ok, the two other copies are not my fault but the fault of this computer.

Nam
I do not know what the lexicon should be like. I am quite sure the following terms may not feature very prominently:
- globalisation
- the state
- right and left
- the market
- the people
- capitalism
- capitalist power
- the power of the state
- global capitalism
- empire
- utopia
- etc...

I believe the new political lexicon will belong more to the everyday-life or to technology and expert knowledge. That is the way for architecture to attain a certain degree of power.

The question from toast is that, even if we have agency by default, we do not know whether that agency is adequately directed unles we have some ideological framework. That may actually be true, but probably not in the traditionally political terms. The question is whether we can replace traditional political terms by new terms such as:
- diversification
- change
- evolution
- distribution
- sameness and variation
- etc...

Nocti, I think there are still ideologies. They have just become redundant as a transformative tool, because there is no outside to the globalised world... I think sustainability is one of the proofs that we have come collectively to realise that there is no exterior, there is no trascendence and our action affect decisively our environment and our fellow citizens... While there is no much help coming from a theoretically eternal state of perfection and balance,

latour points out that people aren't the only thing with agency:

"After all, there is hardly any doubt that kettles 'boil' water, knifes 'cut' meat, baskets 'hold' provisions, hammers 'hit' nails on the head, rails 'keep' kids from falling, locks 'close' rooms against uninvited visitors, soap 'takes' the dirt away, schedules 'list' class sessions, price tags 'help' people calculating, and so on." [71]. This is simply an extension of the concept of an actor being something that makes a difference to a state of affairs. "If you can, with a straight face, maintain that hitting a nail with and without a hammer, boiling water with and without a kettle, fetching provisions with or without a basket, walking in the street with or without clothes, zapping a TV with or without a remote, slowing down a car with or without a speed-bump, keeping track of your inventory with or without a list, running a company with or without bookkeeping, are exactly the same activities, that the introduction of these mundane implements change 'othing important' to the realization of the tasks, then you are ready to transmigrate to the Far Land of the Social and disappear from this lowly one." (From Reassembling the Social)

albatross,

yes, you're right that there are still ideologies...however, your reference was in what you would recognize as being the western world. iran, to some extent syria, hizbollah in lebanon, muslim brotherhood,some hindu factions in india, taliban in afghanistan...etc...are, however, ideological. are they redundant? i hardly think so...they seem to pose the very exterior to their foes.

true, i played along to your tune and took my reference as solely that large secular chunk of the western world, just not to be a party pooper. however, i think the point about a western consciousness teetering between a dystopic even catastrophic future and a seemingly impossible world of remedies, between a commitment to sustainability and the scientific forecasts of disasters is quite relevant.
we have arrived at a point were, in order for history to propel itself to its own end, we either must deny our own denial or ...we must totally uproot history and reroute it eslewhere. the second track has the added allure of seeming improbable and too late in the coming.

as for that point concerning outside and inside, it is my opinion that you have totally accepted, unquestionably, what you read somewhere for being a general dictum. if i stab you with an ice pick, would you see that as being part of the acceptable every-day? would your parents see this as within the understandable 'inside'? for you and for the jaded and complacent elite you refer to, the comfort mundane reality about you (which was a pain for the generation prior to yours) has you believe that in an impenetrable endlessly self similair reel. somehow, i'm sure nothing can withstand a good stand. for example, how funny that the world talks about a post 9-11 world (when the world itself can be measured by so many grander disasters infilcted by people on people). there will also be other post-worlds before the no-world.

correction: nothing can withstand a good stab.

agfa,
exactly. animals, computers, buildings have political agency... That is the whole point of Latour's "Things". The question is whether that agency is driven towards a positive or a negative direction, towards a "good or bad government". As we design agency into a building, are we designing a positive one that would, for example contribute to a more democratic decision making community or are we promoting autocracy, or political numbness?
This is the question we should be really discussing here: how can we define a positive politics of buildings? That is the big challenge.

nocti,
You are right, AZP's proposal, as well as Latour's and Sloterdijk ones seem to be addressed to the jaded elite that inhabits the intellectual classes in Europe, and perhaps the USA, despite Sloterdijk's pernicious attacks on Americanisms. At the same time, and despite the contemporary relevance of Hizbollah, Hamas, Beitenu, Al-Quaida and Laksbar-e-Taiba, BJP radicals in India, BNP in the UK, neo-nazi parties in Continental Europe, and neocons, mormons and evangelists in the USA... I believe that neither me nor you will believe that any of them offer a viable solution for future politics. We can, of course reverse all the way there and forgot about globalisation and cosmopolitanism, but I do hope that it will be a matter of time before these guys and others like them will simply become extinct like dinosaurs, so that we do not have to waste so much time at the airport being checked out.

This doe not mean that I believe, like Fukuyama, that we have reached the end of history and there is nothing to do as politics have now been channeled in a different protocol. I am not the one forecasting the end of the world at all! You can say the likes of AZP and Latour and Sloterdijk and other free-market liberals like them have not suffered proper stabs. But the neo-ideologists, pro-utopians, agonists such as Reinhold Martin, Markus Miessen or Pier Vittorio Aureli, Chantal Mouffe, Giorgio Agamben, Toni Negri and Michael Hardt are even more trapped in the silk cushions of the global Academia, and more part of the jaded elite that play the harp while the city burns down.

You do not need to stab me. I can see that there is a distance between Latour's texts and reality, but I decide to choose that description of reality because there I can see a possible path that does not lead to the end of history, armaggeddon, collective suicide etc... That is why I decide to choose those expalnations instead of others.

albatross: I believe that neither me nor you will believe that any of them offer a viable solution for future politics. We can, of course reverse all the way there and forgot about globalisation and cosmopolitanism, but I do hope that it will be a matter of time before these guys and others like them will simply become extinct like dinosaurs, so that we do not have to waste so much time at the airport being checked out

i don't know about "solution", but certainly these oppositional groups are detrimental not only in their own making, but in the making of the world at large. furthermore, unlike you, i believe that entities like hizbollah and hamas are a natural countering product of colonialism previous and continuing, which your clinically jaded-western de-historicizing viewpoint is completely oblivious to... rather than being aberrant conditions that might inconvenience your good self in airports. you list the names of terrorists and freedom fighters on the same list: an inane CNN-esque flatlining enumeration of the "Other". in fact, the logic and rhetoric you exhibit is two dimensional..drawing people on one or other side, simplistically grouping them per singular sympathy/ antipathy. how about an ideology of a power hungry U.S, a U.S that is a composite of business people who fund think tanks to harness as much as they can of the planet's resources to make them richer and give the U.S an eternal-youth of energy. Is this not a comprehensive vision that is deployed politically, a reification of an agenda and a set of beliefs (in an implicit right to be supreme)? Isn't this an ideology? Isn't this also parallel by a global ideology of prosperity elsewhere, albeit beyond nationalism?
the notion that a country..or a world...should be atomized into businesses where the fundamental belief in labour, competition, growth, prosperity measured numerically and likewise reflecting back numerically onto the businesses and therefore people...that is an ideology, even if communism did fail in its grandiose experiments...this is not to say that simply because there is one dominant ideology now, that it is not an ideology due to the lack of gestalt. as a matter of fact, much of the rhetoric espoused by the likes of hizbollah and hamas has been very informed by leftist convictions, beyond their religious ones. this is not easily discernable to the ear that is harmonically-deaf.

now, re: stabbing you & the all-inclusive interiority you cite...i'm trying to show that this seemingly omnipresent reel, interiority, is in fact even more susceptible to being ruptured and being exposed to the exterior. the more a thing seems consistent with itself, the more its undoing will come as a shock, the more potent the threat and therefore existence of exteriority is. this exteriority does not only arise from what is uncommon, what does not belong to the interiority, but is equally prey to the predatory elements within that interiority itself. crime, violence, terrorism, environmental catastrophes, death, disease...etc. interiority, as such, is merely an illusion of a safeguard. i'd venture that, in fact, everything is an exterior and only our need to feel secure has us create this myth of familiarity to believe in.

oh, silly me. i didn't mean to say that hizbollah and hamas are detrimental, you slipped that into my mind. lets replace that word with ...fundamental.

Nocti,
Good. I thought I needed to tone up the discussion in order to get the discussion to be productive. I hope that you will trust me that I am a bit less flat than CNN in identifying the “other”. But in general terms that is my position. Let me state though that in any way do I share the view that global capitalism is the “end of history” in any way, but I do not think that these “fundamental” pillars of the making of the contemporary world have any capacity to drive history further. Precisely because they are “outside” and never before in history has the ratio between inside and outside been so disproportionate. Is global capitalism an ideology? I think this is an interesting question, as it has become so pervading and widespread in every aspect of our everyday life –and Hamas’ and Hizbollah’s- that I wonder if it is more of an infrastructure. For example, the internet and the system of currency exchange; there is very little in our everyday life that can function outside system. Creationists for example will also state that evolutionism is an ideology, and while I think there are different modalities of evolutionary theory that may be ideological, I think that the basic principle goes beyond being a mere ideology…
I do not think that you can attribute global capitalism to the US alone. By now, the system has pervaded most of Europe and a large amount of Asia. Yes, the all-inclusive bubble can be punctured, but it is unlikely that the effects of this puncture will be very relevant: the credit crunch, -an internally driven cause- has created much more damage to the system than the 9/11 attack or the insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it is more likely to produce an evolution of the system and a substantial transformation of the infrastructure.
Frankly, I have little interest in finding out about the crude weaving of leftist beliefs and religious fundamentalism that form Hamas and Hizbollah’s ideology. Or the ideological lineage of neo-fascists and creationist ideologies for the same reason. They have fallen off the viable political spectrum. I would rather elucidate the different nuances of the theory of evolution, the degree of governmental intervention in the solution to the credit crunch, the way in which the distribution of infrastructural investments should be made in a country, or the different approaches to the problem of energy and sustainability, because those are more interesting and relevant political questions, and more likely to have an effect on the system.
It is interesting that you mention “Gestalt” in your intervention, and that may offer us some interesting cues when discussing the subject from an architectural perspective. It appears as if what we are able to register in our perception of contemporary politics is precisely what lies beyond the system, while what I would be interested in –and I believe that is what AZP’s text is proposing- is in intensifying the visibility –the gestalt- of the more modest, seemingly inocuous politics that operate within the system, rather than the larger molar ideologies that “engaged” architects seem to be inevitably falling in.
The question of representation comes back to haunt our little debate here: Every form of "objectivity", every attempt capture the real is always contaminated with the un-real. This is fine as long as we accept that we live with representations as much as we breathe. AZP’s text straddles the subject making the materiality itself political through performances, environmental, security…

With the economic model being entirely re-engineered and the current meltdown of global celebrity culture, the “politics of the envelope” problematise the links between a material zero degree and a figurative, perhaps expressionist performance which is the trait of architectural design. Can design resist being appropriated to further low-resolution ideology (i.e., the ideology of markets, the ideology of exclusivity, etc.)? In this respect, I believe it may be quite interesting too, to consider Agamben’s proposal that "the political" must remain empty of specific content in order to remain transformative…

your belief, and i beilieve it is exactly that, belies an ideology. i have already stated that this seemingly micro-politics owes its existence to a macro-politics; you merely see the micro because of the lack of gestalt in your life..which i sort of feel sorry for. along with the inanely simplistic and naive portrayal of hizbollah and hamas and their role, groups you very obviously have very little clue about, i will leat you be now on your AZP fertilized turf.

Oh dear...
I guess everybody is entitled to their beliefs. For the sake of clarity, I am just starting to guess the micro. The macro has been evident for a long time.
And, how did you guess the lack of gestalt in my life, doctor? I am sure that Hamas and Hizbollah are slightly more complex I care to understand... Did you read that to improve the life quality of women in Palestine Hamas is now offering $3,000 to every man who marries the widow of a martyr? You need to prove that you can support her financially, especially if you have already other wifes, and you need to prove to be a good Muslim... Now that's real progress!
This is not your first farewell from this turf, and maybe will not be your last. Till next time!