Desperation

"For once and for all, I am going to do this," says Michael. The bakery shop outside his house was closed so he has nothing to eat today. He always eats only a piece of bread for dinner because he does not want to go to bed felling uncomfortably full. He is holding a knife in his hand although he simply does not know what to do with it. Suddenly, moving images from his dream begin to appear. It was not long ago that he was a man with a chronic nightmare. His life has never been worse since he found out what he wanted to do in life: Everything. He kept a journal that he has been writing every morning when he gets out of bed. He records all the dreams he has; all of them including every little detail he could remember such as the colour of a lady’s skirt who was in the background of the scene in which he was engaging. He never understands why people dream. “How important is the sequence, not only in life (or things people perceive as life) but also everything else,” he scratches his head with his other hand which is still available and then rubs his own right shoulder. He insatiably wants to find out because the answer could be something he has always been looking for throughout his life. He also believes that "this reason" is what other people are also looking for. With a kitchen knife in his hand – it is not s a sharp knife at all as he remembers he could not use it even to cut a red pepper – he begins to think about the past; the day when he had good memories with his parents, who are no longer with him. Michael was a good student, until when he found out that he does not want to be a student. The depression (and this is not a complete sentence). He somehow knows that the knife will cut though his wrist if he pushes it hard enough. One day he dreamed of a big black whole inside an onion he was pealing. The black holes sucked him inside and refused to let him out. In the black space he met another Michael, a worry-free Michael. He could not touch him and for some reason his mouth disappeared. He could not use it to say anything but he did not feel like anything was missing -- that was the power of dreams. “Nothing matters more.” With swirling clouds inside his head, he reckons, again, that he does not want to be expected to live his life the way other famous people have. He wants his life to be his and his alone; although he knows so well from his psychology class that human beings absorb all kind of external influences to help to construct their own identity. He does not know why identity is such an important concept for a man (or a woman). “What if everybody has no identity?” he sincerely asks. The identity is what gets people to discriminate and hate each other. It is constructed though various people's perception towards the way they experience the world. Sometimes one very tiny little thing could change the way a person think of other person, or the entire race associated with that particular person, and bang, a war begins. He thinks for a moment and then sips a cold coffee which he made for himself a few hours ago. The depression (here is another incomplete sentence). The taste of the coffee is, of course, awful (if not disgusting) but it reminds him of the time when life was not always pleasant. He never understands, neither, why people always expect him to be what they want him to be. He remembers one morning when he woke up with a great idea about a "universal social theory." The theory explains: "when people get very insecure about their positions, they will superimpose their expectations on a person who might or might not have anything to do with the situation. The role of that person is to represent the insecure people and to die for, if possible, for those insecure people." He calls it a "victim theory." This story reminds him of the time when he was a middle person between two groups of classmates who hated each other. Simply because he was a middle person, he was asked by both parties to represent them in the psychological fight between them. He did not like what he had to do but he had no other choices. His hand started to shake and he began to feel fatigue. He, however, cannot but continue to hold it as firm as he can in order to prove that he has the gut to do it. He, again, allows his mind to travel in space. He feels that in that particular space, there is no time. In a space where time does not mean anything, he feels independent. He is convinced that time is just a "bad form of social construct." He believes that time makes people feel like they all have to try to get a hold of other people's belonging, both physical and non-physical, to seize the moment. Michael’s girlfriend just gave birth to a baby boy. He and his girlfriend never get married, although he knows that for his girlfriend the most important thing in her life is to make sure that other people “think” that she has an official husband. He, however, does not believe in that. He has been victim of the society for a long time and does not want to live his life to just make other “feel good” about their public perception. He starts to let loose all his beliefs at this point. He knows that he will not kill himself but if there is a moment where he can let himself go, it would be, he thinks, this moment. “Are you with me?” Michael feels guilty that he let this beautiful baby boy into this crazy world; but he never regrets it because he does not believe in the past. Similar to the way in which he thinks life should be seen, he understands the reflection on the knife he is holding is unreal. He wishes that no one has ever invented a reflective surface. His name does not have to be Michael; why his parents wanted to call him Michael when he was born? Back to the identity question, blaming it all on the invention of the mirror, he believes that if no one knows what they look like, they will not create a set of rules to differentiate the beautiful from the ugly – simply because everyone would be afraid of being ugly himself. There will be no qualitative judgement based on things that cannot be corrected (right?). Suddenly, everything turns into a white blank space where there is no boarder that limits the scene whatsoever. In front of him hang a big banner "The Victim Theory," which takes him to another series of idiosyncratic hallucination. It goes on to explain why he was not happy at all for the past two years. In being the middle person, not only must he try to mediate the situation by absorbing everything from both side, but he also had to deal with his own difficulty in not being able to say anything loudly about how he believed the situation should end. “What if the dream is indeed the reality and what he sees as reality has been a dream all along?” another hyper-philosophical question comes to mind of a person who never believes in something as shallow as the truth. Not only does he not believe that anyone on the planet could define trust, but he also sees truth as something not be unravelled. He thinks it is something to be buried under layers of social landscape of things (although, as always, he does not know what the “things” are). Here comes another “thing”: the social networks. His problem is not complicated at all. Not very long ago, everything he posted online to make other know what he was doing was misinterpreted. As he was, still, a middle person – a victim – everything he posted on the social network, including something as simple as "I am very happy today" had been interpreted by both sides to benefit their own political agendas. He does not like the taste of the coffee at all but he continues to drink. He begins to think about a novel by Dostoevsky he read last year. Crime and Punishment was not at all, to him, a difficult piece to read. For some reason, he felt that he could understand everything very well and know clearly what he has to do after he finished reading it. He has a crazy idea that something along the same line could just happen now and that he could escape from the situation. He recalls that he had so many glasses of cranberry juice after he finished reading Crime and Punishment. Don’t ask why; there wasn’t any reason to look for. He then asks himself "why do people want to get involved in others' affairs: this does not make any sense." Still, he does not feel any better. In many novels, when authors get to the point where they do not know where they could go on with the plot, they makes up something crazy, like having a leading role who should be dead having a spontaneous combustion. Nothing makes sense in the reality, but people who read that novel do not feel like there is anything wrong with the story. It is quite interesting to think about how people do not feel that dreams and novels are similar in this sense. It is almost like they both are places where real people can throw themselves into the sea of surrealism, where they can believe whatever they want to believe and enjoy whatever comes ad hoc. It has been 3 hours since he picked up the knife and knew nothing what he wanted to do with it. The room gets darker and darker. The kitchen does not smell good as someone left pans and dishes unclean on the sink. He has been hearing water dropping from the leaking faucet that has been broken for a long time; but guess what, the sound of dropping water, which has been very consistent, helps him to meditate. He finally puts down the knife and thought to himself, "this is not going to solve any problem." He imagines himself to be a person in a novel. He starts to think whether or not he is the only "real person" in the world and others are illusions that were created to treat him ruthlessly the way he has been treated. "Why problems are problems" he asks. The story should not end here.

Why I write

The debates about the existence of theory and its dialectical relationship with the practice of reality have influenced provocative thoughts of philosophy throughout the past several hundred years. From the age of industrialization onward until the late twentieth century, tension of modernity, rooted in rapid changes of the society, had inevitably tied theory with practice since there has been a need for the society to implement ideological thoughts that would, hopefully, rectify the problems of modern life namely the emerging superficial culture leading to the retrogression of our ‘perception of value.’ Without the existence of the ‘idea of theory,’ one could not even speculate that theory has run its course. Theory allows people in that time the possibility to posit and intelligently discuss such propositions however untenable they may be. The only reason people come up with the idea of theory is simply due to the stage of abnormality in the geographical entity where a philosopher belong to; hence, every theory owes its formation to the tension exists in the society. We cannot think of theory as separate from history and criticism. The applicability and its validity of a theory could only be validated in conjunction with its time of existence. Criticism is the third element – and probably the most important element – without it one has no way to navigate himself to the truth. Criticism is the main trust of ‘Critical Theory’ which we are reading in this summer school. Nevertheless, my reason for studying theory is different from the mainstream thoughts about theory. I read theory because I would like to seek my ‘way out’ of the theoretical regime that confines us with a series of concepts that are simply too idealist and impractical. I regard practice of reality an autonomous role that intuitively grow from great minds of theoreticians from which I should learn to transcend my critical thoughts towards the perceptional of value. That is, I do not take theory as a point of departure for any further developmental process of thinking; instead, I use theory as a historical base, as it is indeed something people has already laid out the foundation of thoughts, to instigate a rationalized idea that is appropriate to the particular time and space to which I belong. What is important than the question ‘why I study theory?’ is ‘how I study theory’ for which by critical reading method is the answer. Whether there is still a place of theory in the practice of contemporary lifestyle is still an important question for me to find out.

Taipei, Taiwan 2004

Why did Bakhtin make Doestovsky such a ‘big deal’?

Why did Bakhtin make Doestovsky such a ‘big deal’?

The aim of this short response to Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis of Dostoevsky’s literature is to draw some attentions to a few key concepts of which we indeed, in advance, need to understand their deep meaning and interpretation embarking on mission to tackle and unfold the intricacy such analysis dealing not only with the unorthodox characteristic of Dostoevsky’s literary techniques, but also Bakhtin’s fundamental yet absurdly complex study of the ambiguous relationship between a man and his world (and the ‘threshold’ between the man and his world). There is a caveat to begin: We are reading a mid-twentieth century analysis of a nineteenth century literature; hence, what we are trying to achieve is not to ‘invent’ the narratives of the narratives, but to simply understand the basic system of interpretation of pre-Existentialism classic texts through the eyes of an hermeneutic rhetorical literature critic.

Then, why did Bakhtin make Doestovsky such a ‘big deal’? The trust of Bakhtin’s argument is that Dostovsky has demonstrated the way to potentially find out about the infinite capability of a man through the process of the reiteration – over and over – of the unfinalizability through the polyphonic narrative as the principal technique. Through the use of various different voices of different arguments and traits, Doestovsky creates a ‘dialectical moment’ (in the literary sense, of course) that allows the readers to explore the infinite corridor of possibilities. Doestovsky’s advocates the very relationship that every person is influenced by other; therefore, the representation of dialectic through polyphonic narrative is by all means the honest symbolization of a very human nature, transcending Doestovsky’s literature to the much higher plateau of the philosophical writing.

There seem to be a number of distinguished features in Dostoevsky’s literature. Here is what we could find merely from Bakhtin’s analysis: Dostoevsky’s novel is not a traditional novel as it does not lead the readers to follow a somewhat linear and predictable storyline in the ‘traditional way.’ Instead, Dostoevsky writes in such a way that he himself, as the author, reveals the different side of human psyche by creating a so-called hero who does not by any measure exhibit himself as a hero in a traditional sense whose action could be predicted through his pre-conceived role, his constructed consciousness, and his homological dimension. In other words, a hero in Dostoevsky’s is not a hero of the world of the author as reflections to the embracing of the world of the readers. A hero here does not conceive himself as an object of the world which other people might have thought hitherto that it is in fact the realm for which he has been created; instead, a hero solely cares only about how he has ‘come’ to be and how he sees himself truthfully – which might sound as existentialistic as it may. Therefore, if we were to actually ‘read’ Dostoevsky’s work, say, Crime and Punishment, we will be poised to be aware of such literary unorthodoxy and to not try to subconsciously foment ourselves to have got succumbed into the trap to believe that what is going on – some could be totally random and outrage – is one of the linear types of expository narration of a conventional nineteenth century literature. Indeed, Bakhtin, as he denotes in the title of his book, finds ‘problems’ in the work of Doestovsky’s – but only that these problems lead to a full discovery of a new form of literary representation that is expressive of the self-consciousness. In Dostoevsky’s own words, he claims that he is a realist whose aim is to cultivate the ‘utter realism’ through literature that seeks to instigate the man-in-man project. This is very interesting because this bold claim is supported by the rigor of Dostoevsky’s non-fictional reason and instances – that of similar to what we know today as psychology.

Here we could also raise a critical question: What is wrong with the traditional literature? Whereas the traditional ‘normal’ (as opposed to the abnormalism, perhaps, of Dostoevsky’s in this context) literature is a form of linguistic performance whose aim is to provide the meaning through accessible narrative, that is, the narrative that has a certain predictable plot pre-made to be followed; Dostoesky’s story does not have a plot. Therefore, there is nothing wrong with the normal literature but what makes Dostoevsky’s so special – also in a quasi-problematic sense – is its very quality in being polyphonic and dialogic, portraying the absolute confession of the author from the deeper level of the souls.

I have to admit that I still do not quite understand the implication of the word ‘hero’ being used throughout the writing of Bakhtin. By any means, it seems nonsense to think that this hero is “a person who is admired for having done something very brave or having achieved something great” (definition from Cambridge Dictionary) since, in our sensibility, there is no way we could see a person which such idiosyncratic characteristic as a central figure in Doetovsky’s work “someone who have achieved something great.” Nevertheless, the definition of ‘something great’ here is neither clear nor direct. If the primary goal of a man is to understand himself, then it could be the case – or one could simply make the case – that it is the epitome of one’s own conception of man in man that makes this central figure a person with a great achievement that makes him a hero.

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My Book: Shanghai Contemporary The Politics of Built Form

There is a book that I would like to recommend to all of you. Actually, it's my own book called "Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form." I wrote it some years ago when I was a student at MIT. The title of the book is indeed the title of my thesis. I expanded my thesis into a book and published it, yes. Here is one of the comments about the book:

"....Writing complex history and politics is definitely not easy. Reading several of Non Arkaraprasertkul's publications both in English and Thai in the last few years has proven that it is possible to make these topics both interesting and informative. His latest book Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form is not an exception.His curiosity about places, peoples and cultures is extraordinary and matched so well with his capacity to `map' complexities of history, urban geography, physicality and politics with a simple discourse that is easy to follow. He convinces us to see multiple layers of local realities beyond the `western' perspectives on the global city of Shanghai. He describes the making of this cosmopolitan city can complete in a globalized economic context despite its fragmented urban fabric. It has undergone significant crisis, through challenges from semi-colonialism, socio-political collapse by war and lack of coordination in the planning process. Interestingly, the author suggests that the selling point of Shanghai's tourism in the early twentieth century was the elegant image that replicated `western' neo-classical styles. However, he proposes that a new Chinese identity can actually be enhanced through a mixture of diversified sub-cultures on Shanghai's streetscapes. This book clearly points out that the absence of human scale in the city streetscapes can diminish contact, the sense of security and the pedestrian energy level of the city. In general, it answers two simple questions: how a `global metropolis', in particular Shanghai, is defined and transformed, and what is to be expected from its changing images or representations. It is therefore worthwhile to read this book especially as a case study for those policymakers, urban planners, urban designers, architects, academics and scholars who would be keen to learn more about urbanism of the global cities through different lenses in order to see hidden dimensions. The Chinese largest urban `global village' of Shanghai has more historical complexity and dynamic development than arguably any other world city in this century. For those wishing to broaden their perspectives on all these issues, I highly recommend this book...."

Dr. Polladach Theerapappisit, Lecturer and Course Advisor, School of Social Sciences The University of Western Sydney, Australia

You call download the book here (I know it's quite expensive to buy one):
http://oxford.academia.edu/NonArkaraprasertkul/books

Non's Stuff on Academia. Edu

http://oxford.academia.edu/NonArkaraprasertkul

Meanwhile, please take a look at this link for my articles and architectural writings. I will try to update this blog as soon as possible (have yet to secured time to do so but I will definitely). Thanks for your patient and your love of architecture criticism!!

Best wishes,
Non