The Architect as Worker

Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of Design

Peggy Deamer

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781350394971
• eBook ISBN: 9781472570512
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Directly confronting the nature of contemporary architectural work, this book is the first to address a void at the heart of architectural discourse and thinking. For too long, architects have avoided questioning how the central aspects of architectural "practice" (professionalism, profit, technology, design, craft, and building) combine to characterize the work performed in the architectural office. Nor has there been a deeper evaluation of the unspoken and historically-determined myths that assign cultural, symbolic, and economic value to architectural labor. The Architect as Worker presents a range of essays exploring the issues central to architectural labor. These include questions about the nature of design work; immaterial and creative labor and how it gets categorized, spatialized, and monetized within architecture; the connection between parametrics and BIM and labor; theories of architectural work; architectural design as a cultural and economic condition; entrepreneurialism; and the possibility of ethical and rewarding architectural practice. The book is a call-to-arms, and its ultimate goal is to change the practice of architecture. It will strike a chord with architects, who will recognize the struggle of their profession; with students trying to understand the connections between work, value, and creative pleasure; and with academics and cultural theorists seeking to understand what grounds the discipline.

Part I

The commodification of design labor

Chapter 1

Dynamic of the general intellect

Franco Berardi

Sick at heart

Recently I read the words uttered by Mario Savio during a meeting in Berkeley, California on 2 December 1964. He was relating a conversation with the director of the Board of Regents of the University of California. I guess that many of you know these justifiably famous words by heart. However, please, let’s read these words again:

The answer we received, from a well-meaning liberal, was the following: He said, “Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his board of directors?” That’s the answer!

Well, I ask you to consider: If this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents is the board of directors; and if President Kerr in fact is the manager; then I’ll tell you something. The faculty are a bunch of employees, and we’re the raw material! But we’re a bunch of raw materials that don’t mean to be—have any process upon us. Don’t mean to be made into any product. Don’t mean … Don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We’re human beings!

There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels … upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!¹

Fifty years have passed since that day. The world has changed exactly in the direction that Mario Savio then sensed as a frightening possibility.

In his words I see an astounding anticipation of the relation between knowledge and the capitalist economy, the process of submission and privatization of the University and of research, and also a sort of premonition of the destiny of the movement that in 1964 was dawning: the student movement that spread to everywhere in the world in the legendary year of 1968.

The first point that I want to emphasize in Savio’s speech is the understanding that the University is (becoming) a firm, an economic entity whose leading principle is profit. The relationship between the economy and knowledge was an important subject in the consciousness of the students, researchers, and intellectuals involved in the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. That relationship has become absolutely crucial in the thirty years since the digital revolution. In this period, which has also been marked by market globalization, the neoliberal ideology has gained the upper hand, and the subjugation of cognitive labor has become a main factor of capital valorization. Collaboration has been turned into competition, and social aggressiveness has prevailed over solidarity.

The second point of interest in this speech is the heart sickness that Savio is talking about. Knowledge, creativity, and language have become labor. The brain is the work force, and the concept of general intellect noted by Marx, Grundrisse, comes to life in the global network of the digital flow of signs.² Simultaneously, the activity of the brain is disconnected from the social existence of the body. The work of the brain is subjected to the heartless rule of finance, and this subjection makes people sick at heart in many ways.

Mario Savio and his colleagues were protesting against the submission of research to the demands of the Vietnam War. Today, war is proliferating at the margins of the cognitive sphere of production, and competition is fueling war in every niche of daily life.

The third point that impresses me in Savio’s speech is the gesture he suggests: “you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels … upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.”³ Gears, wheels, levers. This is the metaphor that the Free Speech Movement of 1968 had for the machinery of power. The factory and the working class kindled our imagination of social conflict. But the Free Speech Movement did not understand that the most important thing to do was to take hold of the cognitive machine. This is why we missed the point.

In that crowd, five thousand young people were listening to Mario Savio speak in the main square of the premiere university in California; five thousand young people were participating, were breathing together. Many of them have become animators of the processes that led to the creation of today’s global network. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were possibly there.

Because of the industrialist imagination that prevailed in the political culture of the Movement, we missed the opportunity to start a long lasting process of the self-organization of the general intellect. As professionals, we built the high-technology network, but as activists, we were trapped in a nineteenth-century industrialist imagination.

The only possibility of avoiding the subjection of knowledge to profit, which equals the subjection of knowledge to war, was the conjunction of the general intellect with the needs of society. But we were trapped by the old Leninist concept of political revolution.

Knowledge and the automation of work

Since 1968, the relationship between cognition and automation has framed the crucial issue of social transformation involving knowledge and the economy, technology and war.

Haunting the culture of modern times, automation is sometimes viewed as an empowerment of human enterprise, but at other times it is viewed as its enslavement, sacrificing the human soul, personal freedom, and social autonomy.

In the 1960s, critical thought focused on the issue of the automation of work as a dilemma open to two different possibilities: liberation and control.

Herbert Marcuse, who embodies the intersection of European philosophy and American technology, published two books that approach the prospect of automation from two opposing although complementary points of view: Eros and Civilization and One Dimensional Man.⁴ In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse expressed the idea that the technical automation of work may be the condition required for the process of emancipation of social life from its own alienation to take place.

A progressive reduction of labor seems to be inevitable, and for this eventuality, the system has to provide for occupation without work; it has to develop needs which transcend the market economy and may even be incompatible with it.⁵

In the same book, the philosopher emphasizes the prominent role that cognitive work will have not only in the future of production, but also in the social movement against exploitation.

To the degree to which organized labor operates in defense of the status quo, and to the degree to which the share of labor in the material process of production declines, intellectual skills and capabilities become social and political factors. Today, the organized refusal to cooperate of the scientists, mathematicians, technicians, industrial psychologists and public opinion pollsters may well accomplish what a strike, even a large-scale strike, can no longer accomplish but once accomplished, namely, the beginning of the reversal, the preparation of the ground for political action.⁶

Linking the emancipatory force of technology to the organized refusal of scientists and technicians to cooperate with the status quo, Marcuse outlines the possibility of overcoming the alienation or discontentment that Freud saw as a defining feature of civilization.

In One Dimensional Man, the book that canonized Marcuse’s work as an expression of the anti-authoritarian movement, the prospect seems different. The focus is still on the crucial function of intellectual labor, but here such labor is not seen as an emancipatory force, rather as a tool for domination and control.

The capabilities (intellectual and material) of contemporary society are immeasurably greater than ever before—which means that the scope of society’s domination over the individual is immeasurably greater than ever before. Our society distinguishes itself by conquering the centrifugal social forces with Technology rather than Terror, on the dual basis of an overwhelming efficiency and an increasing standard of living.⁷

Technology is taking the place of terror in the organization of social control: this is why Marcuse’s man is becoming one-dimensional.

For “totalitarian” is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests. It thus precludes the emergence of an effective opposition against the whole. Not only a specific form of government or party rule makes for totalitarianism, but also a specific system of production and distribution which may well be compatible with a “pluralism” of parties, newspapers, countervailing powers.⁸

The mobilization, organization, and exploitation of the technical, scientific, and intellectual productivity are the conditions of the new high-tech totalitarianism.

In these two books, Marcuse signals the dilemma of automation in the architecture of knowledge and technology. The neoliberal triumph, the annihilation of the Workers’ Movement (movimento operaio), the catastrophic turn that we have been living during the last thirty years led to the submission of the general intellect to the economy and its war machine.

Meritocracy versus solidarity in the age of cognitive labor

In the second part of the twentieth century, mass education opened the way to the emancipation of the working class: the worker’s “refusal of work” joined the “general intellect,” and the result was a dilemmatic situation whose outcome was not predictable. The student-led Free Speech Movement of 1968 can be seen as the first insurrection of the general intellect: the solidarity between students and workers was not only an ideological effect, but also the alliance of two social subjects sharing a common possibility. Industrial workers pushed toward the reduction of work time, and students acted as harbingers of the intellectual potency of cognitive work, announcing the technological possibility of emancipation from the slavery of physical labor. This alliance between refusal of work and technological innovation paved the way for the digital revolution and the replacement of industrial labor with the info-machine. However, this process of emancipation was disrupted in the last decades of the twentieth century, diverted toward the financial form of semio-capitalism as the neoliberal counter-revolution twisted the force of the general intellect against workers’ autonomy.

The increase in productivity that could have potentially opened the way to a general reduction of work time was turned into a tool for increased exploitation. Limitations to work time were removed, and unemployment rose as a side effect of increased individual work time. The potential of the general intellect has thereby been turned against the wellbeing of the working population.

As cognitive labor became the main force of valorization, economic power tried to submit cognitarians to the ideology of merit—meritocracy—in order to destroy the social solidarity of the intellectual force. Reducing intellectual ability through economic reward, meritocracy acts as the Trojan Horse of neoliberal ideology. Meritocracy, the hotbed of precariousness, is fostering competition: when individuals are obliged to fight for survival, intellectual and technical ability are reduced to tools for economic confrontation. When solidarity is broken and competition rules, research and discovery are disassociated from pleasure and solidarity.

Submission of knowledge to the rule of economy

A crucial passage in the process of the submission of knowledge to economics is the current dismantlement of the public education system, the privatization of the university and the operational submission of research to the rule of finance. This implies the epistemic primacy of the economy. The defining feature of the modern university was knowledge autonomy, namely autonomy from theology. Today, the asserted primacy of the economy implies the cancellation of knowledge autonomy, and the establishment of a new sort of theology.

Since the end of the twentieth century, the university crisis has been embedded in the inability of modern humanism to cope with the networked info-sphere. The institution of the university in the age of modernity was unfit to deal with networked intelligence. The humanist legacy was in need of a reformation. Yet what is happening is different from a reformation; public education has been simply emptied, dismantled, and replaced with a system of market-driven evaluation that kills autonomous research. Innovation is celebrated, but only through the framework of profit and growth, amounting to a new theological dogma.

The old industrial bourgeoisie was a strongly territori...

Table of contents

• FC
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Dediaction
• Toc
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I: The commodification of design labor
• Part II: The concept of architectural labor
• Part III: Design(ers)/Build(ers)
• Part IV: The construction of the commons
• Part V: The profession
• Index
• Copyright Page