Thursday 16 October 2008

Leviathan 8801

...So as to exist some form of domination, there is a need for a real and specific-fundumental-will.Which says that we want to live even if our lives depend on the will of someone else...This will is connected with fear...domination is not derived from above but its origin comes from the will of the social base from the will of whom are in fear...


Michel Foucault


Accordind to Hobbes the State could be regarded as a great artificial man or a monster composed of men.The state power is not something negotiable for Hobbes it is almost a necessity, a necessity that begins with the first social formations.But Leviathan could be read not only as the literary methaphor for the illustration of the right of the state to exercise its power but also, as the nature of the spatial formation of the society-city of the ultimate hierarchical model.

The misleading chaos of pipes and cables is reflected on the tranquil polluted water of the lagoon. The tear-drop of the vast infrastructure networks (above the Harbour) blurred the reflected face of the curious traveller with the same melancholic monotony that the propeller of the cargo ship agitated the muddy bed of the dock.



He ,as soon as he landed ,stepping out from the bulk of the hovercraft, couldn’t stop steering at the biblical scale pillars; 150m height, these concrete columns were erecting from the depths of those murky waters, challenging the limits of the constantly fogy sky, constructing a network of radiant megastructures. With his head constantly turned up trying to grasp the scale of these elements our voyager discovered that there was no obvious passage to the next elevation...no staircase, no elevators, nor gates with guiding maps or signs. Only rusty iron corridors with 6 digit numbers flying over the water connecting vertical clusters of pipes, avoiding countless small docks and warehouses floating and jiggling in time with the waves of the morning tide. “There is a physiological mission of this vastness of pipes and columns and the breathtaking point of view from the bottom of the harbour facilities 300 feet below the habitable level of this city. As some kind of spatial fetishism that connects subject’s perspective with the inquisitive boy peering at the woman’s genitals from below, from her legs up [Freud, Complete Works, 21:155]”


Finally, he reached the cigarettes from the pocket of his raincoat, the thick smoke from the cigarette started climbing into the air merging with the humid atmosphere...he couldn’t stop thinking of the ambivalence of voyeurism _the desire to see accompanied by a sence of prohibition. Disappointed from his own defective thoughts and gazing the fragments of horizon behind the artificial forest he remembered lines from Shelley’s Medusa.


Below the lands are seen tremblingly,

Its horror and its beauty are divine.

Upon its lips a shadow, from which shine,

Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,

The agonies of anguish and of death





[...]Wandering around for several hours he noticed that in Leviathan citizens are wearing the same cloths, a uniform made by rubber like a diving suit, as they are living in constant fear of the liquid thing, at which the whole city is founded on, their society and culture.



From the steady view of people wearing their potential lifesaver suit he gradually felt sick, with his pace accelerated he tried to find an escape. In front of him in 20ft distance one gate among the grimy pipes of the harbour sector was half opened. When he came close he found that one small message was winking on a pale green screen.




‘Should I enter a password to open the gate’, he wondered. On one hand, the gap was wide enough for him to sneak in; on the other hand, he was always fascinated from solving small riddles. But what could be the word, maybe this watery concrete city is not that boring after all.





The non-end Architecture

“...The issue of scale is a fluid concept and probably is a matter of addiction1...”


The problem of representation of social hierarchy in the contemporary context is more or less the problem of representation of the structure of social classification but at the same time outlines the non charted spatial or non-spatial relationships of a vast ambivalent world that bears the weight of the virtual and the physical.





The environment of Leviathan is the constellation of urban slots. Where the state is formed as a binding net of columns of infrastructure and amenities and the human activities are weaving the fabric with the freedom of transient small clusters of communities. These networks built as monumental pillars of overconcentration of optic fibre and structural pipes reflect the necessity of a global spider network of a multi-core but, one uniform cityscape simulating the global networks of data, the manifestation of non-end non-scale architecture.Back to the dialectic of space and power, the initial reading of modern urban societies is that the city is not anymore an environment connected with the economic necessities of industrialization. According to Lefebvre the transition from the industrial city to the so called critical zone is composed of a 3rd urban revolution where the economic and social growth extends from the simple market barter to the global exchanges. So Leviathan is pretty much an offspring of this transformation where the uniform carpet of urban musts is the medium (the essential mediating factor2, page 12 Revolution HL) and the reason between them and nature, between their home and the world, the new urban reality which establishes the complete subordination of the agrarian to the urban.



The screen’s role seemed not to be the one that he suspected initially. There wasn’t a question that should be answered as a key-access to the interior that was partly hidden behind the gate. It wasn’t even a question to be answered, only one phrase, perhaps an anecdote that not only refuses to clarify the role of this detail, but it rather misguides with the allegorical picture that it described.


...Your things are apple trees whose blossoms touch the sky

According to the myths and rumours about leviathan there was in the base of these structures one recorder device that the visitors where obliged to respond and type some kind of information. It was a game of poetry and images some kind of representation of the sarcastic humour of the inhabitants. Our voyager recognised the quote; it was the first line of the poem “Portrait of a Lady”.One smile of approbation light his face as he was recalling the next 2 lines of Carlos Williams poem,


Which Sky? The sky where Watteau hung a lady’s slipper...



[...The acceleration of the elevator shook his head and woke him from the nirvana of thoughts and illusions. In front of him all these million nodes, optic fibre micro-servers and nano-machines attached to the muscular opaque structure were travelling to the opposite direction with the same velocity of his capsule –elevator. He was inside the core of one of these pillars, travelling through the structural elements of the meta-state. All the abstract bureaucratic apparatus of the state transformed to a multitasking column where the subjects travelling everyday inside the flesh of this machine to the upper levels of the city, being reminded with this commuting the importance of this megastructure...]



600ft above the sea level, on the fly-deck of the column Z0-R8188 above the fertile synthetic fields and plantations our traveller lit a cigarette. The vast floating flora underneath his foot was transformed to a gigantic filter of light and further down among the shadows only a trained eye could see the reflections on the brown water far down into the abysses. The upper level of the city formed a landscape extended beyond the horizon; only few towers were emerging in strategic places either as centres of distribution and surveillance, or as privileged resorts. As he stubbed out his cigarette he understood the meaning of the journey and the sequence of the views. The apple tree was nothing more than a metaphor of the image of the city, as a female organism that attracts the male voyeurs by the visual pleasure that she delivers (from a masculine perspective always) aplenty. The female otherness though was untouchable; the city was treated as a pornographic material, where the visuality and the imagination parts of a masturbatory fantasy were provided as any beauty that tempts the male serve their pleasure without the need of first obtaining her consent 4.


One albatross, as if it knew what he was thinking, dived into the urban abyss from the outskirts of the tower. Our hero tracked the orbit of the bird down to the limit of his visual field; the city wasn’t anymore only the image. The elegant dive of the albatross reminded him that he was aware of the female otherness of this city. Somehow the path inside the flesh, the entrails of the city was a path of catharsis. So as to view the fertility of the gardens, you should have felt the violence of the erotic fantasy on the harbour dock, the fetish of gazing the ankles, the knees of the city from below then penetrating the skin of the organism and finally view the blossoms of the trees that touch the sky.












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