Interview with David Cunningham by Melissa Hollis

History and Critical Thinking Debates

Melissa Hollis Apocalyptic Politics Interview with Professor David Cunningham.

The Apocalyptic Fantasy There seems to be a fascination with the ruination of modernity through the destruction of our architecture within science fiction literature and film. Could you elaborate on where you think this modern Apocalyptic Fantasy emerged, and how that may be seen to influence architectural discourse?

Well there is nothing new about apocalyptic fantasies per se, as they go as far back to, say, the nineteenth century or eighteen century. If you

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Sir John Soane Bank of England as a imagined ruin of the future. Etching by Joseph Gandy in 1830.

H.G. Wells.

The Time Machine [1895]

Richard Jefferies After London [1848]

think of early etchings of the ruin of the Bank of England,1 depicting the future ruination of the present. Or, if you read H.G. Wells,2 or even Richard Jefferies imaginings of floods of London,3 and so forth.

So in that sense, the Hollywood images of the Whitehouse blowing up are nothing new. People have been fascinated by the idea of the apocalyptic ruin of there surroundings for at least two centuries or more.

There is something about modernity that allows you to conceive the future as ruination. It relies on a certain understanding of time. Say, if we inhabited a pre-modern culture — though we tend to mythicise these — you would not imagine the future as being substantially different from the present, nor the present being substantially different from the past. So, it would be much harder to think of the ruination of your culture, because in some sense, it would be the only culture you know.

But once we enter modernity, we have a strong sense that what we inhabit is fundamentally different from the world of what people have had in the past. Then, of course, we have the idea that the future can be radically different from the present, and therefore, you can start to imagine the present as ruined. You have a different sense of the temporarily of things, including that of buildings, [which] become very iconic [in] imagining [what we might] inhabit as a ruined future.

[This] becomes a key image of modernity, which, I think, in part, is modeled on the collapse of older civilizations. Particularly, in the ruins of classical culture. I mean, of course, [classical ruins] were always around ... But it is interestingly no one really thinks of them, [as ruins], […] until the eighteenth century. […The] emphasis is on the fact that the classical culture did not survive. ... You have these great moments of Athens and Rome and so on, but, they [have] crumbled like everything else. So then, obviously, somewhere like London might crumble too. The British Empire might crumble in the same way as the Roman Empire crumbled.

I mean, we are living through the ruination of the British Empire.

[The] post second world-war period is, in some sense, [its] ruin. […]

But people envisaging [ruination], in ... the eighteenth century, and in quite a mass cultural sense from the late nineteenth century, in a way, was inconceivable in the middle ages. ...

[T]he thing that interests me, in a more recent shift, is a sense of living through that ruination in the present. But it is, somehow, going unnoticed. We are familiar with the idea of […] the ruination of past cultures, and the lessons to be learned from that often, as in Shelley’s poem - Ozymandias,4 is of despair. But [we are] also [aware of possible] future ruination, that what we inhabit might be ruined. [… But], what seems ... interesting in the present moment, or in the last decade or so, is a certain type of grouping of things which have an idea, that maybe, we are living through an apocalypse and ruination that we have not really noticed.

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Percy Bysshe Shelley “Ozymandias” [1817]

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Rem Koolhaas “Junkspace” [2006]

[…] Laughter So Rem Koolhaas’ Junkspace,5 in architectural discourse, I think, is one of those interesting manifestations of that. ... This idea that the world of modernity that we inhabit is actual this kind of crumbling world.

But we have not quite fixed upon the fact that we are living through that.

‘Progress as Catastrophe’ Would you conceive this idea of the ruination of modernity in Walter Benjamin’s unfinished ‘Arcades Project’6 as one of these manifestations of a crumbling world? While this project attracts much Architectural interest, as an early discourse on nineteenth century capitalism, I wonder if you could also connect his particular notion of ‘progress as catastrophe’ to current times?

Well. There are two interconnected and in a way, importantly separate, 6.

Walter Benjamin Arcades Project [1927-40]

ideas going on with Benjamin, aren’t there?

One is about, yes, precisely, that kind of ruination of modernity where there is a kind of ... beauty in the ruination which is specifically modern.

In ‘The Storyteller’ essay,7 he talks about there being a ‘new beauty’ in ... seeing something vanish. That this has a peculiarly modern (in the strong sense of the word) beauty to it. That is then true of things like the Arcades.

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Walter Benjamin The Storyteller [1936]

Louis Aragon Paris Peasant [1926]

Part of [Benjamin’s] inspiration is ... Louis Aragon’s ‘Paris Peasant’,8 which is more fixated on that ... moment of things becoming lost.

Aragon is writing in the nineteen twenties ... about the ‘passages’ of that time becoming unused and decrepit. But for [Aragon] finding what he calls ‘mythology’ of the modern is beauty in transience. This is an idea that goes back to Baudelaire. The ... very passing of the nature of things is what is beautiful. Of course, that is a very new idea [then], because we tend to think of beauty before that, based on the classical model, [as] the eternal, the permanent, and the unchanging.

The other thing for Benjamin, [… specifically] is within that ruination, there [… is] this continual ruination of the ‘potential of the modern’ that goes unrealized. So that these […] unrealized futures, or these Utopian projections in the nineteenth century never really go anywhere, because they get overtaken by [a dynamic of progress]

This dynamic of progress that [he] talks about. The revolutionary energy of the outmoded things that [are] left behind [… or] were once new and are no longer new because of that progress or dynamism. [These things] have this kind of charge within them that might be recovered in some way, because they speak to an unrealized future of modernity; a kind of desire; a wish for Utopian forms that never come into fruition. [...]

Which is why [Benjamin] is fascinated with people like Charles Fourie’, who makes these kind of crazy Utopian schemes in the mid nineteenth century.9 [… Which] look a bit like Arcades. [Benjamin] is fascinated with ... these types of Utopian visions that get swept aside by modernity. I mean, that in a sense, this is the kind of the Utopian side of, or the messianic side of, Benjamin.

The other side of it, I suppose, is that remorselessness of progress itself, which appears to be giving […] the new. But for Benjamin, obviously, [progress] is actually giving you the ever same. [… It] is a strange combination of the newness and repetition that is […] modeled, for him, on something like fashion or commodity, and production. It is a kind of cyclical movement where fashion is ever-changing but never really produces anything [new].

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Charles Fourie “The Phalanstery” [1822]

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Apple iphone range

It never breaks with that actual dynamic itself, so there is that odd sense that it is moving very quickly but going nowhere. So that is what I think is his sense of ‘progress as catastrophe’ because we are, kind of, swept up in the sense of newness. The kind of ‘quintessential modern experience’ is not actually, really taking us anywhere. [… In] crude terms, [progress] is always just more capitalism for Benjamin. So basically, [progress] is giving us new commodities, but all we ever get is the commodity.

So, we have ‘iPhone 6’ rather than ‘iphone 4’,10 and we are ‘thrilled’ by that advance, but actually all we are getting are more iphones. So, in that sense, newness itself becomes a kind of repetition.

The rise of the Zombie.

This idea of repetition and accumulation becomes clear in your discussion and interpretation of the figure of the zombie as representative of commodity. Would you be able to expand on your particular interest in the rise of this figure, say in comparison to the Vampire? Is there a connection between the figure of the Zombie and say, this ‘unnoticed’ apocalypse mentioned with reference to Koolhaas’ Junkspace? […Well], I think [the zombie] is an its an image of capital. People have disagreed with me. But, I think, what is interesting about the zombie is that is a human reduced to mass production. So, it becomes the figure the human-being reduced to its status as capital.

Marx’s understanding of capital, from which Benjamin obviously draws a great deal, is tied up with the idea of exchange value. [… So] what exchange value does is to quantify everything and render it equivalent or exchangeable. When things take on exchange value […] all the things that might matter to us as sensuous qualities, as difference between objects in various circumstances, are reduced to number equivalence and exchange.

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Karl Marx Das Kapital [1867]

[… So] these books [in my office] may be qualitatively different in standard and interest and so on, they are all £8.99 or £12.99 or whatever. They are all rendered exchangeable with one another.

My argument, is probably, that zombies are kind of ‘residue’ human manifestations of that kind of principle. That Zombies are endlessly exchangeable with each other. That is what makes them different from things like Vampires or werewolves. ... Vampires tend to represent ideas of singularity, ... which is in some way, what makes them sexy or some way traumatic, is that they’re individuated. So, if you think of Dracula, or through to Twilight verses Buffy and things like that, vampires always tend to be ... traumatised.11

Werewolves are a bit like that as well. Whereas zombies, there is nothing actually traumatized about them. There is certainly nothing sexy about zombies. There is nothing because ... they are the removal of individualization. They become a pure quantity or exchangeability.

How would you connect this endless exchangeability to say, reduced individualization to images of the unnoticed apocalypse?

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Well, there is a connection -- although I have not full worked it out -between the two, isn’t there? I think, one of the things in science fiction terms, about the zombie apocalypse is that it doesn’t envisage a future going anywhere, because there is nowhere to go. They [also] don’t really do anything, they just replicate. So it has no, either, Utopian or even, in this sense, dystopian momentum to the future zombie, because all it would ever be is just more of the same. So the zombie image of the future is just the proliferation of the present. The present as ‘on and on and on’ and more so.

Movie Posters Dracula [1931 & 2014] Twight [2010] Buffy [1997]

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Zombies don’t build anything, which is why they are so profoundly unutopian or even dystopian, because they are not building a new world.

They are just their own replication. They inhabit.

Of coarse, going back to what we were talking about before, in the ruins of our world, [… the] zombie apocalypse is always imaged as the take over of these spaces which are then emptied out. So people walk around empty supermarkets, department stores, or city streets or abandoned farm houses or whatever. [This is] the classic zombie narrative, isn’t it?12 The last remaining humans move through these ruined spaces that have been emptied out of other humans, who have been replaced by the zombies. But because the zombies don’t build their own buildings they only ever inhabit these empty junked spaces.

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Movie Posters: World War Z [2013] Walking Dead [2013] Warm Bodies [2014] 28 days later [2002]

Apocalyptic Politics In the HCT Debate, you made reference to the Hayegate as, perhaps a real life example of this ‘emptying out’ of space as part of this apocalyptic rhetoric. Would you be able to clarify what this type of ‘re-purposing’ of space, or radical re-inhabitation of existing space might mean for architectural discourse?

[I think that was towards the end of the lecture…] I was criticizing what I take to be a kind of ‘apocalyptic politics’, or a certain part of the left. I think it has a long complicated history in architectural theory and politics about the […] ’emptying out’ as a radical act itself. In someways, [apocalyptic politics] goes back to the […] flexibility of programme […] from the 60s onwards.

In the context of the sixties [flexibility of programme] is often seen as radical because it is opposed against what it sees as paternalistic, scripted, technocratic, [… The left] was critically mobilized in the sixties against a kind of modernist over determination of programme. [… But] That kind of flexibility , [… which] was thought of as radical in terms of situationism, or archigram,13 or Cedric Price,or all these people who began that type of discourse, has actually become the standard. …

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Archigram [1961]

[Now …] that kind of flexibility works really well with certain kind of neoliberalism, in that, the idea of flexible programme is not … inherently radical in a progressive sense. […] It is [just] the exchangeability of space. So we walk around a city now, and for better or worse, you come across churches which have been turned into art galleries, or flats, or what ever. But what is a problematic response to that, in an ‘apocalyptic politics’ is to say […] ‘the ruin of space is what allows freedom because it opens up these spaces to radical uses’. I think that’s true in some instances. But often it runs the risk of turning defeat into victory, I suppose.

I have found a lot [of what has been written] about the emptying out of the Hayegate as problematic because it acts as if there is a victory … in that it can now be used by BMX riders and guerrilla gardeners. Really?

The loss of social housing in these huge projects […] does not seem to be a victory? That is what I mean by an ‘apocalyptic politics’.

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Heygate Estate, London

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John Wyndham The day of the Triffids [1951]

That a reclamation of space is in a sense disproportionate?

Right yes, and the ‘reclaim’ is severely curtailed, because it is only reclaimable for a period, while it is abandoned before it is put to some other modified use.

I am suspicious of that kind of fetishism of the ‘disruptive void-like’ act, I suppose, […] which seems to flirt with apocalyptic-ism in which, you know, ‘it would be better if everything were ruined’. Which after-all is another kind of long fantasy.

Although, [apocalyptic rhetoric] has taken on rather left wing dimensions recently. Historically, it is more of a right wing fantasy. [… It’s] The fantasy, in more old style, of the conservative sense. It is the fantasy of doing away with modern life and returning to some kind of feudalism of John Wyndham and people like that. […] That kind of, ”if only the apocalypse would come and wipe out all this depravity, we could get back to sensible small scale living and have a proper hierarchy of authority, and you know, ‘women would know there place’. […] Which is what you get essentially in Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids.18

Is this related at all to the idea of a rising feudalism in the property market?

Yes perhaps, [pause] Oh I see. I believe that is true, but in a different form.

Although that is very much a new feudalism, or more a neo-feudalism, rather than a fantasy of a return to the old feudalism, which is what you get in a right-wing apocalyptic rhetoric.

Apocalyptic Manifesto So the rhetoric of return perhaps parallels the ‘desire for destruction’ that emerged in the Futurist Manifestos? That “we must destroy to rebuild’. How do you see this rhetoric in relation to the Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection?

I suppose, in some ways it is talking about the same thing [as before].

[Where] Benjamin can be seen as a meeting point to this. It is talking about the same dynamic, the same form of time, in a way, but from a totally different perspective.

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Coming Insurrection [2008]

Communist Manifesto [1848]

For the futurists, that dynamic of destruction is what is creating newness, and therefore, the glorious future through the present. In that, ‘who wants to hang on to the past’? It is ‘old and pathetic’, and ‘small and useless’. So, the ‘sooner it is destroyed the better’. […] That is the kind of futurist affirmation.

It is clear in the bit at the end of the manifesto, where Marinetti says: ‘when we are old men’ we are [aged] thirty, and that ‘younger men will come along and throw us aside’ and that they should do. So it is that dynamic, of ‘well, we will become old and then we must be destroyed in turn’.

The other side of that is in the Invisible Committee,16 in a sense, is exactly the same dynamic they are describing. That kind of remorseless modern destruction of the old and production of the new. But for them, that IS the apocalypse, that is the entropy. […] Like Koolhaus’ Junkspace. Rather than this energetic newness that the futurists saw, where things are just going to get better and better, and faster and faster, and more and more exciting and so on. It [instead] becomes more and more run down.

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Futurist Manifesto [1918]

[But] there is a large historical context. The Futurists are still, […] as Marx says in the middle of the nineteen century in the [Communist] Manifesto,17 in the famous ‘all solid melts into air’ stuff.

They’re describing the capitalist destruction of feudalism. Or a kind of remanence of feudalism … because there are still large parts of European and North American [areas] that are more or less feudal at the time. […] Now, of course, since the second world war, that has been destroyed. So what modernity destroys now is earlier versions of itself.

What one of the problems with what tends to be named neoliberalism, since the late seventies, is what capitalism is doing now, in some sense, is destroying the earlier iterations of itself. [… Iterations] that took place as a certain kind of compromise with the welfare state, with the trade unions. That is what has been subject to the destructiveness over the last thirty-five to forty years. But that obviously isn’t feudalism.

What we are destroying now is another version of modernity.

The futurists saw this [destruction] as a good thing. Sant’Elia’s writings are very much about needing to have transient buildings and so on.18 But the practicalities of that are considerably different. If the dynamic is [now] one with a continual need for change in the infrastructure? Then, a certain idea of architecture becomes hard to sustain. Especially, when there is a purely commercial logic to it.

... a certain idea of architecture?

[Well …] traditionally, the correlation of modernity with architecture is a metropolitan connection, isn’t it? […] What are these huge Amazon warehouse spaces in the middle of nowhere?19 [… My] presumption is that it is built on the premise that it is not going to last, because the presumption is that technology is going to shift. […]

It is a very odd infrastructure. […] Are they ‘city’ or ‘country’? They are, essentially located in what we think of as rural areas, but obviously also urban and entirely connected to urban networks and so on. So that obvious distinction between ‘the city’ and ‘the country’ become redundant.

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Amazon INC [1994]

… which in turn leads to a deterioration of public space?

Well, some people argue that [public space] is there in the Internet. That is what Andy Merrifield, although somewhat Utopian, he would see [the internet] as the new agora, or something like the new public space […]

It is a public space, in the basic sense, in that is it social space in which strangers can meet in various forms, even if all of it is privately owned and regulated by Facebook PLC. Which is the same, as say ‘shopping miles’ and everything else where there are public spaces that are not ‘public’ because they tend to be privately run and privately owned.

… perhaps this ‘transience’ in networked infrastructure is reinforced by the crisis rhetoric? Or it encourages a crisis politics that calls for a more ‘resilient’ subject?

There is almost a three part distinction [to subjectivity here], isn’t there? There is of course, the neoliberal subject as such, who is the entrepreneurial self, at the top level of transnational classes and so on.

Then at the other level […] Ernst Bloch calls them ‘surplus humanity’, who in some sense, are in part, what would be considered the ‘lives of slumdwellers’ […] and so on. Where people simply don’t seem to have any requirement anymore from the perspective of the global capitalism. Who are just left. Where even ‘resilience’ is not a particular issue, because there is no need for them to become ‘resilient’ from the persecutive of capital.

They are just seen as surplus to requirements, in that sense.

So the ‘resilient subject’ is the kind of one in between. […] Something like, perhaps the traditional proletariat. […] Those who are required by capital, as labour, and as consumers, and so on. But, the effect of neoliberalism is that capital no longer wishes to ‘care’ for those people. Through these traditional means of welfare state, social security, health services, and so on. The rhetoric of ‘resilience’ is then partly about the reproduction of those people, as labour force and as consumers, without the traditional social state. So even though [the social state] is not entirely gone, it is the reduction of the social support network for various people. [Then] There is [also] a physical connection between people and place, isn’t there? So you also get ‘resilience’ around populations and also ‘resilience’ around spaces and infrastructure themselves.

Political Position.

OK. So last question, which is to ask where you stand with regard to the apocalyptic rhetoric. If you do not, say, identify with Invisible Committee, what part of this politics is relevant to architecture?

No […] laughter […] It is certainly not a group I want to be identified with!

But, that is the tricky part of the apocalyptic rhetoric, isn’t it? It is hard not to get drawn into it.

I mean, I don’t feel very cheery about the present, in various ways, I suppose, because I think defeat is defeat... not victory. [and, I see] the problem with a lot of current leftism. … is this tendency to want to simply avoid [that] … defeat of the left. […]

So you get different versions of this. In the Invisible Committee you get the extreme ultra leftist one, which is, ’well yes, left is defeated and that was a good thing because now capital will collapse and we will establish these new communes in the ruins of the contemporary.’ Or you get the Hardt-Negri position which is ‘it looked like defeat but actually it was victory because it was capitalism responding the strength and the demands of the proletariat’, and … ultimately this will ‘breakthrough and capital will fall off in some mystical way’, that I do not fully understand in Hardt-Negri. Or you get Badiou, that ultimately celebrates the loss of the party and unions and so on, because now ‘we can fully embrace the idea of communism which has significantly become just ‘an idea’’.

All of these seem to me, as ways to just avoid dealing with the problem of just the fact that neoliberalism wiped the floor with the left in the eighties.

That is what happened. If the left wants to be serious again it has to start coming to terms with that, and thinking about what that means to find … viability beyond that.

So, in that way, I have an apocalyptic tendency to agree [that …] there was a catastrophe of the left. In some ways, it was earned and in some ways it was unavoidable, but it was a catastrophe […] But I don’t think more catastrophe is the answer to that catastrophe.

There has been a shift since the late nineties in a sense that was taken […] in the other direction, as source of just simple despair. […] The left was just marked by melancholy and morning for its lost glories. … by a kind of: ‘that is done now so we might as well just give up’. So in a sense, the rise of Hardt-Negri and Badiou […] was a justified response to the [that]. But it did [also] tend to swing in the other direction, particularly in Hardt-Negri, which as far as I can see was to poke your fingers in your ears and go ‘lalalalalala’. […] Laughter […]

So, I think yes, we have to understand that [defeat] did indeed happen and that … there is a long process of trying to find ways of re-energising, in broad sense of, what the left meant. You know, the capacity to think collectively and so on.

... and in architecture?

Architecture is a very interesting barometer of that [re-energising]. But I am too much of a Tafurian enthusiast to imagine that architecture itself can solve the problems [of the world]. I mean, [… In] the twenties and thirties […] most of the great architects that we associate the modern movement with [… had] a great desire is to build cities and social housing. […] The kind of the rise in the ‘architectural work’, which in some ways carries on to the sixties, to post-CIAM, Team10 through to the Smithsons and people like that.

Whereas you look now, and you think designing social housing is about as unglamorous as you can imagine for architecture. […] I don’t mean that as a moral condemnation of architecture, but it reflects that […] shift from pre-defeat of the left, in which the idea of building social housing and the collective was part of what architects […] aspired to do, […] but no longer seems to have a viable avenue. […] Purely by the fact that it is very difficult to build social housing now, near impossible. [… due to] the collapse of the institutions around them.

So, my Tafurian point is if you think pre-archigram, when they worked on things like the Southbank Centre project, […] where London Council employed [Architects] to do jobs like that. Those types of institutions are largely gone in [the UK] …

Like the renewed fashion of thinking about architecture as ‘art’, in an expanded post-conceptual sense. This is something [expressed] internally in architecture as a form of contemporary radicalism and so on. [But] to some degree is also a product of the fact […] that architects have been moved out of their positions of power in building things like social housing and massive public projects [… due to other social forces].

I always think this is Tafuri’s fundamental argument — when he has the famously depressive lines at the end of Architecture and Utopia — is for ‘reduced form without utopia, sublime uselessness’, you know?20 That is his point. It is not a moral condemnation of architects [… but,] it is naive to imagine architecture on its own as able to change the world in its own image. […] You don’t have to end up as despairingly as Tafuri, but it is always remorselessly the same argument, isnt it? […] It is always about exercising humility for architecture. That architecture’s grand aspirations and sense of itself, is in fact, limited by other social forces, which in the most part tend to be more powerful than it is.

When you think about it, it’s obvious. […] It is [the] Banks that decide what our cities look like, not architects. […] Architects are chasing the funding from [these] institutions and property development and so on, trying to fiddle with the design to make [building] better, and of course they should.

But they’re not the ones who decide what our cities look like.

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M. Tafuri Architecture and Utopia [1976]