Category: Articles

The present paper is devoted to addressing the basic asymmetry of a move from what can be called “passive metaphysics” to “active metaphysics,” the overcoming of formalism, structuralism, and semiotics by post-structuralism and its hasty replacement with new forms of thought that presume matter that is alive or animate transparently makes itself available to experiencing subjects, who are affected by it immediately, without mediation, directly. For various reasons, the various forms of thought I will review—historiography, affect, metaphysics—have not cashed out this active metaphysics. But the general orientation remains there, ready to be abused at any time. If postmodernism turned swords into ploughshares, we have recently turned ploughshares into swords.

This is not a matter of rejecting electoral politics—winning a majority of citizens to radical change through democratic means is fundamental. But coming to governance without a solid social base while the powerful centrifugal influences of capitalism remain in place leads to the disappointments we and others abroad have repeatedly experienced. Without the ability to monitor, check, support, and pressure governments to stay the course, government promises fade. Elections alone become largely irrelevant. Participation in elections may have a tactical role in reaching people, but building the base for social transformation is what is so overwhelmingly central today. Only that will make elections truly relevant down the road.

Only rarely does the plan survive the making; more often the sculpture takes over, establishing its own rules, its own reality. Each shape goes down on the paper as an expanse of uninflected, transparent color, the shapes are determined by stencils prepared beforehand. As other shapes are added, the overlapping hues create new densities and new colors. Changing the sequence can further alter these tonal and chromatic relationships, creating new spatial suggestions, so that we read each of these unique images differently.

The causes of this relatively bleak state of affairs is, as Reed and Macnair show, that at the level of civil society the dominant political institutions, parties, or NGO-like formations like BLM only allow citizens with a means of engaging in political life by assuming a standpoint reliant on confused and obfuscatory concepts which preclude an understanding of society in class terms.

Together with the sharp-edged quality of the shapes, the intensity of the color-juxtapositions, and the interplay between the shapes with minimal thickness and the ones backed by PVC, the layering adds a note of enhanced plasticity to the ensemble. Put another way, the “Shards” are at once intensely “pictorial,” for reasons already given, and intensely tactile, which is to say that one’s perception of the “Shards” veers continually between a sense of their strength as compositions—as if in the flat—and their presence as a special sort of material artifact, their character as an entirely new variety of relief.

The dominant economic class has always been at the motivating center of the spread of racial antagonism. This is to be expected since the economic content of the antagonism, especially at its proliferating source in the South, has been precisely that of labor-capital relations. The biological difference of color provides a concrete symbol upon which attitudes of fear and hate might be anchored. The dominant class, furthermore, has been explicit in its terms of living together in “peace” and harmony with Blacks. Its pivotal condition has been that the latter be content to work hard, willingly, and unorganized. “Love” tends to vanish as soon as Blacks begin to show signs of unionization, of movements for normal political status, and of desires to bring themselves up to cultural parity.

Architectural history is replete with visionaries, those creatives with the singular capacity to conceive and represent visually the default tension of the discipline to constantly reformulate its own norms. Their function is as structural for the evolution of the field as it is statistically bound to yield minimal built results. The extraordinarily rapid ascent of Polish-born American-based Jan Lubicz-Nycz (1925–2011) and his equally precipitous descent into oblivion falls squarely into this singular dynamic.

The question I want to pose in this essay involves the specific role that this amalgam of Asian influences and modernist ideas had in forming the distinctive language of progressive California design. A definitive answer or even a topographic list is not possible here; that would require a far more extensive study—a book, really. Instead, I want to suggest a few corridors of seeing and understanding in the form of three short case studies.

To an astonishing degree, Schindler remained loyal to the principles he had set forth in the Program of his early years. To walk through the most remarkable instances of Space Architecture—the Kings Road house, the Lovell Beach House, the cluster of houses above Silver Lake Reservoir, and the Kallis House, to name a few—is to feel the aptness of Alexander Koch’s summary of the then unknown architect’s ideas: “The concept of comfort is interpreted anew: it consists above all in the possibility of being able to freely control space, light, air and temperature within the enclosed area.”

From Cox’s perspective, Myrdal falls tragically short at the most crucial moments. Myrdal holds fast to abstractions and to a reformist program where he needed to identify material causes and the overarching requirement of a ruling political class to exploit the labor of the great majority of its population. In a sad but predictable irony, he gave the exploiting class pride of place as the best ally of the dominated caste.