PART THREE
The business of identifying ideologemes is a crucial one; it is a necessary part of politics
(although not all of it), and architecture is a useful experimental laboratory in detecting
and observing the operations of ideologemes one would not normally expect to find there.
But I confess that in none of what I have said do I find any reference to the most
significant political development (and issue) of our own period, namely, globalization
itself, and by the same token I find no reference to the important question of what
architecture might have to do with globalization and how it can offer possible political
interventions into the new world system. As this conference itself, in its mobility,
presupposes globalization, and as contemporary architecture, with its multiple projects all
over the world, is unthinkable without it (more unthinkable than a modernism which
could well be imagined fulfilling itself within a single national regime), I wonder how I
have managed to evade the question of the multiple levels in which all thought has to
move today, namely, the local, the regional, the national and the global: buildings are as
locked into these as are concepts; politics must engage them (I’m thinking of the meshes
on a flywheel) as substantively as aesthetics or theory. But I suspect that in order to reach
globalization as a reality, or a kind of thing-in-itself, we will first have to spend
considerable time in identifying its various ideologies, not least the spatial ones.
NOTES
1 Le temps retrouvé, Éditions de la Pléiade, vol. 3. Gallimard, 1989, p. 1204.
2 F.Jameson, Postmodernism, Duke University Press, 1992, pp. 104–7.Fredric Jameson 255