Interview with Benjamin Noys by Amina al Failakawi

An interview with Benjamin Noys on the Emergence of Futuristic Cities in the past and present, and how Neo-liberalism interplays between these time frames.

By Amina Al-Failakawi | March 2015 HCT Debates | Interview with Benjamin Noys MA History and Critical Thinking | Architectural Association School of Architecture 2014-2015

HCT Debates | Interview with Benjamin Noys | By Amina Al-Failakawi | March 2015 MA History and Critical Thinking | Architectural Association School of Architecture 2014-2015

An interview with Benjamin Noys on the Emergence of Futuristic Cities in the past and present, and how Neo-liberalism interplays between these time frames.

An interview with Benjamin Noys meant an engaging discussion about how the futuristic city can be viewed as a potential accelerator towards a neo-liberal society. Noys reveals his interest in analyzing the ‘future’ city as one ‘free’ of capitalist value and state power, a neo-liberal city in its ‘pure’ form. In realizing this ‘dream,’ he suggests positive modes of alienation that would simultaneously coincide with flexible forms of social spaces. The setback, according to Noys, is the fear of planning, which in turn leads to using the past to generate the future. Two figures are referenced here that exemplify this notion: Nick Land and Hilberseimer, who both aspired to create urban utopias, however using completely different extremes to do so. In this interview, Noys uses these two figures to illustrate how ‘bridging the gap’ between past and future does not need to be achieved in the present, as this phenomenon has already occurred in the past through means of technology, accelerationism and deterritorialization. His ultimate aim is to dissect these ideas and in turn see where they intersect with the aesthetics of a city, which lies in its architecture.

The interview was conducted via email between 11th and 19th of March 2015.

Questions: 1. According to Nick Land, “The City of the Future entangles urban spectacle inseparably with prophecy. One sees, now, what is yet to come”. You then add to this notion that there is “no difficulty in imagining the future, but the difficulty [is] in imagining how we might get there”. How can this ‘negativity’ (as you call it) serve to bridge the gap between imagination/prophecy and realization?

Answer #1: I obviously differ radically, politically and philosophically, from Nick Land. For Land the capitalist city is the image of the future because he regards the future as a radicalization of capitalism – a capitalism freed from the ‘fetters’ of regulation and constraint. His future is a matter of a radical tweaking of the present to ‘unleash’ the forces of deterritorialization, the solvent effects of capitalism, to push beyond the human. Instead, I am interested in the disruption and negation of the forms of capitalism, especially the forms of abstract value that underpin notions of ‘development’ and the ‘future’.

For this reason I would first distinguish between Land’s capitalist utopianism – his image of a ‘pure’ or ‘purified’ capitalism – and various anti-capitalist or post-capitalist utopias or ‘futures’.

Within that, however, I am more interested in struggles for the ‘realization’ of the ‘future’ now.

What I mean is that it is not a matter of creating an image of a future environment we have to ‘bridge the gap’ to, but of struggles to contest the limits of the environment that shapes our current existence. Negativity, then, is not some ‘pure’ resistance, some absolute refusal to countenance the world as it is, but rather existing forms of negation and contestation than exist within the environment.

To cash this out, I am more interested in struggles against gentrification and social cleansing, such as have been taking place in London recently, than plans or designs for a future London ‘free’ of the dictates of capitalist value and state power. In fact I think the second, that future can only come out of the first, currently struggles.

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2. Following the previous question, Nick Land claims to have seen the future of the city and leaped forward towards it to pull it into the present. How can a city like Shanghai represent his prophecy of the future? What elements can we retrieve from it to form our own futuristic cities?

Answer #2: What I find interesting or contradictory in Nick Land’s writing about Shanghai is that while he tends to want a ‘pure’ deterritorialized capitalism, what fascinates him about Shanghai is a particular territory, a particular style – Art Deco. For Land Art Deco is modern without being modernist, a future style that is not postmodernist. So, the dreamer of capitalist utopia, of absolute deterritorialization, ties this to a particular territory, a particular tradition. His violent rejection of the modernism of the International Style speaks, I think, to his interest in the racist and libertarian neo-reactionaries, the ‘red pill right’, as they have been called. These thinkers combine eugenicist, racist, and misogynist thinking with their techno-utopian dreams of themselves as rulers of new neo-feudal kingdoms. Land rejects the ‘International Style’ for being too ‘international’, while Shanghai provides the ‘territory’ or ground for his future vision, one which combines capitalist deregulation and state power. We no longer have ‘pure’ deterritorialization, but an image of a stratified and quasi-fascist future.

I would say this image of the future is one already being realized in urban segregation, surveillance, policing and control. We are living the experience of the ‘evil paradises’ of neoliberalism, ‘islands’ of hyper-privileged space defended against the surrounding world of misery, of which Dubai is the clichéd image. Land’s ‘prophecy’ is a future we are living, or some of us. Therefore what we can retrieve from Land’s vision is the refusal of this vision of the future.

3. In speaking about the image of urbanism, Hilberseimer portrays the city as one “without qualities designed for people without pre-ordained qualities- free, therefore, to express in an autonomous way their own creative, political and behavioral energies. The greatest possible freedom occurred where integration was strongest… Alienation was a new artistic condition” (Andrea Branzi). How would you react to this claim with regards to alienating oneself in a city in the future? Is alienation seen here on a personal level? A national level? A global level?

Answer #3: Hilbersemier’s project, at least as vectored through Italian thinkers of operaismo (workerism), tries to rework the city as a totality. In this way Hilberseimer reaches the limits of a reformist project by taking the urban fabric as his object and by pushing the tendencies of capitalist alienation to their limits – driving the system mad, as one critic says. Of course this depended on certain historical conditions. His initial work was carried out in the context of social democratic reformism. It seems to me alienation is mapped here at the level of the urban or metropole, but with the implication of a future global change.

This work forms an interesting contrast with Land. While Land celebrates capitalist alienation as a rupture with the human, Hilberseimer in many ways has a more radical version of alienation as condition of freedom. While Land rejects rationality as a global project, Hilberseimer pushes it to the limit. Here we could say Hilberseimer is closer to contemporary proponents of ‘left accelerationism’, who argue for a new hegemonic project of global reason. The difference is Hilberseimer incarnates this project in the built environment.

The risk of such endorsements of alienation is that they end in cynical agreement with capitalism, a charge that could be levelled at Rem Koolhaas. I do think we should consider the ‘positive’ effects of alienation – the rupture with tradition, new modes of anonymity, and new forms of freedom. That said, ‘accelerating’ them often seems to imply simply conceding to capitalist

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progress. Also, as you suggest, the problem is the ‘level’ of this project. How could we imagine a genuine global change? I don’t have the answer to this. But I would suggest if Land names a problem – a convergence of philosophical irrationalism, capitalist utopianism, and racialized hierarchies – then Hilberseimer also names another problem – the problem of reform, in the lack of major movements or institutions to complete those reforms.

4. Neo-liberal space is known to be one that can be reprogrammed and reused for different functions and needs. It can also be described as organic, flexible and freeflowing. Can Hilberseimer’s vertical cities be considered neo-liberal even though his notion was created long before this term was formed? If so, how would his rigid, monolithic structures be viewed as ‘liberating’?

Answer #4: This is an important question. As I noted above in the absence of certain forms of state power to implement reform, or mass struggles to drive change, the project of endorsing alienation can come to coincide with neoliberal mappings of flexible spaces. Of course neoliberalism is alienation with a human face – suggesting the creativity, invention, and hybridity that results from these ‘mixed’ spaces. We could add that neoliberalism tends to generate these spaces in forms of business space, education, and consumption, while we remain living in what Patrick Keiller has called ‘the dilapidated dwelling’. The result is that neoliberal space is both smooth and uneven; we have our ‘private’ space, of increasingly poor quality or dependent on our wealth and income to sustain, while public space is privatized into new forms of ‘smooth’ space. Also, these smooth spaces are regarded as ‘flexible’ and refuse the ‘rigid and monolithic’.

Again, we can see a convergence with Land’s celebration of Art Deco, as a ‘creative’ and specific space conducive to new ‘invention’. The fear here is the fear of planning, which is identified with state socialism, ‘totalitarianism’, and seen as an impediment to ‘freedom’.

Hilberseimer is a reminder of a different vision, in which the ‘rigid’ and ‘monolithic’ relieve us of the concerns of self-reproduction, freeing us from demands to maintain ‘dilapidated’ spaces.

That is the reason that these spaces could be liberating. This, however, cannot be sustained without a massive shift of power, it remains only a ‘dream’ of planning.

So, while the recent efforts of left accelerationism usefully raised questions of planning and intervention, what use to be called socialism (as David Cunningham has pointed out), the difficulty is what do these projects mean in current conditions? What is striking to me is that our images of the future are so often images of the past. We leap back to leap forward. What is much more difficult to image is Marx’s Hic Rhodus, Hic Salta!, leaping now, in the present. I think this does call for the disruption of the neoliberal vision of ‘smooth’ space, but also attention to its necessary and dilapidated complement. Perhaps it is a matter of mass movements for rent control, reform of tenancy agreements, preservation of truly public housing, reform of local government funding, and so on, where this unglamorous dancing here will take place.

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References: -Aureli, P.V. ( posted October 31st , 2011) The Barest Form in which Architecture Can Exist: Some Notes on Ludwig Hilberseimer’s Proposal for the Chicago Tribune Building.

-Hilberseimer, L. (1944). The New City: Principles of Planning (With an Introduction by Mies van der Rohe) Paul Theobald: Chicago.

-Noys, B. (2014). Malign Velocities: Accelerationism & Capitalism. Winchester and Washington: Zero Books. ___, “Crash and Burn: Debating Accelerationism” (w/Alexander Galloway), 4 November 2014, 3:AM Magazine: http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/crash-and-burn-debating-accelerationism/ -Land, N. (posted November 9th, 2014) Dark Ecologies: the Carnival Edge of Post-humanism; Nick Land: On Time – Teleoplexy & Templexity.

(Posted by S.C. Hickman in Acceleration History, Accelerationism) -Velaquez, M.R. & Barajas, D. Ludwig Hilberseimer: Radical Urbanism. (PDF article, date unknown). http://thenewpress.com/books/evil-paradises http://boingboing.net/2015/01/28/a-beginners-guide-to-the-red.html

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