Failure- Adaptation or Resistance?

Failure-
Adaptation
or
Resistance? (1)

by tyler caruso

"My awareness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it,
lining it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever
directly touching its substance; it would volatize in some way before
I could make contact with it, just as an incandescent body brought
near a wet object never touches its moisture because it is always
preceded by a zone of evaporation "( Proust “Swann’s Way”).

Architecture as a discipline is struggling to understand its own accountability in relation to society, and how to communicate itself beyond its immediate practical relevance. Furthermore Architecture is far from an auspicious moment, how can it proceed when the world has entered into the consciousness that the best thing we as a society can do is not build. What then is its new role or function? I believe Architecture must, without digressing into rhetoric or crouching into a defensive stance move the role of the built environment beyond the object and open up a critical dialogue of social space. A space should enable its occupants to draw connections from a matrix of ideas and structures- moving simultaneously between the lived experience of embodiment and the theoretical lens of observation. The visionaries of this new arena will not accept but embrace the state of perpetual flux. We have seen the transformation of everyday spaces in Margaret Crawford’s work and the dynamic role the public has on space but as time progresses we will experience an unstable physical form from the earth itself, as we enter into the climate crisis.

While most would agree that language is at times unwieldy- even volatile in certain situations one cannot be content to leave the nature of the built form off limits- carving words into effable stars or punctuations of our very existence. In Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy, Braidotti explains, “The body, far from being an essentialist notion, is situated at the intersection of the biological and the symbolic; as such it marks a metaphysical surface of integrated material and symbolic elements that defy separation.” If we entertain this, what then is the body of architecture? I postulate that Architecture takes this theory a step further and attempts to delineate between the self and the society. The built form must see beyond its state of conception and feature a flexibility that moves away from its material form, creating many different social realms where the individual can participate in the space- where the user has the ability to experience a unique embodiment of that space without the observer trying to define in a homogenous manner the nature of his/her experience (2). We always need to be cognoscente of the material nature of the signifier itself (the built form in this instance), for materiality and signification (the built form and society) are indissoluble (3). It is through the navigation of these realms and the attraction to certain elements and distancing from others that we begin to amass ‘self-knowledge’ and mould the concept of a persisting self – our own ontological nature, identity conditions and character. Sartre posited that,

“Man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterwards will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be. Thus, there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it. Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust towards existence. Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself” (Sartre “Existentialism and Human Emotions”).

What if there is no reasoned existence- what if a critical reading is the only truth we have- in which the reader wrestles from the text- the ever changing failure to communicate. Post Structuralist or Post- Saussurean(4) readings of text denote that “…common sense is itself ideologically and discursively constructed, rooted in a specific historical situation, and operating in conjunction with a particular social formation” (5). ‘Obvious’ and ‘natural’ are produced in a specific society by the way that very society talks about and frames the way it conceives itself.

Common sense theory is analogous to how the world has grown into a grotesques mass functioning on the assumption of infinite limitless resources. I attribute this to a failure of being able to articulate time- we have the same language for years that can be experienced within a life and those that will exceed many lifetimes- we cannot know time that extends beyond the expanse of a single life; it is intangible to us. Empiricism thereby evades confrontation with our demise and the realization of the planet’s limits. We refuse the precautionary principle because human existence has metastasized to an endless formation of wants, powered by the verb of consumerism and the myth of immortality in our language. We cannot carry ourselves as immune the very language we use. Belsey’s reveals that, “…. language is not merely the medium in which autonomous individuals transmits messages to each other about an independently constitutes world of things. On the contrary, it is language which offers the possibility of constructing a world of distinct individuals and things, and of differentiating between them”.

The failure of language to bring people together then rests a heavy burden on our spaces- Barthe relates this feeling, “Sometimes I would mention this amazement buts since no one seemed to share it, nor even understand it (life consists of these little touches of solitude), I forgot about it”(6). My own “ontological desire” is a struggle to understand the failure of language and how that helps to create or restrict social spaces. What is architecture? What are its boundaries? What if architecture is not meant to be more than anything then a “come here”, a ‘meeting’, an interruption of the ‘void’- we are choosing by building this moment- this interruption or fatality. Architecture diverges from other forms of art becomes while the roles of ‘operator’ and ‘spectator’ remain, the ‘referent’ however is transformed into not only an object but a cultural meeting point where the interaction both occurs and is instigated (7). Nicolas Borruidaud argued a similar task for art in the 90s in Relational Aesthics- however I feel that his emotional excitement about the creation of new daily social micro utopias falls sort of action into a sort of acceptance, failing to take the challenge out of the gallery space.

Similar to Crawford’s critique of Davis I agree with Bourriaud’s ‘symptoms’ or description of relational aesthetics but I believe without consent he has pinned the banner of ‘avante garde’ inappropriately on a artists who are not able to take up that mantle. He defined relational art as 'a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space' where art works are intended to provoke and produce inter-human relations. These ideas are rooted to the SI's constructed situations, which are a response to 60s/70s oil crisis, class discord and national terrorism.
In a critique of Bourriaud the Radical Culture Research Collective (RCRC) dissect his positioning relational art as the heir to the 20th century avant-gardes. They feel that,
“The avant-garde legacy becomes at stake with Bourriaud’s claim about the historical importance of relational art as the new cutting edge of politicized cultural practice… The old avant-gardes, Bourriaud tells us, were oriented toward conflict and social struggle; relieved of this dogmatic radical antagonism and macro-focus on the global system, relational-alleviation art “is concerned with negotiations, bonds, and co-existences.” (Bourriaud 45) The new relational avant-gardistes “are not naïve or cynical enough ‘to go about things as if’ the radical and universalist utopia were still on the agenda” (Bourriaud 70). We would put it differently. Precisely formulated, relational aesthetics represents the liberalization of the avant-garde project of radical transformation. In 1998, Bourriaud saw this as a virtue. Today, we see it as the main limitation of relational art – and one that negates any claim it makes to the legacy of the avant-gardes. While we would defend relational art from its conservative and reactionary critics, we would also insist that it not come to stand in for the radical project it falls short of – and indeed refuses”.

New architecture has the potential to be our avante garde- in its response to globalization the grandchild of post-modernism the built form needs to champion its own position- and it is one that both accepts and then moves beyond, to engage failure, in the flexible nature of the space- to create a ‘third space’ (8).

NOTES:

1- Taken from Stuart Hall
2- Jacques Rancière throughout his work he has taken issue with the way that intellectuals have theorized the proletariat. While I agree with Davis that democratic space in America is less I cannot readily sign off that we are in a time of decline from other more emollient times. Writer’s often don the romantic lens of nostalgia and take up the labored view of depicting the proliteratriate as a single mass waiting for their own liberation. In Crawford’s criticism of Mike Davis she concurs that the ‘symptoms’ are valid but she points out that, “ …the perception of loss originates in the extremely narrow definitions of both ‘public’ and ‘space that derives from the insistence on unity, desire for fixed categories of time and space, and rigidly conceived notions of private and public”. Her theoretical framework comes from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay, “Can the subaltern Speak?”, where she warns of the potential of “epistemic violence” to cause just as much harm to a subjugated class as the original colonizers did. Everyone must work to refuse the use of a collective voice that assumes a ‘homogenous’ voice can be lent to the ‘others’.
3-Understood from Judith Butler’s “Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex”.
4-Crawford is engaging in the architectural equivalent to literature’s Post- Saussurean critical theory in her breakdown of the social landscape into which, “cultures consolidate and separate” taking the time to identify the differences that exist between saying Latino and being Mexican as oppose to Cuban.
5- “Critical Practice”
6- Barthes, Roland "Camera Lucida"
7- Brthes, Roland "Camera Lucida"
8- Taken from Margaret Crawford’s adoption of Edward Soja who followed Henri Lefebvre- “a category that is neither material space that experience nor a representation of space- it becomes a space of representation, a space bearing the possibility of new meaning, a space activated through social action and the social imagination”.