The Capsular Civilization

by Lieven De Cauter

Particularly since September 11, the War on Terrorism and the war in Iraq, it has been almost impossible to dissociate architecture from its social context. Add to this the massive influence of capitalism on architecture, disturbing demographic developments and associated political, social, and ecological catastrophes, and the result is a robotic snapshot of a society dominated by fear, exclusion and simulation. Lieven De Cauter, a leading theoretician on the subject of capsularisation, has worked over the past six years on the essays and articles contained in this book, and has documented and analyzed our changing societies before and after 9/11. For the first time, the link between the global economy, demographic changes, world terror and the role played by the United States under the Bush admisinstration, are examined in detail in a single publication. De Cauter sketches a realistic and alarming account of the new world order that is an everyday concern for the architects and planners of the contemporary city as well as for its inhabitants and users.

Genres: Architecture, Philosophy, Nonfiction

208 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Lieven De Cauter is een Vlaams cultuurfilosoof, schrijver, dichter en docent.

Lieven De Cauter in de Nederlandstalige Wikipedia: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lieven_D...


Lieven De Cauter is a Flemish philosopher, writer, poet and professor.

Reviews

[Kane Faucher · Rating 4 out of 5]

De Cauter's book, although ostensibly indexed on urban planning and architecture, is a sweeping ensemble of social and political critique buttressed by readings of Virilio, Deleuze and Guattari, and Agamben. The main core of his argument is that society exists in capsularization that reinforces the wall of the inside and the outside (for example, the climate controlled environment or the ambling suburb versus the disordered outside of the global poor of the south etc.). At times, some of de Cauter's assertions are partial retreads of what Lukacs and Debord say, but the detail is what makes the difference as the "laws" or simple rules of capsularization are presented. At times polemic, and certainly edgy, it is worth a read. Those of a particular theoretical and political persuasion may find themselves nodding in agreement fairly often as what de Cauter advances is not a radical departure. In some ways, it is like reading Lewis Mumford with Paul Virilio's lexicon. The one drawback might be de Cauter's cleaving to binaries such as the Castells-ian ordered inside v. disordered/marginalized outside. De Cauter also might have prospered in leveraging Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the nomad with even more conceptual punch.

[Alper Çuğun · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some notes on this book as I'm reading it:

Reading this has exposed me to the soft underbelly of architecture in that it has little to do with engineering or science. It's mostly subjective and in the domain of postmodern art.

The book posits a lot of stuff but it's shoddy scientific underpinning mostly negates any point that could have been made. The author makes no pretention to be objective or give a balanced view and uses quotes, philosophers and facts self-servingly. The content is somewhat outdated and overly pessimistic and the writing is obscurantist with words being made up on the spot for anything and everything.

That being said the book is far from worthless. This style of writing and mixing and matching world philosophy (or just that part of it that you have read or you find agreeable) is probably exemplary for the entire field of postmodern humanities. So it is good to be exposed to that mode of discourse.

And the problem of ‘capsularization’ in society is definitely a real one, though when you define capsule to be anything and everything, you're problem loses a lot of its force. Though real it may be, I don't think it is as bad or will turn out as bad as the author says it will, nor that postmodern philosophers are the right people to save us.

[Osahi · Rating 1 out of 5]

Interessante theoriën, maar véél te erudiet geschreven (het lijkt wel of DeCauter ernaar streeft eenvoudige stellingen zo moeilijk mogelijk te formuleren, alsof ze daardoor extra gewicht krijgen). Daarenboven valt het boek al te vaak in herhaling (dit is een bundeling van essays en geen aaneengesloten filosofie). Sommige hoofdstukken heb ik met interesse en zelfs groeiend afgrijzen gelezen, andere hoofdstukken werden noodgedwongen aan diagonale oogbewegingen onderworpen.