Expert or Anti-Expert: Is that the Question?

Mark Jarzombek is an Associate Professor of the History and Architecture at MIT and the director of History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art at MIT.

The modern notion of 'an expert' developed to a large extent in the second half of the nineteenth century in the context of the rise of Enlightenment bourgeoisie. By the 1880s, fields like geology, chemistry, medicine, engineering and related disciplines had begun to establish themselves with tell-tale manifestations like professional organizations, journals and annual meetings. Membership was not based on who one knew or on one's aristocratic lineage, but on one's ability to contribute to the field. It was a revolution of sensibilities that has all too often been forgotten in the wake of its success.

Without using too large a brush, however, I should add that the second half of the 19th also saw a remarkable interest in the liberated Ego, and I mean by that not the more limited technical definition coming out of Freud, but the broader, more psychological one with Max Stirner's truly amazing and underappreciated book the Ego and his Own (1864) setting the tone. Holding the emerging expert culture in suspicion, he argued, for example, that the best violinists were not to be found in the Berlin Philharmonic, but on the docks of Hamburg. I mention this to remind us that expertise has to be seen outside of the insistent singularity that the work evokes. It is a historical formation and a unique by-product of the Enlightenment, and yet it is also through and through, dialectical, provoking its opposite at every turn of the clock. Frederick Winslow Taylor, for example, proposed the principles of scientific management in the same year, 1911, in which Wassily Kandinsky challenged the role of the art expert in the criticism of his paintings.

If expertise has a history that is relatively easy to identify because of its penchant for formalized discursive exchanges - not to mention its capacity to create communities around these exchanges -, the anti-expertise argument is just as tightly bound into the fabric of modernist thinking. In 1903, for example, the cultural critic, Wilhelm Uhde, was so convinced about the eminent death of art history, that he predicted that in the future people will no longer "want to whittle away long hours in the stagnant air of the archives writing catalogues"; they will want instead "to recognize the reality of the aesthetic will in the paradise of human creativity." Such ideas were particularly attractive to American educators in the 1950's (as I discuss in my book The Psychologizing of Modernity) when universities were looking for a uniquely American post-war ideology of authentic liberalism. Rudolf Arnheim, for example, wrote that one's artistic sensibilities could easily be "drowned" by the flood of books, articles, dissertations, speeches, lectures, [and] guides" on the subject.

It would be wrong to see the history of expertise as a battle between the scientists and the artists, or as a struggle between academic and non-academic realities. Both want nothing more than to be seen as the legitimate formulated of the modernist episteme. When Kandinsky wrote the Pedagogische Skizenbuch, he was foreshadowing the notion that anti-experts so-to-speak can have their own standards of disciplinary behavior. It was as if the modernity of the Enlightenment, that had instrumentalized itself into something that we might now call "research," (a word rarely encountered in academe until about 1890) encountered a different modernity that was based on a research for a rigorously grounded philosophically Ego. From Stirner, we go through Friedrich Nietzsche's accusation that Immanuel Kant, of all people, was a bad philosopher because he was "too scholarly," to Wilhelm Dilthey's position that the historian's history was less potent that the "history" that one can find in the poems of Lessing. For Edmund Husserl, the scientist's science was weaker than the more encompassing science of "phenomenologists." For Martin Heidegger, the knowledge of an urban technocrat pales in comparison to that of a Black Forest farmer. Closer to our time frame, we need only think of phenomenology, and its post 1970s appropriations of academe to see just how close in architectural education certain anti-intellectual trends still are.

At the heart of this is a legitimate and still unresolved crisis about the nature of intellectual production. Art history, in having separated in academe from art studio decades ago, might have won something in clarity, but I would say that architecture won something too by not yet succumbing to a neither-nor resolution of this crisis. It is a discipline where expertise - having come quite late in the game - is still in a struggle with its modernist shadow. In fact, architecture, it might well be said, is the last discipline in academe where expert and non-expert cultures (and its variously associated politics of exclusion and inclusion) still exist without many of the more common standards of disciplinary separation.

This significantly complicates the problem of how - and where - to locate epistemological gravitas in the field of architecture. Yet we have to accept that we are working in a space where the expert and the non-expert, the intellectual and the anti-intellectual, the historian and the designer, the academic and the professional, the disciplined and the purposefully un-disciplined, are, for better or worse - and in various combinations - bound up in each other's destiny, leaving all of us in the state of uncertainty when it comes to understanding the scope and depth of architectural production. This does not mean that one must accept every brand and flavor of architectural thinking. It means, rather, that given the difficulties in understanding the shape of our discipline's history, we have to be careful not to slide toward the easy answers.