Welcome[fill in the blank] Eclipse or collapse?
From Existentialist alienation to Woke intersectionalism via Robert Venturi, AIA
[fill in the blank] Eclipse or collapse? |
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In the social surround of my chlidrearing, there were few things I liked and no person who was likeable, starting with my parents and then even worse, my teachers at St. Paul's Illiberal Day Carcel for pubsecent male virgins except-for-omerta-sanitary-services-for-jocks.
They were "the they", and they were intrusive. Whatver they at least seemed to like, I probably didn't. And they would not go away. THey should hv eleft me with a bank account. I found "Waiting for Godot" appealing; I could not have articulated it so clearly then becaus I was ignoranced about many things.One of Mr. Godot's best attributes is that, unlike them, he can be expected to not show up. As said, they wouldn't go away; they brought little I wanted → but lots of tests and homework ass—ignments and haircuts and what else? No "tea and sympathy" (Ref.: Robart Anderson) But alwasys more tests and homework ass—ignments and haircuts....
Yale was a mixed bag and I was messed up so I did not maximally benefit from it but it was not maximaly helpful either (I was afraid of Dean Palmer for one person). Having a freshman roommate who was a cultured intellectual aristocrat showed me something new: a human being who seemed better that they existed than not and whom I would hav eliked tobe like not away from. Why would I want to annihilate the universe GHH was part of? One of the few things I read before gong to Yale wa a book which ended with th progtagonist burrowing a hole to the center of the earth and setting off a big bomb ther and thus cleaning the universe of what w on the surfece, which for me, started with my prep school and parents, which latter are not guilty becaue they were clueless, on the superhighway to hell that is paved with good intentions. My perp school teaches intentions were to win varsity lacrosse games and I am "proud" that in the class yearbook it says: "He ooposed the cult of school spirit" although I am embarrsssed that it also says I favored "laissez faire capitalism" about whidh I knew as little as about sex and what I really supported was ont being intruded upon by Ellsworth Tooheys (Clarence Thomas's "hypocritical liberals").
At Yale I mus have discovered Michelangelo Sntonioni's black-and-white"Monica Vitti" films: take me home to where I should have come from not where I actually did! ("They put me off at the wrong stop when I wa born", Doug Schaff)
I should live in the world of Antonioni's films of cultured alienation, or The Garden fo the Fizi Continis' library or in a Kandinsky painting. Some place I would like not [fill in the blank]. I liked atheist ezistentilism! Let me get back on the bus to get off at a right stop!
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I start from the home I never had. Next came something bad but not from where I came from: Robert Venturi, traitor. The people whe I came from were ignorant of "culture". My parents were clueless and Mr. S therton Middleton's pedagogical institution was benighted but none of the were anti anything good — they were just ignorant and stupid so they might tread on treasures not noticing anything. Mr. Venturi, to the contrary, knew what they didn't and aimed to destroy it or at least mock it: He was proactively destructive of "culture". Back to the treasure in the road analogy: my parents and teachers might obliviously step on it and crush it. Mr. Venturi would take a detour to go out of his way to smash it on purpose, or rather he had no itinerary execpt to go hunting for things of value to mock. He was not one of Macnamara's morons. He was Lt. Calley.
I dealt with him in my essay for Maxine Greene (read here).
Onward and downward with the arts! Downs and ups until Sunday 29 August 2021, when I openedthe print copy of The New York Times newspaper which I had picked up from the drivewa and read the rticle in the lower right corner of the front page: "New York's Private Schools Tackle White Privilege. It Has Not Been Easy." Robert Venturi was evil but he was fighting for market share, not to detroy the economy. He said Adolf Loos w bad but Las Vegas was good. Suddenly I discovered people who were out to destroy Las Vegas even. Whatevertheir diffrences, my father, Mr.S. Atherton Middleton, Adolf Loos and Robert venturi and jus tabout anybody I either liked or hated, all had onoverriding irredeemable property in common in common: they were all dead white males. Apparently the Dead White Male Isaac Newton's 3 waws of of physics are not safe from these ActiFists. Well, which side do they consider Hassidim to be on? They worship the printed word, they do.
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Eeixtentialism and alienation do seem like they are well suited even if not exclusively for provileged persons. How likely are you to be worried about being alienated if you are doing back-breaking and/or mind-numbing labor all day and/or don't have enough to eat or a safe place to sleep? As Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn said: "So long as we wake under a peaceful sun we mus lead an everyday life." This problem can be solved, of course, by voluntary exposure to threats, which i not something I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) ever wanted to do. Boredom. Depresion. Anxiety. Neuroses. What else? My solution has been to study in the humanities to the point wher I have bceome able to RYO, for myself even though nobody listens to me., which is another privileged disappointment.
Mr. Venturi's belly was full, thanks to Western Civilization or which he wa a part. For some reason I do not know, instead of contributing to its further elaboration, he found meaning in his life by mocking if not cutting off th branch he was sitting on. Maybe he was pissed offtha the could not have Pal Rudolph's job as head of Yale's architecure program (Mr. Venturi did hav e personal animosity toward Prof. Rudolph). Maybe when working for Louis Kahn Kahn had said something that rubbed him the wrong way? Maybe he figured out that by being a bad boy he could get even, or he found it paid? I don't know what Mr. Venturi's problem was, but, in architecture, he seemed almost as charismatic in architecture as Mr. Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy in Ukraine politics. However he did it, he managed to mislead architects from "less is more" and "Ornament is crime" and architecture should raise everybody's cultural level including the masses, to "less is a bore" and that trying to improve the cultural level of the masses is a bad thing to do. Laearn from Las Vegas, not the it is bad but that it good.
Maybe it's a short step from clown architecture to DEI? But let's consider the unholy trinity:
"Individualism
Worship of he printed word
Objectivity" (See here)
Existentialism is certainly not anti-intellectual, but it does not particularly encourage worship of the ritten word. It argues that scribbling needs to be bound to dealing with issues of living. Objectivity? Existentialism takes engagement with reality very seriously, but is highly critical of objectivism. But where existentialism strongly takes issue with Wokism is on the issue of the individual. Individualism or individuality. "Selfishness or self determination? I suspect Wokism doe snot bother to make a distinction here: All whilte males are bad, even if they are not themselves slave traders becaue hteir lives benefitted form the latter (so too, of course, for many wokies but they don't condemn their own privileged lives).
Example of wok hypocrisy: "AOC", who thus enters the privileged empyrean of mortals who go by Acronyms or a single name or at lest whose names are household words, like "Madonna" or "Prince" or "Napoleon" or "Adam" or "Moses" or "Jesus Christ"... gets a pet dog and names it after the rich people's decadant art movement of the 1920s: Deco". That is not necessarily bad, so far: if she had got a mutt from the dog pound. But no: It's a pure breed from a breed with known genetic issues, which the oppressed whose savior she is cannot likely themselves generally afford like she can. Some animals are more equal than others. They are hypocrites.
A couple years ago I had the displesaeure of encountering one of these [fill in the blank]s in reality, not just on the pages of The New York Times newspaper: here. As stated numerous places in this website, I had an intrusive mother, and, to borrow a trope form the Junior Senator from Wisconsin: out of context: one of them is one too many. I can smell a person who is not going to make my life more fulfilling from a far distance, no matter how much they may try to camouflage themselves with aluminum cholrhydrate or kiss-up platitudes or whatever. If only I had sufficient capitalization to be able to dismiss them all as just whatevers.
How can a self-aware human not be alieated? As David Hume pointed out: we cannot know the nature of anything; we can only observe constant contingent conjunctions, the foundation of which if there is any is inaccessible. And if God made the world, where'd God come from. God could stand in relation to reality a we stand to computer programs or other of our creations, but God would still have made the world out of conditions God did not make and so cannot be certain about anything.
If God was smart God would talk with us about our mutual situaiton. And that's how I see myself differeng from the characters in Antonioni's films: they don't seem to be finding enjoyment ins creating something, even though it may all unexist itself or do something unexpected any minute od any day or night or other. "Hey, God! We're all in the same boat, you know, right? But I think You could have done a better job od makig us and treat us better, couldn't You? And don't fear: we humans ar your eaual only in imagination, not in strength."*
Did Mr. Antonioni himself experience the same kind of alienation as the characters in his films? There is a watertower on a hill across the street from where I live, but not as interesting as the one in the movie (above); I wish it was in my back yard, or more clearly visible and with red aircraft warning lights on top. The character Monica Vitti plays also sometimes plays (is playful); play is not alienated (alienated from something else): in itself, it is an end in itself concerned neither with foundations of further objectives.
 Unfortunate for themself, the person who lacks one; unfortunate for others, the person that is one. Don't be an a**hole! |
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