Assembly 2

Author(s): K. Michael Hays, Stan Allen and Beatriz Colomina

Source: Assemblage, No. 27, Tulane Papers: The Politics of Contemporary Architectural
Discourse (Aug., 1995), pp. 67-73
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3171431
Accessed: 02-02-2017 11:24 UTC

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Assemblage 27: 67-73 ? 1995 by the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Assembly 2
Robert McAnulty: Michael, I'm going to
apply a bit more pressure to the fault Stan
started to open up in this morning's
discussion. There seems to be a plaintive
tone in your presentation, and if I may
put it more harshly than is perhaps appro-
priate, there is a little nostalgia for the
politics of resistance that runs through
the paper. Even though you are inter-
ested in appearing open to a more affir-
mative project, I think that the Marxist in
you cannot seem to get past the "old"
politics. Your description of ideological
smoothness comes dangerously close to
ideological slickness. I'd like to ask you to
engage Stan on the question of ideologi-
cal smoothness/slickness and, for the
moment at least, to play devil's advocate
in defending what may now be the old
school line of the politics of resistance.
K. Michael Hays: To be quite candid, it
is a dilemma for me. And my point was
that it is somehow also a generational
dilemma. I think many of us have moved
from being merely seduced to a genuine
interest in an aesthetics that might
emerge out of the delirium that complex
interactive systems seems to yield. I think
Stan is right that it is no longer mere
intertextuality that is operative. A step
beyond intertexts to some new kind of
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space and some concept of delirious
production of signification is what I'm
seduced by. On the other hand, my
vestigial Marxism makes me suspicious
that this kind of smoothness runs a
supreme risk. Once different regions
and the different practices appropriate
to these regions - architectural prac-
tice as distinct from cinematic practice
as distinct from economic, political
practices, and so on - once those
distinctions are completely blurred,
then ideology (and I'm using that old-
fashioned word, too) creates as tight a fit
as possible between these regions and
between itself and reality. That's what
we used to call doxa - when things are
thought to be just what they look like;
that's what scares me, this collapse.
Now, I can't easily get out of the model
of resistance. Stan was very helpful at
the end of his paper when he was talk-
ing about some strategies of swerving or
detournment that are different from
resistance. But for the moment, I'm just
urging that we not forget that what
we're recommending looks very, very
similar to what we already have been
given by capital.
Sanford Kwinter: I was extremely
moved by your presentation, Michael.

And I did note the way in which the
existential note shifted (curiously, for
someone of our generation) from the
declared realm of the baby bomber right
into a kind of Generation X discourse.
Now it seemed to me that, by the end,
you were talking about the emergence of
a systematic kind of barbarism that has
overtaken the will and soul of, well, cer-
tainly more than a generation, possibly
even a small world. You then began to
talk about how various modes of thought,
of cultural life, of representations, of
media, etc., had flattened out again into
that same sort of slickness or smoothness.
Now as part of a rather conspicuously
ridiculous gesture, I would - sincerely
nonetheless - like to ask whether you
have ever considered the possibility of
committing really radical gestures of
resistance, not the classic kinds that
worked when it was still possible for
power to be identified as external to one,
before it had become a totally environ-
mental and pervasive thing, and to ask
whether or not you have considered a
kind of "enlightened" neo-Luddism, a
refusing of the invisible rationality of the
machines that have come increasingly to
dominate and saturate our lives? In order
to reconceive the imperceptible and
sometimes very concrete walls that have
formed around us and have created this
kind of anomie, like a continual toxic
massage.
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assemblage 27
Hays: No, the neo-Luddite position is
one that would not be a possibility for me.
It's very clear to me that changes in tech-
nology and changes in modes of percep-
tion that are given to us or demanded of
us by certain social and technological
changes - that those changes demand
aesthetic practices and a reformation of
our political mechanism. It is very, very
clear to me that Luddism would be a
completely reactionary and unviable
option. Although Luddism would take me
out of my dilemma, it is knowing that our
aesthetic practices and our perceptual
mechanisms have to change and under-
standing that they are driven by larger
changes that we can call "capital" and
being titillated by that, but still remem-
bering older strategies of resistance.
That's why I say it is a generational thing,
that we still can remember what it would
be like to be a Luddite. I don't believe
that the slightly younger generation can
think what it would be like to be a
Luddite. Our generation can still think
that problem.
Kwinter: Don't you think that you have a
responsibility as an intellectual to remind,
even at the risk of appearing ridiculous
(or simply "untimely")? You just rejected
something in a reflex that maybe one day
you will want to rethink.
Mario Gandelsonas: I don't know if I was
moved, but I felt something hit me when
you [Hays] mentioned Diana's confer-
ence at Princeton in 1974. Its importance
is something that has never been properly
acknowledged, and, in fact, it has always
been suppressed. The internal resistance
at Princeton was enormous, and Diana
was almost fired. First of all, because she
invited a group of totally unknown people
like Rem, Jorge and myself. Diana taught
at Princeton for three years, from 1973 to
1976. And the second year she decided to
invite Manfredo Tafuri, who at that point
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was totally unknown in the States. I guess
part of the problem was that Tafuri came
without slides and gave his lecture in
Italian. When asked about slides, he said
that he might need two because he
wanted to talk about order and disorder.
So he had one Schwitters and one
Mondrian slide. Then he showed housing
by two unknown architects, Rossi and
Aymonimo. What was interesting was
what happened next (which is not well-
known). Oppositions had noted my com-
plicity in this conference and Frampton
and Eisenman got Diana to introduce
them to Tafuri. They then invited Tafuri
(and not Diana) to publish his Princeton
lecture in Oppositions (Peter negotiated
the deal), which then allowed Opposi-
tions to appear as the promoter of this
theoretical break. So I would say that the
politics of that discourse led to an instan-
taneous historical distortion and suppres-
sion of the facts.
On another note, returning to what
Sanford was asking, perhaps this smooth-
ness that worries you [Hays] is almost
structural in a practice that is in its sec-
ond or third stage. Someone said that
when you start a new form of practice,
you must invent almost everything. In the
first few years you invent all the basic
rules and then they are developed. Once
the basics are in place, it is very difficult
to produce the kind of drastic shock that
accompanies the first few years; when you
start you open up the problematic. And I
think your generation and the succeeding
generation (which are still not yet Gen-
eration X'ers) are still performing that
very important task of developing: criticiz-
ing, demolishing, reconstructing, etc.
Stan Allen: I think we are running the
slight risk of idealizing the abstract idea of
resistance as well as some of the specific
practices Michael points to, without taking
into account the extent to which they have
 Assembly 2

already become institutionalized. First Michelle Fomabai: I am uncomfortable

thing I want to say (and I guess I need to
confess that I am probably a kind of closet
neo-Luddite) is that we're all paranoid
enough to believe that the position that we
set ourselves against is always the domi-
nant one. So I would question whether the
practices you (Hays) characterize as ideo-
logically "smooth" are actually dominant
today. It is true that within the general
economy of capital at large, smoothness
and delirium is the order of the day; but
within the restricted economy of the
academy and the high-design architectural
world, I would argue that what is domi-
nant today is actually a vulgarized and
institutionalized form of the various criti-
cal practices that emerged in the seventies
and eighties, if not before: practices of
negation, strategies of resistance, all of
these modernist and late-modernist critical
practices that have today been absorbed by
the very institutions they set out to critique
and codified into what Dave Hickey has
called the "therapeutic institution." If
there is a dominant practice out there,
certainly in academia, and already in
with the seemingly easy and disturbing
slip from baby boomer into Generation
X'er, and the collapse of the notion of
smoothness into slickness. This tends to
read the younger generation through the
economic position of an older generation
that has become the institution to the
extent that it is established economically.
Within this "generational gap" a certain
economic gap remains inscribed. There
remains a class of people who don't pos-
sess these technologies, a group of people with an ever-elusive smoothness. Simi-
operating who don't have access to the larly, the appropriation of this younger
latest computers (which are often held by "look" reduces this lumpy/smooth space
a technological/institutional elite). This is to slickness.
not purely a question of embracing or
Hays: I may have confused two points
resisting technologies in a nostalgic sense,
(because they are confused in my
but rather, an actual, real problem of class
mind). Part of what I want to say is that
and economics (and often race). And yet
access to this kind of theory itself is an
things are produced through an econom-
access that is provided by a lot of train-
ics that demands bricolage, a making do
ing that a certain generation and a
that might approach a certain smoothness,
certain class has gone through in cul-
at the limits where technology intersects
tural production and consumption.
with a certain primitive nomadic. It is
With that training, most of which we
neither a refusal of the mnachine nor an
uncritical embrace of it, but rather a got in the eighties by the way (which is

certain quarters of the profession, it is that.
Look for example, at the recent shifts in
editorial policy at Progressive Architecture,
which has embraced the worst form of
political correctness. And so I wouldn't
want to set myself up as opposed to resis-
tance as such as much as to its institution-
alized and codified forms, which I think,
in the end, are not only ineffective (be-
cause they are so compromised by their
affiliations), but constitute a massive
misdirection of intellectual resources.
McAnulty: So you now want to go back and
endorse resistance, but in a different sense?
Allen: No, absolutely not. I simply want
to be clear about what it is I'm attacking.
Instead of lamenting the loss of effective
strategies of resistance, I think it's time to
look elsewhere.
hallucinatory thinking of that smooth
space, regardless of whether the technol-
ogy is old or new. To a certain extent, it
blurs the notion of resistance with affirma-
tion. As a means of getting a voice,
bricolage already opens up the technology
by using technology through an economic
necessity of rethinking, which can be
critical and can dismantle the myth of
technology. This bricolage, or lumpy
space (smooth space with lumps), remains
distinct from a slickness that comes from
operating from an economically privileged
position, often linked to the institution.
The institution instrumentalizes and
fundamentally misinterprets smoothness.
This slickness masking itself as smoothness
drives the economically privileged posi-
tion and propagates the eternal collection
of the latest gadgets, confusing slickness
not just any decade), with that training
we have produced a theory for ourselves
in cultural production and consulmp-
tion. I think a number of us are in-
volved matching a certain theory of
complex systems to a description of
vulgar everyday cultural habits. This
theorization seemed impossible to me
until very recently.
Mark Rakatansky: I want briefly to
address both Michael and Stan's papers.
Continuing from the first discussion
period, there has been a disturbingly
black-and-white distinction being made
here between some inadequately defined
term being called critical practice and
some particularly vague term being
called affirmative practice, which no one
has yet defined at all. Who or what is
affirming what for who or what? In the

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terms I used in my paper, the latter term
might be seen as that which attempts to
affirm stable identities and the former as
that which attempts to represent the failure
of identity. Yet I say these terms are being
badly defined because there seems to be
some kind of idea here that a critical prac-
tice can only be understood as self-critical,
as a "baring of the device" of formal com-
position (thus the reference to Eiseninan).
Rather than a different sort of critical
practice, one that would understand that it
would inevitably end up as a new identity
-- no matter what it did - but as an
identity that would not necessarily have to
be fixed (as a sort of better mousetrap), but
might in fact be aware of the slipperiness
of its own affirmation. In other words, it
would not need to be naive about both the
inevitabilities and the limits of its affirma-
tion. I think there is a real ground here in
terms of possibilities for practice - I won't
call it a middle ground, but a kind of
oscillating ground. It doesn't have to be on
one side or the other.
And I would say, in relation to Stan's
paper, just a couple of quick comments:
we shouldn't forget that this essay by
Benjamin, in spite of some progressive
aspects, is - why mince words - his
most reactionary. It is the one to which
everyone turns for the discussion of his
most regressive concept: the aura (which
is why Brecht, in his journal, called it
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assemblage 27
mysticism in the guise of antimysticism).
In terms of the history of Benjamin and
Brecht, their affiliations and their ten-
sions, it is a very strange, a very complex
period, a middle period in their long
relationship where Benjamin temporarily
tries to distance himself from Brecht. But
that's a much longer subject that we
don't have time to address now.
And, of course, I will disagree with you,
Stan, about which manages what more:
architecture or users. But I think we both
might agree that it would be interesting to
have an architecture that didn't privilege
one over the other, that simultaneously
showed how users manage architecture
and how architecture manages users.
Allen: This is, of course, an old debate:
between Benjamin as the hard-nosed
historical materialist and Benjamin as the
redemptive, somewhat misty theological
guide [compare Assemblage 6 and 7:
Richard Sieburth's article "Benjamnin the
Scrivener" and Michael Jennings's re-
sponse in "re:assemblage" wherein
Jennings's claim that Sieburth
"aestheticizes and depoliticizes Benjamin"
almost exactly mirrors Rakatansky's cri-
tique - S. A.]. In that sense, maybe it is
possible to link both of your comments. I
still believe that the strange mixture of
historical materialism and redemptive
theology in Benjamin may be a potential
bridge between what I agree have been
stated here as overly asymmetrical posi-
tions. But in order for that to happen, you
can't pick and choose among these mul-
tiple Benjamins; you have to take it all,
contradictions, even "reactionary" or
metaphysical elements intact. Benjamin's
own description of this dilemma deserves
to be quoted: the relationship between
historical materialism and metaphysic, he
says is "like a stocking turned inside out,"
that is to say, properly irreducible and
incapable of being separated out. This is
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why part of the subtext in my essay is that
Benjamin is still a good model for the way
out of this problem. Benjamin himself
refuses to recognize a contradiction be-
tween critical work and affirmative prac-
tice.
Catherine Ingraham: I want to say some-
thing about the Luddite and the way
theories of complexity (as I guess we're
calling them) have become our latest
acquisitions, our latest machines. The
more I delve into machine life, the more
I see the way in which machine life
supplies its own Luddismn. It seems to me
that the machine and theory of the ma-
chine (specifically the computer) are
constantly supplying us with a theory of
resistance through negation that be-
longed absolutely to an earlier historical
period. And that necessary, built-in de-
vice (I'm oversimplifying here) that keeps
that smooth transition from ever develop-
ing or taking place. So we don't even
have to supply the antimachine, the
machine supplies it for itself. It is the
resistance to the threshold that keeps us
from going the distance with the machine
that we're constantly being promised in
terms of virtual reality and that collapse
of the body into machine, that never
happens. We're not even close ...
Kwinter: But we still dream about it ...
Ingraham: We dream,, but we build in a
resistance to the dream. The dream
builds in its own dreaming resistance
because it dreams the resistance simulta-
neously. I keep wanting to find the vein
that takes us past that moment of resis-
tance, but I can't. I certainly don't think
complexity theory takes us there, at least
at the moment. Genetics is the closest,
DNA stuff.
Javier Navarro: Architects know so little
about technology, we know what its
effects are but not how it really works.
 Assembly 2

Beatriz Colomina: Maybe it's not just the
knowledge of technology, but the avail-
ability of technologies. The history of
architecture is often explainable in terms
of the availability of techniques. It is true
that there is a lot of technology in our
houses, but it is also interesting to see
where that technology is coming from. In
the U.S., right after the war there were
millions of people without housing and
there was a generation of architects who
had spent the war working for the military
and who were completely familiar with
these new techniques. The Eameses, for
example, had been producing these ainaz-
ing splints for legs and body litters for the
U.S. Navy. Right after the war, they re-
cycled this technique of molded plywood
should be offering their services to soft-
ware companies, for example. We'll help
you develop software in the way that the
Eameses helped develop splints.
Colomina: I don't know if architects
would want to do that or if they could do
that. But historically architects of that
generation got involved with industry
because there was nothing else to do. It
was not a matter of choosing to work for
the military. Today, in the postwar years,
there is a whole set of technologies wait-
ing to be recycled. Architects could be Ingraham: But architecture is already
involved again. deeply within software companies. They
are feeding back to us all of our most
Allen: I think this leads us right back into
the same territory. Are we simply buying
banal images of space and line, figure, and
into a dominant market for software, volume. It's coming back everywhere. We

that had been developed for medical and
military reasons into the production of
chairs. That is a typical example of medi-
cal and military technologies being re-
cycled into techniques for producing
domestic objects. This is true of many of
the examples I showed here. The Built-in-
the-USA house by Rudolph uses the vinyl
plastic struts, developed by the Navy in the
war, for its roof. So another way that we
can understand modern architecture
(which is not the typical way) is from the
point of view of the recycling of the tech-
nologies of war. The issue is not only what
the architects knew and what they did not.
On the one hand, the architects were
involved with the military industry during
the war and were therefore familiar with
the evolving technology. On the other
hand, and perhaps more crucial, the
industries were looking for places to put
their products. The architects simply
transferred the available technology.
While the Eamses developed the molded
plywood, Rudolph simply deployed an
available technique.
Navarro: Shouldn't architects be finding
other venues for our services? Architects
taking on all of its ideological baggage and
submitting to its scheme of power rela-
tions? Or are there other possibilities,
tactics of deviation, ways of tweaking the
system? How could architects bring their
particular forms of knowledge and creativ-
ity to bear on electronic technologies,
acting not as Luddites, but as creative
consumers, reworking and refiguring the
given materials, using them in ways never
imagined by their original designers?
Could architects do something in the
realm of electronics analogous to what
architects in the immediate postwar period
did with military technologies in the
example Beatriz mentioned? At Colum-
bia, for example, commercial software
designed for Hollywood special effects,
conceived to function under absolutely
normative narrative schemas, is being used
for dynamic modeling of program and
event, reversing its kinematic capacities to
generate form from movement. Is this a
significant modification? Does it consti-
tute a challenge to the software establish-
ment? I have to say I don't know. I'm
slightly less optimistic, but I think we still
have to go after that possibility because
otherwise it's hopeless.
are seeing the most base architectural
fantasies all around us, in aerospace, in all
the military contracts that are using visual-
ization techniques. Architecture is already
deeply within these realms. The question
is can it control its present there - can it
control the feedback loop?
Allen Architecture may be deeply within
these realms, but at present, architects are
not.
Michael Stanton: I have a couple of
rather abrupt questions/comments. First,
don't machines have a kind of built-in
resistance or a kind of built-in availability
of resistance? Because in this post-Chris-
tian era, we attach almost ecclesiastical
importance to each new machine that
comes along. It eventually disillusions us
or doesn't provide that apotheosis we
hoped it would. You can look at the
World Wars as having ended our infatua-
tion with the first machine as some object
of deliverance. And I think, again and
again, that we tend to feel these technolo-
gies arrive at some place culture desires
to be and we continue to be disillusioned
as if resistance is almost automatic within
the mechanism of the machine.

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The other question is one of general
interest. So many of the machines we are
now fascinated with tend to be the ones
that are not directly related to the pro-
duction of buildings. They are related to
the production of imagery or representa-
tion at best of buildings, and often times
not even that. PA is full of ads for new
technologies for buildings but none of us
is talking about new rubber gaskets or
bolts or materials that buildings are
actually made from. We're now talking
about some other removed subject, one
that I am sure is very pertinent, which we
then think about architecture. But I
return to Javier's point: we really are
talking about theory here, we're talking
about the way theory is affected. Not the
actual making of buildings, but the way
we think about the way we could make
buildings.
Mark Wigley: I have some discomfort
with the machine analogy. If anything is
new, and I think very, very little is new by
the way, it is probably that terms like
"machine" don't work very well anymore.
And probably even my expression "work"
isn't good enough either. The whole
sense in which concepts can be
instrumentalized by a knowing subject
whether to critical ends or affirmative
ends (to return to the terms Mark used
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assemblage 27
before) is debatable. It seems to me, for
instance, if we think about the entangled
relationship between the media and the
house that Beatriz described, it just
wouldn't make much sense to describe
those TV sets within the house as ma-
chines. If you can understand how irrel-
evant the term machine is in the face of
television, I think that helps. And I think
the irrelevancy can be more precisely
defined. The term "machine" still car-
ries the implication that the machine
can be detached from the person talking
about it, that it is an object in that sense.
But exactly what the technologies of
representation that we are becoming
more and more immersed in show us is
precisely that we are immersed, we are
not detached. We don't know the begin-
ning and the end, therefore we cannot
position ourselves as either humiliated,
violated, or tyrannized by these ma-
chines, or that we are using them to
tyrannize anything else. We are in some
indeterminate zone. And that's why I
think that the rhetoric of flows and so on
that Sanford was using is correct, it's a
situation of immersion. And it seems to
me that in this state of immersion you
might get into hydraulic arguments and
so on - arguments that flow in certain
ways that disrupt the institutional logic
of the discipline rather than arguments
about flows that simply reinforce that
discipline. There may have been hy-
draulic machines in the past, but even
the rhetoric of the machine, which is
also the rhetoric of instrumentalized
theory, starts to break down. The obvious
reason for belaboring this point is the
crucial role that the word "machine" has
played in discourse of architecture in the
twentieth century, at the most literal
level, at the aesthetic level, at every
level. To make a serious comparison
between Gideon's Mechanization Takes
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Command and the situation today is very
difficult. I don't know if we would be
saying today that mechanization can
take command or that it can take any-
thing. And it is precisely at that moment
when you can no longer consistently
make a distinction between those parts
of your self considered bodily or intellec-
tual, material or immaterial, subjective
or objective that the all the discourse
disintegrates and the dilemma is most
apparent. As long as we continue to say
to ourselves, As architects how can we
use these machines? we are simply being
nostalgic, signaling our commitment to
operating with a prior conception of
architecture. And there is good reason
for us to operate within that kind of
nostalgia because we operate within an
incredibly conservative discipline. It's no
surprise that, in the face of these new
technologies of representation, we
would want to reestablish order, reestab-
lish the subject, reestablish the object,
etc. Because all this is to reestablish the
all-too-fragile figure of the architect.
Kwinter: It is little surprising to hear
repeated again the tired ethic of just
accepting the way things are and trying
to think through the new (putatively
more interesting) problem simply be-
cause we accept the historical fact that
the advance of technologization and
modernization are inevitable, that they
characterize the natural, ineluctable
movement of history. Predictable and
totally exasperating. What you've done is
little more than produce yet another
argument, in a seemingly endless pro-
cession of arguments, that slips the old
false doxa or naturalization process in,
by denying us - the living-the all
important de jure distinction between
what is human and what is not. And the
fact is that the forces of modernization

want nothing more than that, nothing
more than for us to conceive of ourselves
- our essence - in entirely productivist
and machinic terms. And unless as a
culture we are able to invoke - in art or
philosophy - those very distinctions and
memories (even if they are false memo-
ries, dredged up and reinvented copies of
the irretrievable real thing), they are
important to us because they remind us,
as Nietzsche argued, that the past is
useful because it presents to us noble
examples that we can compare ourselves
against. It is clear that I disagree with
you, but more to the point, I think that
Michael disagrees with you as well. Be-
cause when one states his position more
clearly, I think the question is that if
there is any hope for resistance - and
the first thing we have to do is to reject
this falsely disqualifying term "nostalgia"
- I think we have to go back into the
past and we have to look at it in new
ways. And we have to salvage what is
there to find new angles that will permit
us to grasp the processes that are invisible
to us precisely because we deny ourselves
the conceptualization that permits those
things to become visible.
Wigley: Getting back to shepherd and
the sheep then. What happened in New
Zealand was that they replaced the sheep
with tourists, who, first of all, when they
arrived in New Zealand looked at sheep-
dogs - that was the number one tourist
attraction in New Zealand. Now there are
not so many sheep. The meat markets
have shut down and there are just tourists
taking pictures of other tourists being
herded by tour guides. New Zealand has
become the background to a certain set
of picturesque photos, an increasingly
digital image. It has adjusted itself to the
self-image of this new form of wildlife.
There is a shift here and a shift that has to
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Assembly 2
be registered. I completely agree with you
on the need to go back. In fact, that is
why a number of us want to insist on a
certain historical specificity for your
argument. Your own argument has a
particular kind of history.
Unknown speaker: I am wondering if the
panel would care to comment on some of
the work being done by Christopher
Alexander as an example of both resis-
tance and practice?
Kwinter: Oh dear, that is probably the
question I fear most in life, because I
and how theory in architecture seems to
could never answer it to anyone's satisfac-
be so tied up with particular genera-
tion but my own. It is, of course, a logical tions. And somehow Christopher
question and a good one . . . it's just that Alexander would not be part of our
it's too fraught with historical anxiety, and
generation, so we would not have
frankly, I wouldn't have the guts to do it
thought about it. What about this spe-
in public.
cialization of the audience in genera-
Allen: It is a good question and it prob- tional terms? What about the premature
ably cannot be answered quickly. What I obsolesence of theory? Not just
Alexander's, but all theories? What does
hear as a subtext of the question (al-
though I may be reading into it) is that a this mean? Does it restrict the produc-
lot of the issues we've been discussing tion of theory? Or is it a necessary lib-
(flows and connections, the mathematical eration, a freeing up of our horizon?
modeling of program, and so on) were in
some sense anticipated by a lot of work in
the sixties - work that was very forcefully
rejected, interestingly enough, precisely
by the Althusserian moment of the erup-
tion of (a semiotic-based) theory in the
seventies. Within that historical context, I
would agree that we could look again at a
lot of this work, at its sociological basis
and its mathematical basis. But, at the
same time, I would just want to under-
score my own discomfort at the particular
images and specific aesthetic models
produced in practice by work supposedly
based on that research. But I think there
is much that is worthwhile to look at
again in that work.
Colomina: I think this question goes
back to Michael's point about audiences
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