a universalism for everyone

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could release some of the pressure of the lessproductive and confusing paradoxes that artconfronts us with today, and could evencomprise an attempt at accessing some of theemancipatory promises that got us here in thefirst place. A couple of texts from the last issueof e-flux journal may be of help here.

Disengagement

In issue #6, Marion von OstenÕs ÒArchitectureWithout Architects Ð Another AnarchistApproachÓ looked at how modernist urbanplanning projects in the French colonies, whilebuilt with the intention of liberating theirinhabitants, became inadvertently used tocontrol and limit their movement, mechanizingsubjects around a strict top-down logic ofcontrol.1 Though the architects of these projectsimagined themselves as gracious liberators, itseems as though they overlooked a crucial flawin the modern project: that no central plan is

really going to liberate anyone, much less onetransposed from one society onto another. As anatural consequence, inhabitants of thesebuildings and urban grids began to appropriatethese structures and, using improvised buildingpractices, absorbed the logic of the grid into onethat worked for them.

Von Osten suggests that their resolutioncomes from their breakdown into informal,negotiated systems of horizontal exchange inwhich universal modernist forms are abandonedaltogether, often by inhabitants who return thesenotions back to real life. In many ways, it seemsthis is the direction in which things are headed: ifmodernismÕs emancipatory promises are to haveany degree of sustainable relevance, it makes

much more sense to consider these promises notas something granted by a central authority tosubjects down below, but claimed by those verysubjects using an assortment of availablematerials in ways that could not have beenimagined by a central planner.2 The pure formalvocabulary that modernism offered as acomplete project from start to finish wasaccepted only on the basis of being anincomplete skeleton Ð a shell of an idea thatwould not be complete until it could be inhabitedby something else. In essence: it now seems

clear that if any system is to carry any sort ofliberating capacity, it has to lay the foundationfor the subject to claim his or her own means offinding freedom Ð to some extent, one has toreconstitute the system for oneself. Here, self-building works as an interestingblueprint for a means of disengaging from a

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structure of meaning without literally orphysically abandoning its premises. Beyond thepurely resistant dimension of these actions,there is a latent energy in self-building that alsoreflects modernismÕs own irreversibletransformative capacity Ð total in its breadth andinescapable in its weight. Insofar as it is aresponse to the logic of the central planner, sodoes self-building likewise form an extension to

the plan. In a sense, one could argue that everygesture within an experimental laboratory isitself an experiment. And if these experiments doindeed automatically surpass their originalintention, they can be considered within abroader frame of significance. Taken this way,the repurposing of a central plan by itsinhabitants does not replace a universalistconception with a kind of small-scalepragmatism of a withered subject pickingthrough the wreckage, but rather opens up anentirely new field of possibility in the

understanding that each response to the failureof the central plan constitutes its ownuniversalist claim. The idea here is not to find acontainer to accommodate these Ð to reinstallthe role of the planner Ð but to suggest a moreecstatic sphere that can unlock thesepossibilities or disengage them from their purely

pragmatic foundations. ÒBut perhaps they still understood that themost radical form of design emerges when thepeople begin to represent themselves withoutmediators and masters.Ó3

While self-building is testament to thedeath of a certain type of author Ð the architectof large-scale urban projects Ð it can beinteresting to imagine this phenomenon not in

terms of an absence of authorship or authority,but more in terms of its widespread distribution.Since one is certainly not lost without the centralplanner, surely authorship is still in playsomehow. And if this authority shifts to therealm of the subject, then though the subjectmay only have the space of a single unit, a singleblock within the grid to work with, what could beinteresting would be to suppose that the small-scale strategies that emerge in opposition orresponse to the central planner can parallelmodernismÕs scale and reach in the power and

ambition of their vision. Though these responsesmay not even necessarily be destined forconcrete implementation in a real setting, i.e.their power may lie completely within thesymbolic realm, one can suggest them to be noless ambitious than those of Corbusier himself,which is to say that a small-scale response can

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contain an entirely new central plan within itslogic. What modernism never took into accountwith its idea of the universal subject was in factthe subjectÕs own universe. Granted, this is whatthe slightly paradoxical idea of Òopen plansÓsought to liberate, but more importantly, self-building simultaneously calls out the bluff andthe promise of modernismÕs surface by replacing

the logic of central authority with thedevelopment of subjective worlds inside andaround the units of the grid. One could say thatthe aesthetic terrain that provided this promisestill retains it. In other words, when we findfailure in the implementation of the model, weperhaps fail to recognize the latent energy withinthe model itself. And claiming the means todirect this energy has less to do with modernismthan with the terrain on which we locate thematerial of cultural work, and here things beginto return to art. Because what we are implicitly

looking for here in the absence of centralizedforms of legitimation is a logic for understandinghow artistic works might find their ownlegitimacy without having to resort to a centralauthority to grant it. While this begins with abreak from that authority, how does one thenstart to think about reconstituting that

legitimacy in its absence? Perhaps by looking tothe latent energy that surrounds such a claim tolegitimacy at its inception, and by thinking abouta kind of displacement that might already havemarked a gesture as art before it was even awareof itself.

Your Legitimate Claim

Utopia, through the abolition of the bladeand the disappearance of the handle, givesthe knife its power to strike.

Ð Jean Baudrillard, Utopia deferredÉ4

So far, I have tried to identify a potential fora universalist significance in small-scale ormarginal responses to a social system, yet theproblem is that this claim remains trapped in thespace of a subjective projection Ð within, say, a

single apartment in a grid of housing projects. Inthe last issue, Mariana Silva and Pedro NevesMarqesÕ text ÒThe Escape RouteÕs DesignÓexplored the embedded potential of artworks toescape the dead space between theindeterminacy of an artistic proposal and theovert instrumentality of pragmatic social

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engagement or concrete political action.5 Thismay be an opening through which an artworkmight to some degree assert its own inherentvalue, or rather, in their words, Òthe continuousaffirmation of the possibility of exchange valuebeyond the gathering of consensus ormultiplicity.Ó While in the end, their assertion ishighly reliant upon the dynamics of thismultiplicity Ð that of an individual subject within

a cloud of potential possibilities Ð they attemptto take things a step further with a claim to thisindividualÕs freedom to reconstitute the meaningof artistic work. But this freedom is not onlyactivated by a simple matter of the subjectasserting a will or a desire for an act to beconsidered within a broader frame ofsignificance (though surely this is a part of it),but is also an assertion of a latent set ofconditions Ð conditions that might be invisible,sleeping, inert, or displaced Ð that togethercomprise a more objective, however speculative

means of legitimating an artistic act as such. It isa matter of aligning this act with the conditionsthat make it possible as art Ð similar to what theKabakovs called the Òsudden occurrenceÓ thatrenders an unsuccessful project a successfulone Ð that grants its legitimacy. And thisalignment can be a simple matter of a shift in

perspective.

All of this together represents a long andarduous process where repeatedly selectedvariations and Òsudden occurrencesÓparticipate simultaneously. In this sense, itis impossible to refer to any project asunsuccessful Ð it can only be referred to asan unsuccessful variation of something

which in a different altered view or with ashift in components, in a word, a ÒsuddenoccurrenceÓ Ð will turn out to be the correctresolution, absolutely successful.6

In their text, Silva and Marques compare Ilya andEmilia KabakovÕs Palace of Projects to variousstrategies for crossing the Berlin Wall unnoticed.Where The Palace of Projects was a largestructure that contained sixty-five displays ofsculptures and schematic drawings suggestinglarger scale artworks, actions, ideas, or

statements, all yet to be realized, the Òattemptsat crossing the Berlin Wall in its verticality,Ó whilesimilarly speculative in nature, were for obviouspractical reasons intended solely to be executedin real life.7 Yet for Silva and Marques, both ofthese ÒprojectsÓ converge in their allusion to anaction that lies just further afield, and is to

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varying degrees realizable or unrealizable. ThePalace of Projects maintains a fundamentallyutopian structure in that it always projects thecompletion of its projects into the future, and isfrom its outset, reconciled with its ownimpossibility. The proposal suggests apossibility, but then stops short: Òthe realizableis enmeshed in the unrealizable,Ó and in thisadmission, The Palace of Projects, seen in its

totality, becomes no more exemplary ofsomething beyond itself than any monument. On the other hand, the attempts at crossingthe Berlin Wall comprise a similar schematicpresentation, but with a radically differentintention aimed at a literal application of what itillustrates: how to simply escape the GDRunnoticed. Likewise, if there is any utopianpotential to be found embedded in theseschematics, it is similarly negated by theirintention towards actual, pragmatic action.However, when overlaid with the KabakovsÕ

proposals, Silva and Marques find in thepossibility of Berlin Wall crossingsÕ real worldactualization an immanence that can cross overto also legitimate the KabakovsÕ proposals as notonly possible, but as having already taken place.This acknowledgement can come from aligningthe proposed action with a set of conditions that

have less to do with the kinds of consensus thatlegitimate objects and events within the realm ofthe real, but that have more to do with those thatmake objects and events themselves highlyspeculative and potentially incomplete. To drawa parallel to von OstenÕs self-builders, the self-built responses to modernist urban planningprojects can be seen as themselves entirely newurban plans when they (or I, for that matter)

invoke the modern grid as itself a speculativeobject, incomplete in its nature, and thereforecontingent upon such interventions for its ownentry into a sphere of completion. But how do wethen invoke this incompleteness, or project itonto such structures? Where do we locate theseweak points in the alleged completeness of builtprojects? One way is to locate the invisibility of manyprojectsÕ completion. Silva and Marques pointout in the case of the Berlin Wall crossings that,in the act of crossing through covert means,

without the notice of the authorities, thecompletion of the project was effectively hidden,although in every real sense it had actually takenplace.8 The physical act of passing a body fromthe GDR to the West needed, and even requiredno audience to qualify its validity as action. Toinvoke this example would be to assert not only

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that projects are built and Òun-builtÓ without thenecessary position of a spectator, but also that itis impossible to say for sure what has or has notbeen completed, if indeed we accept that realevents can take place without our knowing. By removing the audience from its role invalidating an act, Silva and Marques open thingsup significantly to a myriad of readings. And it iswith this in mind that they propose a kind of

legitimacy for The Palace of Projects that passesits claim retroactively from the sphere of aproposal to that of the actual. This claim doesnot so much assert that a monument is built(though we cannot say with absolute certaintythat it is not), but rather asserts that builtmonuments themselves are not necessarilycomplete, or have not yet fully achieved theirown projected intentions within a real sphere.9 Inthis sense, art draws the real back to itself Ð artbecomes no longer subject to the real, but ratherreality becomes subject to art. Furthermore, The

Palace of Projects can be said to have alreadybuilt its proposed projects by, metaphoricallyspeaking, smuggling them through a checkpointin the Berlin Wall. Finally, for Silva and Marques, it isultimately Òthrough the prism of free attributionof value, kaleidoscopic in formÓ that theindividual aligns an artwork or isolated instancewith its expanded significance, whether in asocial sphere or beyond. If we are to then take forgranted that this attributive license is granted toanyone at any time, then why does thenegotiation of artistic value present itself assuch a burden? Perhaps it has to do with the voidopened up by such an arbitrary distribution ofmeaning. But to then return back to von OstenÕsself-builders, any promises of free attributionmade by the central plan will never be granted bythat plan. Though it may implicitly hold thepotential for a small-scale response to comprisean entirely new plan through the free attributionof pragmatic or artistic value, this potential mustsomehow be activated. !

Brian Kuan Wood is an editor of e-flux journal.

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1Marion von Osten, ÒArchitectureWithout Architects Ð AnotherAnarchist Approach,Ó e-flux

journal, no. 6 (May 2009),http://e-flux.com/journal/view/59.

2See Gean Moreno and ErnestoOrozaÕs contribution in issue #6as well for a detailed account ofthis dynamic: http://e-flux.com/journal/vi ew/58.

3von Osten, ÒArchitecture WithoutArchitects Ð Another AnarchistApproach.Ó

4Jean Baudrillard, ÒUtopiadeferredÉÓ in Utopia Deferred:Writings for Utopie (1967Ð1978),trans. Stuart Kendall (New York:Semiotext(e), 2006), 62.

5Mariana Silva & Pedro NevesMarques, ÒThe Escape RouteÕsDesign: Assessment of theImpact of Current Aesthetics onHistory and a Comparative

Reading Based on an ExampleClose to the City of Berlin,Ó e-flux

journal, no. 6 (May 2009),http://e-flux.com/journal/view/61.

6Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, ThePalace of Projects, excerpt fromtext written in There are No SuchThings as Unsuccessful Projects.

7See detailed documentation ofeach project with translations oftext in the drawings here:http://srg.cs.uiuc.edu/Palace/projectPages/palace.html

8ÒThe performative character ofthese events would thensimultaneously translate into anon-commensurable action, aproduction of meanings and freespaces, conditions and acts ofself-identification, preciselythrough this absence of anintentional audience, theabsence of a predefinedperformative structure;therefore of a demonstrationunderstood as conscious andintentional, as is frequently thecase in the production of artisticvalue, quantifiable andquantified by law. This

exemplary character is thenparadoxically extracted from itsown characteristics of un-example, namely its unformedand undeterminedcharacteristics, foreign to anycommensurable regulation inthe effective making of theaction. É The effective act ofcrossing the Berlin Walldistances itself thus from thePalace of Projects, given thatonly when the monument, itselfa symbol of aspiring potentiality,is effectuated through theattempts at crossing the BerlinWall, is it accomplished in Life.Nevertheless, this recognition ofthe symbolic diluted in life, that

is, unrecognizable as such whileit occurred, would implicate the

negation of the proper identity ofmonument, its understanding assuch, given that the permanenceof its status would necessarilymake its de-signifiedestablishment in the worldimpossible. Solely by denyingthe monument its proper self-referential status as monumentcould it perhaps, differentiatedby this precise negation, permitits own dissolution in the life-worldÓ

9ÒAccordingly, and in view of thestate of democratic negotiabilityof value mentioned above, one isconfronted with a situation inwhich history seems to replyretroactively to the proposalselaborated by the KabakovsÕauthors, precisely by theparticularity of the attempts atcrossing the Berlin Wall in itsverticality. The cases of escapefrom the Soviet regime,perpetuated by numerouspeople during a determinateperiod in time, by transgressingthe boundary of the Berlin Wall,is equivalent to an equal orcorresponding innumerability of

projects, whose conception andrealization, of individual orcollective design, could thenconstitute an answer or ahistorical counterproposal to theKabakovsÕ projects. Thisresponse, as counterproposal, isgiven by its exemplary characterin opposition to the previouslycited demonstrative enunciationof the artist. Put differently, thecharacter of the aforementionedevents imposes precisely andnecessarily the will or act oftaking the design in hand, nolonger understood as a projector model but as the physicalactuality of an act in itssimplicity of idea. With a

multiplicity of common objectsused for and during itsconcretization, it does not ceaseto propose its execution to eachinhabitant, individually andwithout exception. É That themeaning found in the PalaceÕsproposals would have beenextrapolated in their unfinishedcondition and consequentlydemonstrated a real existence ofthese individual gestures ofsocial significance, in that thereferred projects would havealready, truly, at a given moment,and even if in another time andby other means, beeneffectuated.Ó

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