After All, or the End of "The End of"Author(s): K. Michael Hays and Alicia KennedySource: Assemblage, No. 41 (Apr., 2000), pp. 6-7Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3171267Accessed: 07/09/2009 15:52

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After All, or the End of "the end of"

While it is easy to overestimate the importance of the beginnings and

endings of journals, such vectors are, nevertheless, partial indicators of historical shifts. And this final issue of Assemblage evidences a discourse

taking account of its own historicity. Indeed, the sheer motleyness of its form signals a discourse in transition, while the content of most of its ar- ticles is, remarkably consistently, transition itself. This, along with the

perennial concern of the relations of theory and practice, are the main themes that can be tracked across the contributions that follow.

For our part, one point needs to be emphatically made one last time. The end of Assemblage has nothing to do with the end of theory, neither as an editorial intention nor, in our minds, as a historical symptom. Rather, the transitional moment means that theoretical activity achieves a new excite- ment and urgency. We hear the antitheoretical rants to be sure, and, oddly enough, coming from deep within the theoretical camp. A new techno- cratic positivism of an architectural-managerial class* is fusing with an older but ongoing experiential nominalism (an atomized, appetitive im-

mediacy of experience), with the result that the larger abstract ambitions and the sweaty efforts of an older theory are being taken to task. But all this, too, is a problem for theory. A peculiar characteristic of theory is that it must constantly historicize itself. And the various lines of flight out of

theory (the technomanagerial, the postcritical, the neopragmatist, etc.) are still products of theory's success (and, perhaps, excess). They represent the sorts of revisions theory must pass through from time to time: theory taking inventory, adjusting to new demands, going through a bit of necessary re- tooling rather than closing down the shop altogether. - As for the relation of architecture theory to architecture practice, the most interesting recent developments are those attempts (including the turn of attention to the fields of nonlegible architectural effects and affects) to take E

into account how theory must partially undo itself in order to acknowledge what architecture does differently, to respect that about architecture which is excessive, radically incomplete, and as yet unconventionalized. Part of *

6 K. Michael Hays and Alicia Kennedy

the problem of the linguistic or formal design theories from which Assem- blage departed was that they tried to read architecture as an isomorph of the categories and operations of theory. However much they expanded on functionalist and historicist explanations, their elaborate transductions gave no reciprocal force to architecture as a social production. Recent theoreti- cal developments have been more generous to architecture by insisting on the differences among practices rather than on equivalences. But the misalignment of practice and theory cuts both ways. The making of a building or an architectural project requires a highly specific and ma- terially absolute synthesis of its many components and operations within the standards of professional practice at any given moment. Even if a building is inherently projective in the sense that it materially and con- ceptually changes the situation into which it is placed, it cannot ordi- narily push beyond the standards of cultural acceptance and professional practice. Theory, on the other hand, is anachronistic, often radically so. It uncovers aspects of architecture practice that, while not useful or even correct for building now, may become a resource for future architectures. The theoretical text seeks out for us what we cannot otherwise imagine (this is its properly utopian vocation), but it does so not by presenting us with a concrete representation, or even a guide to one, but rather by ex-

posing the gaps and holes in our discipline and our discourse that are our own inability to see beyond the present and its ideological closures.

The work of theory, as we have stated before, now demands new formats, new styles, new modalities, some quicker, some slower, some smaller and more concise, some larger and more encompassing than Assemblage could ever have provided. It is the very nature of theory that it cross over, drift, and expand in society, however much institutions and orthodoxies

try to confine it. After the dust settles, let the Assemblage project be, above all, a reminder of the extreme generosity of theory, its working though the immense variety of human cultural production and offering new ways of thinking and inhabiting.

K. Michael Hays and Alicia Kennedy 7