la fonction utopique
When they are prompted to talk about their work, Christophe Berdaguer and Marie Péjus fondly bring up the primitivist parable of Reyner Banham, summing up the human settlement by contrasting two major original and primary phenomena: the hut (or shelter beneath a rock) and fire. Skirting the problem of shelter and managing to deal with the environment by hiding (beneath a rock, tent or roof)--the point of departure of architecture as we know it today, according to Banham--or alternatively acting on local weather conditions, usually by means of a camp fire, with the area roundabout possessing qualities which architecture cannot hope to match, essentially freedom and variability (1). In The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment, his essay about forms of environmental management, it is the second aspect that is very obviously favoured by Banham. The year was 1969, the high point, it just so happens, of a vast proliferating and contradictory movement, fuelled as much by Pop Art as by the counter-culture, as much by cultural leftism as by a terrified fascination in the face of all the products of the consumer society. That movement was in the process of challenging the very foundations of architecture, as well as the role and status of the environmental designer and planner. So, in an explicit way, and from his introductory words onward, Banham included himself not in any contrary way, but rather as an alert and alarmed heir, carrying things on, as an explorer and as someone revealing the fallow and blank areas of the work of Sigfried Giedion, Mechanisation Takes Command [A Contribution to Anonymous History, 1848], seeking other solutions in capacities other than as secretary of the CIAMs, and turning in particular towards mobile structures and towards an appropriation and even hijacking of the "catalogue" as proposed by manufacturers. Always with that idea that consisted in combining the structurally "poorest" of contributions and input with the conceptually "richest" of solutions. In thus devaluing the monumental by contrasting it with the temporarily liberating and seductive idea of the disposable and the ephemeral (cult of youth, hedonism...), Banham would come upon that vaster movement, one of whose leading lights, Andrea Branzi, one of the founders of Archizoom, recently remembered having moved, "in 50 years", "from a civilization of the machine to a civilization of consumption", and this at the price of a total reversal of values, "the mechanism of the induction of requirements [having taken] the place of what had been the rationalist project"(2).
After hallmarking the postwar years, those years of destitution and emergency, the various problem-sets of Reconstruction, then of development and the "greatest possible number [of people]", underpinned, for example, by Team Ten and the review of the CIAMs, started to blur and fade. It was in "1968 and thereabouts" that people started to see the great void resulting from the ironical smile of Pop being filled with the black humour of that "radical" movement (3). And it is Branzi who notes today, half-scared and half-amused, that the counter-programme of radical architecture has been successfully brought almost full circle, and that everything that had then been envisaged, somewhere between dread and irony, found its production potential in our contemporary world (4).
The fact that this counter-history has ended up becoming History will leave us forever perplexed, as we mull it over.
Position
A while ago, Berdaguer & Péjus, who were, as it happens, born in those very years, 1968-69, thus decided in their turn, and with one or two colleagues, to grapple hand-to-hand with this legacy, to seek support once again from its unthought aspects, and revisit its fallow areas and get a better idea of what it might today be possible to do with it, once the wintry 1980s were over.
To take up the observations recently made by an art critic, if it is highly likely that the notion of geography and its corollaries (maps, plans, satellite imagery, photos, samplings, diagrams and tables) were never as important in art as they are today (5), we might well put forward, in return, the idea that today's art has never been quite as influenced by architecture, and more precisely by the radical architecture--let us so call it, in a general way--which, in the decades from the 1960s to the 1990s, informed an ambitious debate on architecture and make-believe, and on the role played therein by the architect and, in a more general way, by the designer. And once again, Branzi's definition, drawn up some 20 years ago, of the project as something operating "in the territory of the imaginary" and creating "new narratives, new make-believes, which will swell the density of the real" (6), this definition is today appropriate just as much for a generation of young architects as for young artists stomping over the same territories--informed and aware, like so many critical designers suspicious of the claim of being the contracting authority.
Why, then, this ubiquitousness of the biological--and more precisely of the biotechnical--and the organic which might a priori remove us from these "radical" references? We know for example that throughout the history of architecture, the organicist metaphor has (almost) invariably dominated those periods when (political) involvement and commitment was fading.
For better or for worse, this is a very complicated (hi)story. But with Berdaguer & Péjus, it would nevertheless seem that this recourse to biology lies at the basis of another order.
First and foremost because biology does--at the very least--feature in the diary of concerns, be they intellectual or political, marking our day and age. And then incidentally because this recourse now seems to be something quite different, and ends up in a not-too-distant relationship with the ideological criticism that held sway in the period of radical architecture. As if biological forces (still perforce occult, or, rather, even occulted) had replaced ideology and "false awareness" as the key to explaining both the patterns of behaviour and the government of people. And needless to say, this is where things get interesting. Admittedly, 30 to 40 years ago now, Superstudio, for example, "reversed" the grid (a bit like the way, a few years later, Michel Foucault saw mutiny as a reversal of the bars, of the situation of confinement, and of the status of the prisoner), and these days we are trying just as hard to "reverse" things (7). Even if what is involved is no longer the grid of the movement of on-going urbanization, it is still a matter of colonization and management, and they are clearly even more insidious.
In commenting on the reception of his Règles pour le parc humain/Rules for the Human Park (1999), Peter Sloterdijk lamented the obliteration of the difference between prescription and description, an erasure lying at the root of many a misunderstanding about the way his work is read.
As if, in a word, after giving up any idea of changing the world, we no longer admitted that this world could be interpreted. Interpreted, however, come what may, in the light of a "temporal communism for the species as a whole", a "temporal communism" hallmarked, to borrow Sloterdijk's terms, by English, the dollar, worldwide brands, pop music, news and abstract art. "An obligatory commune which has no loophole or way out": "we have become, despite ourselves, so to speak, chrono-communists and bio-communists, the horrified members of a universal genetic Church" (8). And it is more or less from these particular observations that the work of Berdaguer & Péjus kicks off. In the knowledge that modernity henceforth attaches to "the person who is touched by an awareness of the fact that, over and above the inevitable witness-like quality, he or she is incorporated by a kind of complicity in this brand new type of monstrousness"(9). So to gain a better grasp of both the meaning of this organic and biological reference and the ambiguities that it inevitably presents to young artists keen to get to grips with it, while, at the same time taking the legacy of their elders into account. Modern times are those of the generalized operativist revolution and mastery, once and for all, of the artificial, and it is up to the work of art to be aware of this monstrousness, in the knowledge that "participation in modernity can only be owned up to in the form of a radical suspicion directed against oneself"(10).
Back to Roots
If, according to Warhol, Pop means "liking things", we have also known for a while now that things can be liked in a simultaneous state of boredom, by way of their mirror-images, and not merely in the euphoria of the blissed-out consumer. The Situationists, with all their lucidity, observed the following in 1964: "We are perforce on the same track as our enemies--usually ahead of them--but we have to be on it as enemies, and let there be no confusion about that. The best man will win" (11). The selfsame Debord who, a few years earlier, had promised that if fine adventures can only be set and rooted in beautiful neighbourhoods, then the notion of beautiful neighbourhoods will change (12). The promise of a new "life-style"...
The "error" of the Situationist International [SI]
But the problem--or if you prefer, the error--of the Situationist International was to believe in the possibility of winning the race of progress by way of criticism, and in the possibility of emerging victorious from the fatal challenge that it imposed on the "system" in the struggle for mastery of new packaging techniques (13). The struggle of "professional cultural revolutionaries", who had thoroughly understood that the challenge lay right there, in the merchandization of the world, and, first and foremost, in the merchandization of culture, and in the breakdown of cultural values. It was actually a matter of emerging victorious from this race of progress in the way it was defined by the development of liberal capitalism, by way of an extension of leisure activities (entertainment and spare time). In a nutshell, by way of exaggeration, or higher bidding. And henceforth it was important to rethink the class struggle, change the nature of labour and in particular destroy the thesis of the "happy worker", by incorporating the struggle for the management and organization of free time, in so far as the development of the forces of production guaranteed--and still does guarantee--its on-going rise.
Whence the need to "concretely contrast, whenever the occasion arises, the highlights of the capitalist way of life with other desirable ways of living; and destroy the bourgeois idea of happiness by every kind of hyper-political means" (14). Destroy the idea that happiness could be mapped out, and planned. Think, like the Marx of German ideology, that a man freed from the dead time of labour could go fishing in the morning, and hunting in the afternoon, see to the farm in the evening, and devote himself to criticism after supper. But as Hannah Arendt regretted in 1958, and especially as seen from the United States, "the leisure activities of the animal laborans or working creature are given over exclusively to consumption, and the more time the creature is given, the more demanding and insatiable its appetites become": "...no object in the world will be safe from consumption, and annihilation by way of consumption"(15).
In a word, the "error" has resided in believing that the contradictions would be sufficiently strong, believing in the virtues of "progress", even if one clearly sensed that the devil was already in the machine.
Believing, in particular, that the mounting rise in the quantity of goods that can be accumulated would no longer be the source of an absolute wealth, but of a relative and all of a sudden intolerable poverty. And believing, too, that in struggling in this way for free time--hence full-time freedom as was conceived by the Situationists--it might have been possible to fulfil that revolutionary experimental art, that on-going game, that construction of endlessly new situations, so as to make the daily round something thrilling. Turning the weapons of the system against the system (in a word, "diverting" or "hijacking", be it advertising imagery or erotic photos) is a petty game which is not risk-free, and first and foremost, it goes without saying, a game of retrieval and salvage.
By taking up Rimbaud's cry at once rejecting work and proclaiming creative freedom, the SI sowed the wind. It would also reap the whirlwind: the wish to be emancipated from work simply gave rise to a transformation of work. What otherwise is there to say about this new spirit of capitalism singled out by two sociologists, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, after sundry other attempts (those made by Jean-Pierre Le Goff, Jean Baudrillard, and Pierre Bourdieu, all in a different chord)?
What is there to be said about the future development of "art criticism" in this system which elevates as paramount values flexibility, mobility, autonomy, identity, "project-by-project management", creativity, originality, speed, hedonism and nomadism? In effect, the critique developed by the Situationists would thus mark the final stage of the development of that other critique of mechanization that spans two centuries, just before its retrieval--and appropiation--by the "new spirit of capitalism", right after 1968.
The network phenomenon
Drift and oblivion, which were liberating experiences 40 years ago, have become advertising slogans. Mobility has thus become a modern form of oppression when it is constrained, in the home and in the workplace. The archaeology of the notion of "network" is by this token edifying: from the gridding of public facilities and buildings at the end of the 19th century to networks of virtuality and immaterialness (16). All proceeding by way of the transitory phase which, as it were, begins with Haussmann's pilot experiment, the phase of a city (and hence of a territory) that is physically and materially parcelled and separated-- by evisceration--from the second phase of "networks". Capitalism's assimilation of the paradigm of the network (17), partly built counter to the notion of authenticity, and the enhancement of relational properties, to the detriment of substantial properties, nowadays strengthen merchandization.
In the late 1960s, the inflatable--that almost desperate attempt to make a "sidestep" outside the iron cage, as well as being a medium that was inexpensive, easy to handle, flexible, and quick to implement--was "hijacked" at Osaka and the 1970 World Fair, before foundering as a result of the price hike of oil, and thus plastic.
And this was the case, even if the inflatable venture was still somewhat curious, when all is said and done.
How otherwise are we to explain the fact the drawing-rooms of the "advanced" middle class were suddenly embellished by garishly coloured inflatable armchairs and pouffes? How are we to explain that admittedly brief but actually quite conspicuous craze? How, too, are we to explain that at the very moment when architects of the magazine Utopie were exhibiting their works in a large store, and namely the Galeries Lafayette--a department store designed, to be sure, for the purchases of the ruling class, but a "large store" all the same--, the English members of Archigram did likewise at Harrod's in London in April 1967 with their "Living 1990" project inspired by Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House? Would a type of technicist architecture thus at one point have encountered the consciousness of various people? Leroi-Gourhan used to say that a society only ever borrows what it is ready to invent. And the City of which Vernant speaks, the Greek city, is thus already at the core of minds and praxes, when it is focused on the public place in the unity between a spatial language and the praxis of Athenian democracy. And if the city--and architecture--is above all an unfinished human project, if the recourse to a spatial image is futile, when it does not express the consciousness that a human group takes on its own behalf, then something really must have come to pass in those decades from the 1960s to the 1990s.
This is something that Banham had a hunch about in 1969 when he talked about those architects who "are not--for better or for worse--inhibited by the classical architectural culture" (18). Encouraged and reassured in the face of the promises of technology, they tried to express a moment of civilization with, among other things, inflatable structures, structures which were much in vogue within anglo-saxon architectural schools, following the successes and prestige of their propagandist Otto Frei, and duly described by the critic. A vogue, it should be said in passing, that was, in the end of the day, similar to the vogue underwriting certain contemporary theoretical projects. Organic projects, at once flowing and crumpled, strata and layers; flexible epidermises, generative and automorphic to the point of being repetitively proliferative; elliptical membranes, twisted and ribbed; technicist projects, "connected", and too crystalline not to cause some alarm.
According to Banham, the inflatable was a "more subversive" proposition going well beyond the mere quest for a building without constructed enclosures and walls; in fact a complete reversal of the traditional casting of roles in architecture, and, in a general way, in environmental management. Unlike Banham, who in the end waged his war against "tradition" and its temple custodians, against all the conventional "Guadets" and for the "outsiders" who, in his book, are still the "real" innovators, Banham undertaking this fight, like a "pop" apostle, relativist and postmodern ahead of his time, like an apostle of a counter-cultural return to the natural state by way of technology, it is perhaps precisely this singular set of circumstances which decidedly frightened some people. By actually being overly keen to focus on the hasty passage through several climates, distraction and oblivion (in a nutshell, drift), Debord thus reckoned that he had failed to go astray in a day and age that very swiftly came across as being thoroughly modern. Needless to say, there was no comfortable ageing of the ex-avant-garde, but at what price? The price of exclusion, dissolution, and an absence of legacy.
The "legacy" issue
In the matter of legacy of the critique of separation as formulated by the SI, in the footsteps of Henri Lefebvre, it has in fact to be concluded that there was no such thing at all. Firstly because of the radical challenge of the SI: everything being connected, everything had to be changed by way of a uniting struggle... or nothing. So, "start all over again from scratch" at the risk of merely repeating and thus strengthening the system. Then because, immediately after May '68, the lucid Debord effected a far-reaching about-face in the direction of archaism, memory and historical awareness. A turnaround leading him to present an apology for the "old stones" of vanished Paris and of that neighbourhood where the negative held court in Panégyrique (1988).
In the wake of William Morris (19) who, for his part, did not shrink from declaring himself to be "old hat", Debord thus came up with an apology for an idyllic "Middle Ages" put forward as a time of unity, from conception to end product, the time of the "craftsman" (versus mechanization, merchandization and functionalism), and of know-how and expertise, the time of production for utilization as opposed to sales, the time prior to falsification and ersatz. With Morris, however, this artistic programme involving a unity to be refound in conception (and design) also originated from a destruction of the cultural values of the day. Even if the period was dominated by nostalgia for an initial modernity in which it was the user value that produced things beautiful, before user value was completely taken over by the machine, that programme was still dominated by one idea: art had to die before being reborn. Even in the crook of nostalgia, there was thus still the idea of challenge in the face of a Power seeking to constantly erase the traces of a birth in order to delay the death throes.
Based on the identification of separateness as a consequence of the industrial revolution and ultimate outcome of a lengthy process of mechanization undertaken from the Renaissance onwards, once it had been understood that the separate was undeniably the wound of the modern world, two types of reactions actually took shape, one backward-looking, the other forward-looking. The former traced a thread that started with Morris and Ruskin and the Arts and Crafts movement in general, and ended, among other things, with the propositions of the Krier-Culot couple, and a critique of the post-industrial civilization, the division of labour, the mechanical re-production of identical gestures, and that eulogy of communities, craftsmanship and lost areas of know-how and expertise.
The other reaction was the highspeed race with and against, all against the system. This was the idea of turning the weapons provided by the system against that same system. Among architects, in the tradition of a well-known Manifesto which, at the turn of the century, showed a highly ambiguous fascination for speed and mechanization, there was for example the "Internationale of Utopia", and there were the people belonging to the GIAP, and the mega-structuralists in general (Friedman, Maymont, Constant, Kurokawa, Tange, Schöffer...). An Internationale of the 1960s, steeped in the technicism of that decade and, like Coop Himmelbau and its Villa Rosa (1968), still fascinated by the conquest of space, the great event of that period. In the wake of Buckminster Fuller, military research was still a source of endless inspiration (just as strategy and military thinking were for Debord). The domes and the inflatable are relatively inexpensive technical objects that can be industrialized; they are easy to put together, too, but they are also autonomous, moveable and flexible. Mobility also applies to the "Stop-over" apartments of the Plug-in City, where people only come to a halt for a split second, in accordance with the wishes of the people of Archigram who, for their part, only ever think about speeding up the mercantile system, not blowing open its contradictions, but, on the contrary, arriving at a kind of saturation. Mobility is also the dymaxion principle--and the house associated with it--, the original principle behind Fuller's domes built on the idea of a maximum dynamic effectiveness.
And yet it is actually from this fundamental contradiction between the requirement of mobility (and hence of adaptability) on the one hand, and, on the other, authenticity (which presupposes at the same time a personal connection, "naturally", by being "oneself", "honestly" and in "transparency") that the confusion springs that has to do with the deep-seated nature of the relations that we can have today with others in this connectionist world. This need to shift, and move about, within a network (social just as much as immaterial), and as is advocated by management, and the need to adapt to the various situations so as to benefit from the connections, these needs clash with the requirement to be someone who is sound and "transparent", someone you can trust, and as such they undermine the foundations of the old existentialism, and of the subject withstanding the massification of minds. It was of course Constat who, at the end of the 1960s, declared, for example, that he was keen to prepare "a mass culture for the future" with New Babylon. The city here was undoubtedly liberated, but within a mechanized world, and life in it becomes "an endless journey through a world changing so fast that it always seems different" (20). This city of tomorrow, which is dynamic and in a state of continual change, and the perpetual social mobility that informs it, is, according to Constant, the city announced by the airport, where all we do is pass through (21). As Michel Surya emphasizes, in this war of "transparency" that has just unfurled before our very eyes, with the exception of those who took the bit between the teeth-- and "rarely has an intellectual war found the protagonists it called upon more disarmed and defenceless" (22).
The interest provoked by Debord lies in the fact that he had indeed successively explored both these avenues, from his apprenticeship with Constant's plexiglas models to the hagiography, after the end of the SI, of vanished Paris and its book of forgotten stones (23). This wavering between too much memory and not enough, between intimidation by the future and intimidation by the past, faded after May '68, and the day was won by the past and memory, after the defeat in this race for progress. Once Debord realized that, by appropriation and hijacking, strictly nothing was taken from Power, and that, quite to the contrary, people fell into the trap of making its ideology more fluid, as is attested to, day after day, by the various media-related and appropriated uses of the terms "spectacle" and "society of the spectacle".
The Utopian Function
Faced with the generalized aestheticization planned by a world whose formatting potential is as intriguing as it is intolerable, the only way out thus lies in confining oneself to trying to "write well about the mediocre", in a sort of "realistic formalism", the oxymoron proposed by Pierre Bourdieu in The Rules of Art for re-reading Flaubert's "realism" (24). Which is tantamount to saying, as Branzi did in 1974, himself plagiarizing Flaubert [la Bovary, c'est moi = I am Bovary], "I am architecture".
Describing the world as it is, if need be by saturating some of its most extreme features, and by singling out for the occasion notes of details guaranteeing the "authenticity" of figuration. As in literature, the real latches on to these details, and through this process, the "realist" discourse remains faithful to life, even in its contingencies and its most private and futile manifestations (25).
In a word, taking up the programme of radical architecture which cannily reverses positions that "assume utopia to be an initial working datum, and develops it in a realistic way": "...utopia lies not in the end but in reality", "... there is no allegory in it, rather a natural phenomenon" (26). This is where radical architecture manages to salvage an absolute specific realism", accepting "the conditions of a discontinuous reality" and shifting "on the plane of a mediocre reality, refusing any glorious fate", and all this after having posited as a precondition "the separation between creative activities and traditional edifying activities" (27).
To sum up, the real is not altogether representable by images, and it is because people endlessly want to represent it by images, that a history of architecture exists. In topological terms, it is not possible to overlap a multi-dimensional reality and a one-dimensional order, to wit, the image. Even if the architect does not want to surrender, ever. And it is this refusal, possibly as old as architecture itself, that also produces architecture. So we might well imagine a history of architecture that is the history of the often quite crazy iconographic expedients, which have been used by people to tame, reduce, deny or on the other hand assume what is still a delusion. Namely, the basic incompatibility of image and reality.
Architecture is categorically realistic in so much as its sole object of desire is invariably reality. But it is just as doggedly unrealistic, informed as it is by a desire for the impossible. A possibly perverse function, therefore, possibly a happy one, which goes by the name of utopian function.