No matter how you feel about the state of the cultural world of the design that we interact with day-to-day in the world it’s hard not to miss the generic vibes being reproduced on repetition. Looking at artifacts of our post-modern life they can bleed into one another with their sameness, or perhaps with their likeness to artifacts of the 20th century gone by.
The editors at n+1 put out a piece attempting to tell us why design has become brutally “ugly” despite the modern advances in design technology, arguing essentially that Capital has reconfigured the world of architecture, household goods, and the urban landscape to make it easier to reproduce them shoddily. That efficiency and profit is forcing aesthetic concessions upon us.
They spend a great deal of the piece coming back to a condo building set nearby the n+1 offices, using it as an archetype for the modern degradation of design and design quality.
Our own walk begins across the street from our apartment, where, following the recent demolition of a perfectly serviceable hundred-year-old building, a monument to ugliness has recently besieged the block. Our new neighbor is a classic 5-over-1: retail on the ground floor, topped with several stories of apartments one wouldn’t want to be able to afford. The words THE JOSH have been appended to the canopy above the main entrance in a passionless font.
….
The urban building boom that picked up in the wake of the Great Recession wasn’t a boom at all, at least not by previous booming standards: in the early 2010s, multifamily housing construction was at its lowest in decades. But low interest rates worked in developers’ favor, and what had begun as an archipelago of scattered development had coalesced, by the end of the Obama years, into a visual monoculture. At the global scale, supply chains narrowed the range of building materials to a generic minimum (hence The Josh’s pileup of imitation teak accents and synthetic stucco antiflourishes). At the local level, increasingly stringent design standards imposed by ever-more-cumbersome community approval processes compelled developers to copy designs that had already been rubber-stamped elsewhere (hence that same fake teak and stucco in identical boxy buildings across the country). The environment this concatenation of forces has produced is at once totalizing and meek — an architecture embarrassed by its barely architected-ness, a building style that cuts corners and then covers them with rainscreen cladding.
Overall I felt their observations were only scratching at the surface, getting at the material machinations of Capital and missed some real insight into how Capital has shaped our subjectivity. Their thesis was a minor part of a piece that ventured mostly into an attempted funny cleverness of plucking out every silly little generic thing the writers come in contact with in an outing in the city. *eye roll*
I can’t help but feel they were almost on to something. But I wonder if they’re really getting at our design environment being necessarily Ugly, or if it’s simply a jumbled mess because we cannot perceive these things as culturally significant because they’re all the same as everything else. We’re stuck. The design world of today is a remediation of past design that has become ubiquitous rather than a kind of blooming cultural rupture. That design is part of some temporal malaise in culture writ large where what we would expect the New to look like is actually just the same as it ever was.
Late-political theorist Mark Fisher (d. 2017) does an inspiring job discussing this phenomenon in an essay from his 2014 book, Ghosts of My Life, called “The Slow Cancelation of the Future.”
By the slow cancelation of the future, Fisher is referring not to the end of the direction of time (of course time marches on) but to a cancelation of our psychological perceptions of the future as something holding opportunity and endless creation. The sense of the cultural future rushing toward us has slowed down to almost nothing at all, while simultaneously the direction of time itself is speeding along faster and faster.
These lost futures are symptoms of late-Capitalism. Fisher paints a bleak picture of how we have become almost complete subjects of Capital to the point where there is no time and space to create the way we used to. Instead we turn to a sort of jumbled combination of culture from the past with the fast production-for-profit of today. In his book Fisher paints this picture mostly with music and film, but he situates it within a broader cultural stuckness:
I think this notion is reflected as well in the design and architecture pointed out in the n+1 piece. Imagine seeing the design of The Josh condo building back in the early oughts or even the 90s, 20 to 30+ years ago. You might well think that in 30 years this is what our cultural imaginations produced? But these design productions are exactly what the efficient forces of neoliberalism want us to create— the design of a non-place simply imagined and built to bring together many individuals who will pass among one another with no social engagement throughout the empty and particularly unnoticeable surroundings.
It’s not to say progress disappears, but the sense of difference, or specificity, of popular design has. This specificity is no longer obvious, and the subtle differences are really only noticeable to aficionados.
Well, how did these differences disappear? Fisher argues that the cultural space in Capitalism has been shaped by two simple facts that I think we all may have felt deeply, or at least noticed, at one point or another:
1) the intensity and lack of security of our lives have left us exhausted and over-stimulated, seeking the familiar and well-established
2) neoliberal capitalism has systematically and slowly deprived artists of resources to create, and resources in order to create
In basic terms, as subjects of Capitalism we just don’t have the time and attention span to seek and observe the new therefore our expectations have declined. Simultaneously artists no longer have the safe socially democratic spaces to create without the pressures to produce for Capital’s output or for their own livelihoods. These phenomenon of Capital paralyze our will to desire and to build different futures because we cannot see beyond the Capitalist trajectories. Rushing toward the future is a Lose-Lose.
Perhaps there are those of us who can drift from the conformity and see the cancelation of the future, but the vast majority of us trying to get by just do not have the energy to do so. It’s what makes our predicament a little sadder, I think, then even the picture that n+1 paints of material efficiency creating an ugly design environment. It’s worse than ugly, it’s a reflection of our condition.
We are Capitalist subjects, through and through, and we are participating in this slow cancelation ourselves because that’s all we can do—it is the culture around us.
When we’re thrown into the world every day we should look around, listen, watch, desire, if we can. We may find creative and interesting things, but can we find the cutting edge, an unrecognizable cultural thing emerging, or if we really think hard about it will it simply be a weak reflection of something we’ve already loved? It’s a bleak reality, but in the very least opening my eyes has helped me find some freedom from it even if we cannot completely escape it. Ignorance to these realities is bliss, but I’ve found that a new discernment of this temporal sticking point has become somewhat liberating.
Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life is invaluable in understanding these theories, as well is his short early book Capitalist Realism. But I highly recommend a 45 minute lecture on the Slow Cancelation of the Future thesis on YouTube. I’d argue it’s clearer and more succinct for the concept than even the book. (And if you want to go deeper into where Fisher is building some of his foundation from, here’s a good short video on philosopher and sociologist Franco “Bifo” Birardi’s take on lost futures.)
Thanks for reading to the end, bye for now!