Kazys Varnelis says 'it's over.' It's not just the latest bubble, Bilbao spectacle economy, but the "post-critical" theory that went along with it. Chipperfield echoes the sentiment here as well. (With a nod to Palin, those were the years of "Build, baby, build!"). Read | related feature
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BTW, in case anyone cares, I thought about Kazys' point here and while overall I personally agree, I also have something to quibble with...
Overall, I agree with Kazys that the collapse marks the end of this particular market of ideas too. But just to note, what Kazys misinterprets is what led to the collapse. He says: “As any student of network theory knows, robust networks use error-checking to verify the veracity of the data involved. It was not a failure of individuals, but rather a failure of the network to police itself. In other words, the economic collapse of 2007-2008 was a network failure.” I disagree. The collapse was no failure at all and it had nothing to do with contemporary “networks.” It was capitalism writ large, the way it has always functioned through boom and bust cycles. If anything, it was precipitated and aggrandized by the individual actions of the Mr’s and Mrs’s Money Bags of the investment world, acting quite rationally within the bounds of capitalist logic (i.e. get in while the getting is good - and, by the way, the bailout also guarantees or preserves that same rationality).
Instead, Kazys thinks that “The irrational behavior of players led to the real estate boom that I had warned about for years, the subsequent collapse, and this fall’s panic.” If we’re going to develop a progresive criticism (not a “post-criticism”) then let’s beware of thinking like an Alan Greenspan in that some kind of better “risk-management” would have prevented “irrational exhuberance.” A ton of people—ordinary people—that bought into the bubble were duped and defrauded. Others took up an offer that no one in their right mind would refuse. In other words, let’s grant everyday, ordinary people (those who weren’t victims of fraud) the same right to simply act within the rationality of capitalism, the same way the big investors did.
Whilst I totally agree that architecture (and theory) must offer ideas and not just “go with the flow”, let’s make sure when we follow the diktat of “thinking critically,” we think of people and their social actions (not some abstract network), be it big honchos or small-time homeowners. Architecture, if it has anything to offer as Kazys gets at, has to make decisions and have ideas about whom it’s going to build for, and what ‘people politics’ it espouses, in good times and bad. (this is also posted on my tumblrlog)
the economic collapse is not a failure of the network but a reinforcement of the trans-economic network that has proven the strength of the network. As we witness the unfolding of the bailout efforts, they are network centric. the network is being reinvented from it's ad hoc origins into what might emerge as a rational system.
i wonder when we will have 'post' anal?
"Now that architecture has allied itself with a failed theory of the market, what will become of it? This isn't an idle question. As society and culture reconfigure, an architecture that has little to offer except a direct representation of capital flows is unlikely to succeed. "
architecture has survived for a long time by offering direct representations of whatever from of power was in power at a particular time. did architecture end in italy after the fall of fascism, in germany after the fall of nazism, in france after the fall of the monarchy? no, we architects kept right on marching and developed the new iconography for the new hegemony.
all we'll have to do is figure out what's next and come up with clever ways of representing it and interesting ways of speaking about it. we rode this wave, all we have to do is catch the next one or the one after that.
just keep paddling!
For the record:
Trebor Scholz originally coined the phrase "post-post-critical" a few years back in an online discussion (https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2006-September/001933.html) leading up to the Situated Technologies (http://www.situatedtechnologies.net) symposium at the Architectural League of New York.
Kazys was a participant in that symposium.
ah, just discovered this thread... for anybody who found commenting down at my site, i've renabled it. sorry.
javier, it's true that my reading of this collapse was reductive in painting it as a network collapse. deliberately so, i was arguing that from the perspective of the myth of the network and i should i have made that clear. there were real individuals involved and many of them were victims. others were crooks. on the other hand, from a networks perspective, that kind of behavior should have been prevented or corrected for by the system itself indeed, we used to have regulations to prevent such situations from happening but under clinton and bush these were undone.
i urge everyone with a passing interest in the collapse to read kevin phillips' bad money. reckless finance, failed politics, and the global crisis of american capitalism or at least watch his interview on the bill moyers show available online. the bad news is that we should not expect that obama is going to help much. he's not outrightly crazy and corrupt like bush and his administration, but his campaign financing comes from many of the same players who were involved in the collapse. i suspect he's going to do little positive to reform the financial sector.
as for trebor's phrase, i wouldn't want to use the phrase post-post critical for a variety of reasons. one of these is that it assumes a relationship to historicity that network culture seems to have absolutely no interest in. the second is that it would give the post-critical too much credit, it would suggest that it's something we can build on. many of us were doing work opposed to the post-critical all along. see the introduction to blue monday, for example...
(yeah, I fully take credit for in the haste of posting, calling the post "post post-critical" (that's a lot of posts) and looking back on it, given Kazys's response, agree it's not very lucid. Obviously it's more of a "postmortem."
i think claiming this collapse as capitalism writ large undermines its severity and uniqueness. it's an unprecedented phenomenon that does not fall into typical boom and bust cycles, so much so that greenspan retracted his lifelong trust in the markets ability to regulate itself.
i would agree though that considering these abstract concepts does not benefit the next architecture movement, but for me, the verdict is still unclear as to what this collapse means, especially for architecture.
Kazys - i like your article ... it highlights the very nature of architectural/cultural production, that it not only wants but needs a driving mechanism outside itself, be it commodity and the adoption of the diagram as is the present/past case or social commentary and activism as was modernism. How else would it be?
Where does this now lead. Modernism, by style, lives on - does that happen to the post-critical? or was it nothing more than a style? I would argue that the no one really and fundamentally thought it was anything more than style, whereas Modernism attempted something else. It might be that the last few decades in the march towards the market since the adoption of Friedmanism in the 80's, quite literally beyond the box, has not only reversed the social trends towards egality - see the 60'-70's movements across the globe - but reenlisted desire for stratification and class division.
I think you make some very good points. But I am left with one question: can you explain how network theory differs from systems theory? ...
My understanding of Kazys' article is that it's an outline for a book . . . therefore commentary at this point is conjecture, no?
Yes you are right it is conjecture, as is theory by definition.
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