Pyramid pow-wow

[imomus]

Last night's gala event for the Great Pyramid -- a huge "loft dying" necropolis planned for the lush countryside near Dessau -- was pretty interesting. The film presentations and talks actually made me think the pyramid (which could, if it's a success, become the world's largest building, housing the mortal remains of up to five million people) would be a good place for me to be buried, when my time comes.



Ever since I first heard of this pyramid project, I've had my doubts about whether it could possibly be true. Would the world's biggest pyramid -- and possibly its biggest human structure -- rise in the German countryside? Would you really be able to rent a necro-unit in it for all eternity for a total payment of €1000? Was Rem Koolhaas really selecting the architects who'd build the visitor centre around the structure? Were my favourite Japanese architects, Atelier Bow Wow, one of the four contending teams, and was I really going to sing my song "What Will Death Be Like?" at the ceremony which presented their plans?



My doubts were based on the fact that the people surrounding the project are a highly playful group of conceptual jokers, neo-visionaries, intellectual provocateurs and ironic pranksters with ties to REDESIGNDEUTSCHLAND. Basically, writer Ingo Niermann (who writes "popliteratur" in collaboration with Christian Kracht) founded this satirical design thinktank with Rafael Horzon with the idea of thinking about Germany (and the world) in a kind of "Year Zero" way, inspired by the visionary systematizing of the French Revolution, the Bauhaus with its Modernist existenzminimum, even North Korea. Basically, visionary systematic thinking has been taboo in postwar Germany because of the reductive essentialising which links everything of this kind to Nazi dystopias.



And yet Germany is now at the heart of a Europe which needs radical imaginative visions. Basically, connecting everything of this sort to Hitler is a kind of Godwin's Law of the mind, a sort of lazy reflexive caution which would end every speculative conversation and prevent anything interesting ever happening again (Hitler's final revenge: 1000 years of boredom and timidity?) To break out of this postwar paralysis, Ingo Niermann wrote a book called "Umbauland" (Reconstruction Land, Suhrkamp) which laid out ten provocative visions for Germany. He said Germany should have its own nuclear bomb. He advocated (as REDESIGNDEUTSCHLAND also do) the radical simplification of the grammar of the German language (REDEDEUTSCH) so that it can spread easily through the world and stop the totalitarian dominance of English (because, let's face it, we Anglos are the closest thing to totalitarians today). He also welcomes German population decline on energy-saving grounds. And now, as a member of the Friends of the Pyramid, he's advocating another radical vision -- a redesign of the way we deal with death.

Rem Koolhaas really was there last night, attracted by his admiration of Niermann's book. Koolhaas likes bold ideas about the future. His presentation at the HAU1 theatre guided us through conceptual presentations for the pyramid visitor centre by Atelier Bow-Wow (Tokyo), Nikolaus Hirsch, Markus Miessen & Wolfgang Lorch (Frankfurt / M & London), MADA s.p.a.m. (Shanghai & Los Angeles), and Ai Weiwei / FAKE Design (Beijing). Or, as Koolhaas (taller in real life than you'd imagine, and wearing a tough guy leather coat) put it, poetry, pragmatism, mysticism and communism.



The images on this page are all from Atelier Bow Wow's presentation, themed around the natural forms of leaves and tree branches. At the end of the session Koolhaas announced -- slightly disappointingly -- that the jury (which included Miuccia Prada) had decided to use ideas from all four practices. They were all "the winner", or would be if and when the project (which he said might be real or might be ironic provocation -- "delirious Germany", if you like) was green-lighted. The other presentations -- by structural engineers, marketing people, the head of the Bauhaus -- made it clear that the scheme could be a commercial reality, and that it's gone far enough for local residents to have mounted a protest group, seen holding up banners saying "We don't want 5 million dead in our back yard!"

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At the end of it all I sang my song What Will Death Be Like?, not so much a manifesto about a future we all face as a statement about the unspeakability of death. But if we can't say what death might be like, at least we can say where we might spend it. And picture people coming to visit us there, milling around a soothing visitor centre based on the shapes of leaves.

Comments

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

We have a de facto universal language for the world and thats a fantastic thing for world relations.

It's weird. This is a rather cosmopolitan journal in its way. Most LiveJournals I know of are.

Now, Momus often sounds a lot like a staunch cultural conservative, freshly risen out of the sea of the romantic movement and casting apprehensive glances at the rapid change he cannot entirely accept. But I always think that's doing him injustice: He's not an avid enemy of cultural evolution as much as a political aesthete looking after the little guy, the poor guy and the different guy. He loves variety; he's like one of those unsung 19th Century protest philosophers.

And while he's eminently willing to toss around airy words like "totalitarianism" -- and he's an artist, so I suppose we can allow that -- he's not a reactionary. Maybe it's because of of a "do what I tell you to do, not what I do" attitude, or perhaps it's intentional and he considers himself an outside observer.

(He's never expressed any particular regret for, say, me writing here in English instead of my native non-Indo-European gibberish, or Germans in German, and the Japanese in Japanese. I think the reasons are obvious, monoculture or no monoculture. And we're all winners.)

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

To sum up Momus' view of the world: "Power to the underdog", which is just the flip-side of the conservative reactionary viewpoint -- Both as potentially detrimental and lacking in sense as the other, in my humble opinion.

I generally believe it should be "Whatever is best for the most".

In regards to art, I completely support anyone who wants to encourage otherness -- it enriches our culture.

In regards to Politics, I can't just frivolously support whatever happens to be the subsidiary culture -- peoples lives are at stake.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

I'd roughly agree with that.

Insofar as you are right, it may be we won't have much to actually fear from a "Momus" aesthetic in the political sense. The protest philosophers who I mentioned failed to prevent people from building factories, travelling to America, adopting fancy new words, and playing immoral music from distant lands.

Partly it was because they were too nice and humanistic to actually go out and stop them. Partly it was because, at the end of the day, they'd wear factory-cotton too, sort of like Momus hosts this neat cosmopolitan English-language blog, and flits across countries spreading the syncretistic and open-minded Abstract Anglo Man's hold on the innocent tastes of foreign music-lovers. In many ways, if there's an element of romantic conservatism at all there, it's one eating its own tail.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

So what you're basically saying is that Momus supports communism but he's constantly struggling with the fact that on an everyday level he rather likes what capitalism has given him in terms of a lifestyle.

And he says he wants otherness of politics and culture but ultimately, all he's ever done is jump back and forth between rich, first world capitals.

And he says he's against the domination of the English language, but his blog entries are almost always in English because he knows it has the widest audience and in that sense it's the most practical.

Pretty much what I've always said... but you have to love him for that in a way; it's not malicious at all and I'm sure it all comes from the right place for the right reasons.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

Something to that tune, yes. With the caveat that I'm not entirely sure how much Momus's philosophy -- specifically cultural community as a bulwark against everything new and foreign and popular and succesful -- was ever designed to apply to his own behaviour. After all, since in some ways he represents the Anglo-Saxon Hegemony (or whatever buzzword we want to apply here), he can entitle himself to sampling what the world and even its market has to offer rather freely.

He's already described himself a creature of the victorious culture, so clearly him going into cosmopolitan Fashion Muslim territory etc. simply gnaws at the perceived uniformity of the western status quo. He's fighting the power, as it were. The non-English speakers, within or without the western cultural sphere, are the ones actually saddled with the task of assuaging the west's liberal white guilt, curling up like Museum Fremen in our quaint domestic huts while the rest of the world surfs the 'net, drinks imported wine, and enjoys No Country For Old Men.

Alright, perhaps that's exaggerated, but that's nonetheless the implication that I often caution against in these comments -- the idea that them thar primitives are overwhelmingly Noble Savages, content to live in tradition and isolation and saddled with English only by the lures of their cruel colonial masters. (Now, I don't exactly fall anywhere near what Momus usually talks about, since I'm from one of the most western countries imaginable, but the attitude of English as the Anti-Christ peeves me personally, since it implies my adoption and use of English language and literature has somehow magically destroyed my Finnishness. But I have Arabic-speaking acquaintances who have voiced a similiar sentiment to mine, so let's say I'm channeling their indignation.)

In any case, I do agree Momus's ideas often contain this idea which generously allows himself cultural extroversion and eclectism, while asking others to refrain from it for the sake of a cultural aesthetic. And I do think it's not something that works as a political plank -- in policy, action, the real world -- if taken to any considerable length.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

I have to say, your English is extremely good, 'better-than-most-native-speakers' good... I'm in awe that it's your second language. And I really hope you don't find what I'm saying patronising, I'm genuinely impressed.

I shouldn't really be surprised though -- the mainland Europeans have always put the British to shame when it comes to linguistics. I'm moving in with a Spanish girl and a German guy soon and they speak about a million European languages and English on top of that. I'm left feeling like the idiot who knows English and a little Japanese.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I'm flattered! But in all honesty, pretty much all the kids of my generation take a certain proficiency in English for granted, and, indeed, get schooled for it.

(They figure going out into the big wide world armed with a lingua franca is better than going out into the world armed only with what amounts to an obscure code language known only to oneself and six million of one's closest acquaintances. I can't blame 'em.)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

them thar primitives are overwhelmingly Noble Savages, content to live in tradition and isolation and saddled with English only by the lures of their cruel colonial masters

I have to say that this is really not my position at all. For instance, I criticize Alex Kerr's take on Japan, which is basically what you're describing here: "lovely trad culture, shame about the modernity". The Japan I champion is modern Japan. Recently I was also talking about how China had assumed the mantle of modernity from us in the West.

What I object to in what you and Kumakouji are saying is that you seem not to distinguish between Western modernity and other modernities. To be under the umbrella of the American bomb or to be able to communicate globally via English seem to you helpful. An answer to this appears in today's entry: Ingo Niermann tries to imagine a world in which German is reduced and simplified enough to become a new world language. This won't happen, clearly, but what will happen is that China will continuously replace the Anglo world as the template for modernity.

The argument that I'm a hypocrite for saying this is a good thing while speaking English rather than Chinese just shows how silly this "hypocrisy" charge is. Why on earth not use English to tell the Anglos they're not the centre of the world? Why is it "hypocrisy" to talk in English about decentering English? Can a language never be used to describe its own limitations? That would be an odd sort of limitation (one you presumably also couldn't mention, in this weird parallel universe).

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

I note and accept the objection about your views as pertains to cultural synthesis. And of course I have to also concede that you're right about the speaking-English bit. I suppose that idea should have remained in its metaphorical cradle.

That said, I don't think the seminal issue really is about modernity, of any variety. My waxing poetic should really pertain more to your gleeful distaste for the top dog, the hegemon, and indeed "all his works". This is what I think makes your prescriptions so difficult to translate into meaningful political action. Cultural pervasiveness and "success" seem to make you recoil in protest -- and so do the means of acheiving the same, particularly if they approach from the West. Often it doesn't really seem to matter what kind of forces lead this or that western phenomenon. The opposition often comes off as categorical.

Now, this is certainly related to my perception that a fair deal of your criticism of the Anglo-American world is essentially factually uncalled for, particularly concerning "monoculture", but I suspect that in another world where some other sphere had comparable high ground, we might be having this discussion in Mandarin or German, and the basic division would still be much similiar.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Success is failure -- yes, that really does underline a lot of my thinking. It seems to be axiomatic; the prevailing, predominant success of one species -- humans -- has effected the biggest series of mass extinctions in other species since the dinosaurs were wiped out. The same kind of extinction is happening to languages. Now, the effective political counterbalance to this is government protection of diversity, but preceding that is the debate which establishes that diversity itself is a good thing, and that monopoly isn't. Unfortunately, intellectually these are not givens, and I see the position you're spelling out (that the dominant and "successful" modes of living, speaking and so on are "enabling" and benign) as part of the problem.

It's also, as you say, an aesthetic issue. It has to do with originality. The diversity line is like saying "Okay, we already have enough people who sound like Coldplay and Radiohead now. Despite their success -- or rather because of it -- these people have become a limitation to originality. Please go away and do something else." This is what record labels and audiences should be saying. Instead, all too often, they see success as a vindication of the given style, an indication that people should go on making more and more of it.