building/city opposition, but only part of it; or perhaps it is subsumed under that in some
uneven way, since the city also includes the street and consumption, and not merely
working and dwelling: the late capitalist city above all has to make a very large place for
these spaces which are neither public nor private.
Now politics would also seem to include some notion of change, even when that
involves running to stay in the same place (as in ordinary city or even national or state
government). But in its most dramatic embodiments, politics surely always has the
vocation of realizing a collective ideal, fulfilling or at least staging the great collective
project. And this is precisely an allegorical matter. None of the individual projects that
makes up politics has the supreme value of the whole collective activity, but each must
participate in its value in some way other than as a mere part of the whole: they are
allegorical of it, each in its own local and modest way; the revolution (of whatever kind)
is realized fully in each small effort that makes it up.
How can artistic works be read in these political senses? How they can be expected to
participate in a collective project is perhaps the most difficult question, unless we want to
remain with the easy answer that, as monumental public construction, they ratify its
success and remind the passing collectivity of its own achievements, symbolically
offering the occasion to restage and recelebrate the inaugural act, the foundation of
collectivity, the sealing of the social contract itself (Rousseau spoke of festivals, but
architecture is a more durable festival). I doubt if many of us today, however significant
and indispensable we may feel public monuments to be, find enormous aesthetic
excitement in the contemplation of projects like this; the general deterioration of public
values has clearly drawn such architecture with it in its wake; people often loosely
attribute this to the suspicion of politics, the corruption of public officials, voter apathy,
post-Watergate, and the like, but it probably has more to do with the privatization of the
public sphere, the displacement of governmental initiative by the great corporations, the
increasing centrality of multinational business in late capitalism. Thus our public
buildings are now the great insurance centres and the great banks, the great office
buildings, the ring of towers whose construction around the outskirts of Paris was
authorized by Georges Pompidou as a tangible symbol of the financial centrality of Paris
in the new Europe. These buildings show an obvious kind of symbolic political meaning;
but there can be more subtle connotative meanings that affirm this or that aspect of
contemporary business society. I wonder, for example, whether the general low-rise
modernist glass-box style of yesterday did not fulfil a symbolic function with respect to
the social (and not merely represent a quick and undistinguished financial and spatial
solution), just as the deplorable omnipresent pastel postmodern buildings do today: they
remain messages, even though their content may be little more than mere repetition.
Symbolic meaning is as volatile as the arbitrariness of the sign: in other words, as in
dreams, the spatial unconscious can associate anything with anything else—a dead body
meaning jubilatory euphoria, a loved one’s photograph triggering violent xenophobia. It
is not enough to say that opposites mean each other: they especially mean each other. As
St Augustine says in his treatise on scriptural allegory and interpretation: a thing can
mean itself or its own opposite—Noah’s drunken nakedness means disrespect or respect,
‘depending on the context’. What is arbitrary then is that old and time-honoured
mechanism called the ‘association of ideas’: in Proust, for example, the ‘modern style’ in
buildings is incorporated into the Verdurins’ cultural offensive and documents the
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