I don’t know much about utopian (or “visionary”) architecture other than what I’ve seen in galleries and read about in passing, but I get the impression that utopianism played a bigger role in 20th century architecture than in literature. Le Corbusier’s impossible megastructures loom large, appropriately enough, and, perhaps in response, a number of groups produced interesting, experimental utopian designs (e.g., OAM’s “Exodus, or Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture” and the Ant Farm’s various projects). Then there’s the Archigram Group: http://www.archigram.net/projects_pages/walking_city.html.
When I first started reading about the Archigram group’s plans from the 1960s, I assumed that it was all a bit tongue-in-cheek—something like one of the Yes Men’s put ons. Using a mix of collage, drawing, and blueprint, Archigram projects things like cities of disposable architecture or customizable towers made of standardized parts. I read it is as one part capitalist critique, one part ambiguous utopia, and one part retro-futurist romp. But, no, one quickly realizes that Archigram’s utopias are unambiguous, that this is a celebration of capitalism rather than its reductio ad absurdum. Archigram’s visions serve as perfect exemplars of what Lefebvre terms “abstract space,” a homogenous yet fragmented space that represents the triumph of exchange value over use value. In Archigram’s world, each room or building is a prefabricated capsule, gasket, tent, or vehicle that can be bought, reconfigured, moved, or switched out at will. Whereas the Modernist architects looked to the sphere of production for their inspiration (i.e., factories), Archigram is inspired by the sphere of consumption; contra Le Corbusier, Archigram claims that the building is “an appliance for living in.” And so, in this endless exchange, there are no stable places or places with enduring significances. Instead, homes, villages, and cities are constructed and dismantled on a temporary, ad hoc basis. Archigram’s utopians are animated first and foremost by the consumerist freedom of choice: in the future we will be able to buy the shiniest new spaces, discarding the old ones whenever expedient. As a result, Archigram’s utopia appears like the Situationist city’s devil twin.
Archigram makes no apologies—its ideology quite explicit. For Archigram, emancipation is defined as the following:
Goodies: more obvious fruits of high living standard plus obvious mass-production. Fruits of success / fruits of choice. The power to choose. Customizing the mass-produced object. Art customizing. The individual’s effect upon his [sic] environment. Water/underwater as sport/fun/English ‘playing about in boats’ Choice of wardrobe Switch-on fun. In the brain fun. Hobbies. Airplanes. Moon probe. Personality. Oddballs. Simulated individualism. Pastiche styling as fun. (78)
Emancipation, then, is a choice between a series of pre-given menu choices, induced differences within the capitalist system: “Have it your way!” The road to this (false) utopia is through a sort of techno-fetishism: societal ills are simply technical problems, “man vs. the machine,” that can be sorted out through innovation and conscientious, consumer-oriented planning and design. However, Archigram’s utopian potential remains unexhausted. Archigram’s utopia is not merely compensatory or ideological. It has an unspent subversive charge to it and I think Adorno might help to show why.
(I’ve only read Negative Dialectics in excerpt, so hopefully someone will tell me if I have it wrong.) As I understand it, Adorno’s negative dialectic involves discovering the nonidentity between the concept and the object. According to Gillian Rose, Adorno’s notion of the concept is synonymous with the predicate: “the man [the object] is free [the concept].” In this case, Adorno (drawing on the old Marxist playbook) would point out that “the free man” has only obtained political emancipation, as well as the “freedom” to sell his labor-power to capitalists. The concept “freedom” therefore remains unfulfilled: the man is still constrained by economic necessity, is unable to control the conditions and product of his labor, etc. etc. (Think of George W. Bush’s abuses of the concept “democracy” versus, say, the promises held by Laclau and Mouffe’s “democratic imaginary.”) Analysis of an ideological use of the term “freedom,” then, points toward the utopian connotations contained within the concept, even if they are only grasped negatively by their failure to be achieved. If we use this schema, utopianism is about creating imaginary objects that better fulfill their concepts. For example, a utopia might replace the formal equality of a capitalist democracy with a true equality where everyone has equal access to the means of production. Here, the imaginary object is better reconciled to the concept of equality than the real one. Using this method, utopians critique both the object and its concept as they exist in the present system. However, Adorno would undoubtedly point out that the utopian object always fails to become completely unite with the concept; there is always some remainder that indicates the utopia’s limitation. This persistent nonidentity is not simply the mark of utopia’s defeat; it is also a spur to further utopianism, further reevaluation of the object and its concept.
Under this framework, Archigram attempts to better fulfill the concept of consumerist freedom and, in the process, shows both the inadequacy of its object—Fordist capitalism—and the poverty of capitalist concepts of choice. This double move draws our attention to further utopias that might instantiate notions of freedom from restraint and freedom to play and create more fully.
This dream remains unrealized and, instead, we are living in something more like Archigram’s utopia than even their blueprints. A number of theorists have observed that, in a tentative and atheoretical way, utopias prefigure future solutions to the problem of their moment. Archigram’s science fiction becomes material reality under the regime of flexible accumulation. Like Archigram’s groovy denizens, the Post-fordist workers experience both increased autonomy (of a sort) and increased contingency or precariousness. And while space is not yet a cheap, throwaway commodity, it is (was?) the subject of intense speculative trading.
