Involuntary Prisoners of Architecture

FELICITY D. SCOTT

Nothing is more common than the mass media technician who, after a hard day at work, goes off to the movies and cries. —Paulo Virno

On the Silence of Ideas

The recent swell of public discourse on contemporary architecture seems to have taken the discipline somewhat by surprise; the unremitting scrutiny and visibility cast upon it on account of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) competition for the World Trade Center site was met by an uncanny (or disquieting) silence of ideas.1 Following a tragic and traumatic violation of Manhattan—“Capital of the Twentieth Century” and long-standing site of modernist and experimental fantasies, even of retroactive manifestoes—the architectural vanguard was called on to fulﬁll public aspirations that were, for most, distinctly out of sync with contemporary concerns.2 It was interpolated into roles such as enhancing the symbolic legibility of the skyline, ameliorating a sense of loss or tragedy, and engaging social and political processes in order that rebuilding be debated in terms beyond the bureaucratic and ﬁnancial. The discipline was thus also confronted by the embattled status of its role within the ongoing (post)modernization of the city.3 Most of the architects, like those to whom they

1. “It’s an interesting time,” Charlie Rose noted of this visibility, “because tragedy . . . has brought about a great sense of architecture. . . . And for the ﬁrst time in a long time, there’s more conversation about the role of architecture.” “We have never seen publicity all over the world about New York City,” Peter Eisenman responded, adding (in a departure from his long-standing commitment to architecture’s autonomy) that “architecture ﬁnally is where it should be, in the political, social process.” See Charlie Rose, January 8, 2003, transcript no. 3374. 2. Manhattan has long been a testing ground for “fantastic architecture,” from Emilio Ambasz’s 1969 fable “Manhattan: Capital of the Twentieth Century,” to Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York of 1978, to the work of the Italian Superstudio, Austrian experimentalists, and others from this period. 3. That this was unlikely to be affected was noted by many: “Ultimately, the market is going to dictate what’s needed and when it’s needed,” a “major downtown landlord” was reported to have said (Charles V. Bagli, “The Debate: Architect’s Proposals May Be Bold, but They Probably Won’t Be Built,” New York Times, December 19, 2002, sec. B, p. 11).

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promoted their schemes, did not question historical forces conditioning the competition program, but fell back on cliché versions of social tropes—heroes, monuments, rebirth, public space, “visionary architecture,” “defensible space,” spiritual and symbolic legibility—without offering critical strategies to address the political issues they raise.4 Taking them to be self-evident (and as easy vehicles to garner public and media support), architects missed an occasion to problematize the discipline’s imbrication within complex and shifting historical, social, institutional, and geopolitical contexts.5 They missed an occasion in which aesthetic practices and emergent technologies might have been regarded not just as palliative or functional but theorized as politically engaged sites of encounter, dissensus, and contestation.6 The symptoms of this disengagement are many and vary in their visibility and combination: a “postcritical” turn in contemporary practice and discourse that is at once a posttheoretical and postpolitical one; the recuperation of experimental strategies from the 1960s and early ’70s, but voided of any contestatory dimension; the implicit resurgence of a mode of signiﬁcation or iconography with both expressionist and monumental (and in both cases spectacular) tendencies; the ascendancy of the signature architect (replete with glasses and cowboy boots) alongside a cynical disclaimer of such modes of authorship; a delirious immersion in information technology seemingly ignorant of the dystopic lessons of architecture’s earlier postwar engagement with cybernetics; and a call for avant-gardism that is, in fact, a vanguardism without critical or institutional stakes. This constellation of symptoms is not, of course, conﬁned to the LMDC competition; it emerged during the waning of the discipline’s interest in theoretical debates.7 In many senses these symptoms seem to be the residue of earlier polemics. We see, for instance, the persistence of a dichotomy forged in the late 1960s and dominant throughout the following decades, an increasingly unproduc- tive one that persists in various ruses today. According to this polarization,

4. That Oscar Newman’s notion of “defensible space” might enjoy a return in response to the terrorist attacks on New York was posited by Anthony Vidler prior to the LMDC competition. See “A City Transformed: Designing ‘Defensible Space,’” Grey Room 07 (Spring 2002), pp. 82–85. 5. On architects acting like “media-age politicians,” see Julie V. Iovine, “Turning a Competition into a Public Campaign,” New York Times, February 26, 2003, sec. E, p. 1. The LMDC competition was initiated as an “innovative design study” following the widespread rejection of the six initial variations presented by Beyer Blinder Belle. Out of 406 submissions, seven teams were selected and commissioned to develop proposals in response to “one recurring public suggestion—the desire for additional creative and inspiring plans” (LMDC brochure, Plans in Progress, 2002). There were many public forums: an exhibition of the finalists, Plans in Progress, at the Wintergarden of the World Financial Center, December 20, 2002–February 2003; a two-part symposium in mid-January 2003, jointly organized by the Architecture League, the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and widespread television and print media coverage. 6. On other logics of democracy, see Jacques Rancière, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); and Chantal Mouffe, ed., Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community (New York: Verso, 1992). 7. For a demonstration of this reactive turn away from theory, see Assemblage 41 (April 2000), the journal’s ﬁnal issue dedicated to a questionnaire on theory. This stance did not reﬂect that of the editors, nor of many contributors, but was present in a large number of responses.

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architectural practices are understood as situated at poles along an axis: at one end was the unwitting integration into the dominant technological and socioeconomic forces; at the other the dialectical withdrawal into an autonomous disciplinary domain of formal and semantic investigation. It seems important, however, not only to ask how these symptoms are related to this dichotomy and to the competition itself—the role it called on architecture to perform, and the visibility and public voice it conferred to certain streams of contemporary practice— but to ask what they are symptoms of, what they reveal about the state of contemporary architecture.

In his initial, euphoric response to the unveiling of the six LMDC entries on December 18, 2002, Herbert Muschamp, critic for the New York Times, noted of the project by Richard Meier and his collaborators that “It may strike some as a throw- back to the megastructural superblocks of the 1960s,” glibly adding, “So what?” Buckminster Fuller was also invoked with respect to the lofty ambitions of the towers, as was Louis Kahn (presumably the early experimental collaborations with Anne Tyng and Robert le Ricolais) on account of the twin lattice structures of the THINK team.8 Experimental practices might well have been on the critic’s mind following the recent exhibition of the Howard Gilman collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York: The Changing of the Avant-Garde included a diverse ﬁeld of important “visionary” drawings, ranging from work by Yona Friedman, Arata Isozaki, Cedric Price, and members of the Archigram group of the 1960s to

8. See Herbert Muschamp, “Visions for Ground Zero: An Appraisal; The Latest Round of Designs Rediscover and Celebrate the Vertical Life,” New York Times, December 19, 2002, page 10. Muschamp also mentioned Russian Constructivist precedents.

Arata Isozaki. Joint Core System (elevation). Project. 1960. © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York.

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the radical practices of Archizoom, Superstudio, and Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) from the early 1970s through to the emergent postmodern “paper architecture” of Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, and Aldo Rossi. Curator Terrence Riley went so far as to position the work as “the root sources of our architecture today.”9 From exhibitions of the equally remarkable collections of the Fonds Régional d’Art contemporain d’Orléans (FRAC) and the Centre Georges Pompidou to retrospectives of Archigram and the inclusion of key protagonists of experimental architecture in Cities on the Move, the 1960s and ’70s neo-avant-garde has indeed returned to haunt architects’ imaginations. We can also, however, find retrievals of experimental work founded less on historical premises than on an operative program of return. In publications such as Daidalos’s 2000 issue on “Diagrammania” (a response to ANY 23, “Diagram Work” of 1998) and a 1997 issue of Lusitania, “Sites and Stations: Provisional Utopias,” the postcritical camp implicitly or explicitly situated this experimental legacy as a paternity.10 The specificity revealed by historical analysis, as Michel Foucault has argued, “is certainly one of the best defenses against this theme of return.”11 The historical significance of earlier experimental practices and the radical stakes that haunted aspects of the work warrant critical investigation, and an important body of scholar- ship is emerging on this front.12 Exemplifying an earlier engagement with new technologies—not only structural but cybernetic, information, and transportation technologies—the work does seem relevant to a contemporary condition characterized by the capitalist project of globalization, expanded media networks, and increasingly immaterial forms of labor and aesthetic practice.13 If the optimistic 1960s discourse of social liberation (with which the work was frequently coupled) seems in retrospect naive, and if it soon gave way to a dystopic counterpart as ideals of “open” relations proved all too effective at training flexible social subjects for a “control society,” we might nevertheless lament the elision—in this return to

9. Terrence Riley, “Introduction,” in The Changing of the Avant-Garde: Visionary Architectural Drawings from the Howard Gilman Collection (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), p. 14. 10. Not all of the contributions to these publications were “operative” in this sense even if the project of the publications remained so. For exceptions see, for instance, the articles by Anthony Vidler and Mary Lou Lobsinger in Daidalos 74 (October 2000), and Celeste Olalquiaga, Miwon Kwon, Aaron Tan, Friedrich Kittler et al., and others in Lusitania 7 (1997). 11. “For me,” Foucault continued, “the history of madness or the studies of the prison . . . were done in that precise manner because I knew full well—this is in fact what aggravated many people—that I was carrying out an historical analysis in such a manner that people could criticize the present, but it was impossible for them to say, ‘Let’s go back. . . . ’” (Michel Foucault, “Space, Knowledge and Power,” [1982], trans. Christian Hubert, in Sylvère Lotringer, ed., Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984 [New York: Semiotext(e), 1989], p. 343). 12. See, for instance, the catalog essays in The Changing of the Avant-Garde, especially Sarah Deyong’s “Memories of the Urban Future: The Rise and Fall of the Megastructure,” other catalogs to the exhibitions noted above, and Mark Wigley, “Network Fever,” Grey Room 04 (Summer 2001), pp. 82–122. 13. If the processing capacities of digital media were widely embraced by architecture in the 1950s and ’60s, the most recent generation of information technology has radically transformed the discipline once again. Research into the earlier, historical turn to electronic technologies, however, offers not only prehistories of contemporary interest in information technology and virtual space, but also important lessons regarding their historical and political implications for architecture.

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formal strategies from the 1960s—of attempts to forge new modes of radical political and institutional transformation, no matter how transiently effective they might be.14 Even more symptomatic perhaps, and what I want to trace here, is the fact that the recuperation of such technological and conceptual investigations as models has not only elided their political cast, but also perversely recast the work through the semantic qualities that many actively disavowed, but to which, historically, they soon gave rise. Some of these practices were, in the formulation of Alison and Peter Smithson, avowedly “without rhetoric,” and many, such as the Continuous Monument of Superstudio, posed challenges to architecture’s capacity or willingness to signify at that historical moment.15 Despite architects’ assertions to the contrary, these earlier practices are being retrieved to function within a rhetoric of the image more familiar to architectural postmodernism than to neo-avant-garde lines of ﬂight from functional determinism and formal certainty. This seems to mirror a logic Hal

Superstudio (Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, Gian Piero Frassinelli, Alessandro Magris, Roberto Magris, Adolfo Natalini). The Continuous Monument: On the Rocky Coast. Project. 1969. © 2002 The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Foster describes in “The Crux of Minimalism,” in which minimalist art was at once receding as an historical object of the 1960s and being returned to by artists looking for alternatives to the strategies of the 1970s and 1980s. Rather than articulating critical or reﬂexive practices, those “strategic revisions of minimalism,” Foster argues, had “refashion[ed] it in iconographic, expressive, and/or spectacular terms—as if to attack it with the very terms that it opposed.”16 Architectural postmodernism turned away from technoscientiﬁc investigations toward semantic legibility and formal rhetoric as a response or panacea to the

14. See Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” trans. Martin Joughin, in Negotiations: 1972–1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 177–83. 15. See Alison and Peter Smithson, Without Rhetoric: An Architectural Aesthetic, 1955–1972 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974). The SOM team claimed that their project was without rhetoric at the second symposium. 16. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), p. 60.

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anomie of the postmodern condition. The recent post-postmodern work turns back to an earlier engagement with the organizational potentials of cybernetic systems (and its counterpart in electronic languages) only to sublate those avowedly post- semantic investigations to another mode of what was termed at the time “meaning in architecture.”17 Experimental work of the 1960s and 1970s, of course, harbored residual semantic qualities (to which we will turn shortly), but what is being sought in the present seems to be the work’s capacity to signify a proximity to technological advancement. And we might recall that architectural investigations into structuralism and semiotics, if polemically situated against other linguistic paradigms—such as investigations of artificial languages and cybernetics—were working on related strategies of resemanticization, of adding meaning to the abstract packets of information through which architecture’s formal components were understood to be modulated.18 It is indeed an uncanny return.19 Muschamp and other commentators on the LMDC entries pointed to the Megastructure precedent, but there were additional mediatic qualities being sought. “There’s a public appetite for an image,” Meier noted on Charlie Rose, with Charles Gwathmey weighing in to confirm the LMDC imperative that what was needed was “an iconic place-maker in the city.”20 With a populace fed on images of impending war, the appeal to the image as a stabilizing power or familiar landmark, as Muschamp pointed out in a less euphoric moment, raises the specter of the Bush administration’s agenda of refilling the evacuated symbols of American military and economic might. Daniel Libeskind’s entry, he noted in particular, adopts a triumphalist and nationalist bias, albeit veiled in the formal trappings of a heroic expressionism that is at once the architect’s signature response to trauma and a key to the project’s theme-park character.21

17. For a landmark document of the postmodern turn from technoscientific investigations to semantic ones, see Charles Jencks and George Baird, eds., Meaning in Architecture (New York: George Braziller, 1969). 18. For a critique of this connection, see Manfredo Tafuri, “Architecture and Its Double: Semiology and Formalism,” in Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976), pp. 150–69. On relations between communications technology and semiotic investigations, see Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 19. What seems to have occurred then, is a double evacuation: initially through the rejection of semantics altogether, and then a quite perverse recuperation of those structures—Megastructure, flexible structures, triangulated structures, shattered forms—as legible (postmodern) codes. 20. Charlie Rose, January 8, 2003, transcript no. 3374, p. 8. The image of height, Meier posited, “is a symbolic presence that is very important, not only to the people of New York City and the people of America, but the people of the world.” Gwathmey confirmed the connection to Megastructure when he stated that the interlocking towers “were flexible in the sense that over time . . . they can change programs and accommodate housing, they can accommodate hotels, they can also accommodate offices, but the image of the buildings is so serene.” Ibid. 21. See Herbert Muschamp, “Balancing Reason and Emotion in Twin Towers Void,” New York Times, February 6, 2003, sec. E, p. 1. Libeskind’s project, he writes, “is a startlingly aggressive tour de force, a war memorial to a looming conflict that has scarcely begun.” Describing the project as an “emotionally manipulative exercise in visual codes,” he notes: “A concrete pit is equated with the Constitution. A skyscraper tops off at 1,776 feet.” Libeskind’s LMDC statement confirms this: “A skyscraper rises above its predecessors, reasserting the preeminence of freedom and beauty, restoring the spiritual peak to the

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If we can provisionally assert that the intersection of architecture and technology at which experimental practices were situated remains relevant, the question becomes, to paraphrase Michael Hardt, what are the “really existing forces immanent to the social field through which radical theorizing might take place?”22 That is to say: how can the discipline figure not only a moment of assimilation to or withdrawal from the forces of late capitalism—whether they be economic, administrative, social, or informatic—but also take account of those contingencies in a manner that is less cynical than contestatory? What space is there, in other words, for political work? In the late 1960s Foucault described a discipline as a “field in which formal identities, thematic continuities, translation of concepts, and polemical exchanges may be deployed.”23 But he understood that “regularities” in such a field were not tantamount to a limited model of return; the archive of a discourse functioned not only as a homogenizing force, but also as a force of difference. His disarticulation of a discourse’s regularities from its historical context—regularities being understood neither as fixed or universal (extrinsic to history, like a “great, unmoving, empty figure”) nor as fully determined by their time—suggests that architects’ investigations into the formal and critical strategies of experimental architecture might take account of more complex political relations between design and historical forces, as well as between the discipline’s past and its present.

The Use-Value of Experimental Architecture

Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis’s Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture (undertaken in collaboration with Madelon Vriesendorp and Zoe Zenghelis in 1972) will serve as a starting point to look at politically informed work with a more proximate experimental legacy. But any lesson to be found here will not be straightforward or easy. For Exodus marks not just a continuation of earlier political questioning, but also a theory of its endpoint, if not marking its end. It was the last project Koolhaas would complete in Europe before departing for New York where he developed his retroactive manifesto of “Manhattanism,” his distinctly postutopian formulation of the architect’s capacity to negotiate the forces of modernization of the city. A paradigm of the naturalization of urban processes and their relation to capitalism, American architecture, Koolhaas posited in Delirious New York, exempliﬁed a direct relation to capitalist development insofar as it was devoid of the polemical discourse and political and utopian cast of the European avant-garde. Moreover, Manhattan was “a counter-Paris, an

city, creating an icon that speaks of our vitality in the face of danger and our optimism in the aftermath of tragedy. Life victorious.” From Plans in Progress. “The future,” he remarked at the City Hall event, “is destined to be victorious.” Norman Foster made similar remarks in his Plans in Progress statement. 22. Michael Hardt, “Introduction: Laboratory Italy,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paulo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 5. 23. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1970), pp. 126–27.

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anti-London,”24 a capital of the twentieth century that called on the architect to rethink the nature of Empire.25 Submitted as Koolhaas’s thesis project at London’s Architectural Association, Exodus was initially presented as an entry for “The City as Meaningful Environment,” a competition run by the Italian Association for Industrial Design (ADI) and the Italian magazine Casabella.26 It took the form of an illustrated architectural parable much like those of Superstudio to which it is indebted.27 As Koolhaas later recalled, it was a product of the “‘visionary’ 1960s,” a period that was “relentlessly optimistic and ultimately innocent.” Recalling that moment, 1972, he explained:

24. Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 20. 25. Hal Foster makes this connection between Koolhaas and Hardt and Negri’s formulation of Empire in his chapter on Koolhaas, “Architecture and Empire,” in Design and Crime (New York: Verso, 2002), pp. 43–62. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). 26. Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis, “Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture,” Casabella 378 (June 1973), pp. 42–45. 27. Koolhaas notes the importance of Adolfo Natalini’s thinking and his group, Superstudio’s Continuous Monument in “La deuxième chance de l’architecture moderne . . . Entretien avec Rem Koolhaas,” Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 238 (April 1985), p. 2.

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Archigram was at the height of its power and groups like Archizoom and Superstudio were conceiving architectural stories supposing a vast expansion of the territory of the architectural imagination. . . . “Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture” was a reaction to this inno- cence: a project to emphasize that the power of architecture is more ambiguous and dangerous. Based on a study of “The Berlin Wall as Architecture,” Exodus proposed to erase a section of central London to establish there a zone of metropolitan life—inspired by Baudelaire— and to protect this zone with walls from the old city, creating maximum division and contrast. The people of London could choose: those who wanted to be admitted to this zone of hyperdensity became “The Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture.”28 Incarceration here took the form of a willing submission to a brutally dialectical structure, one that supposedly ﬁgured a positive counterimage to that of the wall’s violent (if for Koolhaas also “heartbreakingly beautiful”) impact on the city of Berlin. To quickly recount aspects of the parable, for it is through the ambiguity of its conceptual details that one can read in this “architectural warfare” a knowing dialogue with its historical condition.29 The story began by describing London divided into a good and a bad half, with the gradient of desirability giving rise to an urban exodus. And as in Berlin, this migration was countered (but ultimately exacerbated) by a “desperate and savage use of architecture,” the construction of a wall. In the face of “division, isolation, inequality, aggression, destruction,” the wall operated not by a timid reformist intervention into troubled social domains but by providing “totally desirable alternatives” in the form of “collective facilities that fully accommodate individual desires.” Catalyzing the ruination of an industrial and imperial metropolis, the “strip of intense metropolitan desirability” demarcated by the wall was cast as a force of revolutionary change. The ﬁrst stage of incarceration was accompanied by an “inspired state of political inventiveness, which is echoed by the architecture. The senses,” posited the architects, “are overwhelmed by thought.” But despite this nod to the political, Exodus offered a parodic revision of utopian and political ideals; it pointed to the impossible nature of such escape attempts and to the inevitable return of the discipline’s normative function. To escape the inequalities of the capitalist metropolis, the postindustrial subject had entered architecture, seen as both a mediating and incarcerating, yet not fully disciplinary, structure. Dystopic aspects

28. Rem Koolhaas, “Sixteen Years of OMA,” in OMA-Rem Koolhaas: Architecture 1970–1990, ed. Jacques Lucan (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991), p. 162. Koolhaas also later noted how, after being confronted by the Berlin wall, “the sixties dreams of architecture’s liberating potential—in which I had been marinating for years as a student—seemed feeble rhetorical play. It evaporated on the spot” (Rem Koolhaas, “Field Trip: A(A) Memoir (First and Last . . . ),” in S, M, L, XL: Ofﬁce for Metropolitan Architecture, Rem Koolhaas, and Bruce Mau [New York: Monacelli Press, 1995], p. 226). 29. The term “architectural warfare” is from Koolhaas and Zenghelis. Unless otherwise noted, all citations from “Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture” are from S, M, L, XL, pp. 2–21.

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were soon revealed as inhabitants filtered through a programmed sequence of spaces to find themselves participating in another logic of subjectification. Whether in the subjects’ relations to industry, art, eroticism, administration, medicine, leisure, or dwelling, a disturbing repetition of the institutional logics and spectacular milieu of the outside occurred. The intense collectivism, recalling the architecture of Soviet Social Condensers, was revealed to be a foil to bring “hidden motivations, desires, and impulses to the surface to be refined for recognition, provocation, and development.” Koolhaas noted the indebtedness of Exodus to Italian radicals, the significance of which will take us beyond its conceptual and aesthetic relation to Superstudio’s Continuous Monument (as an endpoint of architectural signification) and their illustrated parables such as Twelve Ideal Cities (their dystopic tales of a postindustrial life characterized through a violent subjectification by architectural machines).30 More provocative even than Koolhaas’s claims that the parable marks a turning point from an architecture of form and signs to an architecture forged by the organization of program (understood as the trace of social forces), is an indebtedness signaled by the title itself. For exodus (esodo) was a key term from the political discourse of the Italian New Left or Autonomia movement from this period. Beyond a historical reference to the exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt, it referred to a strategy of the Autonomia movement predicated on a “refusal of work.” The refusal of work did not, as Hardt argues, “mean a refusal of creative or productive activity but rather a refusal of work within the established capitalist relations of production.”31 It was (as in Koolhaas and Zenghelis’s parable) an active withdrawal from existing relations of capitalist production that simultaneously proposed a positive alternative through new social formations. Exodus was, further- more, a political strategy not predicated on negation or dialectical relations, which for the Italian radicals led inevitably to an irreconcilable contradiction in which both poles remained trapped in a mutual mirroring of their counterpart. Moreover, unlike revolutionary movements that aimed to destroy the upper levels of hierarchical state power or even a monarchy (beheading the king), exodus operated through mass defection in order to cause power relations to crumble from within. As I have argued elsewhere, political strategies from the extraparlia- mentary left in Italy can be traced throughout the work of Superstudio, Archizoom, and other architects associated with the variegated notion of Architettura Radicale, who adopted not only the creative potentials of “the refusal of work” but also the notion of operating “inside and against” the capitalist

30. See Superstudio, “Il Monumento continuo, storyboard per un ﬁlm [Natural and Artiﬁcial Deserts],” Casabella 358 (November 1971), pp. 18–22; and Superstudio, “Twelve Cautionary Tales for Christmas,” Architectural Design 42 (December 1971), pp. 737–42 (published as “Le dodici città ideali” in Casabella 361 [January 1972]). 31. Hardt, “Introduction: Laboratory Italy,” p. 2. See also Mario Tronti, “The Strategy of Refusal” (1965), in Semiotext(e) 3, no. 3, Italy: Autonomia, Post-Political Politics, ed. Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi (1980), pp. 28–34.

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system.32 And like their radical counterparts in other fields of cultural production, the work and sensibility of these architects were characterized not only by a positive and optimistic stance, but also by the embrace of desire as a revolutionary force. As Hardt explains, “The collective pursuit of pleasures is always in the fore- front—revolution is a desiring-machine.”33 Antonio Negri’s work from the 1960s was paramount in theorizing the historical transition central to this political paradigm, a transition from the mass worker (or class subject) as the agent of history to the “socialized worker” of the postindustrial era in recognition of the emergence of new social subjects as productive and dissenting forces.34 This was regarded as an historical fact, a product of the expansive reach of cybernetic machines, their vast infiltration into, and reconfiguration of, social and work spaces. The battle lines had thus been redrawn and political struggle was understood no longer to take place at the mass level, but rather through micro-revolutions of the “multitude,” through strategies of resistance that were antihierarchic, antidialectical, and which refused to congeal into a “general line.”35 If, for the Italian New Left, exodus forged a line of flight from the institutions of the capitalist state, and if it held the promise of a “coming community” (to use the formulation of Giorgio Agamben), we need to ask what it performed for Koolhaas and Zenghelis. Exodus presented a withdrawal from present social, economic, and spatial relations, one that led to the ruination of a metropolitan capital and its institutions. But while pursuing modes of political life and revolutionary action, the occupants find themselves not outside of a disciplinary system, but rather caught within a regulatory one. Short-circuiting the claim to have overcome dialectics (the good versus the bad parts of the city), the zone demarcated by the wall mirrors the recuperative logic of that which it attempts to escape. In a knowing wink to Foucault’s work, hospitals and insane asylums become clinical sites of display, voyeurism, and control rather than of care of the body; archives not only become statistical records of “the vital facts, developments, and life incidents” of past prisoners, but also through automation, come to provide “pre- mature biographies,” “essential instruments for plotting a course and planning the future.” A subject’s desire is shown to be fully captured within this dystopic system, as exemplified by a story of pleasure-seeking prisoners who become addicted to the challenge of endlessly repeating mechanical waves. But if we are to take seriously the potential connection of OMA’s early work to the Autonomia movement, there are more puzzling aspects of Exodus; for the zone of metropolitan desirability it demarcated was not tied to larger post-

32. See my “Italian Design and the New Political Landscape,” in Analyzing Ambasz, ed. Michael Sorkin (forthcoming, 2004). 33. Hardt, “Introduction: Laboratory Italy,” p. 7. 34. See Antonio Negri, “Workerist Publications and Bios,” in Semiotext(e) 3, no. 3 (1980), pp. 178–81. 35. See Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi, “The Return of Politics,” in Semiotext(e) 3, no. 3 (1980), p. 8.

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industrial machinations. While characterized by automation within a vast architectural assemblage, there is a blocking of the transmission of electronic media from without. In this sense, Exodus would not follow Architettura Radicale’s experimentation with, or allegorization of, the potential liberties to be harnessed by those new social subjects emerging within the postindustrial milieu. The “voluntary prisoners of architecture” would reside in a postdisciplinary structure, but one haunted by an archaeology of disciplinary society as it gave way to a logic of control (much like the allegory of OMA’s renovation of a panopticon prison).36

Derelict Spaces

The late 1960s was precisely the moment, Jonathan Crary has observed, at which “the legibility of the [Western] city appeared near a threshold of oblivion.”37 As that legibility or coherence gave way to a city more adequately understood as “a function of networks and forces surpassing it,” discourses of urbanism proliferated in the face of the loss of their material object. Crary notes, Urbanism collided with that moment in capitalism when the rationalization of built space became secondary to problems of speed and the maximization of circulation. Urbanism continued to operate in an increasingly bereft domain; it sought to impose spatial intelligibility onto a locale that was being transformed by the antiterritoriality of capital.38 Crary delineated two distinct responses to this condition: on the one hand were attempts to rationalize or integrate such forces into a functional whole, as exempliﬁed in the work of Buckminster Fuller (along with Constantin Doxiais and Paolo Soleri). On the other hand was Archigram (along with Coop Himmelblau and the Metabolists), whose work attempted to counter such technocratic visions by adopting the cybernetic logic of feedback, reading the capitalist city as a “kit of parts,” which could be “playfully deployed according to the dictates of individual desires.” If, as Crary rightly argues, the technocratic response “actually entailed the full subordination of the city’s inhabitants to the enormity of their systems,” Archigram’s response would, in its notion of participation, ultimately cede too much to the persistence of an intact subject. “Once the city had been reduced to a ‘kit of parts,’” he writes, “only a humanist mirage could prevent its inhabitants from becoming one more relay in this network.”39

36. See Rem Koolhaas, “Revision,” in S, M, L, XL, pp. 234–52, 241. Anthony Vidler discusses the panopticon prison scheme as an archaeology of discipline in “Psychometropolis” (1982), in The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), p. 193. 37. Jonathan Crary, “J. G. Ballard and the Promiscuity of Forms,” Zone 1/2 (1986), pp. 159–65. 38. Ibid., p. 159. 39. Ibid., p. 162. If Archigram “undermined notions of the city as a functional integration of parts,” the “visceral aggregate of technical systems and organs” of the work retained, as Crary argued, a notion of the subject that Ballard’s Crash was to do away with. Ballard’s subject was more radically decomposed, scattered, remapped onto the “shifting mobile arrangements” of the postindustrial condition.

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This postwar urban condition raised a “familiar modernist dilemma,” one exemplified in Charles Baudelaire’s nineteenth century experience of the Haussmannization of Paris. Citing Manfredo Tafuri, Crary recalled that “this recurring problem was ‘how to come to terms with the anguish of urban dynamism.’”40 He returns to this formulation when addressing the work of Koolhaas. (Baudelaire was indeed a pertinent reference; Exodus ended with a section titled “The Avowal,” in which, to “express their everlasting gratitude the Voluntary Prisoners sing an ode to the architecture that forever encloses them” with words from Les Fleurs du mal.41) Koolhaas’s response to ongoing modernization was, as Crary posits, distinct from the dichotomies of the poet (the “exhilarating experience of new velocities, the apparent freedom of sensations of new itineraries and perceptual frontiers” on the one hand, and the “lament at the immense richness of what modernization had eradicated forever” on the other). Moving more fluidly between polarities, whether they be Baudelaire’s or, more proximately, tectonic and electronic paradigms of architecture and other irreconcilable disjunctions emerging in the postindustrial city, Koolhaas’s work (like the characters in J. G. Ballard’s Crash) is cast neither as assimilation nor as opposition to expanding capitalist forces but as a strategy of occupying the anachronistic interstices concurrently emerging amidst incompatible technological systems.42 Crary’s interpretation is a brilliant and productive one. It produces critical concepts that excavate political potentials in the inherent heterogeneity of the urban condition rather than responding (as if it were an inescapably totalized condition) with a melancholic withdrawal. The danger, Crary argues in “The Eclipse of Spectacle,” is to totalize, since to do so is to mystify a system as “beyond the grasp of critical analysis,” and to lose the sense of its imbrication within the “vicissitudes of social processes.”43 In this article he identified a “site of latent but potentially volatile disequilibrium” in “the fundamental incapacity of capitalism ever to rationalize the circuit between body and computer keyboard.”44 In his “Notes on Koolhaas and Modernization,” that body returns, coupled to “outmoded vectors and vehicles” as a productive anachronism through which to counter “the remodeling of the body into an electronic consumer.”45 Architecture (for the lesson is implicitly a larger one) is thus read, like Ballard’s fiction, as having the capacity to induce slow speeds, to inhabit silences, to trace “new cultural vacancies and derelict spaces.” It is understood to have the opportunity, not only of “collaborating with, if

40. Crary, “J. G. Ballard,” p. 163. 41. See S, M ,L, XL, p. 20. This has been elided from the reproduction in Jeffrey Kipnis, Perfect Acts of Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art and Columbus: Wexner Center for the Arts, 2001). 42. Recalling his reading of the disjunction between the automobile and technological reproduction in Crash, Crary traces in the incompatible but adjacent infrastructural systems of Koolhaas’s work, moments that in their incompatibility preclude absolute rationalization. See Crary, “J. G. Ballard.” 43. Jonathan Crary, “Eclipse of the Spectacle,” in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), pp. 283–94, 284. See also Jonathan Crary, “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory,” October 50 (Fall 1989), pp. 97–107. 44. Crary, “Eclipse of the Spectacle,” p. 294. 45. Jonathan Crary, “Notes on Koolhaas and Modernization,” ANY 9 (1994), p. 15.

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not emulating, uncontrolled forces of development,” but also of “simultaneously working ‘against the grain’ of modernization.”46

Signs

I want now to turn to Koolhaas’s thoughts on form and signification, which demonstrate a complexity missing in recent postcritical claims to a fully asemantic, operational, and diagrammatic architecture.47 Koolhaas does argue that his architecture results not from the coding of parts or their formal composition (as in architectural postmodernism), but from the organization of program. This shift from a form/sign coupling to that of force/program was recounted as an epiphany connected to the period of Exodus. Recalling his trip to Berlin in the summer of 1971, Koolhaas explained, On the same level of negative revelation, the wall also, in my eyes, made a total mockery of any of the emerging attempts to link form to meaning in a regressive chain-and-ball relationship. It was clearly about communication, semantic maybe, but its meaning changed almost daily, sometimes by the hour. . . . But on the eve of postmodernism, here was unforgettable (not to say final) proof of the “less is more” doctrine. . . . I would never again believe in form as the primary vessel of meaning.48 Twenty-five years later he cautioned against a too-quick rejection of the importance of semiotics. Indeed, he recognized something of an exacerbation in the functioning of signs that had occurred with the ceaseless expansion of spectacular and informatic logics as they impacted design. It was, he argued, noting the importance of its critical lessons, an exacerbation that rendered a semiotic paradigm “more triumphant than ever.”49

46. Ibid., p. 14. Crary updates the city’s historical mutation with Delirious New York, noting that it was published in 1978, “just when the Western city, as a theater of modernization, began to cede its pri- macy to another more pervasive and placeless arena of transformation and rationalization: the digital circuitry of telematics and informatics” (ibid., p. 15). 47. Some contributors to ANY 9, dedicated to Koolhaas, claimed that the work had overcome representation, that it was entirely nonsemiotic. 48. Koolhaas, “Field Trip,” p. 227. Italics in original. 49. Recounting a manifesto launched by Sanford Kwinter and amplified by Ben van Berkel, Alejandro Zaera, and Greg Lynn, Koolhaas noted that “they had fresh and new ambitions and postures— antisemantic, purely operational—represented in virtuoso computer (in)animation.” “I remember being critical of their claim, then, that they had gone beyond form to sheer performance, and their claim that they had gone beyond the semantic into the purely instrumental and strictly operational. What I (still) ﬁnd bafﬂing is their hostility to the semantic. Semiotics is more triumphant than ever— as evidenced, for example, in the corporate world or in branding—and the semantic critique may be more useful than ever” (Rem Koolhaas, in “Spot Check: A Conversation between Rem Koolhaas and Sarah Whiting,” Assemblage 40 [December, 1999], p. 46). Prior to this provocation, in 1995 while working on a project based in Singapore, Koolhaas had returned to Barthian formulations—in particular those of The Fashion System and Empire of Signs—to theorize this Asian city (i.e., not the Japanese city of Barthes’s analysis) as an “Empire of Semantics.” See “Barthian Slate,” in S, M, L, XL, p. 1039.

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If Koolhaas is correct, then such a mutation calls for a critique forged on account of a coupling of program and sign. If evident to him at the turn of the millennium, this had also implicitly been demonstrated almost thirty years earlier. Beyond the powerful “psychological and symbolic” effect (or affect) of the wall (which, Koolhaas remarks, was “infinitely more powerful” than the artifact), Exodus can also be read as a parable of urban life in which space and urban organization become political diagrams entailing architectural correlates. That is, it implicitly represents a model of power for which the wall is a symptomatic trace or residue. A conversation between Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari from the early 1970s, published as “Equipments of Power,” sets out a reading of relations between spatial organization, infrastructure, community facilities, and power that seems relevant here.50 The city emerges in this discussion as a paradigm of an unstable or variable coding, with architecture cast as a sort of eruption of signs of power. The peculiarities of urbanism as a semiotic structure had already been addressed by Roland Barthes, who noted in “Semiology and Urbanism” that “this conflict between signification and function constitutes the despair of the urban- ists.”51 In this essay Barthes addressed the instability of signification, the lack of “a regular correspondence between signifiers and signifieds,” in the by then familiar terms of a turn to the reader. The city’s user was a reader who actualizes a multitude of meanings through his or her movements. A “site of our encounter with the other,” the city was also “a space in which certain subversive forces act and are encountered, forces of rupture, ludic forces,” he explained.52 But if Barthes had already introduced questions of force and desire into French poststructuralist discussion of urban signification, “Equipments of Power” added figures of regulation and control that read public facilities as “machines of the socius” or implicit expressions of power. “All reterritorializations of political power,” Guattari asserted, “are made on the city.”53 Guattari read the Athens Charter—the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne’s (CIAM) famous 1933 codification of the division of the city into functional zones (work, dwelling, recreation, and circulation)—as a model of spatial axiomatics that regulated or recoded a deterritorialized urban condition. Indeed, modernist ideals, such as those of CIAM, had long ago eclipsed Beaux-Arts predecessors to become official codes. But in arguing that collective equipment—by which was meant public amenities read as “spatial projections” or symptoms of “the social unconscious”—needed to be read as a form of writing, of language—“The collective

50. Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, “Equipments of Power: Towns, Territories, and Collective Equipments,” in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, pp. 105–12. 51. Roland Barthes, “Semiology and Urbanism” (1967) in Architecture Culture, 1943–1968, ed. Joan Ockman (New York: Columbia Books of Architecture, 1993), pp. 412–18, 414. The remark is in respect to historical ruins and contemporary planning in Rome. 52. Barthes, “Semiology and Urbanism,” p. 417. 53. Guattari in “Equipments of Power,” p. 108.

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equipment is only apprehended in the universe of representation”54—Guattari articulated a model of a more volatile temporality than CIAM had accounted for: Capital is also antiproductive—it too would build itself pyramids if it could: but the pyramid of capital runs ahead of it, the signs pop up and disperse in all directions. The body without organs of capital is the ideal of mastering decoded fluxes: it is always running behind the machine, always late in innovating.55 This figure of signs popping up, if quickly dispersing, points to the need for architects to stay on their feet with respect to signification. The question posed to architecture is not how the discipline has shifted or might shift from a vertical paradigm of signification to a horizontal one predicated on force and program, but how it understands its relation to logics of domination and power as manifest through its “innovative” artifacts, in other words, what ongoing role it plays in constructing “equipments of power.”56

The Ambivalence of Disenchantment

In his essay “Psychometropolis,” Anthony Vidler read the early work of OMA in terms of a negotiation between the formal and the programmatic. This intersection, “so difficultly held together by modernism,” he explained, had informed beliefs in social transformation entailed through work on the modernist language of forms, and it had been central to formulating radical potentials for aesthetic practice.57 For Vidler, OMA’s relation to modernism was best understood through the trope of irony, “a rhetorical figure that, in its common definition, operates by means of a mocking, pleasant or serious, of the subject.”58 OMA’s was an irony originating in doubt and seemingly inconsistent with the project of building. It had, however, as Vidler observes, given rise to an architecture that demonstrated a self-conscious ambiguity by revealing the absurdity of modernist form/program relations. Through the work of Barthes and Foucault (work on which, he noted, OMA’s “designs rest their case”), irony had, in fact, become a way of continuing modernist investigations. It was a type of practice that allowed modernism to operate in a postutopian present without turning into a “dried-out cynicism.”59

54. Ibid., p. 109. “A city without writing, does that exist?” he queried. 55. Ibid., p. 110. 56. This formulation is reminiscent of Superstudio. “The places where humanity is concentrated in great numbers have always been based on the city network of energy and information,” they explained, “with three-dimensional structures representing the values of the system” (Emilio Ambasz, ed., Italy: The New Domestic Landscape: Achievements and Problems of Italian Design [New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1972], p. 244). 57. Vidler, “Psychometropolis,” p. 190. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., p. 195.

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If OMA successfully negotiated this line between irony and cynicism, can we say the same of their postcritical, or “strictly operational,” followers? Yet it is not, of course, modernist certainties that are at stake in this instance but experimental architecture’s fascination with formal and programmatic indeterminacy. Koolhaas did not approach practices such as those of Archigram, Cedric Price, and Superstudio without doubt, and he would not leave untouched what he regarded as a naive engagement with cybernetic technology. The postcritical work seems to lose the sense of irony Vidler offers us. Its operational mode demonstrates a cynicism in which technological and organizational investigations merge or modulate seamlessly into formal strategies in a manner that disregards even residual moments of difference between form and program. There is also no space of negotiation forged between form and technology, no space through which the discipline might “set itself apart.”60 In the LMDC Megastructures, for instance, the network-based logic of a redundancy of circulation is adopted to provide more exits in the case of further terrorist attack. Koolhaas is not responsible for architecture’s postcritical turn, but there is a way in which his positioning of architecture in relation to capitalist forces left itself open to such interpretation. His reading of Manhattan aimed to resolve a paradox between the stability of architecture and the instability of its function within a metropolitan milieu; he detected a radical decoupling of “envelope” and interior organization that gave rise to “a mutant architecture that combines the aura of monumentality with the performance of instability.” As he explained: The genius of Manhattan is the simplicity of this divorce between appearance and performance: it keeps the illusion of architecture intact, while surrendering wholeheartedly to the needs of the metropolis. This architecture relates to the forces of the Großstadt like a surfer to the waves.61 The decoupling of form and program was thus cast as an opportunity to replace critical engagement with other maneuvers, a lesson picked up by the postcritical camp. Such instability and uncertainty—conditions exacerbated as the industrial city ceded to its postindustrial counterpart—should not, however, be taken to mean that anything goes or that surrendering to supposed exigencies is the best way

60. See Samuel Weber, Institution and Interpretation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). On such spacing see also Hal Foster’s recent and provocative invocation of Karl Kraus’s notion of “running-room” (spielraum) in Design and Crime. 61. Rem Koolhaas, “Elegy for the Vacant Lot,” in S, M, L, XL, p. 937. A slightly different translation appears earlier in which architecture surrenders to the “exigencies” of the metropolis and “is carried by the forces of the Großstadt as a surfer is carried by the waves.” Rem Koolhaas, “New York/La Villette,” in OMA-Rem Koolhaas: Architecture 1970–1990, p. 160. Of this Lucan writes, “It doesn’t astonish us that the image of the architect held with particular fondness by Rem Koolhaas is that of a surfer on a wave: the force and direction of the wave are uncontrollable, it breaks, the surfer can only, in exploit- ing it, ‘master’ it by choosing his route. . . .” (Lucan, “The Architect of Modern Life,” in OMA-Rem Koolhaas: Architecture 1970–1990, p. 37).

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to proceed. One of the most important lessons of poststructuralism is that such a lack of foundational certainties comes with the burden of decisions regarding how to act.62 Whether with respect to social relations, technological modalities, or semantic codes, it is precisely this indeterminacy that raises the specter of responsibility and, hence, a political decision that is at once an ethical act. Koolhaas’s response to an urban milieu that was “completely modernized, urbanized, and artificial” appears to be not just a delirious but a disenchanted one.63 And here we find additional lessons from Italian radical thought. Disenchantment, as Paulo Virno argues, is intimately connected to the postmodern- ization of production, in particular to modes of operation and subjectification arising from “the versatility and flexibility of electronic technologies.”64 For the productive subject of this post-Fordist condition is a subject characterized by new forms of socialization: “habituation to uninterrupted and nonteleological change, reflexes tested by a chain of perceptive shocks, a strong sense of the contingent and the aleatory, a nondeterministic mentality, urban training in traversing the crossroads of differing opportunities.”65 This training for the vicissitudes of new modes of rationalization has a subjective and an operative dimension: the opportunist, Virno explains, “confronts a flux of interchangeable possibilities, keeping open as many as possible, turning to the closest and swerving unpredictably from one to the other.”66 The computer is a technical correlate, for “rather than a means to a univocal end, [it] is a premise for successive ‘opportunistic’ elaborations of work.”67 In addition to the opportunist, Virno identifies a second subjective correlate. Responding to unfoundedness or insecurity, with its demands of flexibility and reactive adaptation, the cynic takes necessity as a virtue, picking up “only the minimum of signals needed to orient [his or her] struggle for survival.”68 What is important about Virno’s formulation is not just the astute observa- tion of new characters or “professional profiles” (the cynic and the opportunist) that update Georg Simmel and Baudelaire’s earlier metropolitan subjects, but also his insistence that there might be other responses to this vastly exacerbated condition of alienation.69 He vociferously refuses reactionary calls for the return to rootedness or authenticity as well as attempts to sublimate or overcome the

62. See Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); and Thomas Keenan, “Looking Like Flames and Falling Like Stars: Kosovo, the First Internet War,” in Mutations (Barcelona: ACTAR, 2000), pp. 84–95. 63. Paulo Virno, “The Ambivalence of Disenchantment,“ in Radical Thought in Italy, p. 15. 64. Virno, “The Ambivalence of Disenchantment,” p. 14. 65. Ibid., p. 15. 66. Ibid., p. 16. 67. Ibid., p. 17. 68. Ibid., p. 18. 69. “So-called advanced technologies do not so much provoke alienation, a scattering of some long- vanished ‘familiarity,’ as reduce the experience of even the most radical alienation to a professional proﬁle. Put in fashionable jargon: nihilism, once the dark side of technology’s productive power, has become one of its fundamental ingredients, a prized commodity in the labor market” (ibid., pp. 15–16).

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evanescence and sense of contingency of contemporary social life (the “habit of having no habits”). Instability, uprooting, and incessant transformation form “the necessary background condition of action and conduct in general,” he explains, noting that “this modality of experience, even if it nourishes opportunism, does not necessarily result in it.”70 What Virno reads in distinction to a reactionary or ambivalent response is a “virtuous” potential that assumes the burden of investigat- ing “possible worlds.” Akin to Crary’s reading of disjunctive or outmoded spaces, these are conceived not as utopian elsewheres but as latent in the present.71 In “Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus,” Virno distinguishes between two forms of virtuosity. First is a “virtuosic activity [that] comes across as universal servile labor,” a subjugation to the General Intellect and its cybernetic framework.72 Second is a “nonservile virtuosity,” which while operating within the logic and machinations of the capitalist system retains a political vocation. Here Virno returns us to the question of exodus, which for him exemplified such a political practice. An intemperate action against the state, exodus, as I noted above, took the form of engaged withdrawal, a radical disobedience founded through leave taking that was at the same time a positive action. In Virno’s words: The term is not at all conceived as some defensive existential strategy— it is neither exiting on tiptoe through the back door nor a search for sheltering hideaways. Quite the contrary: what I mean by Exodus is a full-fledged model of action, capable of confronting the challenges of modern politics. . . . Only those who open a way of exit for themselves can do the founding; but, by the opposite token, only those who do the founding will succeed in finding the parting of the waters by which they will be able to leave Egypt.73 To define the nature of a positive alternative, Virno argues, one has to specify the nature of the enemy. For the “abandonment of the notion of ‘enmity,’” he posited, was affiliated not only with optimism, but also with a form of optimism characterized by “swimming with the current.”74 This was, he reminded his reader with reference to Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” “the reproof that [Benjamin] directed against German Social Democracy in the

70. Ibid., p. 25. 71. There is a difference in discursive frameworks here between an axis of transformation from virtual to actual and that from possible to real. On this distinction, see Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 16–20. 72. Paulo Virno, “Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus,“ in Radical Thought in Italy, p. 196. General Intellect refers to the collective intelligence of a society arising not just from humans but also from the machines that inform production, in this case cybernetic or information technologies. On the notion of General Intellect, see Virno, “Virtuosity and Revolution,” pp. 194–96; and Virno, “The Ambivalence of Disenchantment,” pp. 21–25. 73. Virno, “Virtuosity and Revolution,” p. 197. 74. Ibid., p. 204.

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1930s.”75 And in what stands as a cogent reprise to the current postcritical turn in architecture, he continues: The benign current may take a variety of different names: progress, the development of productive forces, the choice of a form of life that shuns inauthenticity, general intellect. Naturally, we have to bear in mind the possibility of failing in this “swimming,” in other words, not being able to deﬁne in clear and distinct terms the precise contents of a politics adequate to our times. However, this caution does not annul but corroborates the fundamental conviction: as long as one learns to “swim,” and thus as long as one thinks well about possible liberty, the “current” will drive one irresistibly forward. However, no notice is taken of the interdiction that institutions, interests, and material forces may oppose the good swimmer.76 New Monumentality

There was an earlier endeavor to recuperate “symbolic” functions for modern architecture, an iconographic response born of a sense of the discipline’s overcoming by the abstract forces of modernization. This was exemplified in Siegfried Giedion’s famous 1944 formulation of “The Need for a New Monumentality”77 as well as in the late-modern turn to gestural form such as the “Ballet School” period of architects like Philip Johnson, Edward Durell Stone, and Minoru Yamasaki.78 The desire for legible urban symbols in the LMDC competition also appears to respond to the (in retrospect) extraordinary symbolic efﬁcacy of Yamasaki’s World Trade Center as well as the Pentagon, which indeed pop up as equipments of economic and military power. The current forces challenging architecture’s role in “community life” are no longer primarily those of a mechanical paradigm, as in Giedion’s time, but an electronic or informatic one, and with this transformation come new modes of signiﬁcation. Given the greatly deterritorialized condition of contemporary global cities, and their dispersed mode of

75. Ibid. See also Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), especially section 4: Historical Main Text, on “The Weimar Symptom.” 76. Virno, “Virtuosity and Revolution,” p. 204. A postcritical cynicism recognizes the increasing mutability of both new social subjects and aesthetic practices in the postindustrial age and responds by mimetically adopting cybernetic logics of dispersal, ﬂexibility, contingency, and indeterminacy. Such symptoms are present in number (but not all) of the contributions to ANY 23 on “Diagram Work,” of 1998, particularly those who too quickly assimilate the Foucauldian and Deleuzian notion of the diagram to an apolitical mode of architectural practice, thus overlooking the overtly political cast of both philosophers’ work. But if “swimming with the current” seemed a smooth way out of what might appear as a critical impasse, Virno’s cautionary note suggests otherwise. 77. See Siegfried Giedion, “The Need for a New Monumentality” (1944) in Architecture: You and Me (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), pp. 25–39. 78. See John Jacobus, Twentieth-Century Architecture, 1940–65 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1966), pp. 150–56.

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functioning within digital and circulation networks, what seemed most urgent to many addressing the Ground Zero site (with the possible exception of Lower Manhattan residents) was the return of a signature skyline. “The iconic skyline must be reassembled,” asserted Norman Foster, whose twin towers evoke the ghost of their precedents.79 It was an image of the city that seemed necessary in this global marketplace, one that almost compulsively turned architects’ attention from the horizontal logic of flows and organization to the vertical surface of representation.80 We can also recognize in this move to establish semantic security in the face of its opposite a thinly veiled attempt to humanize technology once again (or at least to play into contemporary humanist rhetoric). To paraphrase Crary, another humanist mirage is being sought on account of the dissolution of the legibility of the city, one offered through a vanguardism of formal innovation. Coupled to attempts to make architectural form legible again, to make it speak of its role in the city, is, however, a paradoxical (if not unexpected) failure to determine what is being signified. The instabilities inherent to signification are returning to haunt expressive gestures as well as other claims to the iconic. This is manifest, for instance, in the uneasy nomination of memorial sites and their relation to heroism and rebirth. Libeskind proliferates the most: “Park of Heroes,” “Wedge of Light,” “Gardens of the World,” “Memory Eternal Foundations,” “Edge of Hope Museum,” etc.81 What seems to be missing in attempts to connect form to meaning is not only a theorization of those instabilities, but also an understanding of architecture’s mnemonic and cultural function. As Tom McDonough reminds us: “Architecture’s meaning remains fundamentally a social matter, produced not simply in the individual’s psyche, nor even in an internal dialogue with architectural tradi- tion, but rather in the articulation of conflicting patterns of use and appropriation,

79. Foster and Partners, statement from Plans in Progress. If otherwise exemplifying the turn from a vertical plane of signiﬁcation to a horizontal plane of regulation, the project by SOM and collaborators also invokes the iconic. On the one hand we learn that “at the very top is the ﬁnal public stratum, a horizontal plateau elevated above the skyline providing a ‘Trans-horizon’ for the resurrected global city . . . ” and that the buildings “respond to our most recent technological and economic imperatives to produce continuity and networks culturally, environmentally, and economically, all at both global and local levels.” On the other hand they assert that in the proposal “the legible icons are the striations of space rather than commercial structures.” SOM/SANAA (Sejima and Nishizawa/Iñigo Manglano- Ovalle/Rita McBride/Field Operations/Michael Maltzan Architecture/Tom Leader Studio/Jessica Stockholder/Elyn Zimmerman), statement from Plans in Progress. 80. This accounts for the popularity of the tall projects, especially the “twins,” which implicitly or explicitly campaigned on a platform of familiarity and urban legibility. See Edward Wyatt, “Three Designs for Ground Zero Emerge as Favorites,” New York Times, January 17, 2003, sec. B, p. 1. Urban legibility is a platform well known to architects from the work of city planner Kevin Lynch in the 1960s, in particular the formulation of “cognitive mapping” that was famously extended as a panacea to the postmodern condition of urban anomie in the work of Fredric Jameson. See Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960) and Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). 81. This is also the case with Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, with its plaques to locate the “Axis of Exile,” “Axis of Continuity,” and “Holocaust Tower” for visitors. Libeskind’s heroic gestures are ironically recast in Ashton Raggat McDougal’s provocative, if literal and troubling, appropriation of its plan for the section of their National Museum of Australia in Canberra that deals with the country’s own genocidal history.

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some authorized and others resolutely illegitimate.” Meaning, he concludes, arises “in the sometimes violent irruptions of other voices into those exchanges.”82 Crary’s formulation of identifying and operating within not fully totalized spaces that remain in the capitalist city continues to be a strong one, especially given the architectural vanguard’s avowed turn from discourses of representation to those affiliated with distribution and regulation. And he offers important distinctions between, in the first instance, politicized attempts to forge “lines of flight” and, in the second instance, banal neo-McLuhanist tendencies, referring, with respect to the latter, to “today’s cyberspace cheerleaders” and the “breathless ‘futurism’ exhibited by some of [Koolhaas’s] contemporaries who believe, a priori, that telecommunica- tions and data manipulation will be the primary component of new social environments.”83 The return to signification in the LMDC entries, even if an unwitting or cynical response to the program, raises the question of how to theorize this phenomena. This is not to suggest that Crary’s earlier reading is redundant, far from it. It is to take seriously his challenge of keeping abreast of incessant mutations—of continuously identifying spaces emerging between irreconcilable technological systems and between those systems and the human body. It is, however, to do so on account of a more semiotic regime of signification, recognizing its expanded capacity to continuously territorialize on the subject’s desire.84 This brings me back to the historical relevance of Exodus and the potential use-value of experimental practices situated at this intersection of desire and dystopia. Superstudio’s Continuous Monument was understood as “a form of architecture emerging all at once from a single continuous environment: the world rendered uniform by technology, culture, and all the other inevitable forms of imperialism.”85 In this sense it functioned something like the “Automonument” of the generic twentieth-century skyscraper Koolhaas described in Delirious New York.86 As Hubert Damisch noted of this formulation, the skyscraper “could not avoid . . . becoming an empty symbol open to all signification and to all manner of ‘history.’”87 In a condition of indistinction and instability, the tower emerged as a legible but typical form rather than as a heroic or signature one. It was, Koolhaas later explained, “zero-degree architecture, architecture stripped of all traces of unique-

82. Tom McDonough, “The Surface as Stake: A Postscript to Timothy M. Rohan’s Rendering the Surface,” Grey Room 05 (Fall 2001), pp. 102–111. 83. Crary, “Notes on Koolhaas and Modernization,” p. 14. 84. On the simultaneous presence of multiple signifying regimes see Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, “5: 587 B.C.–A.D.: On Several Regimes of Signs,” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 111–48. 85. Superstudio, “The Continuous Monument: An Architectural Model for Total Urbanization,” Design Quarterly 89 (special issue on Mindscapes, 1973), n.p. 86. “This category of monument,” Koolhaas wrote, “presents a radical, morally traumatic break with the conventions of symbolism: its physical manifestation does not represent an abstract ideal, an institution of exceptional importance, a three-dimensional readable articulation of social hierarchy, a memorial; it merely is itself and through sheer volume cannot avoid being a symbol—an empty one, available for meaning as a billboard is for advertisement” (Koolhaas, Delirious New York, p. 100). 87. Hubert Damisch, “The Manhattan Transfer,” in OMA-Rem Koolhaas: Architecture 1970–1990, pp. 21–31.

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ness and specificity.”88 Like Superstudio, OMA engaged this condition to produce a sort of self-conscious or critical effect by revealing a peculiar closeness to the unstable forces modeled by the architecture. But perhaps a more important connection to experimental strategies, one that offers a site of potential political engagement, was the embrace of the critical value of the fantastic or fictional.89 Fiction is not just escape from reality but can produce an engaged withdrawal. Foucault commented on this quality in his own work, noting that “I am well aware that I have never written anything but fictions.” And of fiction’s importance, he went on to explain: I do not mean to say, however, that truth is therefore absent. It seems to me that the possibility exists for fiction to function in truth, for a fictional discourse to induce effects of truth, and for bringing it about that a true discourse engenders or “manufactures” something that does not as yet exist, that is, “fictions” it. One “fictions” history on that basis of a political reality that makes it true, one “fictions” a politics not yet in existence on the basis of a historical truth.90 Etienne Balibar and Jacques Rancière have also recently turned to the political virtues of constructing fictions. For Balibar this revolves around the need for identifying through experimentation and experience places of fiction for political life in the face of the foreclosure of notions of utopia.91 For Rancière, likewise, fiction offers a space of projection that is less utopian than virtual. As he explains, “The politics of art, like all fields of knowledge, constructs ‘fictions’—i.e., material reorganizations of

88. Koolhaas, “Typical Plan,” in S, M, L, XL, p. 335. 89. The emphasis is to point to distinctions between a critical use of fiction and the fictions wrought to mobilize public support for invasion and war. 90. Michel Foucault and Lucette Finas, “The History of Sexuality [interview],” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings, 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 183–93. 91. Etienne Balibar, Droit de cité: culture et politique en démocratie (Paris: Éditions de l’aube, 1998).

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signs and images, of relations between what one sees and what one says, between what one does and what one can do.”92 Megastructure was perhaps initially such a fiction. By the early 1970s, however, as Reyner Banham demonstrated, signaling the death of the movement, Megastructure’s dream of flexibility had revealed its dystopic, even despotic kinship to the control function of “Big Management” and multinational corporations.93 In reading LMDC projects as Megastructures, a reading limited not only to the project of Meier et al., but also that of United Architects, Norman Foster, and others, we see some strange departures from the fictional logic of the automonument and Megastructure.94 First, rather than positing a virtual or a fictional structure, we find heroism and codification, whether it be in the calls for a mnemonic or public function or in the turn to a spiritual or religious reception of the work.95 Second, there is the question of what alternative or better (even if not utopian) futures are being posited as design becomes willingly trapped within the logic of the commodity and its commercial tactics. Rather than modeling historical forces in a manner that

92. Jacques Rancière, cited in Jacques Rancière, Solange Guénoun, and James H. Kavanagh, “Jacques Rancière: Literature, Politics, Aesthetics: Approaches to Democratic Disagreement,” SubStance 92 (2000), p. 9. 93. Reyner Banham, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976). Koolhaas carefully disarticulates his later concept of Bigness from the Megastructure movement. See Rem Koolhaas, “Bigness,” S, M, L, XL, especially pp. 504–6. 94. Paul Goldberger refers to both the Foster and United Architects projects as Megastructures, noting of the latter that it is “a super-high-tech version of Paolo Soleri’s city made out of a single building.” See “Designing Downtown,” The New Yorker, January 6, 2003, pp. 62–69. 95. United Architects describe their work as follows: “Five futuristic buildings touch each other, fuse together, and create a crystalline veil that surrounds and protects the sacred space of the memorial. Where the buildings connect, immense arches tower over the plaza, creating a monumental, sacred space at an unprecedented urban scale. From afar, this new symbol of unity and interdependence will rise above Manhattan’s skyline, a beacon for a new beginning.” United Architects statement, Plans in Progress. Goldberger also cites Greg Lynn as referring to the “sacred, cathedral-like space” produced by the interlocking structure, in “Designing Downtown,” p. 66.

Diller + Scoﬁdio. Blur Building. Pavilion for Swiss Expo. 2002. Photo: Beat Widmer.

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would make them legible as “equipments of power” (popping up as they reterritorial- ize on the city) we see unself-reflexive attempts to make architecture congeal the (mobile and dynamic) forces of capitalism as form and to adopt its modes of visuality. These forces are no longer understood as abstract but as serving the pernicious logic of “branding.” If capitalism’s capacity to subsume radical practices into its machinations is recognized, here this logic of cooptation is accelerated without reserve. Diller + Scofidio’s Blur pavilion at the 2002 Swiss Expo offers a counterpoint to, if not escape from, this dynamic. Blur might be understood less as an antispectacular building (through its refusal to congeal into a fixed or legible image) than as a project that asks the very question of architecture’s relation to spectacle. If on the one hand the instability of the perpetually mutating cloud of water vapor challenges the certainty of form, as the blurring of vision and inability to judge scale and distance simultaneously disturbs the subject’s ability to see the object, the interior night lighting reveals a spectacular (if still continuously transforming) counterpart that complicates any reading of the project. And the architects’ fascination with the decidedly comic recuperation of their project into multiple sites of spectacle—not only its presence at an Expo, but also its remapping onto surfaces from chocolate wrappers and sugar packets to stamps and even vodka bottles—suggests an awareness of the almost compulsive insinuation of the nonspectacular into its opposite. Blur in this sense models the ability of capitalism to colonize even the most resistant practices as it (capitalism) deploys semantic instability in the service of a “reversibility of signs.”96 Yet it does so with a knowing wink to this commercial dynamic. One can identify other trajectories of contemporary practice that, to use Virno’s term, pursue strategies of nonservile virtuosity. We can trace such trajectories, for instance, in the research-oriented architectural practices of Laura Kurgan and Stephano Boeri and Multiplicity. Rather than “swimming with the current,” both engage emergent forces—social, technological, and economic—to produce political responses to ongoing institutional and geopolitical transformations.97 Technologies from global positioning system devices to satellite image networks are used “against the grain”; their control functions are turned back on the controller in a renewed modality of architectural warfare. Rather than trying to control the instability of meaning inherent to form—the postmodern response, but one continued in LMDC work and new monumentalities—work such as Kurgan’s You Are Here and Spot 083-264: Kosovo, June 3, 1999 and Multiplicity’s Uncertain States of Europe and ID: A Journey Through a Solid Sea reveal instabilities in modes of digital representation (in what might otherwise have been considered to be despotic or totalized systems) as the site of ongoing contestation and political struggle.98

96. On the “reversibility of signs” see Lotringer and Marazzi, “The Return of Politics,” pp. 8–21. 97. In this sense they radically differ from the expanding phenomena of transnational practice, which at times amounts to neocolonialist appropriation of sites emerging in the rapid industrialization of non-Western cities. 98. See Laura Kurgan and Xavier Costa, eds., You Are Here: Architecture and Information Flows (Barcelona: Libres de recerca Arquitectura, 1995); Laura Kurgan, “Spot 083-264: Kosovo, June 3, 1999,” in World Views: Maps and Art, ed. Robert Silberman (Minneapolis: Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, 1999), pp. 68–75;

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228703322791034 by guest on 28 September 2021 Laura Kurgan. Spot 083-264: Kosovo, June 3, 1999. NATO surveillance photographs of mass burial sites and grave tampering near Izbica, Kosovo. Whether built or located in institutions such as the gallery, museum, magazine, or academy, work that forges conceptual and critical strategies is not so much “marginal” as all too central to the discipline’s capacity to operate as a political form of aesthetic practice. This is not because it transcends the mundane facts of practical design, but quite the opposite: its viability lies in the fact that it offers precise and specific concepts and, hence, tools through which to engage contemporary social, political, and economic parameters. The ability to question architecture’s relation to the semiotic and institutional structures of capitalism, to its official codes and their modes of subjectification, is the ability to destabilize those very codes, to make language shake.99 Instabilities produce openings onto

Stephano Boeri and Multiplicity, “USE: Uncertain States of Europe,” in Mutations (Barcelona: ACTAR, 2000), pp. 338–55; and Multiplicity, “ID: A Journey Through a Solid Sea,” in Documenta 11, Platform 5: Exhibition, ed. Okwui Enwezor (Ostﬁldern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002), p. 577. 99. The recent turn to semantic legibility suggests the ongoing potential of critiques of representation and the political tools forged by poststructuralism (tools too quickly rejected as unfashionable, or

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spaces in which others might speak, not necessarily through an expressive paradigm, but on account of their ability to deterritorialize or otherwise negotiate seemingly despotic social and semantic codes. At the moment of the rise of architectural postmodernism, dissident experimental practices continued to question semantic paradigms and programmatic or functional certainties while remaining engaged with both. These were historically speciﬁc, emerging in the face of post–World War II technological and sociopolitical forces and drawing lessons from the events of May 1968. They were also in active dialogue with contemporary theoretical discourse. Theory too has long been a site of architecture’s encounter with political questions, and it seems imperative to retain such a critical negotiation. While, in the ﬁrst instance, “political” refers to questions of power, of the state and its policies, the political also has additional discursive, temporal, and spatial factors that bear on questions of design. In the words of Samuel Weber, politics is related to “the organization of space through the assigning of places, and to the organization of time through the regulation of past, present and future.” “It is perhaps worth recalling,” he argues, that there is a difference in being “political” at the level of propositional statements (i.e., making declarations, signing petitions, etc.) and being political at the level of established codes of articulation to which one is necessarily submitted, but which are also susceptible to change. This is why a certain thinking of virtuality, possibility, potentiality—what in a study of Benjamin I call his “abilities”—a certain virtualization of concep- tualization itself, of “meaning”—can be politically effective, even if it never gets its act together. This doesn’t dispense with more conventional forms of “political” analysis and interpretation, much less with “political action,” but it does affect and possibly transform the grids within which such actions and interpretations have to be situated.100 Design involves projections, a throwing forward of images and ideas, utopian or otherwise. Architecture thus opens onto a future, but it is the nature of that future that is under question, the nature of its relation to both the present (including present couplings of semantics and technology as well as of program and capitalist exigencies) and to the singular differences or modes of differentiation that remain inherent to it.

misrecognized as purely formal, by those calling for a postcritical architecture). From Deleuze’s “Minor Literature,” to Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, to critiques of colonial discourse, to the “Radical Democracy” of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, to Giorgio Agamben’s potentialities and “coming communities,” to Samuel Weber’s critique of institutions, and beyond, are to be found multiple and differentiated projects that demonstrate the instabilities in dominant modes of discourse. 100. Simon Morgan Wortham and Gary Hall, “Responding: A Discussion with Samuel Weber.” Published online at http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/cmach/BackIssues/j004/InterZone/.

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