THEORY IS DEAD, MAY IT LIVE LONG AND PROSPER.

After attending the New Contexts conference as a co-author, it has taken a few weeks for my brain to process the entire event. In a way participating in the co-authoring sessions was akin to the dream logic of both being yourself and being a fly on the wall watching yourself writhe around under the microscope with a dozen other participants as a new audience rolled in every hour. The audience appeared bored and engaged in equal measures. Perhaps they found the process itself entertaining as the whole structure of the concurrent sessions made it feel like the intellectual equivalent of theater hopping a  multiplex movie theater. No need to watch one three-hour long movie, just watch one hour of three different movies! This has been done and amusingly well documented.

It is tempting to “review” my particular session, but at this point it seems more important to try to shed a bit of light on the recurring issues that were endemic to the conference as a whole. Perhaps one of the most glaring and telling absences is a total lack of any kind of interest in theory. Far from being something particular to design education, the entire design field seems obsessed with praxis. Theory is rendered ineffectual or irrelevant. Perhaps this is a reaction to the massive assimilation of post-modernist and post-structuralist ideas in the last couple of decades. The once vanguard is now taken for granted. These upheavals are now merely historical. But it is telling that no one seems to be able to coherently describe the common set of dilemmas that all the sessions seemed to raise. If the whole concept of “theory” is still strangely ill-defined in design, in the most basic sense it is a way of explaining (or rationalizing) design in a larger context. But the explanations theory may offer are explanations often without easy answers, a state of willful contradiction that I think makes it easy to dismiss it’s relevance.

The final reports for each of the New Contexts sessions had the same keywords pop-up over and over again: “systems”, “tools”, “research”, “opportunity”, “social”, “emergent”, “knowledge”. In light of David Thorburn’s provocation these seem like apt reactions to what he characterizes as an era of chronic (and perhaps permanent) instability and transition based on massive transformations to our communication systems. Literally everything we consider foundational to design or education can be called into question. Yet at present there seem to be no leading “theories” that confront or describe the vast changes that networked technologies have wrought. The post-structuralist name dropping has ceased, but let me have the audacity to suggest that there are people who have begun to think about these conditions in all their pervasive, uber-networked, distempered glory. Both Bruce Sterling and Kazys Varnelis have staked out interesting footholds in attempting to understand this era.

Sterling is of course most well known as visionary gadfly and ex-cyberpunk novelist. Despite his image as a kind of snake oil salesman for technological “innovation” Sterling does have a remarkable ability to put into words the “zeitgeist” of a given era. His Transmediale 2010 keynote on “Atemporality for the Creative Artist” is probably best viewed as a video (a transcript is provided on his blog here), his schtick is weirdly charming and annoying at the same time, yet ultimately effective. The idea that atemporality defines this era is seductive. Instead of the “timeless” the old modernist trope of design “quality”, we have a kind of “non-time”, where historical categories and hierarchies have broken dow, the mashup is the lingua franca and networked technologies provide 365/24/7 availability no matter what timezone you live in. Sterling is aware of the pernicious effects of the atemporal, he’s not merely cheerleading, but he thinks that engagement, not avoidance, is the way out.

Kazys Varnelis is in many ways the more interesting figure here. Trained as an architectural historian at Cornell, he currently heads the Network Architecture Lab at Columbia’s GSAPP. His research works almost in parallel to Sterling’s ideas (they both admit to a cross-fertilization of ideas particularly when it comes to notions of the atemporal), but Varnelis is far more ambitious. His book “Culture in the Age of Networks: A Critical History” which he has posted in draft form on his website, is a work that attempts to “synthesize a historical understanding of our era, coming to terms with the changed conditions in culture, subjectivity, ideology, and aesthetics that characterize our new, networked age.” Heady stuff, but Varnelis is adept at providing crucial linkages with post-structuralism and the post 9/11 era. This paragraph from his preface in many ways perfectly encapsulates most of the dilemmas raised at the New Contexts conference:

Postmodernity is long gone. An undergraduate today has no experience of it, nor do they recall a world before the Internet and mobile telephony, a political condition prior to neoliberalism, or an oppositional culture that had not been colonized. But we have also not had any kind of clearly identifiable rupture with postmodernity. Instead, I see network culture as an intensification of conditions latent in modernity and postmodernity. The subject, art, media, time, space, politics, the economy, and the public sphere are all radically changing, but this change is a process in which existing conditions intensify to entirely new conditions, thus sometimes becoming unrecognizable.

Neither Sterling or Varnelis have any coherent answers and most of what they do is suss out the contradictions and histories of what most of us take for granted. It is odd to live in an era that is so readily theorizes and contemplates its place in a historical continuum so quickly. But that is the nature of intensification. The brick has been thrown on the accelerator and there is no going back.

ON THACKARA

In re-watching John Thackara’s New Contexts provocation it is interesting to note that despite his focus on ethics in design, and the proverbial “wicked problems” there was little of instructive use or insight. Thackara strangely anchored most of his arguments on the twin ideals of a zero growth economy and zero tolerance of negative externalities. Utopian perhaps, but entirely ignorant of some basic economic concepts. Would anyone actually want to live in a stagnant economy with presumably negative population growth, draconian environmental controls and a total inability to deal with any sort of changes in a global economy? Sounds like a nightmarish scenario and it is ridiculously at odds with the rest of his emphasis on approaching “wicked problems” in a collaborative, flexible and local manner. Never mind that Thackara’s approach to these wicked systemic problems is disjointed to the extreme. Problems that scale globally and are beholden to vast economic and political interests seem like they would be entirely immune to design tyros acting in a local, ad hoc manner, no matter who their collaborators might be. I can accept provocations that I might disagree with, but it’s the massive internal contradictions that bother me. In the end Thackara’s framing of designers as “well positioned” to offer “conversations and connections” only seems to underline a certain cynical mistrust of what designers actually do: make things (and when I say “things” I mean that in the broadest possible sense whether they be virtual, experiential, or material). If collectively we have been reduced to being the barfly at the local pub, then I guess we are completely screwed.

“I am going to taser your wall socket LAN port!”

Perhaps the above exclamation doesn’t sound like much of a threat in this era of wireless everything, but apparently it is stupidly simple to fry every device connected to a LAN network by applying a taser’s 50 kilovolts to the appropriate socket. This wonderful tidbit of sabotage comes only incidentally from a provocative reading of William Gibson’s latest Zero History. James Bridle argues that Gibson has created a new genre of fiction called “network realism”. In order to illustrate the Google noosphere of hyperlinked references that plug into Zero History, Bridle uses the example of a character asserting that it is possible to destroy a network by tasering a LAN socket. Lo and behold if one types in a google search for taser + LAN + socket, the reference pops right up. The fact that Zero History is in essence “pre-annotated” on Google provides Bridle with enough evidence to speculate that Gibson has created a new kind of realism where there is a “1:1 relationship between Fiction and the World”. I think I understand what Bridle is getting at, but his formulation is bit weird.

Perhaps I am merely hung-up on his use of the world “realism”, which in a literary context implies a whole raft of associations mainly having to do with the literary style of a text. In the end ‘realism’ in literature has nothing to do with “reality”, it is a set of stylistic conventions which matured in the 19th century and have been accepted as a way of rendering narratives “real” or “visceral”. Put simply, it’s basically a bag of writerly tricks. The fact that you can map and trackback all the content of Zero History does not make it more or less real, the book’s ability to evoke the “endless digital now” is entirely reliant on Gibson’s talent as a prose stylist. The form is the thing, not the skeletal links to the Google cloud. Content is easy, style is difficult. It is Gibson’s craft and skill in the rendering that makes his books compelling despite his disinterest in plot and somewhat facile, depthless characters. Nevermind the fact that Zero History is entirely written in the past tense, it’s closeness to present day reality is entirely illusory, it is a complete and total fiction.

What Bridle is perhaps getting at is even more subversive: the ontological break down between fiction and so-called reality. This is no longer a trope of meta-fiction, it is a component of everyday life. If the content is verifiable and plausible what is in fact fictional about the entire novel? We are living in a Bigendian world, therefore we are living in a world that has been totally fictionalized. I would almost run Bridle’s coinage backwards, it is all about “network fiction”. Wherever atemporality and reality meet, reality loses almost 100% of the time. This is an era where any notion of the “real” has been completely eviserated, mocked, warped and discarded. Need I provide examples? Let’s start with reality TV, Facebook and financial accounting standards…

*

Despite an obnoxiously fêted literary debut five years ago, Benjamin Kunkel appears to have developed into a fine essayist. It probably helps that as an editor of N+1 he has a ready outlet for his writing, but Kunkel has an intriguing range of interests from  Argentina’s recent bicentennial, to the economics of full employment, and a review of Frederic Jameson’s latest. The Jameson review in particular is impressive. It is perhaps the most compelling summation of Jameson’s work and the “postmodern” that I have read yet.  In many ways it provides substantial evidence that postmodernism is quite dead, a past-on era, even if it has indelibly burned its afterimage into the cultural landscape and global economy. Kunkel’s interest in economics and theory is a fine rebuke to the idea that novelists are mindless nitwits, mere conduits of “inspiration”. God forbid that a bird has an interest in ornithology.

Spotty. Neglected. Abandoned. Dead-ended. Nevertheless some dead-ends are worth revisiting. If the fall of Soviet Union some 20 odd years ago consigned Communism and Marxist to some sort of imaginary intellectual dustbin, it is interesting to contemplate the counterfactual: what if the cybernetic central planned economy actually could function as a utopian provider of plenty for all?  This quixotic idea is the subject of Francis Spufford’s “novel” Red Plenty, an impossible to categorize book which sounds like it is an anatomy of the Soviet economic system masquerading as dystopian speculative fiction. Adam Roberts review is excellent, even if the book sounds like it is almost impossible to describe. Spufford also wrote a piece for the Guardian on the background of the book. He offers this fascinating tidbit about USSR economic growth in the 50s:

Give your imagination permission to engage with some unlikely facts: in the 1950s, the USSR was one of the growth stars of the planetary economy, second only to Japan in the speed with which it was hauling itself up from the wreckage of the war years. And this is on the basis not of the official Soviet figures of the time, or even of the CIA’s anxious recalculations of them, but of the figures arrived at after the Soviet Union’s fall by sceptical historians with access to the archives. The Soviet economy grew through the second half of the 50s at 5%, 6%, 7% a year. As Paul Krugman has mischievously pointed out, the USSR’s growth record in the 50s elicited exactly the same awed commentary as Chinese and Indian growth does today.

Unsurprisingly the book is not yet available in the US. Eventually I presume.

*

Ugly Vegas Carpets is a design thesis waiting to happen (if only the grads would get their collective heads out of the clouds of conceptual conceits and nouveau zine making).  These carpets are a fantastic trainwreck of perverted pattern making, subliminal venality and casinos. Vastly more ugly carpets here.

*

Having spent the weekend a few weeks ago attending the New Contexts/New Practices conference to contemplate design education in all its tangential manifestations, I am strangely reminded of this Keith Thomas essay on the “working methods” of historians. Of the course the term “working methods” turns out to be something of a joke since it implies some kind of rigorous methodology of proceeding through research. Thomas instead offers a litany of bad note taking, misplaced references, random procedures, pathetically inept filing systems and a general apathy toward anything systematic. All this coming from an Oxford type! In my experience design education at its most practical is basically a way of trying to get you to cultivate some sort of coherent “working method” beyond pushing crap around on a screen or piece of paper to make a slightly more attractive composition. This is  far easier said than done, often merely resulting in opaque and slightly shoddy rationalizations of why one pushed crap around on a screen into a more attractive composition. Historians seemingly can do no better.

In a recent March 2010 talk at SCI-ARC called “Publishing Practices” Michael Kubo presented a fascinating take on book publishing in architecture as a kind of ‘operative device’ which I take to mean as a kind of parallel or alternative practice in architecture. The explicit premise of Kubo’s presentation was that there was a kind of canon to architectural publishing that could be delineated and dissected over time. These works were ordered in a kind of typology of architectural books: monographs, manifestos, and  histories. On a timeline Kubo mapped this collection of books in two ways; in the X-axis as a linear timeline of books and in the Y-axis as a kind of evolutionary tree showing both antecedents and descendents of a given work. His list includes ten books by Le Corbusier, Giedion, the Smithsons, Banham, Eisenman, Koolhaas, and Venturi/Scott Brown, a kind of carefully selected summa of architectural book production in the 20th century. At the crux of his presentation Kubo provided a case study of Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas fleshing out the history of the studio and book. What is fascinating here is the collision of graphic design history and architectural history that ended in one of the more prominent erasures in design history. Kubo very carefully outlined the tensions and conflicts between book designer Muriel Cooper and Venturi/Scott Brown in the production of the first edition of Learning from Las Vegas. Most amusing were the annotations and marginalia on proofs that Kubo showed with Cooper repeatedly replying with a tersely written ‘NO’ to suggestions for changes. Less amusing was the agreement with MIT press that let Cooper’s first edition be published only to be obliterated by the second ‘revised’ edition. The admiration with which most designers view Cooper’s design of the first edition of Learning from Las Vegas is probably best summed up in this 2004 Design Observer post by William Drenttel: “Learning from Las Vegas: The Book That (Still) Takes My Breath Away”. Comments in the discussion thread from Michael Beirut and Lorraine Wild only add emphasis to this point.

Nicely dovetailing with the Kubo lecture is the exhibit ‘Las Vegas Studio: Images From the Archive of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’ at MOCA/Pacific Design Center (on view until June 20th.) In vitrines one can view the weird progress of the design from oversized mockups done by the Learning from Las Vegas studio to the first edition then on to the second edition and a myriad of translated editions. The early mockups and first edition are clearly unified by a sui generis modernist design sensibility: a cinematic editing of the photos and illustrations, a fusion of text and image on a large scale page size and a typographic structure that emphasized a simultaneity of multiple texts. In comparison the now ubiquitous second edition effectively gutted Cooper’s “offensive and anathematical” original design by shoveling the content into a much smaller trade paperback size. Images are presented separate from text, and texts that initially ran in parallel are now divided up into endnotes. Far from mirroring an ‘ugly and ordinary’ aesethetic this ‘undesigning’ makes the book seem less readable. The visual research the Learning from Las Vegas studio did is integral to the rhetoric of the argument, to arbitrarily segregate the images and text is a rather mind boggling decision. The power and acuity of the writing manages to hold everything together despite the requirement of flipping back and forth between reference images and the essays (in frustration one is almost inspired to photocopy the images out of the book and bind an ad hoc ‘zine’ supplement to read alongside).

The fact that the Learning from Las Vegas book is canonical in architectural history yet is a kind of void in graphic design history is a reminder of an insistent unease in the relationship between these two histories. Perhaps this unease is born of a kind of realization that this relationship often becomes a more or less traditional one; with architecture providing the content and “authorship” and graphic design merely providing an efficient service to the client. But implicit in Kubo’s presentation is the idea that architecture and graphic design are becoming more closely aligned. Architecture has become as much about representation, discursive schemes and ‘paper’ speculations as it is about an actually existing built environment. Despite the proliferation of digital tools that enable a kind of plasticity to visualization and production in both design and architecture, books still have an extraordinary primacy and cultural value. In the end the thinly veiled issue at stake here is the one of authorship. As William Drenttel notes, Cooper’s first edition of Learning from Las Vegas is a definitive early example of the graphic designer as auteur. In a sense she was perhaps too successful as an auteur since both Venturi and Scott Brown felt displaced as the putative ‘authors’ of the book.

But what if this saga was flipped on its head? Or more to the point what if the designer and architect had found a way to reach a sort of authorial detente? Kubo’s own timeline points the way. A quarter of a century after Learning from Las Vegas, S,M,L,XL is the only book on the timeline with both architect (Rem Koolhaas) and designer (Bruce Mau) credited as authors. As an anatomy and compendium of OMA’s practice (a snapshot now 15 years old) S,M, L,XL has the literal heft of a landmark in architectural publishing. But viewed in light of Bruce Mau’s design practice it entails another history as a kind of prelude to Mau’s own exhaustive doorstop Lifestyle published in 2000. If S,M,L,XL is the last stop on Kubo’s timeline, the final book influential enough to achieve canonicity in architectural publishing, then Mau’s Lifestyle positions itself as a contender for a similar position in graphic design publishing. Lifestyle fits into that ever more commonplace niche in design publishing known as the self-initiated monograph in which any third-party perspective is removed in favor of auto-critique or more preferably self-hagiography. To be fair Lifestyle is engaging as a mid-career retrospective of Mau’s studio, showing aspects of process and research that too often goes missing and buried in most design history. Recently Jonathan Barnbrook and 2 x 4 have entered the big book fray with The Barnbrook Bible and It Is What It Is. It remains to be seen if these monographs will form some sort of meaningful, influential ‘canon’ or are merely symptoms of designers’ desire to create enormous paperbound versions of themselves. In a sense these books are a bid for history, but will the history stick?

More interesting is the notion that if publishing is a form of architectural practice, then graphic designers have a certain authorial stake in the process. As Kubo emphasized in his presentation the books in his timeline are valuable not only for their content but equally for their “totality as a graphic object – a careful and deliberate construction of format, layout, images, and words”. If architects sometimes see graphic design as a minor, subsidiary design practice, this view is bit harder to maintain when the book itself becomes the locus of a kind of architectural practice. Architectural design is not isomorphic to graphic design. There maybe some similar foundations and analogies in design processes,  but a translator is still needed, a designer skilled in shaping a multifarious object which is part typographic system, sequential medium, interface and material embodiment a.k.a. the book. Despite recurrent and specious attempts to write the book’s obituary as a ‘dead’ medium, architectural publishing would seem to be a vital niche where books will have a unique durability, still retaining a value that verges on the totemic.

Kubo’s notion of ‘publishing practices’ in architecture is an idea that is wide open enough to encompass numerous histories, it is an operative device that can jump boundaries and generate meaningful, creative friction between design disciplines.

Clearly, the history/criticism model is one many designers are accustomed to when thinking of design research and there is organizational infrastructure (e.g. Design Studies Forum) to support faculty and student exchange on these topics. There is, however, no evidence that design practice makes use of such research, so its contribution appears to be mostly at the level of the discipline.

That is a fairly stunning remark, although I think it is more of an observation than any sort of interpretative statement. A quick scan of the Metropolis survey doesn’t offer much more hope, other than giving me the very strong impression that ‘haphazard’ and ‘ad-hoc’ are not words that should be associated with any kind of research or criticism. Apparently the ‘discipline’ and ‘practice’ of design are the proverbially disjointed left and right hands, just barely connected through some body, however tenuous and ghostly that body might be.

Outside of the academy the idea of design criticism being subsidized by a daily paper or monthly print publication is beyond the pale. In the US with the exceptions of The New York Times and the usual trade glossies (and perhaps the occasional business, lifestyle or tech magazine) I can’t think of a single staff design critic. Film and art critics are still in abundance even in these Great Recession times. Even architecture criticism is still alive at some of the major dailies, although one wonders how long that will persist seeing that the funding for most architectural projects larger than say a dog house came to a screeching halt about a year ago. Not much point in retaining a critic if there is nothing left to criticize.

At the level of practice I think Davis is dead on. Designers often have have a strange indifference to the idea of criticism that can border on antipathy. In a recent interview on the ISO50 blog the Dutch studio Experimental Jetset offers up a very peculiar form of antipathy. The interviewer Alex Cornell asks a very interesting and pointed question about design criticism mid-way through the interview:

Khoi Vinh wrote an article not too long ago about the state of honest criticism in design. At one point in the article he asks, “are we really having the kinds of meaningful, constructive, critical discourses that we really should be having?” I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this issue. Do you find there is a dearth of honest and effective design critique happening in the field? How does your studio approach criticism when it comes to your own projects?

The answer Experimental Jetset provides is at once tantalizing and vague, instead of design criticism they view design itself as a critical act:

We’re much more interested (sic) graphic design AS criticism: the idea that a piece of graphic design is a manifestation of a certain way of thinking, a certain way of ordering the world, and that, by functioning in that way, that piece of graphic design is effectively critiquing the dominant way of thinking, the existing way of ordering the world. Or, in a similar way, we also very much like the fact that two different posters, hanging next to each other in the street, are in fact critiques of each other. To refer again to ‘The Arcades Project’: at a certain point, Walter Benjamin describes the flaneur, walking around in Paris, being confronted by the posters, signs and slogans in the streets of the city: “Under these conditions, even a sentence (to say nothing of the single word) puts on a face, and this face resembles that of the sentence standing next to it. In this way, every truth points manifestly to its opposite. Truth becomes something living; it lives solely in the rhythm by which statement and counter-statement displace each other in order to think each other”. So that is the sort of critical discourse that we find most interesting: the dialectical exchange that exists between designed objects. We’re much less interested in this whole sphere of graphic designers publicly criticizing and attacking each other on weblogs and forums.

What they appear to be saying is that design has achieved an autonomy that no previous artform has ever achieved. Criticism is useless since design itself IS criticism. Mere words need not apply. Even if one assumes the “dialectical exchange that exists between designed objects”, who exactly will delineate this exchange? Designed objects appear to have agency and sentience (I assume they are classed similarly to corporations as ‘artificial persons’) and are capable of “critical discourse”. Their invocation of Benjamin and the flâneur is troubling at best. Do they really want to imply that the flâneur is their ideal audience? An idea that Benjamin lifted from Baudelaire as a kind of critical reconstruction of a roving, urbanized 19th century gaze (that remains manifestly white and male). Their reference to ‘dialectic exchange’ is either naive, anachronistic or a joke. In this era of network culture: atemporal, pluralist, globalized, mashed-up and clearly beyond any kind of history Marx or Hegel might have envisioned; it is hard to imagine ‘dialectic’ having much intellectual or theoretical purchase. It’s more like vacuous doodling in the margins as the empire burns down around you. ‘Statement’ and ‘counter statement’ is pointless when there are a million different ‘long tail’ variations of just about everything available at your fingertips. Reality may be in the process of being completely digitized, but it is not reducible to simplistic, oppositional binaries.

They go on to frame criticism as if it were gossip, not something that occurs between trained professionals as part of a body of knowledge of their chosen discipline. Criticism is an ‘us or them’ stratagem:

It’s also interesting how Khoi Vinh, elsewhere in his essay, makes the connection between criticism and honesty. While, in our personal experience, there is a really strong link between criticism and dishonesty. A lot of the people who have publicly attacked us (calling us lazy, cynical, false, nihilistic, whatnot), have later contacted us, to ask us if we wanted to contribute to their design book or little art project, or if they could drop by at our studio, to visit us. In their mails, some even described themselves as “big admirers” of our work. This phenomenon has always struck us as very bizarre. Publicly they attack you, but privately they admire you. To us, it shows that criticism is often a pose, a facade. It’s certainly not always honest.

Apparently any kind of critical discourse is by definition name calling, comprised of ad hominem attacks, and ultimately dishonest. Design criticism in their view is mere angling for status and one-upmanship. Machiavellian even. However they save their best for that abject tribe of scurrilous outcasts known as ‘the working professional design critic’:

The professional critics, well, that’s a whole other can of worms. Don’t get us started on that. For now, it might be enough to quote Brecht, who described critics brilliantly: “They are, to put it bluntly, enemies of production. Production makes them uncomfortable (…) They want to play the apparatchik, and exercise control over other people. Every one of their criticisms contains a threat”.

In other words design critics are BAD COMMUNISTS. That is the only conclusion I can draw from their rather bizarre quote from Brecht. It does not take much of a Google Books search to find the original context. The Brecht quote is not a direct quote, it actually comes from a diary-like piece ‘Conversations with Brecht’ in Benjamin’s “Understanding Brecht.” In essence it is Benjamin’s recollection of Brecht’s old feud with György Lukács: Mr. Theatre of Alienation vs. Mr. Socialist Realist. Fascinating if you’re into 20th century theater and literary theory. But this is hardly relevant to design. The parallel is bungled, the historical mapping absurd. There is no directorate of design criticism. Those master narratives (if they ever existed) are long dead.

There is nothing wrong with designers attempting to locate their work in areas outside the standard model of service to clients. Experimental Jetset has at least the ambition to situate their work in a theoretical framework that reinstates some form of criticality to their practice. But they stumble when they choose to do so using frameworks that are solipsistic, obsolete and of questionable relevance. It is not possible to completely eliminate critical discourse from design without doing massive damage to the discipline as a whole. There is ample evidence of the fluidity of boundaries between criticism and creation/production. Brecht himself had a large body of critical and theoretical writings, never mind the fact that the vast majority of design and architectural production in the 20th century is defined by practitioner’s critical statements, manifestos and theoretical elaborations. Outside of design, France in the 1950s offers a multitude of compelling examples: the nouvelle vague emerged from the Cahiers du Cinéma. Godard, Truffaut, and Rivette were all critics before they were directors. Alain Robbe-Grillet was both the leading theorist and novelist of the nouveau roman.

Perhaps Meredith Davis is ultimately correct in her assesment. Criticism and history are really only for the ‘discipline’. One hopes that the notion of a design discipline can do more to encompass both the academy and the body of practitioners, recalcitrant or otherwise. ‘Uselessness’ is maybe a spurious way of framing a post on design criticism, but I hope it is not an epitaph.

#thebauplan

“De Selby has some interesting things to say on the subject of houses. A row of houses he regards as a row of necessary evils. The softening and degeneration of the human race he attributes to its progressive predilection for interiors and waning interest in the art of going out and staying there. This in turn he sees as the result of the rise of such pursuits as reading, chess-playing, drinking, marriage and the like, few of which can be satisfactorily conducted in the open. Elsewhere he defines a house as ‘a large coffin’, ‘a warren’, and ‘a box’. Evidently his main objection was to the confinement of a roof and four walls. He ascribed somewhat far-fetched therapeutic values–chiefly pulmonary–to certain structures of his own design which he called ‘habitats’, crude drawings of which may still be seen in the pages of the Country Album. These structures were of two kinds, roofless ‘houses’ and ‘houses’ without walls. The former had wide open doors and windows with an extremely ungainly superstructure of tarpaulins loosely rolled on spars against bad weather–the whole looking like a foundered sailing-ship erected on a platform of masonry and the last place where one would think of keeping even cattle.”
–Flann O’Brien The Third Policeman pg. 21

“What this aesthetic shares with its uncomic nouveau roman forebears is an anti-naturalist, anti-humanist bent: we’re being given access not to a fully rounded, self-sufficient character’s intimate thoughts and feelings as he travels through a naturalistic world, emoting, developing and so on – but rather to an encounter with structure. In a wonderful sequence in Camera, Toussaint sets up a scene of dialogue in a restaurant and, having placed a bowl of olives on the table (as a naturalist writer would do to provide background verisimilitude), suppresses the scene’s dialogue entirely, and describes exclusively the movement of hands as they reach towards the bowl, the trajectory of fruit from hand to mouth, the ergonomics of pit-transfers from mouth to tablecloth and, most striking of all, the regularly spaced imprints made by the back of a fork’s tines across the skin of the lone olive the narrator toys with before stabbing it. We don’t want plot, depth or content: we want angles, arcs and intervals; we want pattern. Structure is content, geometry is everything.”
–Tom McCarthy “Stabbing the Olive” London Review of Books, 11 February 2010

“In the museum of the Château de Rueil-Malmaison there once stood–and still may still–what the faded postcard lent to me by a friend identifies in three languages as the “frock coat and hat of the Emperor.” The card displays the familiar black shape seen on the emperor’s head in endless battle scenes and cognac ads on a sumptuous scarlet ground above a long gray double-breasted coat. The hat recalls the ones worn by Franco’s Guardia Civil, except that here it’s flipped hiphop back to front. The hat and coat float weightlessly: the stub of the display form pokes through where the empreror’s neck once did, never touching the hat, and where the stand should replace the emperor’s legs, the coat shows now visible means of support. These flat contradictions of the law of physics and representation involuntarily recalle for me the marvelous illusions of Méliès: a still from some lost version of The Inn where no man rests. This paradoxical effect may be the result of some deft erasures, or perhaps only of the mechanical wear of the printing plates, for the card has been run so many times its softened contours give as much the appearance of a drawing as a photograph.”
–Keith Sanborn “Postcards from the Berezina” Napoleon How to Make War pg.79