ON MODERN VERNACULARS AND J. B. JACKSON

It seems only appropriate to honor Brinck Jackson by continuing his iconoclastic determination to look closely at words, places, and ideas that are too easily dismissed or taken for granted. This challenge pertained not only to mainstream intellectual life but also to alternative cultures and to individuals, including any friend who enjoyed his correspondence. J. B. Jackson unfailingly played the role of devil's advocate. To raise questions about someone's usual perspective - as a speaker or a listener, as a reader of words or images - helps to keep both people from fixating on any single set of conventions. Some observers have taken this cantankerous stance far too literally, however, leading them to imply that Jackson was hostile to architects, historians, geographers, and other intellectuals, which is simply untrue. Deeply respectful of learning in all these fields, he was indeed intolerant of self-righteousness in any of them (Jackson 1970, 1980, 1984, 1994, 1997). His criticism could even pertain to sanctimoniousness in landscape studies, as his correspondents can again testify. Nor is it true, as some have claimed, that Jackson abhorred the "arid terrain" of European theory; he only abhorred its abuse by pretentious academics. In the 1980s, late in his life, as he became increasingly aware of the inequalities as well as the wonders in the vernacular world, he and I had intense conversations about Michel Foucault. As far as I could tell, Jackson had read most of Foucault's work and deeply admired what one could do with it, but he felt no need - even an aversion - to cite Foucault as a mark of scholarly legitimation. As Daniel Defert has recently argued, Foucault himself would probably have agreed (1997). So too would Michel de Montaigne, who four centuries ago criticized as "jugglery. [t]hose complications and convolutions of language with which the scholars drive us into a corner" (1958, 294). The seeming straightforwardness of Jackson's prose should not be taken too literally. It represents the surface of a carefully honed presentation: His writing followed in the tradition of great essayists like Montaigne, whom he so admired, as his lectures did that of skilled American storytellers. He too chose not to announce his sources or his strategies, despite the prodigious effort and multiple appropriations that underlay the finished product. Something of this quixotic spirit animates my title, though my text will take a more academic (and therefore less dexterous) stance, openly seeking to probe the ambiguities in the meaning of certain terms and concepts often associated with Jackson. In particular, most people think of the two words "modern" and "vernacular" as being in fundamental opposition to each other. Progressive Western architects have embraced this bifurcated image at least since Marc-Antoine Laugier's writings on the "primitive hut" in the mid-eighteenth century (Laugier 1977). In a phrasing that is only now breaking down, it might be said that the modern seeks an expansive universal dominion through a heroic break with history, whereas the vernacular, firmly grounded in one distinctive setting, is presumed to remain unchanging, innocent of history. At least since the late eighteenth century, Western culture has located the vernacular in two literally "marvelous" supposedly unchanging spatial milieus - both conspicuously outside modern cities. A celebration of indigenous traditions in the European or American countryside extolled distinct regional or national folk virtues, including an idyllic harmony between man and nature. Likewise, a fascination with "the primitive" mapped and justified the West's control over the exotic landscapes and cultures being colonized abroad. This history indelibly linked the vernacular with other romantic concepts of the era: the "traditional peasantry" (in contrast to the unruly urban working class); the "authentic folk" of European and American nationalism; the "civilizing mission" of colonialism, claiming at once to preserve the authentic pasts and modernize the backward economies of their recalcitrant subjects (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Bendix 1997). …