The ABCs of Contemporary Design*

HAL FOSTER

Autonomy: Aesthetic autonomy is the notion that culture is a sphere apart, with
each art distinct, and it is a bad word for most of us raised on postmodernist inter-
disciplinarity. We tend to forget that autonomy is always provisional, always
defined diacritically and situated politically, always semi. Enlightenment thinkers
advocated political autonomy in order to challenge the vested interests of the
ancien rgime, while modernist artists advocated aesthetic autonomy in order to
resist illustrational meanings and commercial forces. Like essentialism, then,
autonomy is a bad word, but it may not always be a bad strategy, especially at a
moment when postmodernist interdisciplinarity has become routine: call it
strategic autonomy.

Bonaventura: In his seminal analysis of postmodern space, The Cultural Logic of

Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson used the vast atrium of the Bonaventura Hotel
in Los Angeles designed by John Portman as a symptom of a new kind of architec-
tural sublime: a sort of hyper-space that deranges the human sensorium. Jameson
took this spatial delirium as a particular instance of a general incapacity to
comprehend the late capitalist universe, to map it cognitively. Strangely, what
Jameson offered as a critique of postmodern culture many architects (Frank Gehry
foremost among them) have taken as a paragon: the creation of extravagant spaces
that work to overwhelm the subject, a neo-Baroque Sublime dedicated to the
glory of the Corporation (which is the Church of our age). It is as if these
architects designed not in contestation of the cultural logic of late capitalism
but according to its specifications.

Carcassonne: Carcassonne is a tourist destination in southern France, a medieval

cit replete with chteau, church, and fortifications. Viollet-le-Duc restored its
towers and turrets in the nineteenth century, and the site retains an unreal sheen:
it is a historical town turned into a theme park, with its walls whitened and capped

* This text was written in October 2001 as a supplement (part glossary, part guide) to my Design
and Crime (and Other Diatribes) (London and New York: Verso, 2002).

OCTOBER 100, Spring 2002, pp. 191199. 2002 Hal Foster.

192 OCTOBER

like TV-star teeth. At least Americans make their Disneylands from scratch, or
they once did so. More and more this Carcassonnizationthe canonization of
the urban carcassis at work in American cities as well. For example, the cast-
iron buildings of SoHo now gleam with the shine of artifacts-become-commodities.
Like Viollet-le-Duc, developer s undert ake these face-lift s in the name of
historical preservation, but the purpose is financial aggrandizement. And like
victims of cosmetic surgery, these facades may mask historical age but advance
mnemonic decay.

Design: Today everythingfrom architecture and art to jeans and genesis

treated as so much design. Those old heroes of industrial modernism, the artist-
as-engineer and the author-as-producer, are long gone, and the postindustrial
designer now rules supreme. Today you dont have to be filthy rich to be designer
and designed in onewhether the product in question is your home or business,
your sagging face (designer surgery) or lagging personality (designer drugs), your
historical memory (designer museum), or DNA future (designer children). Might
this designed subject of consumerism be the unintended offspring of the
constructed subject of postmodernism? One thing seems clear: today design
abets a near-perfect circuit of production and consumption.

Environment: The world of total design is an old dream of modernism, but it only
comes true, in perverse form, in our pan-capitalist present. With post-Fordist
production, commodities can be tweaked and markets niched, so that a product
can be mass in quantity yet appear personal in address. Desire is not only registered
in products today, but is specified there: a self-interpellation is performed in
catalogs and on-line almost automatically. In large part it is this perpetual profiling
of the commodity that drives the contemporary inflation of design. Yet what
happens when this commodity-machine breaks down, as markets crash, sweatshop
workers resist, or environments give out?

Finitude: An early version of total design was advanced in Art Nouveau, with its
will to ornament. This Style 1900 found its great nemesis in Adolf Loos, who
attacked it in several texts. One attack took the form of an allegorical skit about a
poor little rich man who commissioned a designer to put art in each and every
thing: The architect has forgotten nothing, absolutely nothing. Cigar ashtrays,
cut ler y, light switches ever ything, ever ything was made by him. This
Gesamtkunstwerk did more than combine art, architecture, and craft; it commingled
subject and object: the individuality of the owner was expressed in every orna-
ment , ever y form, ever y nail. For the Art Nouveau designer the result is
perfection: You are complete! he exults to the owner. But the owner is not so
sure; rather than a sanctuary from modern stress, he sees his Art Nouveau interior
as another instance of it. The happy man suddenly felt deeply, deeply unhappy. . . .
He was precluded from all future living and striving, developing and desiring. He
The ABCs of Contemporary Design 193

thought, this is what it means to learn to go about life with ones own corpse. Yes
indeed. He is finished. He is complete! For the Art Nouveau designer such completion
reunited art and life, with all signs of death banished. For Loos this triumphant
overcoming of limits was a catastrophic loss of the samethe loss of the objective
constraints required to define any future living and striving, developing and
desiring. Far from a transcendence of death, this loss of finitude was a death-in-
life, living with ones own corpse.

Gesamtkunstwerk: After September 11, metaphorical talk of corpses seems

misbegotten, and confusions between art and life worse. Recall the remarks of
Karlheinz Stockhausen on the World Trade Center attack: What happened there
isthey all have to rearrange their brains nowis the greatest work of art ever:
that characters can bring about in one act what we in music cannot dream of, that
people practice madly for ten years, completely, fanatically, for a concert and then
die. That is the greatest work of art for the whole of the cosmos. I could not do
that. Against that we composers are nothing. Yet this reading of avant-gardism
cannot be simply disavowed: with the simplest means the terrorists rocked our
symbolic order like nothing before. But this reading also reveals the grave problem
of such avant-gardism: here its confusion of art and life abets a conflation
between symbolic transgression and mass murder. It is long past time to forego
crypto-fascist ideas of sublimity.

High-Rise: In Delirious New York (1978), a retrospective manifesto for Manhattan,

Rem Koolhaas published an old, tinted postcard of the city skyline from the early
1930s. It presents the Empire State, Chrysler, and other landmark buildings of the
time with a visionary twista dirigible set to dock at the spire of the Empire State.
It is an image of the twentieth-century city as a spectacle of new tourism, to be
sure, but also as a utopia of new spacesof people free to circulate from the
street, through the tower, to the sky, and back down again. (The image is not
strictly capitalist: the utopian conjunction of skyscraper and airship appears in
revolutionary Russian designs of the 1920s as well.) The attack on the World Trade
Centerthe two jets flown into the two towerswas a dystopian perversion of
this modernist dream of free movement through cosmopolitan space. Much
damage was done to this great vision of the skyscraper cityand to New York as
the capital of this old dream.

Indiscipline: Several of these notes circle around a single thesis: contemporary

design is part of a greater revenge taken by advanced capitalism on postmodernist
culturea recouping of its crossings of arts and disciplines, a routinization of its
transgressions. We know that autonomy, even semi-autonomy, is a fiction, but
periodically this fiction is useful, even necessary, as it was at the high-modernist
moment of Loos and company one hundred years ago. Periodically, too, it can
become repressive, even deadening, as it was a few decades ago when late modernism
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had petrified into medium-specificity and postmodernism promised an interdisci-

plinary opening. But this is no longer our situation. It is time to recapture a sense
of the political situatedness of both autonomy and its transgression, a sense of the
historical dialectic of disciplinarity and its contestation.

Jewel Box: No term is more important to modern architecture than transparency.

For Siegfried Giedion this transparency was predicated on technologies such as
steel and glass and ferro-concrete that allowed a thorough exposition of architectural
space. For Lzlo Moholy-Nagy, it allowed architecture in turn to integrate the
different transparencies of other mediums, such as photography and film. Less
concerned with space than light, Moholy saw this integration as fundamental to
the new vision of modernist culture in general. Yet this vision did not fare well
after the war. In Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal (1963), Colin Rowe and
Robert Slutzky devalued literal in favor of phenomenal transparency, in which
Cubist surfaces interpenetrate without optical destruction of each other. This
revaluation marked the moment when, once more, articulation of surface became
as important as that of space, and the understanding of skin as important as that
of structure. In other words, it marked the discursive advent of postmodern
architecture in its two principal versions: first, architecture as a scenographic
surface of symbols (as in pastiche postmodernism from Robert Venturi on) and,
later, architecture as an autonomous transformation of forms (as in deconstructivist
postmodernism from Peter Eisenman on). Today many prominent architects, such
as Koolhaas, Herzog and de Meuron, and Richard Gluckman, do not fit neatly
into either camp: they hold on to literal transparency even as they elaborate
phenomenal transparency with projective skins and luminous scrims. Sometimes,
however, these skins and scrims only dazzle or confuse, and the architecture
becomes an illuminated sculpture, a radiant jewel. It can be beautiful, but it can
also be spectacular in the negative sense used by Guy Deborda kind of commodity-
fetish on a grand scale, a mysterious object whose production is mystified.

Kool House: This architecture relates to the forces of the Grostadt [the metropolis]
like a surfer to the waves, Koolhaas once remarked of the skyscrapers of
Manhattan. With his recent interventions in the global city, the same might be
said of his own architecture, and it might not sound like praise. What does it mean
for an architect to surf the Grostadt todayto perfect its curve, to extend its
trajectory? Even if an architect is empowered enough to make the attempt, can he
or she do more than crash on the beach?

Life Style: In Life Style (2000), a compendium of his work, Canadian designer
Bruce Mau asks us to think design as life style in the philosophical sense of the
Greeks, Nietzsche, or Foucault, that is, as an ethics. But the style of Life Style is
closer in spirit to Martha Stewarta folding of the examined life into the
designed life. Such style does not boost our character, as Life Style claims;
The ABCs of Contemporary Design 195

rather, it aids the contemporary conflation of the realization of self with the
consumption of identity.

Mediation: Mediation used to mean the critical attempt to think the totality of
the social world beyond its fragmentation and disconnection. Now it tends to
refer to a social world given over to electronic mediaand to an economic world
retooled around digitizing and computing. In this mediation, the commodity is
no longer an object to be produced so much as a datum to be manipulated
designed and redesigned, consumed and reconsumed. This is another reason why
design is inflated today, to the point where it is no longer a secondary industry.
Perhaps we should speak of a political economy of design.

Nobrow: One aspect of this mediated world is a merging of culture and marketing.
For some commentators this has effected a new kind of nobrow culture in which
the old distinctions of highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow no longer apply. For
fans of this development nobrow is not a dumbing down of intellectual culture
so much as a wising up to commercial culture, which becomes a source of status in
its own right. Today, this argument runs, we are all in the same megastore, only
in different aisles, and that is a good thingthat is democracy. Yet this is a conflation
of democracy with consumption, a conflation that underwrites the principal
commodity on sale in this marketplace: the fantasy that class divisions are thereby
resolved. This fantasy is the contemporary complement to the foundational myth
of the United States: that such divisions never existed here in the first place. This
delusion allows millions of Americans to vote against their class interests at least
every four years.

Outmoded: The older media, not designed for mass production, take on a new
timeliness: that of exemption and of improvisation. They alone could outflank the
united front of trusts and technology. So writes Theodor Adorno in Minima
Moralia (1951) on the critical use of outmoded media in a capitalist context of
ceaseless obsolescence. Here, of course, Adorno draws on Walter Benjamin, for
whom the outmoded was a central concern. Balzac was the first to speak of the
ruins of the bourgeoisie, Benjamin wrote in his Arcades Project. But only
Surrealism exposed them to view. The development of the forces of production
reduced the wish symbols of the previous century to rubble even before the
monuments representing them had crumbled. The wish symbols in question
are the capitalist wonders of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie at the height of
its confidence, such as the arcades and interiors, the exhibitions and panoramas.
These structures fascinated the Surrealists nearly a century laterwhen further
capitalist development had turned them into residues of a dream world or,
again, rubble even before the monuments which represented them had crumbled.
For the Surrealists to haunt these outmoded spaces, according to Benjamin, was to
tap the revolutionary energies that were trapped there. But it is less utopian to
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say simply that the Surrealists registered the mnemonic signals encrypted in these
structuressignals that might not otherwise have reached the present. This
deployment of the outmoded can query the totalist assumptions of capitalist
culture, and its claim to be timeless; it can also remind this culture of its own wish
symbols, and its own forfeited dreams of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Can this
mnemonic dimension of the outmoded still be mined today, or is the outmoded
now outmoded tooanother device of fashion?

Post-Fordism: The object world of modern cities was born of a Fordist economy
that was relatively fixed: factories and warehouses, skyscrapers and bridges, railways
and highways. However, as our economy has become more post-Fordist, capital
has flowed ever more rapidly in search of cheap labor, innovative manufacture,
financial deregulation, and new markets; and the life expectancy of many buildings
has fallen dramatically. (Many cities are now hybrids of the two economies, with
Fordist structures often retrofitted to post-Fordist needs.) This process is pronounced
in the United States, of course, but it is rapacious where development is even less
restricted. His task is truly impossible, Koolhaas writes of the architect in this
condition, to express increasing turbulence in a stable medium. In a post-Fordist
context, what can the criteria of architecture be?

Quarantine: For Koolhaas, the skyscraper is the crux of the culture of congestion
of the old Manhattan, and he sees it as a mating of two emblematic formsthe
needle and the globe. The needle grabs attention, while the globe promises
receptivity, and the history of Manhattanism is a dialectic between these two
forms. Since September 11 the discursive frame of this Manhattanism has shifted.
New fears cling to the skyscraper as a terrorist target, and the values of attention
and receptivity are rendered suspicious. The same holds for the values of
congestion and delirious space; they are overshadowed by calls for surveillance
and defensible space. In short, the urbanistic ego and cultural diversity that
Koolhaas celebrates in Delirious New York are under enormous pressure. They need
advocates like never before; for, to paraphrase the Surrealists, New York Beauty
will be delirious or will not be.

Running-Room: As much as interdisciplinarity is crucial to cultural practice, so too

are distinctions, as Karl Kraus insisted in 1912: Adolf Loos and Ihe literally and
I linguisticallyhave done nothing more than show that there is a distinction
between an urn and a chamber pot and that it is this distinction above all that
provides culture with running-room [Spielraum]. The others, the positive ones
[i.e., those who fail to make this distinction], are divided into those who use the
urn as a chamber pot and those who use the chamber pot as an urn. Those who
use the urn as a chamber pot were Art Nouveau designers who wanted to infuse
art (the urn) into the utilitarian object (the chamber pot). Those who did the
reverse were functionalist modernists who wanted to elevate the utilitarian object
The ABCs of Contemporary Design 197

into art. For Kraus the two mistakes were symmetricalboth confused use-value
and art-valueand both risked a regressive indistinction: they failed to safeguard
the running-room necessary to liberal subjectivity and culture. Note that nothing
is said about a natural essence of art, or an absolute autonomy of culture; the
stake is simply one of distinctions and running-room, of proposed differences
and provisional spaces.

Spectacle: Clearly architecture has a new centrality in cultural discourse. Although

this centrality stems from the initial debates about postmodernism in the 1970s,
which were focused on architecture, it is clinched by the contemporary inflation
of design and display in all sorts of spheresart, fashion, business, and so on.
Moreover, to make a big splash in the global pond of spectacle culture today, one
has to have a big rock to drop, maybe as big as the Guggenheim Museum in
Bilbao; and here architects like Gehry have an obvious advantage over artists in
other media. In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Debord defined spectacle as capital
accumulated to the point where it becomes an image. With Gehry and company
the reverse is now true as well: spectacle is an image accumulated to the point
where it becomes capital. Such is the logic of many cultural centers today, as they
are designed, alongside theme parks and sports complexes, to assist in the corporate
revival of the citythat is, in its being made safe for shopping, spectating, and
spacing out. This is the Bilbao-Effect.

Tectonics: For all the futurism of the computer-assisted designs of architects like
Gehry, his structures are often akin to the Statue of Liberty, with a separate skin
hung over a hidden armature, and with exterior surfaces that rarely match up with
interior spaces. With the putative passing of the industrial age, the structural
transparency of modern architecture was declared outmoded, and now the Pop
aesthetic of postmodern architecture looks dated as well. The search for the
architecture of the computer age is on; ironically, however, it has led Gehry and
followers to nineteenth-century sculpture as a model, at least in part. The
disconnection between skin and structure represented by this academic model has
two problematic effects. First, it can lead to strained spaces that are mistaken for a
new kind of architectural sublime. Second, it can abet a further disconnection
between building and site. I am not pleading for a return to structural transparency;
I am simply cautioning against a new Potemkin architecture of conjured surfaces
driven by computer design.

Unabombers: From the handler of the terrorist in The Secret Agent (1907), by
Joseph Conrad: Pay attention to what I say. The fetish of today is neither royalty
nor religion. Therefore the palace and the church should be left alone. . . . A
murderous attempt on a restaurant or a theatre would suffer . . . from the sugges-
tion of a nonpolitical passion. . . . Of course there is art. A bomb in the National
Gallery would make some noise. But it would not be serious enough. Art has never
198 OCTOBER

been their fetish. . . . But there is learningscience. Any imbecile that has got an
income believes in that. He does not know why, but he believes it matters somehow.
It is the sacrosanct fetish. . . . The whole civilized world has heard of Greenwich. . . .
Yes, the blowing up of the first meridian is bound to raise a howl of execration.
The terrorists of September 11 picked out our fetishes of today with precision:
the architectures of finance and defense.

Vernacular: Postmodern architecture pretended to revive vernacular forms, but

for the most part it replaced them with commercial signs, and Pop images became
as important as articulated space. In our design world, this development has
reached a new level: now commodity-image and space are often melded through
design. Designers strive for programs in which brand identity, signage systems,
interiors, and architecture would be totally integrated(Bruce Mau). This
integration depends on a deterritorializing of both image and space, which
depends in turn on a digitizing of the photograph, its loosening from old referential
ties, and on a computing of architecture, its loosening from old tectonic principles.
As Deleuze and Guattari (let alone Marx) taught us long ago, this deterritorializing
is the path of capital, not the avant-garde.

Without Qualities: Design is all about desire, but today this desire seems almost
subject-less, or at least almost lack-less: design seems to advance a kind of narcissism
that is all image and no interiorityan apotheosis of the subject that may be one
with its disappearance. In our neoArt Nouveau world of total design and Internet
plenitude, the fate of the poor little rich man of Loos, precluded from all
future living and striving, developing and desiring, is on the verge of realization.
Robert Musil, a Loos contemporary, also seemed to anticipate this Style 2000 from
the perspective of Style 1900. A world of qualities without man has arisen, Musil
wrote in The Man Without Qualities (193043), of experiences without the person
who experiences them, and it almost looks as though ideally private experience is
a thing of the past, and that the friendly burden of personal responsibility is to
dissolve into a system of formulas of possible meanings. Probably the dissolution
of the anthropocentric point of view, which for such a long time considered man
to be at the center of the universe but which has been fading for centuries, has
finally arrived at the I itself.

Xed: Two theoretical models structured critical studies of postwar art above all
others: the oppositional logic of the post-, of an interdisciplinary postmodernism
opposed to a medium-specific modernism, and the recursive strategy of the neo-,
of a postwar neo-avant-garde that recovered the devices of the prewar avant-garde
(e.g., the monochrome, the readymade, the collage). Today, however, these
models are played out; neither suffices as a strong paradigm for practice, and no
other model stands in their stead. For many this double demise is a good thing: it
permits artistic diversity; weak theory is better than strong; and so on. But our
The ABCs of Contemporary Design 199

paradigm-of-no-paradigm can also abet a stagnant incommensurability or a flat

indifference, and this posthistorical default of contemporary art and architecture
is no improvement on the old teleological projections of modernist practices. All
of us (artists, critics, curators, amateurs) need some narrative to focus our practices
situated stories, not grands rcits. Without this guide we are likely to remain
swamped in the double wake of post/modernism and the neo/avant-garde.

Yahoos: . . .

Zebras: In American football the referees who wear striped shirts are derided as
zebras, but the game is difficult to play without them. Critics once had a similar
status in the sports of art and architecture, but more and more often they are
banished from the field. Over the last two decades a nexus of curators and collectors,
dealers and clients has displaced the critic; for these managers of art and architec-
ture critical evaluation, let alone theoretical analysis, is of no use. They deem the
critic an obstruction, and actively shun him or her, as do many artists and architects.
In this void returns the poet-critic who waxes on about Beauty as the moral
subject of art and architecture, with Sensation held over as a fun sideshow, or who
combines the two in a pop-libertarian aesthetic perfect for market rule. This
development needs to be challenged, if it is not too late, and running-room
secured wherever it can be found or made.