Rethinking Marxism
Problems in Theorizing ‘The Political’ in Architectural Discourse
Making architecture is a social practice; it is integral to the finance and construction industries as well as the culture industry. One of the most ubiquitous of social practices, architecture mediates the relationship between economic development and ideological order. Much of what we know of institutions, the distribution of power, social relations, cultural values, and everyday life is mediated by the built environment. Fredric Jameson describes this as “the chain of mediations” that leads from futures markets to finance capital “through land speculation to aesthetics and cultural production itself, or, in other words...to architecture” (Jameson 1998). To make architecture is to construct social and economic relationships and to construct knowledge, to build vision. To make architecture is to map the world in some way, to intervene, to signify: it is a political act. Architecture, then, as discourse, practice, and form operates at the intersection of power, relations of production, culture, and representation, and it is instrumental to the construction of our identities and our differences, to shaping how we know the world. It is located at the political center of a transforming global capitalism and occupies a key position in a postmodern discourse on “the political.”