ALMOST INDEPENDENCE DAY

If architects (and landscape architects) are primarily little whores (as Philip Johnson admitted, at least with reference to himself), architecture critics (insofar as they service architectural reputations, versus anything substantive, as in ideas) are bigger whores … Witness the recent Log 5 (2005), and/or 10 x 10 2 (Phaidon, 2005): the former a more or less needless capitulation to the dark forces of neo-liberalism now haunting architecture (after, alas, Rem Koolhaas) by a normally plucky little architecture journal; the latter a now typical and useless ‘almanac’ of so-called emerging architects world-wide (who should be embarrassed to be included), with vacuous commentary by the architectural-academic illuminati (the ‘critics’, scare quotes necessary). This horrifying downturn in the fortunes of Architecture (the sacred, unfashionable version) represents and references the mere servicing of Capitalism (and architecture as de luxe real estate), a state of things on display in the equally bathetic and co-opted architectural press (books and magazines/journals), or a total capitulation to the new ‘machinic’ ordinance (4 x 4), the machinic ‘universal’; that is to say, the production of sexed-up (‘photo-shopped’) nothingness replicates itself endlessly as a game stacking the cards against the cards, a game now stalking the planet in the form of monstrously de-natured and hopelessly provisional environments -- overall and after all, then, a picture of the New Nothingness Itself. Needless-to-say, the architectural elite are as bankrupt as any other elite.

In this horrific process (the ‘destruction of experience’, after Agamben) is the slaughter of the Real (after Zizek/Zupancic/Badiou), the slaughter of the Given (after Marion), and the slaughter of the ‘as such’ (after Kant and Hegel), a wide-ranging slaughter per se, but always already (after Derrida) the elimination of the specular and spectacular thing in/for itself (after metaphysics). The remainder, then (after Schelling), or what’s left, is a fully voided, zero-sum game (rampant Nihilism).
 
“Take one step outside yourself / The whole path lasts no longer than one step …” --Sussan Deyim
“Not enough sleep again / Thinking of you sinking with dark happiness …” --Laurie Anderson
“How could I say the things I need to / You’d go away …” --Lisa Germano

Architecture schools, architecture practice, and architecture publishing does NOT, fortunately, equal (equate) architectural thought. Yet this nothingness-x-nothingness, out of control and applauded as ‘exuberance’, is architecture-at-present. The answer is AESTHETICS (even if Kurt Forster seems to have forgotten the question) and PHILOSOPHY; that is, the rediscovery of the Real (the Given and its Other, or, paradoxically, ‘the Given Itself’, as Self/Other, as Marion would not say/write out of decorum …).

Architecture as real estate destroys/negates the Real. As such, it is automatically complicit in the furthering of the prison-house of affect/effects (the residual, after Jameson, and -- sadly, tragically -- after Tafuri) of all instrumentalities inclusive of language and metaphysics -- a conflation that takes place in language, semantics, and, therefore, a conflation that places language, architectural languages included, in an unholy alliance with twisted ideologies past, present and future. The battle then is to be/is fought IN philosophy (not the ‘grey’/owlish, pseudo-ontological kind), after theory, and on metaphysical grounds, AT LAST. Architecture today cannot be the site (return to the site) for such without re-formulating the spent premises of its own undertaking (its so-called coming-to-presence).

Therefore, Idealism Itself (not lowly ideology) is the ‘new  black’ (as in Hegel’s Night of the World). IT remains ineluctably BEYOND all instrumentalities as the spectral THING itself (par excellence, etcetera), or as the Categorical (Moral) Imperative ne plus ultra. The moral law AS ‘night sky’, if you will (and even if you won’t). The new black is the OLD black. Strangely, we owe this evocation of the Abstract moral law to the post-Marxists currently burrowing away into the subterranean nether regions of repressed, forgotten and deferred metaphysical and onto-theological agendas. Zizek and Badiou are the exemplars of this excavation only at the moment, though it is unclear if anyone is prepared to follow on their timely archaeological project aimed at the future (while clearing the path to the revolutionary potential of the Absolute Present).

It is necessary, then, to pass through and to pass judgment on the tomb of Architecture Itself, passing towards the archaic aether (philosophy + aesthetics). It is this spirit that now animates (to repeat/state the obvious) the most advanced of the visual arts (the ‘moral’ arts), a spirit that drifts within/through/beyond the pages of dangerous, small, books (nominally insignificant), ‘marginal’ books/texts; notably books that frame experience, books that contain and condense or condition the bastardized (lamented) ‘universal’/abstract spirit forced into the wilderness and wastelands of present-day nihilism. Such books litter the night sky of present-day nothingness. As constellations of concepts and explosive/explicit tropes, they form and re-formulate the World Itself (the interior and -- sadly -- pathetic, yet unnecessarily so, world of speculative and specular particulars … or words-as-things). Such is, nonetheless (after Nietzsche), the open secret -- the foundation of the World (word) as Spirit calls. Alas (and fortunately), there is no other purpose.

GK (07/02/05)

http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/philosophy_of_the_real.rtf