The ABCs of Contemporary Design Author(s): Hal Foster Source: October, Vol. 100, Obsolescence (Spring, 2002), pp.

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The ABCs of Contemporary Design*

HAL FOSTER

Aestheticautonomyis the notion that cultureis a sphere apart,with Autonomy: intereach artdistinct, and it is a bad wordformostof us raised on postmodernist tend to that is We autonomy always provisional, always forget disciplinarity. and situatedpolitically, thinkers defined diacritically alwayssemi.Enlightenment advocated political autonomyin order to challenge the vested interestsof the ancienregime, while modernistartistsadvocated aesthetic autonomyin order to resistillustrationalmeanings and commercial forces. Like "essentialism," then, is a bad word,but it maynot alwaysbe a bad strategy, "autonomy" especiallyat a has become routine: call it moment when postmodernist interdisciplinarity "strategic autonomy." Bonaventura:In his seminalanalysisof postmodernspace, "The CulturalLogic of Late Capitalism," Fredric Jamesonused the vastatriumof the BonaventuraHotel in Los Angeles designed byJohnPortmanas a symptom of a new kind of architecturalsublime:a sortof hyper-space thatderanges the human sensorium. Jameson took this spatial delirium as a particular instance of a general incapacity to what comprehend the late capitalist universe,to map it cognitively. Strangely, as a critique of postmodernculturemanyarchitects(FrankGehry Jamesonoffered foremost the creationof extravagant among them) have takenas a paragon: spaces that work to overwhelmthe subject, a neo-Baroque Sublime dedicated to the glory of the Corporation (which is the Church of our age). It is as if these architectsdesigned not in contestationof "the culturallogic of late capitalism" but accordingto itsspecifications. Carcassonne: Carcassonne is a touristdestinationin southernFrance, a medieval Viollet-le-Ducrestored its cite' replete with chateau, church, and fortifications. towersand turrets in the nineteenth and the siteretainsan unreal sheen: century, it is a historical townturnedinto a themepark,withitswallswhitenedand capped
* This textwas written in October 2001 as a supplement(part glossary, part guide) to myDesign and Crime (and Other Diatribes) (London and NewYork:Verso,2002). OCTOBER 100,Spring 2002,pp. 191-199. ? 2002 Hal Foster

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like TV-starteeth. At least Americans make their Disneylandsfromscratch,or they once did so. More and more this Carcassonnization-the canonization of the urban carcass-is at workin American cities as well. For example, the castironbuildings of SoHo nowgleamwiththe shineofartifacts-become-commodities. Like Viollet-le-Duc, developers undertake these face-liftsin the name of historical preservation,but the purpose is financialaggrandizement.And like victimsof cosmetic surgery, these facades may mask historicalage but advance mnemonic decay. Design: Today everything-from architecture and art to jeans and genes-is treatedas so much design. Those old heroes of industrialmodernism, the artistare long gone, and the postindustrial as-engineer and the author-as-producer, rich to be designer designernow rules supreme.Todayyou don't have to be filthy and designed in one-whether the productin question is yourhome or business, yoursaggingface (designersurgery)or laggingpersonality (designerdrugs),your historicalmemory(designermuseum), or DNA future(designerchildren).Might this "designed subject" of consumerism be the unintended offspringof the "constructedsubject" of postmodernism?One thing seems clear: today design abets a near-perfect circuit of productionand consumption. The worldof totaldesign is an old dream of modernism, but it only Environment: comes true, in perverse form,in our pan-capitalistpresent. With post-Fordist production,commoditiescan be tweakedand marketsniched, so thata product can be massin quantity yetappear personalin address.Desire is not onlyregistered in products today,but is specified there: a self-interpellation is performedin and on-line almost In it is this catalogs automatically. large part perpetualprofiling of the commoditythat drives the contemporaryinflation of design. Yet what breaksdown,as markets crash,sweatshop happens when thiscommodity-machine workers or environments out? resist, give Finitude:An earlyversion of total design was advanced in ArtNouveau, withits will to ornament. This Style1900 found its great nemesis in Adolf Loos, who attackedit in severaltexts.One attacktook the formof an allegoricalskitabout "a poor littlerich man" who commissioneda designerto put "artin each and every thing":"The architecthas forgotten nothing,absolutelynothing.Cigar ashtrays, cutlery, light switches-everything, everything was made by him." This Gesamtkunstwerk did more than combine art,architecture, and craft; it commingled and "the of the owner was subject object: individuality expressed in everyornanail." For the Art Nouveau ment, every form, every designer the result is perfection:"You are complete!" he exults to the owner.But the owner is not so frommodernstress, he sees hisArtNouveau interior sure; ratherthan a sanctuary as anotherinstanceof it. "The happyman suddenly feltdeeply, deeplyunhappy.... He was precluded fromall future livingand striving, developingand desiring.He

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thought,thisis whatit means to learn to go about lifewithone's own corpse.Yes He is completef' For theArtNouveau designer such completion indeed. He is finished. reunited art and life,withall signs of death banished. For Loos this triumphant of limitswas a catastrophic loss of the same-the loss of the objective overcoming constraintsrequired to define any "futureliving and striving, developing and a of this loss of finitude was a death-inFar from transcendence death, desiring." "with one's own life,living corpse." Gesamtkunstwerk:After September 11, metaphorical talk of corpses seems and confusionsbetween art and life worse. Recall the remarksof misbegotten, KarlheinzStockhausenon the WorldTrade Centerattack:"Whathappened there workof art ever: is-they all have to rearrangetheirbrains now-is the greatest thatcharacterscan bringabout in one act whatwe in musiccannot dream of,that fora concertand then fanatically, people practicemadlyfortenyears,completely, die. That is the greatest workof art for the whole of the cosmos. I could not do that. Againstthat we composers are nothing."Yet this reading of avant-gardism cannot be simplydisavowed:with the simplestmeans the terrorists rocked our orderlike nothingbefore.But thisreadingalso revealsthe graveproblem symbolic of such avant-gardism:here its confusion of art and life abets a conflation between symbolictransgression and mass murder.It is long past time to forego ideas of sublimity. crypto-fascist NewYork manifesto forManhattan," (1978), a "retrospective High-Rise:In Delirious Rem Koolhaas published an old, tintedpostcardof the cityskyline fromthe early 1930s. It presentsthe Empire State,Chrysler, and otherlandmarkbuildingsof the timewitha visionary twist-a dirigibleset to dock at the spireof the EmpireState. It is an image of the twentieth-century cityas a spectacle of new tourism,to be sure, but also as a utopia of new spaces-of people free to circulate fromthe street,through the tower,to the sky,and back down again. (The image is not and airship appears in strictly capitalist:the utopian conjunction of skyscraper Russian of the as The attack on theWorldTrade 1920s well.) revolutionary designs Center-the twojets flowninto the two towers-was a dystopianperversionof this modernist dream of free movement through cosmopolitan space. Much damage was done to this greatvision of the skyscraper city--and to New Yorkas the capital of thisold dream. Indiscipline: Several of these notes circle around a single thesis: contemporary design is partof a greaterrevengetaken byadvanced capitalismon postmodernist culture-a recouping of its crossingsof artsand disciplines, a routinization of its We know that even is a fiction,but transgressions. autonomy, semi-autonomy, as it was at the high-modernist periodicallythis fictionis useful,even necessary, moment of Loos and company one hundred years ago. Periodically, too, it can become repressive, evendeadening,as itwas a fewdecades ago whenlatemodernism

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had petrified into medium-specificity and postmodernism promisedan interdisciBut this is no our situation. It is time to recapturea sense plinaryopening. longer of the politicalsituatedness of both autonomyand its transgression, a sense of the historical dialecticof disciplinarity and itscontestation. to modernarchitecture than "transparency." JewelBox: No termis more important For SiegfriedGiedion this transparency was predicated on technologiessuch as steeland glassand ferro-concrete thatalloweda thorough ofarchitectural exposition For Laizlo it allowed architecture in turn to space. Moholy-Nagy, integratethe different and film.Less transparenciesof other mediums,such as photography concerned withspace than light,Moholy saw thisintegrationas fundamentalto the "new vision"of modernistculturein general.Yet thisvision did not farewell afterthe war.In "Transparency: Literaland Phenomenal" (1963), Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzkydevalued literal in favorof phenomenal transparency, in which "Cubist"surfaces"interpenetrate withoutoptical destructionof each other."This revaluationmarkedthe momentwhen,once more,articulation of surfacebecame as important as thatof space, and the understanding of skinas important as that of structure.In other words, it marked the discursive advent of postmodern architecturein its two principal versions: first, architectureas a scenographic surfaceof symbols(as in pastiche postmodernism fromRobertVenturion) and, architecture as an autonomoustransformation of forms(as in deconstructivist later, fromPeterEisenmanon). Todaymanyprominent such architects, postmodernism as Koolhaas, Herzog and de Meuron, and Richard Gluckman,do not fitneatly into either camp: they hold on to literal transparencyeven as they elaborate withprojectiveskinsand luminousscrims.Sometimes, phenomenal transparency however,these skins and scrims only dazzle or confuse, and the architecture becomes an illuminatedsculpture, a radiantjewel. It can be beautiful, but it can also be spectacular in the negative senseused byGuyDebord-a kindofcommodityfetishon a grandscale, a mysterious object whose productionis mystified. Kool House: "Thisarchitecture relatesto the forces of the Groflstadt [the metropolis] like a surfer to the waves," Koolhaas once remarked of the skyscrapers of Manhattan. With his recent interventions in the global city,the same mightbe said of his own architecture, and it mightnot sound like praise.Whatdoes it mean for an architectto surf the Grofstadt today-to perfectits curve, to extend its if Even an architect is can he trajectory? empoweredenough to make the attempt, or she do more thancrash on the beach? Life Style: In Life Style(2000), a compendium of his work,Canadian designer Bruce Mau asks us to thinkdesign as "lifestyle"in the philosophicalsense of the Greeks,Nietzsche, or Foucault, that is, as an ethics. But the styleof LifeStyle is closer in spirit to Martha Stewart-a folding of the "examined life" into the "designed life." Such style does not boost our "character,"as Life Style claims;

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rather,it aids the contemporaryconflation of the realization of self with the consumptionofidentity. of Mediation: "Mediation"used to mean the criticalattemptto thinkthe totality and disconnection. Now it tends to the social world beyond its fragmentation referto a social worldgivenover to electronicmedia-and to an economic world is retooled around digitizingand computing.In this mediation,the commodity no longer an object to be produced so much as a datum to be manipulateddesigned and redesigned,consumed and reconsumed.This is anotherreason why design is inflatedtoday,to the point where it is no longer a secondaryindustry. Perhapswe should speak of a "politicaleconomyof design." Nobrow:One aspect of thismediatedworldis a merging of cultureand marketing. For some commentators thishas effected a new kindof "nobrow"culturein which the old distinctions of highbrow, and lowbrowno longer apply.For middlebrow, fans of thisdevelopment"nobrow"is not a dumbingdown of intellectual culture so much as a wisingup to commercialculture, whichbecomes a source of statusin its own right.Today,thisargumentruns,we are all in the same "megastore," only in different Yetthisis a conflation aisles,and thatis a good thing-thatis democracy. of democracy with consumption, a conflation that underwritesthe principal on sale in thismarketplace: the fantasy thatclass divisions are thereby commodity is the contemporary resolved.This fantasy to the foundational complement myth of the United States:thatsuch divisionsneverexistedhere in the first place. This delusion allows millionsof Americansto vote against theirclass interests at least four every years. Outmoded: "The older media, not designed for mass production,take on a new timeliness: thatof exemptionand of improvisation. the Theyalone could outflank united frontof trustsand technology."So writesTheodor Adorno in Minima Moralia (1951) on the criticaluse of outmoded media in a capitalistcontextof ceaseless obsolescence. Here, of course, Adorno draws on WalterBenjamin, for whom "the outmoded"was a centralconcern. "Balzac was the first to speak of the ruins of the bourgeoisie," Benjamin wrote in his ArcadesProject."But only Surrealismexposed them to view.The developmentof the forcesof production reduced the wish symbolsof the previous centuryto rubble even before the monuments representingthem had crumbled."The "wishsymbols"in question are the capitalistwonders of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisieat the heightof its confidence, such as "the arcades and interiors, the exhibitions and panoramas." These structures fascinatedthe Surrealistsnearlya centurylater-when further capitalist development had turned them into "residues of a dream world" or, whichrepresented themhad crumbled." again,"rubbleeven beforethe monuments For the Surrealists to hauntthese outmoded spaces, accordingto Benjamin,was to tap "the revolutionary energies"thatwere trapped there. But it is less utopian to

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in these thatthe Surrealists the mnemonicsignalsencrypted saysimply registered not otherwise the that have reached structures-signals present. This might of the can the outmoded totalist query assumptions of capitalist deployment be it its to remind this cultureof its own wish and claim can also culture, timeless; of and Can this and forfeited its own dreams liberty, equality, fraternity. symbols, mnemonic dimensionof the outmoded stillbe mined today,or is the outmoded now outmoded too-another device of fashion? The object world of modern cities was born of a Fordisteconomy Post-Fordism: thatwas relatively fixed:factories and warehouses, and bridges,railways skyscrapers and highways. However,as our economy has become more post-Fordist, capital has flowedever more rapidlyin search of cheap labor, innovativemanufacture, financial and new markets; and the lifeexpectancy of manybuildings deregulation, has fallen dramatically. of the two economies,with (Many cities are now hybrids Fordist structures often retrofitted to post-Fordist needs.) Thisprocessis pronounced in the United States,of course, but it is rapacious wheredevelopmentis even less restricted. "His task is trulyimpossible,"Koolhaas writesof the architectin this in a stable medium."In a post-Fordist condition,"to expressincreasingturbulence whatcan the criteriaof architecture be? context, is the cruxof the "cultureof congestion" Quarantine:For Koolhaas, the skyscraper of the old Manhattan,and he sees it as a matingof two emblematicforms-"the needle" and "the globe." The needle grabs "attention," while the globe promises and "the of Manhattanism is a dialectic between these two "receptivity," history forms." Since September11 the discursive frameof thisManhattanism has shifted. New fearsclingto the skyscraper as a terrorist and of the values "attention" target, and "receptivity"are rendered suspicious. The same holds for the values of congestion and "deliriousspace"; theyare overshadowedby calls forsurveillance and "defensiblespace." In short,the "urbanisticego" and culturaldiversity that Koolhaas celebratesin Delirious NewYork are under enormouspressure.Theyneed advocates like never before; for,to paraphrase the Surrealists, New York Beauty willbe deliriousor willnot be. As much as interdisciplinarity is crucialto culturalpractice,so too Running-Room: are distinctions, as Karl Kraus insistedin 1912: "AdolfLoos and I-he literally and I linguistically-have done nothing more than show that there is a distinction between an urn and a chamber pot and that it is this distinctionabove all that The others, the positive ones provides culture with running-room[Spielraum]. are divided into those who use the [i.e., those who fail to make this distinction], urn as a chamberpot and those who use the chamberpot as an urn.""Those who use the urn as a chamberpot" wereArtNouveau designerswho wantedto infuse art (the urn) into the utilitarianobject (the chamber pot). Those who did the reversewere functionalist modernists who wantedto elevate the utilitarian object

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into art. For Kraus the two mistakeswere symmetrical-bothconfuseduse-value indistinction: and art-value-and both riskeda regressive theyfailed to safeguard to liberalsubjectivity and culture.Note thatnothing "the running-room" necessary of culture;the is said about a natural"essence" of art,or an absolute "autonomy" one of "distinctions" and "running-room," of proposed differences stake is simply and provisional spaces. in culturaldiscourse.Although has a new centrality Spectacle: Clearlyarchitecture stemsfromthe initial debates about postmodernism in the 1970s, this centrality it is clinched by the contemporary whichwere focused on architecture, inflation of design and displayin all sorts of spheres-art, fashion,business,and so on. one Moreover,to make a big splash in the global pond of spectacle culturetoday, has to have a big rock to drop, maybe as big as the Guggenheim Museum in like Gehryhave an obvious advantage over artistsin Bilbao; and here architects othermedia. In TheSociety (1967), Debord definedspectacleas "capital ofthe Spectacle accumulated to the point where it becomes an image."With Gehryand company the reverseis now true as well: spectacle is "an image accumulated to the point whereit becomes capital."Such is the logic of manyculturalcenterstoday, as they are designed,alongsidethemeparksand sportscomplexes,to assist in the corporate "revival" of the city-that is, in its being made safe forshopping,spectating, and is out. This the "Bilbao-Effect." spacing Tectonics:For all the futurism of the computer-assisted like designsof architects are his structures often akin to Statue of the a with skin Gehry, Liberty, separate and withexterior surfacesthatrarely matchup with hung overa hidden armature, interiorspaces. With the putative passing of the industrialage, the structural of modern architecture was declared outmoded, and now the Pop transparency aesthetic of postmodern architecturelooks dated as well. The search for the architecture of the computerage is on; ironically, it has led Gehryand however, followers to nineteenth-centurysculpture as a model, at least in part. The disconnectionbetweenskinand structure represented bythisacademic model has twoproblematiceffects. it can lead to strainedspaces thatare mistaken fora First, new kind of architectural sublime. Second, it can abet a further disconnection betweenbuildingand site.I am notpleadingfora return to structural transparency; I am simplycautioningagainsta new Potemkinarchitecture of conjured surfaces drivenbycomputerdesign. Unabombers: From the handler of the terrorist in The Secret Agent(1907), by Conrad: attention to I what The fetish of todayis neitherroyalty Joseph "Pay say. nor religion. Therefore the palace and the church should be leftalone .... A murderousattempton a restaurant or a theatrewould suffer.., fromthe suggestion of a nonpoliticalpassion .... Of course thereis art. A bomb in the National Gallerywould make some noise. But itwould not be serious enough. Arthas never

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been theirfetish.... But thereis learning-science. Anyimbecile thathas got an but he believesit matters somehow. income believesin that.He does not knowwhy, It is the sacrosanct The whole civilized world has heard of fetish.... Greenwich.... meridianis bound to raise a howl of execration." Yes, the blowingup of the first of today"withprecision: of September 11 picked out our "fetishes The terrorists and "defense." of "finance" the architectures Vernacular:Postmodernarchitecture pretended to revivevernacularforms,but forthe mostpartit replaced themwithcommercialsigns,and Pop imagesbecame as important as articulated space. In our design world, this development has and space are oftenmelded through reached a new level: now commodity-image design. Designers strivefor programs"in which brand identity, signage systems, interiors, and architecture would be totally integrated"(Bruce Mau). This integration depends on a deterritorializingof both image and space, which of the photograph, itslooseningfrom old referential depends in turnon a digitizing of architecture, itslooseningfromold tectonic ties,and on a computing principles. As Deleuze and Guattari(let alone Marx) taughtus long ago, thisdeterritorializing is the path of capital,not the avant-garde. WithoutQualities: Design is all about desire, but todaythis desire seems almost or at leastalmostlack-less: subject-less, designseems to advance a kindof narcissism thatis all image and no interiority-anapotheosis of the subjectthatmaybe one withits disappearance. In our neo-ArtNouveau worldof totaldesignand Internet plenitude, the fate of "the poor little rich man" of Loos, "precluded fromall futurelivingand striving, is on the vergeof realization. developingand desiring," RobertMusil,a Loos contemporary, also seemed to anticipatethisStyle 2000 from the perspectiveof Style 1900. "A worldof qualities without man has arisen,"Musil wrotein TheMan Without (1930-43), "of experienceswithoutthe person Qualities who experiences them,and it almostlooks as thoughideallyprivateexperience is a thing of the past, and that the friendly burden of personal responsibility is to of formulasof possible meanings.Probablythe dissolution dissolveinto a system of the anthropocentric whichforsuch a long time consideredman point of view, to be at the center of the universebut which has been fadingfor centuries,has arrivedat the 'I' itself." finally Xed: Two theoreticalmodels structured critical studies of postwarart above all others:the oppositionallogic of the "post-," of an interdisciplinary postmodernism to a and the recursive of the "neo-," modernism, opposed medium-specific strategy of a postwarneo-avant-garde thatrecoveredthe devicesof the prewaravant-garde (e.g., the monochrome, the readymade, the collage). Today, however,these models are played out; neithersuffices as a strongparadigmforpractice,and no other model standsin theirstead. For manythisdouble demise is a good thing:it "weak"theoryis betterthan strong;and so on. But our permitsartisticdiversity;

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can also abet a stagnantincommensurability or a flat paradigm-of-no-paradigm and this default of art architecture and indifference, posthistorical contemporary is no improvement on the old teleologicalprojectionsof modernist practices.All need some to focus of us (artists, narrative our critics, curators, amateurs) practicessituated stories, not grands ricits.Without this guide we are likely to remain and the neo/avant-garde. swampedin the double wake of post/modernism Yahoos: ... Zebras: In Americanfootballthe refereeswho wear stripedshirtsare derided as to playwithoutthem.Criticsonce had a similar "zebras,"but the game is difficult status in the sports of art and architecture, but more and more often theyare banishedfrom thefield.Overthelasttwodecades a nexusofcurators and collectors, dealers and clientshas displaced the critic;forthesemanagersof artand architecturecriticalevaluation,let alone theoreticalanalysis, is of no use. They deem the critican obstruction, and actively shun himor her,as do manyartists and architects. In this void returnsthe poet-criticwho waxes on about Beauty as the moral withSensation held overas a funsideshow, or who subject of artand architecture, combines the two in a pop-libertarianaesthetic perfectfor marketrule. This development needs to be challenged, if it is not too late, and "running-room" securedwherever it can be foundor made.

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