by hand

DEAD

“Millions of men lived in a huge building with no door or windows”
(Vaneigem, 1967:chpt6)

“At the end of our century not much will remain of this planet that is not only polluted and impoverished, but also shrunken and reduced to nothing by the teletechnologies of generalized activity”
(Virilio, 1993:12)

“We are utterly appalled by the global Babylon that the agrarian civilization has produced, with its unsustainable lot of pollution, impoverishment, segregation, repression, privatization, nationalization, and other alienations.”
(Srivastava and Echanove, 2008)

“Of the two, Hell proved the easier to re-create.”
(Steiner, 1974:48)

We were made to breathe the good air of nature, but what we breathe is an obscure compound of acids and coal tars. We were created for a living environment, but we dwell in a lunar world of stone, cement, asphalt, glass, cast iron, and steel. The trees wilt and blanch among sterile and blind stone façades (Ellul, 1964:312), around playgrounds where children find toxic tars and methane gas bubbling under their swings (Davis, 2002:198). People drown in their cars in casino parking lots (Davis, 2002:96 referencing a 1992 Las Vegas flash flood) and public transport authorities install mirrors on train platforms so people can take one last look at themselves before they jump (Berardi, 2009b). Only rats and humans remain to populate the dead city (Ellul, 1964:312), A STONE SEA whose uncontrollable cellular division and spread threatens to choke so much of our lives (Steiner, 1974:23).

Part machine, part sub-human organism, part nightmare-huge projection and embodiment of passion and insanity.

Obsession with meaningless words, worship of lunatic ideas (Huxley, 1939:207-8).

Meager food, barriers to movement. Barriers to use of the body. Thralldom to press and television. Total absence of purpose (Lynch, 1984:364).

Bleached and steamed by meaningless sounds and gestures, spun dry by statistical controls….. murdered slowly[1]. Welcome to a perpetual Jacuzzi with millions of your best friends. (Koolhaas, 2002: 176)

Industrially distorted brains cannot grasp rich, personal textures (Illich, 1973:14); Disembodied minds see only disorder in the life of city streets, see only disorder where a most intricate and unique order exists and itch to erase it, standardize it, suburbanize it[2]. To build it out of the city not as a part of a well-thought-out planning concept but as a by-product of a long series of other considerations (Jan Gehl, 1987: 49) with insufficient understanding of the complex principles which lie beneath their straight angles and rasterized CAD maps[3] (Srivastava and Echanove, 2008). These ‘scientists’/ will discover/ that all that was chaotic/ was in man’s illiterate and bewildered/ imagination and fearful ignorance (Buckminster Fuller, 1963:33).

The production of the better, faster, higher, more beautiful, and more efficient demands (and depends on) increasingly disciplined recipients (Illich, 1973:41) evermore residing in a fabric of impotent rationality outside of human needs (Steiner, 1974:32): Space, produced under capitalism for capitalism becomes our treasured empty cage, which can receive any commodity whatsoever (Lefebvre, 2004:54; also Zerzan, 2008a). Space, degraded from a commons to a meager, gated resource (Illich, 1983, discussing roads, etc; A standing resource – Heidegger) for the infinite game of city exploitation (Bookchin, 1974:44; Davis, 2002:143-81). It is old news that the city houses economic animals (Jinnai, 1995:74) – inertias of greed, politics, bureaucracy and popular indifference ensure that public and private money continue to finance their feed (Braiterman, 2010; Steiner, 1974:58). Here, the shortsighted destruction of community is easily rectified by the righteousness of growth and ‘full’ employment (Jacobs, 2004:59 discussing the Interstate Highway System in the United States; Marazzi, 2010: e.g. p35).

Pour concrete to mark modernity!
Increase vehicle throughput!
Consume Energy!
Progress![4] (after Braiterman (deadspace) 2010; Salingaros, 2010b).

CLASSY EATS.
MILE HIGH CONES.
JESUS SAVES.
HAMBURGERS. (Huxley, 1939:7)

Fast cars, clean bodies (Kaufmann, 2001)

Space may well be the machine (Hillier, 1999) but it has become an inanimate, garagey sort of money pump (after Buckminster Fuller, 1963:9).

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[1] Vaneigem (1967:chpt5)

[2] from Jacobs (1991:583)

[3] “..the stench of decay rises from beneath the slick drawings and the blueprints to fill the nostrils.” (Bookchin, 1974:88)

[4] Linear time → history → Progress → idolatry of the future. Now we’re prepared to sacrifice species, cultures and quite possibly the entire natural world on the altar of some imagined future (Zerzan, 2008b:54).