The Robin Hood Gardens public-housing estate in East London, completed in 1972, was designed by A... more The Robin Hood Gardens public-housing estate in East London, completed in 1972, was designed by Alison and Peter Smithson as an ethical and aesthetic encounter with the flux and crises of the social world. Now demolished by the forces of speculative development, this Brutalist estate has been the subject of much dispute. But the clichéd terms of debate – a “concrete monstrosity” or a “modernist masterpiece” – have marginalized the estate’s residents and obscured its architectural originality. Recovering the social in the architectural, this book centers the estate’s lived experience of a multiracial working class, not to displace the architecture’s sensory qualities of matter and form, but to radicalize them for our present. Immersed in the materials, atmospheres, social forms and afterlives of this experimental estate, Robin Hood Gardens is reconstructed here as a socio-architectural expression of our times out of joint. +++ Free/Open Access PDF of the book now available - linked on the right-hand side of the site linked here: https://research.manchester.ac.uk/en/publications/brutalism-as-found-housing-form-and-crisis-at-robin-hood-gardens
BRUTALISM AS FOUND: HOUSING, FORM, AND CRISIS AT ROBIN HOOD GARDENS
https://brutalismasfound.c... more BRUTALISM AS FOUND: HOUSING, FORM, AND CRISIS AT ROBIN HOOD GARDENS
An online image and text exhibition chronicling the lived experience and architecture of the Robin Hood Gardens council estate in its last years before demolition. Photographs by Kois Miah and others. Text by Nick Thoburn.
Designed by Brutalist architects Alison and Peter Smithson and completed in 1972 in Poplar, east London, Robin Hood Gardens has been celebrated as a “modernist masterpiece” and reviled as a “concrete monstrosity.” Yet in neither account have its residents featured more than as bit players to another’s story, where clichés and stigmatising portrayals abound. Recovering the social in the architectural, this exhibition centres the estate’s lived experience of a multiracial working class, not to displace the architecture’s experimental qualities of matter and form, but to radicalise them for our present.
The exhibition interleaves photographs of the estate’s residents and architecture with lived testimony, architectural critique, and the Smithsons’ project diagrams. Attuned to the estate’s forms, materials, and atmospheres, Robin Hood Gardens is encountered here in its lived experience, demolition, and afterlife, as it courses with the conflictual forces of the present.
This article investigates the Victoria and Albert Museum’s recent acquisition of a section of Rob... more This article investigates the Victoria and Albert Museum’s recent acquisition of a section of Robin Hood Gardens, salvaged amidst the demolition of this Brutalist council estate in east London. The V&A’s fragment is revealed to be a fraught and class-ridden artefact, implicated in the dispossession and demolition of working-class housing. The fragment confounds this interpretation, however, for its destructive valence is bound up with its capacity to appear as a seamless item of modern architectural heritage. Hence the article first unpacks the fragment’s features by showing how it bears certain ‘museum effects’ that obscure and contain the crisis of social housing – effects of cultural history, the public, neutrality, and civic exchange. In a second move, the article considers the fragment’s direct implication in, and fashioning by, the Olympic-legacy regeneration of East Bank, a new cultural-industries quarter, where it will be sited as part of the planned V&A East. To understand the fragment’s features here, the article locates it within a regeneration trend that turns council housing into public art, before focusing on the exhibition film by the artist Do Ho Suh and the physical exhibit’s likely form at the V&A East.
This article considers today's 'post-digital' political publishing through the material forms of ... more This article considers today's 'post-digital' political publishing through the material forms of an experimental book, The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary. Anonymously published and devoid of all editorial text, the book is comprised entirely of some 650 screen-grabbed tweets, tweets posted by black Baltimore youth during the riots that ensued on the police killing of Freddie Gray. It is a crisis-ridden book, bearing the wrenching anti-black terror and rebellion of Baltimore 2015 into the horizon of publishing. Drawing on critical theories of books and digital media, and bringing Saidiya Hartman and Frank Wilderson to bear on issues of publishing, the article appraises seven aspects of this book's materiality: its epistolary structure and rupture with the book-as-closure; its undoing of the commodity form of books; the 'poor image' of its visual scene; its recourse to facial redaction and voiding of narrative progression; and its destabilization of readers' empathy.
ABSTRACT. It is commonly appreciated that issues of ‘class’ are significant to Brutalist architecture, yet in the two main trends of today’s Brutalist critical revival, the place and features of class are sidelined or obscured. Addressing that problem, this article proposes an original concept of ‘class architecture’ through analysis of the social and aesthetic form of Robin Hood Gardens, the east London council estate designed by ‘New Brutalist’ architects Alison and Peter Smithson and currently undergoing demolition. The concept of class architecture is developed here in two ways. First, it appraises the imagistic aspects of the estate’s route to demolition, as the urban ejection of working-class populations is cloaked and lent motive force by its repackaging as a ‘blitz’ on the putative ‘concrete monstrosities’ of post-war estates. Second, class architecture reconstructs how class – a fraught and unstable condition, ever pulled out of shape – is modulated in Robin Hood Gardens’ built form. Through these two aspects of class architecture, the article seeks to reclaim the aesthetics of Brutalism from discourses of abjection and the burgeoning ‘middle-class Brutalism’ that would cleanse concrete modernism of its working-class dimensions. Based on three years’ research at Robin Hood Gardens, the article enlists the Smithsons’ critically neglected methodology of the ‘as found’ and draws on interviews with residents, site observation, photography, and the Smithsons’ architectural writing.
Presenting a "communism of textual matter,” Anti-Book explores the encounter between political th... more Presenting a "communism of textual matter,” Anti-Book explores the encounter between political thought and experimental writing and publishing, shifting the politics of text from an exclusive concern with content and meaning to the media forms and social relations by which text is produced and consumed. Taking a “post-digital” approach in considering a wide array of textual media forms, Thoburn invites us to challenge the commodity form of books—to stop imagining books as transcendent intellectual, moral, and aesthetic goods unsullied by commerce. His critique is, instead, one immersed in the many materialities of text.
This article critically assesses the recent return of “communism” in contemporary political theor... more This article critically assesses the recent return of “communism” in contemporary political theory. The principal focus is Alain Badiou’s formulation of the “idea of communism” and its “sequences,” which are approached here in relation to the body of work collected in Douzinas and Žižek’s The Idea of Communism. Critical of Badiou, the article argues that communism should be understood as a “real movement” immanent to the mutating limits of capital, and not as a subjective “truth procedure.” In taking the latter route, Badiou not only produces a faulty philosophy of communism but also misdiagnoses its historical record, allowing Lenin and Mao, the spectacle of revolution, to stand as its genuine expressions. In this, Badiou contributes to the contemporary nostalgic image of a “real communism” that in practice was nothing of the sort.
This article investigates the place of social relations in Deleuze and Guattari's figure of 'cram... more This article investigates the place of social relations in Deleuze and Guattari's figure of 'cramped space', a figure integral to their 'minor politics'. Against social and political theories that seek the source of political practice in a collective identity, the theory of cramped space contends that politics arises among those who lack and refuse coherent identity, in their encounter with the impasses, limits, or impossibilities of individual and collective subjectivity. Cramped space, as Deleuze puts it, is a condition where 'the people are missing'. This is not, however, a condition of asocial isolation, but one full of social relations; the loss of identity is a condition comprised only of social relations. The ramifications of this thesis are here explored through Marx's critique of citizenship, the socio-historical conjuncture of cramped space in relation to the 'communization' problematic, and the Palestinian mediator of sumud.
For the authors, the term Occupy is a synecdoche for the world-wide proliferation of struggles th... more For the authors, the term Occupy is a synecdoche for the world-wide proliferation of struggles that fall outside of conventional and ‘vanguard’ politic and are based on new tactics, revitalised democratic processes and nomadic systems of organisation. This collection assesses the value of Deleuze and Guattari’s political ontology and looks at modes of organisation, economics, social and political forces, democracy, representation, occupation, resistance, aesthetics, leadership and so forth. Essays from Claire Colebrook, John Protevi, Ian Buchannan, Eugene Holland, Rodigo Nunes, Giuseppina Mecchia, Andrew Conio, Nicholas Thoburn, David Burrows, Verena Andermatt Conley.
This article investigates the complex object of the political book. Mobilising Deleuze and Guatta... more This article investigates the complex object of the political book. Mobilising Deleuze and Guattari's typology of the book, the article assesses the material properties of four specific books (or sets of books): Mao Zedong's 'Little Red Book', Russian Futurist books, Antonin Artaud's paper 'spells', and Guy Debord and Asger Jorn's 'anti-book' Mémoires. Highly critical of the dominant mode of the political book, what they call the 'root-book', Deleuze and Guattari draw attention to the troubling religious structures and passions that order its field. Here the book internalises the world as the origin and source of truth and authority -a mode of existence as dear to the avant-garde as it is to religious formations: 'Wagner, Mallarmé, and Joyce, Marx and Freud: still Bibles.' But the book also features in Deleuze and Guattari's counter-figure of the 'rhizome-book', where they foreground the dynamic materiality of this medium: 'A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds.' The rhizome-book is an enticing concept for assessing the political book, yet Deleuze and Guattari pay little attention to the specific, concrete attributes of this medium. In focusing on the properties of particular books this article seeks to address that absence, and so contribute to an understanding of the political book that is fully engaged with its material forms.
What are the possibilities for a political magazine in the new media environment? This article ad... more What are the possibilities for a political magazine in the new media environment? This article addresses that question through a study of the London-based art and politics magazine Mute, an experimental publishing venture that currently exists as a 'hybrid' of Web and print platforms. The politics in question resides not only in the magazine's content, but throughout its media form. For Mute's coverage of the evolving political and aesthetic capacities of new media has intersected with an insistent self-critique and remodelling of its magazine form, a reflexive orientation it set out in its 'hybrid publishing' manifesto, 'Ceci n'est pas un magazine'. Drawing on an interview with the magazine's editor and directors and employing concepts of 'media ecology' and 'embodied text', the article explores Mute's hybrid media form through its publishing platforms, participatory mechanisms, aesthetic styles, commissioning practices, temporal modes, and commercial structures.
This text is a conversation among practitioners of independent political media, focusing on the ... more This text is a conversation among practitioners of independent political media, focusing on the diverse materialities of independent publishing associated with the new media environment. The conversation concentrates on the publishing projects with which the participants are involved: the online archive and conversation platform AAAAARG, the print and digital publications of artist and activist group Chto Delat?, the blog I Cite, and the hybrid print/digital magazines Mute and Neural. Approaching independent media as sites of political and aesthetic intervention, association, and experimentation, the conversation ranges across a number of themes, including: the technical structures of new media publishing; financial constraints in independent publishing; independence and institutions; the sensory properties of paper and the book; the politics of writing; design and the aesthetics of publishing; the relation between social media and communicative capitalism; publishing as art; publishing as self-education; and post-digital print.
This article considers the place of difference in Marx's politics through an exploration of his c... more This article considers the place of difference in Marx's politics through an exploration of his categories of the lumpenproletariat and the proletariat. Far from a simple set of class subjects or empirical peoples, these two categories are argued to describe particular modes of political composition. Despite the frisson of difference and excess which is usually associated with Marx's lumpenproletariat, it is argued to describe a mode of composition -and, in relation to anarchism, a politics -oriented not towards difference and becoming, but towards present identity. The proletariat, on the other hand, is shown to be not a People, historical Subject or identity, but a 'minor' political mode of composition immanent to the manifolds of capitalism, and premised on the condition that, as Deleuze puts it, 'the people are missing'.
This article explores the different models of political communication that inhere in Hardt and Ne... more This article explores the different models of political communication that inhere in Hardt and Negri's Empire trilogy, models that are explicit and implicit, intended and accidental, dominant and latent. From their existence tangled up in Hardt and Negri's work, I draw out for consideration the communicative models of the rhizome-book, manifesto, textbook, mass-market book, autonomous language, and political journal. My aim is less to evaluate the relative dominance of these models in the trilogy, than to take the opportunity this work offers for thinking political communication as specifically communist problematic, a somewhat neglected field of inquiry.
T HE CONCEPT of hegemony had a central place in the crystallization of 1980s cultural studies, dr... more T HE CONCEPT of hegemony had a central place in the crystallization of 1980s cultural studies, drawing together as it did the analysis of the cultural and ideological formations of the Thatcherite or New Right project with the problematic of the popular and governance through the articulation of consent. 1 For Laclau and Mouffe , hegemony was a perspective with which to engage with the realities of a world where the frames of classical Marxism -class, capital, revolution -had become inadequate to the task of understanding the radical openness of the social and the rise of new, non-class-based actors and social movements. In Laclau and Mouffe's (2001: 161-71) argument, there is some suggestion that the concept of hegemony and the formations that it shed light upon were related to changes in processes of commodification but, as has often been noted, it was a severing of the analysis of hegemonic positions (of the right or left) from an apparently deterministic routing through the economic that was the distinctive feature of this approach. It was to be 'democracy' and the 'logic of equivalence' that became the 'new' and 'fundamental' 'mode of institution of the social' (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 155) in a fashion that, as Osborne (1991: 211) notes, reinterpreted class struggle as an instance of an expanded and open field of struggle for democratic articulation. This manoeuvre, associated as it was with certain post-structuralist positions, was what marked the newness of the post-Marxist project, but it is on the same axis that its frameworks today feel lacking in purchase, since -as research on fields such as cultural economy, information and communication technologies, and globalization attests -it is clear that neither culture nor politics can be understood without an intimate attention to the way capitalist dynamics and imperatives infuse the social (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 189).
The Robin Hood Gardens public-housing estate in East London, completed in 1972, was designed by A... more The Robin Hood Gardens public-housing estate in East London, completed in 1972, was designed by Alison and Peter Smithson as an ethical and aesthetic encounter with the flux and crises of the social world. Now demolished by the forces of speculative development, this Brutalist estate has been the subject of much dispute. But the clichéd terms of debate – a “concrete monstrosity” or a “modernist masterpiece” – have marginalized the estate’s residents and obscured its architectural originality. Recovering the social in the architectural, this book centers the estate’s lived experience of a multiracial working class, not to displace the architecture’s sensory qualities of matter and form, but to radicalize them for our present. Immersed in the materials, atmospheres, social forms and afterlives of this experimental estate, Robin Hood Gardens is reconstructed here as a socio-architectural expression of our times out of joint. +++ Free/Open Access PDF of the book now available - linked on the right-hand side of the site linked here: https://research.manchester.ac.uk/en/publications/brutalism-as-found-housing-form-and-crisis-at-robin-hood-gardens
BRUTALISM AS FOUND: HOUSING, FORM, AND CRISIS AT ROBIN HOOD GARDENS
https://brutalismasfound.c... more BRUTALISM AS FOUND: HOUSING, FORM, AND CRISIS AT ROBIN HOOD GARDENS
An online image and text exhibition chronicling the lived experience and architecture of the Robin Hood Gardens council estate in its last years before demolition. Photographs by Kois Miah and others. Text by Nick Thoburn.
Designed by Brutalist architects Alison and Peter Smithson and completed in 1972 in Poplar, east London, Robin Hood Gardens has been celebrated as a “modernist masterpiece” and reviled as a “concrete monstrosity.” Yet in neither account have its residents featured more than as bit players to another’s story, where clichés and stigmatising portrayals abound. Recovering the social in the architectural, this exhibition centres the estate’s lived experience of a multiracial working class, not to displace the architecture’s experimental qualities of matter and form, but to radicalise them for our present.
The exhibition interleaves photographs of the estate’s residents and architecture with lived testimony, architectural critique, and the Smithsons’ project diagrams. Attuned to the estate’s forms, materials, and atmospheres, Robin Hood Gardens is encountered here in its lived experience, demolition, and afterlife, as it courses with the conflictual forces of the present.
This article investigates the Victoria and Albert Museum’s recent acquisition of a section of Rob... more This article investigates the Victoria and Albert Museum’s recent acquisition of a section of Robin Hood Gardens, salvaged amidst the demolition of this Brutalist council estate in east London. The V&A’s fragment is revealed to be a fraught and class-ridden artefact, implicated in the dispossession and demolition of working-class housing. The fragment confounds this interpretation, however, for its destructive valence is bound up with its capacity to appear as a seamless item of modern architectural heritage. Hence the article first unpacks the fragment’s features by showing how it bears certain ‘museum effects’ that obscure and contain the crisis of social housing – effects of cultural history, the public, neutrality, and civic exchange. In a second move, the article considers the fragment’s direct implication in, and fashioning by, the Olympic-legacy regeneration of East Bank, a new cultural-industries quarter, where it will be sited as part of the planned V&A East. To understand the fragment’s features here, the article locates it within a regeneration trend that turns council housing into public art, before focusing on the exhibition film by the artist Do Ho Suh and the physical exhibit’s likely form at the V&A East.
This article considers today's 'post-digital' political publishing through the material forms of ... more This article considers today's 'post-digital' political publishing through the material forms of an experimental book, The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary. Anonymously published and devoid of all editorial text, the book is comprised entirely of some 650 screen-grabbed tweets, tweets posted by black Baltimore youth during the riots that ensued on the police killing of Freddie Gray. It is a crisis-ridden book, bearing the wrenching anti-black terror and rebellion of Baltimore 2015 into the horizon of publishing. Drawing on critical theories of books and digital media, and bringing Saidiya Hartman and Frank Wilderson to bear on issues of publishing, the article appraises seven aspects of this book's materiality: its epistolary structure and rupture with the book-as-closure; its undoing of the commodity form of books; the 'poor image' of its visual scene; its recourse to facial redaction and voiding of narrative progression; and its destabilization of readers' empathy.
ABSTRACT. It is commonly appreciated that issues of ‘class’ are significant to Brutalist architecture, yet in the two main trends of today’s Brutalist critical revival, the place and features of class are sidelined or obscured. Addressing that problem, this article proposes an original concept of ‘class architecture’ through analysis of the social and aesthetic form of Robin Hood Gardens, the east London council estate designed by ‘New Brutalist’ architects Alison and Peter Smithson and currently undergoing demolition. The concept of class architecture is developed here in two ways. First, it appraises the imagistic aspects of the estate’s route to demolition, as the urban ejection of working-class populations is cloaked and lent motive force by its repackaging as a ‘blitz’ on the putative ‘concrete monstrosities’ of post-war estates. Second, class architecture reconstructs how class – a fraught and unstable condition, ever pulled out of shape – is modulated in Robin Hood Gardens’ built form. Through these two aspects of class architecture, the article seeks to reclaim the aesthetics of Brutalism from discourses of abjection and the burgeoning ‘middle-class Brutalism’ that would cleanse concrete modernism of its working-class dimensions. Based on three years’ research at Robin Hood Gardens, the article enlists the Smithsons’ critically neglected methodology of the ‘as found’ and draws on interviews with residents, site observation, photography, and the Smithsons’ architectural writing.
Presenting a "communism of textual matter,” Anti-Book explores the encounter between political th... more Presenting a "communism of textual matter,” Anti-Book explores the encounter between political thought and experimental writing and publishing, shifting the politics of text from an exclusive concern with content and meaning to the media forms and social relations by which text is produced and consumed. Taking a “post-digital” approach in considering a wide array of textual media forms, Thoburn invites us to challenge the commodity form of books—to stop imagining books as transcendent intellectual, moral, and aesthetic goods unsullied by commerce. His critique is, instead, one immersed in the many materialities of text.
This article critically assesses the recent return of “communism” in contemporary political theor... more This article critically assesses the recent return of “communism” in contemporary political theory. The principal focus is Alain Badiou’s formulation of the “idea of communism” and its “sequences,” which are approached here in relation to the body of work collected in Douzinas and Žižek’s The Idea of Communism. Critical of Badiou, the article argues that communism should be understood as a “real movement” immanent to the mutating limits of capital, and not as a subjective “truth procedure.” In taking the latter route, Badiou not only produces a faulty philosophy of communism but also misdiagnoses its historical record, allowing Lenin and Mao, the spectacle of revolution, to stand as its genuine expressions. In this, Badiou contributes to the contemporary nostalgic image of a “real communism” that in practice was nothing of the sort.
This article investigates the place of social relations in Deleuze and Guattari's figure of 'cram... more This article investigates the place of social relations in Deleuze and Guattari's figure of 'cramped space', a figure integral to their 'minor politics'. Against social and political theories that seek the source of political practice in a collective identity, the theory of cramped space contends that politics arises among those who lack and refuse coherent identity, in their encounter with the impasses, limits, or impossibilities of individual and collective subjectivity. Cramped space, as Deleuze puts it, is a condition where 'the people are missing'. This is not, however, a condition of asocial isolation, but one full of social relations; the loss of identity is a condition comprised only of social relations. The ramifications of this thesis are here explored through Marx's critique of citizenship, the socio-historical conjuncture of cramped space in relation to the 'communization' problematic, and the Palestinian mediator of sumud.
For the authors, the term Occupy is a synecdoche for the world-wide proliferation of struggles th... more For the authors, the term Occupy is a synecdoche for the world-wide proliferation of struggles that fall outside of conventional and ‘vanguard’ politic and are based on new tactics, revitalised democratic processes and nomadic systems of organisation. This collection assesses the value of Deleuze and Guattari’s political ontology and looks at modes of organisation, economics, social and political forces, democracy, representation, occupation, resistance, aesthetics, leadership and so forth. Essays from Claire Colebrook, John Protevi, Ian Buchannan, Eugene Holland, Rodigo Nunes, Giuseppina Mecchia, Andrew Conio, Nicholas Thoburn, David Burrows, Verena Andermatt Conley.
This article investigates the complex object of the political book. Mobilising Deleuze and Guatta... more This article investigates the complex object of the political book. Mobilising Deleuze and Guattari's typology of the book, the article assesses the material properties of four specific books (or sets of books): Mao Zedong's 'Little Red Book', Russian Futurist books, Antonin Artaud's paper 'spells', and Guy Debord and Asger Jorn's 'anti-book' Mémoires. Highly critical of the dominant mode of the political book, what they call the 'root-book', Deleuze and Guattari draw attention to the troubling religious structures and passions that order its field. Here the book internalises the world as the origin and source of truth and authority -a mode of existence as dear to the avant-garde as it is to religious formations: 'Wagner, Mallarmé, and Joyce, Marx and Freud: still Bibles.' But the book also features in Deleuze and Guattari's counter-figure of the 'rhizome-book', where they foreground the dynamic materiality of this medium: 'A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds.' The rhizome-book is an enticing concept for assessing the political book, yet Deleuze and Guattari pay little attention to the specific, concrete attributes of this medium. In focusing on the properties of particular books this article seeks to address that absence, and so contribute to an understanding of the political book that is fully engaged with its material forms.
What are the possibilities for a political magazine in the new media environment? This article ad... more What are the possibilities for a political magazine in the new media environment? This article addresses that question through a study of the London-based art and politics magazine Mute, an experimental publishing venture that currently exists as a 'hybrid' of Web and print platforms. The politics in question resides not only in the magazine's content, but throughout its media form. For Mute's coverage of the evolving political and aesthetic capacities of new media has intersected with an insistent self-critique and remodelling of its magazine form, a reflexive orientation it set out in its 'hybrid publishing' manifesto, 'Ceci n'est pas un magazine'. Drawing on an interview with the magazine's editor and directors and employing concepts of 'media ecology' and 'embodied text', the article explores Mute's hybrid media form through its publishing platforms, participatory mechanisms, aesthetic styles, commissioning practices, temporal modes, and commercial structures.
This text is a conversation among practitioners of independent political media, focusing on the ... more This text is a conversation among practitioners of independent political media, focusing on the diverse materialities of independent publishing associated with the new media environment. The conversation concentrates on the publishing projects with which the participants are involved: the online archive and conversation platform AAAAARG, the print and digital publications of artist and activist group Chto Delat?, the blog I Cite, and the hybrid print/digital magazines Mute and Neural. Approaching independent media as sites of political and aesthetic intervention, association, and experimentation, the conversation ranges across a number of themes, including: the technical structures of new media publishing; financial constraints in independent publishing; independence and institutions; the sensory properties of paper and the book; the politics of writing; design and the aesthetics of publishing; the relation between social media and communicative capitalism; publishing as art; publishing as self-education; and post-digital print.
This article considers the place of difference in Marx's politics through an exploration of his c... more This article considers the place of difference in Marx's politics through an exploration of his categories of the lumpenproletariat and the proletariat. Far from a simple set of class subjects or empirical peoples, these two categories are argued to describe particular modes of political composition. Despite the frisson of difference and excess which is usually associated with Marx's lumpenproletariat, it is argued to describe a mode of composition -and, in relation to anarchism, a politics -oriented not towards difference and becoming, but towards present identity. The proletariat, on the other hand, is shown to be not a People, historical Subject or identity, but a 'minor' political mode of composition immanent to the manifolds of capitalism, and premised on the condition that, as Deleuze puts it, 'the people are missing'.
This article explores the different models of political communication that inhere in Hardt and Ne... more This article explores the different models of political communication that inhere in Hardt and Negri's Empire trilogy, models that are explicit and implicit, intended and accidental, dominant and latent. From their existence tangled up in Hardt and Negri's work, I draw out for consideration the communicative models of the rhizome-book, manifesto, textbook, mass-market book, autonomous language, and political journal. My aim is less to evaluate the relative dominance of these models in the trilogy, than to take the opportunity this work offers for thinking political communication as specifically communist problematic, a somewhat neglected field of inquiry.
T HE CONCEPT of hegemony had a central place in the crystallization of 1980s cultural studies, dr... more T HE CONCEPT of hegemony had a central place in the crystallization of 1980s cultural studies, drawing together as it did the analysis of the cultural and ideological formations of the Thatcherite or New Right project with the problematic of the popular and governance through the articulation of consent. 1 For Laclau and Mouffe , hegemony was a perspective with which to engage with the realities of a world where the frames of classical Marxism -class, capital, revolution -had become inadequate to the task of understanding the radical openness of the social and the rise of new, non-class-based actors and social movements. In Laclau and Mouffe's (2001: 161-71) argument, there is some suggestion that the concept of hegemony and the formations that it shed light upon were related to changes in processes of commodification but, as has often been noted, it was a severing of the analysis of hegemonic positions (of the right or left) from an apparently deterministic routing through the economic that was the distinctive feature of this approach. It was to be 'democracy' and the 'logic of equivalence' that became the 'new' and 'fundamental' 'mode of institution of the social' (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 155) in a fashion that, as Osborne (1991: 211) notes, reinterpreted class struggle as an instance of an expanded and open field of struggle for democratic articulation. This manoeuvre, associated as it was with certain post-structuralist positions, was what marked the newness of the post-Marxist project, but it is on the same axis that its frameworks today feel lacking in purchase, since -as research on fields such as cultural economy, information and communication technologies, and globalization attests -it is clear that neither culture nor politics can be understood without an intimate attention to the way capitalist dynamics and imperatives infuse the social (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 189).
Nicholas Thoburn and Paolo Gerbaudo discuss the implications of social media for publishing, popu... more Nicholas Thoburn and Paolo Gerbaudo discuss the implications of social media for publishing, populism and resistance.
The Robin Hood Gardens public-housing estate in East London, completed in 1972, was designed by Alison and Peter Smithson as an ethical and aesthetic encounter with the flux and crises of the social world. Now demolished by the forces of speculative development, this Brutalist estate has been the subject of much dispute. But the clichéd terms of debate – a “concrete monstrosity” or a “modernist masterpiece” – have marginalized the estate’s residents and obscured its architectural originality. Recovering the social in the architectural, this book centers the estate’s lived experience of a multiracial working class, not to displace the architecture’s sensory qualities of matter and form, but to radicalize them for our present.
Immersed in the materials, atmospheres, social forms and afterlives of this experimental estate, Robin Hood Gardens is reconstructed here as a socio-architectural expression of our times out of joint.
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Free/Open Access PDF of the book now available - linked on the right-hand side of the site linked here: https://research.manchester.ac.uk/en/publications/brutalism-as-found-housing-form-and-crisis-at-robin-hood-gardens
https://brutalismasfound.co.uk/
An online image and text exhibition chronicling the lived experience and architecture of the Robin Hood Gardens council estate in its last years before demolition. Photographs by Kois Miah and others. Text by Nick Thoburn.
Designed by Brutalist architects Alison and Peter Smithson and completed in 1972 in Poplar, east London, Robin Hood Gardens has been celebrated as a “modernist masterpiece” and reviled as a “concrete monstrosity.” Yet in neither account have its residents featured more than as bit players to another’s story, where clichés and stigmatising portrayals abound. Recovering the social in the architectural, this exhibition centres the estate’s lived experience of a multiracial working class, not to displace the architecture’s experimental qualities of matter and form, but to radicalise them for our present.
The exhibition interleaves photographs of the estate’s residents and architecture with lived testimony, architectural critique, and the Smithsons’ project diagrams. Attuned to the estate’s forms, materials, and atmospheres, Robin Hood Gardens is encountered here in its lived experience, demolition, and afterlife, as it courses with the conflictual forces of the present.
https://brutalismasfound.co.uk
ABSTRACT. It is commonly appreciated that issues of ‘class’ are significant to Brutalist architecture, yet in the two main trends of today’s Brutalist critical revival, the place and features of class are sidelined or obscured. Addressing that problem, this article proposes an original concept of ‘class architecture’ through analysis of the social and aesthetic form of Robin Hood Gardens, the east London council estate designed by ‘New Brutalist’ architects Alison and Peter Smithson and currently undergoing demolition. The concept of class architecture is developed here in two ways. First, it appraises the imagistic aspects of the estate’s route to demolition, as the urban ejection of working-class populations is cloaked and lent motive force by its repackaging as a ‘blitz’ on the putative ‘concrete monstrosities’ of post-war estates. Second, class architecture reconstructs how class – a fraught and unstable condition, ever pulled out of shape – is modulated in Robin Hood Gardens’ built form. Through these two aspects of class architecture, the article seeks to reclaim the aesthetics of Brutalism from discourses of abjection and the burgeoning ‘middle-class Brutalism’ that would cleanse concrete modernism of its working-class dimensions. Based on three years’ research at Robin Hood Gardens, the article enlists the Smithsons’ critically neglected methodology of the ‘as found’ and draws on interviews with residents, site observation, photography, and the Smithsons’ architectural writing.
This collection assesses the value of Deleuze and Guattari’s political ontology and looks at modes of organisation, economics, social and political forces, democracy, representation, occupation, resistance, aesthetics, leadership and so forth. Essays from Claire Colebrook, John Protevi, Ian Buchannan, Eugene Holland, Rodigo Nunes, Giuseppina Mecchia, Andrew Conio, Nicholas Thoburn, David Burrows, Verena Andermatt Conley.
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Free/Open Access PDF of the book now available - linked on the right-hand side of the site linked here: https://research.manchester.ac.uk/en/publications/brutalism-as-found-housing-form-and-crisis-at-robin-hood-gardens
https://brutalismasfound.co.uk/
An online image and text exhibition chronicling the lived experience and architecture of the Robin Hood Gardens council estate in its last years before demolition. Photographs by Kois Miah and others. Text by Nick Thoburn.
Designed by Brutalist architects Alison and Peter Smithson and completed in 1972 in Poplar, east London, Robin Hood Gardens has been celebrated as a “modernist masterpiece” and reviled as a “concrete monstrosity.” Yet in neither account have its residents featured more than as bit players to another’s story, where clichés and stigmatising portrayals abound. Recovering the social in the architectural, this exhibition centres the estate’s lived experience of a multiracial working class, not to displace the architecture’s experimental qualities of matter and form, but to radicalise them for our present.
The exhibition interleaves photographs of the estate’s residents and architecture with lived testimony, architectural critique, and the Smithsons’ project diagrams. Attuned to the estate’s forms, materials, and atmospheres, Robin Hood Gardens is encountered here in its lived experience, demolition, and afterlife, as it courses with the conflictual forces of the present.
https://brutalismasfound.co.uk
ABSTRACT. It is commonly appreciated that issues of ‘class’ are significant to Brutalist architecture, yet in the two main trends of today’s Brutalist critical revival, the place and features of class are sidelined or obscured. Addressing that problem, this article proposes an original concept of ‘class architecture’ through analysis of the social and aesthetic form of Robin Hood Gardens, the east London council estate designed by ‘New Brutalist’ architects Alison and Peter Smithson and currently undergoing demolition. The concept of class architecture is developed here in two ways. First, it appraises the imagistic aspects of the estate’s route to demolition, as the urban ejection of working-class populations is cloaked and lent motive force by its repackaging as a ‘blitz’ on the putative ‘concrete monstrosities’ of post-war estates. Second, class architecture reconstructs how class – a fraught and unstable condition, ever pulled out of shape – is modulated in Robin Hood Gardens’ built form. Through these two aspects of class architecture, the article seeks to reclaim the aesthetics of Brutalism from discourses of abjection and the burgeoning ‘middle-class Brutalism’ that would cleanse concrete modernism of its working-class dimensions. Based on three years’ research at Robin Hood Gardens, the article enlists the Smithsons’ critically neglected methodology of the ‘as found’ and draws on interviews with residents, site observation, photography, and the Smithsons’ architectural writing.
This collection assesses the value of Deleuze and Guattari’s political ontology and looks at modes of organisation, economics, social and political forces, democracy, representation, occupation, resistance, aesthetics, leadership and so forth. Essays from Claire Colebrook, John Protevi, Ian Buchannan, Eugene Holland, Rodigo Nunes, Giuseppina Mecchia, Andrew Conio, Nicholas Thoburn, David Burrows, Verena Andermatt Conley.
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The Robin Hood Gardens public-housing estate in East London, completed in 1972, was designed by Alison and Peter Smithson as an ethical and aesthetic encounter with the flux and crises of the social world. Now demolished by the forces of speculative development, this Brutalist estate has been the subject of much dispute. But the clichéd terms of debate – a “concrete monstrosity” or a “modernist masterpiece” – have marginalized the estate’s residents and obscured its architectural originality. Recovering the social in the architectural, this book centers the estate’s lived experience of a multiracial working class, not to displace the architecture’s sensory qualities of matter and form, but to radicalize them for our present.
Immersed in the materials, atmospheres, social forms and afterlives of this experimental estate, Robin Hood Gardens is reconstructed here as a socio-architectural expression of our times out of joint.
https://research.manchester.ac.uk/en/publications/brutalism-as-found-housing-form-and-crisis-at-robin-hood-gardens