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NEO-FUTURISM:
ARCHITECTURE AND TECHNOLOGY
Hal Foster
An advertisement placed by AT&T in various American journals believe it. What interests me is how AT&T has rewritten certain soph?
and magazines during 1986 was called 'Issues of the Infor? isticated theories for its own purposes: it recodes not only the dialect?
mation Age: Promises Kept, Promises to Keep'. On one side ical conception of technology ? technology as both cause and cure of
are the silhouettes of an old man and a little girl in conversation by 'isolation' ? but also the theoretical discourse of the post-modern. It
the doorway of a pre- or post-modern house; on the other side is the recodes them precisely so as to fit its own global agenda. First, the ad
following text: distinguishes between two historical forms of isolation: a pre-modern
geographic isolation which, produced by technology, is also remedied
At the beginning of this century, Theodore N. Vail, president of AT&T, under?
by it (in the AT&T story, by the good of telephone); and a post-modern
stood his competition not just as other telephone companies, but as distance,
loneliness, separation. He foresaw that the success of his company could end informational isolation which, again produced by technology (a Babel
the geographic isolation of man. And, in ending that isolation, the company's of machines), will also (according to AT&T) be remedied by it. The
success would be assured. The vision became reality: by the mid-'70s, America description of this second form of isolation ? of a society 'awash in
had universal telephone service. a sea of information', of a culture 'unable to connect' ? is very remin?
Today, as the Information Age has begun, there is a new kind of isolation.
iscent of certain theories of post-modernism, the culture of pastiche as
People are awash in the mounting sea of information, yet unable to connect
or work with information in an orderly, useful form; that is, with the world's described by Fredric Jameson, or a society of ruined narratives as
knowledge. Often, information machines do little to help. They are difficult described by Jean-Francois Lyotard. Indeed, AT&T uses these diag?
to use, rigid in their demands, generally unable to work with any but their noses of fragmentation as a foil for its own programme of totality, what
own kind.
the ad calls 'Telecommunity', 'a vast global network of networks'.
To overcome this new kind of isolation, we have a new vision: to make the
Granted, this is a corporate fantasy, not a lived reality, but who's to
Information Age universal, to help build a worldwide Telecommunity, not just
open to all, but inviting. say that such a network is not in the works? 'No one company, no one
At AT&T, we are now working toward the day when people around the world nation', the ad says, can achieve this 'Telecommunity' alone: here
will be able to handle information in any form ? conversation, data, images, AT&T is blatant in its call for a corporate global politics, a consortium
text ? as easily as they make a phone call today. And they will be able to get that goes beyond the confines of mere nation-states, a logic that treats
information in a form they can use, whenever they need it, from wherever it is.
all knowledge as so much instrumental information, a research-and
We envision a vast global network of networks, the merging of communi?
cations and computers, linking devices so incredibly capable, they will bend to development programme that incorporates technoscience as it sees fit
the will of human beings, rather than forcing humans to bend to theirs. (by the way, in this world the two ? science and technology ? are
Obviously, no one company, no one nation, can universalize the Information no longer distinct); in sum, a system that determines 'international
Age. It will take the best minds of many companies and many nations. The needs policies' to suit its own ends.
of our customers are creating imperatives for our industry. We need common
The ad is an extraordinary document, and it needs to be taken
standards and compatibility. We need national and international policies that
are open and encouraging. And we need to make information machines far seriously. But how to take it seriously in relation to architecture? How
easier to use. does this problem of a future 'telecommunity' relate to contemporary
We have the science to construct the systems now. architecture? How else but in its very contradictions? The word 'tele?
The technology is rapidly taking shape. community' is almost an oxymoron ? after all, telecommunications,
We are dedicating our minds, our energy, our resources ? our future ? to
or rather the capital that drives such technology, erodes rather than
making Telecommunity a reality. To bringing the best of the Information Age
to the world. builds traditional community. In fact, this very contradiction, I would
Our vision has its roots in AT&T's heritage of service. Just as the telephone argue, is expressed in the famous AT&T building by Philip Johnson in
extended the reach of the human voice, Telecommunity will extend the reach Manhattan: a global telecommunications corporation wrapped in the
and capability of minds and talents. nostalgic image of a national vernacular (the Chippendale motif) and
Telecommunity is our goal. Technology is our means.
We're committed to leading the way.
placed in the anachronistic setting of a neo-classical public sphere
(the facade and the atrium), when it is precisely such multinational
My purpose is not to criticize the ad; that hardly seems necessary: its telecommunications corporations as AT&T which have rendered
corporate humanism ? what is good for AT&T is good for man, blah obsolete such vernaculars, such public spaces. This building may be an
blah blah ? is patently ideological, and few people are so naive as to egregious example, but is there any architecture which might not be
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ideological in this way? What architecture might counter, let alone de? the basic principle remains, and it rebuts his own powerful diagnoses of
construct, the ideology of a 'Telecommunity' ? or, for that matter, of the post-modern ? of the schizo subjectivities and the deterritorialized
an 'Information Age'? spatialities of late-capitalist society. Besides, it is strange for the most
Here the old problem of a counter-architecture, a Gramscian archi? important American Marxist critic to long for traditional monuments
tecture, rises again: How, in the words of Aldo van Eyck, to pose a and psychological maps.
counterform to a society without form? If this is indeed our condition, But what architecture might be resistant or even pertinent to our
the model of a 'collage city' presented by Colin Rowe sounds less like technoscientific times? Certainly not an architecture of the 'information
the basis of an architecture of resistance and more like an apologia for aesthetic', one that abets the ideology of the AT&T 'telecommunity'.
the chaos of modern development. (This architecture', Rem Koolhaas There are architectures, mostly developed in southern California,
wrote recently about Manhattan, a real collage-city, 'relates to the which do at least address the immaterial, simulacral nature of our con?
forces of the Gro?stadt like a surfer to a wave.') I don't mean to suggest temporary urban world ? but they do so without much criticality. Just
that the other extreme ? the urban Utopias posed by various modern? as the plug-in architecture of the sixties mostly fed into the ideology of
isms ? is now somehow valid; far from it. As Robert Venturi showed consumer culture, so too this tech-y cinematic architecture mostly
long ago, such modernist monuments do not transform the city into a feeds into the ideology of a purely post-industrial society, which is to
new totality; as isolated fragments, they simply tear it up all the more. say that it does not contest this ideology or expose its contradictions, but
But this in turn does not leave us alone with the architecture of Venturi rather presents it as an accomplished fact. (Blade Runner at least
? at least I hope it doesn't. Though clearly a more provocative thinker showed a collision of modes of production and modes of architecture.)
than Johnson (and to my mind even Rowe), he too practises sceno But, if an information aesthetic is no grounds for a resistant architec?
graphy more than architecture, pop more than critique; and even his ture, one cannot merely resort to the old machine aesthetic ? neither in
populism does not run very deep. After all, Venturi is also a court its modernist guise, in which the machine informed the architectural
architect. structure, nor in its contemporary guise, in which the mechanical has
Peter Eisenman and Aldo Rossi confront our post-modern condition become a sculptural motif or period decal. This latter use (say, in the
in opposite ways that, though equally important, are equally inadequate. work of Morphosis) is, however, significant, for it suggests not only
In any case, neither practises a truly resistant architecture. Like Samuel that we are somehow beyond the modern machine age (every other
Beckett or Sol LeWitt, Eisenman pushes modern rationality to a post? museum in the USA seems to have a show on the history of the period),
modern point, the point at which its basic irrationality is exposed, but also that the machine is now regarded almost as a romantic ruin. In
whereas Rossi seeks to redeem this rationality as he regrounds it in fact, many young architects seem to treat the machine in the way that
historical-typological form. On the one hand, Eisenman stresses post? Piranesi treated ancient architecture, as an ensemble of ruins to be
modern subjectivity ? decentred to the point of schizophrenia ? but reclaimed as a historical allegory by degrees nostalgic, melancholic,
represses its history; on the other, Rossi privileges this history but fails oppressive, psychotic.
to acknowledge post-modern subjectivity. I want to propose another approach ? a neo-futurism. By neo
It may be that at this point a resistant architecture can only be futurism I do not refer to a style or a school. I mean only to convey the
conceived in the realm of theory, as in the 'critical regionalism' pro? need to respond to a new conjuncture of the technological (electronic
posed by Kenneth Frampton or the 'cognitive mapping' advocated redefinitions of time and space, genetic transformations of life and
by Jameson. But there are problems with these models too. Frampton death). 'Futurism' evokes the dangers of such a response: misogyny,
begins with an opposition of universal civilization ? call it the civil? fascism, a wish-come-true-in-a-war ? are these concomitants of any
ization of capitalism ? versus regional culture: the first pledged to futurist embrace of the technological? 'Neo' recalls the genealogy of
instrumental reason, the second to cultural difference. Rather than trust contemporary futurism, to suggest that critics in the eighties like Jean
in the progressivism of the first or the traditionalism of the second, Baudrillard and Paul Virilio derive from critics in the sixties like
Frampton advocates a dialectical engagement of the one by the other, Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis. In short, the term 'neo-futurism'
whereby each in effect criticizes and corrects the other. It is an attract? signals a need to periodize the modern rapport with the technological.
ive ideal which in the work of his favorite designers (Alvar Aalto, J?rn One way of doing this is to adopt the 'long wave' model of economic
Utzon, Mario Botta) often makes for provocative architecture; but cycles recently rewritten by the Marxist economist Ernest Mandel. In
unless one is a cultural Swiss ? neither in the First World nor in the this model the capitalist West has passed through four fifty-year periods
Third ? it may be impossible to act upon today. For the principle of (generally twenty-five years of expansion and twenty-five of stagnation)
'critical regionalism' is tied to an old problematic developed from a since the late eighteenth century: the long wave of the industrial revol?
twenty-five-year-old text by Paul Ricoeur, 'Universal Civilization and ution (until the crisis of 1848), marked by the spread of hand-crafted
National Cultures'. In this text Ricoeur could still look to the new post steam engines; the long wave of the first technological revolution (until
colonial configuration of the world with optimism, given that he wrote the 1890s), marked by the spread of machine-made steam engines; the
it in 1961 ? after the liberation wars of the fifties and before the neo long wave of the second technological revolution (until about the second
colonial conquests of the sixties and seventies ? that is, before the world war), marked by the spread of electric and combustion engines;
neo-colonial restructuring of the Third World as the labour fund and and finally the long wave of the third technological revolution, marked
market place of the First World. In light of the last twenty-five years, by the machine production of electronic and nuclear systems.
such a sanguine view of a dialogue between worlds ? in which, again, History, of course, is hardly as neat as this scheme; yet it does suggest
the concept of 'critical regionalism' is steeped ? appears romantic, to a way to periodize both economic stages (market capitalism, monopoly
say the least. capitalism, late capitalism) and cultural moments (modernism, high
A similar romanticism undermines the Jameson model of 'cognitive modernism, post-modernism). It also suggests a way to come to terms
mapping'. Here, too, there is a return to a distant moment in the history with the present, for, according to this model, the 1960s mark the mid?
of the First World ? before the full dominance of the megapolis when, way point of the third technological revolution, when electronic and
for example, Kevin Lynch could still chart his home town by reference nuclear systems became structural to the mode of production, a moment
to its landmarks. Jameson, of course, complicates the original Lynch when some critics (like McLuhan) were able to grasp the technological
model of cognitive mapping ? as he must, given present conditions, in historically. The 1980s, near the end of this long wave, are not so san?
which our lives are as dispersed as our bank accounts. Nevertheless, guine: this is a time when electronic systems, no longer restricted to the
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means of production, enter the realm of consumer goods and everyday If not, one might take the Futurist line ? to accelerate rather than brake
life, a time when some critics (like Baudrillard) see in the technological technological speed. Yet, as the fate of Futurism shows, it is not pos?
not a new history but an end to history. sible to outcapital capital for long: one simply advances it ? and then
I don't want to speculate on the next long wave ? a fourth techno? dies in flames. Another option historically is the situationist one ? an
logical revolution or a second electronic one, and I don't mean to imply intervention of noise or of silence in the general noise of the media (as
that the technological is somehow autonomous. Indeed, it is only in our when Captain Midnight, a satellite pirate, replaced the HBO signal with
own time that the technological so dominates the social; that is, it is only his own message for several minutes in 1986). But what exactly is the
in late capitalism ? in the era of the state guarantee of corporate profits site of such an intervention? In other words, is there a technological
? that Marx's vision has come true: a society in which 'all the sciences scene that can be symbolically seized? 'We must get inside Pure War',
have been pressed into the service of capital', in which 'invention says Virilio. 'We can't represent contemporary technologies', says
becomes a branch of business, and the application of science to direct Jameson. How do we get beyond this metaphysics of representation
production itself becomes a prospect which determines and solicits it'. (which technology, after all, has largely eroded)? How else can we
As I have suggested, technology (as practical application) can no conceive the problem?
longer be defined in contradistinction to science (as theoretical know? The first step in a politics of technoscience is to think our way out
ledge): there is instead 'technoscience' (as Lyotard calls it), the instru? of any historicist determinism or imaginary necessity regarding the
mental integration of research and development, knowledge and power. technological. There is no neat line of modes of production; there is
This system erodes many definitions: the difference between body only a conflictual development of technologies. And the exposure of
and not-body (with organ prosthetics, genetic coding, wet circuits), the this history, of its conflicts and contradictions, opens up a way, on the
difference between life and death (with all the attendant bioethical one hand, to resist the dominant techno-logic of the First World and, on
questions), the difference between nature and not-nature (with nature the other, to avoid the romanticism of the not or less technological in
no longer able to contain or recoup techno-events like Chernobyl). This other worlds. On a practical level, artists and critics might articulate the
is real deconstruction ? practised not on literary texts or works of art contradictions between given technosocial paradigms (between, say,
but on our very bodies and environment. In such deconstruction, disci? the spectacular world of the car and television, and the informational
plines like architecture are eroded, as its objects ? body and space ? network of the computer). Once exposed, these conflicts could renew a
are transformed by new machines and new speeds. Given this practical whole range of positions, each for a specific context or conjuncture: the
deconstruction of architecture by rampant technoscientific develop? productivist position, the resistant, the futurist and the situationist may
ment, do we really require the theoretical deconstructions that Eisenman all again have a particular efficacy. Such a revision may even allow for
and others propose? 'convivial' uses of the technological ? maybe even Utopian ones.
One effect of our technoscientific condition is technoschizophrenia: Yet it is foolish to end on such a positive note. Think of the movie The
the belief, endemic to my generation, that technology will save us from Terminator ? a world made up of machines which produce machines
death and that technology has foreclosed the possibility of a natural which destroy still other machines, a world in which the social is
life. We are all technocrats and Luddites at once; and after Bhopal and completely marginal. This is no simple fantasy. According to Mandel,
Chernobyl, Challenger and Star Wars, this condition has not really we are in a permanent war economy: so-called 'defence' is structural to
changed. Technoscience, it is true, is no longer legitimated in terms of the material reproduction of our lives. Thus Star Wars is the answer to
capitalist progress or socialist liberation; it is pledged purely and openly the question of how to 'resolve' the contradiction between industrial
to profit and power. If it abets an ideology at all, it is the ideology of the and post-industrial modes of production. How else but by means of a
non-development of society ? of deterrence in all respects. (It is no huge public/private project which combines heavy industry with high?
wonder, then, that technological deterrence produces terrorism as its tech? This is pure war, pure deterrence, in which military technology
corollary.) This is not to say that the dialectic of technoscience is no would truly dominate the social.
more; this dialectic remains, and it is that of the Enlightenment: as the
objective world is rationalized, the subjective world is irrationalized. In
a recent story J. G. Ballard proposes an updating of the signs of the
zodiac: 'The houses of our psychological sky', he writes, 'are no longer
tenanted by rams, goats and crabs but by helicopters, cruise missiles
and intra-uterine coils, and by all the spectres of the psychiatric ward.'
In other words, not only has nature been penetrated by technoscience,
but so too has our unconscious; and, far from bringing an end to re?
action and superstition, cruise missiles and the like have made them
proliferate.
Given these conditions, what might constitute a politics of the
technological today? According to Ernest Mandel, 'Belief in the omni?
potence of technology is the specific form of bourgeois ideology in late
capitalism.' Belief in the omnipotence of technology: either total faith
or total fatalism, either commitment or resignation to its totalitarian
logic. Both these positions must be rejected ? but in favour of what?
What is a valid technopolitics for the First World?
The productivist position? Fifty years ago Walter Benjamin called
artists, architects and writers to an active transformation of the techno?
logical apparatus; but that call was made in the context of socialist
revolution, and the technological apparatus in question was far simpler
than our own. If transformation seems Utopian today, what about re?
sistance? Immediately, however, a question arises: resistance from
what point? Is there, in the First World, an outside to the technological?
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