Ch. 3, pp.115–120

July 28, 2024

Graham McKay

RIken Yamamoto

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The previous time, we / I learned the eponymous human condition was part of the sentence “The human condition of work is its universality” because work makes the things of the world that allow us to relate to each other. Arendt gave the example of people sitting around a table and asked us to imagine how the sudden disappearance of the table would remove their mutual relationship. Restored to where it was, the table continues to exist long after the people around it have left. I think Yamamoto is going to say that buildings are also things in the world, and that also allow people to relate to each other. This isn’t some wild leap of imagination but just stating the obvious. Still, Yamamoto seems to be the only architect who has read Arendt and come to this conclusion. Sure, architects have been talking about “bringing the outside inside” for a hundred years or so but only with respect to Nature. That world outside never included other people or (if was your own property) the possibility of them.

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114-115
116-117
118-119
120-121

3 From World to Society
All “things” have become products for consumption

Modern society is a society in which the distinction between work and labour has been lost and, in the process, making “workers” into labourers. Instead of making “the world’s things”, workers make products that can be consumed. The value of these “things” has no enduring value. The only value they have is as products exchanged on a commodities market.

Since the advent of industrial society in which the distinction between work and labour has been lost, the production system that is industry has dramaatically increased the labour force of individual worker and, because of this, both labour and work have come to be seen as labour, and a division of labour at that. It is also the division of work. The relative value of labour divided is its monetary value per hour and, as a result, the value of things became monetary. As Ruskin said, “Money became value” and by this he meant that all things existed only in their relationship with money. “Valuing things that can be exchanged turns them into products.” (Arendt, The Human Condition, p.261) They are products for consumption. “Product require the continuous evaluation of a changing supply and demand” (ibid., p.262) “and in the exchange market this evaluation continually changes.” (ibid., p.259) It is relative. “It already has no objective worth.” (ibid., p.262) Arendt writes that this objective worth is “the essence of the thing itself and external to the intentions of individual sellers and buyers, has no relation to likes or dislikes, but is something whose presence can be recognized in the thing itself” (ibid., p.260) but the objective value of which Arendt writes is that of one of the world’s things. The walls and houses that make up the world, and the tables and chairs inside them cannot be exchanged. Things such as fireplaces, are not products, and cannot be exchanged for luggage. They are always in the same place, unchanging. They come between person and person and create a relationship between them. At the same time, they mark a place in the world. The objective value of things is that type of value. [Some] things continue to exist as the world’s things but, in modern consumerist society, all things have irrevocably become products for consumption. This is the type of society in which we are living.

Labourers who labour in order to live

“Society” in consumer society or mass society is a concept in opposition to the world that has durability. “The word ‘social’ has its roots in Latin but there is no corresponding idea in Greek.” (Arendt, The Human Condition, p.44) In Latin, the grammar of the word ‘society’ is societas. “This word has the meaning of a federation in which people support each other and for the purpose of linking people for a specific purpose requiring unity such as in response to crime.” (ibid., p.45) In other words, societas was originally a word denoting private groups. It began to take its more general meaning with the advent of the concept of societas generis humani.” (ibid., p.45) For us, it came to have its general meaning when the term civil society came into use and no longer referred to private groups. Instead, it came to be recognized as an equal and fair abstract space for a large number of people. If we accept that the world is made of things that have a durability longer than the life of a person, then the world is made of things as products. Society is a free market in oder for those products to be bought and sold. The value of those products is constantly changing and the value of things in society constantly changes. ‘Socialized man‘ was Arendt’s term for this society in which we live. (ibid., p.143, p.85)

Socialized man is wage labour. The distinction between labour and work has been lost and it is the inhabitants of the society that recognizes all products as the result of labor. We now think of many of ourselves as wage labourers. ”Other than the earners of unearned income (interest), there is no such thing as a consumer or citizen who is not engaged in some form of wage labor,” (Kawatani, K. [Kojin], The Structure of World History, p.439) This is just what we think. Just as Ruskin said, we are in society as divided and fragmented persons. This is what being engaged in wage labour means. This is socialized man, and it is us.

Society is a society of wage labour and that society is one that consumes products produced by that wage labour. From the point of view of architectural space, the world and society are completely different because their spatial concepts are in mutual opposition.

The world is made from the relationship between the public realm and the private realm. That relationship is that of a community within a community. It is a relationship in which the private realm is within the public realm. The public realm is the polis. The private realm is the oikos = house. The house is related to the public realm by the spatial device of the threshold and it it is because of the threshold that the house is in the world.

It’s easier to see where all this is going. We know that Yamamoto has spent most of his working life designing buildings that don’t totally isolate their occupants and residents from the world outside but nor are they ostentatiously glassy and exhibitionist like Sou Fujimoto’s House Nai for example. Focussing on the beds, this house seems to be for a couple and one child. Notice on the top floor the sensationalist bathroom as large as the living room below and, for that matter, the entrance lobby below?

This entrance hall corresponds to the Japanese genkan in which street shoes and, if large enough, where things like umbrellas and bicycles are left. It is a transition space, in that visitors may be met there but they are not entertained there. Think of it as an airlock separating the public and private realm instead of uniting them as a threshold in the sense that Yamamoto uses the word. Roller blinds are deployed to provide the separation from the surroundings as was typical of an 18th century worker cottage.