Ch. 4, pp.156-159

September 29, 2024

Graham McKay

RIken Yamamoto

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Two weeks ago I thought that I’d reach the part where Yamamoto discusses the layouts of Tokyo municipal apartments but I didn’t make it that far in the time I had. Next week, hopefully.

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136-137
138-139

3. Bureaucratic rule is spatial rule

Bureucratic rule is rule by nobody

The space that is society was economically configured space. In an economically configured space (i.e. space whose only value is monetary), all persons are of equal value as labourers. They are the people that work “in order to live” (Marx, Labour and Capital, p.44). They are people who work for personal gain. In society. this “personal gain is the responsibility of the government, and so such government is all that is shared. ibid., p.97) The role of government is the role of protecting personal gain and the principle underlying this is that of equality. This defending the principle of equality guarantees the basis for ’the rationality of power’. This is the rationality for the equal distribution of the profits of society as a whole. However, and as Arendt says, a government can hardly be called a government if it only has the simple burden of the monetary distribution. “Historically, what we have called nations and governments give up their seats to pure administration. (ibid., p.69) This pure administration means something that has no purpose other than the “maintenance and continuity” of that administration, has no specific personality (subject = subjectivity), and nothing more than the simple and mechanical distribution of money. In other words, it is bureaucratic administration. Bureaucratic administration is pure administration. Arendt calls this bureaucratic administration with no personality (subject = subjectivity) no-man rule. (ibid., p.63) However, ruling does not cease because this no-man rule has lost elements of personality. The most social form of rule is bureaucratic government. Accordingly, if we take s compassionate autocracy and absolutism where there is one-man rule, as the first stage of a nation state, then bureaucracy is the final stage of rule. As we know, no-man rule is not necessarily no rule at all. In practice, there are examples of it being the most tyrannical and despotic for a given environment. (ibid., p.63)

In order to establish rule with no subject or subjectivity – that is, no-man rule – there must be unification and standardization of the ruled. If there is not then then there is no chance for the establishment of mechanical distribution.

Labourers must show a unique self

“Standardization is something society has.” (Arendt, The Human Condition, p.65) This is something different from the equality of the Greek nation states of ancient times. Previously, belonging to the small number of equal persons (homoioi) meant that one was allowed to live alongside persons of the same nature as oneself. However, the polis that was the public realm was a very competitive place and one always had to distinguish between oneself and others no matter who they were, and that one had to use one’s exploits and achievements to indicate one’s greatness (aien aristeuein). To put this another way, the public realm was maintained for for individuality. It was the only place where one could express the truth that one could not be replaced by other persons. (ibid, p.65) The world of the polis was a place where people could be equal but, at the same time was the only place where one could express that one could not be replaced by others.

The polis was a “space that is a world”. It was a space where one had to indicate one’s unique self while amongst a large number of equal persons. In opposition to this “space that is a world” is “the space that is society” in which equality means uniformity. In a society where the difference between work and labour is lost and the value of a person is seen in terms of their labour power, equality means no more than uniformity and standarization. “In a society in which, apart from those live off dividends, there are no consumers or citizens who do not act in accordance with some form of wage labour”. (Karatani Yukihito [? 柄谷行人], The Structure of World History, p.439), labourers performing wage labour are just labourers. In such a society and, as I’ve already mentioned, it is required that labourers “discard their consciousness of their individuality and identity” (Arendt, The Human Condition, p.340) “Uniqueness and excellence become factors that disturb social equality.” (Ref. Chapters 2, 3) This does not mean that the space that is society is the only place where people can show their true selves that cannot be substituted by another person. It is the space where oneself is (must be) conscious of being a single and equal unit of labour in the same way everyone else is. The basis for the selection of designers of municipal housing is financial. This is only possible because it is assumed that there is uniformity across all designers. [Aha!] Those in charge at the Municipality of Tokyo Office of Housing Policy do not choose s designer for their excellence, but instead choose the one who produced the lowest bid from a pool of designers with uniform and equivalent levels of skill. Designers become labourers and not people marketing themselves on the basis of their skills or excellence. What they bring to the labour market is labour and not unique skills. “This labour force is something that, as long as they are alive, all people have approximately the same amount of, no matter who they are.” (ibid., p.143) Designers are just one more unit of labour. In order to produce their own design, designers are labourers that work (in order to maintain) those recurring processes of life. The persons wanting the services of designers know this. I’m repeating myself but in Ancient Greece, the people who worked in this way and labour to maintain life were regarded as being the same as the enslaved. (ibid., p.137) Wage labour labourers. These are the designers of Tokyo municipal housing.

Well. I didn’t get as far as the minutiae of apartment layouts as I had hoped but it’s now clear where all this is going. Designers, even the good ones doing good work or trying to do good work, are wage slaves. It’s a parallel conversation but, when I hear talk of how AI enables designers to produce more options and (therefore) be more competitive in the design market, I can’t help feeling that all that’s being achieved is cranking up the speed while doing nothing about the whole poisonous paradigm of design production and consumption. Yamamoto seems to be wanting us to not accept what we’re being given, and to instead want more from architecture.

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