Long live the performance of Everyday Life

Maybe the only interesting promise of postmodernism was that we might all get to live in a film set. Watching Brazil for the umpteenth time after reading, via the fantastic, ruthless demolition of 80s/90s architectural pretensions that is the Diane Ghirardo-edited Out of Site, that the set where Sam Lowry's ducts are playing up is, in fact, an actual council housing estate in Marne-la-Vallee, which is also, curiously enough, the home of Eurodisney. The 'Spaces of Abraxas' were designed by Ricardo Bofill and the Taller in the early 80s as a spur to the monumentalisation of everyday life, putting the minimal flats within a decidedly Stalinist series of monumental (yet prefabricated) classical blocks. The architects specifically recalled the language of both '68 and the 1920s, in calling for the 'elevation' and 'theatricalisation' of the quotidian, much as in the Alexei Gan book title above. This, seemingly, is an area begging for a Jameson essay.



Yet as Out of Site points out, the facilities that Modernists advocated to help usher in the new everyday life - the collective kitchens, the facilities, the social condensers - were totally absent. The remarkable thing is, that Brazil's sets seem the most 'set-like' imaginable: seemingly made out of cardboard or at the most, fibreglass, looking incredibly flimsy (something I'd always considered deliberate): that someone actually lives in Lowry's block seems utterly incredible. A life lived inside a model. It might well be a fun place for a hauntology of neoliberal aesthetics, as apparently, surprise surprise, it has not been well maintained. Surely, nonetheless, as appropriate for Thatcherism as Thamesmead was for a dying Butskellism, and a reminder that the film is as much a depiction of the morphing, glossy facades of late capital as it is of the more obvious 'socialist' bureaucracy (in fact, is it the first filmed representation of 'market Stalinism'?) Since this steampunk atemporality, most new housing still resembles a film set: just for an extraordinarily boring film.