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.