#anyway i'm really enjoying andreotti and lahiji's book it's v fun and cheeky and more woque than architectural discourse tends to be

[duinoelegies]

Genres provide an affective expectation of the experience of watching something unfold, whether that thing is in life or in art. The waning of genre frames different kinds of potential openings within and beyond the impasse of adjustment that constant crisis creates. [...] In the present from which I am writing about the present, conventions of reciprocity that ground how to live and imagine life are becoming undone in ways that force the gestures of ordinary improvisation within daily life into a greater explicitness affectively and aesthetically. Cinema and other recording forms not only archive what is being lost but track what happens in the time that we inhabit before new forms make it possible to relocate within conventions the fantasy of sovereign life unfolding from actions.

Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism

A fictional character, in being given some form, might be recognizable as a character by its familiarity to what is already given. It is not, then, that we would expose the fictional character as an ideological failure of fiction; even if fictional characters do not and should not be read as expressing a truth of a character, they might still reveal the truth about character, as a system for creating truth. [...] Perhaps by creating reality, the fictional world of the novel brings us close to a reality that exists before the act of creation; perhaps tocreate reality is to imitate reality by imitating its creation.

Sara Ahmed, “Willful Parts: Problem Characters or the Problem of Character”

[...] this endless experimentation on oneself, this continual search for vestimental forms of identity or personality-kits is never more than the limited modality of an indifferent choice made by a prepubescent subject. Hence, the characteristic accompanying symptom of this interiorized exteriority: in Tiqqun’s words, ‘a slight and constant attrition of being, a progressive drying out, a little death distributed along a continuum. We are not SUBJECTS but we play the subject. Like the empty axis of this pit without walls, we are masked nothingness, aggregating the double nothingness of the untouchable “consumer” on the one hand, and of the pathetic impotent abstraction that is “the citizen” on the other.’ More than with the spectacle, therefore, phantasmagoria marks a further step in the breakdown of reality vs. appearance – a new level of irrationality and ontological insecurity in which nothing is more phantasmagorical than the idea of power and control.

Libero Andreotti & Nadir Lahiji, The Architecture of Phantasmagoria