Call to Order

Definition

The call to order names the power-saturated act of denunciation by which an ornamental order re-founds itself: the public denouncing of ornament, of excess, or of the decorative — performed whenever the oppositions that ornament encodes (man/woman, free/not-free, appropriate/inappropriate) begin to re-divide and displace themselves. Soulillou's formulation: "Like a phantom, the decorative always walks in the tracks of ornament, which it doubles and ends up blurring. From which comes ornament's call to order: 'Down with the decorative!'" (p. 320). Its classic form is anti-excess: "One of the classic calls to order that sanctions this displacement is the denouncement of the excessive use of ornament. Each time this denunciation appears in ancient or modern texts this call to order involves positions of power" (p. 321). And the denunciation is structurally paradoxical: since "the excess is a requisite condition for the logic of order to endure" (p. 321), the call to order never denounces expense as such — it polices the hierarchies of legitimacy in ornamental expense, stigmatizing as "decorative," as "excessive," or as "bad taste" whatever opposes the re-founding order in its hegemonic strategy. The concept thus gives the wiki's ornament vs purity debate its reflexive frame: the debate itself — Loos's "Ornament and Crime," Le Corbusier's Rappel à l'ordre against "the flourish, the stain, the distracting din of colours and ornaments," Eastlake's attack on the upholsterer's "fallacies," the "too decorative" verdicts — is a series of calls to order, each tied to a position of power, each re-founding an order whose authority is otherwise failing. The concept also explains why the call to order intensifies at the moments the wiki's sources date: "the need for a call to order was felt most urgently in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries" (p. 321) — exactly when the ground plan's hierarchies were "no longer tenable" and "the idea of propriety… was gradually emptied of all meaning."

Key Thinkers

• Jacques Soulillou — the concept's theorist: the call to order as the mechanism of permanent combat between order and ornament; the denunciation-of-excess form; the "too decorative" stigma as discourse-internal hegemonic operation (2002/2006).
• Adolf Loos — the call's emblematic modern voice ("Ornament and Crime," 1908) — a denunciation the concept re-reads as a position of power re-founding an ornamental order, not abolishing one.
• Le Corbusier — Rappel à l'ordre: the self-named call to order — "the flourish, the stain, the distracting din of colours and ornaments" as one target-set (via Batchelor's chromophobia analysis).
• Charles L. Eastlake — the reform form (1868): the attack on the upholsterer's "degradation of decorative art" as a call to order from within the decorative trades themselves.
• Plato — the ur-form: the Gorgias' ranking of dress and rhetoric as flattery — the first recorded call to order against the decorative arts.

Related Concepts

• Ornamental Excess — the call to order's principal target: the denunciation of excess as the policing of legitimacy hierarchies in ornamental expense.
• The Decorative — what the call to order names: "Down with the decorative!" — the stigmatizing of whatever escapes the new order's encoding.
• Ornament vs. Purity — the debate the call to order structures: the purity position's denunciations (crime, kitsch, dirt, irrationality) as successive calls to order.
• Design Reform — the reform movement as the call to order's institutional form: the nineteenth-century "coup d'état" of the reformers of the applied arts.
• Kitsch — the modern stigma-form: Le Corbusier's "particularly modern form of degeneration" as the call to order's chromatic vocabulary.
• Free and Not-Free — the opposition the call to order defends: re-founding aims "to reaffirm certain divisions, certain hierarchies judged indispensable to its perpetuation" (p. 317).
• Modernism — the call to order's apogee: the "detour of rationality" reaching "its apogee in the modernist architectural movement."
• Fashion — the displacement-engine the call to order cannot halt: the decorative's "endless re-dividing" by intercalating additional terms.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Ornament and Order (Soulillou 2002/2006) — the concept's source: ornament's call to order ("Down with the decorative!", p. 320); the denouncement of excess as the classic call to order, each denunciation "involv[ing] positions of power" (p. 321); the paradox that excess is "a requisite condition for the logic of order to endure" (p. 321); the reformers' "too decorative" as "an internal organization of the discourse, consigning to the decorative whatever opposes it in its hegemonic strategy" (p. 322); and the spectral logic that the calls to order sanction — the decorative's re-dividing of the founding oppositions (p. 321).

Open Questions

• If every denunciation of ornament, excess or the decorative "involves positions of power" (p. 321), is the wiki's ornament debate itself a field of calls to order rather than an argument to be won — and does that reading dissolve the debate's truth-claims into power-positions, or sharpen them?
• Soulillou dates the call to order's urgency to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its apogee to modernism. Does the wiki's contemporary material (the Instagram interior, minimalism vs maximalism, the digital-ornament renaissance) contain calls to order in the same structural sense — and who holds the positions of power in them?
• The call to order polices legitimacy hierarchies while presupposing excess ("It would be pointless for order to appear in the ornament if it had to deprive itself of the possibilities of excess," p. 321). Is anti-ornamentism therefore structurally self-defeating — an order calling for its own condition's abolition — or does the purity position's success (the hygienic refusal, the whiteness regime) show orders surviving their own calls?
• Can a call to order be made from the subordinate side — Eastlake from within the trade, the Garretts from the new profession, Odom's productions claiming effect-production as design's output? Or does every counter-call merely install the next legitimacy hierarchy? See the-decorative, design-reform.