The Beaubourg-Effect: Implosion and Deterrence

Abstract

Beaubourg-Effect ... Beaubourg-Machine . . . BeaubourgThing--how can we name it? The puzzle of this carcass of signs and flux, of networks and circuits . . . the ultimate gesture toward translation of an unnamable structure: that of social relations consigned to a system of surface ventilation (animation, self-regulation, information, media) and an in-depth, irreversible implosion. A monument to mass simulation effects, the Centre functions like an incinerator, absorbing and devouring all cultural energy, rather like the black monolith of 2001a mad convection current for the materialization, absorption, and destruction of all the contents within it. The neighborhood all around is merely a buffer zone, recoated, disinfected by snobbish and hygienic design, psychologically. It's a vacuum-making machine, somewhat like nuclear power centers. Their real danger lies not in lack of safety, pollution, explosion, but in the maximum-security system that radiates from them, the zone of surveillance and deterrence that spreads by degrees over the entire terrain--a technical, ecological, economic, geopolitical buffer zone. What does the nucleus matter? The center is a matrix for developing a model of absolute security, subject to generalization on all social levels, one that is most profoundly a model of deterrence. (It is the very same one that serves to regulate us globally under the sign of peaceful coexistence and the simulation of atomic peril.) With allowances made for scale, the same model is developed through the Centre: cultural fission, political deterrence. This being said, the circulation of fluids is uneven. All the traditional fluids--exhaust, coolant, electricity--flow smoothly. But already the circulation of human masses is less assured (the archaic solution of escalators moving through plastic tubes . . . they should have used suction, propulsion, or what have you, some kind of motion in the image of that baroque theatricality of flux which makes for the originality of the carcass). And as for the stockworks of art, objects, books--as well as the so-called polyvalent interior workspace: there the flow has stopped entirely. The deeper you penetrate into the interior,