The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Architecture, Amnesia, and the Emergent Archaic
In the irreversible metropolitan disengagement of labor and locality,
civic life is unchained from the immediate presence and pressures of organized
production, and labor is reconfigured in other bodies (often female,
nonwhite, and not of the first world) and then spatially disseminated in the
fragmented immediacy of metropolitan service and leisure industries, or
else removed to distanced points of transnational production in Californian
strawberry fields and microchip assembly lines in Singapore. Yet the city—
whether a hard historical settlement such as Naples or a flexible module
such as Irvine, Orange County—continues to disclose and concurrently obfuscate
such coordinates as they come to be concentrated in its language, its
buildings, its daily praxis and style.
If for Le Corbusier houses are machines for living, Heidegger reminds
us that machine “technology remains up to now the most visible outgrowth
of the essence of modern technology, which is identical with the
essence of modern metaphysics.” 10 As design, project, and instrumental desire,
architecture mediates the transmission of intention to realization and
utility, to cultural finality and historical inscription. As such it finds itself
caught in the drive to reduce terrestrial contingency to the causal and controllable
logic of a transparent language in which the “political” and the “social”
are fully absorbed into a regime of rationalism, today increasingly
translated into the seeming soft neutrality of “information.” Note that I say
“rationalism,” which, as the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo rightly
points out, is not necessarily the highest form of reason. 11
But there are limits that circumscribe the projections of such futures,
both that of the desired transcendence promised by technology and
that of the associated suspension of urban civics and the subsequent numbing
of politics. While Southern California is among our futures, it is not
necessarily the future. For, and here I echo both Martin Heidegger and
Richard Sennett, place is not merely the product of global processing. In
his famous essay “Building Dwelling Thinking,” the German philosopher
writes: “spaces receive their essential being from locations and not from
‘space.’” 12 A location, a place, is always the site of cultural appropriation and
historical transformation, the site of dwelling. It is the object of an abstract
design that employs the lexicons of capitalism, technology, government,
planning, and architecture—yet what emerges is never simply the alienated
object of such processes but a subject who introduces agonism into the
agora, constructing a particular place out of this space, confuting the regulated
transparency of the plan with the opacities of the unruly event. 13
Making such a claim is to insist on the deeply heteronomic disposition
of modernity, on what lies repressed beneath the surface of a rational-