Flows of Capitalism, Flows of Architecture

Author: Tim Gough (Kingston University)
Year: 2018 (Ardeth 3, "Money")
Source type: article
Raw file: raw/articles/gough-2018.md

Summary

Gough asks how architecture, "so tightly intertwined with money," can resist neoliberalism. Against Tafuri's stoic resignation, Aureli's eremitic formalism, Spencer's critique of "architectural Deleuzism," and Sorkin's disconnected tactics, he proposes — taking a hint from Jameson — that Deleuze and Guattari's positive transformation of Marx's surplus value (into the "surplus value of a code") lets us rewrite the ontology of architecture as a differential, multiple reticulation of "flows." Architecture conjugates flows to create a surplus value beyond capitalist surplus value, understood as an "haecceity"; political action is thereby feasible within the discipline.

Key Claims

• The impasse of architectural critique: Jameson's 1982 reading of Tafuri vs. Venturi/Scott Brown: "both rest on the conviction that nothing new can be done ... within the massive being of late capitalism." Tafuri = rigorous stoicism (no effective critique from within architecture); postmodernism = relaxation within capitalism.
• Against the alternatives: Spencer's "architectural Deleuzism" (replacing left politics with formalist flow, e.g. Schumacher, Zaera-Polo, Reiser+Umemoto, NOX) de-Marxifies Deleuze; Aureli's "absolute architecture"/eremitic cell reduces resistance to form; Sorkin's nine tactics "fall short" of architectural specificity.
• Surplus value positivized: Deleuze and Guattari "both generalise the concept of surplus value, and make it positive" — the capitalist surplus value Marx describes is "only one negative instance of a broader positive phenomenon," the "surplus value of a code" (e.g. the orchid and the wasp). "The moment of critique is reactionary: it remains on the same level as that which it wishes to attack."
• Architecture as flow and haecceity: architecture is not essential (not Alberti's ideational, Laugier's shelter, Pevsner's aesthetic object, or form per se) but a multiplicity of flows — economic, material, thought, memory, history, technology, political. "Architecture is just such a haecceity": an individuation "consisting entirely of relations of movement and rest," without pre-formed subjects/objects. "Conjugate the flows."
• Against false necessity: only fights capital's "truth game" of naturalizing its position (Unger's "False Necessity"); there is "no essence of architecture"; resistance starts "from a repoliticisation of the discipline and fact of architecture" and "an engagement with economics" — including the worker's safety/economic situation (Morris) and the making-autonomous of form as one flow among others.

Connections

Concepts: Critical Architecture · Ideology · Neoliberal Metropolis · Capitalist Realism
Authors: Tim Gough · Douglas Spencer
Debates: Critical vs. Projective
Related source notes: The Architecture of the City (Bismarck) · The Fate of Critical Architecture (synthesis)

Direct Quotes

"[B]oth [Tafuri and postmodernism] rest on the conviction that nothing new can be done, no fundamental changes can be made, within the massive being of late capitalism." (Jameson, as quoted)

"[T]he moment of critique is reactionary: it remains on the same level as that which it wishes to attack."

"[A]rchitecture is an 'haecceity' ... a mode of individuation utterly different from the solidity of a subject, object or substance."

"[W]e are called by this philosophy to acknowledge the effectiveness of flows and to conjugate them in a manner which calls into question the false necessity and the operation of capitalism."

Open Questions

• Can the Deleuzo-Guattarian ontology of flow avoid collapsing into the very "architectural Deleuzism" Spencer critiques, or does Gough's repoliticization (via the worker, economics, and haecceity) genuinely escape the formalism?