April 2000
 

As a journal and as a group project, Assemblage never promoted a singular position. Rather, it provided a registration plane for a discourse in the process of finding its legs, developing its skills, suffering its growing pains.  Among the primary interpretive trajectories that Assemblage mirtired early on, one, the deconstructive discourse, tended to avoid propositions altogether and another, the Marxian critique, was determined to remain absolutely negative. Committed as we were, however, to the exposition of new forms of practice and new ways of practicing forms and space, to the couplings and transcodings and the blurring of boundaries that gave the journal its name in the first place, to refuse to affirm a position, a single, static stance, seemed right.  Indeed, the historicity of our endavor seemed to demand that we occupy several positions, even contradictory ones, simultaneously.

What, we now ask, are the issues left out of the theory of the Assemblage "generation" -- biography as part of a materialist interpretation; the possibility of a "postcritical' practice, or in other words, of an intervention in consumer culture based on something other than criticism and resistance; a langauge of physical appetites as well as formal operations? What are the issues emerging today -- technology, obviously, but there are others: theory's pedagogical role, now that it finds itself comfortably within the bounds of academic respectability; the writing of history after theory's assimilation; the specificity of architecture theory versus theory of cultural generally? What are the possible new formats, other than journals, for the exposition and dissemination of theory (yes, the web, of course, but how much architecture theory have you seen on the web?); and what are the possible modes for theory other than drawing and writing?

For the final issue of the journal, we would like to enlist you -- as one among nearly a hundred  of the scholars and designers who have contributed to Assemblage over the past decade and a half -- to reflect on your practice, to situate it within current theoretical positions, and to speculate about future ones. We are less interested in a retrospective glance over the Assemblage years than a projective assessment of the present moment.  We look forward to the collective response to our final inquiry, forty-one issues after we first begin asking questions.

--  Michael Hays, Alica Kennedy