After Theory

In the opening to his book After Theory, Eagleton visualises a pretty bleak picture of the critical environment that critics these days have fashioned for themselves in their reactionary drifted towards the margins of discourse. In carving out new academic spaces from which to contribute to the collective knowledge of mankind, he claims that these days critics are more concerned with discussing the irrelevant virgin territories of interdisciplinism (if one interprets his diabtribes against the new situation where "What is sexy... is sex. On the wilder shores of academia, an interest in French philosophy has given way to a fascination with French kissing"). 

How does this context of a retreat from the norms place architects? Well, if those bastions of architectural academia the London-based Schools of Architecture are anything to go by one could assume that the allsorts of inter-disciplinary hallucinations that they peddle are a response to the growing perception that architects are anything to do with making buildings anymore. How many first year entrants at schools of architecture across the UK actually go on to get their part three instead of either falling by the wayside or "getting super-interested in film" or something else anyway?

Do we need the old school critic today in an age of constant internet based commentary? If the norm has shifted to become the anonymous community of peer reviewed reiterations of information that the likes of wikipedia, youtube comments and tweets then one would expect future conservative academics to revert back to the territory of the specifically serious, to the point where it excludes the bloke in the pub or at the back of the lecture theory who isn't quite well read enough to "get it". But what for architecture, with its universities' monotonies of exception and widespread reluctance to prepare anyone for building and the image it projects of the profession as an exclusive club of lonely, heroic geniuses who practice? Oddly enough, it seems that practice is ahead of academia for once, as some of the cannier UK architects have already reverted to the esotericism, mysticism and myth of their trade and operation to negate questions surrounding their use to his native society already developed beyond a need for buildings on a Modernist scale.

Politically radical it ain't though. It's deeply conservative and the cultivation of a mystique is a double edged defense mechanism: If you're supposed to build, why turn projects away on the grounds that they're below your boutique style? Why do the High Tech knights not apply the economic concerns of their componentry and rationality to those buildings which are mass produced the most, the simple housing unit? Would Zaha ever design a stand alone car park, surely a typology that plasticity of form lends itself to? It's difficult to say what will the architect evolve into, but the individual architect definitely should not devolve back to imagining himself as an arts-and-crafts style old boy, part of some kind of masonic order with initiation ceremonies and ranks with nothing at the top. We've seen what the RIBA has become and how out of touch it is with the future of practice.

No, despite the unassailable power of the majority, the architectural avant garde (a term that every architect surely thinks of themselves as a member of) should be trying to make fucking reactionary buildings rather than branding themselves or developing a style. I suppose it flies against common capitalist sense, and even the simplicity and weakness of Mies' architecture can be perverted to become an expected deliverable. The question of the future of our practice 'After Theory', the subsequent retreat back to it and all future oscillations between is something that one must get stuck into not as a critic, but as a practitioner in the here-and-now of whatever time it is that you're living in. Those who can, do it: Those who can't teach: Those who can't teach, criticise.

The Duplicity of Howard Rourke, and Other North Atlantic Differences

It's difficult to know who to trust in Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, and your narrator Paul Pennyfeather, absent as his voice is from much of the narrative despite his central location to it, doesn't provide much insight. Instead it seems like the lonely reader has to build his understanding of a range of characters who, despite being open to telling Paul their stories seem more bent on creating their own personal mythology specific to who their listener is at the time: Though more examples abound, recall how Grimes lives a double (or is it a triple) life with wives scattered across the country, 'Sir' Solomon spins three separate yarns to his three colleagues - though is never caught out and the novella finishes without providing any evidence as to his true identity - and it is the surprising deceit of Margot that lands Paul in the slammer. Thus it is in this context of deliberately unclear allegorical operation that one is meant to unpick the meanings behind Professor Silenus, Waugh's 25 year old Professor of Architecture from the Bauhaus who's life intersects with Pennyfeather's at key moments in the plot.

The impression upon meeting him the first time is that on the face of things Silenus is an absurd parody of the Modern architect: Obsessing over his art to the point of destruction and a complex fabric of paradoxes: Rather like Howard Rourke in both the novel and subsequent film of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. However, despite Silenus' yearnings for the control of the discrete and legible machine, he himself is clearly very human, torn between the inertia of his own humanity and the reassuring stasis of the machines, the perfect residents of an architectural system, that he futilely yearns to emulate.

Whilst Rourke does not aspire to the mechanistic efficiencies that are Silenus' undoing, he still acheives them, from the constant textual references to the angular machinic qualities of his body to the rigour with which he adheres to his code of operating as an architect. Though he remains a thoroughly unrealistic character precisely due to this lack of humanity both physically and emotionally, Rand imagines him as ultimately successful despite the inflexibility means he desires to make the word through. In setting Rourke - the driven self-interested revolutionary thinker who creates only to progress himself - in opposition with the second-hander critic Ellesworth Monkton Toohey whom he makes ultimately irrelevant, Rand makes a moral comment that it is progress for its own sake that should be the goal of man, rather than the manipulations of those progressions or the curation of controllable cronies into mechanisms of power. It's all so clear as to the extent that both film and novel become less allegory and more of a manual for how to aspire to practice as a an architect and even a critic.

Conversely, the duplicity of Waugh's characters results in an invitingly complex rather than predictably binary allegorical roles is perfectly encapsulated by Silenus' final monologue to Pennyfeather, which sees society not as those who carry within them a natural momentum to alter both it and themselves but rather a spinning disc, occupied at the centre by the static, at its fringes by those for whom the ride is thrilling and seek to quicken the rotations, and those in the middle who are either happy to watch the thrill seekers or shift closer to a state of equilibrium. Again in Rand, the direct didacticism of her narrative simmers under what is otherwise a universe so compellingly crafted that people in our seminar believed it to have risen to becoming the second most powerful book in the US after the Bible, unsurprisingly so given it's romantic justification with the selfishness of the North-Atlantic Capitalist dream. The duplicitous predictability of the apparently liberatingly visionary creator Rourke however ensures that The Fountainhead's artistic depth, inasmuch as one can define that through its capacity to hold the reader's imagination, is far more shallow than Waugh's imagining of Silenus, despite the latter's peripheral role to the story of Decline and Fall.

Don't get me wrong: I love the Heroism of Howard Rourke, but it's just that he is incompatible with the real world. If you believe that you can sway the collective opinion of a jury baying for your conviction for arson for no apparent reason then you must be an American. But is that to say that real architects can learn more from Silenus? If what we're meant to learn is how to be successful in an anti-Objectivist way (ie by doing this), then I suppose not. Those are the parameters that Rand sets for herself to operate in though, but I guess in Europe we appreciate a bit of mystique... I'm sure Zaha, Zumthor and H+dM would agree at least.

The Criticality of Precision of Image and Language in Activist Writing

Call me a square, but William H. Burrough's ramblings in the compilation of interviews with him entitled 'The Job' didn't do much for me at large. There were a few nice ideas in there, chiefly his diagnosis the self-perpetuating structures of control imposed on the pre-Columbian Mayan's and its resonance with the idealised 60's American society and the idea of the nuclear family that he lashed out at so, but claiming that one could recapturing control through audio and written "Cut Ups" seemed to do nothing but act as a vehicle for an uncalculated subversion, something of a perversion of the promises Watergate seemed to make.

This is indicative of the whole rebellious spirit that accompanies the counterculture of a 60s avant garde, who paradoxically prefer to rediscover the primal through the use of precisely designed high-tech chemicals such as LSD. Confused, frustrated and restless in their inability to find accommodation  in the mainstream, instead of aggressively protesting against the mechanisms of control that restrict their freedoms to express themselves in an artistic manner, they proclaim peace and love as it is a convenient opposite of the American dream and the Second Amendment, or abdicate intelligent activism as in Burrough's personal case.

Burroughs et al represent an absolutist philosophy that through associating itself with the celebration of vice and anarchy only condemned itself further as a perversion of the stability that could have seen such philosophies actually considered by a wider social and political context... And yet, also curiously traditional in its echo of the first American frontiersman: He who surrendered himself to the satanic promises of the sublime wilderness of an unknown continent populated by a tribal Indian population and a gradual  alignment with their satanic ways. It is perhaps reassuring however that the protestors down at St. Paul's at the moment choose to distance themselves from such a debaucherous celebrations of expressionism by eschewing alcohol or drugs on the site of their academic Glastonbury Festival, and instead prospect the frontier of the mind at their 'City University' rather than obsessing over aboriginal nostalgias.

Likewise, Allen Ginsburg's poem Howl is more seductive a portrait of the American mind raging against the restrictions of mainstream expectation. Firstly, due to the fact that he does it in an infinitely more imaginative way conjuring the beautifully disgusting imagery that would lead to lawsuits against his anthologies, but most importantly through taking a clearly definite stance: Ironically, through this it becomes an accidental act of deliberate design, imagining as it does the sous-rature world of "Moloch!" as a definite image to repel, as opposed to Burroughs attempts to choreograph deliberate accidents to generate design through the stochasticity of his "cut up".

But how do we rage against Moloch, "whose name is in the Mind", the only remaining frontier for the 60's poets and authors to retreat to through drugs or art? In Part 1 of the poem, it seems that it is achieved through the restless nomadic hedonisms of Burrough's literary universe as Ginsberg evokes  the seedy underbelly of a world populated by the nameless "who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripst". However, after taking us on a whistlestop tour of scenes of meltdown in Laredo, Brooklyn, Idaho, Kansas, Baltimore, Oklahoma, etc and ultimately the imagined city of Moloch (the world itself meaning "a thing demanding or requiring a very costly personal sacrifice") he goes on to eulogise his fellow writer-cum-asylum inmate friend Carl Solomon: Ginsberg's clear, opinionated and terrifying language is the essential architecture of his rebellion and his anti-Moloch activism, far more powerful than Burrough's retreat into obscure hallucinogenic inducing and generating vagaries, that suicidally become dry wanks as mentioned in Barnes' literary theory of the previous post.

The Tragedy of Social Space

Henri Lefebvre's chapter 'Social Space' in his weighty "The Production of Space" disappointed me. Henri kicks the chapter off by saying that he was interested in reconciling the mental space where architecture is imagined with that where it is built, but then forgot to directly discuss this. I mean, it's dense with thought that I'm sure is so insightful that he has developed a near impenetrable language to communicate his ideas… but it is something of a paradox that this makes him appear obscurely didactic in his praise of easy going attitudes to design that accommodate phenomenological and cultural dimensions to crafting sensitive architecture and space.

Don't get me wrong, it was good shit: just biblically tough to feel like you're understanding it correctly. I didn't know whether to feel stupid or judgmentally critical of his abstractions of Venice's archaeology when he dissects the practical notions of the work and the product. If "regardless of its devaluation or relativisation, the space of philosophers continues to depend on the absolute", then why does Lefebvre retreat to abstractions, albeit concrete to invent the opposition of the work and the product!? I suppose that's its strength though; through being so bloody tough on the reader it invites their imaginations' generosity to understand, or misunderstand it. Bit of a one liner though Henri ,if you're planning on getting all 'meta' in your discourse though and it's ironically my generous perception of the writing that projects that idea onto his work. Or product. Or whatever.

Berman's 'All That's Solid Melt Into Air's' discussion of the tragedy of development piggybacked onto a run through of Goethe's Faust as more accessible but much more restrictive and definite in its content and argument. There's perhaps more for the reader as an individual to relate to in the discourse, what with the Faustian stages of development's inclusion of more human concepts. I think it's a valid contrast to draw, seeing as both articles are about the individual's ways of thinking about producing and developing architecture, infrastructure, space and their internal consciences.

Berman finishes with a discussion on the idea of the developers inbuilt, ultimate redundancy: "Now, by virtue of his very successes, Faustian man has rendered himself historically obsolete… in the creation of an economy of abundance". Clearly untrue, as if treated as piece of history the 'extinct' developer if what Berman's written solely about: Faust as a character is reanimated in his interpretation and the lessons that subsequent developers can learn from him and thus he maintains his value. Lefebvre as an author however is someone of whom I get the impression that is only read at the request of professors of architecture wishing to scare their students: A whole lot of rhetorical references that can be found out to say very little that is actively deployable in the messy world that dis-empowered architects live in and have to make. Bridging the gap between practise and discourse is something that those caught between the two poles are always trying to do, and Lefebvre only ironically compounds the problem whereas the tradition of Faust and his tragedy would a better road map to use to reconcile the social space of the imagination with those that can be inhabited by a self aware society.

Addendum: 15.11.11

Right, I've got all that bullshit off of my chest, now time for some proper chat. In the seminar discussion we talked about other tragedies of development, and I was ridiculed for suggesting that the creative process in itself was a tragedy in as much as it is inescapably the death of ideas that live in the chora, Plato's imagined space where forms are first materialised in one's imagination.

Excuse the weak joke, but that was a tragedy of development right there for me, as I think that in being labelled the constipated designer ("there's so many ideas that could come out that none do!", when I was aiming for something more Howard Rourke) I got more of a handle on the proper nature of what this course is about: Not critique for its own sake, or epistemological teleology and self referencing but spanning the gap between what we see in the real world and the words we use to describe and analyse it in a way that gets as close to the essential as possible.

I guess rather selfishly, I found it hard to get past the whole that "human development comes at a human cost" thing. However, let's apply the Faustian condition to some of the things discussed in before. All the previous readings, from Badieu to Davies on Abu Dhabi, have sort of hummed along to the sheet music provided by Goethe: Boy meets devil, gets some mad skills, meets girl, drives her to destruction, drives himself to a point of power from where he will be forever isolated and unsatisfied.

Surely Hickey's is exception though: it seems that in his analysis of Las Vegas he finds a space of comfort, albeit nostalgic. Whilst the other writers seem to bemoan injustices in the developing role of the critic, a la Eagleton, feudalism's ironic resurgence in the context of oil fuelled development, like Davies, et cetera, Lefebvre seemed to align closer to Hickey in the lack of emphasising the crisis of the present, whenever it was for the respective others and himself. Apologies to Henri for the following godawful translation of his esoteric garblings: "Yeh" he starts, "There are these things called works, and these things called products. They're different, but I'm not going to play the role of moral arbiter as both are essential for the development of society and its culture regardless of how they come about". It seemed more analytical, and less influenced by the projected belief system that leads one to conclude that Abu Dhabi/current financial system is a bad place/thing as its government/traders have built their monuments and economy on the blood of disempowered slaves and ignoramuses, as one might gather from only a brief skimming of the opinionated Davies and Badiou.

Anyway, I'm off now to indulge myself in the beautiful scribblings of Julian Barnes. For all of Henri's discussion of works/products of beauty, if only he were to craft his writings as such... I mean, why is that the only way academics think that they can really nail an understanding of the quotidien is to machine-gun it with esotericism. Take a lesson from fiction why don't you... after all, surely what motivates critics is the fact that they can monumentalise themselves in the everyday stuff of life through their own literature?

Julian summed it all up rather nicely early on in his latest booker prize winner: "That was another of our great fears: that life wouldn't turn out to be like literature. Look at our parents - were they the stuff of literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which real, true, important things could happen. Like what? The things Literature was all about: love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God. And barn owls. Of course, there were other sorts of literature - theoretical, self-referential, lachrymosely autobiographical - but they were just dry wanks"