Ch. 3, pp. 135-143
A big one, mainly because I wanted to finish Chapter 3. Chapter one used the Ancient Greek city to introduce this idea of the threshold and its relationship with the public and private realms. Chapter 2 was a survey of post Industrial Revolution worker housing to illustrate how the threshold was removed to isolate and subdue the labour force, and Chapter 3 was a survey of labour relations but, I suspect, for leading up to how architects have designed housing that kept workers (who are most of us) in housing essentially designed to keep slaves out of view.
• • •
5. How is society managed?
The home is the basic unit of all modern nations
The towns and villages that we surveyed are still there and still have people living in them. They are towns and villages with spatial characteristics that can be called a world. Many of us probably think those towns and villages belong to the past and that they have societies that have still not been modernized. And that they are societies where home and hearth are still property. And that the processes that lead to free societies such as contemporary society are still developing. Arendt questions this thinking about process, and about contemporary society itself, because society and the world are concepts in mutual opposition. The world is not a space that existed in the past and is now lost. The world is not the development of a process that leads to society. The world and society are spaces configured by totally different thinking. They are totally different spatial concepts.
“The group known as the family is an economic configuration, and we call it society when it is a model of some family above and beyond a family, and we call it a nation [as in a people] when it has a governmental organization” (The Human Condition, p. 50) In the Japanese translation, the translator Kono Seki [? Seki, K. 関曠野] mistranslated this word nation [as countrymen]. (What is a People?, p. 15) Translating ‘nation state’ into ‘nation-state’ is a clear contradiction, as the word ‘nation’ already presupposes a state.（If one follows Seki, then “nation” would be translated as “a people”.) The families of contemporary society divided into units of one house = one family do not belong to any greater entity. As we saw in the worker housing at Mulhouse, the higher level space outside of the “one house = one family” unit was managed by the industrial capitalists. The system expands that administrative space to the size of a nation state. It was a system where the managed space gathered together the “one house = one family” units and directly connected them to the nation. With respect to the modern family, Yuko Nishikawa [Nishikawa, Y., 西川佑子] wrote “These families are the basic units of the nation state.” (The Family and the Modern Nation State, p. 15) The modern family can be defined in this way, and in agreement with Arendt. The family is the basic unit of people configuring nation state. In other words, the nation state is configured as a collection of families. “In a system between the world’s peoples where there is “one people one nation state” (ibid.), the family is the basic unit configuring this “one people one nation state” system. Not only this, the nation state is the model for the family.
Nation states for financial profit
As I’ve already written, the household budgets of families divided into units of “one house = one family” are based upon wage labour. In other words, the nation system is established through a (nation’s) people being either wage labourers or (no more than) families. On this point, “Whatever we do, everything, is for the sake of “establishing a livelihood.” (Arendt,, The Human Condition, p.189) Labourers work in order to live. They work to feed their families. The work to maintain those “cyclic processes of life”. Labourers are a society bound by money.
The meaning of a nation having a family as its model is that a nation is something that is managed simply for the purpose of financial profit. It is a society that works only so that all its people can live. “The system for the unification of society changed to one of the household economy modeled on that of the nation.” (ibid. p.90) The economy was originally the household economy (oikonomia) within the oikos, and it was this that became the model for the national economy. The nation came to be managed as a household, and it was managed for the sake of the economy. “The collective of families was an economic collective” and economic came to have this meaning. Thus the nation (as a collective of families) “was a supra-familial model.” The illusion that all nations are members of this supra-familial model is the illusion of the family.
From the perspective of architectural space, the family with its intimate relationships live in a space of “one house = one family” separated and sealed from its surroundings. This “one house = one family” has no higher-order space such as an intermediate collective, but is directly connected to the (managed space of the) nation. It is the place for a sealed and isolated privacy that has no threshold. It is a place for those cyclic processes of life. The space configured by the collective of families is the space known as society. This is not a space that has specific characteristics such as the space of the world. It is a uniform and standardized space and, in this space, all things have monetary payback. It is a market society and, in the space of this market society, all manner of things have a relative exchange value. Uniformalism is peculiar to society.” (ibid., p. 65) In this society, architectural space is made uniform and uniformalized. More to the point, this uniformalized architectural space makes a unformalized society. As with at Mulhouse for example, the housing groups were isolated for the sake of privacy and the spatial arrangement had uniform houses uniformly arranged in rows making a grid symmetrical along both axes. This grid arrangement was characteristic of 20th century urban space, the principle of which was equality. What is the difference between this grid plan and the grid plan of the polis of Ancient Greece? The grid plan of Ancient Greece was uniform but at the same time was a space in which people were free to participate in governance but, even if we are now mutually equal we do not have the freedom to be part of our governing body. Our houses are made just for privacy. They are separated from each other. They have no threshold. The houses have no mechanism by which they can participate in governance.
“Society” is a group of individuals
Originally, a society was a group of individuals who “had a special purpose” and even now this is so. Contemporary society in which we live is also a society in which “persons have a special purpose” and that purpose is monetary because all persons participate in society as wage labourers. They work for the purpose of money and the space in which these labourers work for money is society. It is a special society made up of persons that work for money. The members of this society that wants to behave “as if they constitute a single huge family that have only one opinion and one interest.” (Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 62) Contemporary society is a society formed by persons with this kind of special purpose. But how is a society such as this managed? How is it governed? It is governed by a bureaucratic system. Arendt says that “A bureaucratic system is the most social form of governance.” (The Human Condition, p. 63)
All persons in the space that is society are wage labourers. “Consumers and citizens that do not practice some sort of wage labour do not exist as other than non-labouring earners (interest earners). This is a space where labour and work have become separated. The difference between labour and work “no longer means that all need to work for the same objective”. (Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 144) “In such a society, work relating to materialization also becomes a form of labour.” All persons work in order to live, and can be regarded as working for money. This is society. For this reason, a suitable amount of compensation must be paid for the house of labourer’s labour and equality, as in equal money, is the principle of this distribution. Equality of money is the reason for the advent of bureaucratic systems.
Societies are homogenous no matter what the environment. It is for this reason that, in contemporary society, the victory of equality means no more than the political and legal acknowledgment society subjugates the public realm and that, as a result, questions of segregation and difference are problems of the individual. (ibid., p.64)
But what does this mean? The market society and the industrial society are the societies in which we live and, in these societies, all manner of things have exchange value in that they are things that can be exchanged for money. The space of society is a uniform and flat space because all it needs to be is a space for the flow of products, and a space for the consumption of those products. Within this uniform and flat space, products are packaged and sold separated from their surroundings in that the products have no relationship to that place. The same package must have the same price. There must be the same package design for the same contents. There cannot be any room for variation. The “Pocky” made by the Glico company must be made all the same size, the same color, the sake weight, the same flavour.
Packaged cucumbers must all have the same size, color, weight, and flavor. The products that we in the market society consume are, whatever they are, packaged and uniform products. A package confirms to anybody that the product within is uniform. As for the packaged consumers, they have “consumption without pain or effort”. (ibid., p. 193) “Anything a person wishes to consume is freely reproduced everyday. (ibid.) And society enables it to be freely consumed. Packaged products pay attention to usability and have a characteristic durability but not the intention to maintain it. Houses and furniture and automobiles are things we must not only consume but devour.” (ibid., p. 187) As targets of use, they have become like fresh foodstuffs and their packaging changes little because they must be consumed as quickly as possible. New packaging replaces old packaging. According to Arendt, “Any preference for even a slight variation is an individual’s residual personal preference.” Architectural space is also packaged and that packaged architectural space is what we call “facilities” [or “institutions”]. In a society, all architectural space is institutionalized and this institutionalized architectural space is bureaucratically managed
The world that existed in the past is not a space we have lost
On the one hand, the world itself is a space that has a special nature. The people who live in it share a space with special characteristics. It has a common sense that is shared. Moreover, that world establishes a strong relationship with its surroundings. The world has a definite realm but it is definitely not a closed realm. The space that is the world is itself a space that has been designed to invite others in. That space does not exceed the range for which the people can maintain and manage its special nature. The polis was such a space and it did not grow larger than what could be politically maintained or comprehended. The space of the world was the space for transmitting the memories of the people living there into the future. It was a place where the traces of those that lived there would remain.
The enormous increase in labour productivity brought on by the Industrial Revolution was responsible for the loss of this special nature. The difference between labour and work was lost and all workers came to be able to be regarded as wage labourers. Laborers made products to be consumed and the labourers became consumers to consume them. The labourers themselves were products in a market economy and lived in the space of the economically organized society that values only money. Moreover, society had to expand in order to increase its monetary value (profit).
“Capitalists searched worldwide for pre-capitalist locations drew them into the unavoidable process of capitalist acquisition and feeding of products imported.” (Rosa Luxemburque, quoted by Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 66)
Society is a space without borders. It is a space that can expand without limits. The more this space is uniform and flat the more it is a society. This is not a space where the memories of those that live there can be carried on into the future. This space does not place any burden on its inhabitants. It does not restrict the people. It is the space of “labourers free as a bird.” It is the space we are living in now.
The world and society are two totally different spaces. To risk repetition, the world is not a space in the process of developing into a society. And nor is it a space that once existed and that has been somehow lost. The world is something still around us today. It is just that we can’t see it. To us, within a society in which all things have become products to be consumed, we do not understand that the these things can exist in the world. We have lost the ability to see “things that have an existence” (Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 166) with a completely different longevity.”
We cannot recognize the space the world had in the past, as the space in which people in the past lived. For us who live in society now, this space is a space that should be overcome. The world is advanced societies, it is local societies, it is local and communal societies and it is traditional societies. These are pre-capitalist societies and all spaces to be pulled into the process of capitalist acquisition.
Society (whether it is a market society or a consumer society, a mass society or a market society, or a bureaucratic society) dissolves the world and feeds off it. It is that kind of space. Twentieth century architects did not make use things with longevity in order to make spaces for the world, but instead made spaces for this thing called society to dissolve the world. The architecture these architects aimed for was not an architecture that contributed to the world but an architecture that could be privately consumed in accordance with the demands of society. It was a space in accordance with society’s demands in that it was functional. It was an architecture for economic effect – a personal space with an economic effect. Architects became the designers of packaged spaces with no relationship to their surroundings. Today, architects are recognized as the designers of these packages.
Much of this will have felt like repetition and indeed much of it was. I think the important points are our society is constructed around a model that promotes the agenda of the nation and that, importantly, households are directly managed by the nation (remember Covid and how the relationship between households and the nation was direct, even if the implementation of lockdown was managed by state or provincial bodies?) with no intermediate body. The subtitle of this book is a call for architects to “Design the space between the indivudual and the nation!” I took a look at the next chapter and I see some Japanese manshiyon (マンション = “mansion” = condominium) plans so I expect the focus will now shift to more recent illustrations of the same.
• • •
2024/08/25 Ch. 3, pp.135–143
2024/08/18 Ch. 3, pp.128–135
2024/08/11 Ch. 3, pp.120–128
2024/07/21 Ch. 3, pp.115-120
2024/07/21 Ch. 3, pp.108-114
2024/07/14 Ch. 3, pp.101-107
2024/06/30 Ch. 2, pp.92-100
2024/06/23 Ch. 2, pp.87-92
2024/06/16 Ch. 2, pp.78-87
2024/06/02 Ch. 2, pp.69-78
2024/05/05 Ch. 2, pp.66-70
2024/05/05 Ch. 2, pp.58-66
2024/05/05 Ch. 1, pp.46-55
2024/04/28 Ch. 1, pp.35-46
2024/04/21 Ch. 1, pp.23-35
2024/04/07 Ch. 1, pp.18-23
2024/03/31 Ch. 1, pp.14-18
2024/03/24 The Space of Power vs. The Power of Space: Preface pp. 7-11
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