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Critical Theory will never die

Another bunch of disaffected academics who claim that they are “beyond theory” set up camp sometime around the turn of the millennium, this time in architecture, but the gripe is aimed at the usual suspects: Frankfurt School Marxists and French Post-Structuralists.

For lack of a clever name, people call it “post-criticality.” Its basic desire consists in wanting to make art while engaging in commerce, to give up the idea that artists and intellectuals are hostile towards money-making institutions. The suggestion is that all the talk of alienation and critique is the fault of philosophers who have convinced regular artists that they should not like mainstream culture, i.e. the place where the money is.

You can read about this cluster of post-critical thinkers in the hippest architecture journals. Last Year Harvard Design Magazine had a piece by David Hickey, called “On Theory: ‘Post-Criticality and Death by Academics.” Hickey is considered cool because he dropped out of academia in the 60s but knows all the theories and writes in a low-key chatty style, like an old philosophy professor having a seminar on the back deck before getting a beer.

The smartest, and most frustrating, aspect of post-critical writing is that it refuses to sound smart. A lot of the time, these guys summarize theory debates with laconic one-liners, Walter Benjamin is just “dopey.” We are all supposed nod and smile.

There is something deliberately down home American about these simple statements. It is also a hip, insider way of talking. German Marxists are just so uptight. You need to have seen the right movies and then you get it.

In Perspecta, another cool journal, Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting explain the difference between Critical and Post-Critical Architecture as the difference between Robert De Niro and Robert Mitchum as actors. De Niro is all intense Method-acting, always showing off how much work goes into his character, while Mitchum is utterly laid back in his bad-boy occupation of a role.

Cool, it’s cool to be cool. This is Facebook Theory. Like the guys in grad school who always have a running joke about this band and that movie. When you see the band, hear the movie, you realize that they are pretty cool, you like them, too, but you wonder if there is more to it.

And the point of theory, of every philosopher since Socrates, is that there is always more to the picture than meets the eye.