1st Edition
Architecture in the Age of Pornography Reading Alain Badiou
Architecture, and its pedagogy in the academy, is dominated by the technology of image production that veils the ‘naked power’ behind its operation. It conforms to the principles of cultural logic of the society of the spectacle, consistent with neoliberal capitalism. The problem with this dominant pedagogy is that it violates the fundamental ethical imperative, putting architecture in direct contradiction with the ‘common good’. In addition, it has let architecture enter the brothel of pornographic capitalism which turns every object into an object of obscene gratification of the senses.
In this book, Nadir Lahiji adopts Alain Badiou’s thesis from The Pornographic Age to demonstrate that contemporary architecture is in absolute complicity with the pornographic present. The traits that Badiou identifies in this age are manifestly visible in architectural surfaces which are subordinated to the same ‘regime of images’. Similarly to Badiou’s political indictments of the society which has given rise to the pornographic present, the book condemns the architecture that has lent its service to the same society with a license to consummate its transgression to better cater to the imperative of the ‘regime of images’.
Transposing the conceptual categories in Badiou’s analysis to the critique of architecture’s pornographic turn in contemporary society, the book constructs a conceptual framework by which to demonstrate the specific manifestations of pornography in building. The book is aimed at architecture students at higher graduate and post-graduate levels.
PART I: PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHTS ON PORNOGRAPHY
1. Visibility of the invisible: Pornography and utilitarianism
2. Profanation and pornography
3. The society of pornography
4. Pornography and the society of spectacle
PART II: BADIOU AND THE PORNOGRAPHIC PRESENT
5. The fetish of democracy
6. The reign of the image and the phallic fetish of our time
7. The brothel and the Chief of Police
PART III: THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE PORNOGRAPHIC AGE
8. Appearance and Schein
9. Building between nudity and clothing
10. Digital tattooists, or, the new criminals
11. The obscene surplus of drapery
12. Veiling and unveiling
13. Pornography and exhibition- value
PART IV: ARCHITECTURE AND POLITICAL TRUTH: CRITIQUE OF PORNOGRAPHIC CAPITALISM
14. Utilitarianism, happiness, and the use of pleasure
15. Philosophy and happiness
16. Political truth, ideology, and the camera obscura
17. Architecture, capitalism, and the pornographic apparatus
Biography
Nadir Lahiji is an architect. He is most recently the author of Architecture, Philosophy and the Pedagogy of Cinema (Routledge, 2021), Architecture or Revolution: Emancipatory Critique after Marx (Routledge, 2020), and An Architecture Manifesto: Critical Reason and Theories of a Failed Practice (Routledge, 2019). His previous publications include, among others, Adventures with the Theory of the Baroque and French Philosophy and the co-authored The Architecture of Phantasmagoria: Specters of the City.
"It seems a cliché to say that we live in pornographic times. But Nadir Lahiji probed beyond this cliché and has given us a concrete assessment of what the descent into pornography has cost us as a society. As he shows with his typical lucidity and profundity, the pornography of our age has eliminated the very space in which we could come together. Lahiji has written a stunning account of what the pornographic invasion has cost us."
Todd McGowan, University of Vermont, USA
"More than a critique, Nadir Lahiji’s book is a fierce condemnation of contemporary architecture, not only for being wholly complicit with the regime of images that characterizes our current age—a regime that Alain Badiou has identified as essentially pornographic—but for providing its structural support."
Alex Ling, Western Sydney University, Australia
