Introduction/Session 1

We shall begin by discussing Paul Mason's book Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. I shall concentrate on the chapter 'The Rational Reason to Panic'. On this occasion you are not expected to have read it before the session, but you should be familiar with who Paul Mason is (economics editor of Channel 4) and perhaps looked a bit of his stuff up on YouTube.

Here's something I wrote with the book in mind:

Paul Mason’s book, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, is a good one. It sets out a dramatic need for change and the tangles we need to get out of. The challenges (and they are all linked) are:

1.     Debt

2.     Lack of Profit

3.     Aging population

4.     Disparity of wealth

5.     Climate Change

We could add microtechnologies or biotechnologies (as Slavoj Zizek does in Living in the End of Times) but Mason doesn’t. He has faith in these new technologies as a positive force that will escape by their very nature the forces of monopoly capitalism (Google/Apple etc) that are presently artificially constricting them. In the future, according to Mason, more stuff will be free and more work will be shared, and moreover everybody will get an automatic universal living wage so that they can afford to do this.

If there is a glaring problem for architects in this analysis, it is that Mason doesn’t seem to consider the quality or materiality of things very much. It’s all very well to be able to exchange a recipe for monkfish free on the web, but it’s another thing getting hold of the fish, and to my mind, you can’t eat a recipe. Architects, when thinking about a house, know that it has to be built, their problem is where and for who and of what and by who and for how much (if everything isn’t free). It’s a material not a digital problem. Mason is constructing his thought around a process of ephemeralisation that so far has always worked against the sensibilities of the architect, or for that matter, chef. I should know, I predicted this in my final project for my PGDip Arch in 1987. Funny to think I was right, not so funny to think everything has got far worse since then.

Don Henley of the Eagles was interviewed on Bloomberg last night, and there were many things he said (in a lengthy interview on an essentially financial news channel) that might draw parallels between the condition of music in the digital age to that of architecture.

First he said something unexpected, that the craft that he executes in the studio, the type of equipment he uses and so on, is something entirely lost on the consumer who’s hearing his music through tiny headphones on the bus, no matter how good the headphones.

Second (and this is something we all sense) that while he spends $5m in the studio making a record he will never see a profit from it. He will only see a profit from touring.

Those of us who write academic books will certainly recognise both points, we won’t make any money from it (not even a living) unless we do something else (teach) and the effort that goes in to writing a book is perhaps not appreciated by the reader, who might be distracted at any moment.

A third thing Henley mentioned was that there was a problem with ‘the moment’. When the audience is busy holding up their mobile phones and taking pictures they are (weirdly but precisely) NOT participating in the moment. They have already turned a real event into a pseudo event they can ‘share’- mass pseudo events. ‘Artists’ of a particular generation (the sixties) are very upset about this, while aficionados turn back to vinyl, which in one way is less pure that digital (with louder background noise) but also crucially ‘warmer’.

There is something rather arts and crafts about Henley, and I appreciate it, because William Morris was saying much the same thing in response to the technologies of the first machine age, and he fathered, in the long term, the Bauhaus. The point here is to say that a negative view of technology actually, again in the long term and not as you might expect, fathered something that seemed very positive about the machine age when it passed through the right hands.

When the Soviet Union wanted houses for true communism, many tactics regarding ‘use’ value, either materially (less structure) or socially (no private kitchens) were employed. One of the most interesting to me was the attempt to design the most efficient possible service spaces. The living spaces were considered separate, and these could be straightforwardly assessed in square meterage, but kitchens and bathrooms were a technical and social problem that knarled away at the architects for years. If we accept that getting rid of shit is a constant, which it probably is in an urban environment at least, that the pipework technologies are merely refined, that the flow of shit down a pipe is down to the laws of physics, then it was a case of the shortest pipe runs providing more people with more homes.

It’s important to point out here that if you live in a world where people want to put their toilets wherever they like (as we do) you are likely in for a string of costly failures (leaks). Any kind of cost benefit analysis would hence find our present system horribly flawed (as do most plumbers).

So builders who can’t plumb, artists who can’t paint, authors who can’t write, architects who can't design buildings; this is the discernable world of today, as defined nicely in the Frank Zappa song, Flakes (1979) and all in the name of profits that are slowly but inexorably decreasing as debts quickly and equally inexorably increase. Ask George Osborne why the deficit is actually going up (latest figures as of yesterday) despite austerity.