Architecture Post Mortem

The Diastolic Architecture of Decline, Dystopia, and Death

Donald Kunze, David Bertolini, Simone Brott, Donald Kunze, David Bertolini, Simone Brott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317179078
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

Architecture Post Mortem surveys architecture's encounter with death, decline, and ruination following late capitalism. As the world moves closer to an economic abyss that many perceive to be the death of capital, contraction and crisis are no longer mere phases of normal market fluctuations, but rather the irruption of the unconscious of ideology itself. Post mortem is that historical moment wherein architecture's symbolic contract with capital is put on stage, naked to all. Architecture is not irrelevant to fiscal and political contagion as is commonly believed; it is the victim and penetrating analytical agent of the current crisis. As the very apparatus for modernity's guilt and unfulfilled drives-modernity's debt-architecture is that ideological element that functions as a master signifier of its own destruction, ordering all other signifiers and modes of signification beneath it. It is under these conditions that architecture theory has retreated to an 'Alamo' of history, a final desert outpost where history has been asked to transcend itself. For architecture's hoped-for utopia always involves an apocalypse. This timely collection of essays reformulates architecture's relation to modernity via the operational death-drive: architecture is but a passage between life and death. This collection includes essays by Kazi K. Ashraf, David Bertolini, Simone Brott, Peggy Deamer, Didem Ekici, Paul Emmons, Donald Kunze, Todd McGowan, Gevork Hartoonian, Nadir Lahiji, Erika Naginski, and Dennis Maher.

1
Driven into the Public: The Psychic Constitution of Space

Todd McGowan

Concerns about capitalism’s tendency to discourage the constitution of a public world and simultaneously to encourage a retreat into privacy emerge almost as soon as capitalism becomes the dominant socioeconomic system in the world. In The Social Contract (which he wrote in 1762), Jean-Jacques Rousseau laments the destructive effect of the turn away from public service. Though he doesn’t associate this effect directly with capitalism, he does lay out the alternative to participation in the public world in pecuniary terms. He notes, “As soon as public service ceases to be the Citizens’ principal business, and they prefer to serve with their purse rather than with their person, the State is already close to ruin.”¹ As capitalism has developed since Rousseau’s epoch, this tendency toward privatization has grown exponentially and today threatens the very existence of public space or of a commons.

The absence of public space is not simply a problem for the lower classes that cannot afford entry into parks where their children can play or gated neighborhoods where they take a stroll without worrying about violence. The privatization of the commons also represents a retreat from what psychoanalysis calls the drive. The drive provides the path through which the subject satisfies itself. Freud insists that the drive doesn’t aim at an object, as we might imagine, but just at satisfaction. What Freud doesn’t say, but what is explicit in throughout his work, is that the drive is the only source of satisfaction for the subject, and the satisfaction of the drive requires that the subject leave its private world and enter into public space.² As the aversion to public spaces grows more pronounced, we distance ourselves from the possibility for the very satisfaction that we seek in our private realms. We ensconce ourselves in privacy in order to ensure that others can’t disturb our self-satisfaction and thereby fail to recognize how our satisfaction depends on this disturbance. The contemporary turn away from public space is simultaneously a turn away from the drive and from the disturbing satisfaction that the drive provides. Privacy promises security not just from physical threats but also from the threat of our own drive, but the price of this security is the very possibility of our enjoyment.

In order to understand the division between public and private space, Rousseau distinguishes between two forms of subjectivity—homme and citoyen. An homme is a figure of the private world who pursues self-interest and neglects wider concerns, while a citoyen is devoted to the public world and interacts in that world. Though Rousseau has fears about the homme completely eclipsing the citoyen, it is not until the twentieth century that the threat to the public world becomes dire and seemingly irreversible. The first philosopher to pay attention to this threat was Hannah Arendt, who, in The Human Condition, chronicles what she calls the evanescence of action and work at the expense of labor.³ For Arendt, labor occurs exclusively in the private realm and concerns only the reproduction of life. Because it confines itself to private reproduction, labor has no creative power.⁴ Work, in contrast, creates a public world, and action represents political engagement in this world. When labor becomes our privileged or even sole mode of being, we lose these creative possibilities.

The critique of the disappearance of the citoyen becomes even more pronounced in the work of Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Rancière.⁵ Both Agamben and Rancière notice an evanescence of politics in the contemporary world. The protection and reproduction of life—what Arendt calls labor—has invaded and subsumed the realm of politics. As Agamben points out in numerous works, a zone of indistinction between life and politics has arisen. He claims, “our private biological body has become indistinguishable from our body politic, experiences that once used to be called political suddenly were confined to our biological body, and private experiences present themselves all of a sudden outside us as body politic.”⁶ The transformation of politics into private concerns about life and the body is the elimination of politics proper. The homme comes to replace the citoyen completely, and with the disappearance of the citoyen, we enter into a world dominated by privacy and bereft of public space.

An impulsion toward the private world has always accompanied capitalism as a socioeconomic system. Even when capitalism requires that subjects interact with each other in relations of production, distribution, and consumption, it demands that they do so as private beings. The philosophical proponents of capitalism inevitably tout this as the genius of the system. Rather than relying on a concern for the public world, it produces a society that succeeds solely on the basis of individuals pursuing their private interest. Even Adam Smith, perhaps the first theorist of capitalism, makes this point. In the Wealth of Nations, he famously notes, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.”⁷ Smith envisions the development of social interaction, but this interaction remains just an extension of private self-interest. There is no public world—and no public space—in the capitalist world that Smith theorizes.⁸

The contemporary impulse to privatize public areas is widespread: it manifests itself in the call to sell federally owned land, to create privately owned and maintained roads, to build private prisons, to construct gated communities, and, in the most general terms, to privilege “austerity” in public finances. The worldwide response to the financial crisis of 2008 reveals cogently the extent of today’s obsession with privacy, especially when we contrast it with Franklin Roosevelt’s reaction to the Great Depression. Though there were attempts to use government money to stimulate economic growth and rescue the economy, these efforts were often inadequate and reflected a clear bias against public investment. Rather than committing substantial resources to the development of a national rail system or alternative energy plants, President Obama’s stimulus package of 2009 had no broad public aims and included large expenses for tax cuts, a private rather than a public stimulus focused on increasing consumption.

But even this minimal gesture toward public investment met with severe criticism and occasioned an exaggerated concern with budget deficits. This same concern prompted the austerity movement in European countries as well, where leaders cut spending on public projects. The ostensible line of thought behind these cuts was that public debt was responsible for the economic crisis, when in fact, it was clear that the turn to privacy and away from public oversight was the culprit. The fact that private speculation, not government spending, occasioned the crisis disappeared beneath the apotheosis of privacy that followed the crisis. It was as if privacy, so self-evidently a good, couldn’t possibly be to blame. As a result, the cause of the financial crisis—less investment in the public world—becomes the solution to it. Such Bizarro World thinking reveals not that people are easily manipulated but the extent to which the apotheosis of privacy dominates our thinking today. We can’t imagine that privacy might be the problem, nor can we imagine that a greater commitment to the public world might be the solution. But this degree of investment in privacy has not always been the case within the capitalist system.

Despite capitalism’s inherent tendency toward privacy, the emergence of capitalism coincided with an unprecedented creation of public space and an explosion of the public sphere of political contestation. Though such space existed in classical Greece and other societies, it is only in capitalist modernity that public space and the public sphere loses the restrictiveness that characterizes it in its past manifestations. That is, the bourgeois public sphere is open, at least theoretically, to anyone who desires to enter into it. This is what Jürgen Habermas celebrates—and then laments its decline—in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.⁹ Though Habermas is not an apologist for capitalism like Adam Smith, he does see its initial benefit for the development of a public. He claims, “Bourgeois culture was not mere ideology. The rational-critical debate of private people in the salons, clubs, and reading societies was not directly subject to the cycle of production and consumption, that is, to the dictates of life’s necessities. Even in its merely literary form (of self-elucidation of the novel experiences of subjectivity) it possessed instead a ‘political’ character in the Greek sense of being emancipated from the constraints of survival requirements.”¹⁰ The emergence of public sites for political discussion did not simply haphazardly coincide with capitalism’s rise to dominance. The two are intricately related. Capitalism leads to the development of a public world because it necessitates interaction in the form of exchange.

Though capitalism and its defenders constitute exchange as a private matter between individuals, the process of exchange tends, at least initially, to produce a public world in which exchange can occur.¹¹ This public world brings subjects into contact with each other and creates the political debate that Habermas celebrates. But the public world of nascent capitalist society remains only a side effect of capitalist relations of production rather than an intrinsic necessity. That is to say, the structure of capitalist exchange leads to the formation of public space but doesn’t necessitate that space. If exchange could occur uninterrupted without any public world, then this world would not form.

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas laments the disintegration of this sphere, but he doesn’t try to explain this transformation in terms of changes within capitalism itself. Nonetheless, capitalism itself does change during the time of the disintegration of the public sphere. The most significant shift in the nature of capitalism occurs gradually but most dramatically at the end of the nineteenth century. Whereas early capitalism focuses on the act of production and the creation of dedicated laborers, twentieth century capitalism creates consumers. Twentieth century subjects of capitalism don’t consume in order to work like their forbearers but rather work in order to consume. When consumption—an ostensibly private activity—becomes one’s end, public space and public discussion ceases to be a primary concern. The subject can consume in private, and as consumption becomes the only social preoccupation, public space becomes increasingly rare. Private spaces that provide arenas for consumption, like shopping malls, come to function as ersatz public spaces. The problem with these ersatz public spaces is that the rules of privacy apply there, in contrast to genuine public spaces. The private security forces of a mall can police political discussion, squelch dissent, and prohibit collective association without any repercussions whatsoever. The public police force cannot act in this way in public space.

Many of the cultural theorists who lament the recent decline of a public space link this decline either directly or indirectly to the predominance of consumerism. Sociologist Robert Putnam, for instance, views the turn away from the public world as a consequence of a specific form of consumption—television watching. In his celebrated account of rampant privatization in Bowling Alone, he claims, “More television watching means less of virtually every form of civic participation and social involvement.”¹² The consumption of television and video images appeals to contemporary subjects in a way that “civic participation” cannot. It allows subjects to bypass the possibility of trauma that arises from public encounters and to live within the safety of the private world. This is what Christopher Lasch labels the “culture of narcissism,” a culture in which public life becomes anathema and “consumption promises to fill the aching void.”¹³ For theorists such as Putnam and Lasch, consumption carries with it an automatic identification with privacy.

But to lay the blame on consumption for the decline of the public world would be to proceed too quickly. Certainly capitalism depends on consumption, and consumption occurs in private transactions. With the advent of the internet, consumption can become even more private: one need not leave one’s home in order to consume as much as one wants, and one need not even rely on the public mail system to receive one’s new commodities. Nonetheless, consumption retains a public dimension insofar as one consumes in order to make an impression on the Other. Though there are commodities that subjects buy for completely private consumption, most have a clear public effect. A designer dress, an iPhone, a BMW, even a cup of Starbucks coffee—these popular objects owe their popularity to the effects that they have on the public. We consume in order to be thought of in a certain way. I am the kind of person who drives a BMW, while you are the kind that drinks Starbucks coffee. The private purchase of the commodity redounds on the public that it ostensibly avoids.

The evanescence of the public world and of public space is not directly attributable to the turn from a production-oriented to a consumption-oriented capitalism, but it nonetheless related to the essential structure of the capitalist economy. As capitalism has developed, it has not only emphasized consumption as an economic motor over production, but it has also ensconced subjects more and more in the logic of desire, a logic essential to its functioning. As the drive disappears beneath the logic of desire, the possibility of a public disappears as well. The public world depends on the drive, and in order to understand this relation, we must turn now to psychoanalysis, which has much to say about the relation between desire and drive.

From its inception, psychoanalysis has taken the side of the individual subject in this subject’s struggle against the demands of civilization. In this sense, it seems to be a certified opponent of the public world. Neurosis, as understood by psychoanalysis, is nothing other than the price that the subject pays for its submission to the demands that the social order makes. The neurotic symptom emerges out of the subject’s refusal to submit completely.¹⁴ In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud goes so far as to wonder if entrance into society as such represents a good deal for the individual. He sees that the p...