Automation or Meaning? Socialism, Humanism and Cybernetics in Etarea

Abstract

Designed in 1967 for a site near Prague, Czechoslovakia, and exhibited that year at the Montreal Expo, Etarea was to be a city of 135,000 inhabitants, where the conveniences of automated infrastructure would satisfy future socialist generations. Conceived by the architect Gorazd Čelechovský as the ideal communist city, the case offers compelling insight into the influence of Marxist humanism and systems theory on postwar and specifically post-Stalinist state socialist architectural culture. Informed by these intellectual currents, as the article details, Etarea placed the question of meaning at centre stage. Meaning in architecture was considered in terms of both cybernetic communication and existential phenomenology, and its function was no less than to advance the communist transition. Etarea was informed by Civilization at the Crossroads (1966), an influential policy treatise that emphasized the significance of the intelligentsia and the so-called 'scientific and technological revolution' to future communism. The article explores the function of the 'living environment' as a conceptual banner and link between the publication and the project. While Civilization argued that urbanization must be decoupled from industrialization, Etarea was to be a model 'post-industrial' environment. Three aspects to Etarea are analysed in detail: the territorial question of the city-country divide, the balance between automation and sociopsychological meaning and tensions between political emancipation and cybernetic control. Civilization at the Crossroads The Constitution of 1960 declared the socialist development of Czechoslovakia complete. 'We gather forces for the communist transition', the document proclaimed, in conformity with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's belief that communism was on the horizon (NACSR 1960). The teaching of 'scientific communism' was inherent to that transition, inaugurated under Party chairman, president and Khrushchev disciple Antonín Novotný (Sommer 2016). 3 Coming to grips with the Stalinist legacy of Klement Gottwald, under whose leadership the Communist Party seized power in 1948, and who died in 1953 only a week after Stalin, the scientification of communism was consid

role of political buzzers in the formation of public opinion supports Anies Baswedan on social media Twitter

“…In practice, In shared cybernetic commodification includes intrinsic and extrinsic commodification. Intrinsic commodification is the review of audience rating services by the media, so that the exchanged is not the message or audience but the resulting rating value (Krivý, 2019). Various media research institutions research, process and sell the results of studies related to the rating as a commodity that is needed by the media to always be in optimal display in the eyes of its audience (Adams, 2016).…”