The key to a successful career in any modern bureaucracy, it
seems to me, is the mastery of and willingness to use a certain kind of
language that is opaque and almost meaningless to an outsider. The mastery
requires dedication, and the willingness a lack of scruple. It demands a
certain intelligence, but not high intelligence. Mediocrities do it best
because others are impatient of it.
The language is peculiar to itself and makes a speech by the
late Leonid Brezhnev seem like a soliloquy by Hamlet. Full of neologisms, its
words have connotations, but no definite meaning can be fixed to them.
Vagueness is essential because only then can responsibility be denied when
things go wrong. It is ugly and circumlocutory, but with occasional
pseudo-poetic metaphors that are supposed to be inspirational but are as
exciting as a cargo ship’s ballast.
This bureaucratese is ever more widespread. It is native to
government, of course, but it is certainly not confined to government. Large
companies employ it, as do educational institutions. A question that I have
long pondered is whether anyone, in the privacy of his own mind, employs such
language. I suspect that after a time those who employ it can use no other.
“Where there is no meaning, of course, there can be no
refutation.”
Bureaucratese
has left few corners of our world uninvaded. It is to be found almost
everywhere. A distinguished professor of architectural history, James Stevens
Curl, who has just published a devastating exposure of the evils of architectural
modernism, Making Dystopia, kindly forwarded to me the
following announcement of a training course for a diploma offered by the
Architectural Association. I give it in full because it is only thus that you
can gauge the full monstrous absurdity of it:
Meta-Elements
and Integrated Morphologies
The unit [of the diploma] will continue its disciplinary project
on the city, engaging with the interdependencies between disparate
domains—imagination and reality, concept and form, text and image. We assert
the urgency of the evolved visionary project that is rooted in a deep knowledge
of the contemporary European city and architectural history. This year we will
conflate several scales and levels of work on new models for ‘dis-continuity
and coherence’, tackling urban ‘meta-elements’ as architectural diagrams and
morphologies. Building upon our previous cities of multiplied utopias and
artefacts, ruptured transfers, systems and frameworks and, ultimately,
conceptual and spatial playgrounds in space-time, we will allow our pursuit of
emerging urban models to inform new phases in the breakdown and re-integration
of an architectural object itself. Our search will go beyond straightforward
augmentation—of Hyper-Buildings, Super-Blocks and Meta-Streets—as we try to
circumscribe and categorise architectural segments of the city. And we will
also question previous shortcuts in scale and complexity—from containing
diffused fields of architectural particles within mega-frameworks or variations
on Arks, Babels and Arcologies, to enforcing and indexing systemic models of
accumulation and growth—seeking internally coherent objects-devices that can
also tackle fraught issues of monumentality and identity, agency and
resilience.
To do so,
we will need to short-circuit current contextual demands with long-standing
disciplinary pursuits—utopias and ideal plans, figure/ground and typology,
diagrammatic system and formal assemblage—by exploring unlikely “friendships”
and mediations within the streams of precedents (from Filarete to Soleri and
Koolhaas; from Boullée to Ungers and Krier). Combining creative methods and
processes, we will “cycle” between analysis and synthesis, creative withdrawal
and critical re-engagement with the exchange platforms of the unit and the
architectural culture beyond it. Emphasising aesthetic achievement and
theoretical coherence (as seen in trademark “meta-drawings” and final books),
these catalogues of architectural “morphs and monsters” will be embedded within
robust Projects on the City—works that reaffirm architecture’s unique capacity
to evolve and grow from within, and to effect profound change in the cities and
the minds of the future.
Where
there is no meaning, of course, there can be no refutation; and if one asked
the author of this verbiage what, for example, “coherent objects-devices that
can also tackle fraught issues of monumentality and identity, agency and
resilience” actually meant (how would I actually recognize such an object-device that
can tackle agency and resilience if it came walking
down the street toward me?), one would no doubt provoke a torrent of
polysyllabic gobbledygook that would make “Jabberwocky” read like a witness
statement. The author’s mind is like a food mixer, and she creates from
pseudo-erudite words a verbal minestrone.
Despite its meaninglessness, it nevertheless conveys something:
the megalomania of the author and her dreadful ilk. She and they obviously
claim the right to design the physical world in which we live (because they
know best, which is proved by the failure of others to understand what they write),
and even to mold the minds of the future. She and they are not just architects,
but architects of the soul—just as Stalin called writers the “engineers of the
soul.” Not satisfied with the supposedly humble calling of designing buildings
that are graceful, beautiful, pleasing, harmonious, functioning, etc., they
want to be philosopher kings (and, increasingly, queens).
People of good intelligence might laugh at the above nonsense,
and in a properly ordered world they would be right to do so. It is worthy of
nothing other than contempt. Unfortunately, however, we do not live in a
properly ordered world: The lunatics are in charge of the asylum. Despite the
most patent evidence of the writer’s terrible combination of mediocrity of mind
and overweening ambition, she is a significant figure, a potential corrupter of
youth.
It is fortunate for her, though perhaps not for the rest of us
(at least in this context), that there is no justice in the world. If there
were, she would be forbidden from publishing anything for the rest of her life.
She would be sent as a farm laborer to a remote part of the countryside or as a
supermarket shelf-stacker to a small provincial town, where the cerebral
products that she would no doubt call her thoughts could do no harm. As it is,
she represents the future, the future of meta-elements and integrated
morphologies. Or is it meta-morphologies and integrated elements? It doesn’t
matter; it’s all the same, and megalomania, like truth, will out.
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