derrida’s book “Specters of Marx”, Mark Fisher adds: “Derrida’s title, needless to say, was a play on all of the ghostly imagery in Marx—most notably, of course, the opening line of the Communist Manifesto: “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism”. Part of the point was: if communism has always been spectral, what does it mean to say that it is now dead? Derrida’s other major reference-plex is Hamlet, especially the line, “The time is out of joint”. Here we are back with dyschronia or temporal disjuncture as the principal characteristic of hauntology.” 4

If specter is what’s inherited from the past (i.e. Communism) as well as from the future that preceded R’s (i.e. the ‘transition’ period), then would it make sense to speculate that the specter of Democracy is also haunting R? Could R’s (neoliberal) Rebirth be approached (analyzed) as a simultaneous haunt of unrealized past and future, both C and D?

Benjamin insisted that “We must wake up from the world of our parents” (V, 1048). 

“But what can be demanded of a new generation, if its parents never dream at all?” replies Susan Buck-Morss. 5

Hence, it might not be too far fetched to speculate that R’s intolerance or repression of old haunts may have animated, enlightened new or renewed apparitions. “When the present has given up on the future, we must listen for the relics of the future in the unactivated potentials of the past.” 6 Has R given up on the past/future its name suggests? 

How would it have been different, if named Repair?

If Rebirth is not more than just a repetition of old ways that won’t die; a coming back of what’s been repressed for so long, the question might be(come): If it won’t die, how does it age? When R promised a new life, a better one, only to then reduce it to an aesthetic unity, a forced top-down style of Idio(t)syncrasy as the only ‘legitimate’ (beautiful) form of a progressive nation, it wasn’t without precedent  (the socialist realism of our time?). We already know how it will age — renewed by rebirth, maybe?

To investigate Rebirth’s possible forms of freedom — those implied vs. deployed — from an uncanny POV, that of the return of the repressed— through defamiliarization and estrangement — is a position of resistance.

[The blog would also argue that absolute freedom resists form, but absolute freedom is improbable — what is possible, at least for the sake of the argument here, is the fact that any and all forms that deny freedom can be subverted from within the regimes of form to reveal their limits in ways that offer new means to undo them. (D&G) This is the position resistance takes. It is the one within from a place of without.]

What if unity of vision was not just ‘renewed beauty’ but a form of freedom whose beauty was ur(a)gency, a form of ‘renewed ur(a)gency‘ perhaps, whose just(ly) design — its stimuli — was the ur(a)gency of rights, the beauty of rights, the designation of/for ‘repair is rights’.  

What if unity+vision was a vision unified through difference; a unity that had the capacity and will to provide new forms of governing, where new doesn’t mean more elaborately designed ways of continuing old policies and practices of corruption, but new as in letting them die, not rebirthing them with a faceless facelift. 

How does a facelift age? 

How does it differentiate from repair?  

An actual birthing of democracy though, whose sole vision is to allow it to exist, to grow, to live independently of who brought it to life. 

I say birth because it can be easily argued that we’ve been democratic as much as we’ve been communist — we’ve not been communist nor democratic. 

(Never‽) 

I say birth because we’re in the midst of ‘celebrating’ the year of Skanderbeg, the year of his death — a symbolic rebirth of (his) democracy — a ‘celebration’ of his unity of vision or R’s? — without once questioning the uncanny resemblance of these ‘celebrations’ to the specter his death brought forth.

The blog never thought it would talk about S so much this year, but all the institutional ‘celebrations’ got to it(‘s nerves), so here we are, haunted by the ghost and spirit of a unity and vision, a freedom that has been dead for half a millennia. A freedom that is now spectral.

Hauntology as “a political gesture” then — as “a sign that the dead will not be silenced” 7, might be another way for this blog to realize itself, to not try to force the genie back in the bottle, but to let R’s “architecture realize itself in its own death” 8 — or at least in what R wishes from the genie (or jinn, defined as a “being concealed from the senses”), although making a deal with the ‘devil’ can’t be that easy. 

If R’s realization, its freedom and repression of haunts, depends on the “collective dreams of escape” implied by its name — Rebirth; the blog approaches R’s existence as a “collective grief” instead — a resistance that insists on Repair as “collective works of mourning”. 9

We continue to live in a time out-of-joint, thus it might not be such a bad idea to view (R’s) existence through the lens of hauntology “as a crucial-cultural and political-alternative both to linear history and to postmodernism’s permanent revival,” because what the blog mourns “most keeningly … is the very possibility of loss” (the loss of freedom amongst others).10

To live is to be haunted — R by its name, the implications of the name Rebirth (haunts) and the design of its new life. One hants the life and the other redesigns the haunt. One might say the blog is haunted too, by the fragmented ways it sees and thinks, as well as by the stuttering of its writing. Embracing, that to live, is indeed to be haunted, might be the first step toward existential freedom, the leap away from mental repression.

Notes:

*I use the word form to mean both (a) regime and (its) limits.

**The italized words in single quotations are, in definition, perception, and use, at least in my opinion, still debatable. There have been many arguments, from people smarter than me, refuting the validity of what thdescribe; the word ‘transition’ for example.

1. Charles H. Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, paraphrases H’s CXXIV fragment: “Graspings, that is to say groups holding together, apprehensions bringing things together: these are wholes and not wholes; they characterize a system which is convergent, divergent, structured by cooperation and by conflict; this system is consonant, dissonant, held together by harmony and discord alike; from all its components a unity emerges, and from this unity all things emerge.”
2. Jennifer Bloomer, Architecture and (the) Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranese; “In its ambiguous emblematicity of “crypt,” and its ambiguous position between picture and writing, the hieroglyph suggests a writing that is other than transparent, writing that is illegible in the conventional sense, a writing in which repressions surface. This “writing” might be termed (s)crypt. It is the writing of Joyce and the writing (etching) of Piranesi, which give themselves up to other readings.”
3. Mark Fisher, The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology
4. ibid.
5. Susan Buck-Morrs, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West
6. Mark Fisher, The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology
7. ibid.
8. Aaron Betsky, Violated Perfection: Architecture and the Fragmentation of the Modern
9. Mark Fisher, The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology
10. ibid.

  

Gentle Manifest | A few words about us

As I revisit and rewrite parts of the manifest, the about us profile, for this site, I keep thinking about why the blog has lasted for as long as it has and why I continue to post and write bits (however fragmented, cryptic or undigested they might be). The quick answer is because the questions never end, but the truth is that the task of learning how to ask better questions hasn’t been that simple. The facts and fictions, the assertions and answers given to the public (myself being part of it) have been seldom clear, and at times contextually senseless. Hence, the persistence of the question why every time I succumb to the mental and physical exhaustion of keeping the blog/ facebook page up and running, voluntarily. It may or may not be a labor of love, unlike the trendy and unruffled pages that populate the ether, but it certainly is labor. It certainly is a struggle (especially for an introvert as myself): a struggle to think out loud, to write; a struggle to cope with a number of designers and projects that have grown numb to social problems, choosing to be intoxicated by a culture of consumption instead; a struggle to find peers, friends, and mentors to think independently and polemically with; a struggle to find the time and energy to be available to this space and the people and conversations in it, because whoever comes to it is the space, it wouldn’t exist otherwise. 

At the beginning, it was the struggle of not finding a space or community, an online forum (an architectural/urban one) to be a part of, outside of grad school and work. Now, I’d say, it is not so much out of love, although it is there, but out of the necessity for such a place — which occupies only a tiny and obscure thread really — that ups my determination to continue it. I am grateful too, for all the people I’ve found along the way, and with whom I share my thoughts and this space. [Feel free to tell me to get off my high horse.]

I understand that each why can be answered with a why not or a so what, thus I want to expand on it a bit more. The longer version might read at times like the work of Nietzsche’s undigested stones of history, or as a struggle in/of form, where windmills and labyrinths of the mind battle for sense, but such is the matter of an unfinished self, the us part of the blog, which, at this point in time, is positioned in the midst of and can be described only through the distance of setting aspirations for itself and not quite reaching them yet. [Hence, feedback is much appreciated.]

Initially, PERfACT(s) was meant as a virtual channel to communicate and express voices in formation, starting with mine, as a way to assemble and often dismantle myself, my position toward life, the world and how being a designer (we’re all designers really) might steer it a certain way or might not have any use in/for it. 

Throughout the years, it has become a process of discovering the self within and without a community that has been as familiar as it has been estranged to me (as an immigrant driven by a certain need to demystify some of the nostalgia that comes with longing). It has become a learning of and with the characters that have populated the posts, be they people, buildings, design concepts, cities or media — characters that have inhabited the space or were imagined in it and of it. It has become a growing with, through and along the distance of these relations, through a simultaneous curiosity and spectatorship, as much as growing weary of it too at times. 

The aim has always been to ask better questions, for a clearer and more in depth understanding of the context and the issues Albania faces — which might be specific to the country, but are not isolated from the rest of the world’s — as one way ofcontributing to the agency needed for a possible social and spatial change there. Another aim is to understand the role of design and designers in shaping such change. That is why I post ‘stuff’. 

I do think that our everyday life has been already and totally designed through an aesthetic that desensitizes courage, as it accelerates an extravagant and unrestrained fantasy (fetishizing hope in a way). I am not against imagination whatsoever, but I remain sceptic of how this source of creativity has been used by those in power, charged against those that are not. It has been deployed as a weapon to widen the gap of inequality, a gap that has been fantasized, imagined and now implemented at full speed. So, the intent has always been to unstuff the ‘stuff’, knowing all along that I’d fall short of properly unpacking most of it — which is the true or ideal aim of this endeavor.

The position taken here is one of simply showing how shockingly unfree design is today, how unfreely and repressively society has been designed. 

Even though, ours is not a direct approach of ‘boots on the ground’ activity, we are determined to contribute — at least to try to, within our limits, even if indirectly — to unravel this design as an anaesthetic tool and strategy (per N. Leach) through different latencies: efficiencies, possibilities, leverages, critiques, etc. — to speak for what the initial shock of design anaesthetics,  its ‘beauty‘ and ‘innovation’, render invisible and insignificant. 

We have always operated on a minor and often off key, a stammering of sorts (per D&G’s work on Kafka), always considering the and any creative act of design as one of resistance; as a process of demystification and stripping bare the stuffed progress too often mistaken as an even more ‘sustainable’ or ‘beneficial’ way toward democratization. 

So, yes, the page is political in that it is public and open to a multifaceted public, but it stands politically independent in regard to the already established party lines. We are political because the questions we ask are political. 

If everything is done by design, then how can we redesign our freedom? How do we redesign ourselves to unlearn the freedom we’ve been designated (assigned) by each passing or staying regime (be it political or economic)? If we predict a future through a design done today, driven by the aneasthetics of today, then would it be free at all? 

What we see happening in Albania and elsewhere is a redesign of hope, not freedom, with nothing left to chance other than the consequences of such a shortsighted design. 

The prospect of a future is the fundamental aspect of human life. It is the promise of freedom that everyone wants; many of us imagine this promise as hope, something to hope for, but only few take it on as life itself, as the courage to actually live freely day in and day out. For them, life itself is at stake. So, to pursue social and spatial change, we need to rethink the promise of freedom, to undesign it as hope and redesign it as courage, within ourselves but also and most importantly within the community we’re a part of and share our lives with, online and offline. 

As I write this, I realize that I am indeed speaking to myself first, as a way to understand my growth or what does it mean to change, but also, and as my personal and professional motto is Whitman’s famous verse “I contain multitudes”, I realize that each individual contains a public within, hence is political in the sense (to fully utilize the greek origin of the word pertaining to sense perception, perceptible, sensitive; aesthetics) of the distances (relationships) we construct (design) between thinking and doing, feeling and knowing, thus to change is to extend oneself outward (from without) toward other characters that make (but don’t necessarily define) us. This is courage. 

And this is what I and this page strive for, at the very least our endeavor has been many a lesson on (growth through) vulnerability and resilience. Said otherwise: PERfACT(s) has been and continues to be a stammering, an enunciation of vulnerable but persistent experiences of experimenting with form as/of formation. Hence, it approaches (it wants to, it tries to) design as the distance between form and formation. It approaches courage as a form of designing the self and the other (body politic, social body). It approaches critique as an inquiry into (1) the desensitization and perceptual stagnation of design; and (2) the legitimacy of known regimes of ‘freedom’. It also approaches critique as an assemblage of graspings and (s)crypts, which is not interested in the average of their multitude, but in the strength of the plurality that comes from their differences (per Bakhtin). And, ultimately, it approaches critique as another form of design(ing)/designation.

We agree with Hannah Arendt that freedom is something fundamentally strange, and to design it, or for design to achieve it, we can utilize its estrangement, our estrangement from it, not only as a creative device (per Shklovsky) but as a craft of resistance (per Brecht), which synthesizes political rigor (i.e. reality, i.e. act) and aesthetic freedom (i.e. ideology, i.e. myth or image) with a revolutionary (high historical) consciousness. 

Ultimately, we understand design as an organism (act+image) of survival and practice of freedom.

~~~~~~

Notes:

I use us and we to note that even though at the moment I am the only one that manages the page, there have been more than a few collaborations with others, as well as many contributors to the blog over the years. Another reason why, is the fact that the blog / page is more than just an extension of myself or my life; it has become a fluid organism (through commentary, discussions and troll messages) with an existence all its own, and to deny it as such is to pretend that I have it all under control. 

Hidden Cities & Walls of Language (excerpts)

No More Masterpieces - A.Artaud

This may begin to delineate a line of scrimmage between making architectural objects and writing architectonic texts. - J.Bloomer

The problems arising through a misinterpretation of our forms of language have the character of depth. They are deep disquietudes; their roots are as deep in us as the forms of our language and their significance is as great as the importance of our language. - Wittgenstein

Does the visual image destroy the walls of language? The true significance of visual images must be rethought after thoroughly examining the thickness of the walls of language. - Abe Kobo

© PERfACTs "The ACTIVATION of the Traditional Games (Lojëra Popullore)"

** The text below is from William H. Gass's essay Invisible Cities, in his book Tests of Time, p. 37-68. The reading emphasis is mine. I have selected these excerpts (sometimes out of the original context) as a tool to make sense of Tirana now, to question the [in]visible gestures and mediated narratives found in the city. My main concern here is 'the scrimmage' between making and writing architecture (architectural forms / forms of our language) - and how we can 'activate' the line of demarcation between what is intrinsic and extrinsic to one and the other.

(Granted, W.H.Gass has written this book with Calvino's work in mind (and what it might teach us about the modern city), but some of the points he brings up cannot be ignored in today's neoliberal Albania. Thus, my interest in posting it. I recommend you read the original essay to draw your own conclusions.)

© PERfACTs "Theaters quietly unseat themselves and perform their plays outdoors." 

Think of the word polis – “city” – itself: a word which will be young still when every other city is a midden or in unsieved dust. It is the wretchedness of this truth, it is the injustice of any one word’s overweening reality which has made this truth so invisible.

Imprisoned by either walls or words, it is all the more important to try: to dream beyond the bricks; beyond the outer courtyard with its watchtowers, guards, guns; beyond the words which screen us from the world, beyond our own aims, fears, normally trivial aches and pains, which we nevertheless enlarge and objectify as bruises in hillsides, as knocks in walls, as cuts through mountains, as the leveling of plains.

Cities can be cleansed even of themselves when they do not understand the true nature of their inhabitants...

Scheherazade, staving off death with her stories, must borrow or invent...

[T]he camps of catastrophe, cities of sewers and open wounds... scalded by their atmosphere, whose admired autumnal sunsets are caused by clouds of foetid gas; cities where growths of garbage define the parks, and every alley is intestinal; the cities we can only forget, it seems, by repeating them, by reproducing… reinvesting, rebuilding, reinhabiting… by reenacting their several and similar hells, not smoothly and professionally, but stupidly and clumsily...

We have fables Aesop might have managed, not by imagining animals but by imagining cities.

From our journeys, we may return with other wares, but that won’t matter, for what will render them significant will be their placement on the pavement, the flights of influence they suggest, the orders they elicit from the eye … returning, not with these images alone, but with the wonder of their relationships. 

The chessboard is also the grid of every great city. It is only incidentally a set of paths, for these paths are principally corridors of power, influence, force.

What we frequently fail to understand is that the city is not an assemblage of buildings streaked by highways and streets; it is a subtle pattern of powers, like the board.

At times he thought he was on the verge of discovering a coherent, harmonious system underlying the infinite deformities and discords, but no model could stand up to the comparison with the game of chess.

[B]eneath the pieces the board is bare, the stones of all his cities’ buildings dissolve in the lines which bound them, and these run pointlessly – invisibly – off into space… On that slick ivory surface, on the fired clay, in that open square of wood which is at once a piece of playing field and a square of the city, what can one further see? the footprint of a pavement? perhaps a taut and angry fiber? the glaze of a dreaming eye? logs lazily adrift in a slow-moving river? a woman peering from an upstairs window? Every object is itself a cell which would contain us, yet every end has its outlet as well; and as we pass through a cave’s yawn to the hollow of a hollow tree, from that hollow to an open door or window, we cross one threshold to achieve yet another, even more wondrous, wider world.

When the concept of the city, with its concrete streets and concrete towers, has been replaced by that of the game, with its architectural grid and gun range, its system of implicit threats, its irregular spheres of influence; and when that game, furthermore, has been, in its interest, exhausted; then the materials of the contest, its dinky tools, the ivory itself, its fingered skin, the shape of the cross on the king’s crown, are entreated for results. A pillar becomes a tree, a tree a totem.

Let me recapitulate our progress. It is a pattern to be found in all the arts. We begin our pursuit of the city by examining the particular, the things that cities are made of – squares, streets, buildings, bridges, people, parks – allowing the least leaf to be engraved upon our faces as though it has been long pressed there. We endeavor to give to the shallowest saucer great depth, but we do so through the intensity of our attention, by dwelling on the small bob of its basin, the thin rule of gold around its rim, the cup which will squat there when the tea is finally ready. We collect facts. We describe things as we believe they really are. Not only our streets, but our lanes, our halls and closets, are named in this realm of reference, this freeway of denotation. The procedure will give us one sort of city: a city of idle odors and random sounds, a city of character, of what is popularly called “place.” Our city will have a personality, for we shall have rendered the gestures of its spirit, the way in which it resembles a young girl, a lecherous uncle, an old maid. Our city will be a richly human body made of countless bones. Many a corner will strike us like an elbow. Many a path will wear like a hole through our shoe. Many a brick will stiffen at our touch. The light will fall irregularly throughout the city, palely in this place, brightly in another, after the manner of our understanding.

Not content with this, we soon seek – in the playing fountain, the shaded courtyard, the kneeling man, the fan, in the look that leaps like a tree through the stone pavement – a pattern of powers, of influence and agitation; and like the Great Khan we withdraw toward the game, although it is still people we see moving about like pawns, and not yet pawns we see moving about like people. This method will give us still another sort of city, a city in which system is beginning to be born, in which terms are beginning to be replaced by relations, in which roles are beginning to define their representatives, and not the reverse.

The signifier has swallowed the signified, although you may still observe it as a swell in the stomach, like a bulge beneath the bedclothes of a bereaved and sleeping body.

What has really happened to us?

We have begun to listen to the sound of our own words, not merely to their meanings; we have begun to circle their shapes like a walk around a town; we have turned to the representatives of thought for sustenance, not to the thoughts themselves, or to the things those thoughts were presumably about; for just as trees are bark and leaves and light, and the forest is trees and leaflight too, so the city is made of millions of small forms and fine textures, of the very near and the quite far, and like the wilderness may have its own mountains, depending on place and point of views, tiredness and timing.

A city is a wall for words, misunderstood or simply imitated in spray paint; but it is a house for houses too, and so should have its doors and sudden windows, its stairs and stories, its halls and dining rooms and dens. We have explored our chosen city through dreams of its streets and derelict alleys, its suspension bridges and bridle paths. Now we remain with the mute sign itself. The map of the city is the city.

Shortly new words will begin to be heard in the sounds which old words make, as for instance in “swoon,” which I understand, now that I speak it clearly and listen with a pure ear, is not the languid faint I formerly feared, but the casual and quiet glide path of a paper airplane.

Not only are there cities which belong to the past, and are now invisible for that reason; but there are cities of the present whose existence is quite evident to any traveler with eyes alert and curious, but which are hidden to the inhabitants, who no longer need to experience their postboxes, their scented trees, in order to allow their dogs to piss against them on their twice-daily walks. A neighborhood may be missed entirely by a preoccupied visitor. I certainly do not notice now the soles of my feet, my weight, my restless or resentful ears, opposing opinions. … Great stretches of so many cities are indistinguishable, and even when we peer at them, they are simply stretches, highways which have thrown out little asphalt lots along them like oozes of rust on a pipe. Amid so much tastelessness, it takes a pretty tasteless gesture to create a locale.

But when are cities invisible because they have no identity, and when is it because of our indifference, our bemused eye?

Our cities are like seas, and it is not uncommon to see one building seize and swallow another like a shark.

All future cities are invisible as a matter of course.

To illuminate the landing of a stairway, panels of stained glass foresee the development of the city. Which are the true forms and which the false? We can ask this question even when we believe we know which is the solid city and which the reflection.

I live, myself, in a city of defeated expectations, a city of inept lies.

When will shopping centers become warehouses if warehouses are already galleries, ateliers, or rifle museums? Theaters quietly unseat themselves and perform their plays outdoors.

But the falsehoods began when the first earth was moved.

Not every building remarries readily.

There are timeless cities, not because they seem eternal, but because everything about them is the same age, like the nose, ears, chin of a face.

[Invisible Cities is a book about still another book, Dante’s Inferno, composed as nearby to The Travels of Marco Polo. The nine sections of Calvino’s text resemble the nine circles of Hell through which Virgil escorts Dante, although Marco Polo carries the khan with him largely by turns of the wheel of the word. There is a definite, not to say plummetous, descent from the first part, which opens with “Cities and Memory,” to the final one, which begins with “Cities of the Dead,” after which we fall more precipitously toward those cities which are said to be “hidden.” In Calvino though, we meet cities on our journey, not Dante’s miserable men.] 

Below that point we found a painted people,
who moved about with lagging steps, in circles,
weeping, with features tired and defeated.
And they were dressed in cloaks with cowls so low
they fell before their eyes, of that same cut
that’s used to make the clothes for Cluny’s monks.
Outside, these cloaks were gilded and they dazzled;
but inside they were all of lead, so heavy
that Frederick’s capes were straw compared to them.
A tiring mantle for eternity!
[Inferno, canto XXIII, 11, 58-67]

The technique of this magical and fabulous fiction concerns the recognition of the Real, which is its insistent subject. … Reality does not consist of things, their collections, or their shallow denominations. Reality is not a set of simple situations, nor is it one shade of anything. It is not even a single system of relations – invisible as they all are. The experience of the city exceeds our experience of Proust. A great city’s life lies in the details, in the details as they fulfill a whole. Consider what a little grass does to a set of steps, and then multiply… multiply…. Consider what a crack of light does to the dungeon, and multiply for freedom and for sky. Consider the multiplication not only of niceties but of vulgarities as well: signs, poles, wires, trash, broken glass, peeling paint, rotting boards. And multiply… multiply….

Isn’t that what happens to the elements of a successful city: they satisfy our needs, allow our lusts, remind us of our past, inhabit our future, encourage our reveries? What is a text but a community of words?

We have seen cities clothed in colored tiles, courtyards composed of images and ancient scripts and antique statuary, streets lined with streams, lined with inclining tables and dissipated awnings… A single building can sometimes overpower an entire city and, become more than an emblem, more than a feat to be admired: a conscience to be obeyed. [The cities] the text takes us through, including those that disappeared ahead of history and before we reached the title page; governmental cities too, capitals with a capital C, and those which will be paraded by our absent or our sleeping eye as the text turns silently inside itself, thinking like a drill bit does, bringing more aspects to inner view … continuously, invisibly.

“The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born.” Yet cities come to an end when they lose their boundaries, when neighborhoods, districts, regions flow together with the sameness of a flooding river, masses of indistinctly different men covering the country.

[Lastly] the unjust city, a meat grinder… Here, hidden, the just recognize one another by their manner of speech … Here, however, within the very virtues of the just and their secret city, lies the sense of their superiority like the celebrated canker in the rose. To realize that your righteousness deprives you of the pleasure and privileges the unjust enjoy drives you to despise justice and resent your own virtue. By means of this grim dialectic another unjust city, hidden beneath the hidden, begins to grow, a cancer called “just cause.”

In the unjust city – our cultureless world – the just – the cultured – recognize one another as citizens of the same secret city, but their very isolation and the protections of superiority they must adopt to survive encourage a bitter hubris, which costs them the esteem they have fancied was their fitting reward.

Notice how the same lesson lay unlearned in this city...

***************************************************

A year worth(y/less) of posts | In search of missing truths in 2016

Another year bites the dust.

Looking back, we can agree that such a year probably started to dissolve at conception (or concession in Albania). A kind of built-up presence, accumulated since the beginning of millennia, which has finally accelerated enough to materialize, becoming unmistakably visible, just enough to crash. An accident of time, maybe? It is time to re-read Virilio's "Information Bomb" and "Politics of the Very Worst" more closely this year-end:

“There are eyes everywhere. No blind spot left. What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible? We'll dream of being blind.” [IB]

“The accident is an inverted miracle, a secular miracle, a revelation. When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution...Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as [...] progress.” [PVW]

2016 was one for the books and drawing boards -- the perfect storm of invention(s). That is, invention of information, as impact [read: accident(s)]; redrawing lines of narrative and image, pushing for form instead of formation, causing a deep withdrawal into (or advance (out) of) oneself.

As a result, this blog was sporadic in translating (as) this trans-form-ation, and making legible the turmoil of its formation, thus fewer posts were written here and (unfortunately) faster 'truths' got made in social media. It got caught up in one too many reactionary sentiments, making itself more sensible to unproductive energy and vulnerable disposition. In an attempt to fathom the absurd logic and the information craftiness of whatever invention, It got distracted (and mildly co/stu-nned) by the face value of its impact; misreading (hence, mistaking) promise for premise and imaginary for imagined. Although, I feel that the thought-image construed and provided as (a cultural) truth was doing both (and all) simultaneously. It has been quite a 50 week (and counting) ride of inventing the anticipation of uncertain, yet already existing accident.

It is just the beginning though, and one doesn't know how to gear up for what seems like a long f(l)ight ahead. Should we feel sick to our stomach, be(come) somber, read Hannah Arendt, or just be and let the hype direct the flow of (one's) thought, energy, and the myth of democracy? If this year was one of attacks on public space just to see its publics hurt (through suicide bombers or privatization); of wars made just as banal and real as the everyday; of post-truths, alt-right, selfies, and nihilism; then, 2017 can be anticipated as one of mass(ive) PTSD (post-traumatic-stress-disorder), of post-revolutions and freedom-fluidity, of alt-delete and alt-control (with no alt-option), of the displaced self (made possible by the displayed self or the selfie) as a representation of the real distanced by reality. A year of paradoxes where cultural progress (as a human construct) will mean both, the normalization of, and invention as/of the accident. ("We'll dream of being blind.")

A new sort of cultural nihilism has emerged in the accident of the post-, and the post-accident of the progress (invention/accident) paradox, where the human makes way for its inhuman self, in a kind of post-colonization (a de-colonization and re-colonization cycle of) survival. 2016 has provided much evidence of (unreal) human fictions and (real) inhuman influences, be that by advancing AI-s, or human cruelty and imagination. We've witnessed way-too-real historical re-enactments of violence enter as newness, in what now marks the era of post(s) human-centrism, the acceleration/deceleration paradox of human artifice. The camouflage(d) has been abstracted; political health, stealth and wealth have become spectator sports, whose public service operate on the inhuman scale of market value; whose public scrutiny has not been (human-)scaled to citizen prosperity and safety of place. 

The future will be an anomaly: a normalization of alienation.

an experimental film by Jonas Mekas

Where does this leave/take us? This is the one question on everyone's mind, beyond what I might as well call hope (Einstein's definition of insanity - doing the same thing and expecting different results), and the perversity (branded as innovation/invention) of New World [B]order(s). Well, be it a blessing (some sure do see it as such, sigh) or a curse, one thing is certain; 2016 showed us the paradox of being human, that we're on the verge of fulfilling a very old proverb, albeit its warnings:

1. May you live in interesting times. 

2. May you be recognized by people in high places. 

3. May you get what you wish for.

We are, then, left to figure out the last one:

4. May you find the final blessing/curse.

With this in mind, I feel the new year ought to be one of forensics, in deciphering facts, truths and what's real - just so we're clear on where the line stands and which side of the paradox we're on (if any). This line of f(l)ight is a spatial (and cultural) force associated with violence (most often than not), but it can also be a tool/place for critical thinking. In disseminating and diagnosing the dimensions of the paradox, we open it up as a line of communication, that determines the progress of and in (its) formation, and not as a (form of) commodity of invention.

We should (learn to) be better critics, diligently and sensibly so. 

Lastly, I leave you with Jan Švankmajer's Dimensions of Dialogue and the possibilities of interacting forms.

Jan Švankmajer: Dimensions of Dialogue (1982) from ΜΙΤSARAS //grafos on Vimeo.

******************************************************************

Calvino's Memos for the Millennials & Albanian Education | In search of missing pieces

I recently stumbled upon Italo Calvino's unfinished manuscript, a series of 'memos' he wrote for the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he was due to give at Harvard University in 1986, but unfortunately passed away in Italy before leaving for Cambridge. These memos make up certain values dear to the author, qualities he thought should be carried on to the new millennium. The work is titled Six Memos for the Next Millennium but only includes five: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, Multiplicity -- leaving Consistency unfinished.

The reason I am sharing a few excerpts on here, is because of everything that is happening with education reform, pedagogy and student rallies happening in Albania. Yes, it is about legitimacy, learning standards and legacy of the university (education system) -- but first and foremost, it is about language -- language as communication, cognition, learning, imagination, etc, etc, -- language of and as access. After all, it is the next millennium already, and providing free and open access to a decent if not great education is an absolute must, a no-brainer (pardon the pun). Therefore, this, is for the students -- to find the courage to continue their quest for knowledge, meaning and value  -- to be brave and assemble (access) all modes of their language in order to be heard.

photo credit: PERfACT, Tirana, AL 2011.

Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (excerpts)

**As always these pieces are taken out of the original context to make the point stated above. To draw your own conclusions, I encourage you to read the book.

I'm not here to talk of futurology, but of literature. The millennium about to end has seen the birth and development of the modern languages of the West, and of the literatures that have explored the expressive, cognitive, and imaginative possibilities of these languages. It has also been the millennium of the book, in that it has seen the object we call a book take on the form now familiar to us. Perhaps it is a sign of our millennium's end that we frequently wonder what will happen to literature and books in the so-called postindustrial era of technology. I don't much feel like indulging in this sort of speculation. My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it. I would therefore like to devote these lectures to certain values, qualities, or peculiarities of literature that are very close to my heart, trying to situate them within the perspective of the new millennium.

Lightness

In this talk I shall try to explain - both to myself and to you - why I have come to consider lightness a value rather than a defect; to indicate the works of the past in which I recognize my ideal of lightness; and to show where I situate this value in the present and how I project it into the future.

It is hard for a novelist to give examples of his idea of lightness from the events of everyday life, without making them the unattainable object of an endless quête. This is what Milan Kundera has done with great clarity and immediacy. His novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being is in reality a bitter confirmation of the Ineluctable Weight of Living, not only in the situation of desperate and all-pervading oppression that has been the fate of his hapless country, but in a human condition common to us all, however infinitely more fortunate we may be. For Kundera the weight of living consists chiefly in constriction, in the dense net of public and private constrictions that enfolds us more and more closely. His novel shows us how everything we choose and value in life for its lightness soon reveals its true, unbearable weight. Perhaps only the liveliness and mobility of the intelligence escape this sentence - the very qualities with which this novel is written, and which belong to a world quite different from the one we live in.

Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don't mean escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification. The images of lightness that I seek should not fade away like dreams dissolved by the realities of present and future . . . . .

[T]here is such a thing as a lightness of thoughtfulness, just as we all know that there is a lightness of frivolity. In fact, thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy. 

At this point we should remember that the idea of the world as composed of weightless atoms is striking just because we know the weight of things so well. So, too, we would be unable to appreciate the lightness of language if we could not appreciate language that has some weight to it.

We might say that throughout the centuries two opposite tendencies have competed in literature: one tries to make language into a weightless element that hovers above things like a cloud or better, perhaps, the finest dust or, better still, a field of magnetic impulses. The other tries to give language the weight, density, and concreteness of things, bodies, and sensations.

 Even Galileo saw the alphabet as the model for all combinations of minimal units . . . . . And then Leibniz . . . . .

Should I continue along this road? Won't the conclusions awaiting me seem all too obvious? Writing as a model for every process of reality . . . . . indeed the only reality we can know, indeed the only reality tout court . . . . . No, I will not travel such roads as these, for they would carry me too far from the use of words as I understand it - that is, words as a perpetual pursuit of things, as a perpetual adjustment to their infinite variety.

There remains one thread, the one I first started to unwind: that of literature as an existential function, the search for lightness as a reaction to the weight of living.

[W]e shall face the new millennium, without hoping to find anything more in it than what we ourselves are able to bring to it. Lightness, for example, whose virtues I have tried to illustrate here. 

Quickness

The very first characteristic of a folktale is economy of expression. The most outlandish adventures are recounted with an eye fixed on the bare essentials. There is always a battle against time, against the obstacles that prevent or delay the fulfillment of a desire or the repossession of something cherished but lost.

The relativity of time is the subject of a folktale known almost everywhere: a journey to another world is made by someone who thinks it has lasted only a few hours, though when he returns, his village is unrecognizable because years and years have gone by.

This motif can also be interpreted as an allegory of narrative time and the way in which it cannot be measured against real time. And the same significance can be seen in the reverse operation, in the expanding of time by the internal proliferations from one story to another, which is a feature of oriental story-telling.

The motif that interests us here is not physical speed, but the relationship between physical speed and speed of mind.

Speed and consciousness of style please us because they present the mind with a rush of ideas that are simultaneous, or that follow each other so quickly they seem simultaneous, and set the mind afloat on such an abundance of thoughts or images or spiritual feelings that either it cannot embrace them all, each one fully, or it has no time to be idle and empty of feelings.

"Discoursing," or "discourse," for Galileo means reasoning, and very often deductive reasoning. "Discoursing is like coursing": style as a method of thought and as literary taste. For him, good thinking means quickness, agility in reasoning, economy in argument, but also the use of imaginative examples.

In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.

The motor age has forced speed on us as a measurable quantity, the records of which are milestones in the history of the progress of both men and machines. But mental speed cannot be measured and does not allow comparisons or competitions; nor can it display its results in a historical perspective. Mental speed is valuable for its own sake, for the pleasure it gives to anyone who is sensitive to such a thing, and not for the practical use that can be made of it. A swift piece of reasoning is not necessarily better than a long-pondered one. Far from it. but it communicates something special that is derived simply from its very swiftness.

[T]his apologia for quickness does not presume to deny the pleasures of lingering. Literature has worked out various techniques for slowing down the course of time. 
 In practical life, time is a form of wealth with which we are stingy, In literature, time is a form of wealth to be spent at leisure and with detachment. Quickness of style and thought means above all agility, mobility, and ease, all qualities that go with writing where it is natural to digress, to jump from one subject to another, to lose the thread a hundred times and find it again after a hundred more twists and turns.

A writer's work has to take account of many rhythms. But it is also the rhythm of time that passes with no other aim than to let feelings and thoughts settle down, mature, and shed all impatience or ephemeral contingency.

Exactitude

For the ancient Egyptians, exactitude was symbolized by a feather that served as a weight on scales used for the weighing of souls. This light feather was called Maat, goddess of the scales. The hieroglyph for Maat also stood for a unit of length - the 33 centimeters of the standard brick - and for the fundamental note of the flute.

 To my mind exactitude means three things above all:
1) a well-defined and well-calculated plan for the work in question;
2) an evocation of clear, incisive, memorable visual images; 
3) a language as precise as possible both in choice of words and in expression of the subtleties of thought and imagination.

It seems to me that language is always used in random, approximate, careless manner, and this distresses me unbearable.

It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty - that is, the use of words. it is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meaning, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the spark that shoots our from the collision of words and new circumstances.
 At this point, I don't wish to dwell on the possible sources of this epidemic, whether they are to be sought in politics, ideology, bureaucratic uniformity, the monotony of the mass media, or the way the schools dispense the culture of the mediocre. What interests me are the possibilities of health. Literature, and perhaps literature alone, can create the antibodies to fight this plague in language.
 I would like to add that it is not just language that seems to have been struck by this pestilence. Consider visual images, for example. We live in an unending rainfall of images. The most powerful media transform the world into images and multiply it by means of the phantasmagoric play of mirrors. These are images stripped of the inner inevitability that ought to mark every image as form and as meaning, as a claim on the attention and as a source of possible meanings. Much of this cloud of visual images fades at once, like the dreams that leave no trace in the memory, but what does not fade is a feeling of alienation and discomfort.
 But maybe this lack of substance is not to be found in images or in language alone, but in the world itself. This plague strikes also at the lives of people and the history of nations. It makes all histories formless, random, confused, with neither beginning nor end. My discomfort arises from the loss of form that I notice in life, which I try to oppose with the only weapon I can think of - an idea of literature.

I think we are always searching for something hidden or merely potential or hypothetical, following its traces whenever they appear on the surface. I think our basic mental processes have come down to us through every period of history, ever since the times of our Paleolithic forefathers, who were hunters and gatherers. The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bride flung over an abyss.
 For this reason, the proper use of language, for me personally, is one that enables us to approach things (present or absent) with discretion, attention, and caution, with respect for what things (present or absent) communicate without words.

Visibility

There is a line in Dante (Purgatorio XVII.25) that reads: "Poi piovve dentro a l'alta fantasia" (Then rained down into the high fantasy . . .). I will start out ... with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.

 Let us look at the context in which we find this line of the Purgatorio. We are in the circle of the Wrathful, and Dante is meditating on images that form directly in his mind, depicting classical and biblical examples of wrath chastised. He realizes that these images rain down from the heavens - that is, God sends them to him.
 In the various circles of Purgatory, besides the details of the landscape and the vault of the heavens, and in addition to his encounters with the souls of repentant sinners and with super-natural beings, Dante is presented with scenes that act as quotations or representations of examples of sins and virtues, at first as bas-reliefs that appear to move and to speak, then as visions projected before his eyes, then as voices reaching his ear, and finally as purely mental images. In a word, these visions turn progressively more inward, as if Dante realized that it is useless at every circle to invent a new form of metarepresentation, and that it is better to place the visions directly in the mind without making them pass through the senses.

It goes without saying that we are here concerned with "high fantasy": that is, with the loftier part of the imagination as distinct from the corporeal imagination, such as is revealed in the chaos of dreams.

Let us ... ask ourselves about the genesis of the imaginary at a time when literature no longer refers back to an authority or a tradition as its origin or goal, but aims at novelty, originality, and invention. It seems to me that in this situation the question of the priority of the visual image or verbal expression (which is rather like the problem of the chicken and the egg) tends definitely to lean toward the side of the visual imagination.
 Where do they come from, these images that rain down into the fantasy?

In short, it is a question of process...

In which of the two tendencies outlined by Starobinski would I place my own idea of the imagination (thought): [i]magination as an instrument of knowledge or as identification with the world soul?

I have yet to explain what part the indirect imaginary has in this gulf of the fantastic, by which I mean the images supplied by culture, whether this be mass culture or any other kind of tradition. This leads to another question: What will be the future of the individual imagination in what is usually called the "civilization of the image"? Will the power of evoking images of things that are not there continue to develop in a human race increasingly inundated by a flood of prefabricated images? At one time the visual memory of an individual was limited to the heritage of his direct experiences and to a restricted repertory of images reflected in culture. The possibility of giving form to personal myths arose form the way in which the fragments of this memory came together in unexpected and evocative combinations. We are bombarded today by such a quantity of images that we can no longer distinguish direct experience from what we have seen for a few seconds on television. The memory is littered with bits and pieces of images, like a rubbish dump, and it is more and more unlikely that any one form among so many will succeed in standing out.

If I have included visibility in my list of values to be saved, it is to give warning of the danger we run in losing a basic human faculty: the power of bringing visions into focus with our eyes shut, of bringing forth forms and colors from the lines of black letters on a white page, and in fact of thinking in terms of images. 

Will the literature of the fantastic be possible in the twenty-first century, with the growing inflation of prefabricated images? Two paths seem to be open from now on. (1) We could recycle used images in a new context that changes their meaning. Post-modernism may be seen as the tendency to make ironic use of the stock images of the mass media, or to inject the taste for the marvelous inherited from literary tradition into narrative mechanisms that accentuate its alienation. (2) We could wipe the slate clean and start from scratch. Samuel Beckett has obtained the most extraordinary results by reducing visual and linguistic elements to a minimum, as if in a world after the end of the world.

Still, all "realities" and "fantasies" can take on form only by means of writing, in which outwardness and innerness, the world and I, experience and fantasy, appear composed of the same verbal material. The polymorphic visions of the eyes and the spirit are contained in uniform lines of small or capital letters, periods, commas, parentheses - pages of signs, packed as closely together as grains of sand, representing the many-colored spectacle of the world on a surface that is always the same and always different, like dunes shifted by the desert wind.

Multiplicity

[H]uman knowledge accumulated over the centuries are the very qualities that were destined to be claimed for their own by the greatest writers of the twentieth century. But theirs I would tend to call an active skepticism, a kind of gambling and betting in a tireless effort to establish relationships between discourse, methods, and levels of meaning. Knowledge as multiplicity is the thread that binds together the major works both of what is called modernism and of what goes by the name of the postmodern, a thread - over and above all the labels attached to it - that I hope will continue into the next millennium.

Someone might object that the more the work tends toward the multiplication of possibilities, the further it departs from that unicum which is the self of the writer, his inner sincerity and the discovery of his own truth. But I would answer: Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.
 But perhaps the answer that stands closest to my heart is something else: Think what it would be to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to stone, to cement, to plastic . . . . .

-- Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (excerpts)

 **************************************************************