ZK101 Structure Note example – Purity

nigelesque

And here is the second, about Purity. This is not really a structure note. It has been produced as a flow of ideas, some familiar, some new. The core applies the importance of purity in modernity to historic buildings. The purpose is to explore the topic for a possible journal article. I suppose my question (leaving content aside) is what you would do next.

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20240802-164112 Ü1 Purity in Modernity

tags: #Modernity #Latour #Purity

Latour latour-b-1993-we have never been modern - annotated.pdf

• Latour opposes purity and hybridity.
• 066: ‘The moderns indeed declare that technology is nothing but pure instrumental mastery, science pure Enframing and pure Stamping [Das Ge-Stell], that econo- mics is pure calculation, capitalism pure reproduction, the subject pure consciousness. Purity everywhere! They claim this, but we must be careful not to take them at their word, since what they are asserting is only half of the modern world, the work of purification that distils what the work of hybridization supplies.' x-devonthink-item://363E3333-6EC5-402D-9A4A-2AFC18E4AA60?page=71&annotation=Underline&x=13&y=300

In Architecture

• 'Second, postcolonial thinking challenges with multiplicity and hybridity the tyranny of singular narratives of modernity. Rather, it encourages alternative interpretations of modernism and legitimizes other modern- isms originating outside its canonized loci. Rather than expect purity and authentic- ity, postcolonial thought accepts hybrids.' x-devonthink-item://1F6B1F6C-49DB-43EF-BF40-DB93603FDD0A?page=101&start=144&length=11&search=alternative

walter-n-2017-thesis 001-311.pdf

• 'Following Latour, this thesis calls for a recalibration away from a particularly modern concern with the purities of authorship, style or period to a valuing of the heterodox, the hybrid and the composite. In the past those purities have combined with an aesthetic- historical understanding to toxic effect, blighting the life of old buildings and stifling contemporary creativity since, as Thoreau observes in his epigraph, ‘the moderns cannot imagine so much as exists’. One manifestation of this peculiarly modern rigidity, the preservation sensibility, remains active and is clearly visible...' x-devonthink-item://604A0978-BE5B-494C-B6EE-05417E3E8EF7?page=228&start=2143&length=3&search=the

Kaufman

• Kaufman, Amy S. 2014. ‘Purity’. In Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, edited by Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz, 1st ed., 199–206. Boydell and Brewer Limited. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781787441422. emery-utz-2014
• 211: Throughout modernity, the Middle Ages ‘has represented a period of innocence and moral purity to writers and artists’. x-devonthink-item://D1B38C87-0D0C-4623-B7D0-0A8A09209AC7?page=210&annotation=Underline&x=88&y=317
• 211: nostalgia for the “unspoiled” past
• purity as a key facet attached to medievalism – e.g. racial purity
• 205: ‘But those who believe their own propaganda about history and purity hope that their vision of an unspoiled past – a world of whiteness, chivalry, masculinity, and monolithic Christian faith – will be the paradise of the future.' x-devonthink-item://D1B38C87-0D0C-4623-B7D0-0A8A09209AC7?page=216&annotation=Underline&x=88&y=236

Ruskin – ruskin-j-1903-v03–05-Modern Painters v1-5.pdf

• (rocks) Their third characteristic. Purity in decomposition. x-devonthink-item://937A3382-34E7-461B-9DD9-91B68FBE6352?page=1921&annotation=Underline&x=402&y=495
  • Links to Romanticisation of decay

ICCROM-2005-ICS03_ReligiousHeritage_en - annotated.pdf

• pollution and purity – also in Ruskin

taylor-c-1989-Sources of the self.pdf

• Taylor, commenting on Williams: 'the exclusive focus on obligation in much modern moral philosophy has its own peculiar motivation in the attachment to a hypergood (as I would call it) of purity'. x-devonthink-item://632A0162-3F86-4628-9AC0-B98B5A1B3A74?page=97&annotation=Underline&x=121&y=215

Bauman bauman-z-2000-Liquid Modernity.pdf

• The security of purity: 'our contemporary obsessive concern with pollution and purification, with our tendency to identify danger to personal safety with the invasion of ‘foreign bodies’ and to identify safety unthreatened and secure with purity.' x-devonthink-item://C6F1E8EF-EE61-4F54-9DF6-AA91285D9751?page=120&annotation=Underline&x=77&y=97
• The cost of purity: 'The dreamt-of purity of the Heritage Park community could be gained only at the price of disengagement and broken bonds.' x-devonthink-item://C6F1E8EF-EE61-4F54-9DF6-AA91285D9751?page=121&annotation=Underline&x=77&y=140
• Purity lamented: ‘Like so many other modern undertakings of public powers, the dream of purity has been in the era of liquid modernity deregulated and privatized; acting on that dream has been left to private – local, group – initiative.' x-devonthink-item://C6F1E8EF-EE61-4F54-9DF6-AA91285D9751?page=190&annotation=Underline&x=77&y=495

In Heritage

• The purist concept of the "pure" doctrine as represented by the Venice Charter, with its clear separation of past and present, the clarity of the instructions for action, has been overlaid by the syncretic model of the many possibilities, the many methods and solutions. lipp-w-2024-60 years.pdf
• Gothicism: ‘One of the catalysts for the formation of The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) was the concern of Morris and others about the implications of the restoration of churches back to some previous state of Gothic purity, mostly a state that was imagined or based on conjecture.' worthing bond-2008

Threads of an Argument

• If purity is always to be opposed to pollution, what is the nature of heritage pollution? It is the architect who alters a historic building, the community that engages creatively with its building.
• Preservation by museumification is a bid for purity – the glass case of the museum (or the ‘crystal palace’ of Thomas Hardy) is there to exclude pollutants.
• Question: Is there any commonality between right-wing immigration purity and preservation purity? Both stem from a common anxiety. They meet in nationalism – central to the development of C19 conservation (Köln Cathedral, Pevsner’s The Englishness of English Art? etc.).
• One implication is that Change is configured as pollution, and the move is made from definition to exclusion.
• Medievalism aligns this with holiness.
• Question: Is there a theological distinction between static (purity) and dynamic (situated, engaged) understandings of holiness?
  • the former sees infection as pollution, and so relies on separation/quarantine/exclusion; the latter sees infection as blessing.

Will

@nigelesque, when I process a PDF and get my notes and highlights to this stage, I look for areas where I can atomize this note. Headers are an excellent place to start. Exploding the note encourages me to add more of my interpretation of the ideas to each heading topic.

I like and also include, in many of my notes, a formal section where I develop questions about the idea and work developing my responses.

nigelesque

@Will said:
@nigelesque, when I process a PDF and get my notes and highlights to this stage, I look for areas where I can atomize this note. Headers are an excellent place to start. Exploding the note encourages me to add more of my interpretation of the ideas to each heading topic.

I like and also include, in many of my notes, a formal section where I develop questions about the idea and work developing my responses.

Thanks, Will. Comments appreciated.