The End of Tradition?

Nezar Alsayyad

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134437115
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Rooted in real world observations, this book questions the concept of tradition - whether contemporary globalization will prove its demise or whether there is a process of simultaneous ending and renewing.
In his introduction, Nezar Alsayyad discusses the meaning of the word 'tradition' and the current debates about the 'end of tradition'. Thereafter the book is divided into three parts. The three chapters in part I explore the inextricable link between 'tradition' and 'modern', revealing the geopolitical implications of this link. Part II looks at tradition as a
process of invention and here the three chapters are all concerned with the making of landscapes and landscape myths, showing how the spectacle of history can be aestheticized and naturalized. Finally, Part III shows how traditionis a regime, programmed and policed and how it has been deployed, resisted, and reworked through hegemonic struggles that seek to create both built environments and citizen-subjects.

Chapter 1

The end of tradition, or the tradition of endings?

Nezar AlSayyad

The July 2002 issue of Time magazine featured the prescient title ‘The Bible and the Apocalypse’ emblazoned on a cross engulfed in fl ames. This blasphemous image underscored the degree to which American popular culture has become obsessed with the ‘end of the world’. For some, 9/11 was an indication that the end was near. On that day, the prophecies of the Bible's book of Revelations suddenly seemed to be manifest in our own backyard. Eerily coincident with the millennium, when the duel between the Lord Almighty and the beast Satan will take place, some believed it signalled the End. And according to Time, 59 per cent of Americans now believe that the events depicted in Revelations will come true.¹

This view, of course, is a singularly Christian imaginary of the Apocalypse. Yet it is held by a substantial proportion of people in a country which, despite a Constitution dividing church and state, remains fundamentally Christian. References to ‘God’ on our money, in the classroom, and (make no mistake) in every speech by President George W. Bush are not to a generalized, ambiguous God, but to the same God that ‘our’ forefathers came to the ‘New World’ to worship. Consequently, this talk of Apocalypse, at least in the United States, is not empty. Increasingly, Americans see it as involving the need for a ‘Holy War’ against the ‘Holy War’.² Indeed, the Time article focused on the popularity of a series of books on the (Christian) Apocalypse called Left Behind which have now sold more than 32 million copies – a surprisingly large number in a world of increased product differentiation.³ This certainly suggests that many Americans, if not actually awaiting the End, are at least curious about it.

Clearly, the popular and often evangelical anxiety about endings has gained new import since the events of 9/11. But surprisingly, this is true not only for American Christians, but also for non-Christians and in other parts of the world. The irony, of course, is that what one group or nation may consider hell another may consider the road to heaven. But the consistent thread through all these discourses – on endings, on apocalypse, on heaven and hell – is that they are all ‘modern’ for having been dialectically constructed as a binary. Triumph is predicated upon the reciprocal defeat of an ‘other’.

These debates, omnipresent not only in America but in other parts of the world, are instructive of the duplicity of discourses on endings – indeed, discourse in general. One needs merely to turn on the television to be reminded of how ‘endings’ and their perception have become instruments of propaganda in complex negotiations between competing subject positions. Thus, news coverage of the same incident in the Middle East by different networks like CNN, MSNBC, BBC, and Al-Jazeera, and their commentary on the looming apocalypse, underscores the relative positions of different cultural groups with different vested interests, politics, tactics, and beliefs. It may be reasonable to infer then that the study of endings is more about an end to certain noble truths than to any real end in the historical sense.

This study of ‘ends’ is, paradoxically, not without precedent. There has, in fact, been a proliferation of proclaimed ends in both the popular media and academia coincidental with the ‘end of the millennium’. These ‘endings’, although secular, exhibit no less anxiety. They are, nonetheless, the stories of the end of things. Consequently, it makes sense to see what can be learned from these ‘other’ end(s) before we consider the end of ‘tradition’. Most importantly, this exercise will shed light on why one writes about an ‘end’ in the first place. Specifically, there are four recent ends that are often explicitly in dialogue with one another. Not surprisingly, each of these proposed ‘ends’ cites similar precedents and outcomes. However, there is little agreement as to whether the results are to be lamented or celebrated.

On endings

While humans have been fascinated with cataclysmic tales of endings since time immemorial, more calculated accounts have been rare. The first scholarly discussion about endings in recent history was Daniel Bell's The End of Ideology.⁴ Written in the late 1950s in the United States (and published in 1960) this book chronicled how the great catastrophes of the twentieth century (World War I, World War II, Russian totalitarianism, etc.) fomented a general suspicion and subsequent abandonment of nineteenth-century utopian ideologies. ‘In the last decade, we have witnessed an exhaustion of the nineteenth-century ideologies, particularly Marxism, as intellectual systems that could claim truth for their views on the world.’⁵ Bell defined ideology as a means of translating ideas into action, and claimed that ‘few serious minds believe any longer that one can set down “blueprints” and through “social engineering” bring about a new utopia of social harmony’.⁶ By contrast, he argued that the acceptance of the ‘welfare state’ by both the ‘right’ and ‘left’ was demonstrative of intellectual and political convergence. Citing such trends, Bell outlined the potential malaise for contemporary intellectuals.

The young intellectual is unhappy because the ‘middle way’ is for the middle-aged, not for him; it is without passion and is deadening. Ideology, which by its very nature is an all-or-none affair, and temperamentally the thing he wants, is intellectually devitalized, and few issues can be formulated any more, intellectually, in ideological terms.⁷

But Bell was actually excited about the prospect of an end to ideology, since he viewed ideology as a means to limit and ‘preconceive’ reality. As dogma, ideology gets in the way of new ideas. And in the end, he suggested, it was not prudent to sacrifice today for the future.

Critics have suggested that history proved Bell's prophecy false when in the 1960s many movements arose, fuelled by recombinant ideologies regarding human society. Ostensibly, the radicalism of the 1960s in the United States made Bell's critique of the malaise surrounding issues of social justice moot. His theories, however, particularly regarding the difficulties facing intellectuals, were to be rekindled by others later.

Bell's was an end not so much of events or progress, but an anticipated end of what he considered the ‘dogma’ of nineteenth-century social planning. Significantly, he saw this end as a victory of sorts. No longer hampered by the musings of Marx, society would be free to develop new solutions for its problems. Implicit in Bell's account, however, was the triumph of the Western democratic model over the (evil) dogmas of the nineteenth century. This victory existed in time, and was thus ‘historical’. Indeed, it was Bell's trajectory of theoretical achievement by democracy (or failure of communism and totalitarianism) that suggested that those ‘other’ ideological models were dead. Not surprisingly, the historical transformations provided as evidence by Bell for the end of ideology also provided the starting point for other writers.

The next major proposition about endings was Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, which identified a similar but, at first, less invidious end.⁸ According to Fukuyama, Hegel had envisioned an ‘end of history’ upon the consolidation of ‘free societies’.⁹ And pointing to the same twentieth-century events as Bell, he argued that because there was no conceivable alternative to liberal democracy, centuries of ideological evolution had come to an end.¹⁰ Thus, according to Fukuyama, the international consensus for liberal democracy was the ‘endpoint of mankind's ideological evolution’.¹¹ However, in what amounted to a truly teleological account of philosophical and political development, Fukuyama allowed no room for alternative visions of the future. Indeed, all systems not currently conforming to the model of liberal democracy were merely waiting to become indoctrinated in the ‘struggle for recognition’, thus resulting in an end to history. But this end was clearly contingent upon a highly circumscribed definition of history, and as such, it became the cause of much of the confusion surrounding the book. For Fukuyama, history was simply the evolution of (Western) political ideology, and its end merely represented the inability to develop it further. To be sure, ‘events’ would continue, but none would significantly alter the political-economic makeup of the modern world.

Like Bell, Fukuyama described what appeared, at first, to be a victorious tale of human development and progress. But it, too, held the seeds of a perverse and fl awed future. Fukuyama, again citing Hegel and echoing Bell, warned that, upon achieving the peace and prosperity of the end of history, ‘men would face the constant danger of degenerating from citizens to mere bourgeois, and feeling contempt for themselves in the process’.¹²

Fukuyama's end, again like Bell's, was a tale of how an ostensibly celebratory series of events – the twentieth-century collapse of fascist, totalitarian, and other despotic regimes – could have a less-than-positive outcome. Nevertheless, notions of the ‘end of ideology’ and the ‘end of history’ both constituted radical, yet sanguine breaks with what had heretofore been considered the root of history and mankind – progress. In both accounts, progress, considered a single, coherent, evolutionary process, emerged as a simple tale of cause and effect. According to Fukuyama, if there was no further challenge, man would simply fester and die. Looking back, it is interesting today to note the ambivalence both authors exhibited toward such a dispassionate future. In the wake of 9/11, Fukuyama's reticence appears as myopic as Bell's some forty years ago.

Today, it has become abundantly clear that there remain serious challenges to liberal democracy. But fundamentalist Islam is not the only one, and all threats are not necessarily violent. For example, China, despite becoming increasingly market oriented, has maintained a uniquely Chinese authoritarian government, indicating how democracy may not be the only choice. Here, of course, one is reminded of the ‘clash of civilizations' thesis and the idea that differences between Western liberal democracy, political Islam, and Chinese market socialism will define the next world confl ict.¹³ It is here that we may also see the impact of history and ideology on space. But the spatial implications of a proposed end to history are quite nebulous. Since history here really means the end of challenges to the ideology associated with liberal democracy, the spatial implications may simply follow Bell's points, particularly because these ends are concerned with intellectual developments and are predicated on paradigm shifts in both government and economics. In this regard, Bell outlined the end of ideologies competing with capitalism, and Fukuyama described the end of associated governments. But neither dealt with the unit of analysis that defined geopolitical discourse in the last century, the nation-state.

It was here that Kenichi Ohmae seemingly picked up the discourse on endings.¹⁴ Curiously, Ohmae proposed an end to the very institution Fukuyama claimed had reached ubiquity. In The End of the Nation State, Ohmae described the end of the nation-state as playing a substantive role in the global economy. He stated that ‘because most of the money now moving across borders is private, governments do not have to be involved at either end’.¹⁵ Unconsciously echoing postcolonial critiques, Ohmae asserted that nation-states no longer adequately represent groups of people based on social interest. Nation-states move too slowly and often exhibit confl icting motives with regard to free and open markets. Moreover, they may actually discourage economic activity in instances of political instability or governmental intervention in local markets.¹⁶ Ohmae proposed the region-state as an economically viable alternative. Using such terms as ‘unbounded’, and ‘deterritorialized’, he described this neoliberal economic paradise as follows:

[Region-states] may lie entirely within or across the borders of a nation-state. This does not matter. It is the irrelevant result of historical accident. What defines them is not the location of their political borders but the fact that they are the right size and scale to be true, natural business units in today's global economy. Theirs are the borders – and the connections – that matter in a borderless world.¹⁷

While it is difficult to argue against the ‘nostalgic fiction’ of the nation-state in terms of its effectiveness at representing the desires of its subjects, or its cohesion regarding ethnic and cultural representation, both the spatial implications and the veracity of such a mod...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Illustration credits and sources
• Contributors
• 1 The end of tradition, or the tradition of endings?
• 2 Tradition is (not) modern: deterritorializing globalization
• 3 The tradition of the end: global capitalism and the contemporary spaces of apocalypse
• 4 Nostalgias of the modern
• 5 Nature and tradition at the border: landscaping the end of the nation-state
• 6 The tensed embrace of tourism and traditional environments: exclusionary practices in Cancún, Cuba, and Southern Florida
• 7 Architecture and the production of postcard images: invocations of tradition versus critical transnationalism in Curitiba
• 8 Tradition as a means to the end of tradition: Farmers' houses in Italy's fascist-era new towns
• 9 Cultural identity and architectural image in Bo-Kaap, Cape Town
• 10 The latency of tradition: on the vicissitudes of walls in contemporary China
• 11 Seizing locality in Jerusalem
• Selected bibliography
• Index