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Current Issue    (Sustainability) + Pleasure, vol. 1: Culture + Architecture Number 30, Spring/Summer 2009

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Reviewed by Tom Spector

Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production

By Dalibor Vesely
Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004

Richard Rorty enjoyed deflating philosophical pretentiousness by characterizing his discipline as cultural janitorial work devoted to tidying up the margins and occasionally consigning bad ideas to the ideological dustbin. For others philosophy is engaged more as a well of ideas from which one can still draw when the pipeline of working assumptions and accustomed thought patterns that ordinarily speed the flow of decisions has gone dry. Philosophic progress is hard-won—if it was a hot topic in ancient Greece, odds are it’s still an idea in play—and not for the impatient. Cambridge University architecture professor emeritus Dalibor Vesely engages in his own philosophical well-dipping to help reason through the problem of “divided representation” in architecture in his sprawling, nearly 400-page, and beautifully illustrated treatise.

What is “divided representation,” and why is it a source of concern?

Vesely argues that the modes available to represent contemporary architectural ideas are condemned to vacillate between the equally unpleasant poles of instrumentalism and subjectivism. Hence, representation is “divided.” He sees the post-Enlightenment hegemony of instrumentalist thinking—the stuff of scientific, capitalist, and individualist outlooks; efficiency planning; and cost-benefit analyses—as the big bugaboo creating the intractably bifurcated world of objectively defined means and subjectively experienced ends. He yearns for a day when architecture might once again reflect a fully unified cosmology.

To make his case, Vesely sets up the scope of the problem in the first two chapters and nicely sums up the difficulties facing architects caught in the gray area between these poles:

The arbitrary nature of the relation between the sphere of experience and the sphere of concepts or ideas is the main characteristic of the gray zone. It is a source of unprecedented freedom to produce new works but also of an overwhelming relativism, loss of meaning, and narrowing range of common references—and as a result, of a general cultural malaise. The nature of this malaise can easily be illustrated by the dilemma facing most contemporary architects. On the one hand, it is assumed that true creative architecture should be free of historical and unnecessary cultural references in order to be as original and unique as possible. And yet, on the other hand, it is expected that the result should be universally understood, appreciated, and accepted. (35)

To provide a sense of how architecture got to this point, he then turns to a historical analysis of architectural representation beginning in the late medieval period, through the first opening cracks brought on by the development of Renaissance perspective, the unifying of baroque décor, then to its complete division in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Romantic backlash, and the 20th-century capitulation to technology. He follows these sections with chapters recommending the restorative power of the fragment and a renewal of architectural poetics emanating from a new commitment to human solidarity.

To combat rampant instrumentalism and to “preserve its primary identity and humanistic role in the future, architecture must establish credentials on the same level of intelligibility as instrumental thinking” (5), a formidable, and possibly quixotic, charge. Instrumentalist thinking—explaining the good of things in terms of what they are good for—is, due to its apparently inexhaustible rationality, seductive to the point of subversion of all other justifications. The most plausible ways of opposing instrumentalist thinking are forms of essentialism and intuitionism—outlooks that simply refuse to engage instrumentalism on its own turf. Another way is to attempt to beat it at its own game. In 20th-century architecture, functionalism attempted (and failed) to do just that. In moral philosophy, utilitarianism and other “consequentialist” formulations that predicate the right action on whatever maximizes the good exemplify both the appeal and the limitations of instrumentalism.1 How can poetics, in Western culture relegated to the subjective pole, hope to approximate the intelligibility of instrumental rationality without itself succumbing to its demands? Even Vesely himself seems to acknowledge that this may not be possible when he observes, “We have already seen that architecture is not as crucial in explicitly articulating the world as in embodying and implicitly articulating it” (97), thus making explaining its value all the more difficult.

Vesely is fundamentally nostalgic for the “classical cosmology” (378) that once unified the symbolic with the instrumental:

We can appreciate how important the cosmological framework was as a focus and foundation for architectural thinking, for the unity of culture, and for the role of architecture in sustaining this unity. Indeed it was the disintegration of that frame of reference, its replacement by the genealogy of historical precedents, and their eventual overthrow at the beginning of the twentieth century that has left us with ambiguity, arbitrariness, and disorientation. (378)

To be sure, this nostalgia for a less fragmented and instrumentalist time is understandable. The problem is that the classical and medieval wholeness Vesely yearns for collapsed, not because it was the victim of an ideological coup d’état but because it proved increasingly wrong about the way the world works. A unified representation of the world could only sustain within a context of ignorance and coercion. Science and growing personal freedom did it in. Unity has been achieved in modern times too, but only purchased at hideous cost. The Soviet Union achieved unity; so did the Third Reich. Thus, the current chaos and arbitrariness he deplores are at least an improvement over a way of thinking proven to be misguided. That a desire for a unified cosmology might have strong political implications is not an argument Vesely wishes to confront.

This observation leads to the book’s major weakness: It’s not the author’s erudition (which in fact inspires confidence) or his diagnosis or the underlying sentiment; it’s his method. To make his argument, Vesely modestly lays claim to no particular methodology or theoretical orientation, relying instead on “the intrinsic nature of the issues discussed and on the coherence of the argument” (5). But the topic—instrumentalism—and his sources (an impressively long list of philosophers referenced in the course of the text include Arriaga, Aristotle, Baumgarten, Cassirer, Descartes, Dreyfus, Gadamer, Grassi, Habermas, Heidegger, Husserl, Kant, Leibniz, Locke, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, Plato, Rousseau, Sartre, Schiller, Schlegel, Stackhouse, and Vattimo) make it hard to take his work as anything but applied philosophy.

Philosophical argumentation typically takes the form of (in the Anglo-analytic tradition, not the “continental” one) unearthing difficult or unpleasant assumptions of the opposing position; discerning problems with the logic of the argument itself including circularity, loose ends, holes, and the like; exposing difficult or unpleasant implications of the argument; explaining discredited theoretical positions informing the argument or unacknowledged parallels with other philosophical stances; and, once in a blue moon, taking a completely novel approach to considering familiar problems. One should give the opposing viewpoint its most sympathetic-possible reading before proceeding to attempt its dismantle. Furthermore, it requires the utmost care in argumentation and a willingness to expose the possible flaws in one’s own argument. This is both the honest thing to do, as well as the strategic one. If it turns out the argument doesn’t quite achieve a full capitulation (and so few do), then at least it may have exposed a few chinks in the armor to guide the fellow-minded in their assaults. As practiced in Anglo universities and conferences it is something of an intellectual blood sport. To play up the glorious benefits of one’s own preferred state of affairs while ignoring the best claims of the alternatives won’t do. Vesely’s refusal to countenance why instrumentalism is such a major force in our culture is a significant shortcoming of a work aiming to communicate on a philosophical plane.

Without a well-drawn foe to go up against, his arguments can be maddeningly vague when they should be incisive. So, for example, in discussing the limitations of the Newtonian paradigm he argues that “if we compare one of its most important aspects, the mathematical understanding of movement, to the nature of movement in the living world or in human affairs, it is impossible to ignore the distance between them (which even today is not fully grasped and appreciated)” (230). This would seem to demand explanation of the nature of movement in the living world and how it differs from mathematically defined movement, but none is forthcoming. Or consider this incautious argument: “The development of scientific objectivity depends, as we have already seen, on the subject responsible for the project of science. In other words, the more objective reality becomes, the more subjective must be the position of the individual who encounters in modern science by definition, as it were, only his or her own projection of reality” (249). It’s a vapid conclusion at best that could be completely avoided if only he was willing to allow the strength of the instrumentalist orientation to give opposing direction to his own argument.

So, after all, what is wrong with architectural representation becoming a two-pronged tool with an instrumental prong on the one hand and a distinctly separate subjective prong on the other? Instrumental outlooks persist, despite their shortcomings, because they are so useful for achieving preset goals. Instrumentalism—“this is the preferred course of action because it leads to that”—creates a transparent means for decision-making all the way up the chain of justifications until the buck must stop, and then it falls silent under the presumption that the ultimate good must be somehow self-evident and, usually, something subjectively experienced such as “happiness” or “feeling of well-being.” But what if this ultimate value isn’t self-evident? Does the instrumentalist justification train pick up steam again until it arrives at yet another supposedly self-evident good? This ultimate subjectification of value bedevils rational disciplines such as economics, where, for example, the things that can’t be readily quantified are relegated to the periphery as market “externalities” or worse, instrumental evaluations corrosively tend to disvalue that which isn’t in principle measurable so that measurable stand-ins such as “exchange value” become replacements for true meaning. In place of ultimate goods, exchange value provides endless substitutions. In instrumentalist-subjectivist conceptions, there is no effective difference between the fact “is valued” and the judgment “is valuable,” yet we find this distinction important to make on an everyday basis. Without this disjunction, critics and criticism would be unfathomably otiose, and values become mere taste. Yet, instrumentalism persists and even dominates thoughtful discussion despite its ultimate muteness. It’s difficult to resist because at least it does offer justifications in a world understandably reluctant to accept either “tradition” or “trust me” as a reason for action. Cost-benefit analyses and their ilk, for all their limitations, are improvements over “God’s will,” “because I said so,” “that’s how it’s done,” the intuitions of the initiated, or other authoritarian justifications because at least they air the criteria for making judgments for examination. Vesely wants to substitute instrumentalism with a new poetic emanating out of human solidarity, but other than to diagnose the problem and phenomenon of divided representation, he does little to actually demolish it or point to a way out of its logic.

In philosophy, a kill is so rare that no one even really looks for it. Often it is enough just to take the full measure of the opponent so that we can know what we are up against. Vesely aims for more but is either too gentlemanly or too impatient to engage instrumentalism’s inner workings and so never really discovers how best to go for its viscera.

Note

1. As Sam Scheffler notes in regard to moral philosophy, “On the face of it, this idea [instrumental rationality], which lies at the heart of consequentialism, seems hard to resist. For given only the innocent-sounding assumption that good is morally preferable to evil, it seems to embody the principle that we should maximize the desirable and minimize the undesirable, and that principle seems to be one of the main elements of our conception of practical rationality.” Introduction to Consequentialism and its Critics, ed. Samuel Scheffler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).