3171388
Post on 07-Apr-2018
221 Views
Preview:
TRANSCRIPT
8/3/2019 3171388
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/3171388 1/3
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 .
Accessed: 29/09/2011 04:35
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new form
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Assemblage.
8/3/2019 3171388
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/3171388 2/3
assemblage 25
N e w Babylons:
Urbanism a t
t h e E n d o f
t h e Millennium
. ... .
::. ..... .•
ii............................L
Radioastronomy antennas from
Michelangelo Antonioni, RedDesert,1964. Film Duemila.
Assemblage5 ? 1995bythe MassachusettsInstituteofTechnology
80
8/3/2019 3171388
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/3171388 3/3
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
top related