 Okay, so thank you everybody for coming and I want to thank the school, as you said, for putting this together. I'm super thrilled to be able to introduce Tim Moutiz-Ramila and Robin Beidenacker. So today, Mike Bell and Sarah Bann will be having a conversation with the two of them on metamorphosis. And I'll do a little introduction as to why it is that I became so interested in their work and how it is that we got here. So the title of this discussion is between irony and sincerity. So irony, in its broad sense, is a rhetorical device with a literary technique or a defense in which what appears on the surface to mean the case differs radically from what is actually happening. Irony is the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically, for a humorous, poetic effect. At the core of the postmodern project, irony was an important device to architecture. How something is said to accentuate a sense of skepticism became almost more important than what is being said. Postmodernism at the height during the 90s was a sparkling cocktail with both the full awareness of the effects of the argument and the tools of the academy combined with the ability to divorce meaning from message. So here, to your left, you're looking at the 1909 theorem, which was made famous by Greta Kohoz in the 1978 publication Delirious in New York. The cartoon Skyscraper by artist A. E. Walker originally published in the March issue of Life Magazine that year, 1909, under the theme that the real estate owner. When this piece was published, there was a naive dream about what the Skyscraper is and how the Skyscraper works in the early 20th century. And I think what is being represented here is represented through an absolute sense of sincerity. A stack of suburban plots with an exponential increase in the property value. To your right, you're seeing the sectionalization of the High Rise of Homes by James Wines. James Wines probably not only was aware of the 1909 theorem, the way that Kohoz used this image, and maybe even aware of how to use this project to signify the opposite and retort the device to an ironic project. So still to your left is the High Rise of Homes project from James Wines. So I want to maybe compare these two as opposed to, you know, the first production where you have a sincere project versus an ironic project, but once again you have an ironic project versus a sincere but ironic project. So the rolling house is from Anders Hake, and the way that I've always regarded the rolling house project is it's spoken through the voice of irony with the intention of sincerity, which is vastly different, I think, from the intentions of the work of James Wines. So today we're joined by Sarah Dunn. Sarah Dunn and I were, I guess, first-hand witness of a, what I would call a movement in Chicago led by Mr. Dr. Balcon. And I think during that time there was a re-examination of values of postmodernism with or without visual qualities of postmodernism. I think it remains a project largely that largely deals with the communicative quality of architecture as architecture behaves as an extension of the human body to communicate all we have of humans. And so if we think about architecture and its relationship to communication, I think naturally it evolved into certain shapes or forms or certain graphics and maybe even the ways that we used to understand ducks and decorated sheds had to happen in the re-exam two. It was also during this period Sarah and I witnessed the making and the coming together of this AP machine radical postmodernism. If you're familiar with this text to your right, I think, if you're not familiar with it, I recommend a quick read of it. This was written by Sam Jacob at Thingsly and how to become a famous architect. Here Sam Jacob is saying, go dig up magazines that are roughly 15 years old, specifically for things that are not fashionable anymore. Do that. But, you know, let's forget it was not that long ago when doing postmodern projects are not only not fashionable, but kind of embarrassing. But we somehow developed the capacity to not only entertain the values of postmodern projects again, but we look at that period with a new feeling. So something is changing. I have to say, you know, as a practitioner, as a person who's in this world of architecture, something has been changing over the last 10 years. And we do now have this ability to embrace the sensibilities of what might look and sound like postmodernism, but underneath it all there's a sincere project. And so these are some of the childhood moments, I think, between Sarah and I. But I think, you know, outside of the United States, even, so here's Konstantinos, he's responsible for the image to the left from Point Supreme. And even within Europe, I think the idea of referencing something to create a feeling is not necessarily regarded as a postmodern project per se, but it's either a stabling project, or maybe even a sensational project, almost the way that you would quote another guitarist when you're playing a solo. And I think, you know, between art and architecture, the feeling of doing something funny or ironic here, I think, you know, especially in the case of First Office, one of the most frustratingly ironic groups that I've ever encountered, everything they do is through a link with their tongue on their cheek. And at the same time, it's fully aware and maintaining a naive position for some reason. So times are changing, and you know, is it postmodernism? Is it not postmodernism? Are we here in a school, even the dean participates in this project? And if it's not postmodernism, what is it that we're doing? I think architecture is a self-reflective field, first and foremost, and I think, you know, as one of the most powerful documentation devices to humanity, the time spent out of our contribution is a marker that sends messages about our way of life into the distant future, just the same way that we can still understand this in the past by studying, you know, archeological architecture. So in today's political landscape, I think the stability that upon which relativism and absolutism used to sit on this study is not only very fragile, but on the verge of collapse today. And I think, you know, especially into this post-2016 world, the oscillation between irony and sincerity is ever increasingly increasing its intensity. So during one of my late night YouTube deep dives, I discovered a clip called The Philosophy of Shire, which I don't know if you guys watched it. Did they do a okay job? For us, people met as well, but they did it together with students at Goldsmith. So yeah, some say it's a yes. Yeah, so this guy, Jared Bauer from the channel, Wisecrack, I think that opened the door for me to kind of discover you guys, the MetaMars group. And so as he described, an obscure philosophy group in the Netherlands. I took the bait and followed this rabbit hole, and it was really fascinating. So here we are today, like Tim and Robin, I think I'm a product of the late 20th century, with many of my coming-of-age moments circulated around Seinfeld, Simpsons and South Park. I think where I learned to speak about topics that may inspire a degree of skepticism or some desire for intellectual scrutiny, I can only speak it with a voice of irony. I don't know how about to speak it, because that is almost my natural tongue. It's almost like a reflex or sneeze. It's almost like a Tourette's. If I see something critical, I will sound ironic with or without being ironic. But underneath it all, I would be a person that would subscribe to a sincere project. So for example, I very much identify with one of the sayings that a person who practices Stoicism may say, which is, for every human connection you make, every relationship should be intent in itself, never a means. Which if that's the type of sincere project that we're in a sincere feeling that we have about people these days, I think architecture is hopefully part of that. And architecture, I think it's always slightly late to the game, as I was mentioning to Tim and Robin. And if we reexamine the way that we engage with various moments in art and philosophy and literature, we are always a little late. It might be because architecture takes a while to build. It might be because architects a lot of times only talk to each other. But I think it's an exciting moment to have the two of them we are able to chat with today. So Vermeelen is an associate professor at the university in Oslo. He teaches in media, culture and discipline. His research interests include cultural theory, in particular postmodernism, metamodernism as well as contemporary aesthetics, both across media and arts and films and television. His main focus now lies in handsome scenes, spatially and in nature fiction. Robin Tenderhacher is a doctoral researcher at the guest research at the residence university. This is a very old biennial, but it doesn't matter. Maybe they can introduce themselves. But it's always been a dream of mine to be able to do this, to engage in living and working philosophers and to offer a new welcome. Thank you. So what we thought... So, I'm Tim, this is Robin, these obscure philosophers. We are quite obscure. We've been working on metamodernism as a project, in an attempt to find a vernacular for a series of developments that we saw happening across culture, especially culture in the West, which is where we are based. So it would be disingenuous for us to make claims beyond that. We lived in Holland when we were in London, where we started, and then in Holland and then in Germany and France. So we're speaking about that above all. So we've been working on this for 10 years. The attempt to find a vernacular, to find a language that may help us understand a lot of these, at once similar, overlapping and yet distinct developments have been popping up since the mid-90s, early 2000s. And then especially after the financial crisis from 2008. 10 years, initially with the two of us, then increasingly with more and more people for a while we had a blog, which is really inactive now. And then I think that over 60 contributors, so it's a big project. We're going to talk about it for 20 minutes, which obviously is going to leave a lot behind. It may also be good, I don't know if we have more depth than 20 minutes, but it will leave some stuff behind. Just to, we saw the Shia LeBouf picture, just to say, we aren't writing about Shia LeBouf, which is not to say that we're not fascinated by what's happening, but we started this as an analytical project. We have particular political claims, but we started this as an analytical project. And then one of our contributors, Luke Turner, started working along those lines with amongst other Shia to do the project. So I think it's important that we come before and not after. The important thing is that we're not pushing the agenda, right? That's the key. Well, yeah, I guess. So, this is what we want to start with, and so we started writing in 2007, 2008. We noticed that, especially across the arts, very different disciplines, so fine arts and galleries and museums and film and literature, something was changing. And it's something, I guess, many different forms and many different shapes and many different implications. But one of the key things that was changing was what you might call a sentiment, an attitude, a tone. We noticed that our students that were no longer reading as we were in the 90s, Brad and Stenelle, so we should have well-backed, or Affiliated Neck, or Barth, or, you know, any of those writers, they were starting to write very different writers. First of all, this is Eddie Smith, and Frantzen, and Jennifer Egan, and Golanio, and so on and so forth. It's a very different group of people. The same was happening in film, where the so-called smart film, which is a concept from film studies, Jeffery Scones wrote a really good article about it in the films of the 90s, films like American Beauty and Happiness, I don't even recall those films. That word, Jeffery Scones said, marked by a bleak attitude and indifference towards its characters, were so very shifted in popular culture for the films where Wes Anderson, Spike Jones, and so on and so forth, a very different sentiment. And we saw this happening again and again, and so in the arts, you saw the move from the YBAs, I mean, no one takes these as seriously anymore, I think, but no one buys them anymore, so there's the market as well. Well, and even as a part of this, the Younger Than Jesus show, which was really landmark here in New York, at the New Museum, a generational shift. Art is younger than 33, you know, Jesus. And whose work was marked also by a shift, the critic Jerry Saltz wrote from a sense of irony, a sense of nihilism, a sense of equity, to a willingness to once again engage constructively. And I'll look deep in some of these out in a second. But so across the field, in culture, you saw a move in what could be called roughly an ironic detachment, a deconstructive notion, right? Red Houston Nellis and the YBAs, they will say the world is really shit, right? It's not a great place, and we should show everyone how terrible it is. But it's really difficult to think in terms of alternatives to offer different ways in which the world could be. And so what you see is that they break stuff down, the same happens across the board. So you see a shift from ironic detachment to what we might call post-ironic, or a willingness to be sincere, not the achievement, right? But a willingness to somehow engage once again with the world around us. And I think this is the move that we started to try and put into words and to map out. I guess, yeah. Right, so these changes that they described from, so, practices that were structured around ironing, and practices that were structured around something that you would call post-ironing. For us, that's why I insisted that we are not sort of pushing an agenda or writing a manifesto. For us, these are pointing ultimately to a change in culture that you do not necessarily celebrate. They point to a shift that's followed in structural feeling. Now, the notion of structural feeling is a notion by Raymond Williams. And it's a very slippery notion. But what it basically points to is the feeling, a sentiment that is so widespread, that it becomes structural, and that it becomes structuring, becomes a formative moment in culture. It has structures as well. The ways of seeing this change in the structure of feeling is by first going briefly back to Jameson in his famous essay that is one of the most popular movies that was The Harmony. They also used the notion of structural feeling. And for Jameson, it was a structural feeling. For those only years, that was related to the sense of an ant, right? That he points to all kinds of debates, in art, in biology, in politics, etc. But ultimately he points to that very famous ideological cipher of the sense of an ant, who beyond his notion of the end of history. Now, for Jameson, and that is one of his most clever native-born versions, I would say, the notion of the end of history is not about time and all he says. No, it's about space. And what it means by that is that the post-money years are marked by what he calls the blocking of historical imagination. The fact that because of, as a development for instance, the complete envelope in the world by capital, because the fall of Soviet Union, the whole thing of the Chinese market, that's on a local level. And on a local level, so the coming of age, the enormous proliferation of consumerist logic, and the logic of the quality in everyday life. What happens in everyday life is that it sort of takes place, from a Western perspective at least, in some kind of competition, competition is highly commoditized, highly reputized, and is only consisting of the kind, right, sort of a competition which is quite well, quite okay to be, and that competition sort of blocks any view, any relation to the past and the future. Now what we have seen happening in the 2000s is the change in that sense of an ant, into a sense of something else. And we have come to call this in our recent book, the sense of an ant, that sort of a wing, both to Jameson, the sense of an ant, and to a column that Markila wrote, allows the band for history as it were. And this sense of a band hopefully points to that widespread feeling among the cross culture that, yes, history is not at all ending, maybe it has ended for us, but it has been somehow, again, excited, right? Somehow all kinds of developments have urged us to once more feel that there is something to take in that history, is once more moving forward. Secondly, it points to the widespread feeling that hidden around the band is awaiting something that looks very costly at this point. We cannot know what it will be, we only know that it will be a clusterfuck or a clusterfuck of horses, right? Something is coming. We don't want to look like it, but we do know for sure that to 1% we'll be sitting at a top of the social pyramid, the rest of us will be sitting at the base, it will be trampled by trampled storms and rising sea levels in highly precarious conditions. Those are sort of parameters of that feeling that is hidden around the band, so that we're rapidly approaching. That sense of a band is, of course, related to the various crises that we have seen emerging in the 2000s. I don't want to go over the realization these sort of 2000s that have been excluded to say and state that for us 2000s they have the same historical importance for the emergence of the metamorphological feeling as the states these have for the emergence of the boson historical feeling. A short cut into that periodization time that these issues would be raised is the point to the two moments of struggle that we could look at in the 2000s, right? In the 90s you get the first sort of wave of all the roadways, struggles of roadways and in 2011 we have the Archibald Times. Archibald is definitely the very short cut to periodize. So this metamorphological feeling is the sense of a band and that could only become dominant in the 2000s as a period or as a band. Yeah, so it's related. I think it might be good that we showed it. You know, it's not Williams and that's why we chose this notion of historical feeling. I think it's important to say that it's not Marx in the sense that he believes that every cultural development is a consequence of material development, right? He says that these can run parallel and interfere with each other and so I think it's the same for us. I think there's these three developments, right? There's all these crises happening, there's these technological changes and we'll come, I guess, to Twitter maybe in a second. And there is also new generation, right? I think this begins really as a generation of design here to do something else. And so it is not the case that whatever the structural feeling is that it emerges as a result of specific development but it seems to run parallel to them so there will be links but it's not one that follows after the other. Okay, this is, so there's, I think there's for us there are five kind of tropes that we've seen in the arts and so we're not really speaking about architecture simply because we don't really know anything about it. So it would seem really weird if we would start telling you stuff. It seems an American political tradition right now to do that but we should be the same thing. So we're not talking about architecture I think we'll talk mostly about literature and contemporary art and so there's five sort of shifts I think that run parallel to this which is the return of constructive political engagement the return of the grand narrative or the problematic grand narrative grand narrative that always sort of eats itself you could say, post-harmonie which is the Constantinous term it's great and we'll come to that in a second. Effect, the return of an effective register people speak about empathy a lot right Ben Lerner, Zadie Smith and the return of a particular notion of craft and this is a work, I don't know if you know it we speak about this a lot because we love this work both of them actually the top one by Namjoon Bhai and the bottom one by Anabelle Daroul an American, the Danish artist who might live here actually in New York is concerned with television with the TV as you can see they are concerned with different ways with television the top one which is a kind of a day to bowie lying, lazy behind all those televisions you know becoming apathetic of all that is offered the spectacles offered on this will be many in Zadie between and so on and so forth the Namjoon Bhai work which is fantastic is indicative for many people I suppose, mother mostly contemporary art to say a few words about now is the second one which is the work by Anabelle Daroul this work, so maybe I should no, I'll start with the work so the work is as follows there is this TV set which is a TV set from a different age obviously I doubt that many of you unless you're like Instagram hipsters few people will have this TV right so it's an old television old model and it's a static image an image that might as well be a confession screen but isn't much enough and so it's an image that mediates between inside and outside and on this television screen there is a performance that can be heard which is the artist asking people in galleries the question which side are you on and I mean every time I hear it I think it's just fascinating so which side are you on and people have to answer instantaneously and so I do this with my students a lot I wouldn't do it here but as soon as a lot of my students were asked the same question which side are you on I expect them to answer instantly and that's really difficult to answer this question instantly which side are you on and it's difficult I would guess and I think this is part of the strength of the work as far more to this work than I can explain right now but part of the strength I think is that it's difficult to answer that question for two reasons the first, oh yeah sometimes I'll say something very meaningful I guess something well intended humanity or this side of the Palestine and Israel conflict or this side of but often they all resort to a joke side of Star Wars the sunny side I think many people say that which is not a bad joke the west side those kinds of things but the hesitation right which side are you on I mean it could really refer to any debate right you could say it refers to a political debate maybe to a sports debate sexual debate I don't know it could refer to everything and so how do you choose if the playing field is open because I could for example say I'm on the side of Arsenal which is my favourite football team but that could do it but I imagine there are far more meaningful answers but even if I would give one of those meaningful answers there would be extra and so it's very difficult to choose because if you can only choose one then what is all the stuff that you're leaving behind and I think the reason that is extra hard is that Leo Tha is written by Jean-François Leo Tha one of the great chroniclers of the post-modern and Leo Tha writes about the post-modern condition as follows he says that the post-modern for him and he writes about this in the Difficult Law is like in Marquis Belago so it's like a series of violence in a scene and the post-modern is the ethanol on a ship sailing between the different islands and in the modern position you would be on one island and you would say this is the truth what happens on this island is definitely and inevitably true and so I would be willing to do anything to make the truth of this island happen this is what we get with fascism if you are willing to sacrifice everything at the cost of that one single truth we are in a particular kind of ballgame it's not a great one I guess and we are seeing I guess the emergence of a similar game across everywhere the post-modern condition for Leo Tha the Difficult Law is different you are the emerald on a ship and you are sailing between these islands and you are never setting foot on the shores and so you can see oh yes this is the language game that they are playing here these are the laws that are there so you can begin to compare without yourself taking position how the world works you can see these different language games you can make sense of it you could call them discourse, language games whatever you want to call them but we can see that each island has its own truth and you'll probably find that a truth on this island is valuable maybe something is valuable here as well and you can easily sail between these islands and the question I think on about all the poses is what do you do when you feel or when you feel that everyone is sick there is no food which island do you go to and so if you are forced to choose one island of all these islands whilst knowing that each of them has a particular value and that choosing I mean that's what Leo Tha says being aware of the white terror of truth I mean Leo Tha is such a great philosopher because he is always afraid of people speaking the truth which doesn't mean we shouldn't ask the truth but we should always have that moment of doubt of the scientific doubt but so what do you do when you choose one island which one do you choose and that's an impossible question because you know that everyone every single one of them has has its value and so what I guess that will point to is that what many people seem to be doing and this will go for the arts in I think very exciting ways and in politics in I think in absolutely disastrous ways and so here you think and then you go somewhere else so you begin just moving desperately until I guess the boat is gone and then you stop somewhere so you have this rapid movement this constant repositioning and I see I mean I don't know about you but when I'm on Facebook especially I mean I'm not on Twitter because the fright is the hell out of me I'm on Facebook which obviously now we're realizing through the fright and the hell out of me there's something really outrageous that's happening and everyone's like oh outrageous and we should share this person and we should be outraged about this and then one person will say something and I think that's a really good argument and then the next person says that's also really valid and then you don't really know where to move in or who to agree with because I guess that's so many of these points have something and so it is that same kind of sense of desperation but it is interesting to take this there's more to say but I think I should probably I don't know so let's go back to post irony which is one of the core sensibilities or strategies of this sense of the matter we prefer a notion of post irony it's a notion that we currently borrow from the normal way and over and because for us we're always already tied to this personal opposition as Kipnis also explained we may also at least have grown up on diet ironing cycle and so we are always tied to this but in the life of this sense of a band we also do the need for irony this place is irony because as David Tosta Wallace greatly argued in the time zone irony doesn't really seem to be a valid response anymore irony was a super powerful tool a soul value say in early post many years and how to expose all kinds of hypocrisies and how to expose all kinds of power structures was rightly said the problem is that once the rules of art are revoked and once the unpleasant realities of irony diet goes are reviewed in diet goes then what do we do? so in high post let's say the 90s with problems maybe still irony became some kind of defense mechanism rather than an assault weapon it helped you to shoot yourself from the absurdities the injustices of the world that you felt powerless to actually deal with or you didn't have the need or the urge to deal with it because everything was brought as well in the end of this so irony for for example irony there becomes some kind of defense mechanism you know that and there's not a lot of things are going on everywhere you don't have the power to do something about it so you sort of start to defend yourself with this irony now what we have been seeing was culture especially in the thousands and still today is that people therefore try to move away on this irony's position but temporarily you see various things obviously the the longing for sincerity so the temporary the displacement of your ironic mode to engage sincerely with certain problems you also see irony coupled often to sort of political activism constructive engagement with the world also knowing perhaps that now what you're doing but at least I do something because I need to I have that urge considering the fact that I have the sense of history bending so it has been one of the downstairs possibilities in the first place but a great example of this is when you compare these two words the first one is that makes today's home so pleasant so appealing which in this case is of course a highly ironic title because Captain is not saying at all that these homes are so appealing as a pleasant those are of course mocking the blossoming those humorous things who work on the fifties one of the first war these, of course criticizing constructing this world he says it's ridiculous this this humorism this body culture this notion of of interior innovation you also see here is this sort of good imagination perfectly fine and well illustrated so this is to speak a moment in which you are in a completely optimal now but there is no sense of futurity or the future and the past is sort of receding in the background so that means available through some kind of mediation right it's also being practically changed so here you see a certain world a world that people start to criticize the here and the now and doesn't give you any sense of being related to the past and the future so the perfect defining illustration of this sense of imagination in the second work Origin Hamilton which is now a reference to which is obviously a reference to Hamilton because the he's understand the slope in lines here the technique that she was calling as well you see something else in that first of all the materials that are used we don't see materials from paper magazine or some kind of we decide chess nobody uses leather paper cutouts much more organic sort of feel to the material you would say second volume the title here which is the Covenant of the Lead and that's a very ambiguous type of because is this sort of machinist naive or malachical that sort of think that they create some kind of community outside of civilization or is actually sort of a tribute to that right so you see here already a big consideration in irony and sincerity but also in a way this world actually functions you see all kinds of references references to worlds of tradition that cannot possibly go together you see references to sci-fi you see very traditional sort of building you see reference to religion which is a type of water far west so what happened before this doing here is creating a world that takes some kind of communal idea in life he does so by using the remnants and sort of the waste products of the past and all kinds of other attempts to build the world and these worlds cannot possibly exist together so what we want we cannot have cowboys and Indians with science fiction we cannot have religion and the particular religion in one coherent universe that still is there second of all what it points to is sort of is allowing to start to reconstruct and sincerely engage with the notion of another world's puzzle right but also completely out of life even though that took of a vocabulary of a political language to create such a another world so in terms of historical imagination you see here again the enormous of walking to construct another type of society another type of community life then using sort of the waste products of the past of the tradition of the history and it wasn't pretty efficient but it points then towards allowing a desire that left sort of the tools and the look at them how long do we have time should we should we call it I don't know I could I could go on talk about this but we can also start having the conversation yeah okay so just to you know to finish so this is just a snapshot what I'm hoping already to become obvious that we are talking about just for probably not a structure sensibility and no parallel to philosophy and mood right in the same way when you wake up and you're feeling a bit and you've eaten too much the night before or too little or you haven't done enough sports in too much your stomach is telling you something and your mood will inflect everything on the day so if you have a person who's unfriendly to you and you're in a good mood then it's alright but if you wake up in a wonderful in a terrible mood and that person's unfriendly obviously you won't but also then if a person's friendly you will still see that through a negative lens right so it's this mood this sensibility that inflects everything and I think what we're seeing here is a shift in that sensibility a shift in your mood in the mood of your body you can say it's a different way in which your body fills out the world and engages with the world around you and that is a shift which is a contract between a speaker and a listener to a more willfully sincere sensibility which is also a contract between a speaker and a listener and I think if this irony is key this is an irony of of knowing that the position of hands may untenable but that the future is as well that you nonetheless make the mood right so like Anagel does or need like David Thorpe does one of the models from the 70s the famous Dutch would do the following you would hang from it and you might know it you would hang from a branch in a tree and then it would let you and the premise was that for a moment he would believe and he could define gravity which of course he couldn't and he would break his arm but it's that moment for a moment you will yourself to believe that something's happening but only within the framework you might say of that performance and so this shift a sensibility shift from irony too sincerity maybe this is what we're beginning to work on a lot right now or so we'll do a little thing for you folks tomorrow about this as well there's a shift in what you could call the what if or the risk society as Ulrich Beck says to the asset which is the modality of fiction which is the modality of postulation right so the what if is the modality of the algorithm right so or the the insurance company right and so you say I'm standing here now what are all the conceivable roots to me dying right that's what an insurance company does they should have said this and like this and this and on the basis of that that's calculation of what could happen you know we'll decide how much you have to pay us right to be sure this is a very I mean Shell does the same with oil right I mean this is the model of the 90s and to an extent not the present the as if is a different model it doesn't say what would we do if that happens or what would we do no it says let's just pretend that this is the scenario I mean this is of course what Donald Trump is doing right he's constantly creating as if as if so it's the modality of the comparative modality the as with the conditional so you're always already comparing something with something that is not real at that moment so you're postulating not questioning you're postulating something let's see let's pretend this is a a teacup right let's pretend that we are all monkeys and then we behave upon that premise on that fictional premise and so this is a very different one and I guess this is a disastrous one and also where we see in the arts that the imagination is returning right if this notion of this vacuum of history this end of history is about emptying out of the historical imagination we can no longer think in terms of the alternative we don't know where to look for how to look beyond what we have at hand then fiction may also well be that alternative right we have to postulate something and then behave or move after that postulation and so this is the modality in a sense this is where you look here it's a wonderful piece it's a Dutch artist you know well I didn't contribute to the piece so there's no reason for me to be proud of it just because I'm myself from Holland no I'm not showing it we don't have time we don't show it I'll quickly tell you so what we see is a little dude you know this is this guy I'm terrible I think it's the artist he looks very timely from here in front of a humongous icebreaker right and so this little man is walking he's almost as early he looks little to us and so he's walking ah okay we are showing it thank you very much so just I think one second will be enough one second no ten seconds maybe no no this is good right here yeah so this goes on this is a little bit and so what we have is an icebreaker who is literally breaking the feet breaking the ground under this dude's feet and yet this person remains walking steadily towards calmly he doesn't move about he remains walking towards us the camera which is at a non-place I guess towards us it starts with this wonderful everything will be alright if this was a Tarantino film we know what would happen right the person would die instantly or like it took so long to do something but everything will be alright boom person dead and all of us will be like good job man it will be good job I guess but here this person keeps walking and nothing happens there's no there's no we don't know why the person is walking but we know that the person is keeping faith somehow into something it keeps continuing the path of go on and go on and go on and the icebreaker doesn't come close it stays at the same distance throughout this person isn't wondering what if this person's wondering is imagining something is imagining that things will be alright things will be okay even though all the evidence points to the contrary right I think if we keep this going on forever eventually something bad will happen but this is the notion you postulate the fiction that you don't really know how it looks so it's if you've been locked into a room forever and you don't know if there is an outside and then if there is one you don't know how it looks so you paint a little window on the wall and you have to pretend that this is how it looks and you begin behaving according to that window right so sorry we should really go yeah super sorry about that it's a really good piece it's a fantastic piece yeah so maybe we can freeze frame and yeah begin with the conversation yeah where do we sit I'm sitting here I'm sitting here so we sit in the film everyone's sitting here everyone's sitting here so I thought that was fantastic and I wish was there one more slide or yeah one more slide which is our growth yeah what tasks oversize the vacation the scheme of what our present looks like right about your present yeah it's a bit embarrassing but this is it yeah yeah like a really I had to encounter my students from the studio in the audience which I'm really talking about ironically the studio is entitled what if then so I should rename it then right we're pretty interested in let me try to twist it around to architecture a little bit maybe for a minute since we're all architects it's not for you all but to ask you after your no sound metamodernism in 2010 it was at a moment where you were able to to kind of quote Barack Obama and the kind of change speech which in the subsequent years has turned out to be unexpected and then I went on to read your utopia sort of essay in 2015 and you sort of started I think maybe you talk about utopia slightly differently and then in the first essay you're talking about it's atopia and then in the second one you're talking about utopia kind of maybe possibility but that it's kind of always proceeding does that change how you talk about the islands and the admiral is it still the same where quickly to each each island or are you going towards one island that's receding kind of like the person walking who's not you're not sure if it's going to turn out okay or not but I thought it was really interesting that you're talking about with the naivete and but hopefulness possibly read I don't know reallowing an almost utopic but not quite approach to to deal with the issues or maybe not to deal maybe to not deal with issues today but what's your current thinking well well of course we always think in time so inevitably our positions slightly changed I think for a role you're still standing moving behind sort of the observations that we made 10 years ago we used the same sort of concepts in the book that we published this years but the same is later but of course this sort of context is somehow changed but she also says that okay our administration what came after his election etc and it was all a little bit different and we expected it to be or maybe not a better viewpoint but at that particular moment the enthusiasm generated by the campaign and by his election and that was a sort of victory that is still very very crucial I guess to understand this notion of to accept the structure of the feeling that we mentioned of course we also went there to the neuro-mediter in the arts and what we it was a very small essay that's a shared literature essay and to the fact that you guys had a lot of people so chip in their own enemies and expand on it but when you look at the neuro-mediter in the arts of the early 2000s we indeed also missed some of the darker the size of romanticism and neuro-medecism that were absolutely also present in the English and so you always think in hindsight about a particular period and now when you think about the 2000s and in hindsight you also see that there were also some darker anti-spirits the nationalism that's also neuro-medecism having said that maybe it is some of the issues you might agree with or you don't know how about but even though some of the different constituencies from slowly making America great again has the same kind of quality of promising a better future and at the same time sort of a longing for neuro-medecism as a begin so even though there will be the opposite Obama and Trump have shown the same logic meaning possibly the fact that things are not turned out and some have not turned out as the bottom turned out turned out in the 90s I don't know everyone seems to be going swell promises of end of inflation during economic world trickled out etc. those promises have not materialized quite particularly and in that situation you see this longing again because it's basically longing the dogie longing to go to a place that's much different than where you are today and you see the bone on the left and the right and it's a longing but the fact is as well we don't really have the it's a desire that we don't really have the tools or the language to see it in America great again we don't have the tool or the language to actually sexualize how we should get to the other alternative future as we suggest we want to go yeah I think thanks for the question I mean yes I think both of them are very different ways of painting these pictures of an alternative with no tools right so I don't know somehow and I think to answer your question about the islands which is here in fact I would say do you change I mean if we look at you know some of the crazy people that are running in the states right or in Europe we have the same thing happening all across the board they are they are at once completely relativist or ironic you might say and completely absolutist and on day one you could say this island is absolutely the right island and on day two you can say this island is absolutely the right and they can be incompatible but no one apparently finds that a problem right and no one says hey hold on a second so there's not a sort of coherent ideological programming without the tools it's feeling out as if we're feeling out the texture of reality to try and feel out where we could go and if that doesn't work or if you need something else we also want to feel out this so lower taxes more schools silly but yeah so I would say there is this this shift that doesn't make them that doesn't make this utopia either less valuable or less dangerous it's the same as you guys were talking so Harry Frankford's work on bullshit yeah it's something that so for example would it be also about 10 possibly almost 15 years ago 10, 15 years ago when Michael speaks who's that I mean so you guys know that GED went on from I guess he went on from comparative literature into architecture and now he's the dean of the school of architecture but at the time he was talking about relationship to truth and bullshit or lying in bullshit and I think at the time it was so funny to talk about bullshit because the idea that an architect may receive a piece of paper that has something to do with the site and we would be also handed the set of programs and square relations or square years and so forth and we would have to imagine something from scratch that does not necessarily rely on any way, shape or form of truth but it does rely on some sort of condition or some sort of as if and you know once the drugs are gone and the city gets sort of disemparised it becomes legal it might even become as real as concrete and so I think as you were talking about the the relativisms and absolutisms you know things that could be real or can't be real it's suddenly the local climate makes it very difficult to think that bullshit is funny yeah yeah in that weekend the bullshit is also a postulated in a way that can then can then use so into the world and then sort of over to the self of because you have a bullshit I think that's what we're seeing in politics nowadays also across in that sense yeah yeah I think what's so important I mean that bullshit piece it was so important about that but also about sort of writing I mean the word very vulgar was a very tricky romantic philosopher but also one I think was some useful ideas who emigrated to flee the war and the Second World War came to the States and he also writes something similar to bullshit when it comes to the Nazis and I think what he points out that was really key is that in every proposition we make I say this I'm referring I'm requiring and implying in a particular world a particular universe so I might as well imply the universe that we are living in right now I could be making up a lie or a fiction and then I would be speaking about it or not if I say yesterday I met elves for tea you know I'm obviously referring to different universe in a way a different possible world where there are elves and so every proposition implies it's own universe and if you lie the bullshit you are creating a particular universe but I guess also if you're not particularly building something you are fitting that within a particular world that you require for this building to exist right maybe this world maybe it's seven worlds at the same time that development isn't yet possible in our world but it's possible in the world that you are foreseeing and I think that Woegeling did so good he did so well in the 1950s writing about Germany and so he wrote about Nazism which is Don Quixote so Woegeling says why don't we treat Nazism like Don Quixote did right so Don Quixote believes that windmills are nice which is an ontological reorientation so this is what I'm after I think bullshit is an ontological reorientation you see one thing and you perceive it like a psychosis almost and so Nazism Don Quixote sees the windmill and says it's nice he is reorienting himself ontologically and creating the world to fit but then Sancho Pancia who is his servant you know who doesn't really believe it has to go along in this reorientation because he's the servant and so he goes along and then the nobility starts laughing and making fun slowly everyone is joining in this possible world which doesn't really measure up to reality so I think it's this bullshit is so important and I think for us this as if the moment you postulate the fiction you are engaging in an ontological reorientation we sorry very much in the end the fact is in architecture you can push what you want in the end you can call by by legislation yes and economic gravities gravities etc yes Tim earlier the choice of words are so interesting to use the word universe currently you know teaching a seminar right now on mathematical sense when you I guess what everything that's been from the bracket is a universe I mean that's like that's an angle for describing a mathematical universe and every item that you choose to set is once you put it it's real yeah and you can't remember anything you can you can't remember anything you can't remember anything there's a wonderful book from the early early 20th century I don't know if anyone's read by Hans Weier here and so Hans Weier is by all accounts a crazy person and by the time he finishes it he has all kinds of physical problems and he writes an introduction which is 100 pages long celebrating himself it's a really wonderful read it was a content of time who was forgotten for a long time because it is a bit of a crazy but it's also quite interesting because he treats every single discipline as a fiction and so he tries to trace the extent to which the economy the invisible hand that Adam Smith which he had never no one had seen that invisible hand obviously no one had egoism no one had studied that Adam Smith maybe not we forget that the idea of the rational citizen of egoism is a fiction and so Weier begins to trace mathematics, architecture different fictional structures that are inherent to everything we do and I think that might be a beginning to really map out not just say oh it's a fiction or yes it's bullshit or yes it's clearly false because we all know that or we don't but this is part of I think we need to begin to understand how these things are fictional how they are bullshit what is this ontological orientation about what has to be missing from this universe what has to be in there can there be gravity can there not whether the news in order to begin to make sense of the kind of laws that have been created yes sorry I went off topic should we open this up should we open this up should we open this up do you want this sure well the question I had was asked in the representation myself but just like how are we supposed to be the time of the band is it a sort of periodization of the first decade of the first century or is this something that you see each of these columns combining in some way now energy thinking all this way some of the references and maybe this is a question related to the kind of time of theorizing particularly also but you know I mean it seems hard to think about you know the foster wall that's a sort of serious you know you know like to me like the wall is an element in like a starter kit for you know sensitive public so I just sort of wonder how like is this the moment that you see as contemporary or is it maybe something about these three categories being different frames from in which the next one can be read but I just also I mean like to me it's like it's just even with the discussion of different crises the feeling I have now is that it's almost hard to name a crisis you know or that the kind of framework within which something like postmodernism would have been able to theorize the meaning of the meaning requires there to be something other than the injustice you know and I just I don't know that nothing quite feels so solid for me enough to be able to sort of make this neat kind of marker columns thanks for your impression of course as Tim said we've only had one few minutes right so what we have been doing is sort of two things playing on two playing few simple things the first one is theorizing and theorizing the questions as I said the crises are just short crowds and I think they're right about the sense and their sort of perpetual crowds right and maybe the crisis because it's the crises everywhere it seems so for us in the thousands are opinionated you can see it for instance when it comes to the democratization of media technologies again the times which is the whole sort of whole new space when it comes to the course of the production you see for instance as well when it comes to biologically renewable technologies somewhere in the thousands there's very few of them I think there are tons of ways to realize this and then we play the playing field of the structural feeling and for us the structural feeling it's not a causal relationship it starts to emerge and then becomes dominant and then now with it right it's just that you only become dominant within a particular context of the questions and you have to be right that we're also using for instance so a structural feeling is not something that is sort of totalizing a clean brain with everything that came before it it's dominant so it allows all of this to form a residual structural feeling like we've still seen moralistic ethics sometimes and emerging structural feeling important for the future and what you see happening is that in it's thousands and it's much more structural feeling becomes dominant and you see enormous resurgence of for instance somebody might take what was was already trying in his time to sort of feel out and get beyond it's a I would say also send a beneficial irony but already trying to move beyond the beneficial irony for instance in leadership and you see that the generation becomes super popular in the thousands even ladies and gentlemen etc they see they for so long as a little crucial figure in this transition from a certain way of doing it to a way to which that wants to move beyond both of them so yes they for so long is rising in the 90s so he really became he becomes absolutely super influential in leadership in the thousands so that's why it's not sort of clean thoughts everything that's been used in a certain period in the period no here it looks to history and to a future in different ways and there are a lot of trends there are also trends that are really not so clearly interesting but also we should not forget when James is writing he's forward-sizingly present as he says he's also aware of that it doesn't really look like a solid thing to him at that time he wants to begin mapping it out so that we can take some form of collection and I think as far as December we see all these things I think all of us feel that stuff is happening but we are no longer sufficient and so the things we're trying to find a vernacular that may help us understand some of these things and relate them to one another and so the meta you know it's not a reflective stance the meta for us came from this notion of metoxy which Bergen and Trace is a plateau which is a both niger right so plateau doesn't know what to do with half-gods because they're ontologically unstable so maybe that's also the clock and they die and they cannot die how do I make sense well they are constantly moving between there's this concept so they are both mortal and niger and immortal and niger of those at the same time so this was for us also to try and map out and this bent I think is this right I'm sure that there's other stuff going to happen that is now emerging and it will be more dominant maybe we should call it fascism I don't know what the name will be for this stuff but I'm guessing it will be fascism and flux and I think we're very aware that we're always late and missing out but I also think it's so keen that before we take action before we jump on to something that we try at least to make sense of stuff in relation to another because the logic of the fragment is the logic also of the neoliberal the logic of the fragment of the of the decontextualize of the gods that's the logic of capital and so I think we should at least try to make sense of it however flawed that may be that would be in addition my answer to it it's a really important question right actually we were talking about exactly this on our way here that we yeah we got a way to begin thank you I happen to have had many of you vote here oh dear oh yeah I'm so sorry for that thank you for the money that you have this was fun too few of you was there at all but anyway I'm wondering what's the normal of the difference and ambivalence in your schema and I'm asking because in architecture there are there are so many choices and some architects are hesitant to even choose there's so many items to go through and then in ambivalence although this artwork fairly pulverized right now what what about ambivalence not wanting to choose anything is there a role in adding your schema for the difference would be my personal preference to always delay the choice to an extent oh sorry you know I think it's a generational thing for me to always be a very good choice right and people choosing one over the other but in terms of I think there's also this need what we try to describe as a need that you feel that you need to choose even though you know that whatever choice you're going to make it's going to be a shitty one it's going to be all kinds of issues and problems and you probably might have taken another choice but it's this this urge whether that's a generational desire whether that's out of financial crisis whether that's out of ecological crisis there's this need to choose in spite of better judgment in a way because the world isn't so you have to choose so you have to choose and in terms of ambivalence I think that's where the ambivalence lies that you you know I don't know if it's the same I guess indeed but in all it now I have been there for a while but you choose your insurance right so you choose an insurance and I think based on how much you pay in which company you choose you can go to certain hospitals for your disease but not others right and so if you make a choice and then you get sick and you come to the hospital it's also your it's your own fault which is even worse I guess and I don't know you're American so I meant it's all more the worst here anyway but so it's the ambivalence is there always already it's always already there I would say in the 90s and 80s you'll linger in that moment of ambivalence right because I already speak with two tongues right and not right so you speak both with the tongue that you're saying and you speak with an invisible tongue which is saying one of what I'm saying I believe in but that is only understood if you read it there is no notion because if I would say I love I love Gyumarills you don't know because you don't know me I do love Gyumarills it's the same way because things come out of the US and so I mean that's serious I mean this is left but I mean that but you wouldn't know that because you know I don't know that because I know you do yes right I don't know then I would make you have a better answer you start with a problem you don't really have a certain right now the ambivalence is always there but it depends on the historical context in which this ambivalence is sort of explained somehow so you could be very ambivalent about all kinds of things in the 80s and 90s but that was fine it's fine you could be ambivalent about it you know whether you're going to shoot both of these politicians or others it just didn't really matter and maybe there was no necessity issues but in this historical context with these sensible managers you notice that things are rapidly changing and not really not really good you might still be ambivalent about all things which are always forced into certain decisions in the middle of if the ambivalence might stay with you but still you have you've already chosen one and they're inside of your still name is possible I have a better one because this Alison Gibbons edited the book with us so it's amazing and she wrote this really good article about Adam Thurball I don't know if you know Adam Thurball is the novelist from the UK and he has this wonderful stylistic trope in which he will say whilst I was in London and then you're expecting for the other side of something else to come and he will stop and so he does that constantly so you're always aware that we are just more complex and more artistic multiplicities than the one that you're experiencing but as a reader you're never privy to that so you're always in this case simultaneously but you can't access it the way you might want to Just in this question which I think is a super interesting and important one so in architecture there's a rap battle forum called Long and within it I don't know if you're referring to that as well so within it the word of difference is currently a debate topic and the I guess the visual is kind of behind the stance of indifference I wonder you know I wonder about his position as well because you know on one hand I say is this Pretzettura or you know the art of effortlessness so he needs to I guess construct an image of effortlessness and therefore he has to behave in a good way so that's made one for me to understand the motivation and the sense of stoicism which is you know I have to consume everything and I have to listen to everything before making a proper decision and therefore everything is valuable and when everything is valuable nothing can possibly be the most important and so you know anyway that's and I wonder what you're going to say about it as well okay now I'm going on a scary story so we're going to commit ourselves to venture a little bit into your domain that's right and I probably made a mistake but it's just speculation just speculation it is indifference right is that to say sort of I don't care or it can be either this or that and it's all fine by me is that sort of the attitude that's so that anything goes basically here you have where it all works yeah I was thinking that if anything goes not any longer the dominant trope the crossroads may be also an architecture and so there's still the freedom maybe the more freedom to design all kinds of force and services but you always even somehow need want to make some kind difference here so there's a lot of freedom to choose whatever you want but it's also always tied to something very dramatic and practical and that is for instance the need to build in a more sustainable way right so you're still able to maybe more so than before because of all the computer modeling to create very significant freedom forms but you're also now required to tackle the functionality of being more sustainable or catching some kind of services or maybe sure that the wind can sort of power your buildings so I can't see how you can still be different in the sense of when if you girls are not cared in the light of all the problems and also all the regulations and also all the new needs and the new needs and the new requirements that are now coming out of that content you can still be different and you are sort of required either by yourself or by generation or by simple legislation to make some kind of difference I think this is sort of catching with the shift from whatever works given by so this is just pure speculation I think this sort of captures something like dark angles you might probably don't like it but I'm not saying because I like this work or something but you see there a big shift from sort of anything goes to pay for formalism to again you don't want to pay for formalism but always type of something that needs to actually be done right why do you think I don't know I'm just saying we're not we're not celebrating or we're not I mean you see that a big shift perfectly clear clearly illustrated in this work so yeah I've never answered a question why do you think no one here likes dark angles no because there's a tendency you know there's always a tendency that the more successful you become you hate it it's because you hate it you love something which is really welfare but it's very hard that's why I had the big shift is this it this is it is it everybody's this could be it finish it then yeah is that a Dutch yeah well thank you everyone for being here Thank you very much. Good for that as well. You're students, right? You're students of these I imagine or staff. I didn't see this. I mean, I guess in a way we're speaking about you, which is very dangerous given that you're sitting here. I mean, I guess just related to that, my question about periodization was more like, do you see this as something which stops with 2010? Do you see this as a moment that we're in now? Yeah, yeah, okay. Still, yeah. I think Donald Trump is here, right? Yeah, but wait, isn't that a moment? I think Donald Trump is a symptom, sadly, you know. You know, this is not a warholah story, right? We're not celebrating this stuff. I think Trump and the populist movement, we see all over Europe, even in more way where I live, right, which is the wealthiest country alive, there's also populism on the rise. I think these are symptoms of the same things, sadly, that some of these movements I would celebrate were symptoms of, yeah. I mean, I guess I was just curious about these things like, I don't know, the new sincerity, it just, or, I don't know, like, when I was, like in the 2000s, maybe we bought organic food and was just going to hell. And then, you know, are there just like things like that now, or just feels like, you know, the kind of hopefulness of that moment? A while, but ever. You know, like the sort of hope for some kind of self-correction from within the system seems like it's no longer really there. Like, the plan's over. Look, what Solomon says makes a tiny mistake in his speech, or when I would now say, I don't know, I would say something horrible, right, so Timothy Morton, just in philosophy, in philosophy, I think he made an unfortunate tweet about Marficial because he was a great thinker. And then everyone, just everyone, started correcting. And I don't think this sort of moral righteousness would have existed for better or worse, I'm not putting a value judgment on it. In the 90s, I don't think, so I think in terms of correctness, I think it is there, but it has taken far less pleasant sounds at the same time. I think there's a lot happening especially in the States right now, which makes me incredibly hopeful. Me too. I think that makes me so hopeful for changes. I think what is, what is key, what is potentially amazing and potentially terrifying is that we don't really seem to have the tools to construct these alternatives, right? This is what Margaret Edwood, I think, pointed out. So one of the things that we spoke about this in this article that people are hating her for as it happens these days, I guess, where she said, look, so we have accepted that maybe the law doesn't work, maybe that this system of how we understand reality doesn't work, but I'm wondering what the next system is and who is in power in that system. She's a really relevant question. So I do think we're in the midst of this. At the moment, it's not only taking sort of these lighthearted, new sincerity, quirky, right? I think these are at the start of it, but they are also phenomenal that evaporate again. In literature, we see different things happening right now. I mean, I think we have folk, right? We see so many different things happening right now. In music, so these are just symptoms, in the same way that when Jameson writes about post-modernism, or he writes about stuff that happens for five years, but then he says, well, there's something else happening here, something else happening here. So these things move, I would say, the structure of feeling that one's through them is in this case the same. It will dissipate and it will become less important. But right now, I would definitely say, and now I think with the city, but yeah, I would say it's the same. Sorry, I don't... No, I'm just finding parts of the category. It's like pop music, I don't know, it's probably like... We're at the end of the second decade of the 21st century. It's like, I don't know what the story is, like SoundCloud Records or something like this. It's completely different. It just seems like a very different cultural moment. I just wonder whether you can... whether the broader theoretical categories that these examples, these were certain examples, and so they have their limitations in that way. But whether the categories to which they are intended to speak still obtain, or whether there's a difference in categories. Yeah. I think you did it as sort of the first symptoms of a changing structure of feeling. I think very first of the signpost that something was lifted off, that we're not so sure anymore whether we were actually at the end or whether we'd be at the end, right? We were speaking in some... something was off, basically. So, in folk music, which is now... it was very stronger by the beginning of the 2000s, and one of the key things they said was we are reacting to, when Rich, right in a cynical world, what he wants to do is create, well, you know, maybe it's possible, new universes, new communities, we want to be honest and honest again, that is just the first symptom. Now you see the kind of the same sentence, the same sensitivity, all kinds of other phenomenon popping up. They also went to the same sort of notion of things are changing, mind and life are what I'm seeing, something that is hidden around the band that will definitely be a very bad place that we were in, something needs to be done now, we don't know how, something needs to be done. So, I agree, those are very cool examples, the process is sort of archival of the first initial phase of transition. It's a bit hard, I think, especially now that the consequences of environmental ruin are becoming clearer and clearer to us. I mean, you know, we're from Holland, I'm guessing there's one other Dutch person here, I don't know how long, I'm still in the air, I think we're one first to go away, once the sea levels are rising. So, I think, you know, I think it's, especially for me, I can't speak to Rowan in 2008, I think he's really, when the line's hard, right? Because I, and I usually had to hope that the financial crisis would, and I think this, you see in the first article, I had to hope that this would necessitate a restructuring of the financial system. And what happened is that, everything just got worse, right? These lines were deepened. So, you see a lot of responses today on the different sides of the political spectrum, a situation that hasn't changed when I think many of us have the hope that it would change, to some extent. I think, yeah. Jesse. But thanks, that's good. I'm harder than it is because I arrived 10 minutes ago, 15 minutes ago, so at least everybody's hot. Seeing the chart and knowing a little bit about the last call about the consumption of this discussion and specifically to the chart that's on the screen, one thing that really strikes me is that the, in the post-modernism column, there's an ingrained politics to all those categories. And I apologize if I'm repeating anybody's statements from earlier, but in the meta-modernism one, there's an almost hate-political capacity in both of them. They become both ways. Like, to be sincerely, can be sincere in any persuasion of what people think that they think is true. There was an article a few months ago about how the world all that managed something in the 90s now means the complete opposite of what you said. Like, grunge and all that. Now it has turned into all right. And so the work, you know, all cuts both ways now. And so, from what I've gathered a little bit, we don't necessarily have the conceptual framework to make sense of this. I don't like the word that much, because I think in everything in that column there's a meta-aspect to it that kind of means something. But I want to maybe, like, how, like, people of an older generation I think I've heard over and over and over saying, as a critique, like, yeah, but what do you stand for? So you have to listen to it. That's a good question. And so, as if they're like, everything is just an action without a, without, got to make a gesture. So I wonder if maybe those things on the bright these are all aesthetic columns. So there's a politics with quirky films who may look not political. But the politics is, for instance, that they had the trope of Child Night Night 18 in which you sort of create very clean frames in which you sort of criticize all the clutter, chaos, in this order of the world and just focus on the square meter that you can sort of manage and you may be effectively, sincerely, constructively on that square meter. So the politics is very local in that sense, right? That would be a political interpretation of the trope of Child Night Night 18. I'm not saying that it's good or bad. I'm saying that it's good and bad. Everything that you see across films here is hyper-problematic in the light of how it actually needs to be done to convert some kind of catastrophe. These are apolitical warm suggestions. Every aesthetics has its politics. This is the politics of quirky films. Focus on your own square circle. Make sure that the plot work of the world don't come in and try to do as much as you can on that square meter. I would say for instance. I would also think that these are highly political but they're political in two different sense. I think the first category for us would be concerned with the politics of the inside. So what's inside, what's there now? You're taking it apart, you're showing the carcass of a rotting society. And I think the second would be concerned with from scratch with no tools at hand, imagining an alternative. And that's the imagination of an alternative, especially after decades of exhaustion is incredibly political. Even sadly, if terrible people are doing it, it's a very political act. And I think also in terms of not taking a step, we discussed this a bit. I think it's the difficult to bring it back. It's about the difficulty of taking a step because you know that so many points are valuable. So you're not certain where you should take place and what you should leave behind as a result and you're aware of the consequences that you're actually taking. This is my honest answer. It's not a popular answer but it also comes back to your question I think. My honest answer is that these are all bourgeois forms, heightened bourgeois forms. And I think what we see now what we call the hardening is that this is spreading across class lines. So we come from a Marxist tradition so we think class is everything. I think it's fair to say we think class is very distraught across everything. And so I think this is so safe because it's bourgeois. I mean quality TV. Quality TV is literally television's attempt to be not just entertainment but art and in order to do so they use the exact same means that Antonioni does in filmmaking in the 60s and 70s or that photographers do in the 20s or that Flo Baer does when he events the novel. They have the exact same stylistic tropes of democratization creating larger fictional worlds in which not every gun that the Czech Republic has to go off. So these are completely bourgeois urbanized discussions and I think and so there is a soft politics I would say politics almost wishes to hide itself I guess but I would say what we've seen since is when it's delving across class lines and I mean lower although I guess we could say on the top end it's the one percent is also defending itself more rigorously and rigorously. And so since you're mostly looking at art and they're mostly architects what is there I see in the essays kind of productive possibility of actually staying in your square meter or going into that square meter and playing out a possible future or near future and then presenting it to all the other islands around as a kind of as a productive possibility because we all produce and so instead of just finding no ground to kind of stand on a way forward is to actually kind of stay or to look at that square meter as a kind of test and at least put it out there. Yeah like you're feeling your artwork we're talking about just this sorry I'm like you're feeling your artwork if one of the famous models for the cosmologist or guest is mad that covers the territory right so you have this man it covers everything I think if you're feeling out on that square meter you're lifting you're lifting a bit of that map off and maybe it will stay and maybe it will collapse again I think you're feeling which also shows a little else we've got left in a way you're feeling out what happens if and of course you may live something you may create a hole in the ground whilst doing it lifting up some ground so it's this feeling out and I mean I guess many of the problems with this feeling I've you seen the square the film so I recommend it I mean it's hilarious the film is a wonderful thing but also because it's about a square in which people have to care for each other and of course the entire project fails miserably but so it's yeah I would say 300% I was going to say something about the human issue to Jesse's question and your response from this interaction I'm thinking about the aesthetics of this category post-modernism and the modernism category and the correlation that I'm thinking about now is but hard hard aesthetics and mild aesthetics and you know but then you know the harder the mild is dependent on left or right or class lines or so forth rather I think it constructs a very different the people who are very mild versus the people who are very young it goes like this I think stretching of the elastic I'm also thinking about just talking about what kind of architecture the aesthetics of say Leon Leon or you know I'm just thinking about the mild-ish approach where in case you need to be asked I think there's a kind of very nuanced way of approaching architecture from a certain generation that matches your description and the kind of like super hardcore way of looking at life like let's say KM3 for instance which is like a super kind of like iron fist quantitative absolute something to tell you about it which is hard really hard and I feel like that generation led to let's say hyper rationalism with an architecture where a kind of programmatic quantitative shape in the boxes would result in form whereas the generation that I've been describing in which it's a pigeon it's not that it's something else it's mild and people prefer to be mild in these days I mean even the way that people are dressed right now are very mild versus if I would be sitting here in the early 2000s I might expect hot pink or I don't know yeah that's yeah we can talk to the essay about the modernism to do with or probably just remembering that the kind of qualitative to the the quantitative to the qualitative in the notes on the air we may as well it's been a while and I'm trying not to look at that essay again so much it may be right a qualitative transformation a transformation to qualitative from quantitative yeah the long dialectics that's so many things in life no so the tipping point is when it's additional other quantity when you need more to augment then transform also closer way to describe that you see all these little things emerging everywhere and nowhere and then all of a sudden suffering into the thousands it transforms into qualitative transformation in culture and that was the something that's that is just made to sort of end we talk about from a cultural and artistic perspective when you talk about the ship of iron post iron you can have a different perspective that is what people do in the cool it's a super great argument you see that post iron is actually the desire behavior for the cool place right but iron is your defense mechanism in the beautiful office where you can identify the co-workers that you might name paper that's really boring so iron like in the documentary that is against the cruel world right but if you're going to be an ironing master in the Google Blacks or in the contemporary project team where you have to come out to something creative people come and puke aren't human nothing productive will come on it right so it also has to be sort of post ironing in that particular project team in which you have three months to buy a cage for something right so this is weird but it's one thing it's not the right it's really post-autonomic mode that becomes highly productive for today's project team so again to argue that you see this shit ironing post ironing in a lot of different contexts in all these different contexts there are frozen cons but I think ultimately there are also still very problematic or at least why are we not super engaged for instance because I've had a question these times so sorry I think we're just okay just because of because of my current knowledge of your apparent hatred of the Tony Blair and I'm just kind of also trying to complete this line Tony Blair represents the end of the spectrum that that you must resist there's a kind of somewhere in the middle which is mildish I guess once you get to Tony Blair is so mild that it's land but once again Tony Brexens for a certain type of politics that is typical for the cosmopolitan economy centuries liberal, liberal and multicultural consensus where I'm sort of the left and the right shaking hands and it could be because because he was booming why would you want to be left that's a third-party player of Paul Cowell Brown etc. and that stands for a particular history moment what we had in the C.A. and I already wrote that directly up to the Christ we knew before occupied the is that the center cannot hold you see complete polarization and fragmentation which only have very small majorities or very large minorities that cover all of a sudden all across Europe the C.A. had the coalition governments in countries where you used to have just one party ruling for instance right you also see all kinds of small all of a sudden getting a lot of votes so it's not so much that I hate when you blare it's that I hate sort of the kind of politics that stands for but when I'm not personal at all it's just simply the politics that he finds in those many years in hindsight and now there's a completely other form of politics which is the politics of fringe parties or unstable governments or radically volatile situations who get Trump Obama and how a lot of people have it very good voters who's the number two Holland but also Corbyn and his old school socialism young people all of a sudden hey first social democracy never heard of it sounds great so all of a sudden this guy who's saying the same thing since the the 70s become super popular as we were just made for Sanders right so yeah I obviously have a trigger for you the name Tony Blair because yeah it is so typical it's the reflection of this central badness and this this notion of oscillation that's being translated into the political arena yeah the end of the alternative Tina with that third wave for Blair it's the same thing Clinton here and Cork Schroeder and now I mean the politics of compromise versus the politics of exchange you throw shit at each other from your own trench and then together that makes it really unstable uneven well it seems like we've been trapped forever everyone's sleeping that is thanks for the interview thank you so much