Date: Wed, 19 Mar 1997 09:12:52 -0800
Subject: M-TH: Buildings and Baloney


On Wed, 19 Mar 1997, sbourke2-AT-metz.une.edu.au (Simon Bourke) wrote:

...If we could agree on "beautiful architecture" then we might
>feel more ambivalent about its relation to the structure of power.
>Benjamin's famous line that every act of culture is also an act of
>barbarism is to the point. There is this really good section in Raymond
>Williams's "Politics and Letters" where he talks about the uncertain
>feelings he has when looking at a gothic cathedral, to be at once in awe of
>the engineering and architectural achievement and the sense it gives of
>what humans can do, and yet to feel the real weight of that achievement as
>itself a symbol of power and authority, exclusion and control.
>

By this reckoning every specific achievement manifested in a piece of property 
is a "symbol of power and authority, exclusion and control," not merely a 
building which reminds us of the Inquisition or has too many friezes.  Of 
course, if the complaint about building-as-symbol-of-authority is limited only 
to pyramids, cathedrals, torture chambers and the like, it has no general 
application or relevance to structures of capitalism per se.

Let's skip churches and go to apartment complexes.  Are these oppressive?  Is 
there any way in which we can occupy a unit in a building without being 
oppressed by the implicit "authority"?  I can only think of two possible 
answers:

1) We don't pay rent.  There is no extraction by "authority" of any of our 
income.  In which case of course there is no upkeep and the building rapidly 
becomes dilapidated (which is what has often happened under rent control).  It's 
much easier, of course, and much less "oppressive" to find an apartment in 
Chicago than it is in Manhattan.

2) Nobody is allowed to usurp any kind of monopolistic totalitarian oppressive 
control over the unit--not the landlord, not the owner of the building, and not 
the tenant.  Every body and any body can come and live in the same space and do 
what they will with it, except of course exclude others (since any such 
exclusion would be ipso fact authoritarian and exclusive).  No confining 
agreements are permitted or enforced.

The point of the sentiment expressed seems to be that if a building is built and 
controlled by some "authority"--presumably a member of a ruling class--the 
building is a symbol of oppression, regardless of whether the owner and his 
partners actually go around oppressing anybody, or got the investment for their 
building by voluntary cooperation or by tithes or force.  

In this line of Rousseauian peregrination there can be no meaning which comforms 
to any extent whatever with what the concept "oppression" actually signifies.  
How is it "oppressive" to enjoy protection from the elements, or to take 
advantage of the human ability to provide such protection?  How is it 
"oppressive" to take advantage of the division of labor which, in a complicated 
market economy, enables some people to spend their time designing and building 
buildings, and others to live in them when all they do is clerk or bag 
groceries?  And if it is the sheer fact of the building's existence per se that 
is taken as oppressive, one must ask what it is a building can do to oppress 
anybody but stand there, except perhaps lose a brick at an inopportune moment. 

I weary of the non-stop obliviousness to the requirements of human survival by 
participants on this list.  There is no sense of reality, no sense of what is 
actually worth valuing and striving for, no sense of what actually hobbles human 
life and what abets it.  What are we to remember Lenin for, for instance?  Not 
his totalitarianism and butchery, not his actual destruction of human life, on a 
massive and horrifying scale--but for his desire (alleged) to electrify the 
countryside, which he muttered in some speech.  If we care about actual human 
well-being, however, we should take heed of the historical record and what it 
means.

Of course if a building has a lousy design, let's criticize the design.  But if 
one is oppressed by the sheer fact of buildings being built by anyone aside from 
a dull government bureaucrat, psychotherapy might be in order.  If the spread of 
electricity is what concerns us, perhaps we ought be less critical of those 
oppressive fat ugly capitalist buildings which, in even a semi-free country like 
the U.S., usually come with wiring and electricity.  

Human survival is a good thing and something to promote.  Let's be a little less 
existentially "oppressed" by the means of human survival and by any sight 
whatever of prosperity and well-being, the proliferation of which is made 
possible only by some persistent remnant of the market process and freedom, not 
by the squelching dictates of the socialist planner.  Let's feel a tad less 
"ambivalent" about the fact that we are no longer living in leaking thatch huts 
and grubbing for berries.  The conquest of nature is not barbarism or 
oppression.  For examples of that one would do better to regard the actions of 
those who seek to conquer those who do conquer nature.

David M. Brown
davidmbr-AT-sprynet.com


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