The crisis in criticism has been replaced by the crisis in the world. In the first chapter of his book, Blindness and Insight, the title of which I have borrowed for this text, the literary theorist Paul de Man’s argues that “all true criticism occurs in the mode of crisis”. Citing Mallarmé’s lecture in Oxford in 1894 (“The have tampered with the rules of verse... On a touché au vers”), de Man applies the words of the French poet to literary criticism in 1970: “On a touché à la critique… Well-established rules and conventions that governed the discipline of criticism and made it a cornerstone of the intellectual establishment have been so badly tampered with that the entire edifice threatens to collapse”. But this type of crisis, which does not necessarily affect historical or philological focuses, is from the outset inseparable from criticism: “To speak of a crisis of criticism is then, to some degree, redundant”.
When de Man wrote this, his comments could easily have applied to architecture as a discipline. After the books of Venturi and Rossi in 1966, the intellectual situation in the field could have been described in the same words: “On a touché à la architecture... The well-established rules and conventions have been badly tampered with that the entire edifice threatens to collapse.” Those rules and conventions were, of course, those of modernism, adopted after the Second World War as a canonical mode of building, and this initial post-modern rejection was to be immediately followed by the unstable and fractured forms of deconstructivist architecture and by the curved and formless constructions of computer-designed bubbles and shapes. Today, four decades after the crisis of modernity that shook both architecture and criticism, the world’s material crises – from global warming and the financial meltdown to human catastrophes and the globalisation of terror – have made it very clear that the edifice in danger of collapsing is the planet itself.
Faced with the depressing reality of the collapse of global governance, architecture’s task has become a very elementary one: introducing some order into the disorder. And criticism’s is even more basic: offering support and stimulation more to projects that set out to improve the world than to those proposals that merely seek to represent the chaos into which it was fallen.
Expressed thus, the work of the critic would seem to intellectually superficial, or even downright trivial, but perhaps the times in which we live require the humility of simplicity – not only in our lives, but also in our analyses. Stupidity is a form of wisdom in times of tribulation, and freeing oneself of the usual clothing of intellectual sophistication is the equivalent of dressing down architecture, taking off its superficial ornamentation, making an effort to get to the roots of things and claiming, for architects, a role that went missing in architecture’s unholy alliance with celebrity and glamour.
The great success architects have had with supplying iconic buildings to cities and countries was much less is much reduced when one has to face the challenges of a world that has lost its way due to pain and anxiety. The most influential intellectual figures embraced a caricature of capitalism as practically the only ideological reference, and the utopian aspirations of modernity have practically disappeared in a climate of extreme cynicism. The discipline of architecture, so long the territory of monarchs and magnates, diminished its associations with power in the early decades of the 20th century and established a pact with the social sphere, placing the everyday life of the people at the centre of attention. But that pact has been gradually chipped away at by the emergence of the spectacular as the dominant feature of contemporary society.
The current awareness of the fragility of our political and economic structures – which practice a cult of the spectacle as obscene as it is obsolete – calls for a renewal, one century down the line, of the social contract entered into by modern architecture: a renewal that cannot be innocent, given that there is much for which architecture must bear the blame, but also one that must not fall prey to scepticism. It is a difficult path, from the outset, requiring constant attention and one that, in the end, might lead to nowhere. But it is the only one that offers fleeting hope, and the only one that seems to be the decent thing to do. From here on, this is the modest and stupid path we must take: creating islands of order in a sea of disorder and offering shelter against the pain of chaos. Italo Calvino eloquently described this path in the final sentences of his book Invisible Cities (1972): “seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
If all this sounds like a dubious attempt to give new validity to a sadly long-spent notion of humanism that is possibly because, as Mark Lilla has argued, too many of us have followed “a false messiah into the desert of deconstruction” and the reaction to this going astray comes with a form of despair that seeks support from the most improbable sources. In The Voices of Silence (1951), André Malraux wrote that “we seek to reclaim man wherever we find that which crushes him”, and that will to rediscover humanity in adversity has an ethical value that we must not allow to disappear. The crisis in the world requires criticism to give voice to the silence and reveals to the eye both the invisible cities and the invisible architectures.|
Translator’s note: quotations have been translated solely for the purpose of this article.