not since Clinton was trying to persuade us that he shared our values (we’ll keep our pain to ourselves, thanks).
Blah Blah Blah
The political rebellion of the 1960s announced itself in the characteristic speech of the late twentieth century: first person. But the self-promoting, self-conscious “I” of my generation has been hobbled by our awareness of the unconscious, which has hovered over us like a specter. This unconscious has not only promised the possibility of a “liberation of desire” from social constraint, it has also rallied skepticism of our best intentions. The unconscious, after all, always trumps the conscious as a cause of action and thus of political striving. Beneath the desire to do good lurks a neglected child. Behind the orderliness of minimalism lies crap in the pants. Politics itself has been reduced to just another symptom; it dares not promise a cure for fear of being labeled the dupe of its own neuroses.
Whether this is a proper reading of Freud is really not the issue; it is the reading that undermined our sense of the world’s reliability and our own political will, producing a special generational uncertainty principle. We all have our styles of superego, and this combination of license and guilt has distinguished us, on the one hand, from the “greatest generation” of our parents who—dammit—had something unequivocal to fight for, and, on the other hand, from the Gen X-ers and Y-ers, the Reaganjugend, whose traumas seem so fifties, inflicted by the pressures of consumption, rather than rebellion. Thus questions of influence acquire for us a special anxiety. The unflagging hegemony of the sixty-something and seventy-something cadre that rules, that formulated the parameters of the depoliticized, desocialized post-modernity that swept architecture in the seventies and eighties, needs a violent shaking from the left.
No More Second-Hand Dad
What to do when the parents in your own family romance are the stalwarts of the avant-garde? That we received our lessons in artistic rebellion at twice-second-hand somewhat diminished our sense of their originality. Avant-gardism is about rupture, overthrow, the father-murderous rage of art. Classic early-twentieth-century avant-gardism wanted a radical reworking of the visual aspect of architecture and a reinvention of the process of production.
The postmodern “avant-garde”—compromised by a sense of having inherited both its credentials and its topics—is a somewhat different creature. Its intellectual agenda has remained caught in the avant-garde dream of its ancestors. It thus re-covered much of the ground explored half a century ago, redoubling the received critical discourse with its own metacritical commentary, interpolating another layer of interpretation between the “primary” investigation and its own. The magazine October, for example, the bible of post-modernity (and exemplar for our own theorizing), continues to be held hostage by its obsession with surrealism, as with some lost idyll. And architecture carries on with fresh formalisms of the broken (or the perfect) square.
Try as we might, we haven’t been able to get Oedipus out of our edifices; inherited property still defines us. A false patriarchy continues to structure the discipline and practice of architecture, in which a fraternal order of equals is presided over by a simultaneously dead and obscenely alive father, father Philip, in this instance.
Life in the Past Lane
This stalled fascination with former revolutions is the result of a failure of nerve and of invention. It is also evidence of the ideological and psychological trauma that has beset our attempts to formulate an avant-garde in rebellion against an avant-garde to which we desperately desire to remain faithful. The result has been a kind of fission. One by-product is the hyperconservatism of our melancholy historicists. Another is the would-be radicalism that has produced visually novel buildings and rudimentary bridges to the world of the virtual, but which still clings to dusty desires for legitimacy.
The lesson we have been unable to learn is that it takes a lot more rebellion than we have been able to muster to remain faithful to the heritage of the avant-garde.
Market Share
I am not sure the New York Times Magazine did us any favors with its gossipy, prurient cover story on Rem Koolhaas, our momentary laureate. Depicting him as a kind of edgy Martha Stewart who refuses to judge any endeavor “a good thing,” whose mission is the “mission of no mission,” the Times tried to inscribe his fundamental cynicism into the format of the hero-architect, Fountainhead-style. Of course, the paper went for the Hollywood version. Gary Cooper may have behaved like Frank Lloyd Wright, but the models in the background were strictly Gordon Bunshaft.
Sound familiar? The challenge of collapsing the tastemaker and the ideologue is sure to test one side or the other dramatically. Is it possible to be Paul Auster, Sam Walton, and Kim Il Sung at the same time? Will Rem succeed in branding the generic?
Africa Shops at Prada
Jetting into Harvard to administer his shopping seminar, Rem snags a job designing Prada stores. The press praises his strategy of branding: no design “identity,” instead a space where things happen, “an exciting urban environment that creates a unique Prada experience.” A TV camera in the dressing room will permit you (TV’s Big Brother is another Dutch import) to view yourself from all sides at once. Will thousand-dollar shoes move faster when surveilled from all angles? Will there be an algorithm to airbrush away our worst features? Must we buy this privatization of culture? Does the postmodern critique of the museum, the call for tearing down its walls, do anything but free art for the shopping mall? I’ll take Bilbao, thanks.
The trouble with an age of scholasticism is that you talk yourself into the idea that anything is politics. By the time it’s devolved from direct action to propaganda to critical theory, to the appropriation of theory, to the branding of theory, to the rejection of theory, something is lost. Critique stokes its own fantasy of participation. On the one hand, this produces boutique design as social practice, and, on the other, it segues into the more rarefied reaches of recombination. My Russian colleague, Andrei, has been smoking cheap cigarettes that someone brought him from back home. The bright red pack is emblazoned with a picture of Lenin in high sixties graphic style. The make is “Prima,” the brand “Nostalgia,” the smell appalling. What’s next? Lenin Lites and Trotsky 100s? Must we succumb to the speed of this? Can’t we slow the whole thing down?
Nostalgie de la Boue
This new nostalgia (the nostalgia for packaged nostalgia) is everywhere. Now that my generation rules the media, part of us keep busy looting our experience for the rudest forms of exploitation. If you’ve turned on your TV lately, you might have seen That Seventies Show, a slick package of affects, the decade as a set of tics and styles. The expropriation continues to the limits of corporate memory. Advertising nowadays is lush with 1960s themes as fiftyish account executives preside over the wholesale trashing of the culture that nourished them. “I Feel Good”—a laxative. “Forever Young”—invidious irony—incontinence diapers. On Survivor, flaming torches turn the game-show paradise island into Trader Vic’s.
Nostalgic for 1950s and 1960s styles, yet too hip not to be troubled by the accumulated political baggage of the project, this cadre of media masters offers a stance of almost pure cynicism. “I am saying this, but I don’t actually believe it; In fact, I don’t actually believe anything, because it is no longer possible to do so.” With Niemayer or Lapidus or Harrison as the soundtrack (and the Stones, perhaps, playing on the answering machine), they seem to want to suspend indefinitely the moment when they would be obliged to take a position.
A micro-generational conflict now exists among those for whom the 1960s represents a source of anxiety, those for whom the decade still represents possibility, and those for whom it is simply ancient history. Most invested in the middle alternative, I grapple with this legacy, but the particulars grow vague (the feeling stays evergreen).
That
