Criticism and Crisis

Luis Fernández-Galiano

The crisis of criticism has been washed out by the crisis of

the world. In the first essay of Paul de Man's Blindness and
Insight (1971) - the title of which I have borrowed for this
text - the literary theorist argues, "All true criticism occurs
in the mode of crisis." Quoting the 1894- Mallarmé lecture at
Oxford ("They have tampered with the rules of verse . . .
On a touché au vers . . ."), de Man applies the words of the
French poet to the literary criticism of the 1970s: "On a
touché a la critique . . . Well-established rules and conventions
that governed the discipline of criticism and made it a cor-
nerstone of the intellectual establishment have been so badly
tampered with that the entire edifice threatens to collapse."
But this mode of crisis, which does not necessarily affect his-
torical or philological approaches, is indeed inseparable from
criticism: "To speak of a crisis of criticism is then, to some
degree, redundant."
When de Man was writing, his commentary could be
easily applied to the discipline of architecture. After the 1966
books by Robert Venturi and Aldo Rossi, the intellectual situ-
ation of this field could be described with the same words:
On a touché a l'architecture . . . Well-established rules and con-

ventions have been so badly tampered with that the entire

edifice threatens to collapse. The rules and conventions were,
of course, those of modernism, adopted after World War II as
the canonical mode of building, and this first postmodern
refusal would be followed by the unstable, fractured forms
of deconstructivist architecture and by the warped, shapeless
constructions of computer-designed bubbles and blobs. Now,
four decades (1968-2008) after the crisis of modernity, which
shattered architecture and criticism, the material crisis of
the world - from global warming and financial meltdown to
human catastrophes and widespread terror - brings forth
the awareness that the edifice in threat of collapse is the
planet itself.
Given the grim reality of the collapse of global gover-
nance, the task of architecture becomes the very dumb one
of providing some order in the midst of disorder, and the
task of criticism ends up being the even duller one of offer-
ing support and encouragement for the constructions that
47

This content downloaded from 193.145.230.9 on Thu, 10 Oct 2019 15:52:53 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 hope to heal rather than for those that attempt to represent
the chaos of the world. So expressed, the purpose of criti-
cism seems intellectually shallow or downright trivial, but
perhaps our historical time demands the humility of simplic-
ity not only in our lives but in our very thoughts. Being
dumb is a way of being wise in times of distress, and shed-
ding the elaborate cloak of intellectual pretense is akin to
denuding architecture of superficial ornament, going to the
root of things and reclaiming for architects a role of service,
which has been forgotten in the unholy liaison with celebrity
and glamour.
Architects have been very successful in delivering built
icons for cities and countries, but much less so in addressing
the current predicaments of a world torn by pain and anxi-
ety. Their most influential intellectual figures have embraced
a caricature of commerce as their almost single ideological
reference, and the Utopian aspirations of modernity have all
but vanished in a climate of extreme cynicism. The disci-
pline of architecture, for so long the province of monarchs
or tycoons, blurred its connection with power in the first
decades of the 20th century, and clinched a deal with the
social realm that placed the everyday lives of ordinary people
at the center of its attention. But this pact has since been
erased by the emergence of spectacle as the dominant trait of
contemporary societies.
The current awareness of the fragility of our political
and economic structures - which renders the cult of specta-
cle both obscene and obsolete - demands a renewal, 100
years later, of the social contract of modern architecture: a
renewal that cannot be naive and guileless, but also a renewal
that cannot indulge in skepticism. It is indeed a steep road,
one that demands constant attention, and one that may in
the end lead nowhere. But it is the only road that offers a
glimmer of hope, and the only one that it seems decent to
follow. This is our meek and perhaps clumsy way forward:
creating islands of order in a sea of disorder, and offering
shelter from the pain of chaos. Italo Calvino movingly
described this path in the closing sentences of his 1972
Invisible Cities : "Seek and learn to recognize who and what,
in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them
endure, give them space."
If this sounds like a halfhearted attempt to give breath-
ing room to a sadly jaded humanism, it is probably because,
as Mark Lilla, author of The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics ,
and the Modern West (2007), has suggested, too many of us
followed "a false messiah into the desert of deconstruction,"

48

This content downloaded from 193.145.230.9 on Thu, 10 Oct 2019 15:52:53 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 and the intellectual backlash has an element of despair that
grabs on to the more unexpected holds that remain. In The
Voices of Silence of 1951, André Malraux wrote that "nous
voulons retrouver l'homme partout où nous avons trouvé ce
qui l'écrase." This "will to rediscover humanity in hardship"
has an ethical value that cannot be allowed to fade. The crisis
of the world demands that criticism give voice to silence, and
make visible both invisible cities and invisible architectures.

Luis FernÁndez-Galiano is an
ARCHITECT, PROFESSOR AT THE
School of Architecture of
Madrid's Universidad

Politecnica, and editor of the

journals AV/Arquitectura Viva.

49

This content downloaded from 193.145.230.9 on Thu, 10 Oct 2019 15:52:53 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms