Capital's Passions / Architecture's Geometries: Movement.

by Michael Bell

On any given weekday the city of Houston drives an average of 53,000,000 million miles. Translated at the average speed of commuter traffic this amounts to aggregate drive time of 35 years per day.

Part One: Dimensional Subjects / shape evading shapes.

In interview conducted during the 1993, Noam Chomsky 1 offered a vivid description of governmental policy assembling itself about the needs of commerce and trade. He made particular reference to economic prerogatives secured by the Bretto n Woods Conference of 1944. The Bretton Woods Conference established the fundamental guidelines that allowed the establishment of the International Monetary Fund in an effort to stabilize international trade after World War II. The New York Times termed t he policies "a new conception of world order," and the "British Economist"2 portrayed an "entirely new and dynamic conception of post war world relations." The Bretton Woods Conference policies established th e IMF to secure a gold standard and ensure predictable monetary values necessary for post war international trade. The Secretary of the U.S. Treasury Morgenthau, speaking at the Economic Club of Detroit on February 26, 1945, clarified the general thesis o f the IMF in direct language: a "postwar economy of full production and full employment . . . required American exports of at least $10 billion dollars annually." The Bretton Woods policies would ensure that an "American salesman could go t o Belgium and sell a car for 40,000 francs without worrying about a sudden depreciation in the value of the Belgian currency. "Throughout history," Chomsky argues, "the structures of government have tended to coalesce around other forms of power." "In modern" times it has organized itself "primarily around economic power." The Bretton Woods treaties were largely dismantled in 1971 under the Nixon Administration, and Chomsky points to these events as effectively mark ing the beginning of a true global economy; one in which unregulated flows of capital would reach new highs and was allowed to chart pathways previously denied. "In 1971," writes Chomsky, "Nixon dismantled the Bretton Woods system, thereby deregulating currencies. That, and a number of other changes, tremendously expanded the amount of unregulated capital in the world, and accelerated what's called a globalization of the economy." Perhaps unknowingly Chomsky then proceeded to describe what I would call the economic topology,3 the shape, of the contemporary city: in describing the "consequences of globalization," Chomsky argues that it extends the Third World model to industrialized countries, and in doing so it extends the two tiered society that characterizes those nations. "In the Third world there's a two tiered society," responded Chomsky; "a sector of extreme wealth and privilege, and a sector of huge misery and despair." The scenario described by Chomsky suggests that the economic figure/ground of a contemporary city demarcates an increasingly stratified class structure that is effectively immobilized in a field that the liquidity of capital has relieved of cartographic or bodily authority. Chomsky's phrase "islands of wealth" and "milieus of despair" offers another description of a site that is not only insightful but also intuitively correct and challenging for an architecture that would hope to intervene.

In his essay "The Nation as Mind Politic," Philip Allott describes a political/economic scenario that elaborates on a potential reading of Chomsky's charge. Allot describes a condition of nation as Self; such a nation arrives as an evolutionary form of governance that becomes a kind of Lacanian Other4 to those subjects that it does not self-conceive. As a mode of governance such a national structure does not so much discipline it subjects, but rather, does not acknowledge their presence. "Nations are a reality-for-themselves, a subjectivity for themselves."5 How does someone protest such a form of governance; how does one assert their presence? Historic assaults upon monolithic and unreactive forms of government have been assumed advantage in arithmetic quantity and the frontal geometry -- they attack, protest, dismantle, assault -- but would a confrontation with Allot's nation as Self find advantage in quantity or geometric description: in other words, would it require that we conclude as Allott does that it "may now no longer be possible . . . to redeem human subjectivity by means of human subjectivity." In Chomsky's case, it seems that such a scenario unreflective economic governance would, and does, allows an agglomeration of power and penury discipline whose morphological dexterity supersedes the historic role of democratic government as representative mechanism or nation as a "people." At the least, it leaves architecture's historically sought geometric role in the fabrication of subject(ive) representation in an exacerbated state: economics and its topological manifestations clearly supersede architecture as a discipline that fabricates the real. In a society that presumes itself to be of arithmetic and geometric representation, such a mode of economic / governance is able to effectively remain an unreflective "Other" even under resistance and duress.

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1 Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many. 1993. Chomsky's interview is further explored in the forthcoming book Slow Space, edited by Michael Bell and Sze Tsung Leong. The Monacelli Press, 1997.

2 See Georg Schild, Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks, (New York: St, Martin's Press, 1995), p. 106. See also, R.G. Hawley, "Bretton Woods: For Better or Worse," (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1946).

3Topological forms, in the most general sense, are geometric forms that retain their independent definition under deformation -- in effect, they allow the description of geometry in time. An economic condition is here understood to be topo logical in that its shape is both a form of geometry and time. A topological form has both dimension and magnitude: it is a four dimensional form. Simple economic systems such a interest amortization could be understood as topological in that they transfo rm their parameters in time while retaining their fundamental properties.

4 In his essay "The Gaze in the Expanded Field" Norman Bryson ascertained a subject that he described as persecuted in Lacan's accounts of the Gaze. Byson's critique asserts that Lacan retain a conceptual frame that posits a subject as the origin of space even as he reveal that this sovereignty is menaced by the presence of other origins; in Lacan's scenario this other origin is the opaque presence of other inanimate entities -- things that "look back." I here refer to Allot's economy as " Self, " as an inanimate entity that "looks back," but reveals nothing. Norman Bryson, "The Gaze in the Expanded Field," Vision and Visuality Dia Art Foundation Discussions in Contemporary Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), pp. 87-108.

5 Philp Allott, "The Nation as Mind Politic," Journal of International Law and Politics, Summer 1992, Volume 24 Number 4 (New York: New York University: 1993), p. 1372.