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Interventions 2020. Мишель УэльбекЧитать онлайн книгу.

Interventions 2020 - Мишель Уэльбек


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architecture; it manifests its autonomous presence, its presence as architecture, solely through discreet winks – generally these are advertising micro-messages about the techniques behind its own fabrication (for example, it’s customary to ensure very good visibility for lift machinery, as well as for the firm responsible for its design).

      Reaching its own optimum by creating places so functional that they become invisible, contemporary architecture is a transparent architecture. Since it has to allow for rapid movement of people and goods, it tends to reduce space to its purely geometric dimension. As it’s meant to be crossed by an uninterrupted succession of textual, visual and iconic messages, it must ensure maximum readability for them (only a perfectly transparent place is likely to ensure a total conductivity of information). Subject to the harsh law of consensus, the only permanent messages this architecture can allow itself will be confined to objective information. Thus, the content of those huge signs that line motorway routes has been the subject of thorough preliminary studies. Numerous surveys have been carried out in order to avoid offending one or other category of users; social psychologists have been consulted, as well as road safety specialists; all of this just to end up with indications of the kind: ‘Auxerre’, or: ‘The lakes’.

      This is also how the architectural ensemble known as ‘La Défense’1 can be read as a pure productivist arrangement, a device for increasing individual productivity. This paranoid vision may be locally accurate, but it fails to account for the uniformity of the architectural responses offered to cater for the diversity of social needs (hypermarkets, nightclubs, office buildings, cultural and sports centres). On the other hand, we will get a bit closer to the truth if we consider that we live not only in a market economy, but more generally in a market society, that is to say a space of civilization where all human relations, and similarly all human relationships with the world, are mediated through a simple numerical calculation involving attractiveness, novelty and value for money. In this logic, which covers erotic, romantic and professional relationships as well as purchasing behaviour as such, the point is to facilitate the establishment of many rapidly renewed relationships (between consumers and products, between employees and companies, between lovers), and thus to promote a consumerist fluidity based on an ethic of responsibility, transparency and free choice.

      Mobile, open to transformation, always available, modern employees are undergoing a similar process of depersonalization. The techniques that teach adaptability, popularized by ‘New Age’ workshops, aim to create indefinitely mutable individuals, free from any intellectual or emotional rigidity. Freed from the shackles of belonging, loyalty, and rigid codes of behaviour, the modern individual is thus ready to take his place in a system of generalized transactions within which he or she can univocally and unambiguously be given an exchange value.

      The gradual digitization of microsociological functioning, already well advanced in the United States, had lagged significantly behind in Western Europe, as the novels of Marcel Proust testify. It took several decades to completely filter out the symbolic meanings added onto the different professions, whether these meanings were laudatory (church, education) or deprecatory (advertising, prostitution). At the end of this decanting, it became possible to establish a precise hierarchy between different social statuses on the basis of two simple numerical criteria: annual income and number of hours worked.

      Now able to define themselves by a brief collection of numerical parameters, freed from the thoughts of Being that had long hampered the fluidity of their mental movements, Western human beings – at least the youngest – were thus able to adapt to the technological changes affecting their societies,


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