by Rem Koolhaas
Here, the conjecture of the Ascension is the initial paranoiac propellant; by recording it in a medium that cannot lie, that postulate is made critical—objectified, made undeniable, put into the real world where it can become active.
Paranoid-Critical activity is the fabrication of evidence for unprovable speculations and the subsequent grafting of this evidence on the world, so that a “false” fact takes its unlawful place among the “real” facts. These false facts relate to the real world as spies to a given society: the more conventional and unnoted their existence, the better they can devote themselves to that society’s destruction.
Salvador Dalí, c. 1929, before embarking on his career as a Surrealist in Paris.
London Bridge rebuilt in original form at Lake Havasu, Arizona, perhaps the most blatant Paranoid-Critical journey in recent memory: dismantled stone by stone, it now spans an artificial lake, with fragments of London life—the red phone booths, the double-decker buses, the guards—adding authenticity at both ends. “London Bridge Racquet Club in foreground is part of the park complex at the West End of the bridge. Broad promenade under the east arch of the bridge leads to English Village at upper left….” “Nearly a century and a half after its inauguration, three years after its demolition in England, a quarter of a world away from Scotland where its stones were quarried, London Bridge stood again, a triumph of engineering skill and determination by English and American Builders five generations apart”—and incidentally solving the Reality Shortage at Lake Havasu.
TOE
Facts wear, reality is consumed.
The Acropolis disintegrates, the Parthenon is collapsing due to the ever-escalating frequency of tourists’ visits.
As the big toe of a saint’s statue gradually disappears under the onslaught of his devotees’ kisses, so the Big Toe of reality dissolves slowly but inexorably under perpetual exposure to the continuous Kiss of mankind. The higher the density of a civilization—the more metropolitan it is—the higher the frequency of the Kiss, the faster the process of consumption of the reality of nature and artifacts. They are worn out so rapidly that the supply is depleted.
That is the cause of the Reality Shortage.
This process intensifies in the 20th century and is accompanied by a parallel malaise: the fact that all facts, ingredients, phenomena, etc., of the world have been categorized and catalogued, that the definitive stock of the world has been taken. Everything is known, including that which is still unknown.
The PCM is both the product of and the remedy against that anxiety: it promises that, through conceptual recycling, the worn, consumed contents of the world can be recharged or enriched like uranium, and that ever-new generations of false facts and fabricated evidences can be generated simply through the act of interpretation.
The PCM proposes to destroy, or at least upset, the definitive catalogue, to short-circuit all existing categorizations, to make a fresh start—as if the world can be reshuffled like a pack of cards whose original sequence is a disappointment.
PC activity is like cheating with the last moves of a game of solitaire that refuses to come out, or like banging a piece into a jigsaw puzzle so that it sticks, if not fits.
PC activity ties the loose ends left by the rationalism of the Enlightenment finally together.
DESIRE
As an example of recycling the used contents of the globe, Dalí himself attacks Millet’s Angélus.
François Millet, L’Angélus. As a child, Dalí could see a reproduction of this painting from his school bench. It “produced a vague anxiety in me…so intense that the memory of these two immobile silhouettes never left me….”
At first sight it is one of the most banal of 19th-century cliches: a couple on a barren field, saying prayers in front of a wheelbarrow loaded with two bags of unspecified contents: the scene is completed by a pitchfork stuck firmly in the earth, a basket and a church spire on the horizon.
Through the systematic reshuffling of these worn-out contents, through the fabrication of flashbacks and flash-forwards—the tableaux preceding and following the known image—Dalí reveals that the Angélus is an ambiguous freeze-frame and discovers hidden meanings: the couple is petrified in a moment of sexual desire that will animate them in the next instant; the man’s hat, ostensibly taken off in a gesture of piety, hides an erection; the two enigmatic bags slumped together on the wheelbarrow only announce the imminent intimacy of the still-separated couple; the pitchfork is the force of sexual attraction made concrete; the woman’s red hat glowing in the sunset is a close-up of the impatient tip of the man’s member; and so on.
Through interpretation, Dalí explodes the Angélus and gives it a new lease on life.9
Dalí’s permutations of Millet’s Angélus. Illustration for Les Chants be Maldoror, 1934-35: here, Millet’s original protagonists have disappeared, but their accessories—the pitchfork, the wheelbarrow and its enigmatic bags—have been reconstructed as paranoiac “substitutes.”
Meditation on the Harp, 1932-33: Millet’s couple now confronted with the accusatory offspring of their scandalous relationship.
INDIANS 1
PC activity existed long before its formal invention. When Columbus sailed west, he wanted to prove two distinct hypotheses:
1. that the world was round, and
2. that he would reach India by sailing westward. The first conjecture was right, the second wrong. Yet when he printed his footstep on the New World, he proved both theses to his own satisfaction.
From that moment, the natives became “Indians”—fabricated evidence that their discoverer had indeed reached India, fingerprints of a speculative error. (A PC race, they were doomed to extinction when the mistake was discovered—wiped out as embarrassing evidence.)
Dalí, The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, 1959. Columbus depicted a split second before his two theses—the correct one that the world is round and the incorrect one that he had reached India—were established as “facts” by the imprint of his footstep on the shore.
GRAFT
Any process of colonization—the graft of a particular culture onto an alien site—is in itself a PC process, the more so if it occurs in the void left by the extirpation of the previous culture.
Amsterdam to New Amsterdam = from mud to bedrock; but this new foundation makes no difference. New Amsterdam is settled in an operation of conceptual cloning: the transplantation of Amsterdam’s urban model onto an Indian island, including gabled roofs and a canal that has to be excavated with superhuman effort.
In a more conscious way, Murray’s Roman Gardens—Antiquity on 42nd Street—is also an operation of paranoiac transposition. Erkins knows that the situation he claims to reproduce never really existed except as a hypothesis in his own mind. Therefore, to impose the “reality” of his analogy between the Romans and Manhattan’s inhabitants—the past reshuffled as modern message—he depends on maximum authenticity of his stolen goods, on the most conventional, imitative, undeniable souvenirs of a journey that never was—to the extent of using actual plaster casts of the objects of antiquity to impose his own form of Modernity.
PROJECT
In the artificial light of the PCM, the 1672 “map” of New York—island accommodating a complete catalogue of European precedents—becomes the only true representation of New York as project.
Jollain’s “bird’s-eye view of New Amsterdam,” 1672, the result of a never-ending flow of paranoid projections firmly established on the soil of Manhattan.
From its discovery, Manhattan has been an urban canvas, exposed to a constant bombardment of projections, misrepresentations, transplantations and grafts. Many “took,” but even those that were rejected left traces or scars. Through the strategies of the Grid (with its fabulous incremental receptivity), the inexhaustible Lebensraum of the synthetic Wild West of the Skyscrap
ers and the Great Lobotomies (with their invisible interior architectures), the 1672 map becomes in retrospect a more and more accurate prediction: portrait of a paranoiac Venice, archipelago of colossal souvenirs, avatars and simulacrums that testify to all the accumulated “tourisms”—both literal and mental—of Western culture.
COMBAT
Le Corbusier is ten years older than Dalí.
Coming from Switzerland, he shares with Dalí that Paris that is the breeding ground not only of Surrealism but also of Cubism (and Le Corbusier’s private Protestant version: Purism).
Dalí abhors Modernism, Le Corbusier despises Surrealism. But
Le Corbusier’s persona and method of operation show many parallels with Dalí’s PCM.
Some of these must be the involuntary signs of a truly paranoiac streak in his character, but there is no doubt that this streak has been systematically exploited, and with relish, by its proud owner. In a classic paranoid self-portrait, he claims: “I live like a monk and hate to show myself, but I carry the idea of combat in my person. I have been called to all countries to do battle. In times of danger, the chief must be where others aren’t. He must always find the hole, as in traffic where there are no red or green lights!"10
OTHERWORLDLINESS
Architecture = the imposition on the world of structures it never asked for and that existed previously only as clouds of conjectures in the minds of their creators.
Architecture is inevitably a form of PC activity.
The transformation of the speculative into the undeniably “there” is traumatic for modern architecture. Like a lone actor who enacts an absolutely different play from that of other actors on the same stage, modern architecture wants to perform without belonging to the scheduled performance: even in its most aggressive campaigns of realization it insists on its otherworldliness.
For this subversive play within a play it has cultivated a rhetorical justification modeled on Noah’s Paranoid-Critical episode in the Bible. Modern architecture is invariably presented as a last-minute opportunity for redemption, an urgent invitation to share the paranoiac thesis that a calamity will wipe out that unwise part of mankind that clings to old forms of habitation and urban coexistence.
“While everybody else foolishly pretends that nothing is wrong, we construct our Arks so that mankind may survive the coming flood….”
CONCRETE
Le Corbusier’s favorite method of objectification—of making his structures critical—is reinforced concrete. The successive steps—from the speculative to the real—of this construction method constitute a transposition of Dalí’s dream of photographing Mary’s Ascension that, for all its commonness in everyday life, is no less dreamlike.
Broken down in sequence, reinforced-concrete construction proceeds as follows.
First, the conjectural structure of shuttering is erected—the negative of the initial thesis.
Then steel reinforcements—dimensioned strictly according to the rational principles of Newtonian physics—are inserted: the reinforcing process of paranoiac calculation.
Dalí’s diagram of the Paranoid-Critical Method at work doubles as diagram of reinforced-concrete construction: a mouse-gray liquid with the substance of vomit, held up by steel reinforcements calculated according to the strictest Newtonian physics; infinitely malleable at first, then suddenly hard as rock.
Then a mouse-gray liquid is poured into the empty speculative counter-forms to give them permanent life on earth, an undeniable reality, especially after the signs of the initial madness—the shuttering—have been removed, leaving only the fingerprints of the wood’s grain.
Infinitely malleable at first, then suddenly hard as rock, reinforced concrete can objectify vacuity and fullness with equal ease: it is the architects’ plastic.
(It is no coincidence that each reinforced-concrete building site, with its mad clutter of shuttering, resembles Noah’s project: an inexplicably landlocked shipyard.)
What Noah needed was reinforced concrete.
What Modern Architecture needs is a flood.
“In times of danger, the chief must go where others aren’t….”
BUMS
In 1929 Le Corbusier realizes a Floating Asylum for the Parisian Salvation Army, an object that establishes all these metaphors on a literal plane. His barge offers accommodation for up to 160 clochards.
(Bums are the ideal clients of modern architecture: in perpetual need of shelter and hygiene, real lovers of sun and the great outdoors, indifferent to architectural doctrine and to formal layout.) They are arranged in pairs of double-decker beds along the length of the barge, which is made of reinforced concrete. (Remnant of World War I military experimentation. Like architecture, all paraphernalia of warfare are PC objects: the most rational possible instruments at the service of the most irrational possible pursuit.)
CITY
But these are mere finger exercises.
It is Le Corbusier’s all-consuming ambition to invent and build the New City commensurate with the demands and potential glories of the machine civilization.
It is his tragic bad luck that such a city already exists when he develops this ambition, namely Manhattan.
Le Corbusier’s task is clear: before he can deliver the city with which he is pregnant, he has to prove that it does not yet exist. To establish the birthright of his brainchild, he has to destroy New York’s credibility, kill the glamorous sparkle of its modernity. From 1920 he fights on two fronts simultaneously: waging a systemic campaign of ridicule and defamation against the American Skyscraper and its natural habitat, Manhattan, while carrying out a parallel operation of actually designing the anti-Skyscraper and the anti-Manhattan.
For Le Corbusier New York’s Skyscrapers are “child’s play;"11 “an architectural accident…. Imagine a man undergoing a mysterious disturbance of his organic life; the torso remains normal, but his legs become ten or twenty times too long… ”12 Skyscrapers are misshapen “adolescents of the machine age,” “handled nonsensically as the result of a deplorably romantic city ordinance”13—the 1916 Zoning Law.
They represent not the second (real) Machine Age but “tumult, hairgrowth, first explosive stage of the new middle ages….”14
They are immature, not yet modern.
For the inhabitants of this grotesque congregation of architectural cripples, Le Corbusier feels only pity. “In the age of speed, the skyscraper has petrified the city. The skyscraper has reestablished the pedestrian, him alone…. He moves anxiously near the bottom of the skyscraper, louse at the foot of the tower. The louse hoists himself, up in the tower; it is night in the tower oppressed, by the other towers: sadness, depression…. But on top of those skyscrapers taller than the others, the louse becomes radiant. He sees the ocean and boats; he is above the other lice….”
That the louse is exhilarated, not by nature, but because he is eye to eye with other Skyscrapers, is inconceivable to Le Corbusier for “there, at the top, these strange skyscrapers are usually crowned by some academic contraption.
“The louse is flattered. The louse loves it.
“The louse approves of these expenses to decorate the cork of his skyscraper….”15
IDENTIKIT
Le Corbusier’s campaign of denigration is made possible only by the fact that its strategist has never beheld the object of his aggression—an ignorance that he carefully preserves for the duration of his attacks—and that for his European audience, too, his imputations are unverifiable. If an identikit portrait of an alleged criminal—assembled by the police from photographic fragments on the strength of more or less accurate descriptions by his victims—is a Paranoid-Critical product par excellence, then Le Corbusier’s portrait of New York is an identikit: a purely speculative collage of its “criminal” urbanistic features.
In book after book, Manhattan’s guilt is illustrated in a series
of hasty paste-ups of grainy images—fabricated mug shots—that show no resemblance whatsoever to his supposed adversary.
Le Corbusier is a paranoid detective who invents the victims (the lice), forges the likeness of the perpetrator and avoids the scene of the crime.
“Identikit” portrait of Le Corbusier’s imaginary New York. “Living in order to work! This means breaking our backs, driving ourselves mad, moral bewilderment, a prodigious hiatus between us and the realities of nature [italics added], plunging into a black abyss of artificiality. So men have grouped themselves together. Why? In order to struggle for improvement in their lives? In order to suffer! To have gone so far, to have allowed ourselves to drift so far in our cities—all our cities—that the human mechanism has run off the rails, so that we are mere hunted animals!… Flowers! We must live surrounded by flowers!” Illustration and caption for the Radiant City.
TOP HAT
Le Corbusier’s passionate involvement with New York is, in fact, a 15-year-long attempt to cut an umbilical cord. In spite of his angry obliterations he is secretly nourished by its reservoir of precedents and models.
When he finally “introduces” his anti-Skyscraper, he is like a prestidigitator who accidentally gives his trick away: he makes the American Skyscraper disappear in the black velvet pouch of his speculative um verse, adds jungle (nature in its purest possible form), then shakes up the incompatible elements in his Paranoid-Critical top hat and—surprise! pulls out the Horizontal Skyscraper, Le Corbusier’s Cartesian rabbit.