Manifold Issue 1

7/29/2019 Manifold Issue 1

1/95MANIFOLD

ManifoldMagazine

An inter-university resource for

students of architectural theory

no. 1 spring 2007

In dialogue:

K. Michael Hayswith Izabel Gass

Sanford Kwinterwith Nicholas Risteen

Nana Lastwith Joseph Lim


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editor-in-chief:

Izabel Gass

facultyeditors:

Sanford KwinterNana Last

associateeditors:

Nicholas RisteenJoseph LimEtien Santiago

Manifold is printed and distributed by the Manifold Publishing Group,established 2006. This issue brought to you through the generosity ofthe 2006-2007 Dr. Bill Wilson Student Initiatives Grant.

All work copyright the original author.

2007 Manifold Publishing GroupAll Rights Reserved

[email protected]@manifoldmagazine.comwww.manifoldmagazine.com


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Manifold TheorySpring 2007

contents

lettertothe reader 5

-Izabel Gass, Editor-in-Chieftheoryand science: reconcilingthe heuristicand PhilosoPhical

Sanford Kwinter on: Science and Architecture 11with Nicholas Risteen, Rice University

AD Architecture and Science 16

-Nicholas Risteen, Rice UniversityThe Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge 19

-Nicholas Risteen, Rice UniversityIntensive Science and Virtual Philosophy 22

-David B. LeFevre, University of Pennsylvania

theoryand Politics: Whatisthe relationshiP BetWeen critical thought

and Political Justice?After Theory 27

-Izabel GassNana Last on: Political Justice 39

with Joseph Lim, Rice UniversityIs Pragmatism an Ideology? Reflections on Theory and Politics inPostmodernity 46

-Michael Hardy, Rice UniversityWhat constitutes theorynoW?

Crib Sheets 61-Stephanie Tuerk, M.I.T.

The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century 65-Paul Morel, Rice University

An Overview of Post-criticality in the Last Five Years 69-Jason Nguyen, Drexel University

Constructions 74 -Nicholas Risteen, Rice University Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture 76 -Rachel Alliston, Pratt Institute


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Atlas of Novel Tectonics 83 -Nicholas Hollot, University of Pennsylvania

K. Michael Hays on: Post-criticality 86with Izabel Gass, Rice University

the editors 94


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Get me a copy editor, or a goodstiff drink, if you will. Our resources have been on holdfor a generation, and this is the result.John Ashbery, Filigrane

Developing a Resource: The Inaugural Issue of the Manifold Project

It is the opinion of the founding editors of Manifold thatarchitecture has encountered an era in which its intellectual resourcesare temporarily on hold, an era in which philosophical innovation andassiduous self-criticality is lacking, and attempts to compensate for

this lack are often ill-considered dismissals of the validity of philosophyaltogether. Nothing could be more difficult than to formulate a viableintellectual program in this atmosphere, but then, nothing couldbe more important. Therefore, four students at Rice University haveattempted to set in motion a reinvigoration of architectural theorywithin an inter-university student-faculty community. Manifold is asocial projecta think tank, if you willto promote philosophical

inquiry within architecture schools today. The project will take on theform of multiple media, including this journal, a correlative websitethat allows for dialogic exchanges and formal online publishing, andcontinual conversations between students and selected faculty. Inlaunching this project we hope to achieve three goals. First, we wantto develop an inter-university community committed to the task ofphilosophical inquiry. The contributors whose book reviews, interviews,

and essays fill the pages of this issue constitute the nascent studentand faculty body audaciously joining our project; we hope more willcome. Second, because every intellectual community must maintain acollective knowledge base, the Manifoldproject will initially introducematerialbooks, articles, ideas, and authorsthat will become thekindling for further, in-depth philosophical debates and inquiries. Third

and most importantly, the primary goal of the project is to see a sustainedphilosophical inquiry through to its fruition, whether in the form ofcritical essays to be featured in print, design projects to be documentedand described, or records of conversations that endure long enough toproduce intellectual innovation. This inaugural issue of our journal isonly intended as a catalyst for the philosophical outpour that we hope


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will soon fill its pages.In structuring this first issue, we surveyed the contemporary

critical landscape by investigating three epistemes that pose seriousquestions for the validity of theory as we know it; these are: science,politics, and current architectural discourse. Each of these categoriesis introduced in its own section of the journal through book reviews ofrelevant texts, interviews with architecture faculty, and short essays, all ofwhich are framed around questions that the editors found compellingor, at times, compellingly unanswerable.

What is to be emphasized here is that these articles are intendedto introduce, not to summarize, their subject matter. In the weeks

following its print distribution, Manifoldwill move to the web, at whichpoint blogs will open for each of the three themes in this issue. The goalis to treat these blogs like web-based seminars of sorts, where all thebloggers are engaged in a quod-libetal discussion of a particular text orset of ideas. For example, the brief review of Jean-Franois Lyotards ThePostmodern Condition found in this issue should prompt one to pursuethe original essay, develop or rekindle a working knowledge of its text,

and return to the Manifoldcommunity, offering critical commentary orinsight. In short, this issue of the journal is an index that should guideus all to an initial swath of reading material and ensuing discussion.

Our first category of inquiry, Theory and Science?: Reconcilingthe Heuristic and the Philosophical, addresses the question of howscience and scientific methods can be incorporated into the theorizationof architectural production. Editor Nicholas Risteen ventured a

conversation with Sanford Kwinter, whose science-based philosophy haslong managed to forge new ground for the architectural mind set. Perhapsthe most important insight that Kwinter offers is his assertion thatscience is about model building, not facts. This notion of architectureand science as likeminded tactics for projecting cosmologies can befurther explored in the writings of Kwinters academic comrade Manuel

DeLanda, one of whose books is reviewed here, among a variety of othertexts that evaluate the relationship between science and philosophy. It iswith the understanding of science as a creative endeavor that we hopeto prompt a future discussion of what it means to structure ontology andformalism scientifically.

The second section of this issue puts forth a major question that


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reaches beyond the scope of architectural theory in particular, asking,What is the Relationship between Critical Theory and PoliticalJustice? The writings in this section primarily respond, implicitly andexplicitly, to the claim of literary critic Terry Eagleton that theory iscurrently futile as a practice for analyzing contemporary culture becauseit has disengaged itself from political and moral issues, a stance Eagletonarticulated with effrontery in his 2003 manifesto,After Theory. My ownreview of Eagletons book is accompanied by contributor Michael Hardysproposal for the possibility of a Pragmatic, epistemologically Postmodernjustice. Hardys paper evaluates how philosophies oriented toward theperformative and the temporal can engage with the fixed ideologies

that inform Western Democracy. Editor Joseph Lim further elucidatesa critical interpretation of Eagletons book in a conversation with NanaLast, a Rice University professor who writes on interrelations betweenarchitecture, art, philosophy, and critical theory in contemporary workand continually introduces political thought into a classroom dialogueon these subjects.

Finally, our third section, What Constitutes Architectural

Theory Now? returns home to an intra-disciplinary overview of recentarchitectural discourse. In the form of book reviews and an explanatoryessay by contributor Jason Nguyen, we present a survey of severaldifferent viewpoints on the contemporary theoretical scene, includingPhenomenology, Materialist Philosophy, and Post-Criticality. Weprovided this survey as a way of asking a question: which of thesemovements, if any, warrants further investigation in our journal? Which

of these topics do we have an interest in exploring more extensively? Oris it time, as I would suggest, to shift our weight to something completelynew, completely outside the parameters of todays critical scene?

It was on the subject of the Post-Critical that I conversedwith K. Michael Hays, an invaluable contributor to the formulation ofphilosophically engaged architecture and a founding editor of the bold

and ingenious journalAssemblage, which enjoyed a fruitful fifteen yearrun from 1986 to 2000. In our interview, Hays offers his characteristicallyforward-facing insight that critical theory is distinctly designed in sucha way that it must constantly update itself. In other words, the practiceof critical theory must continually think its own historicity as part ofthe very work which it purports. I agree with Hays instinct completely,


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and in the spirit of his remark, I hope that we have created a mediumfor re-invention and self-evaluation in our era of suspended resources, amedium to be used by a student community who collectively embracesthe challenge to recreate philosophical architecture in the onslaughtof techno-scientific innovation, political turmoil, and philosophicalrupture.

We have put some names and thoughts on the table to begin,but now its your job, as readers, to pick up the discussion. Go backto the primary material; read the range of authors weve suggested, aswell as (and especially) those whom you find necessary, then join uson the web with new ideas and criticisms until we have a viable project

underway. It is absolutely imperative that all involved in this effort takeadvantage of our communication network to help us set in motion aproductive dialogue. We must collectively define the questions thatframe our discussions and the texts we want to discuss.

The print version of Manifoldwill descend from the web in theform of a physical journal again once we have developed our first setof philosophical projections, whether in the form of essays or design

projects. I thank you for reading, and I challenge you with an invitationto join our endeavor.

Sincerely,Izabel GassFounding Editor-in-Chief


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RISTEEN: As the dialogue between science and design continues,what are the lessons to be learned from emerging sciences? How dochanging ideas in traditional scienceslike the rise of EvoDevofilter into design?

KWINTER: There is a form of real intellectual naivet that is expressedin the very way the word science is being used today in humanitiesmilieus, and although architecture is not the worst culprit, it continuesto be a victim of this naivetindeed one might even use a harsherword: dishonesty. Science has never been foreign to architecture,and it has certainly never been foreign to thought. When we saythat Thales was the first (Western) philosopher it is because when

he posited that All is water he achieved a scientific statementand attitude regarding the cosmos, regarding material reality. Fromthat beginning, civilization has not ceased to organize the traits andproperties and elements found in the world in space, in time andin mind. And there is no culture that does these tasks separately.Architects either step up to the plate and become players in thegame of shaping historical reality, or else they take a back seat and

relegate themselves to the provincial backwaters as decorators of citywalls. The idea that science is that part of culture that speaks aboutfound realityand is therefore somehow poorer than the disciplinesthat inventis another unproductive form of narcissism to whicharchitects often fall prey. Science is about model building, not facts.Every experiment is a model, a form imposed on a piece of world

to produce an effect, isolate a behavior, generate a fact that can betransposed to another milieu. You can even say this about mathematics;even about Gedankenexperimenten. Today, possibly because of thedemise of philosophy and philosophical modes of life and thought,the sciences have become the richest source of novelty and inventionin our world (far more so than the more often vaunted popular

Sanford Kwinter,in conversation with editor Nicholas Risteen on:

Science and Architecture


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culture and absolutely more than art). And as you point out, for allof sciences legendary rigidity with respects to its own formalisms andquantitative criteria, it has of late shown an extraordinary flexibilityand capacity to adapt in order to formulate new questions. Evo-devois but one of the new Gedankenexperimenten that we now recognizeas an independent branch of inquiry with its own hypotheses, its ownobjects and concepts. Yes, today science takes risks, which is whywe should be listening to it more closely than ever. . . Any practicethat takes the material world as its place of workand I would eveninclude sports in this categoryand which approaches this placeand world with something other than a superstitious and magical

attitude, is fundamentally science. All good architecture is modeland cosmology, it tells a story of how things are made that goes wellbeyond the banalities of caprice. When architects stop telling storiesand positing possible worlds they cease being scientific, but they alsocease being interesting and they cease being historical. I would evensay that they cease being architects.

RISTEEN: In reading through literature on science and architecture fromthe past two decades, the preoccupation of architecture tends to bewith the recognizable architectural models in science: topology, thefold, Ren Thoms Catastrophe Theory, and scientific/mathematicaladvances in geometry. Are there avenues of science that you feel havebeen overlooked by architectural practice? How could/should theynow be approached?

KWINTER: Basicallyand I am not feigning optimism hereI feel onehas not yet even begun. There are, for example, new developmentsin the neurosciences that will fundamentally change the way weunderstand experience and perception; they will change every notionwe have inherited about how an organism, or nervous system, arrays

itself in space. Just as scientific optics shaped the architecture of theRenaissance, and phenomenological psychology the building of themiddle 20th century, so will concepts like primary and secondaryrepertoires and superposition determine the organization of spacein the era to come. Additionally, the mental habit of studying sciencefor its formal insights teaches us to think of the brain as itself a material


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product of forces in the environment, a form called up and shaped bya changing world acting on a lump of squishy protoplasm for a certainperiod of time. In other words, the capacity of the brain to organizeand design is itself a product of design. The environment designs themachine that in turn designs it. There is no design philosophy morepowerful or important to understand and harness today than theone that biologists call evolution. It is the great form producer, thegreat function producer, and its tenets, once timidly called simply atheory now form a full-fledged science that is affecting every otheraspect of human inquiry including string theory, robotics, neurology,even economics and literature.

I think the interest that architecture has shown over the last 15years in mathematics and geometry has been more than interestingand altogether merited, even if most of the experimental applicationsended in disappointment. From todays perspective it is possible tosay with complete confidence that this interest has changed the wayarchitects think and it has changed the way they select and formulate

problems. The oblique infiltration of scientific habits of mind hasalso raised the bar on the way in which architects talk about whatthey make. They must now connect their forms to systems of ideas,and they must be able to connect their efforts to efforts that precedethem and that follow from their own. At this point in time, I do notthink this form of forced historicization is at all a bad thing.

Another area that is certainly of value for architecture is the vastfield of non-Western and pre-Modern knowledge systems. It is notjust that these offer extraordinary riches to be mined in the architectsendless quest for unexpected and challenging forms, but the study offorms in non-habitual contexts develops in us a very deep intuition ofthat which I spoke about earlier, the collective and integrated way in

which a civilization generates all of its forms, musical, psychological,and epistemological as well as physico-spatial. No other methodinstills in us the same deep understanding of the foundational logicof form in life. I believe very strongly today in an anthropology ofform as a remedy for the tired formulas that we have inherited frombourgeois art history.


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RISTEEN: To what extent would you say science, as discussed byarchitecture, actually enters the design field in a scientific way? Doesa pre-occupation with applying a scientific method to design denyother possibilities? Is science as a generator of form the only use forscience in architecture?

KWINTER: These are both excellent questions. The first is easy toanswer, the second more difficult. It is clear that one is courtingdisaster (not to mention failure and ridicule) if one tries to adopt apositivist attitude within architecture, to see it as a science in the

classical sense. It would be very misplaced to apply scientific methodto architecture. Part of what is required today is to rethink scienceas well, to bring its spectacularly inventive side to the foreground.In many ways this turn of mind began 40 years ago in the Anglo-Saxon world with the publication of Thomas Kuhns Structure ofScientific Revolutions. Aside from his theory of paradigms his worklargely helped foreground a new understanding of science as being a

generator of ideas and not only facts. It is this aspect of science thatshould interest us. The second question is tantalizing, but probably 5to 15 years ahead of its time. We know the answer, without being fullyable to answer it: no, generating form is not the sole use of sciencein architecture, but what lies on the other side of todays regrettablyutilitarian and opportunistic horizon is very unclear. But one thingis certain; architecture is a form of human knowledge, and it even

represents a form of thought. This is a challenge that architects havenot for the most part dared to meet explicitly. Even composers ofmusic have applied rigorous formal methods to the organization ofsound in ways that yield concrete directions for further research.One of the reasons that this is possible is that the brain respondsvery precisely to designed sound, temporal structures. Architects

for too long have wallowed in the sloppy permissiveness of effectsproduced in space, but much of this sloppiness is only a productof their own historical lack of discipline and clarity. Architecturemay itself well be largely an art, but this does not absolve it of theseriousness and industriousness that we have seen in Western music.This may seem a bit confining to many of todays architects, but it is


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truly bewildering to see contemporary youth and emerging architectsrejecting the challenges laid down by their immediate predecessors(the 90s generation) as too much to bear. My prediction is thatthese architects who try so desperately to put architecture back on afoundation of arbitrary sensibility will be eclipsed and forgotten evenmore quickly than they appeared.


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The Topological Turn takes on a variety of forms in architectural

discourse, from theoretical principles to design rubrics, with argumentsand counter-arguments accumulating along the way. ADMagazinescollected volumeAD Architecture and Science, edited by Giuseppa Di

Christina, collates a large swath of this developing scene, organized ina presumably chronological order (while the argument of the collectedwork unfolds somewhat linearly, none of the articles carry original datesof publication). Spanning roughly 10 years of praxis in architecture(through the 1990s, roughly), the essays from Jefrey Kipnis and GregLynn through to Michael Speaks and Giovanna Borradori show a markedtransformation not so much in content (all are dealing with the issue

of topology and the fold as instigated by Gilles Deleuze) as approachto their chosen subject. As new preoccupations emerge in design, thestruggle with topology becomes more about how to fold them into thepre-existing discourse than in letting an entirely new model emerge.

Roughly, this collection moves from the theoretical underpinningsin Deleuze and Ren Thoms catastrophe theory to technological

advances that allow these theories to take new and unexpected forms,and later to the implications of these forms after the onslaught of anew media culture and issues of the body and the erotic. Expandingthe project beyond a purely theoretical realm are interjecting projectdescriptions from the likes of Eisenman, Reiser + Umemoto, LarsSpuybroek, Stephen Perella and others. While the bulk of the collection

AD Architecture andScience

Giuseppa Di Christina, ed.

Academy Press, 2001

Nicholas Risteen,Rice University


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resides in the essays, these short design diversions provide a good amountof relief to the project as examples of the fold in praxis (with a few ofthem even in built form). A few more would have been nice, but thepublication of the volume in 2001 left many designs in this lineage asyet-to-be-conceived.

The implications of that lineage are what date this volume themost, as 2001 was, by many accounts, early in the integration of theseideas into the mainstream architectural world. Therefore, the project asa whole feels a bit dated; renderings of Stephen Perellas Mbius HouseStudy look woefully behind the times, as do the drawings for FOAsYokohama Port Terminal (at that point still an unrealized project).

While the books contents cannot be described as really current tothe issues of topology and the fold in architectural design practice,what this temporal distance does allow is a greater understanding (andappreciation) of the topological turns lineage.

Peter Eisenmans Rebstock Park Masterplan anchors the initialforay into issues of topology and practice, with a rather literal applicationof a folded geometrical grid producing a series of urban effects on a

grand scale (and one still manipulated by hand). The onslaught of newtechnologies (such as computer modeling) pushes the field into newterritory, and in so doing incorporates issues of organic and biologicalprocesses (see in particular Mae-Wan Hos essay The New Age of theOrganism). Biology gives way to new media (and its saturation ofeveryday life) with Stephen Perellas conception of the Hypersurface,an attempt to activate the process of formal creation in topology and

animation, which had been derided for simply freezing one momentof a design process without providing any means of understanding theunfolding mechanism used in its creation. As Brian Massumi writes:if the idea is to yield to virtuality and bring it out, where is the virtualityin the final product? Precisely what trace of it is left in the concreteform it deposits as its residue?

Critiques of the hypersurface and the faults of animationprovide ground for the final and more captivating portion of the collectionas theoreticians and philosophers like Michael Speaks, Massumi, andGiovanna Boradori undertake to not only critique the topological turnas practiced thus far but open its discourse to issues of the virtualand phenomenological experience that reaches beyond mere technical


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facility. All of these authors proffer a body-centric version of what is trulynew about this architectural vein, allowing for the shifting experientialmovement of the body-in-motion as the topological frame of reference.

While not as cutting-edge as its dust-jacket copy would claim(ages have gone by in terms of technological advancement in architecturesince the books 2001 publication),ADs volume does provide the geneticlineage to the topological turn in a clear and thorough way (though notalways concise, unfortunately; many of these articles could do with a re-editing). As historical record, Di Cristinas volume does an admirablejob of collecting many of the relevant thinkers and practitioners in oneplace. That collection, in turn, shows just how far the topological turn

still has to go.


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Lyotards book is decidedly not about architecture, but thankfully

so. Any clear connection between postmodernity and architecture in adiscussion of architecture and science would by necessity send manyscrambling for cover. What Lyotards book does contain, though, is a

thoughtful critique of the state not just of knowledge but of its receptionand changing process of legitimation within the scientific community.While John Rajchman and the collected authors in Architecture andScienceare all entirely immersed in the theories of Deleuze, Lyotardengages more with the philosophy of Michel Foucault and the muchused (and abused) notion of pouvoir-savoir(power-knowledge) in theworld of late capitalism to formulate his thesis.

The books title is apt: Lyotards book is certainly a report(presented to the Conseil des Universitis of the government of Quebec)and concerned above all with the condition of knowledge at the timeof writing. The book also acts as a rebuttal to Jrgen Habermas textLegitimation Crisisof a few years earlier.

The crisis in Habermas text refers to the loss of reliance on the

master narratives of modernism, or indeed any kind of metadiscourseto legitimate science, literature, and the arts. Legitimation, as theterm is used by Lyotard, refers to the process by which new scientificknowledge is accepted into the collective framework of establishedtruth-statements within either the scientific community or society atlarge. Hard and solid rules that once applied to these fieldsin classical

The PostmodernCondition: A Report

on Knowledge

Jean-Franois LyotardUniveristy of Minnesota Press, 1979, 1984 ed.

Nicholas Risteen,Rice University


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physics, aesthetics, or the epiccome into conflict in the post-modernage, and in many cases with each other. Indeed, Lyotard posits at thevery beginning of his text that science has always been in conflictwith narratives. As progress in science began to dispel the prevalentnarratives of the time, where could legitimacy reside? While Habermasargued for a legitimation achieved through discussion and consensus,Lyotard takes issue with that approach as destructive towards invention,which in his view is always born of dissension. In both cases, theoperative field for legitimation is language, and language games, andthe question of whether those language games can be counted on tolegitimate knowledge and in particular scientific knowledge, which can

in turn be relied upon as a paradigm to describe society.Lyotards argument focuses on languages ability to accomplishthis goal, with special attention to the influence of narrative in scientificdiscovery: we no longer have recourse to the grand narrativeswe canresort neither to the dialectic of Spirit nor even to the emancipationof humanity as a validation for postmodern scientific discourse...thelittle narrative [though] remains the quintessential form of imaginative

invention, most particularly in science. Those bits of narrative, Lyotardargues, are governed by a distinct set of rules, which guarantee themeans by which these language games can reliably act to legitimate thecurrent state of knowledge. To extract an excerpt:

Lyotards turn to parology (false reasoning) is not meant as a sly attackon logic, but rather the opening up of logics own fissures in hopes ofworking towards manifestly new ideas. That accomplishment rests on

The pragmatics of science is centered on denotative utterances, which are thefoundation upon which it builds institutions of learning (institutes, centers,

universities, etc.). But its postmodern development brings a decisive fact tothe fore: even discussions of denotative statements need to have rules. Rulesare not denotative but prescriptive utterances, which we are better off callingmetaprescriptive utterances to avoid confusion (they prescribe what the movesof language games must be in order to be admissible). The function of thedifferential or imaginative or paralogical activity of the current pragmatics ofscience is to point out these metaprescriptives (sciences presuppositions) andto petition the players to accept different ones. The only legitimation that can

make this kind of request admissible is that it will generate ideas, in other words,new statements.


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what Lyotard terms noise, a state of discourse devoid of consensus thatpushes the envelope of knowledge production ever further.

Drawing on Lyotards report for use within architecture pointstowards drawing a parallel in practice between the noise in Lyotardssystem and topological deformation, both of which seek to upset agiven state of normalcy to push towards something new without totallybreaking with the old, a process with clear evolutionary undertones.Formation becomes deformation, the fold folding into infinity, and thegoal a process of ever increasing levels of complication and complexitythat break from linear development and move towards staking a claim inprocess as opposed to product.


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Contemporary philosopher Manuel Delandas Intensive Scienceand Virtual Philosophy is an attempt to translate the ontology of GillesDeleuze as it applies to philosophers of science and scientists interestedin philosophical questions. As a materialist philosopher, Delanda is able

to reconstruct Deleuzes philosophy to show that it is robust to change;the principles of matter and energy are interpreted and applied across arange of disciplines. The notion of utilizing cross disciplinary strategieshas become more prevalent through increasing interest in morphogeneticand morphodynamic processes. As both of these processes are taken tounprecedented levels with the aid of advanced computational and designtools, emergent design strategies that breed global complexity out oflocal simplicity benefit from a materialist ontology that gives a why tothe how of form-generating applications non-linear communicationstructures. Materialist philosophy is an architects tool for linkingapplied knowledge with the art and science of discovery and invention.Understanding the scientific processes behind the functioning of matterand energy allows the architect to hack material principles as a way of

targeting the recipe for problems and opportunities inherent in the builtenvironment.As Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy progresses Delanda

moves from a more technical geometric and mathematical explanationof actual ideas, such as manifold, singularity, and multiplicity, intoan application of these actual ideas as a means of conceptualizing

Intensive Science andVirtual Philosophy

Manuel Delanda

Continuum, 2004

David B. LeFevreUniversity of Pennsylvania


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the spatial and temporal aspects of intensive thinkings virtual ideas.He then distills the relevance and importance of the actual and thevirtual as a strategy for avoiding subjective evaluations or socialconventions. The chapter titled The Actualization of the Virtual inSpace, is arguably the most relevant to the type of work being done inarchitecture schools and research based offices today. It is here thatthe concept of the intensive versus the extensive is elaborated and thepotential of linking biological processes to architectural form findingis explored. Delandas key points in this chapter are the notion thatthe potential energy stored in intensive differences may be used todrive processes and that intensive properties change states at a series

of critical thresholds i.e., solid, liquid, gas. The introduction of near-equilibrium and far-from equilibrium thermodynamics to materialscience yields a rich blend of ideas incredibly relevant to design strategies,especially when issues of self-organization, spatial configuration, andmechanical configuration come to play. Links between part-to-wholecomponent based architecture, the cell-based growth of biologicalprocesses, thermodynamic theory, and information theory are teeming

with metaphor. In Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy Delandasuccessfully reconciles ideas of physics, computation, biology, and formfinding by coupling the materialist thinking of Deleuze with his ownnonlinear and incredibly clear mode of research and description. Thebook provides an architect with an appropriate springboard to launchinto a critical discourse with the implications of synthesizing nonlinearscientific research with nonlinear architectural research.


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Terry Eagletons 2003 After Theoryposits that the utility andvitality of critical theory has come to a pathetic conclusion. Eagletonclaims that the years between 1965 and 1980 saw the full effect of criticaltheorys potency as an interdisciplinary critique of the global, socio-

political status quo; however, since this golden era, theory has lost itsefficacy and cultural relevance, largely because Postmodern discourse hasdisengaged from politicized analysis, dismantled the notion of absolutetruth, and shied away from any discussion of moral imperatives.

From the Political to the Cultural: Theorys Alleged DownfallThe years between 1965 and 1980 saw a flourishing of politically

Leftist cultural commentary within the intellectual circles of Europeand America. During the May 1968 student revolt in Paris, academiadirectly and publicly abutted political action; meanwhile, within theivory tower at the time, thinkers such as Roland Barthes employed thetechniques of linguistics to uncover the political mechanism at workin constructions of mass culture, and Jean Paul Sartre extrapolated the

relationship between existential agency and Marxist political history.Despite the urgency of its Leftist call to action, however, this distinctiveera of political thought was constructively critical of the Marxism regnantof previous 20th century critical theory.

Eagleton lauds the efforts of the intellectuals of 65-80 for acommitment to politicized thought that extended to an innovative

After Theory

Terry EagletonBasic Books, Reprint 2004

Izabel GassRice University


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rethinking of politics as such, but sees this initial reconstruction ofMarxism as a damaging legacy for the later thinkers of the 1980s and90s, inasmuch as it gave rise to cultural theorys abandonment of politicsaltogether. Eagleton claims that if revisionist Marxism began as anattempt to find a way around Marxism without leaving it quite behind...it ended by doing exactly that, for, post-1980,

Julia Kristeva and the Tel Quel group turned to religious mysticism and acelebration of the American way of life. Post-structuralist pluralism now seemedbest exemplified not by the Chinese cultural revolution but by the NorthAmerican supermarket. Roland Barthes shifted from politics to pleasure. Jean-Franois Lyotard turned his attention to intergalactic travel and supported right-

wing Giscard in the French presidential elections. Michel Foucault renouncedall aspirations to a new social order. If Louis Althusser rewrote Marxism from theinside, he opened a door in doing so through which many of his disciples wouldshuffle out of it altogether. 1

Eagleton thusly portrays post-80s, Postmodern thought as a self-indulgent submission to the allure of studies on sexuality, behavioraldeviance, and mass culture at the cost of a rigorous investigation ofinjustice. This, for Eagleton, is theorys move away from political inquiry,toward a superficial form of cultural analysis that never launches a socio-economic critique.

But perhaps the dramatic transition that Eagleton delineatesbetween the 60s-70s scene and the Postmodern is less revolutionary thanhe would have it, and certainly less than entirely depoliticizing. A curious

footnote only thirteen pages into Eagletons text offers a definition ofthe Postmodern agendaor at least a definition of the philosophicalagenda that Eagletons manifesto decries:

By postmodern, I mean, roughly speaking, the contemporary movement ofthought which rejects totalities, universal values, grand historical narratives,solid foundations to human existence and the possibility of objective knowledge.Postmodernism is sceptical of truth, unity and progress, opposes what it sees aselitism in culture, tends towards cultural relativism, and celebrates pluralism,discontinuity, and heterogeneity.2

Certainly, Eagleton is speaking roughlyhere and throughout thebookand perhaps just roughly enough to have talked vaguely around


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the actually intricate and complex contours that define Postmodernity,offering a crude approximation of a philosophical movement easy toattack. One cannot help but imagine that Eagleton, like the dozer inGoyas The Sleep of Reason, has been in repose at the seminar tablefor the last thirty years, and has conjured up a fictive monster in violentpursuit of his own unreconstructed Enlightenment-era values of truth,unity, and progress.

While the Postmodern era has certainly seen moments of weaksusceptibility to a Nihilistic, consumerist idiocy, on the whole, politicaldisengagement and a skepticism of progress does not characterize thephilosophical zeitgeist of our timesif there even is any such unifying

spirit. If anything, contemporary thought has altered the rubric by whichthe Western intellectual community defines politicization. That thevalue of Tel Quelsreligious mysticism as a form of intellectualism isbeyond Eagletons bourgeois rationalist sensibilities is not surprising; yet,to think beyondthe State-defined criterion for academic production andto defile established standards for intellectual performance is a profoundlypolitically radical act in and of itself. For instance, Barthess turn from

politics to pleasure, or from Marxism to a then-unexamined theoryof intellectual desire, engendered a solid proposition for architecturalproduction as a politically radical act in the work of Bernard Tschumi.3Eagletons call for philosophys direct address of politics in order that itbe constituted as politically productive is myopic at best.

More disconcerting is that his rough summary of thecontemporary scene does not even venture to the real intellectual

goldmines we find in the post-1980s hexagon. Gilles Deleuzes worksparticularly his brilliant collaborations with Felix Guattariwere onlyjust getting off the ground in the late 70s, and came to offer a radicalrewriting of subjective agency that has been injected, time and again,into multiple venues of political thought. Neither Deleuze nor Guattarireceives a single mention in the book, despite the pairs vitality to any

overarching explanation of Postmodernity, and despite their productiveinvestigations of Eagletons trine sins of pluralism, discontinuity, andheterogeneity. And Eagletons argument does not even broach therelevant claims of Alain Badiou, who, in his recent Metapoliticsandthroughout his career has argued for a philosophy consciously disengagedfrom politics directly, but innovative within the domain of political


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logic production.4 Ultimately, one wonders if Eagleton isnt either outto attack a strawman, or a small pocket of Anglo-American insipidity inwhich he is himself marooned; in either case, the attack seems of littleconcern to those immersed in productive contemporary thought.

Absolute TruthEagleton credits his roughly defined Postmodern intellectual

regime with having altogether destroyed the philosophical validity ofabsolute truth, or the possibility that linguistic factual statementsrepresentative of material conditions can be unquestionably, universally,valid. Eagleton insists that the absoluteness of truth is a remarkably

modest, eminently reasonable notion, and ultimately, the axiom onwhich the flourishing of democracy is contingent.5

Eagletons assertion implicitly attacks the claims of Postmodernityslegacy of Relativism, an umbrella term for a basic epistemologicalrevelation which comingled with and gave rise to many different schoolsof thought during the contemporary era, including Post-Colonial Studiesand the History of Science. Relativism, as Eagleton simply distills it, is

the assumption that truth, or the set of denotative statements that aculture makes about the world in which it resides, only acquires its statusas truth becausea social consensus is reached that it can be treatedas such. Thus, for the brazen Relativist, even factual statements arenever absolutely or universally true, but rather, are true relativeto theiracceptance by other parties within a society. Obviously, the broad rangeof contemporary Relativist thinkers includes extremists and moderates;

Eagleton cites the writings of the most extreme in his seemingly easycase against Relativist absurdity. Jean Baudrillards dubiousness at theGulf Wars occurrence, for instance, serves as Eagletons best exampleof the dangerous delusions and consequential mitigation of politicalresponsibility that Relativism permits.6 Truth be told, Baudrillard istoooften a reactionary zealot for the aesthetic of the philosophically new,

one who will overstep logic to arrive at any philosophical conclusionsymptomatic of a carelessly defined innovation.7 However, it wouldbe more interesting to see Eagleton tackle the Relativist claims of, say,Thomas Kuhn, who has argued that even scientific discovery, acceptedby the Western mind as a generator of (absolute) truth statements,requires an accommodating epistemological framework in which to


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settle its factual assertions.8

Ultimately, there is an unexamined logic guiding Eagletonsthought that inhibits him from acknowledging the necessity of Relativismand in turn defines his political aspirations: he understands Democracyas a perfectedandeternally unchanging social stasis. For Eagleton, itis the job of contemporary society to discovernot decide anewwhatconstitutes truth. And because his (Enlightenment-era) definitionof truth is one of absoluteness, which is to say, a rigid, permanent,and timeless truth, the quest for intellectual discovery in society ismeaningless beyond the revelation of a finite set of truth statements.Thus, for Eagleton, theory, and all fields of intellectual inquiry, are

utilitarian tools for uncovering a limited data set of indices thatdescribe the material world.This limited data setthe finitude of truththen teleologically

leads to static political constructions. For, where the Relativists see truthas defined by an ever-flexible socio-political consensus, Eagleton demandsthat socio-political consensus (in the form of laws and cultural values)be defined by the timeless truthsthat constitute moral judgments. So

theory is at work in a two-part process of uncovering truth to uncoverUtopia, at which point its utility evaporates.

This logic is apparent, for instance, when Eagleton asserts thatan objective viewpoint is necessarily ajustviewpoint, or, simply put, thatethical judgments are nothing more than absolutely truthfulreadings ofhuman actions:

[Is] oppression just a matter of opinion? Not at all. To argue over whether asituation is anti-Semitic or not is to clash over our interpretations of what is goingon, not over our subjective responses to it. It is not a matter of our both seeing thesame set of morally neutral physical actions, to which you then add the subjectivevalue-judgement good and I add the subjective value-judgment bad. . . . If Idescribe an anti-Semitic assault in purely physiological terms, I am not seeingwhat actually happened 9

Eagleton here conflates what he terms moral judgements withthe material events that give rise to them, assuming that degrees ofmoral qualities are objectivelymeasurable and readily apparent in allhuman actions. Thus, once logic leads the concerned citizen to theabsolutely true, she will have also arrived at the absolutely wrong and


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absolutely right. Eagletons common sense is ultimately the voice offundamentalism, thena fundamentalism of bourgeois, Rationalisttruth.

Moreover, the above passage exemplifies how Eagletonsunspoken preference for ideology, the deductive execution of a set ofpredefined principles, over theory, the act of infinite self-criticality,pervades his rhetorical voice and, consequently, the political views itgenerates. Throughout the book, Eagleton constructs his argumentthrough representative scenarios that provide an image of plausibilityfor all of his logical playshere, for instance, the depiction of anti-Semitism in its concrete social enactment defies any ambiguity in

defining the anti-Semitic phenomenon. What cultural theory does at itsbest, however, is untie the apparent connections that bind an argumentto its plausibility and unsettle the ideological foundations that groundontological assumptionstheory denaturalizes the obvious, to use aBarthesian term. Thus, Eagletons vignette in which two parties argueover whether a situation is anti-Semitic does notask a question aboutits own social construction; theory must push further and address

whether anti-Semitismis a situation. In other words, theory must ask,as various strains of the Relativist philosophy that Eagleton is so quickto denigrate do, wherethe initial construction of a moral code (as thevirtuality productive of real material events) occurs, if not in sometranscendent ontological realmthis being a notion even the outdatedEagleton avoids. The cutely colloquial what actually happened ofEagletons case-in-point here remains an unexplored complexity, leading

one to ask whether Eagleton fully comprehends the strategy of inquiryhis manifesto has set out to quash in the first place.

On the whole, though, what Eagleton most disappointinglydenies in his support of an absolute Democracy extracted from anabsolute truth is the potential for a constant, temporal renegotiation ofjustice. This is readily evident in his quip that, change is not desirable

in itself, whatever the postmodern advocates of perpetual plasticity mayconsider.10 The ambition for Democracy and critical inquiry to achievesocial stasis, hand-in-hand, forgoes the possibility for theory to becomea method of constant creative inventiona way of launching into actionas of yet unforeseen political possibilities.


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MoralityOne might assume that Eagletons unsophisticated critique

of the relationship between politics and philosophy would falter mostseverely in its address of morality, that infinitely complex negotiation oflogic, social norms, and human subjective compulsion. However, it is onthis issue that Eagleton is perhaps his most level-headed and promising,not in the critique he launches on contemporary theorys address ofethical issues, but in his own projections for the constitution of a moralcode for action in the contemporary era.

Eagleton, predictably, accuses critical theory of shying away frommoral inquiry, and sees this timidity as symptomatic of what he considers

a Postmodern (again, Relativist) impulse to evade any cohesive moralframework that might establish a universal code of behavioral conduct,offering that:

You cannot describe someone as oppressed unless you have some dim notion ofwhat not being oppressed might look like, and why being oppressed is a bad idea inthe first place. And this involves normative judgments, which then makes politicslook uncomfortably like ethics. On the whole, cultural theory has proved fairly

unsuccessful at this business. It has been unable to argue convincingly againstthose who see nothing wrong with shackling or ill-treating others. . . Almosteverybody agrees that exploiting people is wrong. It is just that they cannot agreeon why they agree on this 11

First, the accusation that cultural theory has not successfully definedmoral parameters for human action is merely a lazy abdication of the

enormous fissures that philosophy has opened in moral thought in thelast thirty years. For instance, even Straussian Mark Lilla reluctantlyattributes the fruits of the final years of Michel Foucaults life, whichsaw the completion of The History of Sexuality (1976-84), to thephilosophers sincere personal investment in moral inquiry.12 Certainly,Foucaults lifelong study of social mechanisms for oppression and thequelled pursuit of subjective freedom is less than decisively affirming of

the universal standard for moral conduct that Eagleton seeks, but it isalso not unproductive in asking the question of what being oppressedmight look like. Perhaps Eagleton is dissatisfied not with philosophysunwillingness to argue convincingly against injustice, but more withthe strain of injustice against which philosophy argues, as he ultimately


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asserts that:

what is under assault here [within his vaguely defined Postmodern movement] isthe normative. . . Thinkers like Foucault and Derrida chafe against...equivalences,even if they accept them as unavoidable. They would like a world made entirely

out of differences13

And this world made entirely of differences is certainly undesirable toone who claims, the world would be a better place exclusively populatedby gay Chinese, intimating that Democratic structures function best inatmospheres of unanimous social consensus.14 The unsaid assumptionat work in Eagletons thought here is that the world as it currently

existswould be a better place if entirely populated by a homogenouscommunity; Eagleton maintains an indolent unwillingness to participatein reconstructing a political order in which the world would actuallyflourish in its social diversity.

Whats more, especially given his pro-normative position,Eagletons claims that theory has not developed agendas for moralconduct is empty. For one, Martha Nussbaum and her entourage havecontinually gone to bat in the political sphere for the breed of Essentialistethics that Eagleton promotes.

And yet, Eagletons empty criticism finally opens onto his ownrefreshing and surprisingly radical Socialist moral directive:

The liberal model of society wants individuals to flourish in their own space,without mutual interference. The political space in question is thus a neutral

one: it is really there to wedge people apart, so that one persons self-realizationshould not thwart anothers. . . [But] when Aristotles ethics of flourishing areset in a more interactive context, one comes up with something more like thepolitical ethics of Marx. The socialist society is one in which each attains his or herfreedom and autonomy in and through the self-realization of others. Socialism isjust whatever set of institutions it would take for it to happen 15

Eagletons implicit attack on Habermass public sphere is here, finally,truly constructive. The notion of reciprocal self-realization, as heterms it, could fuel true political revision, not least of all beginning inthe architectural redefinition of public space.


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Political Engagement Beyond the Ivory Tower: An AfterthoughtUltimately, the problem with Eagletons fusillade is simply that

his guns are aimed at the wrong target. Philosophy as a discipline willremain forever stifled if we demand of it direct and immediate politicalengagement. Whats more, politics will be forever stifled if we holdall fields of academic inquiry accountable to its existing logic, ratherthan allowing these fields to invent their own cosmologies, the likes ofwhich could fuel political innovation. (Marxism was once a Utopiandream that acheived a very real, if very disappointing, actualization.)But does Eagleton have good reason for launching a generalized attackon the contemporary academic communitys political disengagement in

the first place? Certainly. We live in an era in which intellectuals havedeclined to publicly voice political opinion as citizens, regardless of theirwork in the ivory tower.

Particularly, to bring the discussion to the States and torelevant current affairs, Irving Howes legacy of Dissent Magazinewhich continues to consider itself a mainstay of academic Leftism inour countryhas lately grown so anemic that its content is almost a

mockery of its title. The spring 2007 issue features a piece by NicolausMills assailing the righteousness of the claims of Al Sharpton and JesseJackson against Don Imus as no more than a gotcha game on accountof Jackson and Sharptons own previous (albeit hideous) racial slurs.16Mills article principally castrates the political agency of two public andimportant Black Americans (apparently committing an act of injusticeforever precludes one from speaking out against another), and betrays

the predictable middle-class American tendency to reduce the causesfor unrest and social revisionhere, the intractable legacies of Slavery(American racism) and the Holocaust (global anti-Semitism)to mereinterpersonal quibbling. Naturally, this trivialization is just what Millsallegesto contest when he suggests that Jackson and Sharpton redirecttheir attack on racist language to the rap music scene (implicitly, onto

Black artists rather than White men), in their quest for social equality.But more disheartening than all this is that Mills piece, and by extension,Dissent Magazine, is engaged in its own gotcha game, preoccupied bythe frivolity of a largely inconsequential media affair, rather than thelaunch of a constructive political agenda. If this is the best the Americanacademic Left has to offer, then it is no wonder that our country is fast


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sinking into a vulgar political conservatism.Were Eagletons combative manifesto to address the issue of

how public intellectuals conduct themselves as citizens, in discussions ofcurrent events and, consequently, in the writing of a historical record, hewould have a constructive argument. Since he does not, I would insteadsuggest that we redirect our attention elsewhere, perhaps to the writingsof Eric Lott, whose recent book The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual(Basic Books, 2006) offers a much deserved, heavy handed blow to thepublic American academic Left, and gives us some sense of what a trueliberal intellectual would have to offer.


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1. Eagleton,After Theory, p. 37.2. Ibid, p. 133. To see Tschumis politicized deployment of Barthesian theories of pleasure, lookto: Tschumi, Bernard.Architecture and Disjunction. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996;particularly p. 89: Totally gratuitous architecture is ironically political in that itdisturbs established structures.4. See Badiou, Alain. Metapolitics. Verso 2006.While Badiou, unlike Deleuze andGuattari, does see two brief mentions inAfter Theory, his well-considered projectionsfor how philosophy can productively interact with disciplines outside its own gounacknowledged.5. Eagleton,After Theory, p. 1036. Ibid, p. 50.7. However, this is not to arrogantly dismiss Baudrillard, for he is not without hismoments of stimulative cultural commentary. In the design field, for instance, it

is worth investigating a transcript of conversations between Baudrillard and JeanNouvel: Hays, Michael K., ed. The Singular Objects of Architecture. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Here, Baudrillards often ill-consideredphilosophical extremism and unsustainable Nihilism is surprisingly redirected into arelatively constructive dialogue on architecture.8. See Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1996 (3rd ed).9. Eagleton,After Theory, p. 149.

10. Ibid, p. 163.11. Ibid, p. 149.12. See Lilla, Mark. The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics. New York: NYREVInc., 2001, pp. 137-158.13. Eagleton,After Theory, pp. 13-14.14. Ibid, p. 158.15. Ibid, pp. 169-70.16. See Mills, Nicolaus. The Gotcha Game: Don Imus and his Critics. Dissent

Magazine, Spring 2007; online edition.


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LIM: How would you describe political justice? Is it a condition? Amaxim for action? Regulative or constitutive? How do you view it?

LAST: Political justice particularly as it engages architectural theory orin just the widest way?

LIM: In the wide way and how it engages architecture specifically, if youview it in different ways.

LAST: Well I guess political justice takes a lot of different forms but I seeit mostly as a process, and to that end being constitutive of a state ofsociety, and a set of relations that the society produces that are going

to have huge repercussions all over. So, thats just a starting point...but definitely constitutive because I do think it produces types ofcitizens and what we expect of citizens and what we see as central tobeing a good citizen as compared to extra, what is additional.

LIM: So, where do these additional qualities come from? How do wedecide what those additional qualities are that make up the politically

just or conscious citizen?

LAST: Well, I dont know that they get decided to begin with, but Ido think that they get tried and enacted as the system sets up andtherefore are subject to change.

Can I go a little to something you sent me in an e-mail, because I dohave a thought about that... it talked about Eagletons claim thattheory is dead because it is not politically engaged... and I would liketo connect these things. The point is I read this, and it said how youwanted opinions on Eagletons claim that theory is dead because it isnot politically engaged and how to reconcile postmodernitys cultural

Nana Last,in conversation with editor Joseph Lim on:

Political Justice


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relativism with democracys claim to universal rights, and I thoughtoh, this is a very interesting combination, and I dont know howmuch you deliberately wanted to associate... to bring up Eagleton inrelation to the idea of some sort of universal rights but I thought thatthere is a type of answer which certainly goes to what political justiceis that I think goes very much to the heart of what associates those[things].

So I was interested in their association because... I think what Eagletonexpects of theory and how he sees it functioning, the system in whichhe understands it to exist, is very much related to how you reconcile

or how you support the idea of a universal rights under democracy.So what I wanted to go to was something that does emerge underthe writings of someone like Claude LeFort who looks very much atdemocracy and political justice and is certainly a theorist himself.He talks about when democracy first emerges, at the moment of itsfirst inception; I think he uses the phrase the democratic invention.There is this moment in the late 1800s when there arises this thing

called the Rights of Man, and when they are first spoken they [are]presented as natural. So, here are a list of rights, there is no defenseof them as such when they are first stated, and that certainly goesagainst a lot of things he would find problematic, that they are statedas natural or universal, but immediately what begins to transformthat process, and I think this is a big role where political justice andtheory both play parts, is the understanding that the stating of those

rights the claiming of those rights is an act and its an act that setsinto motion a bunch of things. So whereas you have this momentwhere you are stating things that sound, and almost necessarily haveto be... claimed in this position, as if natural, what it sets in motionis a process where those rights need to be constantly defended andargued for. I think its not even in the act of arguing but in the need,

when things are considered unsettled, when they are considered notabsolute, for people to offer their arguments for it that they becomeimportant. I think thats really the production of those rights. Theyset discourse into motion...they need to be regularly re-defendedand redefined. Its not that they are the only natural ones, we stillargue...its that you need to state your reasons and your arguments.


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Making those arguments public under the system is where I think thedemocracy really emerges and really rises and I think clearly wheretheory is going to step in and play a very important and ongoingrole. Now this very much does relate to Eagletons claim becauseEagleton always sounds so reasonable in some sense and its becausehe speaks from a position where he has naturalized the role of theory.He presents theory very much in a sort of Marxist framework wherethere is an end to theory. It has a goal, and part of its goal involves itsself-dissolution. When it achieves its political ends, when it sets inmotion other processes, when it sets in motion other changes, when itbecomes involved, when it is successful, it no longer has an existence.

It no longer is needed because this new just society or whatever versionthis is supports itself. And he also speaks from the point of view as ifthe subjects under such a society would have no thoughts of theorybecause theory is about this goal of change or bringing about theseother sorts of conceptions. And of course thats where the problemis, because why would you envision a world without the need tocontinually defend, and change, and develop, and argue as the good

just world? Why would you understand that to be the summation ofpolitical justice?

LIM: Well, it is interesting that you bring that up because there is a sortof paradox where Eagleton shuns first principles and Truths andstill it seems he is envisioning a society where we will reveal thosethings, truths and principles that will never need to be questioned.

LAST: In the form of history and real events...

LIM: I am also interested in you describing democracy and the justdemocracy as the one that can constantly change, almost definingpolitical justice as the state that allows this free change...

LAST: . . .that requires it as part of its process. And of course, you cansee it as something that doesnt always know what democracy is, andwe dont know what democracy is around a lot of issues. I always thinktechnology is so interesting because it is always forcing us to define,what is the value? Cloning came out a few years ago and people


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wrote about it different ways, certainly people writing about theoryand justice because it challenges what is a citizen, a fundamentalaspect of democracy. What are we producing, what is allowed?So that whole idea that there are other bases of subjectivity andthat it is being challenged in such an obvious way is, I think, reallyimportant. And Eagleton is interesting in the sense that he seems tobe propounding the importance of theory as long as it has this role.But how can he, given that, understand it as dead? Because then itwouldnt be theory for him. And he is so clearly torn between theimportance of theory and its non-importance. And it is because heis justifying it that it has to have a one to one correlation, and we

have to see its goals. And I am certainly in no way saying that theoryis always successful, but those goals and relationships are not alwaysobvious, and cannot always be directly produced, and we cant alwaysgauge the success of it at any given moment.

LIM: Certainly. And I think it is interesting that the whole culturalstudies project that Eagleton proposes as the replacement for theory

is curiously absent from After Theory. We are missing that kind ofdirect incisive study and look at what culture is really doing. So itis interesting in relation to what you are saying because it becomesapparent that Eagleton is somewhat disengaged, more concernedwith theory about theory rather than with its practice.

LAST: Its true and he always wanted to look at what was going on to

judge it, and he doesnt do that. It doesnt form the basis of his meta-theory as he discusses it.

LIM: What do you make of Eagletons argument that postmodernity gotit wrong when it comes to fundamental truths? He seems to suggestthat postmodernity rallied against these things because it defined

them incorrectly. Eagleton thinks about truth as not necessarilycomes from some transcendent place, but only that it means A andB cannot both be true AND mutually exclusive. So, do you think it isstill possible to talk about truth and objectivity and justice in theory?And if you do, in what capacity?


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LAST: Just going for a second to Eagleton again, his particular versionof theory and his ability to critically assess it, which is what he doesin the position of meta-theory, goes a lot to his understanding ofa unified subjectivity or body of people who will all have relatedor similar desires. The success of the theory he is interested in isbased on the need to have as few distinctions between the public aspossible, either class distinctions or other things that would make aunified aim. So the minute that there is multiplicity, and you look atthe different origins of people and understand any group, and withinany group, to be subdivided it goes against any possibility where he

can see theory as successful. For instance he cannot judge that as asuccessive theory, that we have a far more complex subjectivity andthere are true differences between sets of people, and their goals, andthat they dont need to all be united. He cant see that as a success,thats one of the signs of failures for him. His theory basically needsfor that to be unsuccessful in order for it to work. He has cancelled outthose possibilities and anything that comes out of that is necessarily

a failure. He is going to see it as something that fragments, and heneeds something that unifies.

LIM: And really just the productive way of reconciling postmoderncultural relativism and democracys claim to universal rights is thisproduction of political justice?

LAST: Potentially, but I dont know that they need to be reconciledor that so much goes under either. And certainly under the idea ofa postmodern cultural relativism, a relativism that... as that phrasesuggests... the relativisim isnt something I support. The possibilitiesfor understand that diversity produces more diversity than is apparenteven when we point at it and that we cant speak for everybody and

that the ongoing conflict is itself a sign of success even if it doesntalways achieve certain ends it doesnt suggest this is the best versionwe could have but certainly the idea that cultural relativism couldexist with democracys rights that were augmented first as universaland now understood as ongoing isnt at odds.


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LIM: How do you feel about the current trend in thinking that a lot ofwhat constitutes democracy right now is simply a plurality of opinionand that there really isnt anything underlying it anymore.

LAST: I dont think a plurality of opinion is a substitute for democracylargely because it is offered as opinion and not as argument, not asdiscussion, not put in some form that could be more largely addressed.I think its a comment upon citizens beginning to be engaged; anyfailures are much broader than the theory base, those few thousandpeople who we always talk about being involved in theory. You mightsay that that theory is more successful than lots of other things in

that endeavor. Does that mean its very successful? Not necessarily.But I think you maintain an involvement and I think thats whatit asks for and I think theory helps engender that possibility ofinvolvement. In terms of theory I think all of the after theory andrelated things... I understand really as backlash to the possibility oftheory just beginning to be more successful and more known andmore widespread. Certainly I think there are lots of changes in the

world that arent the pace people might be after but thats assumingthat theres one set of people after that set of things.

LIM: And sort of in the vein of engagement, can you speculate howarchitects and designers can participate materially and critically inthe production of just society?

LAST: Well I do think first that they are also citizens and so they have awider range of action. I think that people should, against those things,really weigh what they do and examine things critically. I think theresno obvious answer for architectures role other than to be continuallyinvolved. This question always seems to demand a set of answers, andyou say you do them, and those actions are always judged in relation

to some immediate result...

LIM: And so really what you are suggesting is that the best way is toremain open and critical of practice?

LAST: Yes. I think one needs to be involved, and I think putting together


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journals like this and trying to get them into schools... Schools areinteresting places because people go out into the broader and diverseparts of the world. Sometimes you hear those discussions about whatpeople are interested in, you know, polls in the newspaper, and itsounds really terrible. So obviously something needs to change veryearly on or how can theory or anything else be successful? Its thatengagement... I think what you do is you dont give up. Certainly,what would that achieve? Its a little bit of a set up of a question...and one that theories like Eagletons suggest we ask. Perhaps we needto compare it to other questions that resituate architecture in andaround other practices and start to see them as combined.


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I. Introduction

InCritical Environments: Postmodern Theory and the Pragmaticsof the Outside, Cary Wolfe defines pragmatism, that alluringly

ambiguous label for an equally ambiguous philosophy, according towhat he identifies as its two main features: (1) anti-foundationalism and(2) a focus on the real-world effects of philosophical theory, or politicalengagement.1 The second tendency means that pragmatist philosopherstake as one of their principal concerns the relationship between mainstreet and the ivory tower. As William James put it, pragmatism ischaracterized by its attention to the cash-value of philosophical

speculation.2 What difference would it practically make to any one ifthis notion rather than that notion were true? James asks. If no practicaldifference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practicallythe same thing, and all dispute is idle.3 At this point, pragmatism maylook like philosophy for non-philosophers, an intellectual movementeven an anti-intellectual could love (an impression James did littleto dispel). But thats because we havent discussed pragmatisms first

tendency.Pragmatisms anti-foundationalism, or anti-representationalism,

means that the movement has no truck with Truth, i.e., with atranspersonal, transhistorical reality that it is the philosopher-scientists job to discover, and which would provide the foundation fora metaphysical philosophy. Not Truth but truths might be the anti-

foundationalists rallying cry.First, one must note that no necessary ideological connectionexists between pragmatisms two tendencies. One can be an anti-foundationalist without being overly concerned with the practicaleffects of theory (cf. Jean Baudrillard) just as one can care deeply aboutthe practical effects of theory without being an anti-foundationalist (cf.

Is Pragmatism an Ideology?Reflections on Theory and Politics in Postmodernity

Michael HardyRice University


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Jurgen Habermas). Not only is there no necessary connection, there ishardly even an elective affinity between anti-foundationalism and whatIll call political engagement. The argument for the interdependenceof these two terms is that anti-foundationalism implies politicalengagement because it compels philosophers to take their heads outof the metaphysical clouds and look around the real world. Yet, thisargument seems as compelling as the argument against it: that anti-foundationalism inevitably leads to a solipsistic abandonment of politicsin favor of recondite language games.

This paper explores the various ways pragmatist philosophers sinceWilliam James, working in the late 1800s, have attempted to resolve the

tension endemic to pragmatism, the tension between a populist focuson theorys real-world consequences and an elitist anti-foundationalism.This tension runs deeper than the superficial populist/elitist split: it hasprofound implications for how pragmatist philosophers conjugate therelationship between theory and practice; for the importance they assignto the role of philosophy in public life; and, perhaps most importantly,for their treatment of politico-ethical responsibility. I will interrogate a

set of philosophers either explicitly or implicitly with three questionsthat I hope will highlight their treatment of this tension:

(1) How useful or necessary is anti-foundationalism for effectivepolitical action?(2) Just how pragmatic is pragmatism? Is it any more effectivethan foundationalist philosophies in accomplishing what it wants

to accomplish?(3) What kind of ethics is possible or desirable within an anti-foundationalist framework?

II. James and Rorty

The founding father of pragmatism, William James, was clearerthan most of his followers about the incommensurability between anti-foundationalism (or, as James would likely put it, anti-dogmatism)and any specific political engagement. Pragmatism, he says in his essayWhat Pragmatism Means, does not stand for any special results. It isa method only. Later in the essay he provides his famous metaphor of


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pragmatism as a corridor:

[Pragmatism] lies in the midst of our theories, like a corridor in a hotel.Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you may find a man writing anatheistical volume; in the next some one on his knees praying for faith and

strength; in a third a chemist investigating a bodys properties. In a fourth asystem of idealistic metaphysics is being excogitated; in a fifth the impossibilityof metaphysics is being shown. But they all own the corridor and all must passthrough it if they want a practicable way of getting into or out of their respective

rooms.4

Here, James reduces pragmatism to the barest skeleton of a philosophical

program. Pragmatism is without positive content; it is indifferent to thedistinctions between religion, science, metaphysics, anti-metaphysics,and so on. What then are we adopting when we adopt pragmatism?A method, an attitude of orientationthe attitude of looking awayfrom first things, principles, categories, supposed necessities; and oflooking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts. Lookingaway from first things (Jamess high-falutin anti-foundationalism)

leads naturally to looking towards last things (Jamess hard-headedworldliness), but the pragmatic attitude engenders no determinatepractical consequences.5 Paradoxically, James seems to privilege thepragmatic method over any particular consequences that might attendits use; he pitches pragmatism as a sort of strength coach for theories,[limbering] them up and [setting] each one at work.6

The contemporary philosopher Richard Rorty agrees that anti-

foundationalism entails no particular political theory, but while forJames this is a recommendation of pragmatismsee how flexible ispragmatism! one imagines him exclaiming proudlyfor Rorty thisdeals a knock-out blow to pragmatism and to philosophy generally.If philosophy (of the pragmatic or any other variety) cannot justifydemocracy particularly and explicitly, so much the worse for philosophy!In the essay The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy Rorty asks,rhetorically, whether liberal democracy needs justification at all, andthen goes on to give an unorthodox reading of John Rawls in whichRawls is seen, counter-intuitively, to prove that democracy can get alongperfectly well without philosophical presuppositions.7 For Rorty,pragmatisms anti-foundationalism, despite not justifying democracy,


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does at least justify democracys priority over philosophy by pointingup the groundlessness of all human constructions. Democracy isntgrounded in anything outside its own rules and structures, and it doesntneed to be grounded in anything outside its own rules and structures.For Rorty, philosophy as it is traditionally practiced, even by pragmatistslike himself, can and should have little influence on liberal democraticpolitics. Never one for hypocrisy, he suggests quite sincerely, in adifferent essay, that philosophers like himself try to work ourselves outof our jobs by blurring the line between literature and philosophy in away similar to the style of Derrida8, whom Rorty argues uses philosophyfor mainly private purposes,9 or Foucault, who uses it for Romantic

self-invention.10

Rorty divides philosophers, in an admittedly crude way, into twocategories: those whose work fulfils primarily public purposes (Mill,Dewey, and Rawls) and those whose work fulfils primarily privatepurposes (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida). Nietzsche-Heidegger-Derrida (Rorty treats them as more or less interchangeable) [produce]private satisfactions to people who are deeply involved in philosophy

(and therefore, necessarily, with metaphysics) but [are not] politicallyconsequential, except in a very indirect and long-term way.11 ForRorty, pragmatic anti-foundationalism is useful for fighting analyticphilosophers in internecine academic warfarefor beating up onmetaphysicistsbut is largely impotent in real politics, which Rortydefines as gradualist, consensualist, liberal democratic politics. There ispolitics and there is philosophy, and never the twain shall meet.

III. Anti-Foundationalism and Unrealizability

Rortys is an extreme position and is more or less directlyrepudiated by the rest of the philosophers I will examine in this paper,none of whom have the slightest intention of putting themselves out

of their jobs. In fact, if there is any agreement between Foucault,Lyotard, Derrida, and the triumvirate of the three-way conversationpublished as Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (Judith Butler,Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj iek), it is on the continuing importanceof philosophy in todays world, albeit a philosophy that looks verydifferent from the metaphysics of their foundationalist predecessors.


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Lyotard sounds the key note of this affirmation of philosophy in hisletter The Subject of the Course of Philosophy (in The PostmodernExplained) when he distinguishes philosophy, which suspends reality,from the whole tendency of contemporary society towards the generalvalues of prospection, development, targeting, performance, speed,execution, fulfillmentin short, towards the very progress that Rortyso forthrightly champions.12 Judith Butler seconds Lyotards defense ofphilosophy when she praises the value of critical theorys commitmentto radical interrogation, which means that there is no moment in whichpolitics requires the cessation of theory, for that would be the momentin which politics posits certain premises as off-limits to interrogation.13

Butler, needless to say, stands in direct opposition to Rorty, for whom acertain premisethe superiority of liberal democracy to all other forms ofgovernmentis indeed off limits to interrogation. (Which then justifiesRorty in simply ignoring, as madmen, philosophers like Nietzsche andLoyola who dare to question this premise.14)

What would a post-metaphysical (i.e., anti-foundationalist)philosophy look like? Rorty, who seems to believe that philosophy and

metaphysics are mortally entwined, refuses to countenance such apossibility, preferring to assimilate to the category of literature attemptsby the likes of Nietzsche-Heidegger-Derrida to do philosophy after theproverbial death of God. But while Rorty was getting his kicks beatingup on metaphysicians, a group of French philosophers were busy out-pragmaticizing the neo-pragmatist himself. Instead of fighting pettyacademic turf wars like Rorty, Michel Foucault mounted the barricades

of philosophy to do precisely what Rorty said philosophers couldntand shouldnt dochange the world. For Foucault, philosophers quahistorians have the ability to perform

violent or surreptitious [appropriations] of a system of rules, which in itself hasno essential meaning, in order to impose a direction, to bend it to a new will, toforce its participation in a different game, and to subject it to secondary rules.15

Here we finally have a different conjugation of the relationship betweenanti-foundationalismthe doctrine that any given system of rules hasno essential meaningand political engagement. For Foucault, theethical, emancipatory moment of pragmatism is the recognition that in


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a plastic world, where nothing is permanent, all sorts of appropriationsare possible. Foucault writes:

The successes of history belong to those who are capable of seizing these rules, toreplace those who had used them, to disguise themselves so as to pervert them,

invert their meaning, and redirect them against those who had initially imposedthem.16

This is reminiscent, and for good reason, of Judith Butlers celebrationof parodic reiterationsof those perverse re-enactments of culturalcodes, such as cross-dressing, that serve to unstiffen (a Jamesianmoment here) their normative force. Both Foucault and Butler see in

anti-foundationalism the possibility of emancipatory discourses thatwould destabilize entrenched structures of domination.

So anti-foundationalism opens up the space for radicalappropriations and revisions of established structures, but how arewe to decide which appropriations and revisions to make? Here, thepractical tendency of pragmatism again comes into conflict with itsanti-foundationalism; the massive emancipatory potential promisedby pragmatisms anti-foundationalism is undercut from the outset bythat same anti-foundationalism, which by definition can prescribe noparticular course of action. Were back in Jamess corridor, confrontedwith an infinite number of rooms but without any light to pick one by.

IV. Decision, Hegemony, Act

How to take action on an undecidable terrain (ErnestoLaclau)that is the question Derrida answers with the concept of thedecision in his 1990 essay Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation ofAuthority. He begins the essay, which was delivered at a path-breakingcolloquium at the Cordoza Law School entitled Deconstruction andthe Possibility of Justice, by remarking that deconstruction and justice

have not typically been associated in the deconstructionist discourse.Why, basically, do [deconstructionists] speak of [justice] so little?Derrida wonders. [...] Isnt it because, as certain people suspect,deconstruction doesnt in itself permit any just action, any discourseon justice but instead constitutes a threat to droit, to law or right, and


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ruins the condition of the very possibility of justice?17 Derrida herepoints up the apparent contradiction between anti-foundationalism andpolitical engagement that lies at the heart of pragmatism. If our actionslack ultimate foundations, how are we to know which actions to take andwhich to refusehow can we be ethical agents?

Derrida resolves the contradiction by accepting it fully: yes,Derrida effectively says, there is a contradiction between anti-foundationalism and a deontological ethics based on categoricalrequirements (thou shalt not kill, act only according to that maximby which you can at the same time will that it would become a universallaw, etc.); therefore we must formulate a different concept of justice.

Rather than relinquishing the concept of justice as a metaphysical relic,Derrida performs a deconstructive rehabilitation of the concept byredefining justice, in contradistinction to Law, as that which cannot begiven by the mechanical application of pre-existing guidelines. Justiceis an experience of the impossible, Derrida writes, as opposed to Law,which is the element of calculation.18 The moment your action iscalculated to the fulfillment of the law, no matter how just that law

may be, you are not in the realm of justice but of obedience. The nameDerrida assigns to the true moment of justice is decision: [Each]decision is different and requires an absolutely unique interpretation,which no existing, coded rule can or ought to guarantee absolutely.19Just as literary interpretation cannot proceed by the application ofhermeneutical rules but only by the most careful attention to theparticular contexts and inflections of each text, what is just cannot be

described or delimited in advance of the moment of decision, which isalways, insofar as it forsakes all previous descriptions and delimitations,a moment of madness (Kierkegaard).

So not only does deconstruction insure, permit, and authorizethe possibility of justice,20 as deconstructions critics are inclined todoubt; in fact, deconstruction is required for justice truly conceived.

In Derridas intentionally provocative formulation, Deconstructionis justice.21 The condition of justices impossibility, the inability tospecify in advance what shape justice will take in a given situation,is simultaneously its condition of possibility, since only

Manifold Issue 1

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