Today, the new rules. It is a fact of life that seems like a law of nature, yet the NEW! is relatively "new." Whether the positive valence it enjoys today dates to the Industrial Revolution or stretches all the way back to Brunelleschi’s renascent ingenuity, the new is not a timeless given. Before the new, the future was regarded with trepidation and the present was endured with resignation. Even Brunelleschi’s peers found confidence only in looking back to the golden ages of the Greeks and Romans. The new had little currency before the Enlightenment, but since then it has become synonymous with progress and has never looked back. Today the new is both eagerly sought and inescapable. Newness hovers over contemporary culture as a value and ideal.
The NEW!ness of the new validates itself, is universally acclaimed, and serves as the standard by which all else is measured. The contemporary privilege of novelty is so common that, despite its absurdly strident mediation, it is invisible as a choice or bias. The logical possibility of "new-and-worse" that lies within the ubiquitous "new-and-improved" is hopelessly buried. To notice that opposition, or otherwise question the favor of the new, is more nonsensical than unwelcome. There is no external position in the industrialized world from which the question might be asked. The media and critical establishment, whose purpose is to provide such a perspective, is hampered by its own enthusiastic embrace of the new. To the pundits, the new is not a subject of inquiry but a source of income and a critical tool. In those rare instances when some new thing does not find favor – New Coke, HistoPoMo, Cop Rock – the pundits do not find a lever to critical understanding but instead confirm the apparent absurdity of the error. Furthermore, when something old is celebrated or re-discovered, it is often explained as having been so-far-ahead-of-its-time-that-only-now-can-it-be-understood or appreciated. Finally, those "advances" that are potentially blatant retreads of previous ideas, like the popular re-stylization of Frederick Kiesler (and the Flintstones), are considered innovative as long as enough intervening cycles of newness have occurred to launder the memory of the first.
"New," however, is not entirely sufficient as a term of approbation because it retains a trace of the merely chronological. But that’s cool, because the newness of the new is not just new, it’s cool. To call something new might simply mean that it was just created; to call it cool means that it is valued for that fact. Of course, this works the other way too. Cool is most often new, in the way that difference is always new. As if to answer this underlying circularity, synonyms for cool proliferate faster than the new stuff they name or judge: def, da bomb, bitchin’, fresh, bad, phat, groovy, dope, stupid dope, fly, outrageous, gnarly, hot, killer, fine, wicked, wild, far out, outta sight, proper, totally tubular, bodacious, and more, have cropped up to name the same state of value. The variation among these terms is due to the desire for novelty that comes to stand for such diversity rather than any diversity in the things they estimate. Their difference is first taken as a sign of novelty, not as a statement of that difference, driving the cool endlessly onward – to the next new thing that can be named.
Considering the cool’s inherent posture of aloofness and self-professed uniqueness, its ubiquity is as ironic as the new’s persistence – irony being another characteristic of the cool, as persistence is the inescapable fate of the new. The cool’s esteem is as universal as the new, spanning from high to low, earnest to ironic, field to field. Stella and Spiderman, Sartre and Seinfeld, string theory and string bikinis – all have been recognized as cool.
In architectural discourse – theory, historiography, criticism – and practice, the new and the cool have been as busy and influential as they have been anywhere else. On the face of it, architecture would appear hostile to their attractions. Historically invested in ensuring timeless duration, establishing the authority of the state, and endowing institutions with stable presence, it is slower than fashion and beset with gravity. At the same time, architecture is responsible for embodying the zeitgeist or will of the epoch. Since the will of this epoch is determined by the new and the cool, architecture has recently experienced some significant disciplinary contortions in order to cope. This has primarily taken the form of a (by now) permanent and institutionally embedded avant-garde, continually chasing the new. Because it is constitutionally at odds with the field’s internal logic, such "advanced work" has turned to outside sources for inspiration and operational models.
The resulting awkwardness has generally been regarded as liberating. In attempting to reconcile the new-and-cool with its heavy public responsibility (and inertia), architecture has arrived at a compromise of politically engaged criticality. Since architecture is too emphatically in the world to maintain the detachment generally assumed by the cool, it must substitute another compensatory posture. The oblique difference typically asserted through the cool’s aloofness is reread in architecture as a more direct resistance to the dominant paradigm. This criticality, the proprietary cool of architecture, tends to get caught up in architecture’s world-making rather than judge its effects from the sidelines, and is a little too earnest to be taken for cool on the outside. At the same time, it provides the alibi for novelty within the field, accommodating indiscriminate newness to a seemingly contradictory and ongoing civic accountability. The foundational assumption of criticality holds that only the new is certain to be free of ties to convention.
In advancing a program of newness as difference, critique combines the two main interests of the cool into a system of disciplinary valences. After decades of cataloguing such difference, pointing out hidden agendas and suppressed meanings, undermining power structures, inverting hierarchies, and displacing centers of privilege, the range of possible tactics for resistance has become fairly well defined. Critical practice in architecture, as opposed to art, has been constrained by the durability, necessary presence, and heavily begrudged, if minimally respected, functionality of its subject. Though continuously underwritten by an interest in enlarging the scope of freedom and opportunity for significant difference, the two meanings of "critical" have been conflated over time, with the emphasis shifting from critical "judgment" to critical "importance." Lacking any program beyond its own aggrandizement, criticality has become more simply synonymous with superiority throughout architectural discourse. As a price of this success, critique has forgotten its political roots and become a matter of taste, trading the specific disciplinary version of coolness for a more common brand.
The new plays a heartless zero-sum game. The privileging of the critical has become habit. The establishment of criticality as the customary yardstick of what matters in architecture has displaced convention from its central disciplinary position. The triumph of the critical has made the critical conventional, a position no less awkward for the critical than an institutionalized criticality is for architecture’s traditional responsibility to the state. Without its outside perspective, difference, or novelty, the critical is ineffective as critique, and even worse – not cool. Changing taste and the restlessness of the new have led, perhaps inevitably, to the possibility of a postcritical position.
What could this be? However history might eventually regard it – a critique of the critical, a celebration of its hegemony, a disguised continuation – the idea of a postcritical provides a momentary and alternative view of the critical. This has been impossible to gain for the new. Yet, because the critical has supplied legitimacy for the new within architecture, wherever the postcritical subverts critical authority, it might also provide some oblique leverage against unexamined newness. Since the new will no doubt remain a sponsor or goal of even postcritical operations, this leverage will only be apparent as a side effect, unknown to the emperor but possibly visible to the audience. Why didn’t this happen earlier? The subversion had to await the perfection of the critical to avoid being subsumed as part of it. If this is the case, then why hasn’t the total dominance of the new led to its own alternatives? Because the new can never be perfected, just as time can never be complete. Alternatives to the new must find other avenues to realization.
There is no particular agreement about its point or direction among the many provocateurs of the postcritical, except that all are wary of the merciless impartiality of the new and complacency of the cool. Those who couch it as a response to critique’s ineffectiveness, refrain from surpassable claims of greater efficacy for the postcritical. Those who look to the postcritical as a more interesting alternative to predictable criticality, avoid proposing daring programs that could fade into habit. So far, in a clever slacker play, those efforts identifying themselves explicitly as postcritical have in fact ceded the very criterion of achievement to this "earlier" "institution." Such practices, which include the postcritical repositioning of theory, shun the macho heroism and political engagement of revolutionary critique and instead pursue self-consciously small and informal projects that address critique’s mistaken self-confidence and operational failures.
For example, the perception that critique is outflanked everywhere by the global triumph of capital has led to a fatalistic formalism in some postcritical practices and a "tactical" retreat from strategic operations in others, avoiding a potentially tragic commitment to stronger resistance in either case. In the same spirit, those versions of the postcritical that are just bored with the critical hold back from offering any more exciting answer. Finding a contrarian outlet in an apolitical revival of "operative criticism" – asking why designers should have all the fun – the jaded postcritics restrict their efforts to less-than-audacious curatorial exercises. The notable success elsewhere of the Seinfeldian premise of a "show about nothing" may offer hope for architecture too that such minor key effort will be rich in diversion, if not significance.
However, low talking, whether from fear of co-optation or commitment, is hard to square with architecture’s emphatic presence. It is as difficult in serious work to avoid (now conventional) critique, out of the same fear, as it is to work outside the economy of the new or cool. Ironically, critique faced the same difficult task in its own dance with – and away from – "precritical" convention. This historical moment reveals that discourse has few options without critique: it can approach existing subject matter "neutrally" (history) or positively (Gideon), or it can engender other, new stuff (design). Since post-structural criticism foreclosed on the possibility of neutrality or objectivity long ago, and affirming conventional work is way uncool, the postcritical has no choice but to create its own new stuff.
Because newness is conserved (the law of the conservation of newness states that each new thing displaces a now-formerly new thing into no-longer-newness), even such forward-looking efforts are caught in a potentially sticky relationship to the existing conditions they condemn to obsolescence. The newly no-longer-new stuff does not always go quietly but often fights back as it disappears over the event horizon. In architecture, for better or worse, this typically happens when the undeniable presence of the existing stuff, while being superceded, calls bullshit on the sheer constructability of the new stuff, which is often no more than digital images and physical models. If the new even slows up to answer these questions, it risks getting bogged down in debates it often cannot win. Some postcritical practices believe it is possible to minimize that passing engagement, as well as any capitalist taint, conventional presumption, or boredom that might ensue, simply by avoiding all grounds for comparison. By operating outside the bounds of performance, purpose, or presence, such practices hope to stay perpetually new and cool.
As a result, beauty is in the air. Only pure, selfish, purposeless delight is relatively safe from obligations to meaning, use or value. Beauty is unsullied by rational concern and unmoved by practical issues. Beauty is beyond care or reproach. Beauty, like coolness, is set apart, put on a pedestal, free of attachment, and self-sufficient. Beauty has always been a haven when disciplinary tastes run to autonomy, and the postcritical covets this.
Beauty’s autonomy is not what it seems, though, and no haven for the postcritical. Beauty might share a contemporary synonymy with other versions of cool, like klutch, tasty or kewl, when used loosely to indicate visual delight, but such informal attribution misunderstands beauty’s nature; beauty is anything but loose. In fact, beauty is historically grounded in extended reference to the sober values of goodness and truth, and encourages reasoned, critical appreciation. Although this appreciation is famously subjective – depending on the eye of the beholder – judgments about beauty can be substantiated through rigorous argument and revised in light of better arguments or other evidence. The rule of beauty is the opposite of casual; like taste, it can be prescriptive and authoritarian, but unlike taste, the ideals it invokes are public and transcendent, not personal. All this lurks within the postcritical’s apparently informal ascription of prettiness. So the postcritical’s appropriation of beauty is either not quite proof against critical engagement or not quite correct. In the latter case, a particular new – or very old – variant of the cool is being named, not beauty.
Despite sharing a certain superlative aloofness that hints at autonomy, beauty and the cool are as different as the histories they have written. Beauty is the visible embodiment and physical exemplary of a well-ordered system of interrelated value, in which isolated reference is impossible. As the "outward sign of the inward grace" of truth and goodness, beauty is defined by its membership in this classical triad. Cool, on the other hand, though equally polysemic, is far less systemic or insistent in its reference. In contrast to beauty, cool stands for . . . well, "cool" and cool. The range of values covered by cool is certainly as broad as beauty but less clearly defined. "Cool" substitutes a shifting play of sophistication, wit, and irony for what could be considered its version of truth and interprets goodness in terms of performance and sufficiency. As these contextual determinants fluctuate, the cool wanders probabilistically within its cloud of synonymy.
In fact, the cool is critical rather than exemplary. Driven by uncertainty, the cool is not naturally productive (as the sneaker industry is only too painfully aware and cool-hunters only too happy to maintain) or dependable. Instead of being "true," the cool is provisionally "right" and valued for its cleverness or insight. The cool seeks no transcendent validation and is not seen as an enduring judgment. The cool refuses to be pinned down. The cool’s version of truth can never rest. The cool is not as generous in its freedom as beauty is in its prescriptivenenss.
Furthermore, goodness cannot be predicated on the cool, at least in the same way that beauty embodies purity, altruism, and excellence. Coolness is judged according to the object’s immediate purpose and efficacy, rather than its moral state, social value, or intrinsic quality. Cool will do, cool is fine. While classical values might still in fact be invoked by cool/goodness, the cool takes a pragmatic view, seeing the question in terms of expedience rather than ideality; the answer is seen as fleeting, rather than indicative of enduring value.
The postcritical reanimation of beauty in the age of the cool provides a well known, if misunderstood, standard by which contemporary notions of the cool and new may be measured. Beauty’s reinterpretation is emblematic of these values’ state of play in architecture – or rather, of architecture’s hopes in a contemporary world determined by them. Where the postcritical perspective on the critical remains largely inchoate, its version of beauty supplies a specific point of view and a visual referent
This brings the discussion back to the new. Beauty is only meaningfully autonomous with respect to time, but its attractiveness to the postcritical on this basis is no less fraught. Fulfilling the postcritical fantasy, beauty does not fear the new. Of course, prettiness fades, and the standards of beauty vary historically, but the recognition of each instance of beauty survives because it has nothing to do with newness, priority, or chronology.
This narrow autonomy is secured by the durability of the other values of the classical triad, though. In comparison, the cool as it exists is wonderfully free of such weighty entanglements — except that it cannot avoid being haunted by the next big thing. The cool knows itself as the current big thing only by setting itself against the last big thing. The postcritical interest in beauty is motivated by a desire to escape this fate, but it cannot succeed without considering the possibilities, and obligations, of the historical, extended sense of beauty. And this, of course, is seriously not cool, and totally not going to happen.
There is, however, another lesson that the postcritical dabbling in beauty could teach before reawakening historicism. Without being so uncool as to suggest a return to Keats’s "foster-child of Silence and slow Time," the basis of these values can still be acknowledged. Beauty’s continuously recognized merit can seem exotic (how do they do that?), but it would be incorrect to see that exoticism as a natural effect, however desirable. In fact, exoticism is an artifact of beauty’s estrangement from the contemporary culture of critique and derives from beauty’s inclusive superiority, so contrary to the cool’s (ironically) customary exclusivity. Where the cool, as critical, is actually slave to the object of its critique, however broadly defined, beauty does not need ugliness – or the antonyms of its correlated values – to distinguish itself. Beauty’s ideality, seemingly aloof, is a selfless challenge to that from which it is separated, while the cool’s aloofness is a selfish fiction to assure its survival. Beauty is free to say, "be like me," while the cool is forced to say, "you wish."
The challenge issued by the exemplary nature of beauty is an invitation rather than a warning. Although it stands apart as such, its exceptional standard is not difference. Instead, it calls for excellence, which is accessible to all who work for it. An appreciation of beauty’s exemplary nature might free the postcritical to consider its own enslavement to the new and the cool as an impoverished norm. By turning the cool’s inherent critical attention to excellence as an alternative to mere difference, the postcritical’s version of beauty/cool can set itself a standard apart without worrying about the clock. Perhaps the postcritical may push the cool to discover an untapped generosity in liberating excellence from the repressive ideology of classical values, and excellence can return the favor by endowing the cool with some of that class.
Although it is not sustained by the same heavyweight values as beauty, the cool is no less serious. The social, economic, and disciplinary stakes are no lower for the cool than they were for beauty. Rather, the ascendancy of the cool perfects the shift from a transcendent and thus certain and enduring basis of judgment to a more quotidian one rooted in the uncertain (and thus free) commerce of the contemporary world. The cool is sought as avidly as beauty ever was, but its achievement is our plight rather than our reward. Ironically, it is as serious as we can be – as serious as we can ironically be.