Bullshit
This piece first appeared, in more or less this form, in the Fall 2006 issue of Work in Progress,1 a quarterly magazine published by the RISD architecture department. It ran alongside a companion essay by the great David Sokol.2
People often think that bullshitting is the same as lying. This can’t be the case, though… at your last critique, was that long-winded rant you received about “interstitial dualities” or “recontextualization” a lie? Not necessarily. If you got out a dictionary and dutifully parsed out all the branching convoluted sentences, you might find that the nonsense people concoct at these things is actually factually correct. The strain of bullshit that percolates in schools like ours is more about confusion than it is about outright deception.
You can, of course, use bullshit to obfuscate a lie. When James Frey, the now-infamous Oprah-anointed memoirist, was recently found to have fabricated his shady past to make himself seem more interesting, that was a lie. But when called on by Larry King, he said things like “95 percent of my book is true” and “all memoirs are subjective”, citing numerous examples. These things were arguably true, but they were also total bullshit.
I started systematically studying bullshit at RISD shortly after I arrived in the graduate graphic design program. I would be at a crit, and someone would say “Yes, I’m fascinated and inspired by the notion of interconnected linear elements.” Why couldn’t they just say “I like lines” and be done with it? And moreover, how could a rational (and most likely talented) human being say such a thing with a straight face?
My first project was to compile all the bullshit words and phrases I could find into a bullshit dictionary. This was easy and fun; by including commentary, I could finally say what I really thought about such vapid terms like “innovation” or “emergent behavior”. The book is shaping up to be a decent field guide to navigating some of the nonsense we’re exposed to daily in art and design circles.
It became clear, however, that the bullshit goes far deeper than mere words and phrases. There are more complex patterns of obfuscating nonsense at work, and they vary greatly between departments and subjects. For example, one of the first things the RISD graphic design curriculum beats out of its new members is the use of most subjective descriptive terms, like “beautiful” or “disgusting.” So you end up with GD students making bizarrely pseudoscientific proclamations like “This generates a fantastic visceral response.”
That’s just in GD, though. I wouldn’t suggest trotting out such speech-pattern chestnuts over in the BEB. In architecture, you’ll want to talk of systematized spatial logic, of mutant typologies, and of sympathetic abstraction, with maybe a few Italian vocab words like pallazo thrown in to seal the deal. And both of these bullshit methods are entirely different from your average discussion in textiles, where the use of the word “beautiful” is not only permitted but pervasive.
It’s a bloody mess. But it’s our mess, indeed, and I want to help. I’m gathering data like this by visiting critiques in as many departments as I can. I record these critiques on tape, and then transcribe them, allowing the patterns of speech to emerge on paper. The book I end up with from this material will provide a direct window into the bizarro-world of linguistic alchemy that we seem to be brewing.
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Public Relations: Mind Your Mouth,
by David Sokol
Let me tell you a secret. I don’t drink the Kool-Aid known as archi-babble. Really, you care. As an editor and writer, I scout for emerging architects and new designs to publish. And I may pass you by if you’re more prattle than substance.
But this point is so well trodden that I’ve asked the gods to send me a press release, a media kit, something, that states my case better than I could articulate it myself.
Et voila, without tactlessly naming names, here’s an invitation for the final performances of a site-specific work. Let’s choose a few opening excerpts about the artist: “…She challenges the traditional notion of facade as constituting a membrane that simultaneously separates and erotically joins the inside with the outside.”
Neat. Our subject will one-up Vito Acconci by pleasuring herself in a doorjamb, or straddling a windowsill, in full public view.
“Her live performances reflect the tension between art and architecture as a conflict between what is aesthetically pleasing (the seduction of surfaces, facades or the face itself) and the realization that our experience of space is circumscribed and curtailed by the very structures we inhabit.”
Um, all right, perhaps she’s masturbating some Bulthaup cabinets while wearing a prison uniform. Perhaps a copy of Discipline and Punish sits on the counter, representing the shade of Foucault as he blithely takes in the scene.
Well, it turns out that our subject will be strapped in a metal chair, with varying instruments prodding, pulling, and stretching her face into a series of excruciating contortions. What this has to do with our premise, I quote: “The face is rendered empty like an architectural element open to interaction and dialog. At the same time, it also appears immobile [sic] a grimace, a mask. Surprisingly, the fusion of mobile and immobile elements causes the architecture of the face to move and facial expressions to dissolve.” I’ll rephrase my question. WTF?
While our subject is an artist, her esoteric lexicon and garbled-masquerading-as-intellectual syntax has infiltrated architecture. Could the democratization of design have inspired such pretension — that the profession is resorting to fancy language to place itself above the Wallpaper* reader?
This much I do know. Self-torture is almost too juicy to resist. But let’s face it, I’m a member of the media. I mediate. I have to assume my audience wants to understand what I write, and I may not have the time or prowess to weave clarity from our largely incomprehensible art performance.