Junk for Code

living wrongly in modernity

Do you have that sense of living in a house that is one's home but is not really home?

More deeply, do you experience a sense of wrong living?

I do. It occured to me as I walked into a city bookshop to try and buy Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others. (No luck. It has to ordered from the US and it will take six weeks.)

As I walked north through the city's side streets to Hindley Street, I became increasingly aware that I was livng a modern urban life that generated a poverty of genuine experiences. I have a sense of a disintegrated urban life.

There was little sense of joy, adventure, growth, transformation on the streets. They felt dead. Full of cars. The concrete urban spaces create a profound sense of discomforture and unease. The heritage Leigh Street, which was restored and marketed as a thriving, dynamic ands active precinct, was dead.

Does modern architecture embody any hope for a better kind of life? It designs home and gives it form.

It occured to me that I live in an expensive trendy inner-city apartment that celebrates its modernness (innovation) against the tradition of the heritage cottages. But a house is not just a work of art. We have to use ithe building and dwell in it.

Yet the building has no sustainability built into it. It is all air-conditioned. There is no solar power. There is no recycling of storm water.

Apart from the built-in security against the anxiety created by the violence of the chaotic street, this building has no sense of the contradictions, dissonances and tensions of modern life.

And this is in a city that is on water restrictions,located in the driest state in the driest continent, and dependent on an increasingly salty river for its drinking water.

It is living wrongly. It is a wrong sort of life.

Then I came across this from from Adorno's Minima Moralia:

"Dwelling in the proper sense, is now impossible.....Wrong life cannot be lived rightly." (pp. 38-39)

And most of my income is now going to pay off a mortgage for a life lived wrongly.

This whole city is living wrongly. I have an uncanny sense that I am living a life that has been imposed upon us by the socio-economic process of modern capitalist civilization. Our architecture has been shaped by, and is a part of, modernity.

It is not a critique of modernity. It's modernist culture is complicit. Dwelling fades into the distance.

Our culture is one of forgetfullness.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at July 7, 2003 05:34 PM | TrackBack