Late for the Future: Notes on the Avant-Garde
By Justin Fowler, MArch I candidate
For the May 12th morning session of the History of the Future colloquium and the panel on the avant-garde in particular, the atmosphere was one of a vanguard paradoxically arriving after the major battle had already been fought. Echoes of Edward Said’s notion of “lateness” reverberated throughout the room and the project of those at the table seemed to be one born out of a certain exhaustion with not only the status quo but with the apparent lack of strategic ambition gripping a profession whose tendency of late has been to exchange the narrative manifestos of the “-isms” in favor of performative “-ologies” and “-trics.”
Michael Hays made a stab into the abyss with his call for a renewed sense of desire through which asymptotic struggle would be reintroduced into the discipline—a move of negative dialectics in the vein of Rossi, Eisenman and Hejduk rather than one of the holistic synthesis of positivist operations. This new symbolic regime of architectural desire would require “absolute formalism, and a critical practice of demystification,” and would also be “totalizing and utopian,” taking on the globe as the physical and infrastructural site of future interventions. Channeling Georges Bataille, Hays also called for both an “unproductive expenditure” and in a nod to Sanford Kwinter and Bruno Latour, a “cybernetic immanence” that recognized a continuity between technical and biological systems.
In an implicit critique of Hays’ position, Scott Cohen offered a defense of the parametric as being the only real collective project in architecture, one that provided “rules in a time when rules are no longer provided.” Against what he perceived to be the recent tendency for architecture to devolve into an archipelago of personal narrative projects, Cohen proposed an almost unholy alliance with the seemingly deterministic ethos of techno-economic progress, an ideology unto itself which Cohen himself acknowledged could lead to the elimination of the architect as an authorial figure.
Cohen’s broadside called for a narrow focus on the techne of architectural production without offering a socio-political framework within which such production could be critiqued. This was despite his own assessment that in the absence of serious and perpetual critique the architect would soon be overtaken by self-generating processes. Cohen’s position seemed to follow the logic of Claire Zimmerman’s analysis that the avant-garde as a utopian concept was no longer valid in that its mechanisms had become “operationalized” within the workings of institutions and the market. For Zimmerman, the avant-garde’s primary role in architectural production is embodied in its capacity to generate novel effects within the constraints of larger historical and institutional systems, and that a studied “calculus of history” was necessary to tease out the operational potential of vanguard concepts.
Following the rhetoric of earlier panel sessions, these proposals represented two poles in a kind of choose-your-own-apocalypse game. As Mark Jarzombek advised, there was little “future” in Hays’ suggestion that one must be “forever wedded” to a life of continual trauma whereby the utopian search for the Lacanian object of desire becomes a pathological affliction. Likewise, Cohen’s courting of rational computational processes for the sake of producing complexity within the realm of the norm seems at once a disciplinary parlor game not unlike the personal narratives he so decries. It also seems to be an incisive argument into the delicate balance that a cybernetic humanity—where man no longer retains a privileged position in relation to the objects and systems he creates—must achieve in the face of the seemingly inevitable march of progress.
If the apocalypse has so easily been conjured—the “unthinkable” having already been thought during the Cold War—and meaning again equated with struggle, then dancing around the brink one more time would hardly seem to be the place of an architectural vanguard. That is, unless, of course, desire, both personal and collective, has and will continue to be the catalyst for the production of the new. Shoot first, apologize later, and wait for the foot soldiers to catch up. It may not be the history of the future, but perhaps just history as we have come to know it.