Submission Guidelines
Log accepts unsolicited submissions of previously unpublished work,
including, but not limited to, writings, drawings, and photos. Hard
copies should be sent to:
41 West 25th Street
11th floor
New York, NY 10010
We cannot return any unsolicited materials.
Manuscripts may be submitted electronically to Log@xxxxxxxxxxxx Be sure
to announce your submission in the subject line. We will not open
unidentified e-mails.
Submission Deadlines
All submissions must include a bio of no more than 50 words.
Log 9 deadline is October 1, 2006
Log 10 deadline is December 1, 2006
Log 11 deadline is February 1, 2007
Log 11: A New Metacritique for Architecture
The tradition of the metacritique is one that invokes a rigorous assault
on pervasive, instrumentalized, and, more often than not, spectral
ideological systems -- that is, cultural systems. As these systems
perpetuate themselves through a series of representations, or “spectral
doublings,” a metacritique responds with a catastrophic, and perhaps
unsustainable, demolition of those shadowy justifications obscuring
cultural hegemonies. While the tradition of metacritique has its origins
in the 18th-century German philosophical challenge to transcendental
idealism—where the “meta” came out of the questioning of the very
methods and possibilities of critique itself—the later, and more
familiar iterations of metacritique included the work of Hegel, Adorno,
Benjamin, Gramsci, and Tafuri.
Recently, there have been signs of the emergence of a new metacritique,
with a decidedly different set of strategies and influences. Today, with
technology advancing rapidly and rapaciously on the last frontier of
subjectivity itself, resistance may require proposing a positive
critique. The antidote to rote determinism may be the Nietzschean double
affirmation of creative jouissance—“Yes, Yes‚” as opposed to the “No,
No‚” of negative dialectics. This is the passage through nihilism
prophesized by Nietzsche and problematized by Tafuri and Cacciari—a
passage that is as yet unresolved.
In disciplines that initially appear unrelated to architecture, there
are signs that abstract and robust thought has returned to battle the
persistent and tragic vestiges of a nihilist postmodernism. Within
architecture, such a critique would imply a reworking of the very issues
central to modernity’s quest for authenticity, transparency, and
objectivity. The task of a new metacritique may include reinvigorating
nascent forms of heresy and insurrection, whether past or present, and
undertaking positive queries of the architectural imaginary. It requires
proposing a radical re-alignment of architecture’s formal and aesthetic
axis with purely abstract, if not utopian, aspects of practice. While
revisiting the architectural imaginary may resurrect the idea of
autonomy, it does so in order to restore the primary coordinates of
architecture as an edifying, intellectual discipline before production.
As a variant of critical theory, or a contemporary version of the
age-old Platonic-Socratic dialogue, the very notion of metacritique
contains an implicit moral imperative. It has resurfaced as a means of
tackling corrupted structural and post-structural games in current
architectures that appear to have all but capitulated to late
capitalism. Such a critique today necessarily includes assaults on
gorgeous but empty-headed celebrity architectures designed for the new
global elite, and plugged straight into the dark heart of the
contemporary city.
Log 11 will tackle these issues through highly-discursive acts of
critical interrogation, investigating parallel forms of thought and
praxis‚ pursuing project-based heresies and insurrections, and
sustaining an assault on the fashionable, but mostly questionable,
discourses and projects that currently masquerade as the new
architectural avant-garde.
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http://www.anycorp.com/log/contribute.php