largest conceivable object of study has come to be understood (and is reinforced, rather
than dispelled, by the attempt to invent compensatory disciplines like semantics or text-
grammar, which dramatically designate the frontiers they would desperately like to
transgress or abolish).
Historical speculation is here only exacerbated by the drawing of political and social
consequences. The question of the origins of language itself (the ur-formation of the
sentence and the word in some galactic magma at the dawn of human time) has been
declared illicit by everyone from Kant to Lévi-Strauss, even though it is accompanied by
a question about the origins of the social itself (and used to be accompanied by another
related one about the origins of the family). But that of the possible evolution and
modification of language is still conceivable and entertains a vital relationship to the
Utopian question about the possible modification of society (where that is itself still
conceivable). Indeed, the forms taken by just such debates will seem philosophically
receivable or, on the contrary, antiquated and superstitious in strict proportions to your
deeper convictions as to whether postmodern society can be changed any longer or not.
Debate in the Soviet Union over the theories of N.J.Marr, for example, has been
categorized with Lysenko as a scientific aberration, largely owing to Marr’s hypothesis
that the very form and structure of language itself altered according to the mode of
production of which it was a superstructure. As Russian had not sensibly evolved since
the tsarist period, Stalin put an abrupt end to this speculation with a famous pamphlet
(‘Marxism and Linguistics’). In our own time, feminism has been virtually alone in
attempting to envision the Utopian languages spoken in societies in which gender
domination and inequality would have ceased to exist: the result was more than just a
glorious moment in recent science fiction, and should continue to set the example for the
political value of the Utopian imagination as a form of praxis.
It is precisely from the perspective of such Utopian praxis that we can return to the
problem of the judgment to be made on the innovations of the Modern Movement in
architecture. For just as the expansion of the sentence plays a fundamental role in literary
modernism from Mallarmé to Faulkner, so too the metamorphosis of the minimal unit is
fundamental to architectural modernism, which may be said to have attempted to
transcend the sentence (as such) in its abolition of the street. Le Corbusier’s ‘free plan’
may be said in much the same sense to challenge the existence of the traditional room as
a syntactic category and to produce an imperative to dwell in some new way, to invent
new forms of living and habitation as an ethical and political (and perhaps
psychoanalytic) consequence of formal mutation. Everything turns, then, on whether you
think the free plan is just another room, albeit of a novel type, or whether it transcends
that category altogether (just as a language beyond the sentence would transcend our
Western conceptuality and sociality alike). Nor is it only a question of demolishing the
older forms, as in the iconoclastic and purifying therapy of Dada: this kind of modernism
promised the articulation of new spatial categories that might properly merit
characterization as Utopian. It is well known that postmodernism is at one with a
negative judgment on these aspirations of the high modern, which it claims to have
abandoned. But the new name, the sense of a radical break, the enthusiasm that greeted
the new kinds of buildings, all testify to the persistence of some notion of novelty or
innovation that seems to have survived the modern itself.^2
Fredric Jameson 249