Project Mimique London

The Complicity of the Posturban or, A Shoreditch Manifesto After Anthony Vidler

'Long John put on the Flying Dutchman and reach me those head phones.' The music pouring in any second now do or say carefully calculated surface (William Burroughs, The Soft Machine, p 120).

The posturban is a name without intimacy, it transcends intense collective exchange. The tendency demands the discarding of established categories of meaning and contextual histories. We aspire to leave no trace on the city/spectacle (a life without buildings), but celebrate the capacity for erasure and forgetting. There is a dialectic here between memory and situation, a limit. We celebrate defamiliarisation and the elision between reality and film/fiction, implicated in the simulacrum. Empty space, empty form, each is a place of transition, of testing; a threshold, and a locus of proof. Unheimlich or unhomely. Blue Velvet, that iconic representation of breakdown and liminal states of being, is "marked by the continuous sliding between states of terror, amusement and sheer banality" (Vidler, p 186). Dark space, "an opaque and unlimited sphere" (ibid, p 174), penetrates us on all sides. We become permeable for darkness but not for light. The world shines with a neon intensity. Oneirism demands "the merging of the locus solus, [a hallucinatory construction] invented by the architect and the locus suspectus of the city/spectacle" (Vidler, p 204), confirming the permeability of ideas and material context. Architecture, creating situations or events, avers a fictional starting point; the city/spectacle, an "accumulation of effects whose causes are reversed" (ibid), refuses any such constriction on its liberty to reconstruct the imaginary. Posturbanism requires also a loss of the body as paradigm of order (an insurrection!). Posturbanism mourns the loss of the tabula rasa as legitimation of the modern movement, while the city/spectacle of old remains a spectral absence, channelling anxiety (that image of lack) for postmodern conservatives, never ourselves. Event itself is a moment of erosion, collapse, and questioning (Tschumi after Foucault). Architecture, simultaneously space and event, is inherently unstable, constantly on a precipice of upheaval. The urban we regard as provisional, a shift in rhythm or velocity. Or rather, an effect of velocity's breaks, absences, and dislocations. This 'crisis of belief' enhances our experience of the city/spectacle, and we search for lost moments. Meanderthals, we wander "like Freud in Genoa" (Vidler: 185), seeking out effects of the real in the detritus of the image. The technologies of schizophrenia frame our sensibility. There is a certain tension between ourselves and the (more celebrated) advocates of a hermeneutics of the self who have seized this meanderthal technique for a memorialisation. By way of contrast, the works of posturbanism interrupt "comic strips where they are imprisoned in fiction, blasting their way" (Baudrillard: 78) into consciousness as "the waste of all syntactic, poetic and political development" (ibid). They are "subtexts or infratexts, tropes that indicate at once signature and its erasure, prosopopeia[1] and apostrophe, all under the sign of catachresis[2]" (Vidler: 186). Discontinuity, substitution, contamination, and permutation are our (aspirant) norms. Irony is the figurative mode of our predecessors, and we draw on it without censure. On a more serious note, posturbanism is dedicated to interrogating the language and fallacies of hegemony. Sustainable development is a governmental technology and we utilise its strictures with caution. Liberal humanism, social conscience and belief in the public realm have no place in a posturban context. Vidler holds out for an enhanced inclusivity, but in reality, posturbanism offers little hope. Nevertheless, there is no place for exclusion or we would not be here. Project Mimique, July 2009. Footnotes 1. Rhetorical introduction of pretended speaker or personification of abstract thing. 2. Incorrect use of words. Derived from Baudrillard, J. (1993) Symbolic Exchange and Death (London) Sage Tschumi, B. (1996) Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, Mass.) MIT Press Vidler, A. (1992) The Architectural Uncanny (Cambridge, Mass.) MIT Press Virilio, P. (2009) The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Los Angeles) Semiotext(e)

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