Surf’s Up!

Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports.
—Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 1992.

When times are tough, architects turn to Deleuze. Since the 1990s, some of the biggest names in the profession—from Greg Lynn ¹ to Peter Eisenman ² and Bernard Tschumi—have invoked the work of this singular philosopher in their attempts to elaborate an architecture appropriate to the present moment. But why Deleuze? What is it about Deleuze that captures the imagination of designers and theorists reckoning with a discipline in crisis? To answer these questions, we must first ask: what’s the matter with architecture?

If the title of this issue—YOU’RE FIRED—is any indication, architecture has, once again, lost its way. In the United States, the future of the research university seems uncertain. If, in previous decades, the university served as a redoubt of critical inquiry in a society guided by the imperatives of accumulation, the present situation feels different. On campus, people are nervous. Academic freedom can no longer be taken for granted. Campus politics have been shorn of their insularity. As recent events demonstrate, the university has drifted far from its monastic origins. What happens on campus—in seminar rooms and design studios—is tied intimately to happenings further afield. As a result, the classroom feels disconcertingly porous. No longer can we assume—if we ever did—that the work of scholarship is insulated from the broader currents of politics. Whether the university, as we recognize it, will survive the coming decades is an open question.

The situation of architects in the labor market is equally ambiguous. The emergence of novel technologies promises to reshape the profession in the coming years, in ways both good and bad. For now, though, one thing is clear: precarity rules the day. Job security is hard to come by. For those lucky enough to find employment in the profession, workloads are onerous, and compensation is often insufficient. Like other forms of so-called ‘skilled labor,’ design is subject to the insecurity and exploitation that accompanies work in our post-Fordist present. Armed with degrees—and (mostly) bereft of labor unions—contemporary designers are tasked with navigating an employment landscape within which uncertainty and overwork are facts of life.

Fortunately for us, the crisis of architecture—as an academic discipline, as a skilled profession—is nothing new. There is, thus, no shortage of places to look for insights into the dilemmas we confront as budding theorists and designers alike. As early as 1973, in the preface to Architecture and Utopia, Marxist theorist Manfredo Tafuri linked the impasse of the discipline to the plight of its students, reduced to the status of mere ‘technicians’ by the machinations of capital. Tafuri argued that, in the wake of modernism, architecture was in its death throes, consigned to the production of ‘sublime uselessness’ after the Enlightenment dream of Utopia has been all but abandoned. ³ With its relentless, Adornian ‘negativity,’ Tafuri’s work should be read as an elegy for the avant-garde impulse which animated the architectures of the early twentieth century. For Tafuri, architecture had become a discipline robbed of its telos, condemned instead to service the very force—capital—whose imperatives it ought to oppose in the name of something better.

Is the world described by Tafuri so different from our own? Has architecture recovered from its abandonment of substantive political engagement? The answer, on both counts, is clearly negative. As a disciplined historian, Tafuri refused to speculate about the future. This is, I think, where Deleuze comes in. In a now-classic essay from 1992, entitled “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Deleuze surveys the “crisis of the institutions” which undergirded postwar society. For Deleuze, the history of Fordism can be written as an architectural history, in which the “spaces of enclosure” explored by Foucault—“prison, hospital, factory, school, family”—were tasked with the orderly production of disciplined, modern subjects. Put simply: under social democracy, institutions mediated between individual subjects and the broader social collectivities of which they were an integral part. The twentieth century was, for better or for worse, the century of the masses. By the 1990s, however, a novel governmental rationality was in ascendance, which operated through practices of autonomy and individuation. This is, in many ways, the world we inhabit. We are all individuals now, entrepreneurial and wily.

For Deleuze, this epochal transformation is captured by a seemingly commonplace observation: “everywhere surfing has replaced the older sports.” ⁴ In other words, mass society, with its characteristic forms of communal leisure, has given way to something new. Surfing, an individual undertaking par excellence, offers a metaphor for the transformations underway. The situation described by Deleuze is familiar to us. The postwar promise of full employment is a thing of the past; internships and insecurity are second nature. The enclosed spaces of the architectural firm and the seminar room grow increasingly porous. Yet, nostalgia has its limits. Surfing, like design, finds its pleasures in openness. Both practices entail shrewd engagement with an emergent field of possibilities. Conditions are always changing; our job is to exploit instability for our own ends. To surf is to locate freedom in the condition of ephemerality. Only time will reveal the full implications of the changes we are witnessing in our discipline. At the moment, everything seems to be up for grabs. But seeing like a surfer enables us to grasp the indeterminacy of our present. If Tafuri is to be believed, architecture has been dead for more than fifty years. Perhaps, then, the tide is finally turning? For us, surfing will involve locating new forms of practical and theoretical engagement with the present that might very well outlive the university or the firm as we now know them. As Deleuze reminds us: “There is no need to fear or hope, only to look for new weapons.” ⁵

1 Greg Lynn, Folds, Bodies & Blobs (la Lettre Volee, 1998).
2 Peter Eisenman, “The Diagram: An Original Scene of Writing,” in ANY no. 23 (1998/1999).
3 Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973), ix-x.
4 Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 6.
5 Deleuze, “Postscript,” 4.