kazysThe recent unveiling of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo reminded me of the flight of SpaceShipOne on June 21, 2004. Steve Rowell of the Center for Land Use Interpretation and I had the opportunity to attend along with the rest of the press corps. I’ve posted some photos that I took that day on my Flickr site.
So many of the recent events and discussions in architecture remind me of material I covered in my dissertation. Some of the writing is juvenalia, some of it is prophetic. Either way, it ensured I’d be persona non grata around Cornell ever since.
Enough people ask me about it that I should upload it and see what the response is. Since the original files are now fifteen years old, forgive me for the inevitable formatting problems and the lack of illustrations (a list is appneded to give you an idea of what you missed).
I produced the attached text a few months after the dissertation itself, incorporating further revisions.
The abstract reads as follows.
In this dissertation, I trace the growth of cynical reason and the spectacle in postwar American architecture by examining the emergence of a new attitude toward form in postwar American architecture and the rise of the group of architectural celebrities that represented it.
From the 1950s onward, a number of architectural educators–most notably Colin Rowe and John Hejduk–derived a theory of architectural design from the visual language developed by graphic art educators Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Gyorgy Kepes. The architectural educators’ intent was to solidify architecture’s claim to artistic autonomy through a focus on the rigorous use of form. In doing so, they hoped to resist the threat to architecture as a discipline, then having its domain of inquiry attacked by the encroaching social sciences and engineering.
Like Moholy-Nagy and Kepes, the architectural educators aimed to create an innocent eye in the student, restricting vision to instantaneous, prelinguistic perception of two-dimensional formal relationships. The student would become a retinalized subject under the influence of outside forces rather than an agent capable of independent action and hence ethically responsible in their life and architecture. In addition, the new theory of architecture was unable to divest itself of its origin in graphic art and produced a formally complex but atectonic, cardboard (-like) architecture.
Against this background, I investigate the rise of the movement’s representatives–Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Richard Meier, and Robert Stern–and their relationship to their patron, Philip Johnson. Together, they promoted each other and cardboard architecture, as well as a history and architecture reduced to image.
But history has a material reality: in the 1930s, Johnson participated in the American fascist movement and left as evidence a body of fascistic and antisemitic texts he wrote for publications in the movement. Since then he and his promoters, among them Stern and Eisenman, have carefully repressed his past by making it into a public secret. Ultimately, the kids do not have innocent eyes: along with Johnson they have promoted a spectacular architectural discourse of cynicism.
I gave the following talk on Banham’s Los Angeles, non-plan, and infrastructure in the Ph.D. lecture series at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation in November, 2009.
Most of us are prone to hero worship. This talk sets out to address one a major problem in the work of one of the contemporary heros of architectural and planning historiography, Reyner Banham, and his advocacy of a (mythical) laissez-faire form of planning based on his reading of Los Angeles.
Below the talk I have embedded a video. Although today its considered bad practice to read lectures, I’ve started doing it again even if my delivery seems more stale. When you give ten lectures a term outside of school and when nearly every venue insists upon something custom, the practice of keynoting ex tempore from notes becomes a bit of a drag. Eventually you realize that with a little more work—and granted, a little worse delivery—your project could convery more, have more theoretical meaning, and be generative toward other projects. At the level of production that I’ve been trying to stay at lately, the only way to produce content is to follow the advice that Slavoj Zizek gave in the movie about him: everything either needs to be a spin-off or work toward the next major project.
This talk, then, is a spin off of my work toward the Infrastructural City but also sets out to tackle Banham critically (something that I’ve also done here), something I intend to take up soon.
Complexity and Contradiction in Infrastructure
The title of my talk refers to Robert Venturi’s 1966 Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, generally accepted as an inaugural text in postmodern architecture. For Venturi, the modernists failed because they strove for purity of form in. Venturi wrote:
“today the wants of program, structure, mechanical equipment, and expression, even in single buildings in simple contexts, are diverse and conflicting in ways previously unimaginable. The increasing dimension and scale of architecture in urban and regional planning add to the difficulties. I welcome the problems and exploit the uncertainties. By embracing contradiction as well as complexity, I aim for vitality as well as validity.”
In other words, Venturi suggested that architects rather than trying to sweep messes under the rug, architects embrace complexity and contradiction by introducing deliberate errors in their works.
Venturi concluded that an appropriate architectural response “must embody the difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion. More is not less.”
Note, however, that Venturi’s argument is historically specific:
“today the wants of program, structure, mechanical equipment, and expression, even in single buildings in simple contexts, are diverse and conflicting in ways previously unimaginable. The increasing dimension and scale of architecture in urban and regional planning add to the difficulties.”
This text, then, comes about at a transition point between late modernity and postmodernity and its virtue is that Venturi not only diagnosed a condition, he also suggested an architectural approach. Both of these suggested a schism from the modern, a move into a new condition. Today I want to talk about another phase in the era of complexity, which is why I cite Venturi at the outset.
Along with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Venturi’s next book, the 1972 Learning From Las Vegas would tackle issues of signage, semiotics, automobility and the commercialization of the American city, flipping the valence on landscapes that had been roundly derided as degraded by architecture critics. But for the purposes of this talk, its worth noting that the authors original interest was in Los Angeles and the Yale studio that resulted in Learning from Las Vegas visited that city first. It may be that the more smaller and more picturesque of the two cities (unlike Vegas, Los Angeles has no central strip) proved more easily explainable.
For architects and historians of architecture (I file myself in the latter category), Reyner Banham’s 1971 Los Angeles. The Architecture of Four Ecologies took on the urban conditions in a more total approach. Banham set out to dissect the city as a total landscape—both geographically and historically, both physically and psychically—as well as in terms of its infrastructural, social, and architectural systems. In this, Banham’s work has been pathbreaking and The Infrastructural City uses his book as inspiration and as a point of departure, something that my subtitle Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles alludes to.
But Banham’s foremost innovation was to flip the valence on the historical evaluation of Los Angeles, praising precisely those qualities that others listed as irredeemable failings: its posturban sprawl; its lack of an overall plan; its chaotic, untamed signscape; its comical roadside architecture; its ubiquitous boulevards, parking lots, and freeways.
Although we could ascribe this to a characteristic British fascination with the degraded, Banham also had a theoretical impetus. By the mid-1960s, he had become fascinated with the possibilities of what he called “non-plan,” a laissez-faire attitude toward urban planning, part of a larger project that he undertook along with Paul Barker, deputy editor of the magazine the New Statesman. In 1967, Barker ran excerpts from Herbert Gans’s The Levittowners “as a corrective to the usual we-know-best snobberies about suburbia.” At roughly the same time, Barker and Peter Hall set out with a “maverick thought… could things be any worse if there was no planning at all?” The result, strongly influenced by Banham’s writings in the magazine, was a special issue publshed in 1969 and titled “Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom.” Barker recalls, “We wanted to startle people by offending against the deepest taboos. This would drive our point home.” To this end Hall, Banham, and architect Cedric Price each took a section of the revered British countryside and blanketed it with a low-density sprawl driven by automobility. According to Barker the reaction was a “mixture of deep outrage and stunned silence.”
For Banham, Los Angeles stood as the greatest manifestation of Non-Plan to date. “Conventional standards of planning do not work in Los Angeles,” he wrote, “it feels more natural (I put it no stronger than that) to leave the effective planning of the area to the mechanisms that have already given the city its present character: the infrastructure to giant agencies like the Division of Highways and the Metropolitan Water District and their like; the intermediate levels of management to the subdivision and zoning ordinances; the detail decisions to local and private initiatives; with ad hoc interventions by city, State, and pressure-groups formed to agitate over matters of clear and present need.”
Now there’s some question as to how well Banham’s Los Angeles worked in the first place: it was in its worst period of air pollution in history, the freeways were wreaking devastation upon the city and the Watts Riots had just shaken any lingering mirage of Los Angeles as either a progressive metropolis or as paradise for the white middle class. Still, in his evaluation, Banham felt that the city—in his mind epitomized not by the Watts Riots but by the individualistic exuberance of Watts Towers— worked because it had no central plan. Rather, planning was left to the competing forces in the city, public and private.
If Banham set out against modernist urban planning, non-plan gave a theoretical basis for neoliberalist planning. Reducing the modernist ethical imperative to a question of fascination with the bottom-up to embrace “a messy vitality” (this is not Banham but Venturi’s term), modernism would be reduced from a question of morality and rational planning to a question of desire, both individual and institutional. The result parallels Manfredo Tafuri’s observation in Architecture and Utopia that the avant-garde’s singular accomplishment is not so much a physical change to the metropolis but rather an adjustment in how it is viewed. We can see this quite literally in Banham’s own role in his book: what remains at the end of the modern project is the experience of the city and the observer’s voyeuristic pleasure in the psychogeographic experience of drifting on the boulevards and freeways of the city.
But things have changed. For one, the 1970s were an era of limits for the city, the state, and country with the first large-scale economic recession since the war, the OPEC energy crisis, Vietnam, and finally stagflation. If the late 1960s were a period of great social unrest, by the mid-1970s, such unrest had largely been reshaped into concerns with individual rights and self-realization, above all the right to property and to dispose of one’s wealth as one wants. Thus, the system of non-plan that Banham lauded would be institutionalized in California in 1978 with the passing of State Proposition 13, reducing property tax by 57% and mandating that future tax increases require a two-thirds majority in the state legislature. Two years later former California governor Ronald Reagan would become President and set out on a draconian program of reducing non-military governmental spending at a national level.
By the time that Reagan took office, with a decade of cutbacks caused by the combination of economic crises and funds being siphoned off for defense, due to dwindling urban tax roles caused by outmigration since the 1930s and due to the more natural phenomena of age, infrastructure was coming undone nationwide.
Thus in 1981, precisely at the instigation of the nation’s Californization (or, and I hesitate to suggest it, Californication?) economists Pat Choate and Susan Walters published a pamphlet for the Council of State Planning Agencies titled America in Ruins: Beyond the Public Works Pork Barrel. The pamphlet soon attracted a large amount of press attention, including a Newsweek cover story on August 2, 1982 entitled “The Decaying of America.” (August 2, 1982) and a US News and World Report story To Rebuild America: $2,500,000 Job, September 27, 1982. Literature searches suggest that is at this moment that infrastructure begins to gain popularity as a term. Infrastructure enters into the national consciousness during crisis.
But a Californicated America would have no room for public infrastructural spending. Instead, the exemplary infrastructures of the 1980s and 1990s—telecoms after deregulation, the mobile phones, the Internet—are privatized. Here, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron describe the legitimizing narrative for such ventures as the Californian Ideology, a union of hippie self-realization, neoliberal economics, and above all, privatization advocated by Silicon Valley pundits like Stewart Brand editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and founder of Wired Magazine. As Barbrook and Cameron suggest, the growth of Silicon Valley and indeed, California as a whole, was made possible only due to exploitation of the immigrant poor and defense funding. Los Angeles, after all, became the country’s foremost industrial city in the postwar period, largely due to defense contracts at aerospace firms. So, government subsidies for corporations and exploitation of non-citizen poor: a model for future administrations.
But there’s more to infrastructural crisis then neoliberal economic policy. Once again Banham and Los Angeles provide a reference point. Banham describes the ecologies of Los Angeles as dominated by an individualism that allows architecture to flourish. But such a model of the city is insufficient. In the Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles, William Fulton describes Los Angeles as an exemplar of what Harvey Molotch calls “the city as growth machine.” In this model, certain industries—primarily the finance and real estate industries—dominate urban politics with the intention of expanding their businesses. Newspapers too endorse the growth machine as a way of expanding their subscription base and selling real estate ads. Moreover, arts organizations such as the symphony, opera, and art museums are also beholden to the model of the city as growth machine.These interests promote a naturalized view of growth in which we are simply not to question that cities will always get bigger or that they should always get bigger.
By the 1960s, however, homeowner discontent about encroaching sprawl led individuals to band together to form homeowner groups. The first of these was the Federation of Hillside and Canyon Associations, which protested the construction of a four-lane highway in place of scenic Mulholland Drive. Soon, homeowners teamed with environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club to create a regional park in the Santa Monica Mountains to prevent further development in their back yards. By the time that Proposition 13 passed, Angelenos were set against the growth machine and with it, too, the big infrastructure necessary to drive it or even the projects necessary to repair it.
The result, then, is a long, steady process of infrastructural decay, privatized infrastructure acting as a layer or retrofit onto a decaying public infrastructure.
It’s in this context, then, that we must situate both Venturi and Banham, as transitional approaches to the material, reducing questions of complexity to form matters, which of course is not too uncommon in architecture. In Venturi’s case, complexity is produced through form, in Banham’s case formal complexity is produced by the laissez-faire city.
Now I’d like to turn to some contradictions that emerge out of this condition. First, we could sense a threat to the vaunted neoliberal individual rights from failing infrastructure. Some of these are quite obvious: the inconvenience of traffic and long commutes but also the potholes that (in Los Angeles) cause an average of $746 of damage annually per automobile, collapsing bridges, energy crises caused by privatization such as electricity grids failing and refineries going offline indefinitely (here the city of Los Angeles, which has not privatized its power wound up ahead of the rest of the state during the crisis that brought down Gray Davis during Enron’s salad days).
Neoliberalism thus exacerbates what sociologist Ulrich Beck calls “risk society.” Banham’s autopia isn’t a risk free world, but rather a condition in which risk and threat are everyday factors, creating a contradiction within capitalism. Beck:
“… everything which threatens life on this Earth also threatens the property and commercial interests of those who live from the commodification of life and its requisites. In this way a genuine and systematically intensifying contradiction arises between the profit and property interests that advance the industrialization process and its frequently threatening consequences, which endanger and expropriate possessions and profits (not to mention the possession and profit of life).” (Beck 1992: 39)
* * *
Now if environmentalism was in part, a movement created by homeowner desires to protect their rights, we would expect that infrastructural collapse (or for that matter the state of California schools) would also be of concern to homeowners and corporations, but in California, Proposition 13 and a politics of stalemate make it impossible to act. Even as voters seek mandates to restore services, the state is hamstrung by the legislature’s terror of touching Proposition 13, which is known as the “third rail” of state politics. Last month the Guardian asked “Will California become America’s first failed State?”
I want to be stress that in other respects conditions have intensified, moving postmodernism to another phase. Take risk. Environmentalism has been thoroughly capitalized as the green movement, with the Californian ideology now promising to save us from global warming through technological means. Crisis becomes profitable.
Crisis becomes profitable.
On to my last two points. Profit, as Robert Brenner tells us in the economics of global turbulence has become a problem, in part because of some of the problems that face infrastructure. Massive investment in fixed capital make it impossible to abandon when more efficient structures elsewhere threaten. The most familiar aspect of this, of course, is the rise of Chinese industry and the evacuation of American production. But infrastructure is of equal concern. Infrastructure, like other technologies, follows a classic S-curve, in which initially steep returns per dollar invested are followed by diminishing returns as the curve flattens.
The results, for the country have been devastating. California, together with Soho and Boston appeared to enjoy massive growth in high technology, particularly telecommunications and digital technology, during the last three decades. But much of this growth happened not in terms of production, but rather in finance, both in the lucrative financial instruments that accompanied public offerings and in terms of technology that made ever more complex financial operations possible.
Traditional profits, in this context, were considered devalued in comparison with the profits obtainable. Jeffrey Nealon in Foucault Beyond Foucault suggests that in this sort of operation, the classic equation that Marx observed in Capital of M-C-M’ is now rewritten as M-M’, in other words, capital leads to capital growth without any intervening commodity.
The result, then, is a bit of what we saw this spring when, after President-Elect Obama made a YouTube speech calling for a WPA 2.0 as an economic stimulus, he turned away from infrastructure in the actual stimulus bill. Blame has been laid on Obama’s chief economic advisor Larry Summers.
But how the Democrats (or in California, Schwarzenegger) are going to get out of this mess is entirely unclear. Economic indicators suggest that the country will endure a long term period of stagnation, different from, but reminiscent of the 1970s and 1980s. This month, the New York Times reported that unemployment and underemployment now stands at 17.5%, the highest level since the Great Depression. Official unemployment in California now stands at 12%. These are staggering numbers. The state is making cutbacks while raising tuitions at the University of California system, leading to mass student protests and the regents macing students. California leads the nation again, it seems.
If the restructuring of the 1980s destroyed manufacturing, this decade’s recession has mowed down the creative class and the financial sectors. In the latest New Left Review, Gopal Balakrishnan suggests that we have entered into a stationary state, a long period of systemic stagnation. As he points out, Adam Smith never expected the wealth of nations to improve perpetually but rather expected it would come to an end in the nineteenth century as resources were exhausted. Capital’s perpetual growth would have been a mystery to him.
To conclude then, I want to return to where I started, the theme of complexity. I’ve been thinking about these issues a lot lately, re-reading archealogist Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter’s thesis differs from Jared Diamond’s (and also precedes it by a decade). Instead of turning to the external forces of ecological catastrophe (as Diamond does) or to foreign invasion (as other commentators do), Tainter sees complexity as the downfall of societies.
As societies mature, Tainter observes, they become more complex, especially in terms of communication. A highly advanced society is highly differentiated and highly linked. That means that just to manage my affairs, I have to wrangle a trillion bureaucratic agents such as university finance personnel, bank managers, insurance auditors, credit card representatives, accountants, real estate agents, Apple store “geniuses,” airline agents, delivery services, outsourced script-reading hardware support personnel, and lawyers in combination with non-human actors like my iPhone, Mac OS 10.6, my car, the train, and so on.
This is the contemporary system at work, and it’s characteristic of the bureaucratized nature of complex societies. On the one hand, in a charitable reading, we produce such bureaucratic entities in hopes of making the world a better place, keeping each other honest and making things work smoothly. But in reality, not only is this dysfunction necessary for the operation of the service economy, these kinds of entities rub up against each other, exhibiting cascading failure effects that produce untenable conditions.
In Tainter’s reading, complex societies require greater and greater amounts of energy until, at a certain point, the advantages of the structures they create are outweighed by diminishing marginal returns on energy invested. The result is not just catastrophe but collapse, which Tainter defines as a greatly diminished level of complexity.
Just as rigidity was the failure point for Fordism, complexity is the failure point for post-Fordism. In this light, the culture of congestion valorized by Koolhaas is undone by the energy costs of that complexity.
Now I agree with Tainter when he concludes that the only hope to forestall the collapse of a complex society is technological advance. I’d argue that this is what’s driving the field of networked urbanism at the moment. But, I’m not so sure we can do it. This is where my optimism rubs up against my nagging feeling that urban informatics, locative media, smart grids, and all the things that the cool kids at LIFT and SXSW are dreaming up are too little, too late.
Technology itself is already all but unmanageable in everyday life and adding greater layers of complexity can’t be the solution. It’s in this sense that the Infrastructural City was more Mike Davis than Reyner Banham, something few have caught on to yet.
We should have taken our lumps when the dot.com boom collapsed and retrenched for five or six years. Instead we added that much more complexity—take the debt and what is required to maintain it or the impossible war or the climate—and now our options are greatly limited.
So we need to develop a new set of tools to deal with the failures of the neoliberal city and the impossible conditions of complexity today. This is hardly an overnight task, if it can be done at all.
Now Tainter holds one other card, suggesting that most of the people who experience collapse don’t mind it too much. Many of them seem happy enough to just walk away from the failing world around them, much like owners of foreclosed homes do today. Eventually a new civilization springs up and with it, perhaps we can imagine a better future.
I want to conclude by talking about whether I’m a pessimistic or an optimist since I’m apparently being accused of being a pessimist at all my talks recently (parenthetically, I’ll add, I suppose that’s better than being accused of being an optimist). Back to Los Angeles: anyone visiting Hollywood Boulevard is accosted by attractive young men and women asking if one is an optimist or a pessimist. The next step is being lured into the Scientology Center to take a test. Maybe we’re better off not taking that test, but rather looking at reality, not a future scripted by a science fiction writer.
Second, I’m afraid that academe is a bit infected by Prozac culture these days. Hope would be fine if we had a President who seemed to have an ability to deal with the issues or if the alternative to this one wasn’t so deeply frightening.
End
Complexity and Contradiction of Infrastructure from kazys Varnelis on Vimeo.
British author Charles Leadbetter critiques the “Digital Britain plan” for making broadband ubiquitous, much like the Obama Administration’s own plan. Leadbetter points out that both are flawed because they focus on infrastructure in a narrow way, failing to address the deep transformations that the Internet is making on network culture and economy. Read his response here.
This section is particularly important:
Accelerating the spread of broadband will not save these industries but make their predicaments more difficult. Here’s the truth: plans to invest more in digital technologies will only pay off if they bring further disruption to economies that are already in turmoil. We will know when politicians are really serious about the coming digital revolution when they start to admit that it will have to cause significant disruption to established business models if it is to pay off.
This is particularly tricky in the UK. The implosion of financial services, long the flagship of the services economy, means the cultural and media industries, in which Britain has a strong position, will take on an even more important role.
Leadbetter has this right and what he says can also be applied to the two countries that I work in, the United States and Ireland, but the problem for capital will come in monetizing what he calls “mutual media,” the rising ecology of bottom-up media production.
The problem with this model, also proposed by other authors such as Yochai Benkler and Clay Shirky is that it does not give an adequate explanation of how to monetize such media or how to distribute wealth in a remotely equitable manner (let’s forget socialism for the moment, I’m talking about market monopolies, in particular the inherent power-law nature of networks and how we can have anything beyond Google). Let’s be clear about this: mutual media are incredibly successful not just because we can produce anything we want and upload it, they are successful because it has us producing content for free for corporations.
Make no mistake about it, the day that it dawns on the administration at the New York Times that there are bloggers out there who would work for free, for the fashionable cachet of a byline on a Times column, and that these bloggers are better than many of the Times’s own writers is about two weeks before the entire staff of the Arts & Leisure section finds itself looking for work at Starbucks.
The economy undergoing an unprecedented transition. The owl of Minerva spreads her wings at dusk. Theory once again dreamed its successor era: if in the years between 1988 and 1994 theory seemed to be everything only to vanish, in the years since culture has seemed to be everthing, but on a much vaster scale, forming what appeared to be a new backbone in the economy (even if, as I’ve pointed out, it was finance all along). That’s vanishing now and with it, economic crisis is at our doorstep. There is no way out of this on the horizon. The wealth of networks is not in their ability to promote sharing or interaction, but in their ability to strip away jobs and destroy industries without proposing sustainable new ones.
For anyone who thinks I’m being pessimistic, I do hope you’re right and I’m wrong. Really, I do.
Alternate scenarios wanted. My only caveat is that I we don’t cook the books or take on more Ponzi schemes like the real estate bubble.
Fellow resident of my adopted hometown of Montclair, NJ and New York Times journalist David Carr has a new piece out yesterday entitled “The Fall and Rise of Media” in which he explores the rapid decline of the (traditional) media industry and makes a case for optimism about new media. It’s a good read, take a look.
Carr puts on a brave face as he remind us that all reigns are temporary. The media jobs being swept away are positions that were obsolete years ago, he suggests, all but invoking Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” as an up side to the devastation that media outlets face today. As historian Jackson Lears reminds us in his latest book, Rebirth of a Nation, Americans have a longstanding fascination with the idea of rebirth and our own era is hardly immune to.
This struck a chord for me this morning as I had just finished watching the third season of Mad Men last night* and wondered about the show’s future. (spoiler alert!) With the end of the old firm that the Mad Men worked for, would the new firm they would build be nimble and intelligent, able to embrace the changing terrain of the 1960s, a diabolical player in an alternate universe version of Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool? Or is it destined to be wiped out by the juggernaut of sociocultural change that comprises the mid and late 1960s the way Philip Johnson was, at least for a decade? In the atemporal world of network culture, we often forget how commonly we still look backward to find reference points for transformations in the contemporary world. Here I’d identify the popularity of Mad Men today. It offers us a glimpse at a moment of massive, societal transformation, as a relatively comfortable came unglued. Perhaps four decades from now we’ll see a remake of Mad Men set at the New York Times, or at a dot.com corporation. Certainly, it would lack well-designed furniture and well-cut suits, but so it goes.
In his article, Carr points to a new generation of under-30 journalists armed with netbooks, wireless connections, and visions of reshaping their world. Let’s hope so. The dinosaurs were dinosaurs not only because of their attitude and their budgets, but also because of the poverty, our worse yet, the outright fiction, of their reportage (no disrespect to David, but the Times itself often led the way with this: Judith Miller anyone?). No question, it’s high time to renew media. Already the architectural blogosphere is smarter, sharper, and more critical than newspaper critics have been in decades.
But there’s also much to dread and not just for the dinosaurs. Rarely do things go back to normal after a serious downturn. Economic regimes undergo radical changes during recessions, often even more dramatic than during boom times when excess liquidity keeps the status quo well lubricated.
What we’re seeing now, then, isn’t just the disappearance of some crufty old salts from journalism, but rather the restructuring of the creative class. Media is very much at the forefront of this. Faced by the perfect storm of a collapsing subscription base and the decline of the advertising dollar, media corporations have figured out that the losses of income are permanent and made cuts accordingly.
In contrast, architects are flailing about. This doesn’t mean that job losses in the profession haven’t been massive, but the profession has done little to rethink how it operates. There’s little question that we won’t see another building boom the size of the one we just witnessed again in our lifetime (nor do I wish it: there’s only so much economic destabilization we can take!). The downsizing is going to be permanent. The result will be heady competition between young unemployed veterans with serious job experience after a few years in the job force and a corps of new graduates trained in new skills that even those who graduated five years ago don’t have. If my readers want to see me as a pessimist, that’s fine, chalk up my position to a refusal to buy Prozac, but I’ve lived through enough recessions to know that the last few years were a huge anomaly and there’s a price to be paid for the excesses.
Beyond the collapse of the media sector, the very core of the contemporary upper middle class—jobs in media, advertising, real estate, finance, law and other services—faces evisceration, and may well follow the lower middle class into extinction over the course of the next decade. Those jobs are gone now and with them a host of possible commissions for architects. More than that, since the Obama administration’s greatest accomplishment seems to be to have unloaded the word “hope” of any meaning, at this point it seems likely that the shift rightward during the next elections will ensure that cities are deprived of the funding necessary to keep them afloat. Fade back to Mad Men and the early 1960s. It’s at this moment that New York takes a turning point and Mayor Robert F. Wagner sees his city entering into a multi-decade fiscal crisis from which it barely recovered.
Decades from now, will the monuments of the last decade—sadly much inferior to the monuments of the 1950s (where, after all, is our Seagram or Lever? The Standard? Magnolia Bakery maybe?)—remind us of the last days of the Creative Class and the hipster city? In 2029 will Sex in the City be as anachronistic in its depiction of the city as a thriving place for young people, just as Breakfast at Tiffany’s was in 1979?
Or is it possible that somehow the Obama administration will wise up? That he’ll take a cue from Harvard and fire Larry Summers together with the investment bankers that have infected the Cabinet, and insist that America not only has a public option for health insurance but that we’re going to rebuild manufacturing, in some smart, as yet unforeseen way? Heck, maybe the multitude will throw off its shackles and we’ll all live in a Shangri-La of post-Marxist immaterial culture.
One thing’s for sure, though. We’re not going back to 2002. Time will tell who succeeds in navigating through it as individuals, nations, and worlds.
*In general, I don’t have the time to ever watch shows when they first come out so I watch them time-shifted, either on my pitifully small Verizon DVR or on my AppleTV, Roku box, or sometimes even via Blu-Ray disc from Netflix. I point this out since I want to hammer home how media consumption habits are changing. It’s particularly interesting watching my children, who have never known a world without on-demand or, for that matter, full-time PBS Kids Sprout.
I have uploaded the lecture on network culture, intellectual property, and subjective that I gave at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies to Vimeo.
Properties of Networked Publics from kazys Varnelis on Vimeo.
I was invited by Marysia Lewandowska, a visiting critic at the CCS this year. Her “Museum Futures” project sets the context and is well worth watching. See here.
The following text is a methodological introduction to a talk I gave at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies yesterday. A video of the talk, which is on the topic of intellectual property under network culture will be forthcoming soon.
At hand today is a discussion of publics and property under network culture. The reading that I will undertake emerges originally out of work that I did while a senior fellow at the Networked Publics group of the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. The work of our year-long faculty seminar was published in the book Networked Publics and my attempt to make sense of that time outside of my usual field of study in architecture led me to the conclusion of that book, which in turn is now a crucial project tentatively titled “The Meaning of Network Culture: A Critical History of the Contemporary.”
My goal with this project is to create a model of the contemporary world, much as other writers did for the postmodern era. Over the last few years, I’ve found it more and more incongruous that theorists still refer to our moment as postmodern or use postmodern theory to reflect on the contemporary. Although there is unquestionably utility to going back to the texts of the 1980s, just as there is utility to going back to the texts of the 1930s or 1730s, it seems to me that if T. J. Clark wrote in 1999 that “modernism is our antiquity,” for us, a decade later, postmodernism is, if not Rome to modernism’s Athens, then it must be our dark ages.
I sense that it must be the latter—not because of questions of value, but rather because of the sense that the Fall only came once, at the end of the modern. The end of the postmodern seems to have barely been noted. Where Fredric Jameson begins his discussion of the postmodern with the sense of an end, we have no such sense. Instead, if postmodernism quite clearly ended—except for some academic theorists, who it seems are reciting from syllabi they developed many years ago—we still only sense the end of the modern which, if anything, has become more sharply defined. As Jean Baudrillard suggested a decade ago, with the millennium, the end of the end had been reached. It seems that he was right.
Thus, when the 90s ended and our decade—and it’s crucial for me that in the United States, at least, there is no signifier for this decade—began in earnest, after September 11, 2001, the sharpness of the idea that nothing would be the same was soon replace by the Bush administration’s idea that the war on terror would be perpetual, that there could be no end to it, that it would be interminable. Now, under Obama, it’s the economic crisis as well that is interminable, a condition from which we cannot conceived of escaping for decades.
But as a historian, this sense of an atemporal disturbs me. Instead, I’d like to turn back to Jameson for a certain inspiration, in particular to the injunction which he begins the book with: “Always historicize!” In particular, then, the question is, can we make a model that can describe a series of cultural phenomena? This principle of totality, which is crucial for Jameson in his definition of postmodernism, also ran up against postmodern historiography’s critique of totality. This is the famous conundrum in Jean-François Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.
Lyotard, who very much had Marxism as his target, argued that it was the decline of master narratives such as Marxism or logical positivism that marked the postmodern condition. Still, it’s as if postmodernist thinkers used the Derridean idea of putting terms “under erasure” on postmodernism. For an era that could not have a master narrative, it did.
Again from our more distant vantage point, it might be possible to follow Clark’s Farewell to an Idea and see postmodernism as being very much the consequence of the end of modernization. Once that process was complete, and the world have been modernized, an event that happened in the postwar era, that world became lost to us. Postmodernism, then, announced itself as having taking place after modernization and, if modernization relied on master narratives, postmodernism set itself adrift as the last master narrative, but one which could not anticipate its own development.
Still, whether we go to New Orleans to look at Charles Moore’s Piazza d’italia or to Metropolitan Museum of Art to see the works of the Pictures generation in the recent, this work seems strangely unfamiliar. Something has changed, and the change is, if anything, an uncanny one, a sense that we have that while we were caught up in the dot.com boom, the millennium, and then the real estate boom, the immediate past slipped from our grasp.
So to make some sense of all this, it is crucial to build a broad new interpretative framework. In doing so, I want to unfashionably revisit the concept of totality.
If, as a Marxist, Jameson suggests that postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism, maybe its possible to understand today’s condition as the product of networked capital.
First, let’s look at the role of the network. Already in the Global City and the Rise of the Network Society, Saskia Sassen and Manuel Castells did much to demonstrate that by the mid-1990s, capital, and with it society, was becoming dominated by networked flows.
But second, there is a force to the network itself. As Charlie Gere points out, digital culture was marked by abstraction, that is by the reduction of complex entities into abstractions that could then be traded as commodities. But now, its less the abstracted entity that matters and more its position within the global network. This, I suggest is a fundamental shift.
With it too, is a more fundamental shift within capitalism itself. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Marxist thinkers repeatedly attacked the idea of post-industrialism as deceitful. In their view, industrial production was still a determinate reality. But this soon began to shift, first to the Post-Fordist service sector, as David Harvey convincingly argued in the Postmodern Condition and then to the financialization. The latter is key. In Foucault Beyond Foucault, Jeffrey Nealon suggests that the Marx’s famous equation M-C-M‘ is now superceded by a new equation M-M‘ in which money is intensified without the necessity of commodity production.
This may seem to be folly, but after all, it is the primary driver of the advanced financial sectors during the last decade. Sure, China produced industrial goods, but the developed world largely abandoned them along with agriculture. Where a 8% return on investment in industry had been healthy in the 1950s, it had become laughable by the mid part of this decade when financial instruments could return triple that to the average individual, let alone the investment bank.
The economic collapse of the last two years does little to change that. If some nodes have been cut off the network, Detroit, for example, the growth of high-speed trading suggests that the financial system, at its highest (and therefore dominant) levels is increasingly not only financialized but networked. The laughably slow actions of the human trader are now replaced by high-speed computers connected to ultra-low-latency networks located at strategic points in the planetary financial network. Even the suggestion that cities are command-and-control centers of the word economy needs to be questioned when the Philadelphia Exchange is in Weehauwken, New Jersey whil the NYSE is in Mahwah, New Jersey.
Of course the network has had a vastly transformational effect on our lives outside of it. Where postmodernism was a period of economic restructuring, shedding the old industrial order, our period of restructuring is marked by the intense networking of the world, albeit at the same time as a new economic restructuring in which the educated and creative classes seem to be facing the same landscape of uncertainty that the working classes faced in the 1980s. So, too, the dimension of the network is vast, entirely unlike that of the 1980s. State monopolies have been replaced by competing and converging wireless and wired networks. According to the United Nations over half the world’s population now has a cell phone.
Now, my project is meant as a heuristic model. It is not meant as a new master narrative although undoubtedly it risks that but just as Jameson defended the concept of the postmodern, I defend the idea of network culture as being useful for us to try and make connections where they might otherwise be unclear. Most especially, if the system itself aims at its own total reach, it seems to me that to avoid modeling it prevents us from understanding it and, thus, fighting it.
I do want to make it clear that I am not in the business of promoting an alternative strategy at this point. First, I think that if it is anachronistic, I do believe in the value of certain intellectual divisions. By specializing and focusing, we can aim for a degree of rigor. Moreover, it seems to me that one of the problems with theory in the 1990s was not that it delivered so little, but that it promised so much. Theory aimed to be not only an explanatory model, but also an avant-garde with specific political projects. It seems to me that the failure and superficial nature of such projects did as much to eviscerate theory as anything else. In other words, I suggest that my project is to always historicize and, to do so, map the system that we find ourselves trapped in but for now, I am leaving open the methods by which such a system can be fought or what it can be replaced with. My intent here is humility, that theorists trained more in politics than in culture might be better equipped for such responses.
In the investigation that follows, it is crucial to think dialectically and to understand both the positive and the negative within network culture. This is what will concern me for the rest of this talk, which will focus on the specific occasion today, which is the role of intellectual property and networked publics today.
I delivered the text for the following paper at Ed Keller’s Shockwave Riders Symposium,
Parsons, 14 November 2009
Hunting for Precipice: An Introduction to Network Culture
Kazys Varnelis
During the course of the past year, my time has been consumed by the task of writing a history of the immediate present. Think for a moment of the postmodern condition. This is the last historical period that we can agree on. But how is it possible that we still live under it, some two decades after it was first identified? Empirically speaking, there’s no question in my mind that the condition of postmodernism has intensified to the point that it has produced a phase shift in history, that culture, economics, politics, technology, and society have become something quite other. Thus my charge, which I do not undertake lightly, is to do for the present what theorists like Fredric Jameson and David Harvey did for their day. This is the last thing that a historian is supposed to do today, but we’ll get to this later.
I call our new condition “network culture” for four reasons. The first is that I witnessed the wars between supporters of postmodernism and modernism and wish no repeat of that debate, which I believe ultimately consumed more energy than it was worth. Second, we’ve already had supermodernism, second modernity, the altermodern, digimodernism, transmodernity, neomodernism, and post-postmodernism. Such attempts at nomenclature have had little traction. Moreover, and this is my third point, basic aspects of la longue durée of modernity are shutting down or transforming: the nation-state, the media, the public, even subjectivity. Fourth, if the machine was the cultural dominant under modernity and if the market was the cultural dominant under postmodernity, our own is the network. All this, then, leads me to the term network culture.
Today, I want to talk critically about this condition. To begin, I want to enter another list of points into the discussion.
First, the role of technology, which the symposium frames as a key topic. There’s little argument that technological advancements have returned to our lives in force. Where the postmodern condition was marked by a deep skepticism of technology, this is far from our experience; skepticism about technology seems unimaginable today.
But this leads to my second point. Network culture not only intensifies postmodernity, it also intensifies salient aspects of modernity. We are, in some respects, more modern than postmodern.
Network culture abandons aspects of postmodernity and modernity alike.
My third point is that technology is not all there is. This is crucial. We need to understand that network culture has deeper underlying conditions, the most intense of which is the networking of capital. If digitization served the abstracting, reifying tendencies of earlier forms of capital, the network corresponds to capital’s contemporary needs, allowing a new form of trade, the trade in pure information. Well over a decade ago, Manuel Castells observed that it was the network, not the corporation, that determined the economy. The technological changes that we are witness too today are as much technological as sociological. To take one example, look at politics on the net. Yes, there’s a proliferation of alternative sources of information on politics. Yes, democratic mobilization can now take place more rapidly and effectively than ever before. A Jeffersonian democracy is, on paper, made possible by the net. And yet, we are more polarized than ever. The latter is perhaps to some degree a statistical effect of power laws, but it also fits the nature of society itself. Or take social networks. Would these sites exist at all if it were not for the research into social network theory undertaken in the 1990s? And would that research have taken place if it there were not a social need for it? If technology affects some social forces, it concretizes others. This is a fundamental point. Network culture is as much a product of globalization and overcapitalization as it is of any technological forces. It is, however, plausible to say that the relationship between culture and capital than Jameson identified in his work on postmodernism is now replayed in the relationship between information and capital, only at a new level of intensity. The primary industry in developed countries is no longer production, nor is it service, it is financialization. This must, however, be the matter for another talk.
On to my fourth and, I suspect, most contentious point: I need to make very clear that I am not talking about a Zeitgeist or new wave to surf. Rather, network culture is not a happy turn. It as much a condition to take up critical arms against as a state to endorse. My goal is to dissect it in order to understand, as Karl Marx did in his day, what is vital and what is fatal in it.
Still, network culture conspires against us in our effort to grasp it. It does so through its atemporal nature. Some fifteen years ago, Baudrillard suggested that the countdown to the millennium was a countdown to the end of the end, to the end of any sense of temporality. It seems that his prophecy was fulfilled as today, we can’t even identify our decade with a proper name.
In this decade marked by zeros, we inhabit an unprecedented historical void. Jameson observes that postmodernism was marked by the waning of historicity and Lyotard concludes that the postmodern was marked by the end of grand narratives. Our condition is intensified to an utter lack of temporal grounding. We have not only no concept of, or interest in, our own position in history, we have no ability to structure experience temporally. Where postmodernism relentlessly defined itself, we do not. Where postmodernism operated in the traumatic caesura after the modern, network culture hasn’t so much celebrated or witnessed the end of the postmodernism, it has forgotten about it. The past itself is less pastiche and more simulation, not Gravity’s Rainbow so much as Mad Men.
Or take the future, for that matter. Our obsession seems to be with the proximate future, made possible by already patented technologies. It’s no accident that William Gibson sets Pattern Recognition and Spook Country in the immediate past. The future, it seems, is now.
Just as the obsolescence of historical practice is the first way that network culture conspires against us, so does the end of criticism. Again, the lack of critical distance that theorists observed under postmodernism is now cemented by its evacuation. Critical thinking is replaced by the coolhunt, by ideological smoothness, or rather slickness. Let’s not mistake the message of Obama here. It’s not to give hope, not to promise change, rather its to be cool.
How to address all this? For critical inspiration, I want to turn to one of the last crucial texts of the postmodern moment, a text that all but announced itself as a moment of closure, Hal Foster’s 1996 The Return of the Real. Here, Foster suggests that the neo-avant-garde set out to “reconnect with a lost practice in order to disconnect from a present way of working felt to be outmoded, misguided, or otherwise oppressive.”(3)
The lost practice I am pursuing then, is critical history, the historical demystification of the present. My goal then, for which this talk is something of a manifesto, is to become cognizant of the network as an ideological apparatus.
Unquestionably, the era of the mass (or the People) is behind us. Identified, or rather, interpellated by ideologists on the right (let’s think of Edward Bernays and the development of public relations) and on the left (here Marxist-Leninism), the mass was the great historical agent of the twentieth century. Today, it’s atomized, dispersed into networked publics, into micro-constituencies. Now it seems to be receiving a new level of interpellation, identified as “the multitude,” Hardt and Negri’s “irreducable multiplicity.”
As the conference topic suggests, we are witness to “emergence of crowd-sourced collective intelligence, global swarm urbanisms, new disruptive economics [‘wikinomics’] and ultimately the formation of a global political ‘multitude’-with commensurate revolutions catalyzed by these changes cascading across all cultural and political domains.”
Much as this new spirit attracts me, much as I wish to have hope, it’s precisely here that we need to exercise caution. What could be a better ruse for global capital in its quest to align the world with its most recent financial order? I’d like to recall that in a recent lecture at Columbia, Michael Hardt suggested that a co-op board might be a familiar New York analogy to the multitude. This is something that I, like many of you, will never have experience of due to the permeation of the city’s real estate by the forces of global capital and the marginalization of the hard-working people who live here.
In our excitement about the possibilities of the swarm, we need to remember that thus far the multitude has accomplished little. It’s been a decade since Empire and if Obama is the best the multitude can do, then it seems to have failed us. Couldn’t we at least have a flash mob against torture? Or to close Guantanamo Bay? Instead, we are further from political action than we have been before, more separate and more atomized. If the days of critical theory are somehow repugnant to the academy, is it really better for us to serve as the R+D wing of business? Is academic success to be measured by the startup funds one receives?
What is the multitude and its significance? History suggests that capital has a need for an avant-garde to grow our sensorium. If Warren Neidich was here, I think we might have had further insight into just what a matter of hard wiring our brains this is. Thus, I want to caution that the multitude is very much a Californian Ideology for our day, a matter of suggesting that the only way forward for political action is to acknowledge the lack of an alternative to the very forces proclaiming it ineffectual. Thus, when we speak of the virtues of open source and nonmarket production, I have to ask, is this because we see a Utopian virtue in which nonmarket production offers an alternative to capital or is it because nonmarket production allows capital to extract ever more labor from us, thoroughly colonizing our everyday life?
I’d like to bring this talk to a close by adding another dimension to the equation, one that has concerned me greatly during the last year. Economic indicators suggest that we are entering into a long term period of stasis. In part, the brief growth in productivity spurred by the adoption of network technologies seems to be coming to an end. Now such productivity was in great part the result of eliminating newly redundant jobs. This month, the New York Times reports that unemployment and underemployment now stands at 17.5%, its highest level since the Great Depression. If the restructuring of the 1980s destroyed manufacturing, this decade’s recession has mowed down the creative class and the financial sectors. In the latest New Left Review, Gopal Balakrishnan suggests that we have entered into a stationary state, a long period of systemic stagnation. As he points out, Adam Smith never expected the wealth of nations to improve perpetually but rather expected it would come to an end in the nineteenth century as resources were exhausted. Capital’s perpetual growth would have been a mystery to him.
Network culture faces another threat, one that might be understood as an opportunity by revolutionaries both left and right. During the last year I’ve been reading and re-reading archaeologist Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Civilizations, in which he suggests that complexity is a product of advanced civilizations, that it is something that civilizations produce as they grow and specialize. Our civilization is, if nothing else, hyper-complex. Complexity offers diminishing returns to the energy invested as it advances. Tainter observes that at a certain point, the energy invested is insufficient and people simply walk away from the civilization. Massive layers of complexity are shed as the state declines. As he points out, if population declines, the lifestyle of the survivors is not necessarily worse. Someone in 8th century Europe almost certainly would have lived a life under better conditions than someone in 19th century Europe.
If we face a stationary state, we face an increasingly complex one, the course of empire may inevitably be collapse. We need to be wary, for there is one way to cut through the collapse and that is evil. Not only did Hitler build the autobahns, Mussolini, so the saying goes, made the trains run on time. The stationary state is the perfect milieu for the shock doctrine. Against an over-complex condition, what better than a state that can cut through the crap, a state informed by the project for a new american century? A state to which, under network culture, we have willingly given more information about than George Orwell could have imagined?
I’m going to close with these words: Brunner’s Shockwave Rider is a dystopian vision of the now. But perhaps not dystopian enough to predict our day accurately or how willingly we embrace it. How, then, do we, like the novel’s protagonist Nick Haflinger find our Precipice?
Over at Triple Canopy, I expand on the themes that I covered with Joseph Tainter in the interview I posted earlier here, this time as the interviewee.
It’s been a whirlwind semester. I just got back from another delightful trip to Ireland. Next up is one of four remaining lectures for the fall, an appearance in Ed Keller’s symposium Shockwave Riders: Collective Intelligence & TransDisciplinary Pedagogy at Parsons on the 14th. I’m very much looking forward to the event and look forward to seeing many of you there.
The only down side to all my travel and appearances is that I’ve had precious little time to blog or, worse yet, work on my book. On the other hand, some of the upcoming talks—including this one at Parsons—are prompting me to make progress on those fronts. I am looking forward to that.