Compiled by Louise Garrett
A
after
Life is lived forward but understood backward.
Søren Kierkegarde, Philosophical fragments
airports
In the airport, desire is always infinitely deferred, and meaning is elsewhere and otherwise.
Martha Rosler: Positions in the life world
arcades
In the field of architecture, the wrought iron and steel that was first developed for railroads would ultimately be combined with glass for the construction of modern skyscrapers. But the passages, the first construction of iron and glass, instead resembled Christian churches, while the first department stores with their immense glassed-in roofs “seemed to have been modelled after Oriental bazaars”.
Susan Buck-Morss: The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project
archigram
The old libidinous mechanical kraken of Modernism had re-awakened and raised itself from the placid waters of the dead sea of current architecture, and the panic was on. Had the panicked hung around a bit, they would also have seen that marvellous, witty and life-enhancing later drawing of four or five walking cities gathered together in friendly interlinked discourse…
Ron Heron: Walking City
architecture
The simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality, of engendering dreams. It is a matter not only of plastic articulation and modulation expressig an ephemeral beauty, but of a modulation producing influences in accordance with the eternal spectrum of human desires and the progress in realizing them.
The architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space. It will be a means of knowledge and a means of action.
The architectural complex will be modifiable. Its aspect will change totally or partially in accordance with the will of its inhabitants…
Ivan Chtcheglov (alias Gilles Ivain): ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’ (1953)
B
Bataille, Georges
I want to speak as a philosopher and without reserve. This means that I commit myself: (1) not to limit the object of my discourse; (2) to empty of meaning or to relate to a meaning that I will give to everything philosophers have said before me or will say after me.
Georges Bataille: ‘Aphorisms for the “System”‘, The Unfinished System of Knowledge:
Baudrillard, Jean
What fascinates us is always that which radically excludes us in the name of its internal logic or perfection: a mathematical formula, a paranoic system, a concrete jungle, a useless object.
Jean Baudrillard: For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign
C
Chatwin, Bruce
Nomos is Greek for ‘pasture’ and ‘the Nomad’ is a chief or clan elder who presides over the allocation of pastures. […] The verb nemein – ‘to graze’, ‘to pasture’, ‘to range’ or ‘to spread’ – has a second sense as early as Homer: ‘to deal’, ‘to apportion’ or ‘to dispense’ – especially of land, honour, meat or drink. Nemesis is the ‘distribution of justice’ and so of ‘divine justice’. Nomisma means ‘current coin’ hence ‘numismatics’. […] In fact almost all our monetary expressions – capital, stock, pecuniary, chattel, sterling – perhaps even the idea of ‘growth’ itself – have their origins in the pastoral world.
Bruce Chatwin: The Songlines
cityscape
…a continuum where the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human world than the older one, but one in which ‘culture’ has become a veritable ‘second nature’.
Frederic Jameson: Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
collection
The collection relies on the box, the cabinet, the cupboard, the seriality of shelves. It is determined by these boundaries, just as the self is invited to expand within the confines of bourgeois domestic space.
Susan Stewart: On Longing
context
…Referring to context as a way of working; working in a parallel space; also referred to as ‘something else’, ‘someplace else’ and ‘not quite named’…
Liam Gillick & Rirkrit Tiravanija
‘”Forget about the ball and get on with the game” from a truncated correspondence (simile: belly laughs)’
cyberspace
A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts … A graphic representation of data abstracted from the bank of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights receding.
William Gibson: Neuromancer (1984)
D
destabilisation
Precisely because cities are sites of ‘meetings’, they are also places which are saturated with possibilities for the destabilisation of imperial arrangements. This may manifest itself through stark anticolonial activities, but also through the negotiation of identity and place which arise through diasporic settlements and hybrid cultural forms.
Jane M. Jacobs: Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City
dinner
At the end of the nineteenth century, Stephen Pearl Andrew, in The Science of Society, already proposed that dinner – where ‘everyone’s individuality is fully admitted, groups are formed, undone and reformed through attraction’ – be considered the very image of ‘complex human relations taking place under circumstances dreaded by lawmakers and politicians as the conditions of inevitable anarchy and confusion’.
in Micropolitiques (catalogue), Grenoble: CNAC-Le Magasin
E
effect
So what then, where is the work located? Perhaps that is the wrong question, perhaps a ‘where’ intimates a fixed and known location where we might conceivably go and look for the work and actually find it. Perhaps better is the notion of how does the work function and what does it produce. Of what effects it has in the world rather than what existing meanings it uncovers.
Irit Rogoff: ‘Art as Interlocutor – The Flight Lines of Address’
elsewhere
By its own definition, ‘elsewhere’ is both somewhere and nowhere, a place that is known but not fixed. It implies movement, deferral, a continuous process of arrival. It implies an edge. The edge of Empire. It comes to me slowly that ‘elsewhere’, by virtue of history and genealogy, is the place (literal, metaphorical) in which I have mostly lived. Here? There? Where? It depends on who’s doing the talking.
Lesley Naa Norle Lokko
everyday
The everyday is situated at the intersection of two modes of repetition: the cyclical, which dominates in nature, and the linear, which dominates in processes known as ‘rational’. […]
In modern life, the repetitive gestures tend to mask and to crush the cycles. The everyday imposes its monotony. It is the invariable constant of the variation it envelops. The days follow one after another and resemble one another, and yet – here lies the contradiction at the heart of everydayness – everything changes.
Henri Lefebvre: ‘The Everyday and Everydayness’ (1972)
F
field of positions
When we speak of a field of position-takings, we are insisting that what can be constituted as a system for the sake of analysis is not the product of a coherence-seeking intention or an objective consensus (even if it presupposes unconscious agreement on common principles) but the product and prize of a permanent conflict; or, to put it another way, that the generative, unifying principle of this ‘system’ is in the struggle, with all the contradictions it engenders (so that participation in the struggle – which may be indicated objectively by, for example, the attacks that are suffered – can be used as the criterion establishing that a work belongs to the field of position-takings and its author to the field of positions).
Pierre Bourdieu: ‘The field of cultural production’
flânerie
The city is the realization of the ancient human dream of the labyrinth. Without knowing it, the flâneur is devoted to this reality. […] Landscape, this is what the city becomes for the flâneur. Or more precisely: for him the city splits into its dialectical poles. It opens to him like a landscape and encloses him like a room.
Walter Benjamin: The Arcades Project
flâneur
Walking is the best way to explore and exploit the city; the changes, shifts, breaks in the cloud helmet, movement of light on water. Drifting purposefully is the recommended mode, tramping asphalted earth in alert reveries, allowing the fiction of an underlying pattern to reveal itself. To the no-bullshit materialist this sounds suspiciously like fin-de-siècle decadence, a poetic of entropy – but a born-again flâneur is a stubborn creature, less interested in texture and fabric, eavesdropping on philisophical conversation pieces, than in noticing everything. Walking, moving across a retreating townscape, stitches it all together: the illicit cocktail of bodily exhaustion and a raging carbon monoxide high.
Iain Sinclair: Lights out for the territory
formless
Formless – A dictionary would begin as of the moment when it no longer provided the meanings of words but their tasks. In this way formless is not only an adjective having such and such a meaning, but a term serving to declassify, requiring in general that every thing should have a form. What it designates does not, in any sense whatever, possess rights, and everywhere gets crushed like a spider or an earthworm. For academics to be satisfied, it would be necessary, in effect, for the universe to take on a form. The whole of philosophy has no other aim; it is a question of fitting what exists into a frock-coat, a mathematical frockcoat. To affirm on the contrary that the universe resembles nothing at all and is only formless, amounts to saying that the universe is something akin to a spider or a gob of spittle.
Georges Bataille: ‘Critical Dictionary’ in Encyclopaedia Acephalica
G
geography
Social space is not an empty arena within which we conduct our lives; rather it is something we construct and which others construct about us. It is this incredible complexity of social interactions and meanings which we constantly build, tear down and negotiate. And it is always mobile, always changing, always open to revision and potentially fragile. We are always creating, in other words, not just a space, a geography of our lives, but a time-space for our lives.
Doreen Massey
gesture
What characterises gesture is that in it nothing is being produced or acted, but rather something is being endured and supported. The gesture, in other words, opens the sphere of ethos as the more proper sphere of that which is human.
Giorgio Agamben: ‘Notes on Gesture’
H
here & there
…space creates history by inventing ‘the spatial and conceptual coordinates within which history … ‘occurs’: providing the agreed points of reference, that which maps the architecture of ‘here’ and ‘there’.
Jane M. Jacobs: Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City
heterotopia
Our epoch is one in which space takes for us the form of relations among sites. […]
The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real space several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible…
Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time. […]
Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable. In general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place. Either the entry is compulsory, as in the case of entering a barracks or a prison, or else the individual has to submit to rites and purifications. To get in one must have a certain permission and make certain gestures.
Michel Foucault: ‘Of other spaces’ (1967)
history
History is the subject of a structure whise site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now.
Walter Benjamin: Theses on the Philosophy of History
hospitality
Hospitality is culture itself and not simply one ethic amongst others. Insofar as it has to do with the ethos, that is, the residence, one’s home, the familiar place of dwelling, inasmuch as it is a manner of being there, the manner in which we relate to ourselves and to others, to others as our own or as foreigners, ethics is hospitality; ethics is so thoroughly coextensive with the experience of hospitality.
Jacques Derrida: ‘On Cosmopolitanism’
I
intention
An intention is embedded in its situation, in human customs and institutions. If the technique of the game of chess did not exist, I could not intend to play a game of chess. In so far as I do intend the construction of a sentence in advance, that is made possible by the fact that I can speak the language in question.
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations
installation
Installations should empty rooms, not fill them.
Robert Smithson
J
jail
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
Michel Foucault
K
Kant, Immanuel
Space does not represent any property of things in themselves, nor does it represent them in their relation to one another. That is to say, space does not represent any determination that attaches to the objects themselves, and which remains even when abstraction has been made of all the subjective conditions of intuition.
Immanuel Kant
L
Lefebvre, Henri (Social) space is a (social) product.
Social space will be revealed in its particularity to the extent that it ceases to be indistinguishable from mental space (as defined by the philosophers and mathematicians) on the one hand, and physical space (as defined by practico-sensory activity and the perception of ‘nature’) on the other. What I shall be seeking to demonstrate is that such a social space is constituted neither by a collection of things or an aggregate of (sensory) data, nor by a void packed like a parcel with various contents, and that it is irreducible to a ‘form’ imposed upon phenomena, upon things, upon physical materiality. If I am successful, the social character of space, here posited as a preliminary hypothesis, will be confirmed as we go along.
Henri Lefebvre: The Production of Space
location envy
…the envious dynamic inscribed in moving and looking. The passions aroused by the desire to be located in multiple insides and outsides in order to share in the power, knowledge and privilege of various parallax views or vanishing points. ‘Location’ is a primary determinant of status, a staging of presence, a desire to visit and enjoy vantages and participate in exercises of othering. In this sense there is no contradiction between travelling and being at home, it is always a dialectic experience – home is an experience imposed on the exotic as well as an exotic of the ordinary.
Barry Curtis and Claire Pajaczkowska: ‘Location Envy’
lost
But those who have found this point at which they are also lost have often run away from it too, shocked by the realisation that oneness with the world entails the loss of the ability to think, experience, criticise, or reflect upon it. While the radical subject is ecstatic, it cannot express itself; as soon as it is separated again, it cannot remember how it felt at the time.
Sadie Plant: The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age
M
meeting
The philosopher Louise Althusser said that the basic point of any society was the meeting, and sociologist Francesco Alberoni stated that the meeting was the most basic of all friendship relations […] The meeting is not only the basis for professional relationships (in Althusser’s sense) but is also an anthropological event, an experience and an impression (in Alberoni’s sense). These two basic points usually do not concur with each other, ie, a circle of friends does not coincide with the professional corporation.
Viktor Misiano in Fresh Cream
museum
We must take into account the fact that the galleries and objects of art are no more than a container, the contents of which is formed by the visitors: it is the contents which distinguish a museum from a private collection. A museum is comparable to the lung of a great city: every Sunday the throng flows into the museum, like blood, and leaves it fresh and purified. The pictures are only dead surfaces and it is within the crowd that the play, the flashes, the shimmerings of light technically described by the authorised critics takes place.
Georges Bataille: ‘Critical Dictionary’ in Encyclopaedia Acephalica
N
new town
Here, in the new town,
boredom is pregnant with desires,
frustrated frenzies, unrealized possibilities
A magnificant life is waiting
just around the corner, and far, far away.
Henri Lefebvre
nomad
Much as the nomad trajectory follows habitual trails or paths, their function is not that of the sedentary path, which consists in spreading human beings out in an enclosed space, assigning each person his or her part and regulating communication between the parts. The nomad trajectory does the opposite, it spreads human beings (or animals) out in an open, undefined, non-communicating space.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
O
orientation
Getting oriented, like getting lost, is a cultural experience. It is the acquisition, the building, the discovery or the lack of a network of references. It is an activity we usually share with other people. Or it can put us into a pre-existent social and cultural context. There are various ways of getting lost.
Between getting lost and getting oriented there is a cultural process, the use of external, arbitrary occasions to make them propitious, to make the unknown hospitable, and to become able to settle in it.
Franco la Cecla
P
perhaps
Now the thought of the ‘perhaps’ perhaps engages the only possible thought of the event – of friendhip to come and friendship for the future. For to love friendship, it is not enough to know how to bear the other in mourning; one must love the future. And there is no more just category for the future than that of the ‘perhaps’. Such a thought conjoins friendship, the future, and the perhaps to open on to the coming of what comes – that is to say, necessarily in the regime of the possible where possiblization must prevail over the impossible.
Jacques Derrida: Politics of Friendship
polis
The root of the word political is polis (city), so when you take the city as your field of experimentation, that work is political by definition, regardless of your personal politics.
Francis Alÿs in David Torres: ‘Simple passant Just Walking the Dog’
Price, Cedric .
..Increasingly architecture must be concerned with mixing unknown emotions and responses, or at least enabling such unknowns to work happily together.
…I feel that the real definition of architecture is ‘that which, through natural distortion of time, place and interval, creates beneficial social conditions that hitherto were considered impossible’.
Cedric Price: ‘Technology is the answer, but what is the question?’
proun space
Space: That which is not looked at through a key hole, not through an open door. Space does not exist for the eye only: it is not a picture; one wants to live in it.
El Lissitzky: ‘Proun Space’, 1923
Q
quotations
Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
Walter Benjamin
R
research
If we knew what we were doing it wouldn’t be research.
Albert Einstein
refuge
I also imagine the experience of cities of refuge as giving rise to a place (lieu) for reflection – for reflection on the questions of asylum and hospitality – and for a new order of law and a democracy to come to be put to the test (expérimentation). Being on the threshold of these cities, of these new cities that would be something other than ‘new cities’, a certain idea of cosmopolitanism, an other, has not yet arrived, perhaps.
Jacques Derrida: ‘On Cosmopolitanism’
S
spielraum
space for drama
play space
room to play
play room
figures in play
Antony Vidler: ‘Walter Benjamin and the Space of Distraction’
surrealism
Surrealism sought meaning in the magnetic excitement of the instant: love, inspiration. The key word was encounter. What is left of this? A few canvases, a few poems: a branch of living time. That is enough. Meaning lies elsewhere: always a few steps farther on.
Octavio Paz: Alternating Current
T
tactics
Tactics are procedures that gain validity in relation to the pertinence they lend to time – to the circumstances which the precise instant of an intervention transforms into a favourable situation, to the relation among successive moments in an action, to the possible intersections of durations and heterogeneous rhythms etc.
Michel de Certeau: The Practice of Everyday Life
telecommunications
M. Christine Boyer argues that ‘electronic telecommunications’ have reformulated our perception of time and space, so that we experience a loss of spatial boundaries or distinctions, so that all spaces begin to look alike and implode into a continuum, while time has been reduced to obsessive and compulsive repetitions.
Martha Rosler: Positions in the life world
thought
Everything is thought [gedacht]. The task is to make a stopover at every one of these many little thoughts. To spend the night in a thought. Once I have done that, I know something about it that its originator never dreamed of.
Walter Benjamin: fragment written ca. June 1928
trace
With the trace [spur], a new dimension accrues to ‘immediate experience’. It is no longer tied to the expectation of ‘adventure’; the one who undergoes an experience can follow the trace that leads there.
Walter Benjamin: The Arcades Project
U
underground
I mean, a truffle is a fantastic thing buried somewhere in the ground … Sometimes I find it. Sometimes I don’t. In fact, the next area that interests me is an expedition into the underground: a search for forgotten spaces left buried under the city as historical reserve or as surviving reminders of lost projects and fantasies … The activity should bring art out of the gallery and into the sewers.
Gordon Matta-Clark: in Object to be destroyed: The work of Gordon Matta-Clark
V
vocabulary
Folds, blobs, nets, skins, diagrams: all words that have been employed to describe theoretical and design procedures over the last decade, and that have rapidly replaced the cuts, rifts, faults and negations of deconstruction, which had previously displaced the signs, structures and morphologies of rationalism. The new vocabulary has something to do with contemporary interest in l’informe…
Antony Vidler: Warped Space
W
walking
The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations, no matter how panoptic they may be: it is neither foreign to them (it can only take place within them) nor in conformity with them (it does not receive its identity from them). It creates shadows and ambiguities within them. It inserts its multitudinous references and citations into them (social models, cultural mores, personal factors).
Michel de Certeau: ‘Walking in the city’ in The Practice of Everyday Life