What was absolutely staggering about modernist utopians in the past century, and hard to comprehend for a contemporary observer is the religious zeal, buttressed by a relentless and unyielding optimism, about improving the world by design

I do not use the word 'religious' lightly. To the extent that the modernist utopian believed he could transcend the workings of dialectics and emergence alike in giving shape to history he wasn't just religious, he was religious to the verge of blasphemy

One of my main ideas about aesthetics is how a certain cycle of genesis, evolution and corruption can eventually be laid out, and its genealogy be traced, by identifying the archetypal occurrences of each stage. Two key stages are the inception of symbols and, later, ideology

The primitive aesthetic ecstasy of modernity, rooted in the context of a revolution of technics, eventually produced its own symbols — conceptual pointers that later translated into aesthetic metaphors that only refer to themselves. None of them is more important than the grid

The grid is the ultimate anointment of the modernist priest, his aesthetic currency, and a symbol so dense in meaning that any attempt at a complete explanation, in a sense, defiles it. The symbology of the grid crystallizes and encapsulates the entire episteme of modernity

Gramsci noted that an intimate trait of America was that it rationalizes man, reframes him in terms of utility. He thought of Fordism. But Europe attempted to rationalize man in a more capillary, philosophical way than capitalism did, by rationalizing the entire economy of life

The 20th century was the century of design, of the rationalized life. Le Corbusier conceived his 'machine à habiter' as the USSR perfected the prototype of the state as design. The first technological war was fought. The grid transfigured all of that into a plastic minimum

Many years later modernist culture would cannibalize its own memes, the ideology phase giving way to a withered repetition of forms, the grid reduced to a formal idol. But let's keep this for another time, and dabble instead into what gave the modernist impulse such vitality

The fundamental insight into a century of design, its symbols and ecstasies is that, for the first time in history on such a scale, design overpowered the natural process of emergence with such a virulence that is all too ingenuous to ascribe to reason https://twitter.com/logosnaut/status/1226534499258970120

Such frenzies can have people convinced that design is a standalone force; that the world, so to speak, can be willed into being. The red pill, instead, is that design is but a mode of emergence

The 'rational' utopias of modernity failed not because they were averse to human life as some simpleton critics have enjoyed noting, but because they cast design as a process opposed to emergence, as the father of creation ex novo, rather than as a mode of emergent creation

Designed urban utopias fail, design states fail, the designed life ultimately fails because it assumes a tyrannical role for design as opposed to an integrated one; aesthetic impulses turn ideological, and their poietic energy withers https://twitter.com/logosnaut/status/1180046027455369216

It is precisely at the ideological turn that you know any genuine aesthetic impulse has already fled creation, and only ugliness or a farce of parroting forms of past glories can ensue. Ideology is intimately degenerative, a perversion of desires more attuned to man's nature