[Place a direct, on-line order for The Architecture of Alienation from Amazon.com Books!]
[See, also, Clarke's Arguments in Favor of Sharpshooting, which can also be ordered from Amazon.com Books!]
In this "gathering of fugitives"[1] David Clarke offers what might be viewed, superficially, as an eclectic set of critiques focused primarily on architectural education and practice. However, a discerning layman perusing these essays will slowly (and, for most, disconcertingly) recognize that Clarke's critique is not disjoint and eclectic but consistent and coherent and in its essentials applies to virtually the full panoply of the contemporary "literate professions"[2] and their related programs of higher schooling.[3]
While I hardly qualify for (or aspire to) status as a disciple of Jürgen Habermas, I have long been impressed by Habermas's distinction, in Toward a Rational Society,[4] between "theory" and "practice." Historically, Habermas argues, "theory" was concerned with the "immutable essence of things," while the conduct of practical affairs was "pragmatically practiced according to traditional patterns of skill." The chasm between theory and practice was indeed bridged, but only in an indirect manner: Theory "obtain[ed] practical validity only by molding the manner of life of men engaged in theory." The capacity to comprehend (and engage in) theory, to engage in the search for the "immutable essence of things," provided an ethical orientation to practical action and thus represented a sociocultural qualification required of those whose practical actions would have consequences for others. Knowledge of theory provided the moral sanction for practical action, while practical action itself relied primarily on pragmatic, instrumental, technical qualifications which were quite unrelated to theory.
The contemporary conception of the relationship between theory and practice is quite different. Theoretical knowledge as the prerequisite for the ethical exercise of practical power has been superceded by theoretical knowledge itself as practical power. Habermas characterizes this as "the overhasty subordination of theoretical work to the ad hoc requisites of practice." A principal consequence of this "overhasty subordination" is that theoretical knowledge can have practical consequence without having moral force or relevance.[5] At the risk of oversimplification, this issue impresses me as at the heart of Clarke's critiques of professional education and practice.
Most succinctly, what Clarke describes is a profession, architecture, which has become progressively more insulated from and independent of its sociocultural context. Having, by whatever means, succeeded in severing any organic links to the broader culture, it is left to its own devices. If there exist imperatives which contemporary architecture cannot evade, these are entirely internal to the profession, i.e., there exist no external, non- or extraarchitectural laws, standards or constraints to which architectural imperatives must conform.
What is not frequently recognized, however, is that the internal imperatives made possible by the "emancipation" of a profession, in this case architecture, are fundamentally arbitrary. In the absence of an external referent, any imperative is possible, and the choice of one over another (e.g., of one "school" of architecture over another) is correspondingly arbitrary. Architectural education, in consequence, becomes simply a process of inculcation of (or indoctrination into) one set or another of these arbitrary, decontextualized imperatives.
Thus, Clarke argues, convincingly and disturbingly, that the imperatives of contemporary architecture are impervious even to physical laws: A "design" can exemplify the internal imperatives of a school of architecture even if it cannot be built, if it cannot stand even if built, and if it cannot be lived or worked in even if it is built and stands.
These issues are more directly addressed in Clarke's Arguments in Favor of Sharpshooting.[6] The first two pages of that volume set the tone with a devastating opening salvo in which Clarke focuses his sights on Robert Venturi's house for his mother ["designed [...] to contain global rather than local meaning (oversolved)[,] [...] [t]hat error [...] compounded by using very cheap materials and construction (undersolved), the enormity of it all supposedly made inoffensive by a patina of wit. But the problems don't cancel, being in different categories, and instead accumulate. Mrs. Venturi has been as silent as one would hope a mother would be on such an issue [...]] and on Mies van der Rohe's house "for a hapless doctor named Farnsworth in Plano, Illinois" ["much the same thing in reverse, without the wit, [...] it ended up in court."]. Clarke summarizes his indictments in captions to illustrations of these two quintessential examples of contemporary architecture:
Architecture as angst: aged widow Vanna Venturi's 1962 house by her son. Cardboard zips and zaps reflect 20th century existential miasma, including tortured stairs, for a woman likely seeking peace, quiet, and no stairs at all.
Architecture as scientific reduction: Mies van der Rohe's glassy box with no screens or air conditioning in the land of brutal winters and torrid summers and many, many mosquitos. Client Farnsworth sued.
In this volume, Clarke's first essay, "Investment vs. Consumption Spending in U.S. Architectural Education," provides more than adequate evidence of the fundamental ignorance of a practitioner whose education has not extended beyond that of the "professional architect"; his second essay, "French Revolutions: Architecture and the Government," suggests that the situation in France is, if possible, even worse.
Stated somewhat differently, Clarke's study of architecture comes to conclusions very similar to those which I am reaching with reference to contemporary science. Operationally and symbolically, for the United States the Second World War marked a major change in the social, political and governmental perception of fundamental science.[7] From a highly decentralized and invisible activity, of at best secondary and indirect interest and concern to government, fundamental science emerged as a major force in its own right, one which, it was argued, could (and should) be channeled by government to achieve specific social (i.e., governmental) objectives. Ideologically, this fundamental change in the perception of science was forcefully enunciated by Vannevar Bush in Science: The Endless Frontier,[8] which might be characterized as contemporary scientism's counterpart to The Communist Manifesto[9] of Marx and Engels.[10]
Thus, in an unfinished essay[11] I argue that there is a direct parallel between the perceived roles of "communists," as articulated by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, and of "scientists," as articulated by Vannevar Bush in Science: The Endless Frontier:
The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1847)
The responsibility for the creation of new scientific knowledge -- and for most of its application -- rests on that small body of men and women who understand the fundamental laws of nature and are skilled in the techniques of scientific research. We shall have rapid or slow advance on any scientific frontier depending on the number of highly qualified and trained scientists exploring it.
Vannevar Bush, Science: The Endless Frontier (1945)
Replace Bush's "scientific/scientist" by "architectural/architect" and the fit is very close.
With reference to science I argue that several paradoxical consequences of the institutionalization of the scientistic ideology can be identified:
First, and perhaps most paradoxically, the adoption and institutional realization of the scientistic ideology resulted in a loss of "motivation" for science. On the one hand, science (as portrayed by Bush, his associates and followers) was perceived to be of value because of positive scientific contributions to, inter alia, health, economic growth, public welfare and national defense (each of which was explicitly cited by Bush and was to be within the purview of his National Research Foundation, which would have primary responsibility for and authority over all scientific work relevant to each of these domains). On the other hand, direct state funding and management of science, by an agency designed for that purpose, served to sever the organic links between science and its exploitation which had characterized the earlier, decentralized system. Thus, under the guise of augmenting "exploitable" science, a gulf was created between science and those other activities which, it had been argued, justified and would benefit from the expansion of science.
Second, science was deinstitutionalized. The source of this deinstitutionalization has just been suggested: Financially, science became at least partially (and increasingly) independent of those institutions and sectors, academic and industrial, within which it was (and generally continued to be) pursued and by which it had been supported under the ancien r‚gime; while these institutions and sectors continued to provide the nominal locus for the majority of scientific work, their scientific segments, to the extent to which they became putatively "selffinancing" (through governmental largesse), obtained effective independence from their immediate institutional settings. It was in this sense that preexisting "organic links" to the other activities of these institutions/sectors (e.g., education, production) were effectively broken. This break was virtually complete in the case of the rapidly growing intragovernmental research agencies and of the newly established national laboratories, the latter of which were related in name only to the academic and industrial organizations under whose nominal auspices they were established; in both cases, financial support derived entirely from the federal government, the avowed functions were purely "scientific," and functional relationships to non- or extrascientific sectors and activities were virtually nonexistent.
Third, science became bureaucratized. Having been deinstitutionalized, freed of its integral, organic relationships to those broader academic and industrial institutions which had provided the locus for fundamental science, science became reinstitutionalized as, simply, science, with the superstructure of this quasiindependent science system provided by the bureaucratic institutions and associated mechanisms created by the state for purposes of administering the public funding of science. If science had previously been "governed" in a highly decentralized manner, through complex interactions between the scientific and non- or extrascientific activities/components of relevant academic and industrial sectors, on the one hand, and through equally complex interactions between and within the diverse components of the scientific system (disciplines, journals, invisible colleges), on the other, with the change in r‚gimes scientific governance became routinized and, to a significantly greater extent than previously, monolithic.
My reading of Clarke (in this volume and in Arguments in Favor of Sharpshooting) suggests that in each of these regards there is an interesting parallel in architecture, although precise manifestations in architecture differ from those in science. If only implicitly, Clarke's essays in this volume indicate that these parallels provide a fruitful focus for examination.
I have been acquainted with David Clarke since (I believe) 1982, when he commented extensively (and enthusiastically) on a "popular" column of mine.[12] We have corresponded sporadically (but not disinterestedly) since, and I look forward to continuing to benefit from the products of his insightful mind.
[1] Lionel Trilling, in the introduction to his A Gathering of the Fugitives (Beacon Press, Boston, 1956), refers to "what used to be called fugitive essays": "The old name seems appropriate even though it has never been clear to me just what fugitive essays were fleeing from." While Trilling suggests that these essays may have been fleeing from "unity" (which might be argued to be the case of Clarke's essays as well), my own guess is that these fugitives were at grave risk of disappearing, perhaps recollected but unavailable, eventually to be forgotten. As an example, I have often recalled a very insightful critique by Jacques Barzun of public support of the arts published in a generalist "middle-to-high-brow" journal sometime in the last decade, an article which, despite its devastatingly incisive commentary, I had not been able to locate on those occasions (notably in the context of the debate over National Endowment of the Arts funding of the Mapplethorpe and Serrano exhibitions) when I had been called upon to participate in discussions of this emotion-laden topic; only as a legislator confronting an "arts establishment" outraged by prospective state budget cuts and enjoying the resources of the State Library was I able to locate Barzun's "A Surfeit of Art" in Harper's (July 1986). This experience indicates the usefulness of such gatherings of fugitives as that which Clarke presents here. Having introduced the term fugitive, however, I might suggest that its more conventional usage may also be relevant: In light of the numerous oxen gored by Clarke in the following pages, he may well find that he has joined the confraternity of fugitives from the wrathful "justice" of putative peers and colleagues. [Return to Text]
[2] Here I use the term "literate professions" in the sense in which Kenneth R. Janson and I employ it in "Recruitment and Accomplishment in Fundamental Science: A Generalization of the 'Giants, Pygmies' Model," Technological Forecasting and Social Change 37/1 (1990), referring to those occupations in which performance is dependent on the practitioner's at least modest endowments of an array of diverse "talents" (e.g., analytical, creative and manipulative abilities). The literate professions are in contrast to professions in which performance depends primarily on the practitioner's endowment of a specific talent or talents. [Return to Text]
[3] This broader applicability becomes explicit in Clarke's essay in this volume on "The Marketplace and the Academy." [Return to Text]
[4] Basic Books, 1968. [Return to Text]
[5] It is interesting to note that this change in the conception of theory, from an activity concerned with the immutable essence of things to one which has direct practical force, involves a fundamental change in the perceived nature of theory as well as in the relationship of theory to practice. From insight, albeit partial, into "the immutable essence of things," theoretical knowledge itself become transitory. While individual observations may (but need not) be "immutable," the meaning or interpretation of these observations becomes provisional, tentative, subject to radical reformulation on the basis of future observations. While such radical reformulations occurred in the past, as in the revolutionary displacement of Ptolomeic by Copernican astronomy, these reformulations were the exception rather than the rule; most importantly, they did not undermine the subjective perception that scientific knowledge was concerned with immutable essences. In contrast, among adherents of instrumentally practical science, it would be difficult to find anyone who seriously believes in any immutable essence; contemporary theory is validated not by the insight it provides into the immutable but by its perceived usefulness, a usefulness which is at best temporary as new observations undermine existing theory. [Return to Text]
[6] Timber Press, Portland, Oregon, 1984. [Return to Text]
[7] For present purposes, I will not attempt a rigorous definition of the term "fundamental science." Operationally, as developed by Derek J. de Solla Price, "An Extrinsic Value Theory for Basic and 'Applied' Research," [in J. Haberer, ed., Science and Technology Policy, Lexington Books, Lexington, Mass., 1977], fundamental science is distinguished from "other science" (i.e., from extra- or quasiscientific activities of scientists) by the capacity of a purchaser to "order" the results of the latter, while this is impossible in the case of the former. Suffice it to say that fundamental science appears to embrace much of what is classified, e.g., by the National Science Foundation, as "basic research," probably also includes a large fraction of activities classified as "applied research," and constitutes an important activity even of many of the scientifically trained who are ostensibly devoted to "development," not to mention the "unmotivated," "pirate" activities of some frustrated academic administrators and governmental science bureaucrats. [Return to Text]
[8] Vannevar Bush, Science: The Endless Frontier, U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development, Report to the President on a Program for Postwar Scientific Research, Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1945. [Republished on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the National Science Foundation Act with an introduction by Alan T. Waterman, NSF director, Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1960.] [Return to Text]
[9] Although first published in 1848, The Communist Manifesto was presented by Marx and Engels at a London meeting of the International Working Men's Association in 1847. [Return to Text]
[10] Interestingly, while 70 years elapsed between the public promulgation of The Communist Manifesto in 1847 and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, the National Science Foundation Act of 1950 was passed only five years after the transmittal of Science: The Endless Frontier to President Truman. While I hesitate to speculate on the significance of the more rapid institutionalization of the scientistic ideology, my more daring colleague K. R. Janson has noted (in personal communication with the author) that "on an appropriately logged scale of compound growth of innovation, these gestations are equivalent[, and] indeed one could parameterize the process of acceleration with just these data." Thus, I offer *Janson's Law of Accelerating Institutional Realization of Ideological Potential*: "The period required for institutional embodiment of a newly enunciated ideology is contracting over time (from seventy years in 1847 and five years in 1945) at a compound annual rate of 2.657 percent." This law implies that the time required for institutionalization of a newly enunciated ideology is halved every 25 years and 270 days; thus, an ideology propounded in the year 2000 will achieve institutional embodiment in one year and fifty days, and institutional realization will occur only one day after enunciation of an ideology on the 312th day of the year 2223. One can only speculate (indeed, hope) that the period required for the dissolution of an institutionalized ideology may be contracting at a comparable rate. [Return to Text]
[11] "The Triumph of the Scientistic Ideology and the Sterilization of Talent" (in progress) is an adaptation and elaboration of a paper entitled "Science and the Social Exploitation of Talent," presented to a workshop devoted to the subject of "An Agenda for Science Policy Research," sponsored by the National Science Foundation's Division of Policy Research and Analysis in Washington, D.C., on 17 September 1987. Related issues are also addressed in my paper, "On the Economics of Fundamental Research," in John W. Sommer, ed., Higher Education and the State (Independent Institute, San Francisco, in press). [Return to Text]
[12] "Academic Science's Ambiguous Relationship to Technology, Education and Productivity," Chronicle of Higher Education, March 10, 1982, which I mention because of its relationship to much of the substance of this book. [Return to Text]
[Place a direct, on-line order for The Architecture of Alienation from Amazon.com Books!]
[See, also, Clarke's Arguments in Favor of Sharpshooting, which can also be ordered from Amazon.com Books!]