Historical Consciousness

Reinhold Martin

JAE OpArch: 2 August 2010

Relationships between reflection and action change over time and according to context. But how to account for these changes? Although this may seem a historian’s question, in truth, it is answered indirectly by every historical actor whatever his or her métier. The term “agency” often describes such relationships.

Architects, for example, are normally thought to possess agency in direct proportion to their capacity to implement their ideas in practice. Take the partly mistaken idea that architects “build” buildings. Clearly, architects do not build; they issue instructions. However, the performative character of this type of professional “speech,” whether enacted verbally or graphically, readily allows it to be construed as a form of direct action. Critical historical analysis might assign further and somewhat contradictory agency to different actors at different stages in this complex process, all of which combine to make the architectural “speech act” possible or not. Subsequently, the buildings themselves might also be considered agents of consolidation or of change, independent of the architect’s intentions. So to imagine that the architect proceeds linearly from reflection to action, and that this process can or ought to be authorized by precedent or some other type of historical knowledge, is to substitute an imprecise metaphor for an actual network of discursive actions and material relations.

The past few decades of criticism and pedagogy in architecture seem to have recognized this. In fact, the modern architect’s too-literal sense of agency has been diminished (or demystified) to the point that many students today seem incapable of imagining themselves as historical actors in any sense of the term. This despite the recent and highly affecting calls to “change” that seemed briefly to have awakened a generation whose historical imagination has been savagely beaten into submission by a world-system that is based on a sort of permanent crisis masquerading as the maintenance of the status quo.

We can therefore define historical consciousness as an actually imagined relationship with the world-system. I say “actually imagined” to suggest an interpenetration rather than a hierarchy between what has traditionally been thought of as ideological (an imagined agency) and the actual, material ground of historical action. Since, especially in the social strata with access to advanced education, including professional education, the imagination has emerged as a real, material, disciplinary site, in both senses of the term “discipline.” This development, which has been widely observed, has helped to requalify architects as “symbolic analysts” whose role as actors in the cultural networks operating the world system is on a par with that of movie directors, advertising agents, or other knowledge workers. In that sense, imagining oneself as a participant in such networks while failing actually to imagine the possibility of anything like a structural transformation of the system actively reproduces that system. In contrast, a critical historical consciousness would consist in being able to imagine such a transformation as a real, historical possibility.

This is the minimum that has always been required of a properly enlightened education. It is also, in the end, what distinguishes education from training, including the systematic training of the imagination to presuppose that no alternative to the world-system is possible. This type of training occurs every day in mass or “popular” culture. And unfortunately, I fear that it applies (and probably has always applied) to the greater portion of architectural “education,” whether it is historical, theoretical, practical, or professional in character. I will even risk extending this to include the recent swing of the pedagogical pendulum toward a type of earnest activism that cannot be faulted for its idealism. For even there, the emphasis is generally on entrepreneurship rather than on collective agency, often in keeping with a latent or manifest combination of “free-market” ideology and religiosity with which the American moral landscape is thoroughly saturated.

How then to teach a critical, secular, historical consciousness? In this regard, architecture’s most effective instruments have always been primarily aesthetic in character. Though, I hasten to add, by “aesthetic” I mean something very far from an “art for art’s sake” helplessness or indifference toward the world-historical processes to which I have been alluding. Instead, I mean to highlight architecture’s function as a kind of technical instrument for training (or more appropriately, educating) the human mind and in particular, its faculties of discernment and of judgment. Like other cultural forms, architecture helps to shape the contours of thought by participating in the ongoing process of dividing up the world such that some things are visible, thinkable, and imaginable while others simply are not. A double consciousness, then, is required, one that is capable of sorting out both the historical conditions under which one is operating and the objective processes organizing the imagination such that this or that possibility comes into view while the other disappears. That, too, is history.