Grad school: The Obfuscation

[kz_blogorambling]

I don't know if you've ever had the opportunity to read a Marxian perspective on Architecture, but a word of advice: DON'T.

For fun, I read through one of the husband's assigned readings. GOOD GRIEF.

This is one of the more readable portions:

"It has often been observed that the emblematic significance of architecture today, and also its formal originality, lies in its immediacy to the social, in the ‘seam it shares with the economic’: and this is a rather different immediacy than even that experienced by other expensive art forms, such as cinema and theatre, which are certainly also dependent on investments. But this very immediacy presents theoretical dangers, which are actually themselves fairly well-known. It does not seem preposterous to assert, for example, that land speculation and the new demand for increased construction opens a space in which a new architectural style can emerge: but, to use the time-honoured epithet, it equally seems ‘reductive’ to explain the new style in terms of the new kinds of investment. It is said that this kind of reductionism fails to respect the specificity, the autonomy or semi-autonomy, of the aesthetic level and its intrinsic dynamics."

Comments

[judithprietht.livejournal.com]

Wow, man. I am having some grad school flashbacks.

[bristlesage.livejournal.com]

Mmm. This is the kind of stuff I used to get tipsy before reading, when I was in college. Michel Foucault goes GREAT with two large whiskey sours, for example.

[crankyasanoldma.livejournal.com]

I know, right?

[crankyasanoldma.livejournal.com]

As a matter of fact, I found a review of this guy's work in which the author (another architectural scholar) compared it to a drug trip--it seems so damned profound while you're reading it, but the next day you can't remember much and don't know what the big deal was. Heh

[delphica.livejournal.com]

Architecture has well-known theoretical dangers, way to point out the obvious, buddy. ALL THE TIME I am walking by buildings, and get hit by a wayward theory.

[esprix.livejournal.com]

That's why they charge the big bucks for them books...

[gundy.livejournal.com]

A wayward architectural theory killed my mother!

[beagledave.livejournal.com]

I caught the clap from a FLW entryway.

[delphica.livejournal.com]

You were kind of asking for it, though.