Learning From Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form

Learning From Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (1977 [1972])
By Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour

Synopsis: This book is about the symbolism of architectural form (rather than about Las Vegas, per se), and examines the architecture of the strip in order to counter Modernist design and to celebrate an architecture of movement. The authors analyze the layout, structure, and design of the strip, its buildings, and the significance of its architecture as symbols and signs, and as creating a zone of pleasure. The authors prefer the postmodern playful use of symbols and signs to the austere Modernist style which rejects symbol and decoration in favor of becoming the decoration itself. The megastructures of Modernism are all about imposed unity, whereas "urban sprawl" is more about variety and pluralism. While Modern architecture claims to have rejected symbolism, the modern buildings have just become symbols themselves. The authors castigate modern architecture for dismissing contemporary vernacular architecture and for dismissing the tastes of "the people" in favor of some kind of elitist "heroic" architecture. Basically, the authors reject the idea that sprawl and the strip is "visual pollution," and question its necessarily link to ecological pollution. They instead want us to see this style as just a new type of order and symbol system, an order imposed by speed, movement, and the car.

Interacts With:

Variations on a Theme Park, Jane Jacobs, City of Quartz, Baudrillard, Country of Exiles, J. B. Jackson (in his celebration of everything and of the "common" landscape), Neon Metropolis
Which book talked about the "age of hieroglyphics" (symbols)? This would definitely connect with anything that focuses on semiotics and symbols - even those books on 19th cent urban culture.
This actually has echoes of Janet's list in its desire to "take back" the architecture "of the people" and rescue it from elitist criticism.
This book supposedly launched the postmodern movement (according to Jeff's Design in the U.S.A. book)

Subculture: The Meaning of Style

Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979)
By Dick Hebdige

Synopsis: This book investigates the styles of subculture and the processes through which mundane objects take on symbolic dimensions. In doing so, Hebdige seeks to "recreate the dialectic between action and reaction which renders the objects meaningful" (2). Basically, this is a study of the meaning of style. Grounded in a cultural studies/semiotics perspective, Hebdige looks at case studies (Rastafarianism, hipters, teddy boys, punks, glam rockers) and performs "readings" on them, focusing on the functions of subculture, the use of styles, style as a type of communication, and style as embedded in subcultural meaning. Argues that tensions between dominant and subordinate groups are found in the surfaces of subcultures and their styles. "The meaning of subculture is, then, always in dispute, and style is the arena in which the opposing definitions clash with the most dramatic force" (3). Argues that the use of "common sense" is a way to bury ideology, i.e. of "naturalizing" it. Subcultures, he argues, represent noise and interference, as well as "symbolic challenges to a symbolic order" (page?). "Others" can either be dealt with via trivialization/domestication or turned into meaningless exotica. Bottom line: Subcultural style is intentional communication which means to be read (unlike "normal" style which attempts to be "natural" or "invisible"). Subcultural style all about collage and re-organization and mutations, rather than "pure" expressions.

Interesting Specifics:

Sometimes objects/styles become "a form of stigmata, tokens of a self-imposed exile" (2).

"...ideology saturates everyday discourse in the form of common sense" (12).

"Hegemony can only be maintained so long as the dominant classes 'succeed in framing all competing definitions within their range' [Hall, 1977]" (16).

"The succession of white subcultural forms can be read as a series of deep structural adaptations which symbolically accommodate or expunge the black presence from the host community...We can watch, played out on the loaded system of British working-class youth cultures, a phantom history of race relations since the war" (45).

"...the punk aesthetic can be read in part as a white 'translation' of black 'ethnicity'" (64).

"Reggae and punk were audibly opposed" (68).

"The twin concepts of conjuncture and specificity, (each subculture representing a distinctive 'moment' - a particular response to a particular set of circumstances) are therefore indispensable to a study of subcultural style" (84).

By subverting "conventional uses and inventing new ones, the subcultural stylist gives the lie to what Althusser has called the 'false obviousness of everyday practice'...and opens up the world of objects to new and covertly oppositional readings. The communication of a significant difference then...is the point" (102).

Subcultures can be conservative or progressive - "integrated into the community, continuous with the values of that community, or extrapolated from it, defining themselves against the parent culture" (127).

"...no amount of stylistic incantation can alter the oppressive mode in which the commodities used in subculture have been produced" (130).

Interacts With:

Many books on Janet's list, especially Stuart Hall and anything that deals with the flexibility of popular culture and the subversive potential embedded in it.
Barthes (through focus on semiotics).
Foucault ("naturalizing" of ideology by dominant class)
Gramsci (hegemony)
This is a key cultural studies book as it focuses on the totality of society, and not just on the "high" culture elements

The Mezzanine

The Mezzanine (1986)
by Nicholson Baker

Synopsis: This is the only novel on my list! It's about the superficial and symbol-laden materiality of modern life. The story follows a man as he journeys on the escalator up to his office on the mezzanine. It's composed entirely of his random and in-depth observations of the most minute details of everyday social rituals and material culture, and is punctuated by footnotes which elaborately expand on i.e. the mechanics and materials of drinking straws. Book often links material details to nostalgic memories and childhood; adulthood, nostalgia, and memory are recurrent themes. The book is obsessed with materiality - with the texture, look, and feel of things, especially paper vs. plastic, and various containers of all sorts. The most microscopic details are discussed and pondered upon in depth, giving a portrait of the "weightlessness" of modern culture and the way we've been forced to sublimate all sense of purpose and meaning onto the ridiculous aesthetic and material conditions that intrude on us in every moment. His descriptions are detailed and witty and sometimes hilarious, and although its style is more "postmodern," it's really about the banality of modernity, as machines and technology and artificiality figure prominently.

Interesting Specifics:

Good example of the narcissism of small details; collection of "microhistories."

"Why do these images have to age before we can be fond of them?" (78). This is a common theme - the importance of distance and nostalgia in producing a sense of fondness or importance.

Concerned with microscopic instances of the "renewal of newness" - like the appearance of another plastic cup when you pull one from the dispenser.

Paper is the nostalgic favorite over plastic.

Interacts With:

Material culture books, Meaning of Things,
No Place of Grace (as connected to the antimodern quest for personal fulfillment, and the banality of an existence focused on minutiae).
de Certeau (focus on the minute details of everyday life)
Monochrome Memories
Flight Maps, American Plastic (idea that plastic represents the fake)

The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art

The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (1988)
By James Clifford

Synopsis: This book examines the "postcolonial crisis of ethnographic authority" - that is, "who has the authority to speak for a group's identity or authenticity?" (8). It does this by tracing the development of anthropology, and says that West can no longer consider itself to the the sole authority on 'other' cultures. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is the argument that there is tension between the humanizing aspect of anthropology which seems to render things understandable (the render the strange ordinary), and the surrealist aspect which seeks to render the ordinary strange. The surrealist does this by picking up on fragments and random oddness. Clifford himself is more in favor of the surrealist approach, and writes that "A 'culture' is, concretely, an open-ended, creative dialogue of subcultures, of insiders and outsiders, of diverse factions" (46). In this way, an ethnography of polyvocality should be employed. Some anthropology tries to "collect" culture, corner it, and categorize it, and label the non-Western as primitive artifacts always on the verge of disappearing.


Interesting Specifics:

Participant observation began around the 1940s.

"Ethnography is an explicit from of cultural critique sharing radical perspectives with dada and surrealism" (12).

"The West can no longer present itself as the unique purveyor of anthropological knowledge about others" (22).

"A 'culture' is, concretely, an open-ended, creative dialogue of subcultures, of insiders and outsiders, of diverse factions" (46).

Clifford equates surrealism with ethnography because surrealism's aesthetic "values fragments, curious collections, unexpected juxtapositions - that works to provoke the manifestation of extraordinary realities drawn from the domains of the erotic, the exotic, and the unconscious" (118). Seeks to provoke the unexpected (145). Culture now is all fragments and irony, and culture now as an object to be collected (120).

But, this ethnographic surrealism is different from ethnographic humanism which seeks to render culture and things comprehensible. [In this way, the two approaches can be seen as postmodernist vs. modernist].

Interacts With:
Seems to take a positive postmodern approach, without really explicitly talking about postmodernism. In this way, can be seen to interact with:
Jameson (pomo negative), Koolhaas (pomo positive), Venturi and Brown (pomo positive), Baudriliard (pomo negative, bordering on pomo neutral)

The Condition of Postmodernity

The Condition of Postmodernity
By David Harvey (1990)

Synopsis: Asks: What is postmodernism, and are we indeed living in a postmodern age? His overall argument is that postmodernism builds on ideas of modernism (in its reaction to change, chaos, ephemerality, and time-space compression), but whereas modernism was all about the grand overarching plan that would make everything better, postmodernism represents the death of the grand narrative. Postmodernism instead embraces chaos and fragmentation and collage (and embraces the signifier rather than the signified), and was aided by the disembodied nature of capitalism itself. Though he celebrates the multiplicity of postmodernism, Harvey is afraid it may cause each specific group to remain in their own little ghettos, and a focus on surface and difference might lead to larger political inertia or disengagement from bigger picture (117-118). The late 1960s brought on a crisis of overaccumulation, as capitalism is a fetishizer and creator of new needs and wants.

Interesting Specifics:

Says postmodernism arose between 1968-72 as a result of the anti-modern movement of the 1960s (38).
1914 marks the rise of Fordism and ushering in of new way of life obsessed with mass production and functionalism.
Jefferson's homesteading project helped spatially set-up Enlightenment ideal in a utopian way (255-57).
Talks about the rise of image consultants as a fairly postmodern phenomenon (288).
Time-space compression (beginning around 1910 he says) is central to both modernism and postmodernism.