In the shadow of the enlightenment : Le Corbusier, Le Faisceau and Georges Valois

On 9 January 1927 Le Corbusier materialised on the front cover of the Faisceau journal edited by Georges Valois Le Nouveau Siècle which printed the single-point perspective of Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin and an extract from the architect’s discourse in Urbanisme. In May Le Corbusier presented slides of his urban designs at a fascist rally. These facts have been known ever since the late 1980s when studies emerged in art history that situated Le Corbusier’s philosophy in relation to the birth of twentieth-century fascism in France—an elision in the dominant reading of Le Corbusier’s philosophy, as a project of social utopianism, whose received genealogy is Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier. Le Corbusier participated with the first group in France to call itself fascist, Valois’s militant Faisceau des Combattants et Producteurs, the “Blue Shirts,” inspired by the Italian “Fasci” of Mussolini. Thanks to Mark Antliff, we know the Faisceau did not misappropriate Le Corbusier’s plans, in some remote quasi-symbolic sense, rather Valois’s organisation was premised on the redesign of Paris based on Le Corbusier’s schematic designs. Le Corbusier’s Urbanisme was considered the “prodigious” model for the fascist state Valois called La Cité Française – after his mentor the anarcho-syndicalist Georges Sorel. Valois stated that Le Corbusier’s architectural concepts were “an expression of our profoundest thoughts,” the Faisceau, who “saw their own thought materialized” on the pages of Le Corbusier’s plans. The question I pose is, In what sense is Le Corbusier’s plan a complete representation of La Cité? For Valois, the fascist city “represents the collective will of La Cité” invoking Enlightenment philosophy, operative in Sorel, namely Rousseau, for whom the notion of “collective will” is linked to the idea of political representation: to ‘stand in’ for someone or a group of subjects i.e. the majority vote. The figures in Voisin are not empty abstractions but the result of “the will” of the “combatant-producers” who build the town. Yet, the paradox in anarcho-syndicalist anti-enlightenment thought – and one that became a problem for Le Corbusier – is precisely that of authority and representation. In Le Corbusier’s plan, the “morality of the producers” and “the master” (the transcendent authority that hovers above La Cité) is lattened into a single picture plane, thereby abolishing representation. I argue that La Cité pushed to the limits of formal abstraction by Le Corbusier thereby reverts to the Enlightenment myth it first opposed, what Theodor Adorno would call the dialectic of enlightenment.

Constructing the Architext : Georges Perec's life a user's manual

Mitchell critiques Georges Perec's Life a User's Manual, which articulates compellingly the confluence of literature and architecture studies that emerged in the late twentieth century. He argues the Perec's novel diverges from this tradition, for, rather than being a search for origins and true expression, Life a User's Manual denies the very possibility of originality. He adds that Perec's architext is de-constructive and ironic.

Understanding the abnormal brain activity in epilepsy as a potential predictor of the onset of an epileptic seizure

The Brain Research Institute (BRI) uses various types of indirect measurements, including EEG and fMRI, to understand and assess brain activity and function. As well as the recovery of generic information about brain function, research also focuses on the utilisation of such data and understanding to study the initiation, dynamics, spread and suppression of epileptic seizures. To assist with the future focussing of this aspect of their research, the BRI asked the MISG 2010 participants to examine how the available EEG and fMRI data and current knowledge about epilepsy should be analysed and interpreted to yield an enhanced understanding about brain activity occurring before, at commencement of, during, and after a seizure. Though the deliberations of the study group were wide ranging in terms of the related matters considered and discussed, considerable progress was made with the following three aspects. (1) The science behind brain activity investigations depends crucially on the quality of the analysis and interpretation of, as well as the recovery of information from, EEG and fMRI measurements. A number of specific methodologies were discussed and formalised, including independent component analysis, principal component analysis, profile monitoring and change point analysis (hidden Markov modelling, time series analysis, discontinuity identification). (2) Even though EEG measurements accurately and very sensitively record the onset of an epileptic event or seizure, they are, from the perspective of understanding the internal initiation and localisation, of limited utility. They only record neuronal activity in the cortical (surface layer) neurons of the brain, which is a direct reflection of the type of electrical activity they have been designed to record. 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