Beyond ( post- ) critical architecture: A realist perspective

After nearly fifty years of architects' scramble to define an architecture which is not merely subordinated to external forces emerging from social and economic domains but consciously conceives and intends to transform its surrounding conditions, critical architecture still deprives a clear conceptualization of both its aims and strategies. Current debates on possibility of critical architecture suffer from a turmoil on the very key concepts of rhetoric: reality, autonomy, agency, and even criticality itself are still subjects of arbitrary disputes. It is turmoil in a sense that it lacks any ground, any external reference through which multiple arguments can be confronted or valorized. Given the historical failure of different strains of critical architecture, which this thesis categorizes them in three main strands of sixties Neo-avant-gardes (inspired by critical ideas of Frankfort school), American criticality (represented mainly by Peter Eisenman and Michael Hays) and European criticality (promoted mainly by Rem Koolhaas and Bernard Tschumi), current situation of critical literature and the strategy of blending or reformulating already-existing paradigms, just inflates discourse bulk and deepens the crisis of critical discourse. The story becomes even more depressing by adding post-critical narration, a recent paradigm which denies any critical or oppositional agenda in favor of innovative technological experiments and adapts firmly with prevailing neo-liberal agenda. Despite critical camp which remained stuck to polemics of judgement and negation, post-critical engages 'dirt' of real world and positivizes nagativities through internalized multiplicity to hold up experimental and pragmatic deterritorialization of objects. This thesis, founding on meta-theoretical orientations of Critical Realism, argues that in current situation of (post-)critical discourse, it is first and foremost the discourse itself that hinders conceptualization of architecture's critical potentials. Critical realism opposes the (post-) structuralist principle of critical tradition that the relation between architecture and its knowledge is arbitrary and totally subjective, but there is always a third pillar, the object in itself, which both signified and signifier must refer to. This ontological move, entails a huge paradigm shift in critical architecture rhetoric, so that legitimacy of narratives cannot be found in the interrelation of various knowledges or ideas, but in their power to explain architectural reality and its causal mechanisms more comprehensively. Tracing loss of reality in critical discourse, highlights Tafuri's primary role in deviating discourse from objectivity of architecture toward a merely cultural reading and thus preventing discipline to gain a holistic insight on stratified reality of architecture and the potentials of agency that lie on each. By Tafuri, fallacies of structuralism propagated in architecture, and sedimented at the heart of critical discourse, while architecture's disciplinary content was inadequate to provide appropriate theoretical tools to excavate this inheritance. While different narrations of criticality struggled to positivize Tafuri through formal criticism (Eisenmann) or exceed his critique through visionary activism (Koolhaas), they reproduced the very conflation of his that 'object of study' is the same 'real object'. If architecture is a set of signs assembled by human mind with no need to correspond with external reality, then it is possible to criticize reality through inventing a set of self-critical codes (American mode), or to change it through reassembling of those signs and creating new meanings by resorting Surreal idea of unconscious (European mode). This lack of concept of reality and disregarding its causal mechanisms was also prevailed it pre-Tafurian movement of sixties avant-gardes. Following Frankfurt school, these utopians took reality equal to positivist interpretation of it, by which experiencing individual was distorted to objects of scientific experience. To resist this alienation, they denied the idea of (real) object since object itself is embedded in historical and social processes, and identified science as merely subject's product (what is called epistemic fallacy in Critical Realism). In architecture they shifted from traditional practice of architecture of objects (buildings) to architecture of subjects (bodies), and this occurred through culturally inscribed performative practices of daily life. In dissolving objects in subjects of everyday life, they actually reduced reality to empirical level of human experience and this hindered their utopic ideas to develop a holistic conception of causal mechanisms engaged in architectural production. As such, according to a Critical Realist analysis, tragic failure of sixties utopians stems from lack of concept of reality and disregarding its causal mechanisms, not necessity of dissolution and reconciliation of any utopian imagination under impenetrable structures, as Tafuri claimed and found his theory on it. Tafuri's role is also distinguishable in initial phases of formation of post-critical trend. If borders of intelligibility (criticality) are limited to borders of language, then criticality naturally fades by stepping into pre-linguistic domain virtuality. So any struggle for criticality would be a futile effort of reviving an already dead paradigm. In its shift from representational and indexical to diagrammatic and experimental concerns, post-criticality found neo-materialist ontology applicable to get rid of general ideas of (and confrontations with) criticality, society and human, and found intelligibility in efficient managerialism of symmetrical components. As for new materialism reality was the flat domain of events (actualized or still virtual) in which homogenized objects freely assemble (or dissemble) together and constitute external real world. Critical Realism also opposes this flat ontological account by arguing that reality is structured and differentiated. Accordingly, there is an underlying domain of structures and mechanisms which causes events of actual domain, and what emerges through this process lies in a specific ontological level different than constituents. As such, from a critical realist perspective, if critical paradigm suffered from loss of reality, post-critical one is involved in a flawed account of reality. This deficiency of robust and comprehensive conceptualization of reality is what I call crisis of (post-)critical. This ontological deficiency of architecture discourse hinders development of architectural knowledge and infects produced theories with fallacies and conflations. In wider realm of architecture reality, discourse, in a dialectical relation with non-discursive mechanisms, acts as a causal mechanism in directing architectural actions toward collusion with status quo, at the same time that takes possibilities to actualize architecture's transformative potentials. Acceding to Critical Realism reality is not exhausted by its structures. It is true that agents are constrained within structures, but they are not simple bearers of them, rather, along (mostly unconscious) reproduction of structures they have the potential to consciously transform these structures. Also, Reality is not exhausted by flux of events either. There are contingent relations as there are necessary ones too. It is true that causal relation does not necessitate emergent phenomena, but it doesn't mean that emergence is totally unintelligible or open to any possibility. If we identify underlying structures and mechanisms of power can predict what forces will be in effect and how the phenomenon will inclined to be. Critical Realism also proposes an infinite stratification of reality, so that a single emergent layer acts as a root layer for a higher emergent one. This highlights the fact that any emergent layer results from specific processes and possesses a specific ontological value (so demands an specific account of conceptualization). Critical realism categorizes these strata in four ecological, social, political and psychological domains and argues for their dialectical interdependence . This stratified account of reality in CR (which seems widely applicable in architecture) along with its robust abstraction of causality and its mechanisms, in my view, provides a compelling departure point to transcend long-standing crisis of architecture discipline. Critical Realism's ontological account allows discipline to conceptualize multiple layers of architecture's reality, investigate what borders and boundaries of this reality might be, develop its knowledge of mechanisms which are at work in any given context and then determine 'where' (what layer) and 'how' to engage to fulfil a transformative agenda. Without such coherent knowledge of architectural reality, critical architecture will not move beyond a discursive fallacy.