Flying the Bullet,or When Did the Future Begin?Sanford Kwinterp.71

In Koolhaas, the concept of 'America' hasalways loomed large. It has served not onlyenormous aesthetic ends, but has played amajor role in generating both the noveltyand the radicality in OMA's work (especiallyin the primarily European context withwhich they have dealt), and has provided acoherent theoretical framework throughwhich the OMA office has come to under-stand, and harness, for speculative architec-tural and urbanistic ends, the volatile pro-cesses of late-capitalist modernization. ForKoolhaas, America, although deeply studiedand assimilated into his work, has alwaysstrategically been kept at a 'dangerous'-andtherefore creative—distance: it has been con-stituted and skillfully maintained as thenecessarily ragged, mythical gateway to thedestabilizing, novelty-inducing outside.Koolhaas's America (Houston, Atlanta, Man-hattan) would come to represent the whooshof matter in free action, wellspring of thenew, provenance of everything that has evercarried the wishful promise of'the future'.America as a stränge and extreme milieu-adomain of pure movement free of historicaldrag. Now it was this America, one mightsay, that actually invented the hyper-future,precisely because only America could inventthe outside of the outside. Europe inventedAmerica' as their future and outside, but

America invented the new frontiers-outerspace and the insane warp speed that wasmeant to take them there—as theirs. Speedand space were the new materials of whichthe future would be made.

Among architects, then, Koolhaas mightbe said to be the true American, for he is theonly one to have attempted to engage theabsolute and pure future. And yet, fromwhere does this stränge idea of a pure futurecome? After the Second World War, Americarode a manic wave of cocksureness, not somuch for having 'won a war' as for having

realized the hubristic technological achieve-ment that made such a claim possible in thefirst place: the Manhattan Project and itscolossal, savage produet, the Atom Bomb.The American air force played a crucial rolein choreographing this complex, two-yearlong gesture, which was said to be capableof'ending all wars*. Its pilots had also per-formed brilliantly in many critical battles inboth the European and Asian theaters. Re-turning home after the war, the flying 'aces'were celebrated as godlike heroes, and thewarmasters soon deeided that the sci-fi,bigger-than-real post-war future would beushered in on their shoulders (and at the riskof their necks). To maintain America's tech-nological (geopolitical) edge, it was deeidedthat two fundamental space-time 'barriers'would first have to be torn down: a mannedaircraft would need to fly beyond the outerlimit of the earth's atmosphere (280,000 ft.),and the so-called sonic wall (660-760 mphor Mach 1)—the speed beyond which, it wascommonly believed, any aircraft would disin-tegrate—had somehow to be surpassed. Theselinked achievements laid the founda-tionsfor what the general public would soon —de-liriously—come to know as 'the space race'.

There was one pilot whose wartime dog-fighting skills and natural aircraft handlingabilities were legendary, indeed consideredby some to be supernatural. For these rea-sons Chuck Yeager was chosen after the warto spearhead the classified supersonic project,and by October 1947, he had broken theproverbial sound barrier, against the adviceand wisdom of many physicists. But Yeagercould know what no physicist ever could: hewas a pure creature of movement and speed,among the most 'instinetive' pilots the airforce has ever seen: "the only pilot I've everflown with who gives the impression thathe's part of the cockpit hardware, so in tunewith the machine that instead of being fleshand blood, he could be an autopilot. Hecould make an airplane talk." In the space-time world of (i dogfight, where Yeager'sinstinets were trained, everything takesplace right at the limit, perhaps even a littlebeyond. To survive "you've got to fly an air-plane close to the ragged edge where you'vegot to keep it if you really want to makethat machine talk." Knowing the critical tol-erances of the aircraft in a variety of violent,dangerous maneuvers was everything. Onehad to know exactly "where the outside ofthe envelope was...[to] know about the partwhere you reached the outside and thenstretched her a little ...without breaking

through."21 Aerial dogfighting, more thananything eise, is like space-time arbitrage:one must exploit discrepancies that appearbetween parallel flows (the twisting vectorsof adversarial aircraft), but these flows areso far from equilibrium-so stretched-thatthe critical discrepancies must be snatchedfrom any dimension that is not already to-tally strained to the max. No one knew this"fine feathered edge" better than Yeager.31

There are many ways to inhabit space,and so, we will see, there are many ways tohandle an airplane. In Koolhaas, I will wantto claim, we bear witness not only to a re-markable architectural project traditionallydefined but to the emergence of a new wayof holding social and economic space alto-gether, for which, in architecture, there arealmost no real precedents at all.4' Koolhaas'swork, with its fierce, stark geometries andimperious logic, is in many senses an extremearchitecture, and bears philosophical andontological kinship with all extremity (evenVirtual or unrealized) in all domains of cul-tural activity. What these extreme states andactivities have in common is sudden preeipi-tation and total blending of diverse materi-alities, of wild fluxes, in an organic compu-tational ensemble that defies both predeter-mination and 'hard', or rational, control ("ifyou have to think, you're dead," aecording toa common fighter pilot's slogan). In simplerterms, extreme activities involve the mobili-zation of every interacting part in a field, sothat every movement of every part instanta-neously changes the conditions of the un-folding of the whole. The edge of the enve-lope is where time (relations) gains the com-putational upper hand over space (things).

In Yeager's world, the sky is a totally ki-netic domain. One could say that Koolhaas'swork is to classical architecture exactly whatthe dogfight is to formation flying. In theair, formations establish rigid, homogeneousstruetures of movement and relationship,they injeet a uniformity into space by fixingintervals and relative speeds, they arrest na-tural Variation and all developmental rou-tines. Even the earth, the sun, and the hori-zon are drawn into this meticulous stratifi-cation, for they are all interpreted as stable,on their own and in relation to one another:

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the earth's varying features serve as guideson which to project fixed routes, the horizonequilibrates gravity like a regulating line, andthe sun offers a fixed point to triangulatePosition and the progress of linear move-ment. In air-to-air combat this space becomesnot only liquid but turbulent: the sun, theearth, and the horizon spin, volley and fly—in a word, they go ballistic. The pilot epi-sodically uses these elements (and their bal-listic pathways) to hide against, to blind theOpponent, or to create vertiginous relation-ships of weaving, gyrating motion. The car-dinal rule for survival in aerial combat:Never become predictable. Indeed, what bet-ter slogan for the creation of a truly modern-and wild-architecture? Imagine a fighter(History/Capital) on your tail. You are forcedinto evasive maneuvers to avoid getting'locked' on the radar intercept screen. Doyou now follow guidebook escape routes?Regularly shaped oscillating trajectories? Doyou carve desultory, fluctuating lines acrossa single, even skewed plane? Certainly not.The true question is, how to avoid any reg-ulär repetitive behavioural pattern (how todepart the space you are in entircly)? Thesimple but not obvious answer is: Explodeinto all dimensions at once. Easier to saythan to do? Perhaps, but far from impossible.The Koolhaas' projects—the multiple, focusedconfluences of communication, transportand capital flows of the Zeebrugge vortex;the plucked and twisted, then re-embedded,positive-negative and scoop-the-loop struc-tures of the Bibliolhcque de France; thepsychoplastic amplifications of image andinfrastructure in the Karlsruhe Art and MediaZentrum-represent cxactly such controlledexplosions of active materiality into invisiblebut adjacent co-dimensions. [End encounternumber one: History/Capital disengagcs,peeling off into a long are, circling back tore-engage later in a different tactical scen-ario.]

In November 1994, Yeager published abrief article on air-combat tactics. The ar-ticle consisted of three short paragraphs,each outlining what might be referred to asthree new 'dieta1 on how to expand the elas-tic "edge' of any 'envelope'.sl Before examin-ing these dieta, it is worth pointing out howthe envelope coneept is itself significant.The term's origin almost certainly derivesfrom military ergonomic milieus, a contextin which envelope always implies at leastthree things: the idea that a human-machineinterface constitutes a next-order syntheticunity; the idea of a homeostatically containedgroup of forces in flux that form a tempor-ary, fluid, but historical ensemble; the idea

that this unity or ensemble is an organicone, that it is defined performatively, andpossesses its own global tolerances and par-ameters. The envelope, by definition, is acommunicative, active apparatus. No won-der it has for years been a favorite term inKoolhaas's lexicon. A Koolhaas project, forbetter or worse, is never an eternal or stablesolution to a 'classic' problem, nor does itpretend to be. Rather, it is a provisional, elas-tic resolution of a compound conjuncturalSituation. His Solutions have half-lives, theyare temporally and historically determined,they move with the stream of the world andso build in flexibility and allow for immenseprogrammatic turnover. They are more fullyproduets of their n-dimensional epoch thanof their time-blind (world-blind!). literal site.The Koolhaas work, like the aerial encounter,is composed in a purely tactical arena,formed in an abstract envelope of concretehistorical (cosmopolitan) fluids.

The Füll Metal JacketSee more than your Opponent sees; Yeagerdictum number one. For the flyer this canmean only one thing: free the eyes of objeetsand the habits that follow from objeet-oriented vision. Yeager shows how to retrainone's focus to take in all of space, to seeeverything. (When asked what made himsuch an exceptional flyer, Yeager used toanswer, "I had the best eyes.") For the archi-tect, this means take your focus to infinity,do not linger on objeets but rather enter thespace tactilely and prospect the space insearch of breaking developments. Scan forchanges and fluetuations, then respond as ifpart of a cycle, as if you had always been acausal part ofthose flows. This dictum workswell with the more classic exhortation to"spot the enemy first." Arbitrage, here aseverywhere, is the process that makes theemerging difference critical, it is the symme-try-break that 'seeds' space, allowing formto rush in. For Yeager, as for Koolhaas, his-tory, even material history, is all aboutthresholds. This is because in free matter,cnergy and information become perfectly co-extensive fluxes, the translation of one intothe other is simultaneous, and events are'computed' instantly. Matter, like history, isan aggregate, partly fluid and partly solid, a

'colloid' or liquid crystal that shifts its pat-tern rhythmically in relation to the flow ofinputs and Outputs that traverse it. The shiftsare distributed like stages with triggers thatare tripped when variables extend beyondtheir local 'equüibria,' or envelopes. Thepilot must learn to enter this domain as freematter, to become computationally coexten-sive with the aggregate's unfolding, so thatall reaction is instantaneous ("if you have tothink, you're dead"). Koolhaas's technique isto ride these thresholds as well. After all,"threshold' is just another name for that privi-leged event-filled place at the edge of theenvelope.61 He defines at least six thresholdsor emergences, potential or already realized:1. congestion (short of which the "metropoli-tan' effect would not exist); 2. a new coneeptof Europe, its new modalities of collecting,sioring and deploying energy based on asudden 'explosion of scale', and the multiplereorganizations that take place around it;3. bigness, the umbrella theme that typifiesall 'quantum' phenomena in the late-modernlandscape, where changes in scale and sizeproduce not only changes in degree butchanges in kind (new qualities); 4. dissocia-tion of interior and exterior, which becomenot only autonomous programs to be de-veloped freely, but free-floaling values (ex-teriority folded within buildings; interiorities,as in a Riemannian manifold, locally andpromiscuously defined); 5. sheer mass as af-fect or trait, a density-volume relationship,like Jorge Silvetti's 'Colossal'", that speaks aforgotten language, like a lost tribe of theBeautiful suddenly come home; 6. rootless-ness, the severing of relations with slow anddeep unfoldings (the old-world swells of'ground' and 'place') and the reterritorializa-tion—inevitable if regrettable—onto the 'fast,cheap and out of control' ethos of late-mod-ern capital, demographics, and globalization.81

Yeager's third dictum (allow me to savethe second for last): Use all four dimensions.A poor pilot (and a medioere architect), one

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might say, thinks of space as a discrete mani-fold of two-dimensional sheets in a varietyof different axes and orientations. An aver-age pilot (and better architect) thinks in termsof three dimensions in continuum. In a dog-fight, however (or in the space of the latetwentieth Century), a precise and especially aplastic sense of time is critical. What mostpilots don't understand, Yeager teils us, isthat "by Controlling the throttle, they're Con-trolling time".91 Now time, of course, is notsimply one dimension among others, it isthe dimension out of which all other dimen-sions unfold. It is adjacent to everything, itpresses at every edge, assigns every threshold,opens onto every becoming. How long doesit take to get from point A to point B? Thatquestion is at the basis of modern materialspace, although not in the sense of a simpletranslatory trajectory. In a four-dimensionalmanifold, space, quite simply, is alive. PointsA and B are no longer simple coordinates ina Newtonian lattice ('simple location', inWhitehead's terminology), but vectors in aLagrangian mesh (Whitehead"s proto-'organ-ism'). What this means is that every move-ment drags local space along with it-localconditions with a high degree of correlationwith their surroundings-so that every dis-placement of location is simultaneously atransformation of kind. In the dogfight—anextreme activity par excellence, because timebecomes so material you can taste it—thevariables become so multiplied, that the veryconcept of aerial tactics essentially evapor-ates.101 All that is left is a very rapid game of"relative motion and time-distance prob-lems." This new Lagrangian space is one ofcompound correlations or, in aerial combat,of "multiple tactics." For example, with se-veral enemy and friendly aircraft in play,you must, in a given Situation, determinewhether you can take an enemy off yourwingman's tail even while another is alreadycoming, and gunning at you. You must com-pute the 'energy' differential in each "frame':can your relative motion get you into rängeto take you? In such a Situation, it must beremembered, speed determines every coordi-nate (not 'simple location'), yet velocity re-mains only a relative value. The game is toexploit differentials, and to produce themwhen needed, continually, and indeed liter-ally, out of thin air. For example, forcing anOpponent to overspeed is even more effectivethan tlying pirouettes around him. This logicexplains why the slower Russian and ChineseMiGs had tighter turning radiuses, why theyenveloped a different spectrum of traits or'materiality,' and why this made them lethalto many much faster aircraft. In encounterssuch as high-speed turns, for example, theappearance of significant G forces introduceda new internal envelope, with new tolerancesThat offered a new material dimension thatcould be exploited, a new envelope to befeathered or stretched. The envelope of fluids

that presents itself to the fighter pilot is notsimply one of multiple mobile elements-thediverse aptitudes of his own airplane, thepositions and energy levels of terrain, hori-zon, sky, sun, enemy, co-wingmen, e t c -whose coordination must be precisely tracked;it is one of compound relationships all woventogether in hyper-time. The architect whograsps this grasps the bizarre truth of boththe dogfight and of late capitalism all atonce: the agent who triumphs is the onewho makes best use of his aircraft and weap-ons within the constraints of its Performanceenvelope. One must fly one's airplane closerto the edge of the envelope (without exceed-ing it) than the opponent-History/ Capital-flies his/its. One materiality against another,in the same world, with freedom hoveringalongside disaster, just at the edge. Optimismand danger: two heads on the shoulders of aSingle beast.

This then brings us to the final problemof integrating gunnery into the flight sy-stem, and with it Yeager's final, most mysti-cal, dictum: Fly the bullet. Learning to seeand learning to shoot, it turns out, are ex-tremely similar problems, the latter at an or-der of magnitude and complexity a füll stepabove the former. Yet as we move up theladder of complexity, we also move up theladder of Integration: more elements in in-teraction but with a smoother overall shape.This smoothness actually derives from theintense directedness that is built into materialSystems. One could again invoke the theo-retical intricacies of the Lagrangian mesh,but for such a complex problem it is a dutyto develop a much simpler model. We areagain dealing with relative motion and time/distance computation: how to make the bul-let find the enemy aircraft, or rather, how tomake the bullet meet its target, in time andnot only in space...when that rendezvousmust clearly take place in the unknowablefuture! This was the same problem, at an-other level, on which Norbert Wiener hadworked during the Second World War andwhich led to the science of cybernetics. Butlong before the science of cybernetics therewas the art of cybernetics. Now that art re-mains superior to the science in most ex-treme (hypertemporal) situations and milieus,and so it is the art that both the pilot, andthe visionary architect, pursue. How, then,to fly the bullet? Well, Yeager was probablya natural: "In the midst of a wild sky, Iknew that dogfighting was what I was bornto do. It's almost impossible to explain thefeeling: it's as if you were one with that mus-

tang, an extension ofthat damned throttle...You were so wired into that airplane thatyou fiew it to the limit of its specs...You feitthat engine in your bones, feit it nibblingtoward a stall, getting maximum maneuver-ing Performance... achieved mostly by in-stinctive flying: you knew your horse.""'

No, this is not mysticism, it is computa-tional metallurgy. We all know that metalsare liquids whose flow has been arrested.Precisely where and by what sequence ofoperations we arrest them determines howthese metals will behave, what they looklike, and what qualities they possess. Thecloser we bring them to extreme states-thatis, liquid, compressed, or hot—the more qual-ities or properties they 'speak.' Arrestingtheir various flows is a process achievedthrough painstaking operations, separatingthis one off, letting these others continue onfor one or two more measures. Artisans inall materials follow and exploit the foundmaterial pattern and structure that presentsitself as 'potential'-the work for free spokenof above. Even fish tap the vortexes in theiraquatic environment in a similar way toachieve greater than 100% locomotor effi-ciency. Mostly, though, this work emerges atconfluences, where communication and in-formation exchange between Systems is atits most intense.

Yeager has taught generations of pilotshow to fly and be effective in the air. Thereis no doubt that these techniques, thesemodes of extracting effects from unfoldingconfigurations, are transmissible. Fly thebullet: "In order to lead the [enemy] plane[on its time path so your bullets will meetit], you have to be able to make the aircraftan extension of your body."121 Now the sub-merged art of cybernetics has always said:Your airplane is metal. Your flight path ismetal. (Our cities, no doubt, are metal!) Ofcourse the airplane is very complex metal,exceptionally highly organized and, of course,füll of life. Now that it is 'hot' enough-thatis, far enough from equilibrium and there-fore close to the envelope's edge—hadn't wereally ought to let its own metallic naturespeak? The entire encounter now, includingyour nervous system, is a metallic one(action potential cycles of Na+, K+ and C1-),and we must let its metal speak as well. Allthat remains is to enter the imbroglio andfollow the flow. But to do this we must firstforget the airplane.'31 As your focus opens,the airplane is drawn inside you (the universeis metal!)141 Yeager: "Don't even think aboutturning. Just turn your head or your bodyand let the plane come along for the ride.When you take aim, fly the bullet into posi-

That's it. Ignore the plane, just fly thebullet into position. The sweep of your headand the are along which your buttocksswing on the cockpit seat form a Single com-putational matrix with the tangent from

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your guns. Total continuity, total extensioninto time. There is no room here for numbercrunching, no room for Computers, no roomfor auto-override. "Forget planning," Kool-haas teils us; "Forget the plane," says Yeager.And we know they are right, because theessence of successful dogfighting, despiteradical technological developments, has notchanged since the World War I.161 WhenKoolhaas cautiously promotes "a forward-looking extrapolation" as an alternative tofixing rules, you know he is looking for justthis extension into the future and into time.Koolhaas's city is the metallic city (Karlsruhe—the tungsten and phosphorus of the cathoderay tube; Paris—silver bromide and Techni-color chemistry of optical image processing;Zeebrugge-the sheet metal of train, boatand automobile), it is the cybernetropolis of'the open' and of the ragged edge. To fly thebullet is to prime matter with action poten-tial (ionic differentials allowing Signals topropagate long distances through the nerv-ous System by exploiting local interactions),with continuums of influence transmittedahead of them likc shoek waves into time."When Koolhaas talks of the possibility ofgenerating Virtual congestion by eschewingthe usual radial connections in favor of cir-culation and of serial—or massively parallel-links in a megalopolis condition (what hecalls "bridge connections"), it is just this'action potential' in the urban axons that hcis exploiting. To fly the bullet is to endowthe material field with directedness—all that,and yet nothing mystical, nothing more.

Koolhaas commits to the bullet and itsmysteriously correlated trajectory when hecommits to the 'vitality,' however stränge, ofwhat is. Vitality is materiality, and materi-ality, like Nietzsche's Will to Power, mustalways engage other units of itself. OswaldBoelcke makes an important point aboutNature as well as dogfighting when, in dic-tum no. 6 he says, "If your Opponent diveson you, do not try to evade his onslaught,but fly to meet it." Koolhaas, to the horrorof many bystanders in the so-called "Resis-tance,1 has largely adopted this activist creed.

Vitality, then, is a field property, a quali-ty of active ensembles (of 'cxcitable media"in the biological sense, the 'wild sky' inYeager), and is not reduceable or locatablein the living system, be it that of the city,the organism, or the hyper-field of the dog-fight. Life may be defined as a pattern sus-taining itself over time, a control systemthat regulates a sequcnce of processes thatfollow mysteriously from one another. Inthis organismal view of things that, I wouldclaim, we see in both Yeager and Koolhaas,and indeed at every ragged edge through

which the future intrudes, there can be nohorror vacuii. The void, as Koolhaas recog-nizes, is the very source of novelty, of crea-tive potential, because it is both indetermi-nate and correlated (directed but not prede-termined). To fly the bullet is to allow thevector, once released, to inhabit itself; it isthe interval in the throes of becoming sub-stance. In the organismal view of the world,interval is substance, an active plastic me-dium projected ahead of the present, andwhich in turn recieves it. We do not know inadvance what it will be, because it is pureformation (potential) without form.

Only when architecture fully grasps theintuition of continuity and of relation as apragmatics and as a physics will it have be-come extreme. At that moment, however dis-tant, we may well find that, in architecture,the future did in fact begin with Koolhaas.

1) Major Gen. Fred J. Ascani, in Chuck Yeager,Yeager, (New York: Bantam Books, 1985).2) Yeager; Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff, (New York:Bantam Books, 1979).3) Yeager, who flew only winged aireraft (eventhe F-104 had seven-foot-long razor wings) orones that took off under their own power (notincluding the X-10 experiments of the 1940s),never actually flew beyond the absolute atmos-pheric boundary (280,000 feet), but he un-questionably prepared the way. He was the firstAmerican to probe the extreme edge of the NF-104's envelope (a conventional atmosphere-dependent aireraft) by flying it above 100,000feet, a test flight that all but eost him his life.Nonetheless, Yeager routinely took his studentsup beyond the first atmospheric boundary(70,000 feet) where the sky goes black and silentbut the air's molecular strueture still sustainsaerodynamic buoyancy—to give them a taste ofthe 'outside' that is, of space.4) Sant'Elia, Hilberseimer and certain early Sovietrevolutionaries are the only who come to mind.5) General Chuck Yeager, "How to Win a Dog-fight," Men's Health, November 1994. My thanksto Brian Boigon for alerting me to this article.6) 'Class four behaviour' in Stephen Wolfram;'edge of chaos' in Chris Langton and Stuart Kauf-mann; 'separatrices' and the 'catastrophe sets' inRalph Abraham and Rene Thom; 'bifurcation re-gimes1, and 'far from equilibrium states1 of chao-logists and thermodynamicists; 'singularities' inDeleuze and Guattari; 'flow' in Csikszentmihalyiand optimal experience theorists; 'one-over-f

Systems in signal theory; the State of 'highest orfulfilled tension' in Zen Buddhist disciplines...thelist is beautiful, and long.7) Jorge Silvetti, "The Seven Wonders of theWorld," a lecture delivered at the Rhode IslandSchool of Design, 1982.8) Koolhaas's own mot d'ordre here is 'fuck con-text.1 Cf. 'Bigness' in Rem Koolhaas, S,M,L,XL(New York: Monacelli Press, 1996).9) "How to Win a Dogfight", ibid. Emphasis sup-plied.10) Peter Kilduff with Lieutnants Randall H. Cun-ningham and William P. Driscoll, "McDonnell F-4Phantom", in In the Cockpit, ed. Anthony Robin-son (London: Orbis, 1979). My thanks to JesseReiser for bringing this text to my attention.11) Yeager, ibid.12) "How to Win a Dogfight", ibid.13) Similarly, in the art of juggling, the flexiblecontrol of multiple non-linear variables (hands,balls and their trajeetories) to maintain a solidpattern is properly achieved only by keeping theeye off the ball, that is, by letting touch, memory,and more importantly, natural rhythmic attrac-tors (coupled oscillator phenomena) deep in thebody's bio-schema take over regulating themovements. There is a musieal materiality thatjuggling calls out of the body. The strueture ofthese pattern relationships is just beginning toundergo experimental notation in what is knownas 'site swap theory.' See Peter J. Beek and ArthurLewbel, "The Science of Juggling," ScientifieAmerican, November 1995.14) "Not everything is metal, but metal is every-where. Metal is the conduetor of all matter...Nonorganic Life was the invention, the intuitionof metallurgy." Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1987). The entire discussion ofmateriality here is indebted to this work, especiallythe chapters 'On Nomadology' and 'The Geologyof Morals.'15) "How to Win a Dogfight", ibid.16) The RIO (radio intereept officer), who sitsdirectly behind the pilot in most advanced fighterstoday and who is responsible for managing theweapons Systems, has an entirely computerizedcockpit. In front, however, Computers are oftenlittle more than a liability; in aerial combat therenever has been such a thing as a pushbutton war.Even today, bomber pilots seek maximum overridecapability against automated pilot funetions,giving the pilot maximum control over critical'edge' maneuvers. The role of Computers, moreoften than not, is to filter and minimize the flowof numerical data to the pilot's nervous system.1 7) Kinematic wave theory, applied to traffic flowstudies, has shown that pulses, or traffie shockwaves, form on highway traffic clusters. Thesewaves travel backward or forward along the flowentirely independent of, and at a speed greaterthan, that of any individual automobile or thevelocity of the group flow.

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On 'Generic City'Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelmp.76

How does one treat a text that shadows itsobject, the Generic City, so closely that it hasno object of its own? Even on reading it asecond time, one can find hardly any meansof orientation - apart from the numberedthemes - for finding one's way around inthis text or for dealing with it analytically.Furthermore, too evidently it stages itself, itputs a higher value on speed than on reflec-tion or argumentation. The Statements fol-low one after another, seamlessly, withoutany paragraphs, like a breathless entreatywhich does not want to let the reader out ofits talons, and certainly not to give him timeto reflect, to question, to take a single stepto the side. All one can do is take a step tothe side on one's own initiative and let itrun by as Performance.

1. As far as style and tone are concemed, weare dealing here with the literary genre of themanifesto. This is where the deliberately lit-erary, the montage, the lightning transitionfrom exact observation to pseudo-meta-phorical, the fragmentary, the breathless, therenunciation of any clarification or explana-tion originate from. To that extent, what isat issue is the nth futuristic manifesto.

This newest Koolhaasian manifesto de-mands once again the abandonment of anyintellectual commitment to objectivity orconcreteness, place, identity, knowability,resistance, difference, rupture; instead, it de-

mands yet again more speed, more forgetting,more arbitrariness, more derailment. Thismuch one knows if one has read anythingby Koolhaas before or heard anything abouthis work. But the tone that is set here is some-thing eise again. The manifesto self-destructsin the same measure that it unfolds over thecourse of a given number of pages. In lightof the feigned rational order of the chaptersand theses numbered progressively, it disin-tegrates into unalloyed, consciously brutalcaprices merely pasted together - or rather,caprices in the sense that Goya employedthem, intellectual phantoms which look somuch like the world that we know - that themanifesto, i.e., the advance notice of thefuture and Koolhaas' own role as successorto Marinetti, Breton, Duchamp, Scheerbartand so on, championing the civilization ofthe new order, renders itself basically super-fluous.

It is not that the manifesto does not takeitself seriously. But it does not master its lit-erary technique. It alternates so wildly be-tween satire and proclamation, between cyni-cism and euphoria, that one notices that it isout of control. It is not so much that the textshifts deliberately; rather it is grimacing in-voluntarily because it is collapsing under theweight of that which it has taken upon itself.For, when it comes to the point, what exactlyis Koolhaas manifesting? The meanness andmalevolence of the cities that await us, or thebeauty of indifference, of Generic Cities, inwhich any variety of baseness, social, econ-omic or aesthetic, can be cultivated at will,unhindered in its inventiveness by any kindof intellectual scruples, architectural bonds,typologies or genres, social planning, buildingcodes, lamentation about the public sphereand so on and so forth.

Grimace means: the genre of the manifestoand the author's intention are at odds withone another. By no longer being able todistinguish between them - and he doesnot want to, either - Koolhaas destroys thedemonstrative sense of the manifesto genre,which says that the present is bad and thefuture has to be quite different; therefore,let us demolish the present. If, however, thefuture is already that which constitutes thepresent, then the only use for the persuasivepower inherent in the genre can be to directthat banal sandwiching together of presentand future, i.e. the impossibility of change,hope and so on, against those who havenot yet understood, who do not want tounderstand that there is nothing more tochange. If the present day is right, the entireemphasis of the text thus turns, in completeidentification with the aggressor, againstthose intellectuals who have not yet pro-gressed that far - a manifesto in the Serviceof the Status quo, against the retrograde,wrongheaded people who still speak of acity that has long been inexistent, both inJapan and in Singapore, but in Europe andthe United States too.

2. It seems to me that the reason for theKoolhaasian speed is to be discerned moreclearly in this distorted, satirically derailedtext than in any other that I have read todate. Because it has reached such lightningspeed here, accelerating from zero to onehundred and immediately running up againstthe outermost wall that a European can runup against, that of voluntary loss of identity,something of his motivation is revealed,both in the midst of it and beyond it.

From a town planning perspective, it is amanifesto of a receptive and architecturalmedia culture utopia - but if it is a utopia,then it is one in a thoroughly modern sense,that of a future obviously already burnt-out.Hope feeds on despair. The hope is to be ridat last of this damned European fixation onloss and mourning for destroyed identity andto become one with that which is global andup-to-date: to be able to say 'yes'. To thisextent, the utopia of being generic is a glo-balized new edition of Venturi's Learning ofLas Vegas with far eastern colours - wherebyVenturi is particularly interesting as a com-parison because as an architect, he has re-fused the consequences of his intellectualPosition and cannot endure Las Vegas andLevittown, either as an architect or as a con-sumer.

Koolhaas performs his European mourn-ing for the loss of identity of the cities muchmore cleverly and ruthlessly. He knows, inview of the example of Venturi, that onecannot separate intellectual position fromarchitecture if one wants to be quit of thesuffering that he is combating. But of coursehe is suffering too. Only someone who issuffering from it can describe so cuttinglythe loss of identity of the old city centresand celebrate the non-identity of the periph-ery. It is for this reason alone that he fails soflagrantly in his attempt to make the globalcity convincing for himself as the beautifulcity, the interesting, creative, rieh city,which produces above all architecture.

It is precisely for this reason that, con-tinually accelerating he plays the role of thechampion of civilization of a new age ofnon-identity, when homesickness has beenovercome. What is sad about the present textis that Koolhaas runs away and ahead soquickly that he has already arrived; he can-not offer us anything that he has withheldany more, no scraps of utopia are left, noscraps of possible future fulfilment, nothingbut the present itself. Why should we makeany effort then? It is sufficient to let every-thing go on as it is. What is left then has

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nothing to do with the city, it is the salvagingof architecture as a field of aesthetic activity,as bill board (I havc already said what I havcto say on this subject elsewhere, in theCentrum-Jahrbuch 1995).

3. Can nne seriously speak of cities like this?Many of Koolhaas' metaphors are apt, butsomehow he loses sight of the main issue. Inthe satirical universe of the city caprice thatKoolhaas designs point by point, neither realcities nor real people appear. As far as thebuilt aspect is concerned, it is only partialdomains, fragments of cities, and as regardsthose who live there and use the city, thelived city, we are dealing basically with cityidiots, with celluloid people, with city dwell-ers who, as cockroaches or mice, sweat panic,chaos, blood and sperni on elaborate filmsets. There is no such city, either in Europeor anywhere in the developing countries.Bombay and Calcutta are not absurd. Theyare like the other gigantic cities in south-east Asia, Africa, Central or South America,cities of tremendous social strength, in whichmasses of humanity - for whom there is nobasis of existence anywhere eise any more -survive, economically and socially, under anincredible pressure of poverty.

The European cities bear no resemblancewhatsoever to these tropes. We have theabsurdity of the hollow touristic centres andthosc of the airport settlements; in the largercentres, we have the short-cireuiting ofcentre and periphery upon which Koolhaas'whole videoelip is based. But it is only byfilmic means, through continual cutting andisolating and concentrating, that the spec-tacle of the city that is pending has beenevoked. The real city areas, selfishly over-taxed, but also defended, lie between centreand periphery. There, city for city, millionsof people transform the Programme of glo-bality and locality, of difference and simul-taneity into everyday lives which have manyflaws, but with nothing absurd about fhem.

But Koolhaas does not live in these cities.He lives and works in the centre and theperiphery, at mcgamalls. As a person, he in-habits airports. Fine. It is his choiee. But whydoes he revile the real cities, then? Why doeshe despise the stupidity of urban politicaldecisions, the stupidity of tourists? If he isthe only one to whom the new global city ispresent, and who is really up-to-date as aplanner, why does he still have the problemthat it would be more reasonable to planeverything as the Professional, Rem Kool-haas, proposes year by year? Basically, then,Koolhaas is not polemicizing at all againstthe rest of us who have not yet got so far,but against himself. Doing violence to him-self in the process, he has ruthlessly identifiedwith the new instant city, and yet he cannotcome to terms with the fact that these Asianglobal cities just grow like wildfire, and notin the style of the functionally and aesthet-ically organized space of Piranesi that Kool-haas projeets onto the real globalizcd cities.He too is frustrated, he too is not on con-tract to all the world city Councils, he too isnot listencd to, he too is fighting on thelosing side of reason. Why is he straining tobe the forerunner? Come back, sit downwith us on the benches in the waiting roomsof political and administrative ignorance,and let us reflect upon the reason for thesestupid benches.

4. In conclusion, a judgment oftaste. Theperson who leans so far out of the windowobviously wants to be seen in erotic under-

wear, or at the very least, reviewed in thefeuilleton style. Koolhaas' projeet of makinghis dilemma of the overtaking of the globalplausible through aesthetic acceleration hasfailed - at least as text: exaggerated speed,the commercial art of the filmmaker - heshould relinquish his dream of writingscreenplays.

Translated by Fiona Greenwood

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