Architecture of Preservation: On Neoliberal Time

Architecture of Preservation: On Neoliberal Time Ross Exo Adams Architecture and the Neoliberal Turn, Kenny Cupers and Helena Mattson EAHN conference 2016, Dublin Architecture/Preservation Neoliberalism, in Hayek’s imaginary, is ‘living thought’.1 More than any speciic economic agenda, political ideology or social regime, ‘neoliberalism’ has come to name a sweeping mode of existence – a rationality that increasingly shapes all spheres of our collective experience of the world, operating at both the general level of policy and law and at the level of individual subjectivity. A wave of architectural scholarship has begun engaging with neoliberalism, reading into architecture its broader socio-economic contours. Yet in doing so, it all too oten tends to frame its critiques around a host of established arguments about neoliberalism (privatization, withdrawal of the state, inancialized capital, etc.), most of which tend to invite critical examinations of the immediate present. Such critiques harden a certain understanding of neoliberalism as a stand-in for a multitude of particularities, 1 his is an interpretation Michel Foucault made of Hayek’s work on (neo)liberalism. See Foucault, Michel. 2008. he Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures in the Collège de France, 1978-1979. Eds. Michel Senellart, François Ewald, Alessandro Fontana and Arnold I. Davidson. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador/Palgrave MacMillan. 218-219. whose overall consistency remains decentralized and heterogeneous, and thus neoliberalism can only be known through the contingent appearance of events, processes and policies that it unrelentingly produces. Yet arguably some 80 years into our neoliberal present,2 it is perhaps high time to consider that it is precisely in the heterogeneity of these efects that a more coherent and generalized rationality has in fact constituted itself – one that we can retroactively say thrives on change and instability.3 As recent scholarship has argued, neoliberalism should be understood not as the efect of a new governmental form, but rather as a kind of unconsciously produced governmentality constituted by its cumulative efects – the more or less coherent result of countless policies, mechanisms and measures whose overall efect, we could say, is a generalized rationality. Indeed, if we understand neoliberalism in this way, it will likely demand new modes of critical interpretation. To this end, architectural discourse, I believe, can yield a crucial insight into the broader understanding of neoliberalism. To interrogate architecture in a neoliberal world may require that we turn the question around: in other words, rather than ask how architecture operates as a signature of speciic neoliberal policies or as an instrument of the market, we may instead need to question how the status of architecture itself has changed to propagate this new rationality. What new capacities have been invested in architecture to assist in the neoliberalization of society? In this paper, I would like to consider one way in which architecture works as a fundamental actor in this process, examining how it participates in new processes of subjectivation.4 More precisely, I’m curious to look at how architecture has begun to take part in the construction a new, non-modern temporality, whose corresponding proposals articulate a capacity for architecture and urbanism to preserve the present conditions of life in a world increasingly characterized by unstoppable change. If modernity invented ‘progress’ as a device to instrumentalize history, accelerating the present towards a teleological future, then this new temporality arrests this movement by impoverishing both past and future, producing a stasis of a blinding, unending present. In this vein, I’d like to relect on the notion of preservation; not so much in the preservation of architecture (which has arguably blossomed under neoliberal society), but rather in tracing what we could call an architecture of preservation. With this, I want to suggest that critical research into architecture can expose the more elusive, phenomenological dimensions through which neoliberalism conducts itself. his line of thinking has only recently begun to emerge around issues like ‘environmentality’,5 or ‘ontopower’ 6 yet within architectural discourse, it stands to open more far reaching critiques of neoliberalism as a spatio-political rationality that, in turn, poses new questions about the status of architecture today. 2 Foucault argues that the history of neoliberalism begins with the ordo-liberals of post-war Germany, roughly dating this economic ideology from the early 1930’s. See Foucault. 2008. he Birth of Biopolitics. See also Dardot, Pierre and Christian Laval. 2013. he New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society. Trans. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso. 3 Ibid. 4 See chapter 9 in Dardot & Laval. he New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society. 255-299, and Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2014. Signs and Machines. Trans. Joshua David Jordan. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). 5 Gabrys, Jennifer. 2014. “Programming environments: environmentality and citizen sensing in the smart city” In Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 2014 32(1). 30-48. 6 Massumi, Brian. 2015. Ontopower. Durham: Duke University Press, or Stiegler, Bernard. 2014. Symbolic Misery. Cambridge: Polity Press. he Eden Project It may be impossible to mark this architectural tendency with any precise point or origin. However, there is a particular project – he Eden Project – that I’d like to look at, which might help to open up our understanding about neoliberalism as a regime that both produces and manifests itself through a new temporality. Designed by Grimshaw Architects in 1996, and opened to the public in 2001, the Eden Project is an educational tourist attraction built as a new kind of botanical garden. he predominant architecture of the project is a series of contiguous, Buckminster-Fuller-inspired geodesic domes, a central wooden exhibition building – the so-called ‘Core’ – that appears to mimic a certain leaf structure and the visitor center, all of which cling to the topography of a former clay pit. Its departure from traditional botanical garden comes both as a result of the scale its interiors achieve and in the architectural strategy employed: Behind the vast arrays of pillow-like cells of inlated, semitransparent ETFE skins, the ‘soap bubble’ geodesic domes span hundreds of meters across the deep site, creating sweeping, luminous interiors. Collectively, they form two main structures inside which they house the main attractions of Eden: two ‘ecosystems’, one a rainforest and the other, a ‘Mediterranean’ landscape. he use of a geodesic structure serves two purposes: the irst is to create a large-span structural system that can simultaneously manage the highly uneven site. he second is to produce a ‘recessive’ architecture – an enclosure which, in its scale, clearance, span and lightness, allows its visitors to become immersed in the worlds it contains: it is at once interior and exterior; both boundary and ‘artiicial sky’.7 he Eden Project is decidedly an educational venture. While reinterpreting the botanical garden as a set of ‘ecologies’, it narrates its immersive space with directed footpaths, learning stations and larger botanical installations, all of which help to choreograph a certain pedagogical understanding of ecology. Yet it is not simply a matter of conveying various facts about ecological systems that Eden achieves. Populated by otherworldly objects and mythical follies, Eden, as its name suggests, dwells in the imaginative sphere, reconstituting ecology as both a timeless category and one which, because threatened today, is also timely. he sensorial atmospheres in the 7 Pearman, Hugh and Andrew Whalley. 2003. he Architecture of Eden. London: Transworld Publishers. 8. geodesic biomes opens a vast imaginative space in which not only architecture, but history too can recede behind the thick, moist verdancy of idyllic natures reproduced within. Where architecture reappears, it is in a form reminiscent of a primitive hut, unburdened by the dredges of industrialized society, by politics or of course by history itself. Here, nature and humanity can remerge, outside of their modern opposition, as an ahistorical interdependency. Yet as a greenhouse, the biomes of Eden also promise to preserve their contents from the degrading world outside of its translucent skin. As a project, it proposes a technocratic agenda where a hi-tech architectural technology can at once curate the discourse around what ‘nature’ signiies (utility, productivity, systems, circulations, relations of dependency, etc.) and be used to construct the technologies through which nature can be created. Unlike previous botanical gardens, Eden’s emphasis rests on its role of educating the public about that which it, at the same time, intends to preserve. Of course, one might suggest that such an architecture of preservation predates Grimshaw’s soap bubbles by almost half a century in the work of Buckminster Fuller himself – work that directly inspired Eden in the irst place. Surely such ideas of preserving humanity against the crises of imminent ecological collapse or the fallout of “neighboring regions’ atomic explosions”8 drove him to imagine schemes in which a geodesic technology could be employed to enclose entire cities. Much like our present, the popular awareness of crisis loomed large amidst a new awareness of ecology and the Cold War. And like the Eden Project, a similar ethos of technocratic, ecological stewardship courses through Buckminster Fuller’s later work, particularly in his seminal text, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth of 1968.9 Despite these resemblances, there is a stark conceptual diference between the two projects that lies not in the diference of their respective content, but in the temporalities that structure each one. Buckminster Fuller’s entire approach is conditioned by a strong presence of futurity coupled with a utilitarian understanding of the past. In the opening paragraphs of Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, he introduces the agenda of this text around a science of prognostication of the near future, of which he claims to have some expertise. History, for Buckminster Fuller, presents itself as an assemblage of data, available to the discerning scientist which, in turn, can be put to work toward makings a prognosis of the future. He then sets out to build a world history, whose force is an evolutionary capacity invested in technological innovation. Change, in his temporal structure, is not ‘arithmetical’, but ‘geometrical’;10 that is, it accelerates toward a rationalized future, giving the present a certain 8 Buckminster Fuller, Richard. 1965. “he Case for a Domed City” In St. Louis Post Dispatch. September 26, 1965. 39-41. Buckminster Fuller, Richard. 1969. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 9 10 Buckminster Fuller. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. p. 37. ungraspable quality. Instead, the present is a kind of hinge around which a universal history turns, pivoting the past (scientiic diagnosis) into the outlines of a desired future (visionary prognosis), the urgency of which is driven by an evaporating sense of the present, known only through its perceived appearance as crisis. his is a temporal structure that we can trace from the late eighteenth century developing into the nineteenth, where the introduction of ‘progress’ would make visible a futurity beyond that which rational prognosis alone could help shape. While evermore unknown, the future would be preempted through visionary schemes produced in the rush of an accelerating present.11 his is why Buckminster Fuller can propose a single dome over a city – an idea bound to a techno-positivism that frames itself around an identiiable futurity. In this structure, a trope like ‘progress’ permits the utopian suggestion that the problems of the present have their solution in singular techno-spatial transformations. While, preservation of the human species may be an outcome of Buckminster Fuller’s scaleless architecture, it is clearly one which operates in a modern temporal structure. Turning to Eden, we would no doubt ind it a diicult task to map Buckminster Fuller’s universal time onto the architecture and contents of Grimshaw’s complex. Indeed, with Eden, we have a wholly diferent temporal register at play – one which inverts the former. To start with, it is hard to pin down either a clear futurity at work in Eden or how it speaks to any legible sense of the past. Unlike Buckminster Fuller’s visionary domes, Eden’s appear within the world of spectacular, iconic architectures and are thus emptied of any ‘visionary’ capacity. Instead, they stand as replicable prototypes available for franchising.12 Eden trades a future-oriented agenda of proposition for a radically non-future oriented program of global education. Caught somewhere between tourist attraction and a pedagogical medium, Eden produces a bizarrely vague futurity (if at all) through an implicit extension of the present in perpetuity. his is perhaps why crisis, while arguably the very reason the project exists, is oddly absent from this mystical Cornish valley. Crisis is palpable only as an implicit igure which stands outside the space and time of Eden, invisible, yet presses in on it from all sides – the delicate pressure which inlates its PTFE façade. Likewise, if there is a past that Eden draws upon, it is located in its otherworldly, fantastical landscape of surreal follies and primitive architectures. If it depicts a history at all through these objects, it is one emptied of a legible ‘world history’ of the sort Buckminster Fuller responded to, and seems instead to reside outside of history altogether. Such a pre-history resonates with the way in which Eden frames the ecological crisis of the present as one drained of the political – as a crisis naturalized through science and which can be attenuated with the managerial ethos of ecological stewardship. As a narrative, Eden reairms that it is not about what constitutes our present (i.e. history), but rather how to constitute it continually. Future and history both collapse in on a totalizing and continuous smoothness of the present. Eden, we could say, is a machine for the education of ecological conduct. Here too, the narrative of preservation takes on a decidedly more complex disposition than it may have within the modern temporal structure Buckminster Fuller’s work responded to. Eden represents not a device capable of preserving the human species in its biological consistency, but rather a cultural apparatus that helps to narrate an entirely new experience of time itself. What Eden intends to preserve is both nature and the conditions of our socio-economic present. It suggests a temporality devoid of both past and future – categories that appear irrelevant to the task of managing the conditions of a dynamic present. Unburdened by both history and future, Eden 11 See in particular Chapter 1 (“Modernity and the Planes of Historicity”) of Koselleck, Reinhart. 2004. Futures Past: On the semantics of historical time. New York: Columbia University Press. 12 Currently, there are plans to build another Eden center in Qingdao, China. See: https://www.edenproject.com/ eden-story/our-ethos/eden-in-china (accessed 2 March 2016). inscribes its urgency in the present as a solitary temporal reference point from which to experience the world: at once the omnipresence of crisis and that of its elimination. Preservation thus becomes indistinguishable from the permanent techno-ethical management of crisis. In a world that presents itself as one of uncontrollable change, our temporality can see only the present, producing an imaginary withdrawn into a melancholic desire to stay the same. Neoliberalism as a government of crisis How is this temporality aligned with neoliberalism? It seems unimaginable that such a radical inversion of the modern temporal structure could be attributable to the way in which the contours of our ecological crisis have begun to take shape in projects like Eden. One of the consequences of a rationality that thrives on volatility is that it normalizes conditions of utter precariousness that appear in the everyday experiences of our present. If, within a modern temporality, grounded in the universality of the nation state, past (‘world history’) and futurity (‘progress’) gave both a stable direction and sense to the present, today’s neoliberal temporality establishes its metrics of time in contingency: in a neoliberal world, the future is unknowable. Tipping points, thresholds, volatile market changes are always immediately relativized, surpassed by evermore unparalleled events. Contemporary time, we could say, measures itself by the constant experience of the unprecedented. Crisis, whether ecological, inancial or civil, is a igure not only normalized by this rationality, but one that is, in turn, its fundamental condition of existence. his is precisely why we can describe neoliberalism as a governmentality of crisis. As Eden shows, architecture has unwittingly played into this rationality. By displacing the historical conditions which have produced climate change, Eden re-presents it as a timeless and immersive condition made legible through its techno-ethical present. As a pedagogical construct, it helps, on one hand to individualize responsibility for the collective crises neoliberalism fuels, while on the other, to neutralize crisis, presenting it as an apolitical category of the perpetual present. As more and more projects today show, architectural imagery, spaces and technologies coordinate a similar narrative around crisis that naturalizes it as something uncontrollable, while at the same time redirecting its resolutions to the personal, techno-ethical modiications of everyday life.13 Oddly, like the geodesic architecture of Eden, whose ‘recessive’ qualities make it appear less and less visible, neoliberal governmentality also takes on a recessive appearance, withdrawing behind its immersive efects and afects.14 Conclusion ‘[Neo]liberalism’, as Foucault noted, ‘must be a general style of thought, analysis and imagination.’15 As Eden suggests, neoliberalism may be conditioned by a temporality that, in turn, cuts across and synchronizes the social, economic, political and spatial into a single rationality, where life and market become indistinguishable from one another. And it is here where architecture begins to play a key role. Yet although architectural scholarship’s recent engagement with neoliberalism has produced interesting results, it may be that it positions itself too timidly with respect neoliberalism, assuming it to be a category whose analysis can only emerge from other ields of expertise 13 See Adams, Ross Exo. “Notes from the Resilient City.” Log, no. 32 (2014): 126–39. 14 See for example Massumi. 2015. Ontopower. op. cit., or Stiegler, Bernard. 2014. Symbolic Misery. Cambridge: Polity Press. 15 Foucault. 2009. he Birth of Biopolitics. 219. (political economics, sociology, geography, etc.), thus presuming architecture to be a signature of an external economic agency at work – at most a tool of a very speciic economic or political activity (development, proit, gentriication, tax avoidance, etc.). Yet if we acknowledge that neoliberalism (unlike classical liberalism) is indeed a meta-economic rationality constituted by its efects, then our analysis of its impact on the practice and conception of architecture must invert this relation. We must see architecture as more than simply a passive artifact bearing traces of neoliberal logics, policies and processes, and one that actively participates in its unfolding. Far more than the unwitting victim of neoliberal policies, architecture today assists in the narration of neoliberalism as an apolitical, ahistorical condition of conditions bound more to life than to economic or political theory. Architecture translates the totalizing rationality of neoliberalism into a set of individually experienced contingencies made visible against a temporality of the absolute present. If we can begin to distinguish the bizarre quasi-logic of neoliberalism from its more overt efects, architectural criticism stands to reveal much more about what we might come to call the political phenomenology of neoliberalism.