NEO-FUTURISM: ARCHITECTURE AND TECHNOLOGY

Author(s): Hal Foster

Source: AA Files, No. 14 (Spring 1987), pp. 25-27
Published by: Architectural Association School of Architecture
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 NEO-FUTURISM:
ARCHITECTURE AND TECHNOLOGY
Hal Foster
An advertisement placed by AT&T in various American journals
and magazines during 1986 was called 'Issues of the Infor?
mation Age: Promises Kept, Promises to Keep'. On one side
are the silhouettes of an old man and a little girl in conversation by
the doorway of a pre- or post-modern house; on the other side is the
following text:
At the beginning of this century, Theodore N. Vail, president of AT&T, under?
stood his competition not just as other telephone companies, but as distance,
loneliness, separation. He foresaw that the success of his company could end
the geographic isolation of man. And, in ending that isolation, the company's
success would be assured. The vision became reality: by the mid-'70s, America
had universal telephone service.
Today, as the Information Age has begun, there is a new kind of isolation.
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
knowledge. Often, information machines do little to help. They are difficult
to use, rigid in their demands, generally unable to work with any but their
own kind.
To overcome this new kind of isolation, we have a new vision: to make the
Information Age universal, to help build a worldwide Telecommunity, not just
open to all, but inviting.
At AT&T, we are now working toward the day when people around the world
will be able to handle information in any form ? conversation, data, images,
text ? as easily as they make a phone call today. And they will be able to get
information in a form they can use, whenever they need it, from wherever it is.
We envision a vast global network of networks, the merging of communi?
cations and computers, linking devices so incredibly capable, they will bend to
the will of human beings, rather than forcing humans to bend to theirs.
Obviously, no one company, no one nation, can universalize the Information
Age. It will take the best minds of many companies and many nations. The needs
of our customers are creating imperatives for our industry. We need common
standards and compatibility. We need national and international policies that
are open and encouraging. And we need to make information machines far
easier to use.
We have the science to construct the systems now.
The technology is rapidly taking shape.
We are dedicating our minds, our energy, our resources ? our future ? to
making Telecommunity a reality. To bringing the best of the Information Age
to the world.
Our vision has its roots in AT&T's heritage of service. Just as the telephone
extended the reach of the human voice, Telecommunity will extend the reach
and capability of minds and talents.
Telecommunity is our goal. Technology is our means.
We're committed to leading the way.
My purpose is not to criticize the ad; that hardly seems necessary: its
corporate humanism ? what is good for AT&T is good for man, blah
blah blah ? is patently ideological, and few people are so naive as to
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believe it. What interests me is how AT&T has rewritten certain soph?
isticated theories for its own purposes: it recodes not only the dialect?
ical conception of technology ? technology as both cause and cure of
'isolation' ? but also the theoretical discourse of the post-modern. It
recodes them precisely so as to fit its own global agenda. First, the ad
distinguishes between two historical forms of isolation: a pre-modern
geographic isolation which, produced by technology, is also remedied
by it (in the AT&T story, by the good of telephone); and a post-modern
informational isolation which, again produced by technology (a Babel
of machines), will also (according to AT&T) be remedied by it. The
description of this second form of isolation ? of a society 'awash in
a sea of information', of a culture 'unable to connect' ? is very remin?
iscent of certain theories of post-modernism, the culture of pastiche as
described by Fredric Jameson, or a society of ruined narratives as
described by Jean-Francois Lyotard. Indeed, AT&T uses these diag?
noses of fragmentation as a foil for its own programme of totality, what
the ad calls 'Telecommunity', 'a vast global network of networks'.
Granted, this is a corporate fantasy, not a lived reality, but who's to
say that such a network is not in the works? 'No one company, no one
nation', the ad says, can achieve this 'Telecommunity' alone: here
AT&T is blatant in its call for a corporate global politics, a consortium
that goes beyond the confines of mere nation-states, a logic that treats
all knowledge as so much instrumental information, a research-and
development programme that incorporates technoscience as it sees fit
(by the way, in this world the two ? science and technology ? are
no longer distinct); in sum, a system that determines 'international
policies' to suit its own ends.
The ad is an extraordinary document, and it needs to be taken
seriously. But how to take it seriously in relation to architecture? How
does this problem of a future 'telecommunity' relate to contemporary
architecture? How else but in its very contradictions? The word 'tele?
community' is almost an oxymoron ? after all, telecommunications,
or rather the capital that drives such technology, erodes rather than
builds traditional community. In fact, this very contradiction, I would
argue, is expressed in the famous AT&T building by Philip Johnson in
Manhattan: a global telecommunications corporation wrapped in the
nostalgic image of a national vernacular (the Chippendale motif) and
placed in the anachronistic setting of a neo-classical public sphere
(the facade and the atrium), when it is precisely such multinational
telecommunications corporations as AT&T which have rendered
obsolete such vernaculars, such public spaces. This building may be an
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?
construct, the ideology of a 'Telecommunity' ? or, for that matter, of
an 'Information Age'?
Here the old problem of a counter-architecture, a Gramscian archi?
tecture, rises again: How, in the words of Aldo van Eyck, to pose a
counterform to a society without form? If this is indeed our condition,
the model of a 'collage city' presented by Colin Rowe sounds less like
the basis of an architecture of resistance and more like an apologia for
the chaos of modern development. (This architecture', Rem Koolhaas
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
that the other extreme ? the urban Utopias posed by various modern?
isms ? is now somehow valid; far from it. As Robert Venturi showed
long ago, such modernist monuments do not transform the city into a
new totality; as isolated fragments, they simply tear it up all the more.
But this in turn does not leave us alone with the architecture of Venturi
? at least I hope it doesn't. Though clearly a more provocative thinker
than Johnson (and to my mind even Rowe), he too practises sceno
graphy more than architecture, pop more than critique; and even his
populism does not run very deep. After all, Venturi is also a court
architect.
Peter Eisenman and Aldo Rossi confront our post-modern condition
in opposite ways that, though equally important, are equally inadequate.
In any case, neither practises a truly resistant architecture. Like Samuel
Beckett or Sol LeWitt, Eisenman pushes modern rationality to a post?
modern point, the point at which its basic irrationality is exposed,
whereas Rossi seeks to redeem this rationality as he regrounds it in
historical-typological form. On the one hand, Eisenman stresses post?
modern subjectivity ? decentred to the point of schizophrenia ? but
represses its history; on the other, Rossi privileges this history but fails
to acknowledge post-modern subjectivity.
It may be that at this point a resistant architecture can only be
conceived in the realm of theory, as in the 'critical regionalism' pro?
posed by Kenneth Frampton or the 'cognitive mapping' advocated
by Jameson. But there are problems with these models too. Frampton
begins with an opposition of universal civilization ? call it the civil?
ization of capitalism ? versus regional culture: the first pledged to
instrumental reason, the second to cultural difference. Rather than trust
in the progressivism of the first or the traditionalism of the second,
Frampton advocates a dialectical engagement of the one by the other,
whereby each in effect criticizes and corrects the other. It is an attract?
ive ideal which in the work of his favorite designers (Alvar Aalto, J?rn
Utzon, Mario Botta) often makes for provocative architecture; but
unless one is a cultural Swiss ? neither in the First World nor in the
Third ? it may be impossible to act upon today. For the principle of
'critical regionalism' is tied to an old problematic developed from a
twenty-five-year-old text by Paul Ricoeur, 'Universal Civilization and
National Cultures'. In this text Ricoeur could still look to the new post
colonial configuration of the world with optimism, given that he wrote
it in 1961 ? after the liberation wars of the fifties and before the neo
colonial conquests of the sixties and seventies ? that is, before the
neo-colonial restructuring of the Third World as the labour fund and
market place of the First World. In light of the last twenty-five years,
such a sanguine view of a dialogue between worlds ? in which, again,
the concept of 'critical regionalism' is steeped ? appears romantic, to
say the least.
A similar romanticism undermines the Jameson model of 'cognitive
mapping'. Here, too, there is a return to a distant moment in the history
of the First World ? before the full dominance of the megapolis when,
for example, Kevin Lynch could still chart his home town by reference
to its landmarks. Jameson, of course, complicates the original Lynch
model of cognitive mapping ? as he must, given present conditions, in
which our lives are as dispersed as our bank accounts. Nevertheless,
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the basic principle remains, and it rebuts his own powerful diagnoses of
the post-modern ? of the schizo subjectivities and the deterritorialized
spatialities of late-capitalist society. Besides, it is strange for the most
important American Marxist critic to long for traditional monuments
and psychological maps.
But what architecture might be resistant or even pertinent to our
technoscientific times? Certainly not an architecture of the 'information
aesthetic', one that abets the ideology of the AT&T 'telecommunity'.
There are architectures, mostly developed in southern California,
temporary urban world ? but they do so without much criticality. Just
as the plug-in architecture of the sixties mostly fed into the ideology of
consumer culture, so too this tech-y cinematic architecture mostly
feeds into the ideology of a purely post-industrial society, which is to
say that it does not contest this ideology or expose its contradictions, but
rather presents it as an accomplished fact. (Blade Runner at least
showed a collision of modes of production and modes of architecture.)
But, if an information aesthetic is no grounds for a resistant architec?
ture, one cannot merely resort to the old machine aesthetic ? neither in
its modernist guise, in which the machine informed the architectural
structure, nor in its contemporary guise, in which the mechanical has
become a sculptural motif or period decal. This latter use (say, in the
work of Morphosis) is, however, significant, for it suggests not only
that we are somehow beyond the modern machine age (every other
museum in the USA seems to have a show on the history of the period),
but also that the machine is now regarded almost as a romantic ruin. In
fact, many young architects seem to treat the machine in the way that
Piranesi treated ancient architecture, as an ensemble of ruins to be
reclaimed as a historical allegory by degrees nostalgic, melancholic,
oppressive, psychotic.
I want to propose another approach ? a neo-futurism. By neo
futurism I do not refer to a style or a school. I mean only to convey the
need to respond to a new conjuncture of the technological (electronic
redefinitions of time and space, genetic transformations of life and
death). 'Futurism' evokes the dangers of such a response: misogyny,
fascism, a wish-come-true-in-a-war ? are these concomitants of any
futurist embrace of the technological? 'Neo' recalls the genealogy of
contemporary futurism, to suggest that critics in the eighties like Jean
Baudrillard and Paul Virilio derive from critics in the sixties like
Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis. In short, the term 'neo-futurism'
signals a need to periodize the modern rapport with the technological.
One way of doing this is to adopt the 'long wave' model of economic
cycles recently rewritten by the Marxist economist Ernest Mandel. In
this model the capitalist West has passed through four fifty-year periods
(generally twenty-five years of expansion and twenty-five of stagnation)
since the late eighteenth century: the long wave of the industrial revol?
ution (until the crisis of 1848), marked by the spread of hand-crafted
steam engines; the long wave of the first technological revolution (until
the 1890s), marked by the spread of machine-made steam engines; the
long wave of the second technological revolution (until about the second
world war), marked by the spread of electric and combustion engines;
and finally the long wave of the third technological revolution, marked
by the machine production of electronic and nuclear systems.
History, of course, is hardly as neat as this scheme; yet it does suggest
a way to periodize both economic stages (market capitalism, monopoly
capitalism, late capitalism) and cultural moments (modernism, high
modernism, post-modernism). It also suggests a way to come to terms
with the present, for, according to this model, the 1960s mark the mid?
way point of the third technological revolution, when electronic and
nuclear systems became structural to the mode of production, a moment
when some critics (like McLuhan) were able to grasp the technological
historically. The 1980s, near the end of this long wave, are not so san?
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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