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New Babylons: Urbanism at the End of the MillenniumAuthor(s): Sanford KwinterSource: Assemblage, No. 25 (Dec., 1994), pp. 80-81Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3171388 .

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assemblage 25

N e w Babylons:

Urbanism a t

t h e E n d o f

t h e Millennium

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ii............................L

Radioastronomy antennas from

Michelangelo Antonioni, RedDesert,1964. Film Duemila.

Assemblage5 ? 1995bythe MassachusettsInstituteofTechnology

80

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New Babylons

The sinews of modernity maybe dis-

cerned in three succinct and interwoven

social processesof nearlyidentical ori-

gin: the processof rationalization,the

process of industrialization,and the

more concrete process into which the

latter two are subsumed, that of urban-

ization. Yet these forces are all too

readilyassociated in the historical mind

with the specific upheavalsof the late

eighteenth and nineteenth centuriesalone, too rarelywith the more bizarre

and idiosyncraticdevelopments of our

own contemporaryworld. Indeed, a greatdeal of our intellectual life during the

last thirty yearshas actually sought to

minimize awareness of the intricate and

increasinglysubtle continuities that

these fundamental social forces repre-sent through their stubborn, if increas-

ingly invisible, persistence. The recent

bankruptciesof two important but ob-

fuscating intellectual movements - the

so-called postmnodernist hilosophy, on

the one hand, and on the other, theretreat within our plastic traditions to

increasinglyhollow formalismsof "style"- are a sign that a window is now open-

ing up through which we may again

apprehend,perhapswith a new clarity,the systematic playof forces that has

alwaysdriven the historical transforma-

tions of social, economic, and mental

life. The study of the results and impli-cations of these processes,of their move-

ment, strife, and intermixing, is what is

here referred to as "urbanism.

"NewBabylons"

s the title of a new

section that will appear regularly n

Assemblage.It will be dedicated to chart-

ing out, in as ccumenical a wayas pos-sible, the cmergcnce of that new

modality of twentieth-century civiliza-

tion known as the metropolis. The term

urbanismwill be used here rhetorically,as if to summon back into robust exist-

ence a type of textual practicethat

subsists today only in the frailest form.

Indeed, what we seek ideally is to revive

the urbanismof the essay (discursiveor

graphic), the urbanism of the specula-tive historical or philosophical treatise,or in a phrase,the semi-"delirious"

urbanism of ideas, as a vital alternative

to the present ultranarrow,hyperpro-fessionalized, sterile urbanisms of the

clericaldisciplines. No longer content

with the milquetoast urbanism of merelyremedial design propositions, nor with

the camp urbanism that transforms the

advancing, often savage deprivalsof the

modernization process into cult objects

(that is, suburbs,nets, edges, and

spectacle), what we seek is agenealogicalurbanism that both invents and un-

earths embedded histories-in-the-mak-

ing and through such invention

transfiguresand transvalues the very

landscape on which it operates.

The inauguraltext in this section, byLars

Lerup,is one that

mightbest be

described as a "paraliterary" ork(in the

sense that this term has been applied to

the later workof Roland Barthes), a text

that functions as a type of early

portolano of the late-century metropolisin that it sketches out, with no pretenseto exhaustive projection, a provisionalseries of actantial characters(generativedramatic structures);fixes privileged

points of urban threshold and rupturewhere affects naturallycluster in the

landscape;establishes an inchoate lexi-

con of the increasinglyabstract and

creolizedobjects (that is,

initial"corrup-tions" that emerge into primaryuse)

that punctuate the new urbanfield; and

most important of all, supplies the above

elements with a set of algorithmsthat

link them into a mobile syntax of proce-dures, routines, and events. The text is

remarkablenot only for its expository

style (it seems an almost promiscuous

amalgam of Ballard,Gibson, Banham,

Baudrillard,even Carl Sagan, not to

mention Lerup'scareer-long guide,

Foucault) but for the unity and original

ity of its analyticalmachine: Lerup'sHouston is a marvelously ntegrated

metabolizing beast, an animal rife with

tropisms, habits, appetites, exudations,

cadences, and transient life cycles. The

mysterious and complex "stimdross" s,

moreover, in Lerup'sview, an active

concept that targets the city-objectobliquely as a fulminating ecology of

multiple forces inhabiting ordersof time

now, not only orders of space. It gives

place to what is certainlythe most im-

portant concept of the essay:the prin-

ciple of the megashape,a dynamrnof

spontaneous continual efflorescence not

unlike the orgasmiccloud of Duchamp'untouchable bride -

self-generating,evental, entirely organismic,beyond all

totalizing grasp,yet pure solid geometryand nothing but.

This first installment of "NewBabylonsis an eccentric work,though only in

relation to the most diffident, bureau-

cratic forms of urbanismthat, in the las

two decades, have become the norm. In

reality, its spirit (like those that will

follow it in subsequent issues) belongsto another, confident, if sporadictradi-

tion that includes the work of Mumford

Banham,Virilio,and Koolhaasas much

as that of de Toqueville, Simmel, We-

ber, Benjamin,and Foucault. Yet argu-

ably, it is still art forms specificallyof

the cinema and of literature - that hav

providedthe most

compellingurbanist

archive that the twentieth century has

produced, and it is to their oblique and

infinitely rich documentaryspirit that

we have here attempted, and wish in the

future to continue, to adhere.

SanfordKwinter

81