CRITICAL ACTION AND ACTIVE CRITICISM

For Critical Architecture, ed. Rendell Hill Frasier Dorian, Routledge, August 2006

 

The Ruddy Duck is an American species of stiff tail duck that was imported into England to decorate ornamental duck ponds. It escaped - of course - and is now thriving in the wild. Ruddy Ducks are closely related to a rare European species, the White Headed Ducks - so narrowly speciated, in fact, that the two can interbreed. The reaction of the biodiversity lobby has been to institute a program to kill every Ruddy Duck in the country. They say it is not a native species, ignoring the realities of Duck nationhood, which are not at all like our own. They don't say, though they might as well: we have to destroy the world in order to save it.
Could this action be construed as a work of architecture, involving as it does the manipulation of the material world to better suit us humans? The critical impasse is certainly familiar, confusing the ideal of a better world with the consequence of material action, which makes the world not a better place, but a different place. It is such a simple confection, that distinction, that one almost prefers the comfort of the confusion: surely the whole point of criticism is to make things better?
The genocide of the ducks is a critical action. It pursues an ideal. It is justified by a tautology - themed ‘conservation' - constructed in opposition to the previous tautology of technological expansion, whose enthusiasm for exotica bought the ducks here in the first place. But another kind of criticism could be written from inside the event: it would describe the capture and the escape of the ducks, the invasive character of hybridisation and the ever changing character of the biomass in a way that made the description itself the action. I'd call it an active criticism - and I'd say it was a more interesting proposition for the critic to engage in than analysis in service of an ideal. But then you may say: What use is a criticism that simply describes? And isn't anything destined to change the world - for better or different - being idealistic?
Perhaps the implicit idealism of criticism springs from the ambiguity of language itself. The simple possibility of translation, which implies a perpetually feasible, other version of what has just been written, and which serves us so well in our interminable human arguments about what to do next, is a problem in architectural criticism. Try as we might to construct unimpeachable tautologies, or measuring frames to judge our actions, there is a mismatch between the criticism and its subject, the material world; in which ambiguity disappears, and the simplest saw cut is effortlessly conclusive. We can chase certainty by emphasising history and typology, as the context-fond Frettonites do. We can employ the power of slogans, as the Koolhaasians do. We can even manipulate the numbers of the bottom line and call it the ‘real world'; but in the face of emergent nature it is all abstraction, as futile as the ethnic cleansing of the duck nation.

So what would an untranslatable, material literature that could do the job of active criticism be like? Painting could be such a thing, inescapably wound up with contexts and narratives as it is, but intensely local and partial at the same time. The contortions that painting has gone through to reclaim its material capacities from the idealism of the real world have already been mirrored in literature, from consciousness streams to minimalism - I think of the example of Gertrude Stein's beautiful Tender Buttons, which were an explicit attempt to write as Picasso painted. Concrete poetry is something else, sculpture by other means, concerned with internal architectonic correspondences and organisations: what I am looking for here is a critical literature that is active in the world around it. Stein's effort was to trap the impressions and associations that mediate the seeing of an object - is this the ether that pre quantum scientists used to describe the forces of attraction? And was that itself a naïve metaphor for what became in quantum physics the influence of the observer?
Pieces of writing can be materially active as all art is, traversing one's thoughts and sparking possibilities of further action. In spite of this, critical theory tends to come with its aspirations predetermined as part of the discourse, and with its tactics of oppositions, its undergrounds and its challenges to the mainstream, it hobbles itself. What more could we hope for in a critical writing that acted from inside its subjects, spurring their trajectories, wobbling their orbits and sharing in their evolutionary opportunism? And what would be the difference between this literature and the persuasive polemics that accompany the release of every new architectural event - those little spats between traditionalists and modernists, or between contextualists and iconographists, those emphasis wars that keep that real world turning?
If they were actual wars, it might be clearer. War is not the natural state of humans, but a sort of human skit on the dynamics of the natural state of the world itself - the driving holocaust of emergencies and extinctions that is the material history of the world. But what of the writing that is embedded in the fog, which happens inside the turmoil of the events themselves, as though writing about material action was writing about wild life events? What is that like? Can you imagine a critical writing that is without discrimination, because it can only see itself? That has no future, because each unfolding moment changes everything? That makes no assumptions, because survival crowds everything else out?
The neutrality this proposition requires might look like quiescence. Worse still, the partiality it paradoxically requires might seem like ignorance - so much so that anyone attempting to do it risks being accused of having no values. Indeed, there is something of a backlash going on against the kind of relativism I am espousing. How can you build a society without values? It says. And when I say: but I value everything - it says how can you determine action without discrimination?
I have no answer to that, except to say that action is action and determines itself. The material world is, as it has always been, the wild world, and this is the world an active criticism might be able to describe. After centuries of ring fencing and the worst kind of discrimination, the gift of this moment is to be returned to complexity, inside a dynamic of many simultaneous singular actions, unstable, unpredictable and peculiar: without balance, future or commonality. I think freedom is no longer a question of busting fences, but of choosing where to stand in the tumultuous roar of the emerging world. Why should one give up the possibilities of all that for the simple pleasure of being right?