Читать книгу Interventions 2020 - Мишель Уэльбек - Страница 9

Contemporary architecture implicitly adopts a simple program, which can be summed up as follows: building the shelves of the social hypermarket. It achieves this on the one hand by showing total fidelity to the aesthetics of the pigeonhole, and on the other hand by favouring the use of materials that show low granular resistance (metal, glass, plastics). The use of reflective or transparent surfaces will also make it possible to increase the number of displays. In all cases, the aim is to create polymorphic, uniform, modular spaces. The same process, incidentally, is also at work in interior decoration: furnishing an apartment these days is essentially a matter of knocking down walls so to replace them with movable partitions – which will actually hardly be moved at all, as there is no reason to move them; but the main thing is that the possibility of movement exists, that an additional degree of freedom has been created – and the fixed decorations can be eliminated: the walls will be white, the furniture translucent. Contemporary architecture is all about creating neutral spaces where the information and advertising messages generated by social functioning can be freely deployed, messages that in fact constitute that very functioning. After all, what is produced by the employees and executives gathered at La Défense? Strictly speaking, nothing; indeed, the process of material production has become completely opaque to them. Digital information about objects in the world is transmitted to them. This information is the raw material for statistics and calculations; models are developed, decision graphs are produced; at the end of the chain, decisions are made, new information is reinjected into the social body. Thus, the flesh of the world is replaced by its digitized image; the being of things is supplanted by the graph of its variations. Versatile, neutral and modular, modern places are adapted to the infinite number of messages they are to transmit. They cannot allow themselves to deliver an autonomous meaning, to evoke a particular atmosphere; they can thus have neither beauty, nor poetry, nor more generally any character of their own. Stripped of all individual and permanent character, and on this condition, they will be ready to welcome the indefinite pulsation of the transient.

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.