338 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in PedagogyNeil Leach, London, United Kingdom
I just wanted to make a comment on the last paper. I detected some references to
Jean-François Lyotard, the critique of the post-modern tradition, the breakdown of the
grand narrative and these sorts of minor narratives that are appearing, which of course
has been the sort of standard paradigm people have accepted; and I want to be a bit
provocative here and suggest that if you pick up on Freddie Jamieson’s thinking, you
could actually find an almost opposite argument going on there, that in contrast to
the kind of homogenising space of late capitalism we are getting these kinds of calls
for difference through these kinds of alternative approaches. But his argument is not
actually resisting the marketplace of late capitalism: it is a product that feeds the
marketplace of late capitalism. In other words, we are not actually breaking away from
homogenisation; we are actually becoming increasingly homogenised, in the sense of
marketplaces out there. I will just simply put my experience to you, and maybe it will
help to show some examples of looking at education. I curated a show in Beijing last
year, to which we invited twenty-four schools from all over the world. Strangely enough
there is a kind of process of universalisation that is surprisingly everywhere apparent,
wherever you are, even in China. And two of the possible reasons for that are, firstly,
the way in which we, and the tools that are being used, Maya etc., are leading to a
kind of universality in expression that is somehow unavoidable, and secondly, that
there is a kind of marketplace of people who are teaching. For example George, who
we heard this morning, has taught in Harvard, in Princeton, and so on, and I teach
all over the place, so I think that there is this kind of networking of educators that
has led to a kind of surprising homogenisation in a certain sort of way. So I think
I would be more dialectical about that process and think more about the reciprocal
processes at work; and while I appreciate the subtleties of your paper, I suspect that
one could even be provocative and argue almost the opposite way.
Inês Salpico, Lisbon, Portugal
But don’t you think that the universality you are referring to might also in some way
freed from an ability to cope with the need to affirm one’s identity and to assess
one’s individual values?
Neil Leach, London, United Kingdom
I do not know. I think that the kind of dialectical approach to connections and
separations is to say they exist absolutely. You cannot have separation without con-
nection and you cannot have connection without separation; and therefore identity
and distinctiveness are, actually, from an intellectual point of view, folded into their
opposite. This is a kind of provocation. I think that one has to be aware that it is not
quite that simple, that identity is not something that is so discrete. The more universal
the world becomes, the more we begin to see individual differences, and the more we
see individual differences the more the universalising of things become apparent.
Dimitris Papalexopoulos, Athens, Greece
I have just a few words to say on that. I think that this is much more complicated,
and I wanted to mention the theory that says we have to distinguish between identity
and personality.