Recently I have been engaging with a bit of Barthes’ Mythologies, and to my own surprise it’s had me thinking the most about architecture instagram meme accounts like dank.lloyd.wright and the other usual suspects. There seems inherent in these accounts (of often anonymous authorship) the idea about revealing hidden architectural meanings through rather simple images and comparisons, through metaphors which begin to draw out or unmask ideas inherent in the current architectural discourse, and to approach them in an understandable, yet ironic way - something right in-step with Barthes.

 

The open question I might pose is to ask if this may lead to the conclusion for the accounts that Barthes eventually found himself through this pursuit of ironic demythologising. Without arguing about the accuracy or truth of his mindset before he passed, Barthes certainly reached a moment of extreme self-awareness. His original semiotic writings worked to demystify the symbols of popular culture and consciousness, and had all been in support of far more progressive ideas. Through this act of mythologising, he had turned the critic into the artist: and as such he became a poet, and in this way allows for a view of DLW and others as both visual artists and even poets themselves, rather than simply critics (see: memers).

 

What Barthes found later though is that his progressive ideas were not made in the act of a demystification, but instead a re-mystification. The style and form of critique had led him to a point of reflection beyond which he began to believe that the metanarrative of the bourgeois ideology that he was revealing through this identification of myth was only being replaced by a mythology of his own, and that it was simply more favorable for his own flavor of politics. For him, there was no mistake in doing it, only in misunderstanding what one was doing. Sometimes I wonder if this has happened to any of those meme accounts, which, by the way, should not be understated in their place in both the conscious and subconscious of current architectural students.

 

What really drives the moderators of these accounts anymore? Are they still ‘true believers’ in many of their goals of imagining a different structure for both architectural education and practice? And if so, do they think of themselves as those which reveal the truth beneath these stale architectural lectures and old ass professors, or simply another truth, with its own alternative world of art, architecture, and culture. What does all this seem to mean? Well, I’m not all that sure myself, but I do think it matters.

 

There are also questions to be asked about how to approach criticism as a meta-practice in the digital age, when ‘publishing’ on instagram makes criticism a form of ‘low’ art itself, but perhaps that is something I should come back to and meme on myself for even thinking about in a year or so.

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- C

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4/10/2023