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Overview
This book uses affective critical regionality to enable a re-valuing of the local as a powerful means to appreciate the everyday and the over-looked as vital elements within a more inclusive understanding of how we live. Exploring a variety of cultural materials including fiction, memoir, theory, poetry and film it demonstrates how this approach can deepen our understanding of, and simultaneously provoke new relations with, place. Moving beyond the US context through its use of international theoretical voices and texts, it will show how the concept is applicable to other cultural spheres.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783480845 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 08/17/2016 |
| Series: | Place, Memory, Affect |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 610 KB |
About the Author
His major research project is an interdisciplinary trilogy of books on the contemporary American West. The first two are The Cultures of the American New West (Edinburgh/Columbia UP, 2000) and The Rhizomatic West (Nebraska, 2008) and he has just completed the final part, Post-Westerns, on cinematic representation of the New West. He is, with Christine Berberich & Robert Hudson, co-editor of Land & Identity: Theory, Memory, and Practice (Rodopi, 2012) and with Alfredo Cramerotti co-editor of Photocinema (Intellect, 2013). Affective Landscapes also edited with Christine Berberich & Robert Hudson is forthcoming with Ashgate in 2014 as is the special section on ‘affective landscapes’ in the Journal Cultural Politics.
Read an Excerpt
Affective Critical Regionality
By Neil Campbell
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd
Copyright © 2016 Neil CampbellAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-084-5
CHAPTER 1
From Regionalism to Regionality
The introduction started to explain the move towards regionality as an active, agitating presence, a becoming that deviates from the standard model of regionalism and is, therefore, not an 'order-word' as defined by Deleuze and Guattari that 'marks stoppages or organized, stratified compositions' but rather a 'pass-word' 'to transform the compositions of order into the components of passage' (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 110). Passwords get us into places and through barriers, they open up unsuspected worlds to our attention and to wider relations, and this is how I would like regionality to function in this book as a whole, acting as a word of passage, a bridge to different ways of being, seeing, and becoming in our relations to the world. Chapter 1 will, however, deliberately go back further in an effort to understand in more detail the lines of my own thought away from regionalism towards critical regionalism and from there onward to the themes that interest me in this book.
1: ON CRITICAL REGIONALISM
Lawrence W. Speck wrote in 1987 that regionalism 'mines everyday life and perception for messages about a truly progressive future' through its attention to 'the particulars of place and culture ... from experience. It tinkers, crafts, accepts, rejects, adjusts, and reacts' (in Canizaro 2007: 71). Through this he compares regionalism to jazz: being of a place, New Orleans, and yet borrowing from other traditions, nations, expressions and continuing to influence and inflect other new forms and styles beyond its regional roots. As Eleftherios Pavlides has put it, in a progressive view of regionalism 'the past informs the future' (ibid.: 166) through 'a modern phenomenon that criticized modernity by asserting difference ... and proposing alternatives that reversed modern contempt for the old, the marginal, and subcultures associated with politically subordinated communities' (Fox in Canizaro 2007: 212). Thus, in architecture these more progressive and theoretical concepts became associated with critical regionalism, which Stephen Fox argues was, among other things, a 'negotiation' between styles and traditions rather than a direct absorption into approved metropolitan forms, which meant that regionalism became an 'uncovering and recovering of otherness as a critical practice' (ibid.). But as Fox's point about the 'old, the marginal, and subcultures associated with politically subordinated communities' suggests, these ideas were never simply contained by architectural theory or practice but always had strong alliances to wider political purposes. It is an early example of what, following the use of the term 'minor' by Deleuze and Guattari (as in the introduction) and developed by Jill Stoner, we might begin to think of as 'minor architecture' (see Stoner 2012) precisely because it remembers the old, the marginal, subcultural, and the local and draws dynamically on these perspectives to challenge 'majoritarian', universalist positions.
Anthony Alofsin, writing as early as 1980, may have been one of the first architectural critics to move towards an actual definition of critical regionalism when he wrote of 'Constructive Regionalism' as 'an architecture that both follows local traditions and transforms them' (in Canizaro 2007: 370). Alofsin helped explain Lewis Mumford's support for Bay Region Architecture, which, according to Mumford, 'both belongs to the region and transcends the region' (ibid.: 372) and, argues Alofsin, provided 'criteria for criticism' in relation to the principles of regionalism it embodied rather than a slavish following: 'it would embrace traditions and transform tradition; it would be wed to its setting ... it would foster craft and push the limits of technology; it would speak to the individual search for the universal' (ibid.). Alofsin began to formulate an architecture of 'paradox' and of 'contradictions' which would 'embrace native detail and color and at the same time discourage cultural hedonism' (ibid.). Wrestling with its paradoxes, Alofsin saw 'human use', 'local life', and the 'bonding of people' as intrinsic to this constructive but critical regionalism, while refuting the 'imposition of style or visual hegemony' and 'cultural hedonism' (ibid.: 373, 372).
Alofsin formed these ideas while working alongside Lianne Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis in the early 1980s, finding a focus in the specific idea of critical regionalism, which was given a name by the latter's 1981 Greek-English essay 'The Grid and the Pathway'. For them, regionalism 'bears the mark of ambiguity', a kind of doublenesss, because it has been used both to 'foster a new sense of identity' and also 'proved a powerful tool of repression and chauvinism' by enclosing and restricting styles or 'abstract universal forms' 'based on the book rather than experience' (Lefaivre and Tzonis 1981: 64, 74). The tendency to hark back through earlier regionalist architectural design to 'a sentimental utopianism' is broken in their analysis through alternative forms of 'critical regionalism' protesting 'against the destruction of community, the splitting of human associations, the dissolution of human contact' so often epitomized by international modernist forms with their 'custodial effects' (ibid.: 76, 72). Thus, in their essay the 'pathway' moves, connects, and humanizes spatial practices to form 'an architecture that grows out of movement and meeting', imitating the local, popular architecture of lived experience with intense 'human associations', such as 'doorsteps, passages, courts', with 'a history ... and a social life' rather than established and 'highly normative architecture' (ibid.: 76, 78, 74). For them, critical regionalism interrupts the 'monumentality recalling another distant and forlorn elite' through 'an investigation of the local', weaving a 'braid of niches' into an intimate 'bridge over which any humanistic architecture of the future must pass' (ibid.: 74, 76, 78). Embedded in their language are the earliest ruminations on critical regionalism as bound up with affective relations with place and space: 'movement and meeting', 'experience', 'lived-in spaces', and through their example of Dimitris Pikionis, a belief in the 'rehumanisation of architecture' to create 'a place made for an occasion' rather than just 'abstract space' (ibid.: 76). These traces of affect will be central to the development of critical regionalism as an architectural approach and ultimately as a developing theory or 'critical framework' (ibid.: 78) interested in rethinking regionalism in its relation to the world.
It was this work that provoked Kenneth Frampton to write two essays published in 1983 which both extended and developed their ideas in a more systematic and theorized manner: 'Prospects for a Critical Regionalism' and 'Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance'. Both took up the challenge of critiquing the overly abstract, universal form and its consequent dissolution of human contact. However, Kevin Lynch, writing in Managing the Sense of Region (1976), had argued for the 'sensory quality of regions', which he believed had been largely 'overlooked or denied' in favour of 'imposing a monumental form on a multitude of unwilling users' (Lynch 1976: 4–5). In the broadest sense, Lynch recognized how 'the sense of region affects the lives of people' and wanted to rethink region through 'patterns of ... sensations [that] make up the quality of places' (ibid.: 6, 8). For Lynch, an appreciation of the sensory meant 'local attachment', 'liveliness', a belonging to a 'web of living things' (ibid.: 25, 35, 34) managed practically through 'regional agency'. He pre-empted Frampton's work, recognizing that '[n]o place remained unchanged' and that 'from small actions, set in local circumstances, one gathers the backing to move to wider action' (ibid.: 72, 71).
Thus, in Frampton's 'Prospects for a Critical Regionalism' critical regionalism is defined as 'a dialectical expression ... [which] self-consciously seeks to deconstruct universal modernism in terms of values and images which are locally cultivated, while at the same time adulterating these autochthonous elements with paradigms drawn from alien sources' (Frampton 1983: 149). It is a doubly disruptive force, drawing on both the local and 'alien sources' to disrupt the homogenous space of the universal. He is interested in 'cultural fissures' and 'borderline manifestations' as a means to challenge and question the largely unquestioned 'hegemonic center' (ibid.). Critical regionalism is, therefore, an expression of 'anti-centrism' explored through 'sensual and earthbound' architecture (ibid.: 149, 153), of, for example, Mexican Luis Barragan, and, according to Frampton, expressed most powerfully by Californian Hamilton Harwell Harris in his address 'Regionalism and Nationalism' (1954):
Opposed to the Regionalism of Restriction is another type of regionalism; the Regionalism of Liberation. This is the manifestation of a region that is especially in tune with the emerging thought of the time. We call such a manifestation 'regional' only because it has not yet emerged elsewhere. ... Its virtue is that its manifestation has significance for the world outside itself. ... A region may develop ideas. A region may accept ideas. Imaginations and intelligence are necessary for both. (Frampton 1983: 153 — italics in the original)
The distinctions here are significant and mirror those discussed in the introduction, for they emphasize the restrictive associations of regionalism as a kind of philosophical enclave protective of its styles and values in opposition to the world outside. However, Harwell Harris imagines a liberative form, emphasising the 'critical' in critical regionalism stemming precisely from its dialogical engagement with the outside and which, in turn, has 'significance for the world outside itself' because 'a region may develop ideas' as well as 'accept' them within this process. Thus, the 'universalist' hegemonic centre is put under pressure by the presence of the detailed local, by site tactility, and by the fissures and borderlines that such attentiveness produces. Frampton's admiration for the Japanese architect Tadao Ando is based on his 'trans-optical architecture', which moves beyond sight to appreciate 'tactile value' and sensual, affective relations to space:
Light changes expressions with time. I believe that the architectural materials do not end with wood and concrete that have tangible forms but go beyond to include light and wind which appeal to our senses ... the detail is an element which achieves the physical composition of architecture, but at the same time, it is a generator of an image of architecture. (Ando quoted in ibid.: 159)
At this point, Frampton uses the strange but provocative phrase discussed in the introduction, 'the bounded fragment', to suggest how these local, tactile, fissured details, create critical regionalism as a dynamic space that is fragmentary, recombinant, and capable of generativity while also being linked or 'bounded' to the specific and grounded.
Frampton's better known essay 'Towards a Critical Regionalism' (in Foster 1990) focuses upon the tension between 'universalization' (closely allied to what we might now term 'globalization') and the 'local/regional', beginning his essay with a long quotation from Paul Ricoeur's essay 'Universal Civilization and National Cultures' (1965), which explains how an increasingly standardized world of integration, convergence, and consumption creates 'universalization', with its many advantages for economic improvement, closer national links, and interdependence. However, as Ricoeur points out, it also marks a 'subtle destruction' of traditional cultures and the reign of the 'mediocre': 'the same bad movie, the same slot machines, the same plastic or aluminium atrocities, the same twisting of language by propaganda' (Ricoeur 1965: 276). Ricoeur unravels a 'paradox' by which nations want to 'root' themselves in 'the soil of its past' against colonialist influence, and simultaneously embrace a 'scientific, technical, and political rationality' which seems to require the abandonment of 'a whole cultural past' (ibid.: 277). This paradox is summed up by the dilemma of 'how to become modern and to return to sources; how to revive an old, dormant civilization and take part in universal civilization' (ibid.). For Frampton, this is the situation of regional architecture, too, torn between the 'universalised' rational, international styles of modernism and its interest in the local, rooted, and traditional. Frampton, following Ricoeur, asserts architecture 'has to remove itself from both the optimisation of advanced technology and the ever-present tendency to regress into nostalgic historicism or the glibly decorative' and in this way forge 'a resistant, identity-giving culture while at the same time having discreet recourse to universal technique' (Frampton in Foster 1990: 20).
His project for critical regionalism rejects sentimental, nostalgic versions of regionalism and any revival of 'a lost vernacular' and emphasizes instead, quoting Lefaivre and Tzonis at length, 'the hallmark of ambiguity' as a means of mediating the impact of 'universal civilization with elements derived indirectly from the peculiarities of a particular place' (ibid.: 21). Thus, critical regionalism is marked by 'critical self-consciousness' functioning through what Frampton calls 'double mediation'; 'to "deconstruct" the overall spectrum of world culture which it inevitably inherits' and 'to achieve through synthetic contradiction, a manifest critique of universal civilization' (ibid.). The architectural example of Jorn Utzon's Bagsvaerd Church, near Copenhagen, built in 1976, negotiates or 'mediates' between styles, forming 'a revealed conjunction between ... rationality of normative technique, and ... arationality of idiosyncratic form', between the 'regular grid', standardized concrete and extravagant 'patent glazing', and most clearly between the inside and the outside (ibid.: 22). The architecture conveys 'multiple cross-cultural references' drawn from the 'alien sources' discussed above, constituting, Frampton argues, a new form of regionalism that functions with what he terms 'an expressive density and resonance, as if to suggest its complex layering of materials as well as time, memory, influence, and worldly allusions reflecting the 'in-laying' of the actual building into the contours of the site itself (ibid.: 25). From this expressive density and resonance, as Harwell Harris had claimed, emerges something 'potentially liberative ... since it opens the user to manifold experiences' (ibid.).
It is in the final section of Frampton's essay 'The Visual Versus the Tactile' that he turns to affect, following the lead of Tzonis and Lefaivre in 'The Grid and the Pathway', expressing the importance of the 'tactile resilience ... of place-form' and the vital 'capacity of the body to read the environment' in ways not simply determined by sight, as a strategy to resist 'the domination of universal technology' (ibid.: 28). His assertion of tactility, following on from the 'trans-optical' he admired in Ando, and his belief in sense-more-than-sight that echoes Lynch's work on sensory regions demonstrates a different affective perception and relation to architectural form, and more broadly, in his wider argument, to region. Thus, through the 'labile body', one senses 'the intensity of light, darkness, heat and cold; the feeling of humidity; the aroma of material; the almost palpable presence of masonry as the body senses its own confinement' (ibid.). For Frampton, such tactility is 'liberative' and resistant because 'it can only be decoded in terms of experience itself and does not, therefore, become 'reduced to mere information, to representation or to the simple evocation of a simulacrum substituting for absent presences' (ibid.). Here he shifts towards the recognition of an affective critical regionalism that is 'more-than-representation', as examined earlier, because it is embodied, experienced, felt through multiple attunements to the energies of place and space rather than a limited, 'reduced', substituted apprehension through sight or simulations. This 'Western tendency to interpret the environment in exclusively perspectival terms' (ibid.: 29) removes us and distances us and, therefore, distorts our relations to place, region, and to the world. The etymology of the word 'perspective' reveals its definition as 'rationalized sight or clear seeing', and therefore, Frampton argues, 'it presupposes a conscious suppression of the senses ... and a consequent distancing from a more direct experience of the environment' (ibid.). This signals a move away from representing place as something already there, like a static, bounded, and reductionist text, and towards experiencing its variability and uncertainty as something in process and, therefore, fully dynamic and alive. Such distancing Frampton equates to Heidegger's concern for the 'loss of nearness' (ibid.), which can be countered by renewed tactility and its 'capacity to arouse the impulse to touch' placed alongside, and working with, the 'tectonic', or that which 'raises this construction to an art form' and gives the functional form 'expression', 'a structural poetic', its 'revealed ligaments' (ibid.: 30, 29). Elsewhere Frampton states his intention to 'stress the nearness of tactility as distinct from the distance of sight', citing Lissitzky, who wrote of being 'beyond the constraints of perspective and the pathos of a false vernacular: "We reject space as a painted coffin for our living bodies"' (Frampton 2007a).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Affective Critical Regionality by Neil Campbell. Copyright © 2016 Neil Campbell. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
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