… what the historians want to do is eliminate the newness of current practices by relocating them in an earlier movement.
Robert Somol, interview with Monika Mitášová, in: Oxymoron and Pleonasm
Q: …Robert Somol’s and Michael Speaks’ relation to ANY is not so clear anymore…
A: That really had to do with Bob’s argument that poststructuralist theory had turned into a justification for indexical procedures, and indexical procedures had become only interesting because they were indexical procedures. They had lost their force to produce a significant critical effect; you know, it’s like gestural painting
And Bob Somol said, look, there are certain problems that we haven’t been able to solve, like urbanism. And the New Urbanists have been able to solve them because they were able to project a lifestyle. Instead of critiquing institutions or clichés, the critique had so succeeded that it had become the worse cliché. So Bob introduced the idea of the projective – he basically was an anti-Tafurian, obviously, and tried to pick up Banham’s idea. It was a really smart thing to do. It required a new kind of rigour. It also meant the discourse had to be internal. In other words, you couldn’t justify it because Foucault said this or that. You basically said here are some effects we can produce; here are some effects we need to produce. And then you had to do that.