Antagonizing the Present: Reflections on the “Ugliness” of the Contemporary American Landscape

deploring the contemporary American landscape, arguing that its "ugliness" corresponds to an inner ugliness of today's self-centered, consumption-obsessed, technology-hawking Americans.1 Published by the University of Alabama Press, the newest and perhaps most opinionated work in this genre is Egotopia: Narcissism and the New American Landscape, written by John Miller, a Silicon Valley public relations consultant and the founder of Scenic America, based in Washington, D.C.2 Generously praised by the likes of cultural critic Ashley Montagu, Egotopia, like other similar books on the market, has garnered a fair amount of press attention. Moreover, it has resonated with many of my architecture and landscape architecture students, who believe that it articulates their concern for the commercializing of the American landscape and, perhaps more important, the related concern for the diminishing cultural authority of professional designers of the built environment. Because of this apparent nerve touched, Egotopia is an ideal target for scholarly reflection on the genre. Implicitly reminding his readers of the historical precedent for his critique, Miller quotes William Blake, the British romantic poet. In his poem "Milton," Blake used the term "dark Satanic Mills" (referring to the coal-burning factories that increasingly blackened the landscape of preindustrial England) as a metaphor for both the negative human implications of industrialization and for the site for potential redemption. In his extended misapplication of Blake, Miller observes that more than 150 years after Blake's death we continue to be "infatuated" by the "aesthetics of... [the] agrarian epoch." To Miller, this longevity bespeaks a fundamental validity-a subconscious "yearning for the aesthetics of paradise lost" (pp. 1-2). Our current inability to acknowledge this longing-due to the apparent uselessness of "aesthetics" in our utilitarian culture-is basic to the contemporary problem, as Miller sees it. "Dark satanic malls" are harbingers of a "New American Landscape" (pp. 4-5). The problem that Miller presents arises, in his understanding, from the nexus of capitalism and democratization-and specifically from the emphasis of both on individual self-interest. The New American Landscape, Miller explains, is designed to serve the singular purpose of encouraging Americans to consume in a perpetual quest to fulfill their private individual desires. As such, the New American Landscape obliterates natural and historical experience, "eclipsing local or regional distinctiveness" and leading to the "dramatic disestablishment of Public Man and a total enshrinement of his private alter ego," the "New Man" (pp. 16-17).3 Miller finds this Public Man in America's past, where he personified the "transcendence of self-interest and self-absorption" and practiced "benign disinterestedness as the most powerful alternative to private passion" (p. 26). The New Man, in contrast, "marginalizes selftranscendence .... [He] no longer imitates God, nor even some generalized Platonic version of man" (p. 28). The egotism of the New Man is evidenced by the decline of "traditional sources of ormative behavior-such as the church, the school, and the home-" in favor of psychotherapy, which enables individuals to maximize their private objectives (pp. 30-31). Miller believes that because "aesthetic" concerns come out of "disinterestedness," these concerns die with the increasing self-absorption of the New Man. In his choice of protagonist as past and antagonist as present, Miller allies himself with a long tradition of critics who deal in the ahistorical: They consistently invoke an endangered refinement and enlightenment-in a "European" sense-in retreat from an advancing barbarism and ignorance. The poet Matthew Arnold, whose thought perhaps most shaped this discourse, was such a critic of mid-nineteenth-century British culture. His influential "Culture and Anarchy" reminds us that this type of cultural criticism stems from the struggle between the groups dominating society and their challengers in a given moment.4 As Miller perceives changes occurring in society today, Arnold perceived the increasing political power of the urban and industrial working classes of Victorian England as representing "anarchy" and "confusion," a disruption of the established social order. To stabilize this disruption, both critics call for reinforcing the cultural standards of the previous regime. Miller's "Public Men" replicate Arnold's "great men of culture," members of the priestly caste that preserves culture in a society, men who were to be "apostles of equality" (p. 38), bringing "sweetness [beauty] and light [intelligence to] ... the raw and unkindled masses" (p. 37). The "raw and unkindled masses," of course, were the "common" people-those linked by shared experience among the "dark Satanic mills" and who agitated for power in an industrializing Britain. Against this onslaught, the "great men" would preserve "the best that had been thought and said in the world," in Arnold's words. But this "best" necessarily reflects the values of "great men"-of a class already in possession of the power to articulate and canonize those aspects of culture that advanced their interests. Critics from Arnold to Miller cast these supposedly traditional standards as absolute-granted by nature or God-and therefore above historical moment. For those of us who believe that any given aesthetic standard is a set of artificial codes of valuation tied to the relations of power in society, this should be the point at which we step back from Miller's argument. Journal ofArchitectural Education, pp. 191-193 @ 1999 ACSA, Inc.