#to deal with THIS level of discourse on the greek classics

[la-pheacienne]

me an appalled greek yiayia on the left, boiling with rage in a foreign hostile environment and on the right my non-greek mutuals trying to make me accept the new reality

[hellomynameisbisexual]

“Personally, I think choosing between men and women is like choosing between cake and ice cream; you’d be daft not to try both when there are so many different flavours.” This endearing analogy, uttered by equally endearing Icelandic icon Björk, stresses her steadfast opinion that “everyone is bisexual”. But even if bisexuality doesn’t describe everyone, it makes up the largest proportion of all people non-compliant to the adjective ‘straight’. Simply put, bisexuality is a term to describe individuals who feel romantically and/or sexually attracted to both sexes, meaning their preference is neither exclusive to men nor women.

But despite its sizeable demographic, and the numerous studies which conclude pure hetero- or homosexuality to be a myth, bisexuals often fall victim to social ostracism. Too gay for straights, too straight for gays, bisexuals are too frequently labelled as frauds or experimentalists, incapable of committing to one sole party. And as society’s understanding of sex and gender progresses, leaving little room for binaries, ‘bi’sexuality becomes increasingly complex.

Bisexuality Pride LGBTQ David Bowie Lady Gaga Freddie Mercury Music Pop Culture Pride 2019 Pansexual Queer Think Piece

A constant and bothersome companion to bisexuality is its apparent ambiguity—society’s inability to grasp the potential for erotic or amorous interaction with not just one of the two sexes has wrongfully made bisexuality a matter of superstition. A recent study found that bisexuals, of all sexual minorities, are the most likely to suffer from mental illness along the lines of anxiety and depression, stemming from both internalised and externally inflicted biphobia on account of stigmatisation and discrimination induced not only by straight people, but by members of their own community as well. The most prevalent vehicle for intolerance of bisexuals is (surprise, surprise) the narrow-minded idea of there only being two sides to pick from, leading to nonsense-assessments à la “bi people are repressing something”, “bi people are on the verge”. Moreover, male-identifying bisexuals are regularly pigeonholed as gay men who want to feel more “normal” every now and then by strutting alongside a woman, whereas many bisexual women endure belittlement, their experiences reduced to mere trial and error phases of rebellious college years.

But what does being bi even really mean in an age when dating apps such as Tinder offer more than 20 options to describe one’s own identity? How timely is the concept of bisexuality when we’re on the cusp of throwing out expired definitions meant to mathematise human sexuality and identity politics? Connecting the dots—ranging from those force-feeding frequently surreal interpretations of bisexuality to the rusty roles and rules of gender coinciding herewith—brings along another, very new problem for and with the titular term. Bisexuality is rooted in duality—its name is predicated on the ‘fact’ that there are two genders: male and female. Present day’s discourse, however, has done its best at dismantling said duality, pushing the notion of gender as a social construct. What makes bisexuality a problem for mainstream culture to comprehend is the underlying, subtle reality that it ultimately caters to everyone but the straight cis-man—unfathomable for a mindset cemented in patriarchal convictions. It, with other things, then leads to a phenomenon called bi-erasure, and furthermore to bigotry at its broadest, sourced from wide-spread disregard for sexual fluidity and refusal of the concept that one doesn’t feel exclusively drawn to one thing in favour of the other.

It’s this exact type of treatment that exhibits the general populace’s insufficient degree of sensibility in dealing with matters “out of the ordinary” and why, despite it’s historic prolificacy (ancient Greek, Japanese and Roman depictions of bisexual relationships were fairly common), sexual fluidity didn’t gain mainstream momentum until the 70s, when Freddie Mercury and David Bowie emerged as two high profile beacons of the cause. Where previously bisexuality had been the product of retrospective speculation—Hollywood figures such as James Dean, Marlon Brando and Greta Garbo were ‘outed’ after their careers ended—pop music popularised bisexuality in the present—and for an audience beyond the queer underground.

That’s not to say Bowie’s take on bisexuality exactly exuded ‘Pride’—in fact, the artist explained more than once that officially coming out did him more harm than good. Still an undeniable legend in- and outside of the LGBTQ+ cosmos, Bowie—just as other people in his shoes—had difficulties with the term in question, revoking or minimising claims again and again—to the point that, to this day, biographers, fans and exes alike remain unsure wether or not he felt honestly attracted to women and men, or was merely intrigued by bisexuality on a shock value- or curiosity-level. It resembles the kind of borderline sensationalism that brought forth Madonna and Britney’s VMA kiss, vague-at-best comments by celebs in interviews and other question-worthy instances of how bisexuality has been brushed up against, but rarely embraced on a genuine level by people of public interest.

It all charts back to what is referred to as the male gaze—the filter through which we’ve been taught to consume our environment, particularly by way of media. Even the little bits and pieces one does see tapping into alternatives to classic hetero monogamy are mostly blemished by negative stereotyping and bizarrely hypersexualised scenes fresh out of frat-bro wet-dreams. Going against this grain is Desiree Akhavan’s series “The Bisexual”, in which the 35-year old actress, director and HBO’s “Girls”-alumna has managed to entertainingly and thoughtfully depict what might be be one of the first examples of how to pop culturally handle the often conflicting topic of being bisexual with care.

Aforementioned proceedings considered, execution and a heightened awareness for cause-and-effects are why a new generation of vocal youth has, across all platforms, boosted a conversation to crack open the boxes we are either placed in, or choose to place ourselves in for fear of bad resonance. More modern, more inclusive designs like pansexual—the tendency to sexually or romantically like someone in spite of biologically- or self-ascribed traits of gender or sex—are on a rise. To many, ‘queer’ is the least restrictive of all labels, indicative of liberation from the binary. In this instance, it seems as though bisexuality in its traditional sense no longer remains the most politically correct of all notions.

But that being said, we mustn’t forget: labels can do harm, but they also set free. The ability to engage in conversations like these is a privilege we’ve been afforded in the West—a privilege that’s important to remember at the time when our part of the globe celebrates Pride, while others in the LGBTQ+ community elsewhere are being imprisoned or even killed for their sexual identities. Bisexuality, and everything that has branched from it to articulate sexual fluidity, needs to be taken seriously within our own, local spaces—just as serious as every other letter in the line-up that constitutes the LGBTQ+ umbrella. Resisting to defy suppressions of any kind—even if you’re not personally vulnerable to their consequences—results in nothing. It’s only through efforts to increase visibility inside our already comparatively progressive realms that we can transport Pride’s cause to places still at unease with non-heteronormativity, and actually feel proud.

[him-e]

this might be a dumb comparison but would you consider star wars/skywalkers in general to be kind of like a greek tragedy? or at least inspired by greek tragedies? i just really love mythology and would like to think there’s some sort of connection in some way. thank you! :)

Definitely! Star Wars relies heavily on archetypes and psychological motifs, and many of them come from Greek and Latin literature. In the original trilogy, taken in isolation, you see more echoes of arthurian myths and classic fairytale elements than tragedy. It’s when you think of the three trilogies as a whole, particularly in terms of Anakin’s arc, his rise and fall and redemption and the repetition of the cycle with Ben’s fall just a generation later, that the Greek tragedy vibes become evident.

To put it in very simple terms, Greek tragedy typically revolves around a good/average man who has one “fatal” flaw (usually an error in judgment or hubris). Because of this, but also because of the crucial role played in the genre by the inevitability of fate and the cosmic order dwarfing humanity, fragile and powerless even at its best and at the mercy of much bigger and incomprehensible forces, the hero is bound to fall. And one fundamental aspect of tragedy is that the audience knows he’s going to fall, and watching the events unravel to the inevitable gut wrenching conclusion is cathartic. (see how the whole prequels experience is built on the premise that you know exactly how it’s going to end.) (also, side note, catharsis is a major reason why even today we need fiction, including “dark” fiction.) 

The fall of the hero often takes the form of a heavily immoral act, a horrific crime against the aforementioned cosmic order that the hero performs either in good faith, as a result of his hubris, anger or passion, or because he feels he has to—be it accidentally killing your father and sleeping with your mother, sacrificing your own daughter to the gods, punishing your asshole ex husband by killing your own children, or choking your pregnant wife who has come to confront you after you slaughtered a temple of younglings. As monstrous as the act can be, the audience can’t help but sympathize with the fallen hero, because it’s clear he’s motivated by a desire to do the right thing (or to fix some wrong), he loves fiercely and intensely, he is (at least in part) a victim of circumstances, and the pain and punishment inflicted on him and everyone who he loves and who loves him is disproportionate. What happens to the protagonist is a metaphor of the fragility of human condition, in which sometimes a minor mistake or an unforeseeable chain of events leads to catastrophic consequences. Individual responsibility matters, but it’s always portrayed in tension with the cruel irony of a blind, irrational fate who tears good people and bad people down alike, which it often succumbs to, or is proven to be eventually irrelevant.

You can see how Anakin is in this sense the quintessential tragic hero. A good man raised in humble conditions but destined to be royalty, to be the hope of a galaxy, the fulfillment of a long awaited prophecy, who rises to a state of quasi-kingship (becoming a Jedi master, marrying a former queen), but remains ultimately a slave—to his own passions and fears, to destiny (as personified by Palpatineworking slowly to corrupt him), to the will of the gods (the Force), to the trappings and limitations of a corrupt society (the Jedi order and the republic). His one fatal flaw, loving Padmé, backfires and turns him into the very cause of her death. 

Ben’s fall is also deeply tragic, as it’s the result of a twofold lapse in judgment: Luke’s (who falls for a second prey of his own darkness and briefly considers executing his nephew for the greater good) and Ben’s himself (who mistakes this one second of weakness for a truly murderous intent, and violentlyretaliates, and never stops acting on the false assumption that his uncle was really going to kill him).

Hubris and madness are two other crucial themes in greek tragedy and I can see the dark side as a fascinating space opera portrayal of both. And then, vengeance, and family—and even more relevant to star wars, the cycle of violence-pain-revenge. The original crime opens a wound in the cosmic order (you could also say: the Force becomes unbalanced) that spreads like a cancer dooming multiple generationsand is only really healed when there is a genuine will to step out of this cycle. 

This is imo the key to understand the three trilogies in their entirety, and what they’re trying to do with the sequel trilogy in particular. Many people struggle with Ben’s fall because he “had everything”—i.e. was born in a time of peace, from a loving family of revered rebellion heroes, with unique force powers and someone to teach him how to use them, etc.—so his turning to the dark side is thrice as hard to swallow. Was he a bad seed from the start? Or did he just infuriatingly squander all he had? Other people complain that the new trilogy is built on a nihilistic concept, that evil always come back cyclically one way or another, that victory is never complete, that the heroes are bound to make the same mistakes over and over again, or that everyone is inevitably destined to be corrupted and lose hope (see the discourse re: Luke in TLJ).

Both miss the point, in my opinion. The way I see it, it all ties back to Anakin’s original crime—his tragic, blood-soaked fall to the dark side, order 66, and most importantly Padmé’s death—and how that crime was a cosmic wound that tore the balance of the universe apart and was never fully healed. So it reverberates across the galaxy, onto his progeny, and his progeny’s progeny (Ben).

Luke did begin to make things right—by choosing to reject violence he gave Vader the chance to sacrifice himself to to kill the emperor and save his son, which earned him his redemption. And…it’s a good way to end a story if you want it to end there, but if you want the story to continue, then you have to face the fact that it’s only a partial, and in many ways convenient solution to a much larger problem. Vader’s redemption did nothing to eradicate the deep-seated political views of those who were still loyal to the Empire and fighting for a dictatorship in the moment when Palpatine was killed. It wasn’t enough for Luke and Leia to actually embrace their lineage and come out as Vader’s children, if Bloodline is to be believed. It wasn’t enough to shield little Ben from Snoke’s attentions—in fact, Anakin’s blood is exactly what put a big ol’ target on Ben’s back, with nothing of his grandfather’s post-redemption wisdom to keep him on the right track, only the myth of his legacy, a myth that as we’ve sadly seen can be easily misconstrued and exploited and that Leia and Luke never properly explained to Ben either. Anakin just died, and if that single sacrifice was enough to save his soul, it actually didn’t do much to fix the countless wrongs he contributed to create during the two decades he served the Empire as lord Vader. The galaxy bled because of him. And he just died and left his children to clean up his mess. Lucas’ original idea that Vader’s redemption brought balance to the Force is a good happily ever after, but only if you don’t really plan to deal with the consequences.

More on a thematic level, RotJ represents a perfect fairytale ending on almost all fronts but it leaves a question unanswered: was Anakin wrong to love Padmé? Is romantic love wrong? Aside from Han and Leia—whose marriage didn’t end well anyway—romantic love comes out of this narrative as a tragically negative force. Specifically, romantic love for a Jedi. If you consider the first six films, the logical conclusion is that the Jedi were right, after all, to forbid romantic attachments, because look at the mess Anakin made. Anakin destroyed himself and Padmé. It was only Luke’s familial love that made him come back to the light—Luke, the eternal celibate Jedi. Familial love is good, romantic love is poisonous. The narrative absolutely implies this reading.

So although RotJ’s ending fixes everything on a superficial level, the wound keeps festering underneath, there are still many things that weren’t made right, and this is why only a few years later Luke is still so haunted by the darkness and still so afraid that a new Vader is possible that he actually considers killing his nephew for a split second. This is why the ashes of the old Empire don’t die out, but instead give birth to a new tyrannical power; and why Leia cannot be free to live her life in peace with her family, but still feels committed to a rebellion that never ceased to have reasons to exist, even after the Emperor’s death.The gods (the Force) aren’t satisfied, if you will, so they keep punishing this family. The original evil has not been completely exorcised. Love, personified by Padmé’s unacceptable, unnatural death, hasn’t been vindicated. The balance is not restored. And Ben falls.

The sequel trilogy is set to heal this wound, for real, this time. It’s also why it has a much darker tone (despite the superficial humor) than the original trilogy. It’s not impossible for a tragedy to have a happy ending, but the resolution must have the same tone, the same gravity of the premise. The prequels are a tragedy, and the original trilogy is essentially a fairytale, a hero’s journey—they’re basically two different genres, and Vader’s last minute redemption seems (and is) inadequate once you’ve seen all three movies of his very detailed and nuanced fall to the Dark Side.

We’re watching, through Ben, the tortured redemption arc that should have been written for Vader if this story had followed a chronologically and stylistically linear narrative. Through Ben and Rey, we’re watching a reconciliation of the Dark and the Light side, whose unresolved conflict, worsened by the repressive puritanical policy of the Jedi order, originated the schism in Anakin’s soul. And we’ll also (hopefully) get the answer to that question I said earlier, and see the redemption of romantic love.

[mxdam-a]

conygma replied to your post: also one time my dad and his male friends were...

sTICKS LEG THRU THE ROOF i do

herateleia replied to your post: also one time my dad and his male friends were...

ME ME ME ALWAYS

horrorempathy replied to your post: also one time my dad and his male friends were...

i do

so to quickly define my terms before i go on

simone de beauvoir was the longtime partner of jean-paul sartre, and uses a lot of transcendentalist philosophical terms in her writing. that’s part of why the second sex is kind of... difficult? as a book; not only is it a work of philosophy, it was actually translated into english by (i believe) a biologist, because the american publisher wrongfully thought it was actually a book on biology (there’s a whole section about the sperm and the egg and stuff it’s neat), and obviously a biologist isn’t going to know how to translate works of french philosophy.

in the context of tss, “transcendence” and “immanence” are used to talk about two opposing positions. transcendence is about Going Beyond, Going Above; being active, creative, and in control of one’s own life. immanence? the opposite. it’s women’s situation throughout history, one of stagnation, of staying put, of not having control of one’s own destiny, a deliberate withholding of access to transcendent experience and power. immanence is also, more broadly, about the material, and about remaining at the level of the material. in religion for example, immanence is a concept which places the divine in the material world, rather than somewhere outside it. i think it’s the idea of immanence and the material that’s absolutely crucial to classical greek misogyny, and to the latter’s influence on modern-day misogyny.

imo the idea of women as immanent in greek thought is nowhere more obvious than in ancient greek ideas surrounding conception. to wit: the idea that the man provides the soul or animating life force (actually called the pneuma, or breath) via the sperm, and that what the woman contributes is the base biological matter. she provides the “stuff,” he provides the soul. in the greatest miracle of human life the woman is reduced to nothing more than the clay which is molded by the active principle of the male seed. consider:

The male provides the ‘form’ and the ‘principle of the movement’, the female provides the body, in other words, the material. Compare the coagulation of milk. Here, the milk is the body, and the fig-juice or the rennet contains the principle which causes it to set. ...

... Just as it sometimes happens that deformed offspring are produced by deformed parents, and sometimes not, so the offspring produced by a female are sometimes female, sometimes not. The reason is that the female is as it were a deformed male; and the menstrual discharge is semen, though in an impure condition; i.e. it lacks one constituent, and one only, the principle of Soul.

An animal is a living body, a body with Soul in it. The female always provides the material, the male provides that which fashions the material into shape; this, in our view, is the specific characteristic of each of the sexes: that is what it means to be male or female. Hence, necessity requires that the female should provide the physical part, i.e. a quantity of material, but not that the male should do so, since necessity does not require that the tools should reside in the product that is being made, nor that the agent which uses them should do so. Thus the physical part, the body, comes from the female, and the Soul from the male, since the Soul is the essence of a particular body.

-- Aristotle, from Generation of Animals, quoted in Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts, ed. alcuin blamires, karen pratt, c.w. marx

this idea of women as body, and as tied inherently to their body, trickles down from and throughout classical thought. in the same anthology there is an excerpt from galen describing women as “mutilated” men. the bodily difference of women is taken in a weird essentialist way as physical evidence of defect, of deviation from the most perfect form and therefore lacking the most perfect capabilities. i think you could make a serious argument that ancient greece is where medical justification of misogyny first got its start; consider this idea from anne carson’s “putting her in her place: woman, dirt, and desire” (in before sexuality: the construction of erotic experience in the ancient greek world, ed. david m. halperin, john j. winkler, froma i. zeitlin):

Physiologically and psychologically [to the Greeks], women are wet. ... It is the consensus of Greek thought that the soundest condition for a human being is dryness, provided it is not excessive dryness. ... the dry state of mental alertness may be undermined by wine, sleep, or self-indulgence, according to Diogenes of Apollonia, who proposed in the fifth century that the conscious element in man consisted of air and that an individual’s intelligence depended on the dryness of this air ... . ... The condition of dry stability is never attained by the female physique, which presumably remains cold and wet all its life. Partly by virtue of her innate wetness, woman is more subject than man to liquefying assaults upon body and mind, especially those of emotion.

carson adds in a footnote, “We are dealing not with physical fact but with cultural and rhetorical artifact ... What is essential for our analysis is to note a clear trend in ancient interpretations of physiological data: women are presumed at home in conditions of physical and emotional extremity that discomfit male flesh and protocol ... .”

these are not just abstract ideas about women but ideas that are rooted in women’s physiology that provide, in essence, a pseudoscientific justification of misogynist discourse surrounding women’s bodies. i think you could argue that this is the very essence of misogynist immanence: men’s bodies are prime real estate for the gestation of rational thought, simply by virtue of being male; women’s bodies are a kind of gross soup that bogs down rationality and swamps Good Male Things like, idk, bromance? women are dragged down to the level of body and body only, denied access to transcendence, with this denial justified by the fact that they are at the level of the body.

this is a line of thinking that draws itself very clearly from classical greece all the way into the modern day. consider the extent to which women are treated as belonging to their hormones (”is it your time of the month?” “are you PMSing right now?”), slaves to biology in ways that men are not, trapped at the level of the immanent and subject to the whims of their cuh-raaaaazy bodies, and therefore not trustworthy (who wants a female national leader when she could have access to nuclear launch codes while she’s on her period!), not able to achieve transcendence, because of that tie to the material. men are allowed to be minds, pneuma; women are just bodies--base, biological matter. transcendence and immanence.

[bluewatsons]

Amy Koerber, From Hysteria to Hormones and Back Again: Centuries of Outrageous Remarks About Female Biology, 1 Rhetoric of Health & Med 179 (2018)

In this persuasion brief I suggest how rhetorical-historical insights into the scientific and medical discourses of female hormones are relevant to current organizational and institutional diversity initiatives, especially those that aim to increase the number of women in leadership positions. Many of the examples I cite in the essay make specific reference to hormones, and as I argue, hormones often serve an enthymematic function in these expert arguments, both past and present. More specifically, I argue, discourses about hormones allow people who do not possess any scientific expertise to make authoritative-sounding claims that resonate with popular beliefs about women's bodies and brains. Uncovering these historical tendencies in scientific and medical discourse offers new perspectives on the obstacles that women face in today's workplaces. In this persuasion brief I aim to discuss these perspectives in ways that make the findings of rhetorical-historical research relevant to the many different stakeholders, leaders, and policymakers who are currently working to help women rise to leadership positions in many different fields.

When Google engineer James Damore recently wrote an internal memo arguing against Google's diversity efforts, he made several authoritative claims about female biology. These claims were meant to support his larger argument that the gender disparities in the high-tech industry are a result of biological differences between the genders—not a result of gender discrimination. As Damore explained, "men and women biologically differ in many ways" (n.p.). Hormones played an important role in Damore's argument, as is often the case in popular and expert explanations of sex difference. For example, Damore supported his claims about biological difference with several "facts," including a statement that the differences he identified "often have clear biological causes and links to prenatal testosterone." Then Damore went on to say, "these differences may explain why we don't see equal representation of women in tech and leadership." He listed several examples of these biologically determined differences:

Women "have a stronger interest in people rather than things."

Women have "higher agreeableness," and this means they have "a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading."

Women experience "neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance)," and "This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high-stress jobs."

In the remainder of his memo, Damore elaborated his theory of presumed biological differences as a reason why we do not see more women in high-tech leadership positions. As he said, "These positions often require long, stressful hours that may not be worth it if you want a balanced and fulfilling life" (n.p.).

At this point, readers from any discipline might be asking why an engineer at Google feels qualified to make such extensive claims about female biology and its relationship to women's professional success. These kinds of questions about the expertise, authority, and credibility of those who make claims on a subject such as female biology are questions that rhetorical scholars of health and medicine are well equipped to address. We use a wide variety of methodological approaches to address such questions, and our research findings in this area have important implications that extend beyond our narrow academic field. As Judy Segal (2005) says, the findings of rhetorical research in health and medicine can be "useful" for "clinical practice and health policy" even if they cannot be "applied" in the same way that clinical research, or some social science research, can be applied directly to healthcare practice or policy (p. 4). In this persuasion brief I broaden the scope of Segal's claims about the usefulness of rhetorical-historical research in health and medicine to explore how the findings of such research can have relevance that even extends beyond clinical practice and healthcare policy. Specifically, in this persuasion brief, I address those stakeholders in the academy, and in the private sector, who are leaders in workplace diversity initiatives.

For every James Damore in the world, there are organizations and initiatives that are dedicated to helping women succeed in the academy, the high-tech sector, and elsewhere. These include freestanding organizations such as Catalyst, a "nonprofit organization with a mission to accelerate progress for women through workplace inclusion" (n.p.), but they also include efforts within organizations and institutions. In fact, Damore's memo was titled "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber," and it was provoked by a diversity initiative that was underway at Google when he wrote it. His memo included scathing criticism of Google for, in his words, creating "several discriminatory practices" to try to help women overcome the obvious gender disparities that exist at Google. Specific examples that he mentions include "programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race," "special treatment for 'diversity' candidates," and "hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates" (n.p.).

What Does Rhetoric Have To Do With It?

In a rhetorical-historical project that I have recently completed, I explore a centuries-long pattern of language use that has developed around one of the concepts that played an important part in Damore's argument: hormones. One of the key findings of my rhetorical-historical study is that hormones have become a shorthand version of more complicated arguments about female biology. To use a term from rhetorical theory, hormones serve an enthymematic purpose—that is, they allow long, complex arguments to be condensed into something simple so that an engineer, or a politician, or a business executive, or a judge can speak with great credibility on a topic such as female biology. 

In classical rhetoric, enthymeme was defined as an abbreviated syllogism—a deductive argument in which one of the premises is left unstated, usually because the audience already assumes this premise to be true, so leaving it unstated allows the argument to be more concise and impactful. In contemporary rhetorical theory, enthymeme has been defined more broadly to include any argument that is condensed or made brief by leaving a key component unstated. The omission that characterizes enthymemes makes such arguments especially powerful. Thus, enthymemes facilitate movement within the minds and bodies of audiences at a given time and place, but they also allow ideas to move across physical, digital, and geographic space, such as when a scientific study receives a great deal of media attention and then feeds into the frenzy of popular beliefs that can surround a topic that piques public interest.

My own findings about the enthymematic function of hormones in scientific and popular discourse emerged from an extensive rhetorical-historical study of a large number of scientific and medical texts, extending from ancient times to the present. My study reveals how in the early twentieth century the term "hormone" started gradually to replace the concept of hysteria—which had been used to explain female problems since the beginning of recorded history—while still allowing ancient ideas about female biology to persist in modern scientific texts. This study's findings are relevant to workplace diversity initiatives because they reveal some of the hidden assumptions and patterns of language use that pose obstacles to initiatives that aim to increase diversity and bring more women into leadership positions—whether in high-tech industry, the sciences, or the academy or private sector more broadly conceived.

To briefly summarize my research findings, the "mansplaining" of female biology evident in James Damore's memo is not really anything new. This kind of mansplaining has been going on for a very long time—all the way through recorded history, actually. A lack of qualifications, or of scientific facts, has never stopped self-designated "experts" from making authoritative claims about female biology. Throughout much of that history, it was hysteria (which derives from the Greek word for womb) that provided the dominant metaphor in these "mansplain-ations." However, when British physician Ernest Henry Starling coined the term hormone in a 1905 lecture to the Royal Society in London, the experts suddenly had access to a whole new vocabulary for diagnosing female problems (Koerber, 2018).

For at least a couple of decades before Starling first used the word hormone, experts knew there was a chemical substance that enabled the organs to communicate with each other to enable processes like digestion and respiration. However, they did not have a good word to describe these substances—they were using vague terms like "chemical messenger" and "internal secretion." None of these terms was powerful enough to win the argument, so the experts kept going back and forth, quibbling over how to interpret the same old evidence. But when researchers finally had a word they could all agree on, the science moved forward after decades of standstill. By 1915, endocrinology had become established, and this field continued to experience rapid growth for many years after that.

The impact of hormones on scientific understandings of the female body has been profound. The belief in hysteria, which spans the centuries of recorded history, was based on wild imaginings about the womb wandering around inside a woman's body, whereas the relatively new belief in hormones is based on scientifically verified chemical substances with resulting behaviors and systemic effects that can be measured, documented, and replicated in the laboratory. The short version of this story is that science has gradually come to replace mysticism and religious beliefs as the basis for understanding women's bodies and women's health.

As we see in examples such as the Damore memo, however, some aspects of the transition from the hysterical woman to the hormonal woman have been far less absolute than we might expect. The reasons for this are made apparent through close examination of the scientific texts in which this transition occurred. When medical experts first introduced terms like "premenstrual tension" in the mid-twentieth century, for instance, the language they used to describe symptoms was taken directly from medical texts in previous eras that described female symptoms affiliated with hysteria. Using the rhetorical concept of metaphor, which derives from the Greek term for "carrying over," we can see how the earliest configurations of the hormonal woman in mid-twentieth-century medical texts carried over meanings that, in the older medical texts, had been carried by the hysterical woman metaphor.

And even in the most recent medical texts, written within the last decade, researchers approach female hormones from perspectives that are shaped by centuries of belief in the idea that women's bodies are fundamentally irregular and much more difficult to manage than men's bodies. The very fact that there is a whole body of scientific research devoted to topics such as "pregnancy brain" is reminiscent of a distrust of the female body that has its origins in the centuries-long belief that the uterus has a special influence on the female brain and that women's health—both mental and physical—is defined by this problematic body-brain relationship. Furthermore, when we consider how this information is communicated to the public with headlines such as "Changing Hormones and Mood Swings: What You Can Do" (Bouchez, n.d.) and "Mommy Brain: Yes, It's a Thing" (Lucia, n.d.), it becomes even clearer that ancient beliefs about the female mind-body relationship have not entirely vanished from our popular imagination.

As rhetorical scholars of health and medicine, an important part of what we do is illuminate the processes through which new scientific terms and concepts gradually morph from older terms and concepts. This kind of rhetorical-historical research on language and meaning allows us to understand the history of medical beliefs on a subject such as female hormones as a rhetorical movement that is characterized by anything but progression along a straight line. Rhetorical-historical research suggests that the forms of movement that are evident in these scientific rhetorics are best characterized as folding, fluxing, morphing, and twisting. Through close examination of the scientific and popular texts that facilitate these forms of movement, we can see how a concept such as hormones never fully breaks from its history, but instead, comes to encapsulate key ideas from that history, reshaping these concepts in ways that fit the demands of ever-changing rhetorical contexts. This highlights a fundamentally conservative element of the scientific endeavor, suggesting that one reason why new ideas emerge is to preserve old ways of thinking—to make those old ideas acceptable to new audiences—rather than only effect a clean break from the past.

A Few Additional Examples

In a recent New York Times article, Gerri Elliott, a former senior executive at Juniper Networks, recounts a story about a workplace experience that was related to her by a colleague: "A presenter asked a group of men and women whether anyone had expertise in breast-feeding. A man raised his hand. He had watched his wife for three months. The women in the crowd, mothers among them, didn't come forward as experts" (Chira, 2017). And, turning to a less light-hearted example, in 2012, Missouri Congressman Todd Akin caught the attention of audiences around the world with his public comment that rape was not likely to result in pregnancy because "from what I understand from doctors, that's really rare. If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down" (Alter, 2014). And Akin is not the first modern public figure who has made remarks like this about the female body. Washington Post reporter Sarah Kliff (2012) traces a series of comments along similar lines back to at least the 1980s, documenting how such arguments, for several decades, have been used to deny the necessity of exceptions for rape in anti-abortion legislation. The common theme in all these examples, and a theme that also connects these examples to the claims that Damore makes in his memo, is powerful public figures making authoritative claims about female biology without any actual qualifications to do so—except that they are men who occupy positions in society that enable them to speak authoritatively on any subject about which they wish to speak authoritatively. Additional examples reported by Kliff include Stephen Freind's 1988 remark that during rape, "a woman secretes a certain secretion, which has the tendency to kill sperm," and Garance Franke-Ruta's 1995 claim that "The facts show that people who are raped—truly raped—the juices don't flow."

When a politician such as Todd Akin attests publicly that a woman cannot get pregnant if she is "legitimately" raped, it might be easy to dismiss those remarks as coming from a crackpot politician who has no scientific credibility. Of course, we can take some solace from the fact that Akin lost his election in 2012 after those remarks went viral. And we can take even more solace, perhaps even enjoy some laughter, from the fact that Akin made a complete horse's ass of himself two years later in a 2014 interview when he said, "I had a number of people in my campaign that were children . . . who were conceived in rape," and MSNBC host Chuck Todd responded by pointing out something that might seem obvious to most people: Akin's statement about all the people in his campaign who were conceived in rape completely contradicted his 2012 claim that women's bodies would shut down conception in the course of a "legitimate rape" (Alter, 2014). But now that we are living in a new reality, we cannot afford to feel quite so comfortable or amused by President Donald Trump's well-documented history of public misogynistic remarks, which often refer to specific aspects of female biology.

Through the many different examples I am providing in this essay, I am trying to make clear that there is a danger in setting aside outrageous remarks about female embodiment—whether they are made by a crackpot misogynistic politician who loses the election after making the remarks, or by a crackpot misogynistic politician who wins the election and becomes president of the United States after making these remarks. Rhetorical-historical research that explores the centuries of scientific discourse on female biology that precede the present moment offers us a unique perspective on these current discourses. Without understanding this preceding discourse, and without understanding how the earliest references to female hormones were literally built from the concept of hysteria that dominated expert beliefs about women's health for centuries prior to the 1905 emergence of the word hormone, we will never understand why the discourse of Todd Akin, James Damore, President Donald Trump, and so many others like them can keep surfacing and resurfacing, again and again, even in the twenty-first century. Specifically, the rhetorical-historical research that I have conducted over the last few years reveals a phenomenon that manifests itself in an endless number of rhetorical configurations throughout the eras of recorded history—configurations in which the female mind and body repeatedly emerge as foreign, mysterious, or defective versions of the male mind and body.

Action Items

Rhetorical-historical research in health and medicine is relevant to stakeholders involved in diversity initiatives at Google and elsewhere because, as Damore's memo makes clear, the problem that stakeholders on all sides of this controversy are addressing is fundamentally a rhetorical problem. Like any rhetorical problem, it can be viewed from many different, often conflicting, perspectives. From one perspective, when Damore makes these claims about female biology, he is benefitting from a long tradition that has enabled men to make authoritative claims about female biology, whether or not they possess any expertise in this area, and whether or not they have any credible scientific findings to sustain their claims. It is easy, of course, for those who would argue against Damore to depict him as misogynistic, ignorant, and ridiculous. But from another perspective, we need to be careful focusing too much on Damore as an individual because that might cause us to ignore the fact that a man like him has hundreds of years of "science" to back him up. If we do not pay attention to that long tradition of scientific discourse, it is hard to grasp why there will always be individuals like Damore or Akin who can make claims like these and be believed by some audiences. From yet another perspective—one that I find especially concerning—the same people who are likely to be the most vocal critics of the kind of language that appears in Damore's memo are, at the same time, often willing to accept casual claims about female biology when these claims appear in a less blatantly misogynistic manner. For example, it is not uncommon for women themselves to talk about the "pregnancy brain" that they experience, or about "feeling hormonal." And, in fact, when I have discussed my research in public forums, more than one woman has expressed concern that my rhetorical critique of such language might risk denying their capacity to describe what they are experiencing. I acknowledge this risk, but I still contend that until we interrogate the scientific origins of all of these patterns of language use—blatantly misogynistic language as well as the mundane phrases that seem less shocking—we cannot fully understand why it is that people like Damore and Akin keep resurfacing; nor can we fully appreciate the severity of the damage that is caused by any of these remarks.

Returning to the question of workplace diversity initiatives, one of the ways in which this rhetorical problem can be summarized has been expressed eloquently by a leading expert in this area who recently said, "it is difficult if not impossible to believe that you can be what you cannot see. If there's no one like you 'up there,' it's not likely you'll get there . . ." (Silva & Ibarra, 2012). This is a useful way to characterize this rhetorical problem because it captures the importance of the relationship between the images people see on a daily basis and their beliefs about what they can become or what they can achieve. And it's important to note that these ordinary images that people see on a daily basis are often less shocking and attention-grabbing than the obviously misogynistic words of Damore and Akin, both of which went viral and gained wide readership. But rhetorical-historical research on the scientific discourses of female biology is perfectly suited to exposing the layers of meaning that lie behind the surface of discourses that we see on a daily basis, similar to the manner in which archaeologists illuminate current practices by exposing layers of meaning from the past.

What I ultimately want to argue is that current efforts to address the diversity problem in today's workplaces, organizations, and institutions are always going to be hampered by the fact that they are only addressing the surface of the problem. I certainly applaud these efforts, and as an academic administrator at a large public research university, I am also actively involved in these efforts on a daily basis. But as long as we are only looking to increase the number of particular demographic groups who occupy particular positions, the changes we implement will only scratch the surface. Rhetorical-historical research lets us take the next step and see the patterns of language use that make it seem normal for women to remain underrepresented in the higher ranks, especially in areas such as the high-tech and financial sectors. Until we look beneath the surface of crackpot, misogynistic remarks and acknowledge that the assumptions stated in these remarks are actually embedded in the same expert scientific discourses that we have always treated as neutral and authoritative in the Western tradition, we will not fully appreciate why the battle we are fighting is such a hard one. Another important component of this is acknowledging that we often participate, perhaps unknowingly, in perpetuating such problematic assumptions when we casually use terms such as "pregnancy brain" or "feeling hormonal."

Before we can work toward a goal such as increasing the number of women in leadership positions, we need to step back and do an archeological dig that exposes and dislodges the deeply entrenched assumptions that, for many centuries before this, have made it seem impossible, or at least unlikely, that a woman could succeed as a leader. Instead, when we hear the word "diversity" in today's discourse, it is often part of a moral argument for an organization's obligation to increase its diversity, as visible on the surface. For example, in early 2017, after several media reports made clear that gender discrimination and sexual harassment were rampant at Uber, the company's CEO, Travis Kalanick, responded by acknowledging that only "15.1% of [Uber] employees are women." He also promised to improve "diversity and inclusion at Uber" and to "fight for and support those who experience injustice" (Swisher, 2017).

I am asking us (stakeholders interested in increasing diversity, myself included) to take a more expansive view, to start imagining diversity initiatives that go beyond scratching the surface. We need to re-frame the diversity conversation so that, from the beginning, we insist on the inherent benefits of diversity in knowledge production, reporting, and reception. The common thread connecting the varied examples that I have presented in this essay is that they are all examples of situations in which we grant too much authority to experts, just because they are perceived as experts, and even if they do not possess qualifications to speak on the subject about which they are speaking. It is not, by any stretch of anyone's imagination, a coincidence that most of these experts belong to the same demographic group: white Western males. Until we acknowledge the long historical tradition that has allowed this single group to speak authoritatively about women, we will have a hard time fighting against this tendency. There is a sharp contrast between the automatic authority that is granted to these experts in so many different domains and the absolute lack of credibility that is granted to women themselves to speak about their own experiences as embodied individuals. And unfortunately, sometimes women participate in these patterns—hence, the breastfeeding example above, and the use of terms such as "pregnancy brain." Certainly we can find other ways to speak and think about female biology, but it's going to require a lot of hard work.

The larger point I want to make, in closing, is that this is not just a matter of social justice, or of everyone getting a chance to sit at the table where expert knowledge comes to be. This is ultimately a pathway to making better knowledge. And here is where I am intentionally looking beyond the disciplinary borders that delineate what counts as the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM), and invoking some recent social science research that I believe complements our rhetorical scholarship in important ways. In addition to the obvious moral reasons why it is important to achieve greater diversity in institutions and organizations involved in expert knowledge production, I believe that recent research in the new field of social physics has the potential to help us think of this situation in terms of practical benefits. That is because social physics provides us with quantitative evidence that shows organizations function more effectively, and are more productive and successful, when mechanisms are in place to ensure that ideas are, as Alex Pentland (2014) says, harvested from everyone in the organization. Pentland defines social physics as "a quantitative social science that describes reliable, mathematical connections between information and idea flow on the one hand and people's behavior on the other" (p. 4). He and his team use this new science to provide empirical evidence that demonstrates the value of achieving broad input in decision-making from all sectors of an organization, rather than limiting decision-making authority to a few individuals located at the top of an institutional hierarchy. In Pentland's words, social physics "enables us to predict the productivity of small groups, of departments within companies, and even of entire cities. It also helps us tune communication networks so that we can reliably make better decisions and become more productive" (p. 4). Pentland goes on to assert that, "When decision making falls to those best situated to make the decision rather than those with the highest rank, the resulting organization is far more robust and resistant to disruption" (p. 211). Working with his team of graduate students and colleagues in the MIT Lab that he directs, Pentland designed a method of collecting data on all kinds of human interactions within specific organizations, including electronic communication such as e-mail but also precise counts of the quantity and nature of face-to-face interactions and phone calls. He claims that this groundbreaking method of data collection provides quantifiable evidence to show the monetary value that an organization can accrue by achieving a more diverse workforce and ensuring that everyone in this workforce is able to contribute good ideas.

Although Pentland's (2014) social physics approach is implemented in the context of specific organizations, and is thus geared toward business professionals, I believe the ideas established in his team's study can potentially revolutionize the arguments we make in favor of workplace diversity. Rather than continuing to depict this as a problem that individuals face and that institutions need to solve to benefit these individuals, we can come to understand diversity as a goal that will enable academic institutions, and the scientific enterprise at large, to produce more and better knowledge.

This social physics approach suggests that our whole world can benefit from achieving a knowledge-producing enterprise that is more inclusive—that is, achieving an apparatus of scientific knowledge production that incorporates contributions from a wider, more diverse group of knowledge producers. Similar ideas are also reinforced in recent leadership communication research. For example, Judith Baxter's (2015) study of gender difference in leadership teams is perhaps one of the first to offer close scrutiny of gender dynamics in different kinds of teams: male-only, female-only, and mixed gender teams. The most important finding about the teams included in this study is the value of diversity to team productivity. As the author concludes, "Gender balance and diversity within a leadership team enables its members to utilize a wider linguistic and business communication repertoire, leading to more supportive working relationships and the successful accomplishment of business leadership goals" (p. 448).

The approach that I am advocating allows us to understand that the problem with the long history of misogyny that permeates medical discourses of female biology is not just in the content of the ideas that it has perpetuated, but in the fact that the knowledge production has been almost entirely a one-way process, with men producing knowledge about women. This persistent pattern, accumulated over so many centuries, is why even in today's scientific discourse we see so many deeply embedded judgments that are made by men about women. If you live in a world in which there is a centuries-long tradition dictating that one group will be the knowledge producers and another will be the objects of knowledge, it is not surprising that the former group will be granted expert authority in everything they say, while the latter group will be perpetually depicted as mysterious, pathological, uncontrollable, and in need of further explanation.

Although they might use different words, like suggesting that women have "juices" that control reproduction or that their bodies can "shut the whole thing down," hormones or something like them have a special role to play in the diverse examples I have used in this essay to highlight the contrast between the knowers and the objects of knowledge. Recall that in the Google memo that I discussed at the beginning of this essay, "prenatal testosterone" was the scientific foundation for the Google engineer's theories of biological difference. In revealing how deeply embedded such patterns have become in our everyday lives, rhetorical research also identifies openings and gaps where it is possible to introduce twists and turns and mutations. Although this might not mean we can escape the old patterns, it can help us find new ways to live with them, and it can reorient our approach to diversity initiatives in the private and public sectors.

References

Alter, Charlotte. (2014, July 17). Todd Akin still doesn't get what's wrong with saying "legitimate rape." Time. Retrieved from http://time.com/3001785/todd-akin-legitimate-rape-msnbc-child-of-rape/

Baxter, Judith. (2015). Who wants to be the leader? The linguistic construction of emerging leadership in differently gendered teams. International Journal of Business Communication, 52, 427–451.

Bouchez, Colette. (n.d.). Changing hormones and mood swings: What you can do. WebMD. Retrieved from http://www.webmd.com/women/features/escape-hormone-horrors-what-you-can-do#1

Catalyst. (n.d.). Who we are. http://www.catalyst.org/who-we-are

Chira, Susan. (2017, July 21). Why women aren't CEOs, according to women who almost were. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/sunday-review/women-ceos-glass-ceiling.html?mwrsm=Facebook

Damore, James. (2017, August 5). Google's ideological echo chamber [Web log comment]. Retrieved from https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320

Kliff, Sarah. (2012, August 20). Rep. Todd Akin is wrong about rape and pregnancy, but he's not alone. Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2012/08/20/rep-todd-akin-is-wrong-about-rape-and-pregnancy-but-hes-not-alone/

Koerber, Amy. (2018) From hysteria to hormones: A rhetorical history. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press.

Lucia, Carole Anderson. (n.d.). Mommy brain: Yes, it's a thing. FitPregnancy and Baby. Retrieved from https://www.fitpregnancy.com/parenting/real-mom-stories/your-incredible-shrinking-brain

Pentland, Alex. (2014). Social physics: How good ideas spread—the lessons learned from a new science. New York: Penguin.

Segal, Judy Z. (2005). Health and the rhetoric of medicine. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Silva, Christine, & Ibarra, Herminia. (2012, November 14). Study: Women get fewer game-changing leadership roles. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2012/11/study-women-get-fewer-game-changing.html

Swisher, Kara. (2017, February 20). Uber CEO Travis Kalanick says the company has hired former Attorney General Eric Holder to probe allegations of sexism. Recode. Retrieved from https://www.recode.net/2017/2/20/14677546/uber-ceo-travis-kalanick-eric-holder-memo

[roger-awop-blog]

LEBBEUS WOODS

LEBBEUS WOODS

ARC820: Architecture Without Physics Professor: Yew-Thong Leong Roger Xu February 2, 2017

1.0 INTRODUCTION

Lebbeus Woods was known as a visionary thinker, focusing on unbuilt work; through mediums of drawing, and physical models. Trained in engineering and architecture, he first worked with Eero Saarinen and Kevin Roche before deciding to focus purely on theoretical work. Lebbeus’s drawings are often characterized as a formal exploration of dystopia. This is especially attributed to his creative visions of alternate realities, and misinterpretations of “aestheticized crisis settings”, albeit his therapeutic intentions. However, to look at his projects purely from this view is a static understanding of his work, whereas if Lebbeus work is examined contextually, it reveals that he intended more than render imaginative fantasies. Lebbeus work came from a period of conflict and ambiguity in the 1980’s. There was much uncertainty of the future in architecture despite the precise nature of where architecture left off. The scope of this paper will examine a thorough historical discourse, the postmodern context and rising capitalistic and globalization trends to examine its impact on Lebbeus’s work. His projects shifted in a political nature after the effects of globalization resulted in extreme consequences such as the Bosnian war in Sarajevo.

Figure 1: Quake City, 1995. Lebbeus Woods. A drawing of a reconstructed San-Francisco after the earthquake.

.

2.0 THE CONTEXT OF MODERNITY AND POSTMODERNITY

2.1 Modernity vs The International Style

The architectural fallacies of the postmodern era derived from the ubiquity of the modernist period. Before discussing postmodern work, modernist architecture must be carefully examined first. At the vanguard of modern architecture were Walter Groupis, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. These three individuals celebrated a new form of architecture that celebrated the machine and efficiency. In 1930, Alfred Hitchcock and Phillip Johnson put together a publication that documented their work, resulting in the spread of the style they dubbed: The International Style. This publication interpreted the

modernist work through simplification and physical categorization in an attempt to characterize visual characteristics. This is not to deny a common language of expression in the three architects works, but rather that the publication lacked a deeper understanding of spatial and conceptual structures of architecture in dealing with obvious similarities of appearance. Architects began to blindly imitate this style, like a new fad, that created a homogenous ubiquity. This publication caused several concequences, because instead of focusing on ideas, it categorized the physical observations to establish a generalized historical identity.

The mass spread of The International Style drew sharp criticism from several individuals that began to question its validity, critiquing the architecture as problematic because it failed to communicate with its users, nor make connections to the city and it’s history. While the criticism of modernity is valid, the blind plagiarism of the modernist’s work created an exaggerated lack of expression into architecture. To illustrate this idea, Mies’s Seagram Building can be compared to Skidmore, Owings and Merril’s (SOM) Lever House (figure 2) to understand the discrepancy in detail. The key difference in the buildings is the level of thinking behind the details, which sequentially informed the expression of the building. The Seagram building clearly communicates its formal logic that speaks to an era of the Industrial Revolution1. The era radically transformed everyday life into a culture of secular beliefs. For the first time in history, materialism has triumphed religion. Charles Jencks describes this phenomenon as a “pseudo-religion”, a new faith in industrialism as the vehicle towards the future.2 Mie’s work focuses on industrial materials and construction to express its era with careful detailing. The Seagram building clearly expresses this through an array of I-beams that ornament the façade yet signal a sense of structural and formal logic. However, in the three Lever House, SOM loss sight that resulted in creating the expression of simply a uniform massing. The originality of Mies’s intention was lost and any sense of detail and expression with it.

2.2 Postmodernism: Critique and Reaction

Industrialization revolutionized the way people lived, but at the same time caused a collapse of vernacular traditions. Strong vernacularism can only arise from limitations to breed unique architecture. Through globalization, this has been lost and subsequently modern architecture has been criticized for disregarding human needs and identity.3 Robert Venturi reacted against the modernist movement in the form of a manifesto in his book, “Complexity and Contradiction” in 1966. Famously known for saying, “less is a bore”, this acted like a rallying slogan, leading to the creation of numerous styles against modernist architecture. Many people characterize the movement as a return to classical revivalist forms to counter the homogeneity of the modernist movement.

1 William J. R. Curtis, Modern architecture since 1900 (London: Phaidon, 1996), 257-258. 2 Charles Jencks, What is post-modernism? (London: Academy Editions, 1996), 21. 3 William J. R. Curtis, 21-22.

However numerous other styles arose as an inherent need to challenge modernity. This would indicate that postmodernism more so follows a form of resistance rather than avant-garde. Jencks describes the Post-Modern era as a time period that “chooses us”, for the reason of the extreme distaste in modernism. In Jencks exact words, “Post-Modern has chosen use because it is so precise and ambiguous at the same time; accurate about the port we have left and richly suggestive of the destiny for which we are heading”. 4

Figure 2: Comparison between Seagram Building and Lever House Left: Lever House Completed, SOM. Completed 1952. Right: Segram Building, Mies Van der Rohe. Completed 1958.

2.3 Kitsch and Architectural Misinterpretation

After Venturi’s publication, numerous buildings began to ornament their facades with historical references in hopes of creating architecture with a richer vocabulary. However, this was the exact opposite of what Venturi stood for. He wrote in his manifesto, “I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning, or implicit function as well as the explicit function.”5 Instead, architects completely misinterpret his thinking, turned around and did the exact opposite. As a result, architecture like the Portland Building (Figure 3) marked a new turn of controversy in architecture. In the early 1980’s, the construction of office buildings flourished, attempting to using revivalist themes to compete against the out of fashion standardized modern buildings.6 This further pushed a superficial agenda into architecture, devaluing it into nothing more than a marketing tool.

4 Charles, Jencks, 15. 5 Robert Venturi, Complexity and contradiction in architecture (New York City: The Museum of Modern Art, 1977), 16. 6 William J. R. Curtis, 620.

Figure 3: Portland Building, Michael Graves. Completed 1982.

The hopes of architects to challenge modernity ended up becoming an antithesis to the exact reason they were criticizing modern architecture for: designing building with no significance to its user or context, and even worse; in poor taste. The majority of the work from the 1980’s became an exercise on form-making and pointless decoration.

The idea of honest architecture is somewhat counterintuitive. How is it that pagan temples of the Greeks and Romans are inherently classified as honest despite ornamentation? The reason is because their architecture was symbolic to their times, a clear expression of the cultural and social values of its epoch. Mies and Corbusier were no different in the work, expressing an idea about the Industrial Revolution and the machine through their work. Ornamentation has always played a role in expressing an idea in the context of the architecture. Venturi was ultimately looking for architecture that spoke to ornamentation because it has the power to express an idea about the building beyond a formal interpretation. From that viewpoint, he critiqued Mies because his buildings chose to ignore select issues and focused on specific context instead that allowed him to create such strong formal architecture.

7 Alain De Botton, The architecture of happiness (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006), 65.

ornamentation postmodernists used was somewhat a fallacy. In fact, Le

where Corbusier almost faced lawsuit.7 In the same way SOM misunderstood

The argument against the lack of

Corbusier was also artistically motivated, using expensive Swiss mortar to create

pure walls and designing inefficient flat roof that leaked extensively to the point

Mies to completely strip ornamentation, the improper use of historical references

resulted in poor taste because their historical references had no meaning other

than for the sake of countering modernism.

3.0 THE ARCHITECTURE OF LEBBEUS WOODS

3.1 Craft and Integrity in Architecture

With the premise of the postmodern context established, it is evident that Lebbeus was clearly also concerned with the problem of the architectural trends at the time that many other architects faced. The problem of this untruthful architecture created the loss of craft and integrity in the buildings (much like the way SOM failed to understand Mies work). These references to antiquity and classicism contributed no inherent value, and were also poorly constructed as well. Facades were entirely constructed out of cheap materials like stucco and wood for ornamental elements. These buildings notoriously fell into disrepair, often in less than a decade.8 Lebbeus’s work made a clear statement on his stance against this trend.

What is striking in Lebbeus work is not a because of an ecstatic vision of a science fiction fantasy but a clear representation of tectonic constraints in the way people build that postmodernist architects form the 1980s attempted to hide. Even with today’s construction logistics and methodologies, architects need to economize the construction process, whether it is due to restraints on budget, human skill, or available technology. The way architects have built since antiquity has relied on this concept; relying on patterns, and standardization. The future that Lebbeus imagines is no different. For many, the idea of tectonics is an inherent vulnerability, as it constrains the way people build. This is what makes Lebbeus’s work is incredibly inspirational, it paints a vivid imagination of striking formal qualities in architecture, by celebrating the components as an integral part of his architecture in his drawings and models. From a representational understanding, this concept is clearly communicated in all his drawings, where he extensively rendered his work in great detail. His drawings illustrated the sheen of the metal, showed all the joints, and even depicted loose components such as wires and ropes. He drew his work in a way that appeared to capture the architecture as if it was real, despite it being fictitious and impossible with today’s technological capacity.

Much like how the futurist Sant’Elia aspired for a future of dynamism and technology to move forward with modernity, Lebbeus’s work speaks to the way architecture will inherently be communicated with a relationship to its construction, the joinery. Unlike postmodernist attempts at avant-garde, his work is about the future, about progress, that envisions the way we built to become honest, and the components into an integral part of the way buildings communicate. In fact he often describes his drawings as buildable, but just that we lacked the current technology to make it happen. Lebbeus’ early works all share these characteristics like A-Project (figure x) that investigates technology integration into cities. In a lecture he articulated this thought clearly:

8 William J. R. Curtis, 605-606

“So I am building in my drawings, I’m building using the detailed manner that I have developed: I’m interested in the connection of parts, in the nature of surfaces, in the exact way elements come together.” 9

Figure 4: A-City: Sector 1576N, Quad 2nR, 1987.

3.3 Deconstructivism

A generalized way of looking at Lebbeus’s work is to categorize it as a part of the deconstructivist architectural style. His work is often published alongside other such categorized contemporaries such as Daniel Libeskind and Frank Ghery .10 Incredibly, once again Phillip Johnson was the one to push forward a new agenda, coining the term “deconstructivism” for the 1988 MoMA exhibition with Peter Eisennman, in a striking similar way to how he pushed forward the International Style. Johnson simply derived the style from superficial visual similarities, tying into Jacques Derrida in hopes of creating a new avant- garde, to which Lebbeus describes nothing more than a “marketing tactic”.11 Instead Lebbeus argues that these architects arose from the literary and linguistic theorists in which texts made multiple meanings of coding and references. Architects then applied this thinking into their work, and proposed architecture to be understood as a separate from the architect or client’s intention, but as an autonomous existence; that the meaning of architecture is to only be found within architecture itself.12 However, architects hastily began to

9 Peter Noever and Regina Haslinger, Architecture in transition: between deconstruction and new modernism (Munich: Prestel, 1991). 10 Nikos Angelos. Salingaros and Christopher Alexander, Anti-architecture and deconstruction (Solingen, Germany: Umbau-Verlag, 2007), 88.

11 Lebbeus Woods, "LIBESKIND’S MACHINES," December 11, 2009, accessed February 02, 2017, https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/libeskinds-machines/. 12 Lebbeus Woods, "LIBESKIND’S MACHINES," December 11, 2009, accessed February 02, 2017, https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/libeskinds-machines/.

criticize them, with emergent thinkers that joined Christopher Alexander’s idea of pattern language. They insisted that deconstructivism was the antithesis to architecture, that focused on abstraction only for the purpose of creating chaos and confusion and promotion of the academic bourgeois. 13

Figure 5: Guggenheim 1997. Frank Ghery. Paradigm of deconstructivist architecture.

It is arguable to say that Phillip Johnson is even partially responsible for trapping architecture into self-cannibalistic cycle, where architecture became a venture for trendy formal search in style. From the post-modernist movement, this mentality has propagated extensively into a search for a superficial obsession of novelty for sake of instigating avant-garde but in turn became argumentative for the sake of resistance. Lebbeus describes this architecture of resistance weak because, “it does not believe in progress but only to be effective in the present for those without a place to be.”14

3.4 Trends in Globalization

The superficial turn in architecture is part of a larger trend of globalization in the world, more specifically a product of a communication technology that allows a compression of the world into the size of a computer screen. National identities are hybridized and cultural boundaries become dissolved due to this effect. This also allowed for the rapid increase in trade through instant communication in the world. Communication has accelerated global capitalization.15 Such an interconnected information system has created a new global product: Information. This indeed has become the ultimate capitalistic product which also brings further confirmation behind the compulsion of architects rushing to categorize buildings into styles; dismantling architecture into

13 Nikos Angelos. Salingaros and Christopher Alexander, Anti-architecture and deconstruction (Solingen, Germany: Umbau-Verlag, 2007), 89. 14 Lebbeus, Woods, "Lebbeus Woods THOUGHTS ON ARCHITECTURE OF RESISTANCE,”, accessed February 2, 2017, http://www.lebbeuswoods.net/LW-ResistanceText2.pdf

15 Charles, Jencks, 51-52.

superficial and trivial concepts. Lebbeus find this as the reason architecture has lost its inherent value:

Lebbeus relates global consumerism to the concept of utopia, because information has become widely accessible to everyone. A materialistic focus that emerged has erased any social aspirations that Lebbeus hopes for. This mentality is more evident when Lebbeus takes on a new in areas of tension and conflict.

3.5 War and Architecture

War and genocide is one of the extreme consequences of globalization, mainly described as a result of the pressure created from internal insecurity against each other because of interdependence. One example of this is the emergence of the Bosnian war from the dissolution of the Yugoslavian Republic. The war turned into mass genocide, focusing on total elimination instead of victory. These circumstances impacted Lebbeus significantly, propelling his work forward into a new direction. To develop his own narrative, he developed a new mature focus, creating his manifesto on war and architecture. This progress in his work no longer only focused on a pure tectonic and formal stand point against postmodernism, but against war and destruction as well, starting from the context of the three year Sarajevo siege.

His project in Sarajevo proposed a reconstruction of the city, in a way to address the destruction that people faced form the war. He categorized three principles in post-war conditions that impacted the way cities build. The first method was to restore to the pre-war condition, the second to demolish the damaged buildings and propose entirely new works. These two ideas inherently indicated the societal need to return to normalcy. His final principle was one he came up with himself, to integrate scars or scabs of the war into the architecture, as a memory of the war, and a foothold to move forward. 17

The works Underground Berlin in 1988 (Figure x) and Berlin Free Zone in 1990 is another major project that explores the social-political grounding in his work. He imagined an underground community of civic spaces, free from

16 Lebbeus Woods, "UTOPIA?," October 11, 2009, , accessed February 02, 2017, https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/10/11/utopia/. 17 Lebbeus Woods, "WAR AND ARCHITECTURE: Three Principles," December 15, 2011, accessed February 02, 2017, https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2011/12/15/war-and- architecture-three-principles/. /

“ we don’t find work that envisions a social world widely improved by

architecture. No utopias of the sort that dot the map of architectural history up

through the post-Modern era of the 70s and 80s of the last century. Today, their

aspirations seem to have retreated before the advance of capitalism and liberal

democracy.” 16

constraints that only saw fit for human needs, developing a new kind of community and even mold for a new way of life. Through drawing, he describes that for him, they bring to project to life only by carefully drawing the “thin metal plates”, and “delicate instruments”, there would be a recognition of the contextual awareness.18 His series extensively continued to develop architectural solutions to social issues in context of crises for the next decade.

Ultimately, Lebbeus woods imagined a new social responsibility for architects, saying that architecture has the power to shape cities. The globalized trends have diminished the role of architects in the profession, in which Lebbeus hopes to inspire, and evocate through his drawing in extreme contexts. Because he believes architects largely ignore violet transformative environments like his work grounded on political walls and wars, he feels that architects should not be afraid to step out of this domain.

Figure 6: Lebbeus’ later works that focused on war zones, areas of conflict and reconstructing from destruction.

Left: Drawing of his Solution in Sarajevo, 1993. Right: Underground Berlin, 1988.

18 Peter Noever and Regina Haslinger, Architecture in transition: between deconstruction and new modernism (Munich: Prestel, 1991), 137-128.

4.0 SUMMARY

One of the most important ideas to Lebbeus Woods was building worlds through his drawings; that architecture could shape the environment and the people in it. In a nonprescriptive way, he put great effort into his illustrations to first challenging the postmodern condition, and expanded into a more social- political vision on the role of architecture. A hint to this was his involvement in the set design for Aliens 3 before the director chose to back out. Universal studios plagiarized his designs for a set in the film 12 Monkeys, in which he rightfully filed a lawsuit against (figure 1995). This illustrates the capability behind his drawings to evoke a sense of emotion (although not in the way Lebbeus intended the drawing to be represented). Lebbeus’s Woods was an original thinker and architect, that proposed clear innovative ideas in an era of ambiguous and self-damaging thinking.

Figure 7: A comparison between the plagiarized film 12 Monkeys and Lebbeus’s work. Right: Neomechanical Tower (Upper) Chamber by Lebbeus Woods, 1987. Left: Interrogation scene in 12 Monkeys, 1995.

(END)

5.0 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Botton, Alain D. The architecture of happiness. New York: Pantheon Books, 2006.

This book provided a contextual history to ornamentation in argument of the value of “happiness” in ornamentation. The information was studied in regards to key influential modernists to provide insight on their ornamentation values. This is written not by an architect, and provides some insight in a more contemporary era.

Curtis, William J. R. Modern architecture since 1900. London: Phaidon, 1996. Curtis explains in great detail and context, the majority of the modern and postmodern architecture buildings, theories and context. It explains key theories and figures in the period, written in the 1990s. The majority of the history presented in this paper uses information form this text.

Jencks, Charles. What is post-modernism? London: Academy Editions, 1996. Charles Jencks introduces the context of modernism and establishes a critique against modernist architecture, and an attempt to identify and reasons of postmodernist architecture, published a decade after Venturi’s work, in the first edition. It provides a societal context as well, and attempts to inform the reader about postmodern thinking.

Lebbeus, Woods. "Lebbeus Woods THOUGHTS ON ARCHITECTURE OF RESISTANCE." Accessed February 2, 2017. http://www.lebbeuswoods.net/LW-ResistanceText2.pdf

This essay is written by Lebbeus as a commentary on trends and styles in architecture, that govern the progress, making comparisons to the avant-garde. The shortsighted nature of an architecture of resistance is primarily what he comments on, and what it really means for architects to resist architecture.

Noever, Peter, and Regina Haslinger. Architecture in transition: between deconstruction and new modernism. Munich: Prestel, 1991. This was a series of lectures that was collected into a book about various leaders that were thought to be at the vanguard of deconsructivism. Lebbeus’s lecture provides an overall insight of his thinking in later works.

Salingaros, Nikos Angelos., and Christopher Alexander. Anti-architecture and deconstruction. Solingen, Germany: Umbau-Verlag, 2007. This book primarily focuses on the critique of deconstructivism, and postmodern thinking form Derrida’s writing. It is focused on a systematic interpretation of architecture influenced by Christopher Alexander.

Venturi, Robert. Complexity and contradiction in architecture. New York City: The Museum of Modern Art, 1977. Robert Venturi provides a strong argument against modernism, introducing the idea of context that modernism lacks. This text as used as a mean of insight to understand the context that derived into the post-modern era as well as reading into the original work provided his exact intentions.

Woods, Lebbeus. "LIBESKIND’S MACHINES." December 11, 2009. Accessed February 02, 2017.

https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/libeskinds-machines/.

Lebbeus kept a blog he continuously updated for several years that disclosed his many positions of architecture, the global context and how they impacted his works. These blog posts are highly informative of the intentions behind his work.

Woods, Lebbeus. "UTOPIA?" October 11, 2009. Accessed February 02, 2017. https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/10/11/utopia/.

The text contains Lebbeus opinion on various ideas about the globalization culture, capitalism and the architects role in today’s society.

Woods, Lebbeus. "ARCHITECTURE: the solid state of thought [complete]." December 09, 2010. Accessed February 02, 2017. https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2010/12/10/architecture-the-solid- state-of-thought-complete/.

This blog post is a part of a blog post series that provides contextual insight on his work . in Sarajevo, and thinking that derived his shift into reconstructing architecture

Woods, Lebbeus. "WAR AND ARCHITECTURE: Three Principles." December 15, 2011. Accessed February 02, 2017. https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2011/12/15/war-and-architecture- three-principles/.

This is the second continuation of a series of blog posts that contextualize his work and thinking.