AD603 Critical Theory

In the past semester I have read more documents that have questioned my Latin-Americanicity than I think I can handle. Recently, I have started questioning my work, asking, “How much of this is evidence of Mexicanism? Was I taught, at some point that I need to make work that looks like Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera? Am I making images that are predictably Latin and therefore exotic?” Well, the images above are a juxtaposition of a really old lithograph I made and one of Kahlo’s famous self-portraits. Notice something similar about them?

In response to the first questions, I really do not remember anyone imposing Mexican artists on me as role models. No ever said, “Erika, this is what Mexicans make art about. You need to do this, too!” So, have I accomplished this all on my own?  I think I have. But I can’t figure out if I’ve done something wrong. I am pretty certain that I haven’t.Can you really blame me for making a person that looks this fabulous into a hero?

Mosquera, in “The Marco Polo Syndrome,” maintains that there is this idea going around that permeates the art world, among other worlds. The syndrome, as I understood it, is an approach. Mosquera argues that the way we approach art and culture is much to European-ized. How did this happen? Through centuries and centuries of persuasion, apparently.  Moreover, Mosquera suggests the colonization was the vehicle for Eurocentrism. Colonization is like a special invitation–extending an offer to the less advantaged (third worldly) to be as privileged as one is. In his own words, “Western metaculture established itself through colonisation, domination, and event the need to articulate it in order to confront the new situation within itself.” This reminds me a lot of museums and galleries, actually. It reminds me of carnival-like biennials that aim so desperately to encapsulate a “universal” or “global” art world. All of these are good in theory but in their actualized state they are less than successful.

What I liked about this document is that the author proposes solutions to problems. What I did not enjoy was the absurdity of the solutions proposed. Self contradicting, Mosquera advocates de-Eurocentralisation through “adopting postcolonial impurity through which we might free ourselves and express our own thought.” I am not sure if “our own thought[s]” really exist anymore after all the evidence Mosquera provided against it!

He gives the example of Jose Bedia, a Cuban artist, whom Mosquera refers to as a “Western” artist who makes Western culture from non-Western sources. Here is a video of Bedia’s work. It is certainly different than what I have seen produced in the United States, for example. The explanation sounds convincing. But I think it is inevitable for Bedia’s  work to become saturated, even a little bit, by his “Western ways.”

Mosquera’s ideas make me question my own authenticity. Am I making uterus pinatas because I’m Mexican and it’s “what we do”? Or is it just that I am using my ethnic identity as a necessary vehicle for the concepts I choose to investigate? I prefer the latter. But I am western so naturally I would think these things?

I think it’s a terrific idea to dream about the “possibility of a global dialogue among cultures.” The interesting part is seeing who monopolizes the conversation.

This week’s readings were all about identity and race in art. How do we define it? Do we end our critique of the work on the canvas, or extend it back to the artist personally?

The “Cornered” piece by Adrian Piper was very interesting. It begins entirely about her, yet ends up entirely about the viewer. So often you see works in galleries that are very personal for the artist, but the trouble becomes crossing that bridge to make it personal for the viewer. Piper flawlessly integrates the viewer into her literal struggle and by the end, leaves them asking questions the average viewer wouldn’t with regards to race in art. This leads nicely into Wright Jr’s piece about the over-representation of Caucasian art in the mainstream. Piper’s piece is really aimed at the same white artists and gallery patrons that Wright Jr writes about. 

What I think both Wright Jr and Piper are getting to the fact that there’s clearly no white and black anymore. I use that as a metaphor to of course include all races and nationalities. As gallery-centered “fine art” becomes more and more under fire, the eye of the art world zooms out from the gallery to see other works in other communities, I think both Wright Jr and Piper want to make sure that the art-world isn’t quick to label it’s newfound finds as “African-American art” or “Native-American art”, etc. The point that both writers are making is that race-lines don’t exist. So as we move away from the gallery, don’t add qualifiers in front of a piece in order to categorize it into a sub genre. The piece isn’t a strong sculpture from a Chinese-American artist, but rather is a strong sculpture period. If there are no race-lines, there are no sub-categories of art.

I had a hard time finding an outside source for the week. Most of the artists I follow don’t really focus on race, but are rather motivated by time/place. I finally settled on something from John Waters. He’s a filmmaker/artist from Baltimore whose work frequently comments on struggles surrounding class, race, and sexual orientation in 60/70s Baltimore. Waters talks about how people are inherently the same, even in our differences. Our inner neuroses need to be embraced, since outer differences mean nothing.

Recently Waters has become a photographer, shooting images on his TV set of cult-films and comical messages he finds in modern broadcasting. Water’s photos do exactly what his films do: show non-mainstream society’s similarities with the norm, just in a different way.

http://www.amazon.com/Directors-Cut-John-Waters/dp/393114156X

http://www.designboom.com/trash/waters.html

So both of this week’s readings provided insight into a topic I think is becoming more and more prevalent in today’s art world: race. Both Piper and Wright Jr contend that there are no hard lines anymore, and because of this, the art-world is refocusing outside of the gallery, finally moving towards the mainstream acceptance of the counter-culture. I think class discussion on this should be pretty interesting this week.

“And so we stare at the pit in the earth and think we both do and don’t know what sculpture is.”

My response to that is: why do we have to know? This urgency to categorize things, make them “official,” “authenticate” them, “verify” that they are what they claim to be seems a little counter-productive to me. It’s always been my feeling that the more we try to define something, the less meaning it actually has. Some examples: love, normalcy, comedy, art, appropriateness, God, ethnicity, and on, and on. It seems that when a definition is imposed on any of these, the definition’s unique purpose is to familiarize the unfamiliar. Or, as Krauss would put it, “reducing anything foreign.” It’s only for comfort. Because without the comfort the entity that has been defined can not exist peacefully in our world.

When explaining sculpture, Krauss demonstrates first that it used to be that the officiality of a sculpture was contingent upon it’s base, space, and purpose: “it sits in a particular place and speaks in a symbolical tongue about the meaning or use of that place.” During the late 19th C., that logic changed and gave sculpture some freedom. Sculpture was no longer site or purpose specific–it referenced itself and was autonomous. Further, it became “nomadic” and “transportable.” Krauss’ use of those two words was something that I really like because they indicate movement. For me, it indicates much more than physical relocation, however. The movement that is most valuable is progress toward something more truthful–what we’ve always been searching for.

That progress is diminished by categorization. The malleable qualities of sculpture (literally and otherwise) is hindered by the urgency to encapsulate it. Can we really know the truth about art (what it means, why we make it, what are its capabilities) if we force it to be separated into categories? This is similar to understanding people, and consequently, oneself.

This weekend I saw the exhibition Class Pictures by Dawoud Bey. (To view the pictures “enter” the website, go to “photographs” and then go to “class pictures.) Bey has been taking pictures of ordinary high schoolers because he recognizes their role as determinants of culture. Next to every photograph exhibited was a short story that the photographed teen wanted to share about him/herself. I looked around for 30 seconds and then heard voices coming from the corner of the adjacent room. A video was playing and it was being projected onto the wall. The video was composed of short clips of some of the photographed teens talking about their experiences. Most interestingly, the camera never strayed beyond the features of the face, only one or two features at a time. At first, it was strange because I felt aggravated that I could never see the persons full face as they were speaking. The experience, however, of viewing these moving images allowed me to focus on skin, flesh, muscle movement, textures and other facial features. This, coupled with hearing the person’s voice telling a personal story allowed me to identify more closely.

The video was more successful than the photographs–this is my point. The concept between the two (photographs and video) is similar: images, one hanging and one moving.  But the video was not technically the exhibition, it was a small complement to the photographs. The category was “photography” so the main attraction was the series of photographs. I sat in the little room watching the video but also watching spectators. Of the 15 people that were around at the time, 0 actually watched the video. There is always this insistence on formality in museums and galleries that bothers me. There is an urgency to hold onto what we “know” but still throw in something “exotic” for good measure. Where is the investigation in that? Where is the need to explore the capabilities of art? Are we listening to art or just looking at it?

What good is progress if it’s not constantly challenged? What good is being able to move if there are too many limits?

I don’t know that I really have that much to say about the Krauss reading. I thought that it was interesting, but explained the function and definition of sculpture in an all too structuralist approach; especially since the thing in question (sculpture) was seen as something that could not be defined in structuralist terms. So, for me, I found there to be much to be desired in Krauss’ argument.

She discusses binaries, but only in the terms of things that are opposites and then two levels of (not titled as such) grey matter. For instance, architecture and landscape are a set of binaries in which she frames to reference sculpture. However, she clearly sees that merely stating the two ends of the spectrum as being insufficient. In this case she adds two other terms, in an attempt to broaden the framework in which to fit the subcategories of sculpture. These terms are non-landscape and non-architecture. Although she believes the addition of these terms to be an adequate finish to the extension of this binary, I do not. In her diagram she uses these terms like freshman algebra. Does anybody remember “FOIL”? … Fronts, outsides, insides…etc?  She pairs these terms up so that the end result is a fully defined and comprehensive look at modernist sculpture (architecture: landscape, Architecture: non-landscape, Landscape: non-architecture, Non-architecture: non- landscape). Maybe it is just me, but I’m not convinced that you can boil down an entire media into a mathematical equation, one in which all parts fit. What about the things that don’t within that pretty little structure?

For example, Krauss questions the sculptural validity of cultural sites such as Stonehenge, saying that because of their use, are “just exactly not sculpture”. Although in this case Krauss aligns herself with Kant in his Critique of Judgment (which I am quite fond of); I, in this case, disagree.

Stonehenge doesn’t fit in her definition of sculpture, and it certainly doesn’t fit neatly into her uber structuralist diagram. In this case, the art is in the landscape. It is not removed from the landscape, or place there to obviously interfere with it. It has become part of the landscape. Stonehenge is certainly not architecture. I think the greatest shortcoming in Krauss’ argument is that she sees actuality for what it is at present. The reality is, that nothing is permanent. The landscape is fluid, and is constantly changing. With that in mind how do we validate Stonehenge as anything but sculpture interacting seamlessly within a landscape, to the point of becoming one? Does anybody living actually remember that hill without those monstrous rocks? Nope. In our own consciousness and reality, we could not fathom that landscape looking any different. It is iconic as well as it is sculpture.

In that case…does her formula work? No… some sculpture, even modernist sculpture cannot be defined by charts and formulas, especially when, at times, that is exactly what it is trying to avoid.

“Clearly architecture has a new centrality in cultural discourse. Although this centrality stems from the initial debates about postmodernism in the 1970s, which were focused on architecture, it is clinched by the contemporary inflation of design and display in all sort of spheres-art, fashion, business, and so on. Moreover, to make a big splash in the global pond of spectacle today, one has to have a big rock to drop, maybe as big as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao; and here architects like Gehry have an obvious advantage over artists in other media.”

–Hal Foster, The ABCs of Contemporary Design

“Artists lost something when the market made them content providers”
-Rem Koolhaas, Content

I started with a quote I used before and another one from Rem Koolhaas’ Content because I find Hal Foster and Rem Koolhaas to be the most representative contemporary theorists that carry the Foucault torch today, they sometimes, also, are included inside the post-structuralist label. Even if Foucault didn’t wanted to be labeled as an structuralist or a post-structuralist, one has to admit that his disection of power structures has paved the way to the understanding of contemporary society by artists and theorists along.

In Hal Foster’s Design and Crime you get to see how spectacular architecture works as a container of culture, nothing is to big for megastructures as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao or the Tate Modern in London: they now can contain even land art and provide the artists with enough space to install and intervene in any way possible. In this case, the big container works as an invitation to libertarian practices (being “open” to any work scale and dimensions) but in a larger scale the container works as an oppressive symbol of power too. These huge cultural containers can be seen as large-scale iPods in the way they are designed to be able to storage a large amount of aesthetic information and still “look good”. This is the “Bilbao effect”: this computer-assisted design, of exterior surfaces that rarely match up their interior spaces, appears in our cities like “cultural rocks” landing in a parachute from outer space just to make a touristic statement, they are meant to be bidimensional, they are meant to be photographed, they are designed to sell cities.

Frank Ghery’s Guggenheim in Bilbao opened its doors in 1997 and stablished Ghery as The Starchitect of our generation, our “Master Builder”




This is where Koolhaas claims that “artists lost something when the market made them content providers”, seeing how art has taken the shape, size and form of the architecture that contains it, being that space the museum, the gallery or the rich lady’s living room. The art piece is seen by Koolhaas and foster as an outmoded object, which only function relies in the support of this power mega structures followers of the Bilbao Effect.

Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth is a long crack opened in the floor of the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. Spectacular space calls for spectacutal art?

With the Internet a new generation of designers and artist have found a space that they believe has a structure (or a lack of) that allows them to exercise their liberties in a more comfortable and controllable fashion than the gallery or the museum. The mere fact that the Internet is seen as a “new” thing makes the gallery circuit look old and exhausted: most of these artist don’t feel the need to send portfolios to galleries and museums anymore, or go through all the burocratic process that goes along with that (a power structure by itself), since they have found a space that not only allows them to display their work, but also to market and distribute their production to a wider audience that many galleries can’t even reach. Here the game works in two different ways too: The fact that this computer-aided art production/distribution is available for everyone who owns one of these machines and the software necessary to produce “art” makes the academic world suspicious of this contemporary practice in which even a myspace page can be considered art, these new spaces (like Flickr) standardize their displays in a way that after a quick examination everything starts looking exactly the same, since they also provide a very strict frame to showcase the “artist” material. Also this new space helps the old space (gallery-museum circuit) to get rid of these obnoxious new media artists who are impossible to sell in today’s art market (try to sell a video, a song, a radio show today), and has them confined to the sense of “success” and “fame” that they experience through their online communities. The lack of materiality of this “online art” has started to require a new approach to curatorial studies in which curators are basically judging the power of the pieces by the way “internet rules” are bent and how the piece is breaking away from the boundaries of myspace.

Radio Chiguiro’s online and offline community radio





Cory Archangel’s nintendo hack “I shot Andy Warhol”





Miki Guadamur, Mexico’s favorite pixel artist.





Bazuco’s online performances

Space, Knowledge and Power

“

“The space in which we live, from which we are drawn out of ourselves, just where the erosion of our lives, our time, our history takes place, this space that wears us down and consumes us, is in itself heterogeneous……but in a set of relationship that define positions which cannot be equated or in any way superimposed.”

The term “space” could be understood in many different ways. Architecture is one, so is time and history and distance between one and other is also one of the understandings. And the relationship between one individual and another can also be a way of understanding. There are many different kinds of relationship among people in human society. Friends, husband and wife, parent and children, employer and employee, teacher and student, producer and customers and so on., all of which is defined or recognized by the distance between one and another, close or far away or in between. So even a couple are not in the same city or country, they are still in a very close relationship. The certain position we gain in the social life is located by the relationship and also by the emotion or mood we have.

In the past, the relationship between one and another could be told very easily since the traffic or the communication media were not that convenient or powerful, compared to today. But now, with the help of internet, the relationship becomes complicated sometimes. Everyone may meet someone new through internet and become good friends or lovers or even start a family. Under the shadow of internet or with the help of every satellite’s tiny but strong signal, everything is possible in any relationship. Strangers can become closed to each other and ex-enemies can be friends, sometimes only on internet. The space created by internet is mysterious but huge or even more much larger than what we could imagine. At the same time, the position of knowledge and power has been changed. The power of media which used to be dominated by paper based mediation things has been succeed to the internet. Just look at the 2008 election, this is the first time that internet has taken part in and is playing such an important part in the whole campaign process. And I’m sure that the influence of internet on the result of election will be serious.

Also, reading and writing, drawing and painting, design and redesign may create new spaces, knowledge and power, the power of culture and public opinions. This kind of space is based on ones’ thoughts and realization. When it comes to design, what it can create is a style of life or a certain space of living, both physically and mentally. In the interview with Paul Rabinow, Foucault discussed the changes of function of architecture and the role of architects in the 1700s and today. What I am thinking is that what has happened to architecture is just the same with design, industrial design. The aim of design sometimes is trying to create a way or media or a special space between products and users, providing emotional communication and interaction. In this way, the power of design turns to be domination. At the same time, people’s realization of design has changed. Design is not only the attachment of industry or life, but it is a part, a significant part in daily life. The space created by designers is new and unique which leads people to think deeply in new ways, look at different relationships in different ways and like to have some exchanges of position with others, which help people understand others better.

Can walls both real and imaginary define us as a culture, as a society?  Where do the walls begin, and where do they end?  How do we classify these walls and how many are their?

I don’t think that Michael Foucault would necessarily have definitive answers to any of these questions; he would probably say, well this is about that and I don’t want to hold anything to a solid definition, so lets look to this example in the past.

I remember shortly after 9/11 I was watching Fox news and they were interviewing a lady from Afghanistan, and she said something like “the US is a snake, and New York is the head of the snake, so if you kill the head, you kill the snake”.  So, what did she mean by this, why is New York the head?  New York isn’t the capital of the United States, so who gives a shit about New York?  Obviously this lady did, as well as a large group of terrorists, and probably a large part of a nation, but why?  Is it due to the fact that immigrants use to pass through New York in order to come to the US, or is the architecture to blame?  Does the setup or the position of the city have anything to do with how we perceive New York, or how we see any city for that matter? 

There are walls on buildings and then there are walls within districts of the city.  Streets act as walls, by defining where Chinatown begins and ends within the city.  The same thing happens with soho and Little Italy, and on and on.  I wonder if there are walls with in the walls.  If there was a Little Ireland would there be a Northern Ireland and an Ireland within the whole spectrum of Little Ireland?  Would there be walls and if there were walls, and how would they be defined?

In Chicago police saw walls forming around Cabrini-Green, the ABLA, Stateway Gardens and the Robert Taylor Homes.  Walls that were both clearly defined, and clearly undefined, if you lived around the projects you knew were these walls stood, yet if you were driving through you wouldn’t see these walls.  These projects have been torn down to rid the city of the gang violence and improve the areas.  The families that were housed by the projects moved to nearby suburbs, or to other housing developments in nearby cities.  Once the projects are fully demolished the Chicago Housing Authority will be building mixed income housing on the sites.  The families that lived in the projects were promised that they would not only have a home within the mixed income housing they build, but that they would also be able to afford living their.  Most of the families have already moved, and the ones that have stayed nearby don’t feel like they will be able to afford the new homes.  The walls within the mixed housing have the idea of two types of walls, walls that define a Barrier between your home and your neighbors, as well as walls that define your income and their income.

Everything that has ever gone wrong in my life is defiantly because of some stupid architects design.  Is there a reason why I placed walls around my bathroom, and on top of this, is there a reason why I placed my bathroom next to the kitchen? Who knows?

http://www.thecha.org/

http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/253.html

http://www.voicesofcabrini.com/index.html

In this reading, Foucault brings up a concept we haven’t seen yet. We’ve discussed the culture industry, authenticity and aura, and our unconscious; but Foucault reveals something new for us. Intentionality. However, Foucault discusses this within the framework of architecture intended for liberation versus oppression. He not only discusses the intentionality of the artist (or architect in this case), but the feasibility of this intentionality, and result of intentionality.

As artists we immerse ourselves in a fairly selfish and internal reality sometimes (at least I do), but Foucault reveals that issues of our intentions must be thought about. For example, Foucault discusses that spaces designed and intended for liberation and freedom can often be transformed based on use and conduciveness to spaces of oppression. He points out that designing for cohesive and total intentionality is impossible, because the opposite can occur. People that can wander freely within the space can find them selves surrounded and caged by the openness of their environment. On the flipside, one can find total liberation in encased solitude.

This is a fairly depressing thought for an artist; what the hell are we doing if our intentionality is defunct through the process of use by the intended or unintended audience? Well, first of all, I’m not entirely sure this is what Foucault was saying. Intentionality and planning are all very important; the artist however has to be aware of the implications of their own intentionality. The intentions may not always make sense within the context of the exhibition, space, or audience. Furthermore, the artists symbols may not make sense, and although the artist may have something very important to say, the audience may leave without the meanest understanding, or worse, offended even when the artist’s intentions were nothing but innocuous. 

What do we do then? What can an artist possibly do to not be taken in and be consumed with issues of intentionality? It’s already hard enough to make work that makes sense to us, so how do we rationalize all of the issues and make work that a comprehensive audience will be able to understand? We don’t… This is another thing that I’m pretty sure Foucault was getting at.  Part of being an artist is doing the best you can to make the work “work”. Not to be absolutely positive that the work cannot in any situation be used for evil. No work, space, or frame is entirely conducive to any extreme. An artist can be as intentional as possible, however, once the artist gives up his work for exhibition or sale, only fragments of that intentionality remain.

I am still coming to terms with this… and I feel as though I might be for a long time. It’s hard for me to grasp that nothing I say means anything; what matters is what the audience thinks I am saying… which brings up the question, other than the literal creation of the work, what is the point of the artist? If what he has to say is diluted by the fact that his intentionality has very little to do with how the work is understood, does he matter?

First, I want to say that these readings have been the most enjoyable and informative of all the readings we’ve done. Foucault gives examples of what he is talking about–a novel concept! His step-by-step (first principle, second principle) structure in Of Other Spaces and the question-answer structure of the interview with Mr. Rainbow (a great name) increased the fluidity of thoughts for me. I made more connections with Foucault’s works than I have with other documents. 

I’ve never really considered space in the way that Foucault introduced it to me. It came at an appropriate time, ironically, because I have been teaching “perspective and anti-perspective” for a week in 114. I brought in my conceptual understanding of what “space” is, influenced by Bachelard and the like, and asked my students to consider using a less literal understanding of what space is. Foucault’s understanding is the least literal and most significant understanding of space that I’ve ever understood.

The historical framework that Foucault uses to structure his argument is pretty magnificent. Somehow, it’s easier for me to understand ideas if I know what was going on at the time that they were born. Foucault states that post-18th C., “our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.” In other words, we are less preoccupied with issues of expansion and more concerned with exploring the space which we do know. The connections and relationships within those spaces is what will ultimately yield the most significant information for us. We can understand ourselves, eachother, the world, the universe better is we focus on relationships between all those things. This relates very much to what is going on in art–the progress into an understanding of art as less technical, less sterile, less copied and more soul-ified, more invigorating, more inventive. Art is becoming less about showcasing a handsome skill set and more about investigating ourselves by making use of observational skills.

I loved Foucault’s transformation of space into something that is absolutely political. I am thinking about “political” the way Plato refers to in the The Republic and not necessarily how we understand it, especially in light of the up coming election. I am thinking about “political” as something that deals intensely, and by its very nature, with lots of people and the relationships between all of them. 

These ideas are especially interesting to me because I have this idea that our individual identities are actually reflections of each other’s identities. Picture a bunch of mirrors facing each other and then imagine the infinite number of reflections possible. This is how I picture us–except less exactly reflective, there are lots of irregularities and inconsistencies. I have this strong feeling that the community you belong to hugely influences what you become.

This is why, for me, the 2nd and 5th principles of heterotopias are most significant. They deal the most with invention (or at least the possibility for invention), which deals the most with art, then.

The 2nd principle of heterotopias states that  as time passes and it effects the structure of a given society, existing heterotopias take on different rolls. I thought immediately of our installations last year and how we transformed that Jacques Building into something that it was not before. Now, as it sits on State St., there is no more installation in it but it is never going to return to it’s “original” state.

The 5th principle of heterotopias is that they have a system of “openness” and “closedness” at the same time. I thought of galleries. Not everyone feels comfortable in them. Actually most people do not feel comfortable in them. Sometimes I do not, either. It’s funny because most of them are free but if you walk in there as anything but a buyer, most commercial gallery monitors are not fond of you. Galleries don’t always scream “accessible” to me. I have a problem with this because I think art should be accessible to absolutely everyone since art is about everyone.

I was waiting for a good time to show Swoon, probably my hero right now in art, at least. She’s part of the street art movement. One of the things she does is makes prints and wheat-pastes them onto street walls in her NY community. She’s not the first one to do this but she does it particularly well. The movement is dedicated to accessibility of art and reflecting urban communities onto themselves. The walls are transformed spaces, once simply giving structure, now serving as places to have an art experience.

Foucault seems to be a hesitant proponent for post-modernism.  While reading his conversation with Rabinow I came to the conclusion that Foucault was saying that critical thought should not exist without reference to history,  something that Modernity seeks to suppress while embracing rational thought.

He does acknowledge that there is a tendency for people to negatively compare the present to the past, usually resulting in a false sentiment that doesn’t fairly compare the two.  Like how a person might be appalled by contemporary sexuality,  without taking into consideration the progress sexuality has made (private bedrooms).   This thought process builds a mythical past, and really is just an explanation for people not being able to come to terms with their own age and the passing of Father Time.  Of course, old people tend to talk about how rough they had it too: “I had to walk five miles to school, in the snow, uphill both ways”.

GRAMPA SIMPSON

Foucault proceeds to discuss the reason and rationality we use and how it is used as the center of critical thought (oh no!).  This requires taking notice of history.  Modernism seeks to use ONLY rationalism and suppress history which, according to Foucault, can lead to an irrational form of rationalism.  Critical thought must embrace this “revolving door of rationality” and acknowledging history is part of that.  Post-modernity allows for this flexibility of rational thought that refers to history.  Seems Foucault was slightly conflicted with his ideas, and his theories seemed to embrace that conflict.

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

I struggled with grasping the idea of heterotopia.  To me it seems that some form of it is included within every aspect of living in some way.   Is this Foucault’s method of categorizing the separate spaces that are compiled into a person’s life and living reality?  And he is actually talking about real external space, right?  The environments we exist in?  One detailed example he touched on very briefly is the railroad system.

“a train is an extraordinary bundle of relations because it is something through which one goes, it is also something by means of which one can go from one point to another, and then it is also something that goes by”

While reading that segment I was imagining the space that is defined by the New York subway system.  It is a constantly moving space that hundreds of millions of people from all over the world have encountered.  In relation to what Foucault names the second principle of his heterotopias description, this one defined space of the NY subway serves as a particular function for each time it is used by each person.  It also therefore has completely different meanings to each person at each instance.  In relation to the third principle, it makes differing real place compatible with each other, opposing neighborhoods on opposite ends of town.  In relation to the fourth principle, the subway system links transitory slices of time from individuals’ lives.  Each ride is like a festival in itself!  And like Foucault’s fifth principle, the use of the system is relegated to purchasers of passes and tickets.  It is an isolated yet penetrable environment that can be entered through a particular ritual.

1972 NY CITY SUBWAY MAP