autonomy (is) for dummies 2

ah here a loose thread...

key concept propogated by grand-peres D&G:
the distinction between "power-to" and "power-over".
it's a bogey I tell you, the
same phenomenon looked at through two
different fun-house mirrors.

every power-to is also a power-over,
a fact
tacity acknowledged in D&G's
over-inflated
wrasslins
with this toothless lion-cub.

abuse is abuse -- plain and simple,
without embellishment.
call it on it's own terms.

dive into the pandora's box of "not taking power"
and you give over your meetings
to continual obstruction.

to say that the instruments of power,
as they exist
are not effective for our ends
is quite another thing.
and here's the slip:
what may be a viable political position
in the "decolonialized" world (though not
necessarily one I agree with across the board),
but it is
manifestly incorrect and utterly wrongheaded
to apply the same political determination
to the neocolonial metropoles!

the apparent radical absolutism
of "autonomy"
is revealed as softheadedness
swimming in generalities.

smoke_fire

Flan of the Year

Ugh. Could Time Magazine be any more servile than to call this soft-bake cookie an "american revolutionary"?

Their reasons: "confident" and "polarizing". Hmm. "Polarizing" I'll leave for another post, I've been planning one for a while. But "confident"? That demands immediate rebuke.

Bush is not confident. And I have a deep hatred of the "confident". But Bush doesn't even rise to that dubious standard. He is simply smug.

What's the difference, you say? I've long argued that "confidence" leads directly to smugness. But at least confidence is a response to a real-world encounter with adversity, and places a real stake in the outcome of events.

Bush feels way above all that. If there are any stakes in his life, they are no more important than the outcome of one of the ivy-league sporting events he was a cheerleader for, or a tedious (and futile) competition with dear ole dad.

Don't believe me? He proves it every time he opens his mouth. Take the clip I watched approximately 500 times on the overnight news feed: he references a press conference "the other day in the Oval"—no "office", just "oval". This is not homespun or country or merely stupid, this is not casual or confident, this is a prep-school self-preening vocab, and embodies a flippant disregard for the danger and risk felt by other, "lesser" men.

Feeling

Feeling is not a good guide for action. Emotion without thought carries out into the barren swamp lenin warns of (see previous post) just as surely as thought without feeling.

The baby boomers reacted to what they percieved as their parent's "unfeelingness," their use of thought to suppress emotion. Their simple negation, using emotion to override thought, yeilded equally inadequate results.

"What is it with our country? Our brains have stopped and our emotions are running wild..." --Bill Hicks

Then you got the Xers -- the negation of the negation, right? -- but they negated motive force itself. Whoops. Then again, this is all just the circling of patty-burger turds in the toilet-bowl of the mass media. Tomorrow I'll try to think like Lenin, and see the virtue & omnipotence of historical movement above this rancid frey...

Lenin on dialectics

"Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an independent, complete straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the quagmire, into clerical obscurantism (where it is anchored by the class interests of the ruling classes). Rectilinearity and one-sidedness, woodenness and petrification, subjectivism and subjective blindness -- voila the epistemological roots of idealism. And clerical obscurantism (=philosophical idealism), of course, has epistemological roots, it is not groundless; it is a sterile flower undoubtedly, but a sterile flower that grows on the living tree of living, fertile, genuine, powerful, omnipotent, objective, absolute human knowledge."

Lenin, "On the Question of Dialectics" 1915

Success/Ambition

Gen Xers made a mistake when they ditched ambition. They hated their parent's ambitions, and rightly so, but one ambition can only be vanquished by another. In fact, Gen X's refusal of self-created ambitions, of their own standards for success, has lead them back into the very ruts they hoped to escape by abandoning ambition.

Success, like motivation, like any artifice, is a prosthesis for desire and can be its trap—I have seen more than one of my friends foundering as they try to succeed on their parents' terms. Even worse, you could settle for simply seeking praise without even having true ambition.

But ambition is not inherently a trap. On the contrary, I am becoming convinced it is an indespensable tool for structuring motivation; for weathering the vicissitudes of fortune.

I have the mixed blessing of not seeing my life by the terms of anyone else's ambition. I have no clear path laid out for me.

For many years now, one thing have been clear to me—my fervent desire to see the abolition of class society. This has been my guiding star, but it remains beyond the practical scope of personal ambition. Here on earth, too, I have a clarity—my burning love for Molly, but it is no more workable a material from which to draft ambition. I cannot overcome love, it has overcome me; it cannot be my object, only a place to dwell.

Compared to these absolutes of shared desire, my personal destiny must always be relative, experimental. Nonetheless, it must be.

Collective Dwelling

From the previous entry, it is obvious that the vital counterpoint to Teige's "minimum dwelling" is the collectivization of services and cultural activities. The vestigial, atavistic elements of the "live-in kitchen" can only be eliminated once-and-for-all when they can be taken up by collective organs.

In the present, while the social and material development of cities has far surpassed the cities of Teige's day—the disarticulation of "traditional family life" has progressed dramatically, in step with the advancement of the technology and infrastructure of service—we remain caught in the same chasm. Food service, while widely available, remains too expensive (and inadequately nutritious) to allow for the elimination of home kitchens. This is partially a chicken-and-egg problem—with rents as high as they are, outside food is unaffordable on a day-to-day basis, requiring individual kitchens, which keep rents high, etc.—and perhaps it might be possible to muscle through the affordability issue by a bold leap. (although this re-introduces the problem of nutrition as the main focus in food service...)

Similar arguements could be made for laundry service, house cleaning, etc.

A more intractable problem, and one that doesn't yield to a simple quantitative solution, is the need for collective social space; social space, in NYC at least, exists as an adjunct to other service zones—in restaurants, bars, night clubs, on the streets, in parks—and with few exceptions only function as long as you keep moving through them at a rather brisk pace. The alternative—using your apartment as a social space—is equally fraught, as it means inviting people into your (limited) private space, and not very many people at that. Neither of these options meet even Teige's most rudimentary criteria:

"Clubs (regardless of whether these be regional clubs, clubs joined to dining halls, clubs attached to factories, or even central palaces of culture in the green zone), should not be designed on the model fo ostentations casinos, the clubs of the English aristocracy, or promenades of fancy health spas of the past. In short, they shoulud never take on the appearance of the pleasure palaces of the idle rich. The true purpose of a workers' club is to provide the setting for an integrated cultural development of the working class as a whole. The workers' club is the crucible of collective life, where the character and the psychological features of a new cultural consciousness will be forged into new shapes. It is in the workers' club where the new collective man will be born. It is the workers' club that is to be the center of a new solidarity (about which Jules Romain has no clue). This means: no more bourgeois-type clubs for idlers, but instead new centers of political and cultural life. Such a club will thus become the true "family hearth" of the collective and the very heart of collective living—its common living room, without which the collective dwelling could not exist, and without which these beehives would be reduced to just another version of 'mass housing barracks.'"

THE MINIMUM DWELLING, Foreward

excerpts from The Minimum Dwelling, by Karel Teige

FOREWARD

"The minimum dwelling has become the central problem of modern architecture and the battle cry of today's architectural avant-garde. As a slogan, it is announced and promoted by modern architects, because it sheds light on a situation that has reached a point requiring the radical reform and modernization of housing; as a battle cry, it calls for answers to the question of the current crisis of housing."

"The international collective cooperation of modern architects, stimulated by the congresses and guided for some years by CIRPAC [Comite International pour la Realisation des Problems d'Architecture Contemporaire], has contributed very effectively to the elaboration and clarification of the problem of the minimum dwelling and has helped shed new light on the questions of popular dwelling in many of its aspects, for the question of popular dwelling is not only a special concern of architecture alone but, if we are to understand it in all its complexity, needs to be dealt with by the full interdisciplinary cooperation between architects, sociologists, economists, health officials, physicians, social workers, politicians, and trade unionists. It cannot be considered separately from questions of production, societal conditions, the prevailing economic crisis, the material standard of the strata of the "subsistence minimum" (particualrly the proletariat and working intellectuals), the level of salaries and wages and their dynamics, and —more generally—the wage system as a whole. The housing question would be viewed one-sidedly, wrongly, and distortedly if one failed to deal with it according to its relationship to the economic system and the structure of society, on the one hand, and with respect ot the given state of the family and the domestic household, the ruling ideology, prevailing morality, customs, and the legal order, on the other hand. To deal with the question of the dwelling for the subsistence minimum—that is, the question of a popular and (most of all) worker's dwelling—is possible only synthetically, in all its aspects and within the context of all its economic, hygienic, ideological, and sociopolitical ramifications."

"In parallel with the work of CIRPAC, the book will discuss the following themes:
The objective conditions of actual difficutlties that may be encountered in trying to sove the problem of and to postulate policies for the design and planning of popular dwellings (e.g. production conditions; social structure of the popluation of cities and villages; popular settlements; functional aspects of housing, work, transportation, and supply in residential agglomerations; the relationship of wages to rent, speculation, social, and political legislation, etc.).
The social content of contemporary housing (e.g., the patriarchal family, its household, and its disintigration).
The principles guiding functional architectural solutions, which adhere to the principle of a dwelling minimum. In contrast to the usual small apartment floor plan types (e.g., room and a nook for cooking),which happen merely to be conventional adaptations of bourgeois floor plans, and which represent merely a quatitative change of the traditional bourgeois or farmer's dwelling, shoehorned into a small area and designed without first having established functionally valid norms for the dimensions of a dwelling area for an average household, this calls for a new postulate: for each adult man or woman, a minimal but adequate independent, habitable room. Just as particular types of small apartments, such as those with a live-in kitchen, a small kitchen, or a living room with a cooking nook, are not simply commensurate variants and alternatives—each corresponds to a different lifestyle and a different socially determined world—so too, at a given stage, an apartment without a kitchen suggests a dwelling where each adult individual is provided with a separate dwelling cubicle, which may be considiered the most developed and most progressive form of modern dwelling: one that transcends the framework of the traditional household type, one that is in effect the specific dwelling form intended for the working intelligentsia and the proletariat, and one that represents in embryonic form a new conception in the culture of dwelling.
The same applies to the dicussion about low-, medium-, or high-rise buildings, as we discover that these are not really separate housing categories: the freestanding family house, the duplex, the row house, and the medium-size rental apartment house with stairwells or balconies, not to mention the large apartment house, are actually only different variants of accepted models of contemporary architecture, each determined by its own particular economic attributes. Thus it is not a matter of just mechanically citing dimensions and numbers of stories: instead, what is important is which of these housing types either does or does not allow for, or promote, the concept of collective dwelling, by allowing the individual dwelling cell to be complemented by a scheme of central collective facilities and by incorporating all the required economic and cultural institutions in a single coordinated housing complex.
Site plans must be judged on the basis of similar criteria. Whether we are considereing a closed or open block, or row housing, all must be combined in an organic fashion with the plan of a linear city, as recommended by Miliutin in his proposals for socialist settlements.
Finally, we shall critically examine a new type of housing: the collective dwellilng. We intend to elucidate various and hitherto controversial solutions of this new type, and to sketch out the course of its future development under new social conditions: this is meant expressly as an answer to the various "ideal proposals, to be realized in the future" that are referred to in the questionnaires of CIRPAC.
At a time whe the world is divided, when there exist side by side two types of economies, two civilizations, two societies, two cultures, and therefore also two architectures and two dwelling cultures—one decaying, even though it may have a modernistic surface appearance; the other progressive, advancing, and victorious—the author will not be satisfied by comparing in a neutral manner the various achievements of contemporary architecture but will pass his own judgment on the various individual systems of housing, site planning, and urbanism. We shall make a distinction between aravistic and decadent figurations, hidden behind the facade of modernistic outward appearances, and shall examine all those figurations from which it may be possible to extract certain usefula dn cohesive principles for the establishment of future patterns, so that nothing would go to waste that is of value in modern culture, that is healthy and perfect—in short, the best of the best. In addition, the book attempts to sketch out a prognosis of emerging in embryonic form from the most progressive manifestations of the present. This will also include presenting the reader with examples of emerging new forms of housing and the city, new lifestyles, and the anticipation of new social relationships. However, it is not the intent of this book to make idle prophecies; instead, it is more important to read the story of tomorrow between the lines of today's realities."

"The question of the minimum dwelling, the question of settlements for the broad strata of the subsistence minimum, where currently hundreds of thousands, nay millions, in our so-called civilized world do not have access to adequate housing, is not only a question of architecture, or a matter of building cheap new apartments; it must be considered on of the most important social questions in general, topped only by the questions of nutrition, work, and clothing. All this has been confirmed beyond doubt by the copious data of any research study of social health and by statistics on prevailing living standards. This point leads us directly from the study of the problem of popular housing to the study of today's production relations and related social phenomena. We are aware of the fact that if we want to get to the bottom of the problem and find a key to its solution, the form and structure of human dwelling—the house, the agglomeration, the city—cannot be viewed as isolated factors. Instead, it is necessary to view dwelling and the city as the sum total of certain relationships between people and social classes, and as a process that reflects the counterplay of social forces actiong dynamically in the change of one set of forms into elements and structures of a higher order. For these reasons, any architecutral or urban solution must be mainly the result of all these complex relationships, if we want to get to the bottom of the problem and find a key to its solution.
The title of this book, The Minimum Dwelling, is therefore an attempt to review and formulate the housing question as it exists today in all its complexity, dynamics, and actuality. Instead of offering generel recipes and examples of how to improve and equip small apartments, we shall make an attempt to focus first on those aspects which shed a light on the general question of housing; we shall identify all those requirements and premises that are essential, before we can begin to consider questions of architectural and construction solutions in order to arrive at answers to a housing situation that will be truly social, homan, and cultured and genuinely dedicated to the service of all the people in a new society."

Collectivist reconstruction of dwelling

again by Teige

Schema of a collective dwelling: the centralization and collectivization of the economic, cultural, and social factors of the dwelling process; the reduction of the "apartment" to an individual living cell. One room for each adult person, whose content (function) is a living room and a bedroom; the reproduction of a single space undifferentiated dwelling on a higher level; material and organizational forms of life.

Teige on the evolution of dwelling

Smart Growth

Urban Land Institute

"Smart Growth on the Fringe"
http://research.uli.org/Content/Reports/PolicyPapers/POF_686.pdf

"Participants agreed that a significant portion of all new development will occur on the fringe and that alternatives such as infill development, while important and valid, will not absorb enough growth to lessen the pressure on out-lying suburban areas."

"It is also a place where citizens expect a high quality of life, initially defined as family-oriented communities with private houses on large lots."

"But through a series of initiatives aimed at better guiding growth -- from strict concurrency infrastructure rules to a growth zone with density bonuses and a no-growth zone with disincentives -- significant advances toward smart growth has been made."

"Participants agreed that smart growth on the fringe has the same characteristics as smart growth anywhere -- including connectivity, walkability, a mix of uses in proximity, housing and trasportation choices, a deemphasized use of the automobile, a mix of income and age groups, and access to recreation and green space."

"Because the fringe is connected to a metropolitan region, smart growth practices aim to allow a balanced rate of growth between communities in a region. furthermore, new growth is planned in accordance with existing or planned infrastructure and transportation availability. Multimodal transportation systmes should be integrated where feasible, and road networks should be logical and interconnected. Transportation corridors should be well maintained in terms of design and capacity."

"As a basic premise, forum participants concluded that smart growth principles are the same whether they are applied to urban infill or fringe areas."

"The Role of the Private Sector is to Implement the Vision. The private sector needs to take the lead in implementing the vision, realizing that this is actually harder than the planning itself. At the same time, however, the public sector needs to provide incentives for smart growth." (!)

also: "Smart Growth: Myth and Fact" http://research.uli.org/Content/Reports/PolicyPapers/PUB_S50.pdf

Debs quote

"Socialism is a growing idea; an expanding philosophy. It is spreading over the entire face of the earth: It is as vain to resist it as it would be to arrest the sunrise on the morrow. It is coming, coming, coming all along the line. Can you not see it? If not, I advise you to consult an oculist. There is certainly something the matter with your vision. It is the mightiest movement in the history of mankind. What a privilege to serve it! I have regretted a thousand times that I can do so little for the movement that has done so much for me. The little that I am, the little that I am hoping to be, I owe to the Socialist movement. It has given me my ideas and ideals; my principles and convictions, and I would not exchange one of them for all of Rockefeller’s bloodstained dollars. It has taught me how to serve—a lesson to me of priceless value. It has taught me the ecstasy in the handclasp of a comrade. It has enabled me to hold high communion with you, and made it possible for me to take my place side by side with you in the great struggle for the better day; to multiply myself over and over again, to thrill with a fresh-born manhood; to feel life truly worthwhile; to open new avenues of vision; to spread out glorious vistas; to know that I am kin to all that throbs; to be class-conscious, and to realize that, regardless of nationality, race, creed, color or sex, every man, every woman who toils, who renders useful service, every member of the working class without an exception, is my comrade, my brother and sister—and that to serve them and their cause is the highest duty of my life."

E.V. Debs

image from the file

3rd ave

Rent Notes 1

I've begun reading Marx's work on rent in Capital 3. I'm going to be progressing on two parallel tracks: in the drafts section, I'm assembling a study guide of excerpts (and some notes); meanwhile, I'm going to record my thoughts on how the theory applies to the politics of the city.

I've posted a preliminary study guide to the Introduction. The thing I was most impressed by is Marx's incisive analysis of the formal aspects of the rental agreement.

"...as soon as the time stipulated by contract has expired — and this is one of the reasons why with the development of capitalist production the landowners seek to shorten the contract period as much as possible — the improvements incorporated in the soil become the property of the landowner as an inseparable feature of the substance, the land."

This translates into a chronic problem for the cities, often noticed but rarely understood, obscured by the confused discourse on "gentrification," understood largely as a social process (albeit one enriching to landlords). Infrastructural improvements accrue to the landlords. As a neighborhood improves in terms of services and safety, so rent rises, without the landlords having to lift a finger. (At this point, it's important to distinguish rent (ground rent) from return on capital, i.e. return on investment in buildings).

This analysis provides an alternative to the typical supply-and-demand explanation of rent raises. While the chronic shortage of housing clearly plays a role in the ability of landlords to raise rents, Marx understands this not in terms of supply-demand, but by way of the monopoly on land that forms the basis of rent under capitalism. The need to understand this difference is particularly important in understanding the movement of commercial rents. For example, when a restaurant moves into a commercial space, a series of upgrades are necessary -- ventilation (a hood), fire safety system, gas line upgrades, etc. The expenses for these upgrades are paid for by the tenant, but once they have been made...

Residential tenants fare somewhat better, but protections such as we have in New York city merely serve to regulate the speed of this handover. The majority of leases are one or two year leases. For rents under $2000/month (almost all worker housing), the allowable rise in between leases is set by a city commision, usually at a rate of 2% for a new single year lease and 4% for a two year lease. (Under conditions of stable rises, the tenant is always better off taking single year renewals -- their right to renew their lease is protected. However, the last "finding" of the commision saw these rates double, benefitting those with longer-term leases.) While this rise in rent is not mandatory, it is almost always levied.

When a tenant moves and a new tenant (not related by blood or marriage) takes over an aparment, a "vacancy" raise is permitted, usually of about 14%, or more if "improvements" are made. Moreover, "improvements" made by the landlord during the occupancy of a tenant may legitimate a rental raise -- "improvements" which often amount to merely replace decrepit or broken fixtures! Needless to say, even these meager protections are often trampled by "over-eager" landlords (over-eager to line their own pockets!) who go so far as to terrorize (or even murder) tenants in order to secure the vacancy allotment. The history of neighborhood "development" is rife with sordid details, and reaches into the highest parts of city government, which has acted in complicity with landlords to destroy and "vacate" neighborhoods as part of urban renewal plans.

peach panorama