Key Writings
the Development of an Approach to Culture Production
I put together this Key in order to help anyone who wants to understand and read the different topics of my writing. A full bibliography is attached, but this guide names the focus of each primary text.
PHASE 1: Academic interrogations.
Section A: Political economy.
Building Shelters in a Corporate Society, Master's Thesis. University of California, Berkeley 1974.
Section B: Political process of knowledge construction particular to architecture education.
Architecture as Social Strategy: Structures for Knowledge for Change, Doctoral Dissertation. UC, Berkeley, 1990.
PHASE 2: Theoretical Inquiries
Section A: A dinner party discussion of the politics of difference, differentiation, and the process of learning; primary citations from historic figures who engage each other in my imagination (20+ characters).
“Crossover Dream: A Parti, Structures for Knowledge of Difference,” in Thomas Dutton, ed. Voices in Architectural Education: Cultural Politics and Pedagogy, Critical Studies in Education Series, (Grande, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1991).
Section B: An argument for the strategic approach to aesthetic practices--critical constructive, affiliated.
“Modernism, Postmodernism, and Architecture’s Social Project,” with Thomas A. Dutton in Thomas A. Dutton and Lian Hurst Mann, eds. Reconstructing Architecture: Critical Discourses and Social Practices Pedagogy and Cultural Practice Series (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
Section C: An autobiographic interrogation of socialist feminist theory as I experienced it and now analyze it.
“Socialist Feminism: Reflections After 30 Years,” AhoraNow (Los Angeles: Labor/Community Strategy Center, 2004).
PHASE 3: Popular Polemics
Section A: An interview discussing the social practice of architecture and why Mann is leaving traditional practice.
“Penetrating the Facade: The Social Project of Architecture, Lian Hurst Mann Talks with Kenneth Caldwell,” Architecture California 18:2 (Winter 1996/97).
Section B: A short manifesto for aesthetic interventions.
“Popular Propaganda #1," AhoraNow no. 1 (Winter 1996) available at http://www.ahoranow.org/
Section C: This polemic argues for a systematic program of encounters through an international network of publications aimed at fostering an exchange of theoretical, propagandist, agitational, and organizing work, that is, creating a shared experience of political exposures.
“Revolutionary Education in the Age of the Culture Industry: Publishing on the Terrain of the Bourgeois Culture Industry and Crisis in the Socialist Project” (“Publicar en el terreno de la industria de la cultura burguesa y la crisis en el poryecto socialista”/ “Publier en le domaine de l’ industrie de la culture bourgeoisie et la crise du project socialiste”)—Dossier Paris Rencontre (May 1998). available at http://www.ahoranow.org/
PHASE 4: Development of a theoretical framework for agitprop work.
“Subverting the Avant-Garde: Critical Theory’s Real Strategy” in Thomas A. Dutton and Lian Hurst Mann, eds. Reconstructing Architecture: Critical Discourses and Social Practices Pedagogy and Cultural Practice Series (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
Section A: History and theory of a particular set of relationships between aesthetic avant-garde and political vanguard.
“Avant-garde Meets the Vanguard: The Realism Debates” in Reconstructing Architecture.
Section B: Discussion of the practical agitprop work of the Labor/Community Strategy Center.
“‘Specters of Marx’: Contemporary Practices of Critical Realism,” especially the part following the Subhead “Activist Realism: Agitprop Reorients the Subject Within the Social Real” in Reconstructing Architecture.
PHASE 5: An argument for “affiliated” cultural practice in 2 Parts, in two different publications:
Section A: the theoretical polemic against intellectual “disinvestment” as a strategy:
“Problems in Theorizing ‘The Political’ in Architectural Discourse,” with Thomas A. Dutton, Rethinking Marxism, 12:4 (Winter 2000).
Section B: explanation of particular tactical theories with examples of practice in the work Tom and I have done:
“Affiliated Practices and Aesthetic Interventions: Creating Counterspace in Cincinnati and Los Angeles” (with Thomas A. Dutton in Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies (2003)..
PHASE 6: Post-September 11 analysis of conditions in the world
Section A: Articulates an approach to strategy and tactics in the current stage of imperialism
Towards a Program of Resistance: We Make These Demands Against the Institutions of U.S. Imperialism (Para un programa de resistencia: exigimos estas reinvindicaciones en contra de las instituciones del imperialismo norteamericano),” with the Program Demand Group of the Labor/Community Strategy Center and AhoraNow Working Paper (August 2001) available at http://www.ahoranow.org/; www.thestrategycenter.org