Spaces' Significance as Ruin of Their Signification: From Space to Theory and Back Again

At this point I am concerned with where spatial turns into theoretical as part of the process of applying institutional ethnography to the field of international art biennials. Possibly the whole enterprise hinges on the alienation of the gaze at the same time as suspension of the natural attitude towards words as much as towards pictures.

The structuralist rending asunder of the signifiers and their signifieds should apply to the extent to the spatial signifiers and their spatial signifieds. That's where probably the attempts at founding semiotics of space founder under the weight of their own unrealizable assumptions about the significatory potential of reading spaces as if they were elements of a certain kind of langue as opposed to parole of actual physical existence of urban spaces.

The bad infinity of possible meanings that can possibly accrue to any element of such spatial language has apparently drowned out the structural regularity of spatial configurations that continue to maintain their coherense across times and spaces. However, rather than advocating a revival of some sort of structuralist paradigm, which has never lost its significance and force to rupture many a received idea, I have in mind Deleuze and Guattari's project as extension of the initial attempts to theorize structure in directions of thought that can combine material, social, and discursive into abstract configurations that are capable of neither losing the actual regularities out sight nor falling into reductivist trap of meaning as the sole order of revelance to research into what spaces do.

Spaces can be ascribed agential capacities to the extent that they participate in the relations of ruling that in their totality produce the field of power upon which spatial configurations map in the analytic account of their significance. Therefore, the study of the production of space can recover significance of spaces out of the ruins of their signification.

And that goes beyond the efforts at cultural mapping that one may undertake vis-a-vis spatial artifacts towards the recognition of importance that numerous discursive associations, appropriations, and accretions have for adequate rendering what a structure given to urban space holds in stock for ethnographer of spaces.

Marx and After in the Look at Theoretical Filiation from Marxism to Post-Structuralism

In dialogue with elaborations on the order of information that continue the line of thinking by Karl Marx I want to raise the question of the multiple revolutions that shook the world since the 1850s around which decade his major works were written.

Whole panoply of communications, science, and culture revolutions have remade thoroughly the foundations of modern society as whole scholarly fields were discovered, as civil society institutions sprang up where there were none, and as revolutionalization of capitalist relations of production paced ahead.

It indeed is true that in their famous Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels have charted the lines on which the course of the changes underway and to come. However, the Marxist discourse that has set in in the wake of the scholarly archive of Marx, and here I am using archive in its narrow meaning of corpus of works that came from under his pen, has somehow frozen in the moment it first came to light.

Maybe the two, the archive and the oeuvre, are not identical after all even if used in their narrow meanings since Marx's texts prove to be far more relevant to the present situation of rapid change than the archive of what his theory had been thought to be has ever been. Should the discussion of the relevance of the Marxist terms be ever continued? Should whole new vocabulary be summarily adopted? Should radical break be attempted with the thought associated with the name of Marx?

While Deleuze and Guattari's oeuvre comes to mind what I am mindful of also is the apparent absence of Deleuzian archive in terms of the whole discourse that would be readily recognizable or applicable to situations present and past. The formidable brilliance of their texts seems to have left after themselves a long silence that no superficial borrowing of their terms can break.

Maybe in a sort of Oedipal dynamics their attempted disciples have never been capable of liberating parricide in order that they be able to overcome their discursive figures and charge in their own direction. As in poetry, the influences of the dominant figures of the day seem to be difficult to shake off as long as the whole generation does not change to newly constituted situation of aesthetic sensibility.

By way of a rhetorical question, what a post-Oedipal dealing with the situation could be?

Spaces of Utopia Under the Theoretical Scrutiny of Post-Marxist Gaze

The thick volumes of biennial catalogues inspire awe and anxiety at the same time since beyond the enjoyment of the richness that they represent for their readers and fortunate attendees of their bi-, tri-, or quinqu-ennial events that take more after elaborate theatrical shows, which are on many occasions incorporated into the programming of biennials as distributed institutions, than they do just an exhibition in a white cube of gallery or museum.

Here lies the conundrum of the expanded field of representation that Lefebvre may help to answer since his thesis on production of space can prove to be critical beyond the reception it has received at the time of its publication or translation into other languages it being understood that these events in their majority have happened before the 1990s decade.

Of similar importance would be the unexplored quadrants of the theoretical space that Guy Debord charts in his writings as he addresses the society of the spectacle in its relation to the transition from the first to the second modernity. In his interpretation I see the symptom of the transition to the second modernity rather than accurate description of its principles of operation since I perceive Debord's condemnation of social uses of spectacle in what amounts to late modern society, or the first modernity in my terminology, as the pressure that the contradictions of modernity exercise on its institutions to adopt the loops of reflexivity into their normal operation.

It is exactly this surfeit of complexity as a matter of course that captures my imagination as I develop my ethnographic understanding of second modernity as it manifests itself in biennials, museums, and cultural districts. In this regard it appears important to leave room for realization that the second modernity is less the process of temporal succession then the outcome of what is variously referred to as internal contradictions of capitalism, spatial fix of the next cycle of capitalist restructuring, or change in the mode of accumulation.

Thus dissociated from the vestiges of teleological thinking, the discussion of the second modernity allows for predictive thinkers, cities, or spaces to come into their own in providing both models and prototypes for developments that are at a temporal distance from their historically situated works, cultures, and manifestations. In this frame of reference one can readily appreciate the place of Paris as paradigmatic city of the nineteenth century or even twentieth.

With regard to my theoretical concerns, I see museums, biennials, and urban complexes as those utopic spaces that under the conditions of the second modernity can hold genuine promise for positive alternatives to come true.

On Baudrillard's Obituary: Front Page News From the French Intellectual Field

World writes obituaries to Jean Baudrillard. Some newspapers write short stately pieces on his rise to international prominence as one of the major minds behind the 1960s student uprisings and the change in the intellectual atmosphere in their wake. Others spend more time to divine the producer of Cool Memories, Simulations and Simulacra, and The System of Objects. A great mind sleeps.

Whole generation of thinkers, personalities, and activists has receded into time to make room for their young guard. Somehow modernity never ceases to supply the adrenaline that its each beat of intensity pumps up our veins. The inventor of pataphysics, the writer of post-September-11-th treatise on terrorism, the sociologist of the late modernity has left a trail of cryptic texts and allusions that are sure to occupy the generations to come with puzzlement, amusement, and inspiration.

Even if the legacy of Baudrillard will prove to be negative, as would befit the negative style of his thought, the positive anti-shadow that we will have to supply to come to terms with the shape of the present transition as it takes in the aftermath of the major contradictions, traumas, and narratives that the first modernity has left behind will continue to cast its pall on him. Hurled into the unceasing stream of events, our minds seek a point from which our theoretical glances would be able to see the parameters of the present moment even as it endlessly peels away in the rear-view mirror of our memory.

Now that his oeuvre has reached the quality of completeness of a collectible set of volumes, drafts, letters, and notes, a new wave of interest is bound to throw ashore of public attention the intellectual archive that in bits and pieces will be gathered under Baudrillard's name as another signifier newly afloat in the intertextual sphere of references, citations, and glosses. The work of mourning of the space that his complete works will fill on numerous shelves will be at the same time the work of displacement of the awareness of the historical context around his live onto the image of Baudrillard's thought as finished work.

That invisible touch of the closed brackets with two numbers that his name will be combined with thereafter may prove transformative in how his texts will be exchanging their meaning for hard currency of their reading. Equivalent of varnish on old masters' paintings this day will push his works into endless cycle of their circulation.

The Position of Modernism in Between First and Second Modernity as Material, Social, and Discursive Process

Between documentary film and fictional cinema fall works that attempt to bridge both. How does subject-matter dealing with poverty, abjection, and marginalization get treatment that goes beyond the response always already wrapped into pieces of the narrative that the majority society has produced in the work of social differentiation?

Zygmunt Bauman says that in the governmental setup of modernity the two extremes of privilege and deprivation serves to bring the rest of society into the fold of self-regulated society that generates its dreams and nightmares on the model of those who are assigned the structural position of excess and lack in terms of social distribution of chances for leading lives that are on one hand desired and on the other hand abhorred.

Possibly, the question is born at the conjunction of theory with the after effect of watching the films that rarely get beyond the circuit of festivals, biennial screenings, and art house distribution, which makes them public at the same time as it puts them out of effective reach by the mainstream audience. The question of the archive as virtual construction with components that conjoin in equal measure social, discursive, and material may shed light of the question of the importance of such limited interventions as are the films that go back to the premise of the social realism and avant-garde that rather than entertain seeks to shake its audience out of complacency.

Rather than being merely different the impact of art on the larger society of necessity draws in its force on the very same components that curtail its effectiveness. The analyses of avant-garde propose that art that has reached that stage in its history has confronted thereby the limit conditions of its autonomy in the bourgeois society that permits freedom of expression within the institutionalized confines of museums, galleries, theaters, libraries and cinemas.

However, once the material side of the movement of modernity towards modernism is brought into account the dilemmas of autonomy and involvement that the very conditions of existence of art maintain in permanent relevance may begin looking different from the stalemate that the discourse on artistic autonomy seems to consign the efforts to bring art into concert with developments lying outside its exhibition spaces. In material terms the very spaces for the exhibition of art have to be built for that express purpose, should the mass audience be sought for the works that their creators want to make public.

While the historical discourse on museums stresses generic features of the practice of showing of things in public, the material conditions for gaining large scale exhibition venues for common use have only arisen with the decisive entrenchment of changes that in their sum have become constitutive of the first modernity as formation having social, economic, and political underpinnings. In this light the reclamation of the Louvre Museum as civic institution rather than the royal palace is more indicative of the revolution in the conditions of capital accumulation than it is of the gains for the fledgling French republic in public space since before the last decade of the eighteenth century the command of the material forces that went into erection and upkeep of architectural spaces on the scale of the Louvre were only available to the person occupying the pinnacle of the rigid social hierarchy that pre-revolutionary ancien regime enshrined.

Whether the intuition of the national museum that Louvre has become is also reflective of the ideological need for legitimization of the then newly ascendant republican regime or not, the work of ideology that monumental structures perform has little to do with the substantive nature of the political regime around these structures. For that reason, the material history of the museums can probably more felicitously mapped onto the preconditions for the creation of the wealth of nations than onto the rise of nationalism, as it has more commonly has been.

In the heyday of nationalist movements the whole constellation of sites, sights, and statements has been commanded into the production of the anamorphic illusion of the incontrovertible existence of the nation that only came into its naturalized own in the mirror of the bourgeois self. As the larger situation in which the bourgeois society has gone on to reproduce itself has changed over the course of movement from the first industrial revolution towards the host of revolutions in the growing number of fields the very nature of the connection between the self and the spaces where it was supposed to find its naturalized reflection has underwent changes that justify the introduction of second modernity as term of reference with which sense can be made of the spaces of the disorganized capitalism of the world operating as a single unit.

Thereby the assemblage of the social forces within which art becomes institutionalized in the spaces it does adds to the existing material dynamics that has conjured the productive forces for their construction in the first place. The spectacular growth in the number of museums worldwide, as well as in the countries of the First World specifically, has largely escaped theorization. That leaves room for venturing a hypothesis that the saturation of the urban space with places that are capable of lending themselves to ideological uses can bespeak of the uses for ideology that fall out of conventionally conceived critique of ideology.

In this point I concur with Scott Lash that a new kind of social critique has to be offered in order to adequately account for the changes that the transition from the first modernity to the second has as its precondition. Specifically, it may call for theorization at the speed at which certain significant events are occurring. Such real-time theoretical activity finds its paradigmatically contemporary to the moment of writing expression in blogging when journalistic reportage from around the world provokes the reaction that brings conceptual framework and the information on actual developments into confrontation.

From this perspective the third dimension of the discussion - that of the discourse - gains in relief as museums gain in unprecedented degree to which they are able to dictate the terms of their integration into the daily life. At the same time the scholarly attention to museums becomes ever more important both in terms of impartial understanding of the relations of ruling within which museums have to operate in the second modernity and in terms of cultural map making that different agents in the field of art would appropriate for their purposes in their turn.

In this situation I expect to bring my dealing with the contradictions of the presently occurring foundational change in the defining structures of modernity to bear upon the subject matter of the Guggenheim Museum on one hand and the international art biennials on the other. The notion of the future archive of contemporary art unites these two terms of comparison by virtue of its centrality to the issues of urban culture, minority art, and museum studies.