ABSTRACT

The new architecture of the global economy implicitly declares the end of history and, by extension, the end of architectural meaning. Faced with this character of the built environment, contemporary writers such as Michel Houellebecq, Joseph O’Neill, David Cronenberg, and Zia Haider Rahman have taken a critical stance toward architecture, seeing it as the concrete manifestation of the excesses of finance capital and the existential drift of contemporary society. These writers register the discontinuity and disorientation of subjective consciousness insofar as it is faced with the oppressive continuity of the seamless connections between architecture, media, capital, and consumer products. The critical stance adopted in their works consists either of an explicit analysis of the human costs of the contemporary built environment, or of what we might call critical mimesis—writing designed to show the effects of the built environment in its own form. The latter are novels about people whose subjectivities are wholly saturated by the logic of consumerism, and where the effects of the product-environment are entirely naturalised. The power of capital is such that in the world of these novels, there is no ground on which a critical position can stand, yet the representation of such a world can itself constitute a style of resistance.