patrikschumachertheoriesThe Architecture of MovementPatrik Schumacher 1996Published n: ARCH+ 134/135, Wohnen zur Disposition, Dezember 1996 German: Architektur der Bewegung"To see the system of movement as a key to space remains an exception in architecture. n other areas, e.g. dance, such ideas have been conceived."(1)1. The quest for the space of movement as the quest for an Other SpaceCan there be a theory or a conception of space beyond the "arch-architectural" space of modular control?s there an alternative tradition, an alternative paradigm of space or at least the theoretical possibility of defining space through movement alone, without an independent and prior system of reference? How do design a system of circulation without presupposing points to be connected? A system of connection that defines its points of destiny from within itself? The circulation-system runs in circles and turns into its opposite, a dance: a movement without motivation, ultimately to be understood as the escape from the architectonic system. How does the dance define itself and its space without cartesian grid? Not without fundamentally subverting the whole notion of definition, of rationality and objectivity as resting on regularity and reproducability. The "definition" of space through movement becomes the solipsistic fiat of gratitious subjectivity. Per definition such escapist "architecture" must remain exceptional. This escape from Architecture - to be traced historically - becomes a revolt against architecture and attains a philosophical as well as political dimension, in as much architecture as "the system of systems"(2) remains the original reference of any notion of structure and order. (Here emerges the problematic of a selfconcious deconstructivism.(3))The idea of an "architecture of movement" depends upon an architecture of (modular) order being presupposed logically as well as historically.Logical: a-rythmic, creative movement is only identifiable through its negative definition as de-viation from the algorythmically compartmentalized space. The perception of space becomes "subjective" as deviation from the objective order of space. Time becomes "subjective" as deformation of the objective relations established by mechanically produced time: the hand traverses the modular space of the clock's face. Freedom/subjectivity registers and thinks itself against the framework of an institutionalising "architecture". The technology of architecture gives birth to such concepts. ("Architecture" sigifies not any kind of built something, but first of all a formal system, postulating a structure as an ordered whole conceived and errected in reference to such system.)Historical: The space of movement and experience of the picturesque English landscape garden emerges in the 18th Century as the artificial reconstruction of the natural. t offers itself as the unknown and confronts us with the unforeseen. t does this playfully and comfortably, embedded in the familiar and transparent order of architecture that has already conqered the unknown alien. More existential than playful seems Baudelaire's flaneur who's dis-tracted and desire-driven movement dis-figures the architectural space of the 19th Century city. Guy Debor's psychogeographical "derive" continues this dis-membering anti-tradition in the 20th Century: The disoriented drifting within the body of the city has (anti-)method as it expects unexpected spaces of encounter, potentially revolutionary "situations" that re-open the possibility of the "Other". Debor's Situationism is Anti-CAM, Anti-planning, Anti-architecture, an architecture of movement. All those architectures of movement are comprehensible only as atempts to suspend the territorialized architectural space. This counter-movement is always also part of a political movement, because the order of architecture is always also a political order. This regards also the movement of the English landscape garden, that was part of an aesthetic revolution carried forward by the ascending bourgeoisie of the 18th Century. The landscape garden validated and took part in the unrestrained usurpation of space by early industrial capital. Considering parallel developements in France, Manfredo Tafuri (4) identifies in Laugier's naturalizing architectural theory the urban ideology of capitalism, which aetheticizes as vital "uproar and tumult" the dynamism of urban growth that can no longer be contained within the formal system of baroque planning. n the case of Debor the political dimension is absolutely selfconscious and ecxplicite, and his movement becomes part of the movement towards 1968. The same applies to the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari (5) that is the basis for the recent american architectural debate around the notion of folding: a political critique as critique of a rigid, hierarchical and "territorializing" order is put forward in the form of a quasi-geometry. Deleuze and Guattari are scetching open, flexible and fluid anti-architectures, permanently moving in and out of shifting networks of relation. The space of the nomades - a "smooth space" defined in opposition to modular "striated space" - is the paradigmatic metaphor.Here, within the ambit of 1968, one finds as well the political and philosophical origin of Deconstructivism, propably the the most extreme and selfconscious anti-architecture of movement in the 20th Century. But before deconstructivism makes sense, a long historical process of construction has to be presupposed.2. The Production of Space as Elimination of the OtherArchitecture is geo-metry, the founding technique of man's appropriation of space. Following Mark Cousins, the history of mankind, in relation to space, might be described as a successive internalization, in real as well as in conceptual terms, an integration of the surrounding into the interior of the city. Athens still had an edge-condition, whereby it met the unknown and uncontrolled Other. Greek cosmology can still ask questions concerning the end of the world. The whole middle ages exist within aristotelian cosmology, the city remains a closed circle, departure from it being adventure, and the map stops at the white terra incognita.Architecture's formal systems start to conquer the landscape during the Renaissance. The italien villa emerged as the castello could shed its fortifications and the control over the hinterland was completed and asserted by way of extending architecture's geometry - the order of the city - all the way to the horizon, thus placing all of nature under its spell. This finds its pendent in the representation of space through perspective construction which, according to Alberti, starts with the gridded horizontal plane, thus domesticating everything in advance. Everything that might happen to occupy space is always already safely positioned. The medieval realms are trancended. City, landscape and villa are unified into the "integrazione scenica". Venice's reclaimation of the Veneto in 16th century was the politico-economic agenda setting the task for the Palladian Villa. The villa transposes the urban architectural order into the hinterland, formally sizeing upon the colonizing grid imposed under the centuriatio system that devided the land relentlessly into squares of 625sqm. The Villa was placed at major crossing points within this system formally enhancing the intersecting axes. Palladio recommends to raise the axial streets against the fields and to line them with a regular rythm of trees, while the piano nobile was again raised above the intersection. This was the first precise articulation of a comprehensive modular and hierarchical order. Here emerges the space of the controlling perspective, which found its historical peak in the service of 17th century French Absolutism, as the land was built into a state.(This historical process of appropriation is traced by Clemens Steenbergen and Wouter Reh's "Architecture and Landscape"(6), a brilliant study attentive to the various formal strategies by which the ever-resistant geo-morphology is forced under architecture's rule.)3. First Dance: Toying with the tamed Other18th Century England: The period in which Palladianism and its dialectic extension - the english landscape garden - is proliferating in England is the period when the land is finally brought under the total jurisdiction of private property and made accessable through the comprehensive transport network of roads and canals. This process of territorialization leaves no space for ambiguity. All formerly common land is turned into private property according to parliamentary act regulating this so called "enclosure". This process of appropriation is accompanied by a rationalization of the agricultural geometry. The resulting 1/93 - Patrik Schumacher - Theorieschessboard pattern was marked by hedges and drywalls. The canals imposed a horizontal datum: an architecture of dykes, tunnels and aqueducts defined the hilly topography as de-viation. The roads were straightened and their surface hardened. Signposts and milestones were introduced, effectively subsuming space and movement under the modular order of the map. Manufacturing industries, accompanied by new settlements, spread out into the country, utilizing the water-energy available along the rivers. A whole new class of country nobility (with bought titles) settled on country estates crowned by Palladian Villas. This massive urban colonization of the countryside was the framing context of the emerging landscape gardens, those artificial zones of nature's irregularity and freedom, playful escapes from the architectonic system. The picturesque garden was a labyrinthine, mythically charged space, without visual boundaries, impenetrable by the controlling gaze, only to be revealed through movement. But this movement was no longer measured by milestones and signposts, it followed another drama, allowing for surprise and even sublimated horror. Such sublimated experience of the danger of untamed nature was theorized in Burke's 'Philosophical nquiry into the Origins of our deas of the Sublime and the Beautiful' from 1756, postulating a new aesthetic category. f the Sublime and the Picturesque are signalling moments of relief, moments of freedom from and a reaction to Architecture, they also pave the way for an urban developement which is no longer fully controllable by the (baroque) architectural formalism.4. Modern ModularityOne might argue (with Tafuri) that the sublime as aesthetic value became a means by which the emerging bourgeoisie could sublimate and aesthetizise its chaotic industrial urbanization, unbearable to a classical sensibility.n this respect one might then interpret Modern Urbanism as a late atempt to finally bring the chaotic capitalist urban landscape into the domain of architecture. The urban models of Tony Garnier, LeCorbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ernst May, Ludwig Hilbersheimer etc., all these are based on the classical geometric canons of modularity, conceived as tabula rasa structure. The more complex and open spatialities emerging through suprematism, futurism, cubism, and neoplasticism are assimilated into (anti-)architectural spatial experiments on the scale of the villa only. This new sensibilty and concept of space, which Sigfried Gideon (7) termed "space-time", did involve subjectivity and movement, whereby the identity of a spatial unit (a "room") would shift with the respective position of the moving subject. The spatial units - or rather no longer units - would enter into successive alignments, dissolving the possibility of unitary identity implied by the notion of the room or module. Giedion discovers within the "Parkways" around New York an architecture of movement on an urban scale. "The fundamental law of the parkway: there must be unobstructed feedom of movement."(8) Because the highways neither follow straight lines nor any algorythm, but are rather lead by the natural topography, they convey to Giedion the illusion of a totally free movement: "a feeling like nothing else so much as sliding swiftly on skis through untouched snow."(9)Despite Giedion's claim that "space-time" represents the essence of the modern epoque it remained marginal within overall 20th Century construction, which, based on the fordist mode of production, was bound to be relentlessly modular. The history of 20th Century urbanism between 1920 and 1980 was following the paradigm of the modular "Siedlung", being reproduced on an everextending scale throughout this period. 5. Movement within the moduleWithin and against this modular mass production LeCorbusier developes the seemingly unproblematic idea of an architecture of movement, best exemplified by his classic icon of modernity: the villa Savoye, one of the few built experiments in modern "space-time". Within his Oevre Complete, edited by LeCorbusier himself, the photographic sequence through the interior of the villa is inconspicuously subtitled "promenade architecturale". f the thus suggested analogy to promenading through a park, landscape, or urban environment is taken serious, one faces an uncanny (unhomely) paradox: The inhabitant of such an environment would have to be conceived as a flaneur, a stranger in his own house. n his own house, where he once knew himself safely kept and reassured of his identity, the scene should constantly vary, offering change, surprise and the unknown, re-emerging over and again as the unfamiliar and never becoming his home. A similar spirit haunts the Villas of Adolph Loos: Spatial sequences merging across the shifting levels prevent fixed identities to take root anywhere. Communism would move through such spaces, if the exterior would not have been secured architecturally as a discrete, hermetic unit. The same is true for LeCorbusier's Villa, who's landscape-like quality is constricted into a cartesian envelope, thus clearly and objectively defined as object and property. Only within the four walls does spontaneous movement extrude its space from the given, inexhaustably ambiguous spatial substance.6. Movement beyond the module: Two limit casesSuch a conception of space as generated by spontaneus movement entails an understanding of Being and Dwelling at its point of disappearance. Architecture can only approximate or simulate its implied disappearance. The work of Zaha Hadid and of Berkel&Bos might be interpreted as such an anti-Architecture. Particulary shall reference two residential projects, where the question of Being (and being at home) is most radically challenged. Ben van Berkels multi-storey housing project for Borneo-Sparenberg radicalizes the dissolution of the stable, modular framework of orientation that would locate one's home within the structure. Ten maisonette units - three-dimensionally complex figures - are entangled into one another, thus constituting a rectelinear mass. Within this tangle the single unit looses its identity and integrety. The dweller is no longer able to overlook where his property starts and ends. He disappears into an inconceivable burrow-geometry. The public outside space penetrates and "erodes" the block. The three-dimensional jigsaw conjures a continuous labyrinth of interstitial spaces, that, while operating as access and lighting space, allows for a strange "promenade architecturale". A potentially liberating space, that comes as surprise within a multy-storey building, a type that has hithertho been the paradigm of modularity.Zaha Hadid's design (1991) of a villa for the Hague ("Spiral in the box") proceeds from what seems at first to be a purely formal contradiction or contrast: between a violently dynamic interior and a strictly modular exterior. The envelope is prefigured by the setback rules and rigidly positioned within the grid of Koolhaas' masterplan. This given volume is conceived as indivisible continuum. Any form of devision into levels or cells is suspended. The dichotomous distinction between programme areas and circulation areas is erased. Everything seems to be shot through with movement. This dynamic thrust seems caught and fixed within the given cubic grid, yet it remains unsettling in as much as the cube itself is undermined and distorted by the thrust of the "movement". The internal anti-geometry touches, twists, and cuts the architectural envelope. The facades seem to follow the spiralling drift as they transform along a sequence from opaque, translucent, to transparent.The spiral is the means by which the whole three-dimensional field of the volume remains open and continuous. t is not to be understood as geometric figure. t does not follow any geometric rule but bends and twists out of pure "willfullnes". Endless design variations bear witness to the indeterminacy of the morphology, within limiting parameters like maximum incline, smoothness of curves etc. Exact geometrical determination - a constant or algorythmically controlled radius - is excluded, like anything that would lead to uniformity. Everywhere variations within the field are offered as local (and temporary) possibilities of identification, without ever implying an unambiguous territorialization of the space. A dynamic of inhabitation is thus suggested that radicalizes Adolph Loos' "Raumplan" and further enhances the fluidity of the relational play.This "topography" of movement deterritorializes - potentially - the hierarchical structure of the family as well as the related rigidity of the functional zoning of the house. The creative play - the (anti-)principle of the "soft" free-form furniture of the sixties - is here swollowing the whole house. The inescapable identification and labelling of the standart territories like "living room", "master bedroom" etc. is always possible and can even utilize certain valences or latencies offered within the free-form morphology. 2/93 - Patrik Schumacher - TheoriesNevertheless, such labels remain subject to the destabilizing forces of movement and subjectivity. Those inscriptions mutate into absurd stipulations. The spiral-house remains an unhomely bunble of open questions, born from willfullness, lust and an urge for freedom. This overstretched architecture tears at a brittle social edifice and sets it into motion.References:1. ARCH+, Nr. 131, "nformation der Architektur", p.14, Joachim Krause interviewd by ARCH+, 2. Denis Hollier, "Against Architecture", M..T. Press, 1989, S. 333. Mark Wigley, "The Architecture of Deconstruction", M..T. Press, 19934. Manfredo Tafuri, "Architecture and Utopia", M..T. Press, 19765. Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, "Mille Plateaux", Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1980 6. Clemens Steenbergen, Wouter Reh, "Architecture and Landscape", Prestel 19967. Sigfried Giedion, "Space, Time and Architecture", Harvard University Press, 1941, Fifth Edition 19678. ebenda S. 8249. ebenda S.825Soja 's "Postmodern Geographies" - a political readingPatrik Schumacher 1996Lecture delivered at Architectural Association, LondonA "political reading" generally assumes that the possible meanings of theory in the "humanities" ultimately reside in the political consequences that are drawn or might be drawn from such theorizing. The meaning of theory fulfills and reveals itself in the practise it directs. Soja himself conceives his critical theory as a form of political writing, "a source of emancipatory insight and practical political consciousness."(p.1)Soja's main thesis is that geography can contribute to the emancipatory political project as much as history, which has supposedly been unduly priviledged over the last hundred years. This neglect of geography (and its subject matter space) concerns not only the established social sciences, but particulary the Marxist tradition to which Soja wants to contribute: Soja's claim is that 'Marxist Historical Materialism' has to become "historico-geographical materialism"(p.7).The first 156 pages (chapters 1-6) of Postmodern Geographies are telling the story of this neglect and the dawning of a reassertion of space, most prominantly in the writings of Lefebvre, Foucault and recently David Harvey. n chapter 5 Soja is trying to ground his argument in "ontology", claiming an "existential spatiality of being".(p.131) But pragmatist epistemology precludes the question wether "space matters" to be established in the abstract. The political relevance and emancipatory potential of geography remains a more or less plausible working hypothesis until substantiated by the elaboration of a concrete political geography. The arguments of these first 6 chapters thus remain abstract claims that need to be tested by a political reading of the last three essays (chapters) which - in Soja's own words - "atempt to give greater empirical and interpretive substance to these arguments."(p.7)Capter 7 - "The historical geography of Urban and Regional Restructuring" - identifies the political task for a critical socio-spatial science as "making theoretical and practical sense of the contemporary restructuring of capitalist spatiality". (p159)Geographically uneven developement, indeed a crucial fact to be tackeled by any emancipatory politics, is recognized by Soja as central to his case for the political relevance of space. For Soja "geographically uneven developement, ... reproduced at multiple scales, is inherent to the concretization of capitalist social relations ... both as medium/presupposition and as outcome/embodiment."(p163) More than just being a projection of class-relations on to virgin space, a particular spatiality (territorialization) is sized upon, as indispensible and effective instrument of class-forcement (my words). Soja sees contemporary restructuring (like all previous shifts within the socio-economic order) as being rooted in crisis - this time in the urban insurrections of the sixties and the world economic recession of the early seventies."Capitalism's 'inner contradictions'" constitute explicitely the "enduring central theme"(p.158) of Soja's analysis. Soja describes "spatialization" as an "ideological process associated with the developement and survival of capitalism"(p.158) Capitalist restructuring and (re-)spatialization are interpreted from an implied if not explicite revolutionary perspective as fundamentally defensive mechanisms warding off revolution (my words), or at least as mechanisms of social containment, disciplinary control and dissipation of class-struggle. The analysis intends to reveal how the spatial organization of society is implicated in the survival of capitalism, i.e. in the reproduction of class-society. Soja is talking about the developement and survival of capitalism, but what does not come out explicitely enough is that this process is indeed double edged, that developement and survival are - from a marxist point of view - increasingly in contradiction with each other, that the survival of class-society has to be continually re-organized according to progressively developing technologies of production, which in turn are fettered and incarcerated by repressive class-relations. Spatiality and spatial restructuring participates on both sides in this double-edged and contradictory process: it establishes the integral spatiality of the next stage of the developement of the forces of production, yet overdetermined and distorted by the concerns of capitalist class rule. n Soja this contradiction remains hidden in mere juxtaposition (developement and survival), allowing for a reading of spatial organization purely as an instrument of repressive class-control. (Marx's dictum that all history is the history of class-struggle does not imply that history is nothing but the history of class-struggle.)Before going into the specifics of contemporary postfordist restructuring and the concurrent postmodern geographies, Soja sketches a history of previous periods of restructuring. He is adapting a well-established marxist periodization by shifting the focus of analysis towards the respective spatiality. Historical Materialism becomes "historico-geographical materialism". (The stratification of the time-continuum into distinguished epoques remains defined on the basis of the regulationist-marxist notion of 'regime of accumulation' as a subdevision of Marx's notion of 'modes of production' rather than 'regimes or modes of spatialization' - my words.) Soja starts with freely competitive capitalism, being spatially organized along a hierarchical subnational regional devision of labour between industrialized territories and subsidiary agrarian regions, "internal colonies" exploited as reservoirs of cheap labour. He identifies in 19th Century regionalisms the spatially defined political resistance against this imposed and hierarchical spatial devision of labour, resonating also in the anti-state and decentralist principles of anarchism, posing the most radical challenge to capitalism in this period.The primary source of exploitation and with it the arena of struggle shifts in the phase of corporate monopoly capital and imperialism. "Underdevelopement (in colonial and semi-colonial territories) became more important to the survival of capitalism than subnational regional differentiation."(p.165) "The old city-countryside relationship became ... a global structure of capitalist core and periphery"(p.165) "Within the core-nation "the overall intensity of regional inequalities was significantly reduced."(p.166) and one should add here that the labour-movement within the imperialist heartlands was effectively ameliorated and even coopted into the first imperialist world war and the knife-edge survival of capitalism immediatly after the war, while the communist parties (which emergred from the disintegration of the international labour movement as splinters of the dominant socialist parties) stressed the international character of the revolutionary project, proclaiming the absolute necessity of seeking active solidarity with the oppressed colonial people and starting crucial organisational links across the continents. 20th century Marxism has identified imperialism - effectively a devide and rule strategy towards the international proletariat - as the main mechanism of capitalist survival. And this fundamental mechanism fundamentally involves territoriality, that is a spatially defined devision of the working class. Space becomes an indispensible instrument of class-enforcement. But then again: 3/93 - Patrik Schumacher - TheoriesThe international devision of labour in the sense of an international integration of production is not reducable to the survival of capitalism. The ports, railways, telegraphs ect. are as much part of early 20thCentury spatiality as border-enforcement, colonial ghettoization and spatial regimes of apartheid. The postwar regime of state-managed (fordist) capitalism did not suspend imperialism (neo-colonialism), but went much further in smoothing out internal contradictions through state-intervention and planning. Soja relates the particular spatialization of this era of urban planning - the forceful decentralization enacted in the British New Town Programme, the similar French programme and taly's re-distributive regional welfare planning - to regional unrest and regional political movements. But as Soja points out, these atempts to balance regional inequalities were always halfhearted and remained more promise than reality. This system of state-managed fordist capitalism suffers political and economic crisis in 1968 and 1973-75 respectively. Here lie the seeds of the current restructuring towards Postfordism. Before going into a detailed account of Postfordism, Soja has a second take on the history of the socio-spatial dialectic, this time more concerned with the structure of the (american) city rather than the macro-scale overall spatiality of the economy. Again the story focusses on the history of class-struggle (my words).This time he starts with the mercantile city which suffered crisis because the spatial proximity of wealth and poverty became a source of social unrest. Soja quotes David Gordon: "Because the commercial city retained the precapitalist transparencies of immediate, intimate, and integrated social relationships, commercial capitalist profits could not be masked. The quest for such a disguise ... played a central role in prompting a turn to a new and ultimately more opaque mode of capital accumulation."(p.176) Soja follows on describing the next phase of the competitive industrial city: "new kinds of cities and hierarchical city-systems added to the growing traditional functions of social control, commercial accumulation, and political administration ... the agglomeration of industrial production."(p.177) The shift from water-energy to the steam-engine allowed for this urban concentration of industry opening the "wellspring of agglomeration economies" (p.177). "The efficient geographical centralization of factories and working-class communities ... seemed to be breeding a strengthened working-class consciousness and militancy."(p.179) Concentric zoning is interpreted as the urbanist fix: "The zonation was largely a matter of class, as the antagonistic social structure of competitive industrial capitalism became spatialized in segregated and socially homogenous urban compartments and enclosures (p.177) ... a hidden instrumentality ... a disciplinary spatialization designed not by some conspiracy of capitalist architects but artfully designed nonetheless."(p. 178) Here the contradictory dialectic of technological progress and rearguard social containment comes out clearly, although not explicitly reflected thus by Soja.But the inner-city zoning was insufficient in controlling the workers. n the Corporate-Monopoly Capitalist City ... "the separation of management and production functions reorganized the spatial devision of labour in capitalist urbanization."(p.179) A policed central business district (corporate headquarters, financial and government institutions) was served by rings of working class and ethnic enclaves, industry moved into satelite centres and the white collar manegerial class joint the bourgeoisie in a surge of suburbanisation. "This fragmented, policentric ... urban regionalization assisted industrial capital in escaping from agglomerated working class militancy. Employers could more easily move away from organized union pressures, the workforce became more segmented and residentially segregated."(p.180) This process was facilitated by a mass-rail transit system and increasingly also by the emerging auto-mobile system, L.A. taking the lead from the very beginning.This tendency was substantially expanded in the following State-Managed Urban System. "Suburbanization was markedly accelerated after the Second World War. With substantial state support and encouragement, sizable portions of working class, blue as well as white collar, settled into suburban tracts and privatized enclosures ... accompanied by an even greater fragmentation of political jurisdictions."(p.181) One might add here that this localized planning jurisdiction facilitated the segregative character of the respective settlements by way of setting indirect income thresholds via the stipulation of minimum sizes of building sites.Concerning the contemporary situation, i.e. here the late eighties, Soja asserts that we are in the middle of an unresolved process of restructuring. "A new upswing ... has not yet begun."(p.183) Soja also warns us that "the recovery of capitalism through restructuring is not mechanical or guarantied." (p.183) However, "the contemporary period must be seen as another crisis-generated attempt by capitalism to restore the key conditions for its survival: ... Central to the resurrection of expansive superprofits is, as usual, the institution of invigorated means of labour discipline and social control." (p.184) This formulation gives opportunity to elaborate once more on the dialectic of economic developement and capitalist survival. Not only is survival in contradiction with developement as its fetter - if judged against a potential developement beyond class-society - but survival itself is double-edged as it not only has to ward off revolution, but has the delicate and dangerous task to organize and discipline a production- and labour-process that remains alienating and breeds resistance under the given conditions of unequality and disempowerment. Capital under todays increasing competitive pressure remains forced to develope the forces of production, continually re-coopting labour into a restructured process, while simultanly, under the spell of deregulated profit-maximization, having to betray labour over its participation in the benefits of increased productivity, thus turning what was more like co-optation in the postwar regime into coercion and aggressive exploitation now, at least for the growing bottom of a re-differentiated hierarchy of labour. Postfordism emerges from the mutually enhancing but also contradictory interaction of factors and processes. Soja's mere list of postfordist phenomena (pp.185,186) does not atempt to analyse the dialectic tangle of positive and negative feedback mechanisms and he fails to make the politically crucial distinction of aspects that pertain to productive progress from those that pertain to the intensification of exploitation, class-struggle and class-control. The inability to distinguish Post-fordism as a new paragigm of production attaining new levels of productivity from the simultaneous neo-liberal offensive that utilizses (and the competing capitals force each other to utilize) the unsettled relations of production for a decisive shift in the underlying class-relations, this inability leads the political struggle down the road of regressive utopia.n my analysis the three main progressive and productive factors of Postfordist restructuring are the following:1. globalization, i.e. a new level of international integration of production2. flexible specialization - made possible by the computer-revolution 3. the organizational revolution - i.e. the relative de-hierarchization and de- beaurocratization of work.Those features would need to be recuperated within an emancipatory politics. Under current capitalism these features are distorted, compromised and borne out to the disadvantage of the majority of the world population. 1. Globalization takes the form of a re-emergence of interimperialist rivalries, militarism, enforced austerity programmes, the break up of national welfare compromises between capital and labour, resulting in a fierce downward competition of labour-costs, i.e. of the majority's standart of living. Also overall productivity suffers as long as the world allocation of material and labour resources remains driven by an irrational , militarily guaranteed , and thus ultimately very costly "cheapness" of labour, which allows the squandering of millions of potentially much more productive lifes.2. The new flexibility and potential richness of life-work is borne out and experienced by labour as existential insecurity. On the product side the new economies of scope are abused for stratification and status consumption rather than non-exclusive diversity. They become barriers rather than means of social communication.3. The rationale of discursive cooperation rather than command type of work-organization, which is forced upon the capitalist corporation by the new degree of complexity and 4/93 - Patrik Schumacher - Theoriesflexibility of the total production process within which it has to function, remains nevertheless highly compromised and limited by the reality of class-society with its inherent hierarchy and irrational hingeing of authority upon property.So much for Postfordism's promise and its neo-liberal reality. For its Geography should hand back to Soja. Soja's exploration of postmodern urbanization is focussing on Los Angeles' Metropolitan region. Soja justfies this focus via the supposed paradigmatic character of L.A.'s developement. n as much as L.A. is one of the leading "superprofitable growth poles" it is well chosen according to marxist principles of materialism, finding in superproductivity (which under ideal capitalism translates into superprofit) as the incontestable criterion for identifying the future within the presence. From a world system perspective - i.e. Marxism at its most concrete level of analysis - such isolated study remains necessarily abstract.But Soja's analysis of L.A. seems to suggest that the L.A. Metropolitan Region is like a "mesocosm" that reproduces within its own spatiality the complexity and contradiction of the global economy. "Seemingly paradoxical but functionally interdependent juxtapositions are the epitomizing features of contemporary Los Angeles. ... One can find in Los Angeles not only the high technology industrial complexes of the Silicon Valley and the erratic sunbelt economy of Houston, but also the far-reaching industrial decline and bankrupt urban neighbourhoods of rust-belted Detroit or Cleveland. There is a Boston in Los Angeles, a lower Manhattan and a South Bronx, a Sao Paulo and a Singapore."With this internalization of the peripherie comes the largest homeless population, soaring rates of violent crime and the largest prison population within the US. The militarization of the world economy translates here into the rule of a militarized LAPD. (The anti-racist explosion of 1992 testifies to this.) The simulteneity of growth and decline, locating the leading high tech industrial sectors next to the abandoned industrial wastelands, and a growing low-wage economy of industrial sweatshops, posits an uphill battle for social control and calls to task the friction of distance of spread city L.A. (my words). Yet the postmodern geography of L.A. differs from the postwar broad-acre-anti-city type suburbanization. Orange County is described as "an amorphous regional complex that confounds traditional definitions of both city and suburb."(p.212) The postfordist landscape integrates a loose and open network of research, production and service systems, interspersed with leisure environments and alternating expensive residential developements with enclaves of cheap and manipulable labour. The interpenetration of different activities succeeds even despite the problems of social control and the cost of policing caused by the engendered proximity of increasingly polarized incomes. One might speculate about the spatial and architectural possibilities and productive synergies to be released beyond the need for spatial policing.Another marked spatial phenomenon has been superimposed on the polycentral spatiality of the L.A. postfordist landscape: the decisive re-centralization of corporate headquarters within the downtown core, reversing the trend of the fordist era. This revival of the central business district and selective gentrification of the inner city, and which one might add was the material basis for the boom of Postmodern architecture, reflects the postfordist organisational shift in corporate structure and business organisation. Larger but looser and diversivied conglomerates, in permanent negotiation with banks, surrounded by flexible clusters of consultancy and service firms, establishing project-based networks and alliances to flexibly adapt to a far more volatile and globalized market etc., meant a shift in the requirement for business-communication and a highly mobile manegerial workforce of mainly single professionals that would find in the re-invented downtown its appropriate work-environment, cultural and consumption needs (my elaboration). Soja is linking this downtown renaissance also to the "increasing internationalization of the local economy. "(p.215) Citadel L.A. has become one of the major control centres of the world economy, a place from which US multinationals reach out and where foreign capital moves in. More than half the prime downtown properties are foreign owned and as much as 90% of recent multistorey building construction was financed by foreign investment. This hub of business-communication is the milieu where new architectural types, like Portman's big Bonaventura, mushroomed on fertile ground. "The Bonaventure Hotel, an amazingly storeyed architectural symbol of the splintered labyrinth that stretches sixty miles around it. ... The Bonaventure has become a concentrated representation of the restructured spatiality of the late capitalist city: ... seemingly open in presenting itself to view but constantly pressing to enclose, to compartmentalize, to circumscribe, to incarcerate ... everything imaginable appears to be available in this micro-urb but real places are difficult to find ... its spaces confuse effective cognitive mapping ... and encourage submission instead ... entrance is encouraged at many different levels ... once inside however it becomes daunting to get out again."(p.244)Soja's maps chart the marked spatial displacement of industrial activity into the hinterland. The new postfordist growth sectors are decidedly not taking up the space left behind by the plant closures that mark the end of Fordism. The new developements seemed paradoxically repelled rather than attracted by the dense infrastructure and labour-supply left behind. The irrational capitalist rationale was dicounting infrastructure and workers for the possibilty to exploit virgin land and virgin, that is non-unionized labour. Membership of the industrial labour unions went into deep decline. Soja speaks of a selective occupational recycling, polarising the labour market by wage differentials. "The middle segment of skilled, unionized, and well paid blue-collar workers has been shrinking, with a small number of its expelled labourers floating up to an expanded white collar technocracy but a much larger proportion perlocating downward into a relatively lower skilled and lower-wage reservoir of production and service workers, swollen by massive immigration and part-time and female employees."(p.207) Soja cites the garment industry as an example for such a sweat-shop industry which "tends to be highly labour-intensive, difficult to mechanize, and organized around small shops to adapt more quickly to rapidly changing fashion trends. ... Unionization rates are low and infringements of minimum wages, overtime, child labour and occupational safety laws are endemic."(p.207) One should add here that the life-squandering exploitation of such cheap labour, made available by class-society - here utilizing patriarchy and racism as 90% of workers here are female immigrants - puts a direct barrier to the progressive extension of available technology to such work supposedly "difficult to mechanize", while the appropriate CAD/CAM technology of flexible specialization is precisely what has been developed in the current period. L.A. reproduces on its territory the contradiction of the capitalist worldeconomic system, reproducing precisely the active underdevelopement that has kept whole continents in the status of so called "developing countries" for more than 100 years of so called and supposedly aided developement. n conclusion: These violent processes of socio-economic and spatial restructiuring proceed with "remarkably little resistance" (p.219) "The labour movement ... remains in a Fordist mode of fighting against an enemy that has become too slippery and diffuse to negotiate with in traditional ways."(p.219) With organised labour being decimated and illegal immigrant labour being excluded from political activity, Soja sees glimpses of potential in urban movements around housing and rent-control as emerged in Santa Monica. Ephemeral inspirations towards an urban revolution mobilizing around issues of urban space - a would be corroboration of Soja's central thesis that an emancipatory social science needs to include an urban geography. Geography directing the struggle.End.Materialism vs Morality - Part 1 Patrik Schumacher 1997Lecture delivered at Architectural Association, London as part of the Graduate School Ethics Lecture Series0. When - two month ago - was asked to speak here within the Graduate School Ethics lecture series it dawned on me that should use this opportunity to venture across the limit of a purely academic exposition and - as it were - 'come out' and expose my 5/93 - Patrik Schumacher - Theoriespolitical and philosophical position to your criticism. n fact to do anything else at this occasion would have meant a betrayal - or to avoid a moral term here - it would have meant the effective abandonment of this position and of the project it wants to become. Some of you might already have witnessed that am operating from a fairly consolidated theoretical postion, i.e. Marxism. would also like to call myself a communist. But what can that mean today practically? am not an activist although there still is a number of organised revolutionary marxist groups in Britain and have been in loose contact with quite a few of them over the last ten years. (1)However, have chosen to focus on trying to build a carrier in architecture, professionally as well as academically. But in this process continue to suffer from capitalist class society.(2). Or to put it positively: continue to gather and evaluate experience in the light of the marxist hypothesis that there could be another superior socio-economic and political regime that would allow us to engage and collaborate in more democratic and more productive relations.n order to mediate and share here some of the resultant speculations and insights want to pick up an initially arbritrary series of issues which seem to fit into a lecture on ethics in architecture, in order to demonstrate how from a marxist perspective every issue and problem can be driven to expose the political barrier to its solution. The first isue will raise is the question of the disciplinary boundaries in the organisation of knowledge and professional progress.1. This lecture series is one more example for the way in which the AA continues to operate in defiance of what one might expect to be the limit of the discipline of architecture. Some remarks on the underlying rationality of such deterritorialization is a necessarry preface to my lecture as it questions not only various disciplinary boundaries but ventures beyond what you might deem the proper limits of the theoretical and academic. From an ethics lecture one might here expect reference to particular moral dilemmas the profession sometimes admits to like the one wether alligeance is owed to the private client or the general public interst, or questions of moral value as they arise in public projects , in social housing, for instance the dilemma of catering for of divers ethnicities etc. maintain that such questions can not be adressed and solved in isolation but inevitable drive towards general questions of philosophy and ultimately political strategy.One might point out here that in all professions, disciplines and specialist knowledges the most advanced proponents in each discipline consistently find themselves rehearsing and potentially challenging philosophy. Philosophy at it's best is nothing other than the attempt to adress and work through the general questions of method and purpose which arise in any research or systematic activity. Any innovative and rigorous specialized inquiry or practise will move beyond provisionally useful but ultimately arbitrary disciplinary boundaries and tendentially will have to recuperate, synthesize and advance the systematic totality of knowledges, experiences and practises. And do link the regressive postmodern ideological abandonment of totalization to the political hegemony of capital in this period.The very notion of Architecture versus mere building seems to call for innovation and theoretical grounding: great architecture was always innovative building and what we call architecture always - since the Renaissance - comes along with theory, most notably since modernism, post-modernism, deconstructivism etc. That is what we expect from ourselves as ambitious architects and from architecture versus mere building: that it knows what it is doing and that it can make an argument for itself. But such arguments have to reach beyond architecture. Architecture can have no value in itself - that would be fetishism. That means that once you enter architectural theory you are already on the drift towards deterritorialization and totalization: architecture and urbanism have been and have to be theorised as facilitating society, the good polis, social progress, institutional innovation, manifesting contemporary cultural and moral values etc. all of which obviously transcends the bounds of the expert knowledge required to merely build something.The exercise and transmission of routine operations within the profession are of course also part of an architecture school's agenda, and such exercise rests comfortably within the discipline's boundaries. The rationality of these operations might safely be taken as corroborated by their pervasive survival and reproduction. When it comes to critique, innovation and the formation of new practises - and the AA as any academic institution does and should claim such ambitions - a responsible account of these practises has to transcend the disciplinary realm of specialized professional expertise. n the place of the guarantees of a corroborated standart practise an anticipatory theoretical speculation is required in order to ascertain, predict or at least bracket the effect of new architectural repertoires on social relations and the life process in general. And this would ultimately require architecture, sociology, business organisation, economics and political theory to be studied in their dialectical relations. But since capitalism atomizes the relevant decisions, such integrated science has no audience. Such integration already fails relative to the disciplinary neighbors architecture and urbanism. That disciplinary boundaries might be useful for routine operations embodying an economy of complexity reduction but are incompatible with innovation and progress can be seen with regard to the relation between architecture and urbanism. The disciplinary boundary between architecture and urban planning is obstructing innovation in both disciplines and thus of the rational developement of the built environment. They exist as two separatly institutionalized practises arresting each other in mutual deadlock. Whereas urban planning is limiting its options in advance by always already presupposing the same set of building types as given from outside its domain (office tower, detached house, ...) as the basis of its planning strategies (zoning laws ect.), architecture in turn finds its narrow limits in the planners' prescriptions. The two disciplines hold each other back intead of propelling each others progress. There is only one built environment. But to stop at an integrated architecture/urbanism would be equally arbitrary. Ultimately the built environment is only one subsystem of total social material reproduction. nnovative architecture thus requires transdisciplinary theoretical speculation to assess its possibilities and effects, and to establish a criterion to identify the new as innovation. Moral questions might arise and in the last analysis a political philosophy seems to be inevitably presupposed. The separation of the disciplines of architecture and urbanism is not a theoretical deficiency nor a mere institutional problem of academia. The politico-economic agents of the respective disciplines are categorically separated: architecture is private, urbanism is state matter. The categorical dichotomy between architecture and urbanism, between house and city, is specific to capitalism, where only the unavoidably collective connecting infrastructures are socialized and democratically planned. All other decisions are privatized and therefore atomized. The theoretical quest for a comprehensive science of the built environment faces a political barrier. The revolutionary urbanism of the modern movement was unleashed by the post first world war social revolutions in Germany and Russia and in as much as it remained unfulfilled it was limited by the limited and compromised character of the revolution in Germany.And want to generalise here and make my first political statement: n the last analysis the solution to any technical problem also involves the political and is up against a political power structure that systematically blocks progress. And this is the rationale behind my attempt to push academic into political discourse. The underlying hypothesis is that - more than ever - the technological, organisational and cultural resources are in place to construct a higher, more democratic and more productive form of socio-economic and political organisation beyond capitalist class society and imperialism. This is acknowledged in the rythm of this lecture which will recursively drive the issues it engages towards a totalising political statement. 2. Architecture is usually seen to be concerned with aesthetics rather than ethics. Some remarks on the relationship of ethics and aestetics might therefore seem as an appropriate way to introduce a lecture on ethics in an architecture school. Ancient Greek philosophy is said to having naivly identified the good and 6/93 - Patrik Schumacher - Theoriesthe beautiful. n Kant they seem to be strictly set apart and we all know the bad conscience that comes with the indulgence in pure aesthetics and the pursuit of the beautiful.Earlier this year gave a short paper on what titled "the dialectic of the aesthetic and the pragmatic". The paper contains what would call a marxist , i.e. materialist analysis of aesthetic regimes, an analysis which would like to extend here also to moral regimes: "Within a consistently materialist outlook aesthetic regimes have to be analyzed as sublimations of an underlying performativity. At the root of any style or typology (which goes beyond the drawing board and effectively shapes the built environment) lies an economic - and might add here moral - rationality. The aesthetic judgement of cities and buildings is rational in as much as it operates as an immediate intuitive appreciation of performativity, shortcircuiting first hand comparative experience or extended analysis. Aesthetic judgement thus represents an economical substitute for experience. t depends on a tradition that disseminates accumulated experience via extrinsic and dogmatic rules. This dogmatism is the virtue as well as the limit of aesthetically condensed intelligence.For instance: The Vitruvian or Palladian regime of proportions represents a condensation of accumulated building experience, allowing for the 'blind' design of sound stone-structures. The classical orders are regulating column-height to width-ratios, spans, foundations, minimum roofangles for drainage etc. The Palladian rules concerning room proportions guarantee certain standarts of daylighting and air-volume. Any such rule-system embodies an economy of performance as well as an economy of design effort. Those regimes participate in a dogmatized science of building.Over and above these technological principles the aesthetic rules concerning e.g. (Vitruvian) city-layout or the (Palladian) rules for the suburban villa enshrine and make easily reproducable specific social - and again might add here moral - organizations which in turn are easily read off by the trained eye identifying the (morally) right environment aesthetically. With the developement of society and the availability of new building technologies (reinforced concrete, steel etc.) and new concepts of human association the classical aesthetic regime lost its rationality and became a fetter upon the further developement of the built environment. What once was an accumulated wisdom became an irratioinal prejudice that had to be battled also on the ideological plane of aesthetic value."Materialism explicates the seriality of modern housing, urban zoning and the principles of specialisation evident in functionalist architecture as structural aspects of the socio-economic regime of fordism. t allows a proper assessment of modernism historical role rather than falling for the ahistorical claim of its supposed failure in terms of human values. Materialism also furnishes a criterion to identify the role and rationality of Postmodernism and Deconstructivism within the logic of post-fordist restructuring. The recent return to minimalism in architecture seems to be a rearguard move as it clings to precisely those formal orders that the logic of socio-economic and institutional development has identified as its incarcerating fetters. n a period of crisis and intensified restructuring such (conservative) aesthetic investment is bound to decline into a stance of defensiveness and self-victimization. This purist sensibility will suffer and reject all that which becomes operational, vibrant and vital in the current transformations. Under Capitalism productive relations are still progressing, although far less than what is possible beyond this political barrier. And the new spatialities of folding which seem to share a vocabulary with the latest drift in productive relations point in many ways beyond class society: dehierarchization, deterritorialization, fieldspace, nonlinear and open networks etc. These remarks are supposed to demonstrate how Materialism offers a criterion to take a postion relative to various current architectural trends.So what am suggesting here is that aesthetic judgement might be reconstructed and redeemed as an intuitive appreciation of the vital and productive. t also might be said to contain a hidden moral sentiment. The beauty of Mies's Crown Hall or of Falling Water rests with the fantasies, and anticipations we project onto the space, it's suggestiveness for the wonderful encounters, collaborations and forms of human association those spaces allow us to envisage. But we have to go beyond this edifying moment into a rather less comfortable territory to find out what stands in the way of those beautiful and ethical anticipations.f aesthetic sentiment can be recuperated as moral sentiment, moral sentiment itself can not be taken as god-given, but needs to be rationalised and recuperated within a pragmatist or rather materialist framework. could rewrite my paper on the "dialectic of aethetics and pragmatics" as "the dialectic of ethics and pragmatics".So morality moves from the position of explanans to the position of explanandum and again the second term - pragmatics - is the stronger term in the dialectical relation. The initial statement therefore reads now:Within a consistently materialist outlook moral regimes have to be analyzed as sublimations of an underlying performativity. The moral judgement is rational in as much as it operates as an immediate intuitive appreciation of performativity, shortcircuiting first hand comparative experience or extended analysis. Moral judgement thus represents an economical substitute for experience. t depends on a tradition that disseminates accumulated experience via extrinsic and dogmatic rules. This dogmatism is the virtue as well as the limit of pragmatic intelligence condensed into ethics. With the developement of society and the availability of new technologies and organisational patterns - the classical moral regime lost its rationality and became a fetter upon the further developement of the overall forces of production. What once was an accumulated wisdom became an irrational prejudice that had to be battled also on the ideological plane of moral value. n my analysis the status of a whole series of moral values that guide our patterns of behavior today are exposable as fetters upon production and therefore expose as irrational the capitalist class relations upon which they depend. The best way to go beyond such a general political declaration might be to analyse and critique my own immediate political conditions of production, the concrete micro-political relations under which educational and academic institutions operate today. This might very well be seen as a challenge to the AA and my own position here. But also know that the structure of the school is such that it can not easily be challenged. n all its parts and because it falls into many more or less autonomous parts, the school can choose to ignore any challenge even in the absence of the intellectual resources to counter and refute such a challenge. The school does not really exist as a intellectually positioned entity. t lacks the respective constitutional level. There is no constituted faculty which could formulate a position. This quality of unchallengeability pertains of course to the institutional structure of the school rather than to any of its individual members and any criticism of this structure is here made in good faith towards all its members and the collective in nuce the school might be projected to be or become. And of course the AA is just one of a consistent type of institutions, like any other university on the one hand and the art-circus on the other hand, participating in and limited by late capitalist class society under the spell of imperialism. The pursuit of rigoros argument is constantly frustrated and alienated by the exchange- and class-relations through which we are constantly forced to exclude each other from what we are pursuing here in academia as much as in the profession at large. Secrecy is pervasive and obscurantist publications are nothing but another form of secrecy. Or call it 'Spectacle'. Any serious contribution perverts into an existential threat for those who are adressed as much as for those who are trying to offer it. You might not feel this as strongly as long as you are moving within a consensus or as long as it does not occur to you that you could take those things you teach or learn or do professionally for real and serious instead of something you are trading casually as career-building stock. Nevertheless know you all had at least glimpses of what am talking about - of course you have.To point out that this lecture as much as any other event or articulation in this carrier-building institution is always already corrupted and alienated from its content appears prima facie as a straight forward moral condemnation. Two remarks need to be made here to set the trajectory of the argument: First: the whole point here is to attempt a materialist reconstruction or supersession of moral judgements. Each of these reconstructions or interpretations rely on a totalizing 7/93 - Patrik Schumacher - Theoriesscience of history. All the obvious morally revolting aspects of class-society in general and academic careerism in particular, i.e.leadership being based on property or bureaucratic position, territorialism, pretenciousness, obscuratism, and the rhetorical sealing of all the cracks and questions etc. because the exchange of contributions is integrated only through a scamble for priveledge, all these horrors are ultimately institutionally constituted and they are serious infringements upon production, and this spells their historical dimension. Contemporary moral judgements are at best intuitive reactions to the immediate social or political barriers of production and productive progress. But they might also be dogmatic ossifications of practises which are - although at some stage historically validated - no longer conducive to the developement of industrial civilization. Finally at worst moral tenets become reactionary defence mechanisms for long since entrenched vested interest. Second immediate note: The institutional political barriers and limits upon serious communication and with it those patterns of intercourse which revolt us are also protected by a whole host of moral defenses.Some of the older moral defenses, traditional moral sentiments like personal loyalty, (to be translated as "partners in crime defending their vested interests") or reverence to seniority, although they might still have a waning force, might nevertheless safely assumed to be on the way out. What one rather has to focus on and challenge are those seemingly modern or rather post-modern values which appear less contentious, even progressive. Sentiments like the celebration of difference, pluralism, the liberal tolerance that comes with a half-acknowledged relativism, the value of academic autonomy, the dogmatic or bureaucratic independence of all teachers, as well as of all students, an institutional culture which allows only an immanent criticism, the rejection of substantial leadership; the fetishisation of individualism, individuality and so called personal intellectual or artistic interests; the fetishistic respect for authorship and the forced invisibility of anonymous collective work etc. etc. All these wonderful moral values - again: pluralism, tolerance, autonomy, independence, individuality etc. - while participating in the contradictory fusion of progressive post-fordism and regressive neo-liberalism and - of course - having to be defended against any looming authoritarianism from above, are to be criticised from below, i.e. from the vantage point of a radicalised notion of democracy, a notion of democracy that does respect the wholly arbitrary and crippeling defintion of a public versus a private domain as little as the equally arbitrary and increasingly ineffectual national definition of the public as the unit of societal self-determination. Both these limits of the public democratic domain need to be challenged. n their respective moral cloak - respect for privacy and patriotism, private and national self-determination - those illusions remain amongst the most powerful ideological bullwarks for class-society and imperialism. But it seems again that am jumping to conclusions too quickly introducing notions which today can no longer be taken for granted as being self-evident.Therefore let me go back - as it were - and build my argument by picking up the question of morality from where bourgeois politics and academic discourse has left it.The question of ethics or morality - how should we live, behave, interact with each other, commit ourselves to each other etc. - might initially be approached emprically or even on a personal level. t seems as if through the further questioning of what one finds historically or empirically or even through one's personal dilemmas one sooner or later feels compelled to enter what one might be inclined to call the plane of philosophical reflection. For most of us this is tricky territory and it seems as if one would have to rest with ultimately unaccountable stipulations or beliefs. "That's how feel, that's who am." And this is indeed what a considerable part of the anglo-saxon philosophical tradition in the 20th Century settled for. Morality and 'ultimate values' are to a large extent seen to be outside of the domain of rational inquiry and critique. A position which - by the way - rests comfortably with an increasingly privatising society. This wholly agnostic and defeatist stance results theoretically from the narrow conception and artificial isolation of the issue and discipline of moral philosophy. From this perspective one might start to distinguish the various modes of philosophical analysis in respect to the scope of phenomena that would enter the analysis of morality. A lot of the latter day Oxford Philosophy of Ethics starts and concludes with the analysis of language use. Some moral philosophies would include references to biology, or psychology, or the sociology of every day life, some include a certain degree of historical reflection, or abstract reflections about the liberal democratic state, but ultimately moral philosophy ends up insisting on its own original turf, formulating abstract and eternal criteria of evaluation: utilitarianism, contractualism, consequentualism, emotivism etc. According to my previous definition this is 'philosophy' only by name, a closed off discipline which itself can be brought to task only through a totalizing philosophy like Marxism.What would be required here is the systematic historical analysis of socio-economic relations. But within bourgeois academia such an inquiry is consigned to another department which in turn, as it touches on moral issues from within its own trajectory, receives abstract and eternal moral truth as bullwark against the radical thrust of its own rationality. This kind of constriction of reflection to a circumscribed area of supposed relevance and expertise achieves a conservative mutual deadlock. This is a general hallmark of bourgeois academic discourse, although one that is being increasingly challenged recently through all sorts of interdisciplinary researches. But nowhere is the irrationality of these constrictions more evident than concerning the fundamental question of ethics - how to relate to each other, i.e. how to organize our materially interdependent lifes. What bourgeois philosophy seems to be lacking is even the inkling that what is required to answer this question is nothing short of a totalizing science of history that reflects and reconstructs moral categories and cultural patterns in respect to the evolving conditions of total social material reproduction on a world scale. As witnessed here in this lecture series three weeks ago, bourgeois academia thinks it possible to contribute to what it calls 'Political Theory' ahistorically as well as apolitically, i.e. without any reference to the latest socio-economic and political developements - post-fordism, neo-liberalism, globalisation, hegemony of international capital over nationally organized labour etc.- and refusing to draw conclusions in the form of a political position and thus leaving all its terms for ever indeterminate and undecisive.But bourgeois society lacks much more than the right insight. t rather has long since become itself an irredeemable obstacle to the constitution of the transcendental subject that is the democratic discourse through which alone the necessary theoretical synthesis, this totalizing science of history can emerge.Within the marxist discourse those incarcerating disciplinary boundaries and the political limits of discourse are materially challenged. The explosion of these limits is one of the founding moments of this radically different intellectual paradigm and practise which crucially fuses theoretical work with concrete political organisational work. The vitality and intellectual breakthrough of this paradigm into which philosophical reflection is transposed and brought to task depends inalienable on its alignment and synthesis with a new political force - the global industrial working class and the hypothesis and promise of international communism. Marx and Engels elaborate the crucial breakthrough towards the science of history in the process of and through their involvement with the organisation of the First nternational, and their insights could not have come to maturity outside of this engagement. Once stated it is irresistable and self-evident that philosophy and science can only fulfill their ambition through an alignment with the forces of resistance from the very bottom of society which due to their very position are bound to constitute themselves democratically and can only proliferate through a universalizing movement. What transpires here - despite all the impurities and contradictions that might beset any concrete struggle - is something that indeed was already demonsrated by the dynamic of 18th Century enlightenment: the irresistable epistemological thrust of what Lenin calls the 'universal class'. n order to mediate these insights for you might have to go back and take on bourgeois morality and philosophical moral reflection at its most sophisticated, profound and edifying elaboration as it is articulated in the work of Kant.8/93 - Patrik Schumacher - TheoriesMaterialism vs Morality - Part 2 Patrik Schumacher 1997Lecture delivered at Architectural Association, London as part of the Graduate School Ethics Lecture SeriesKant seems to have given the conclusive formalization of the fundamental principles of bourgois morality, a morality we still inhabit as might transpire through the edifying force of Kants exposition. What will also transpire is that certain key moments in his reflection already point beyond the bourgeois order. Those moments are a reflection of the universalizing logic of the bourgeois ascendance from below and are as such recuperable for more radically democratizing movements. Other moments of bourgeois liberation have now to be analysed as moments of containment.Kants moral discourse is in many ways the culmination of 18th Century philosophical work developing in the context of the proliferating sciences on the one hand and the emerging capitalist economic and political relations on the other hand. The very notion of a principled formal investigation of the total system of moral categories against and above a mere empirical engagement with particular moral tenets is most clearly brought to bear in Kant's critique. Such a project significantly suspends all traditional values and precepts and in this respect can become a force in alignment with the dynamic of emergent capitalism and modernization. n his famous text from 1784 "What is enlightenment ?" Kant takes self-determination as the ultimate a priori of practical life: "The criterion of everything that can be agreed upon as a law by a people lies in this question: Can a people impose such a law on itself?" This selfdetermination requires the free use of public reason which is therefore treated as a priori of any enlightened civil society. At the bottom of it one finds in Kant the notion of progress. Any specific order is provisional, and any attempt to frieze - even if by contract - any social order or law is, according to Kant, impossible and in contradiction to the notion of self-determination. "Such a contract, whose intention is to preclude forever all further enlightenment of the human race, is absolutly null and void, even if it would be ratified by parliaments. One age cannot bind itself, and thus conspire, to place a succeeding one in a condition whereby it would be impossible for the later age to expand its knowledge. That would be a crime against human nature, whose essential destiny lies precisely in such progress; subsequent generations are thus completely justified in dismissing such agreements as unauthorized and criminal." *A radical reading of Kant would construct from this a commiment to permanent revolution, whereby the only dogma would be the insistence of absolute anti-dogmatism, the only categorial constitutional prerogative would be defined through the constitutional conditions of further progress, the protection of unrestricted public reason, the only exclusion from its universalizing thrust would be the exclusion of the excluders, the only limit of freedom is the logic of freedom itself etc. n the following want to trace how this enlightenment as bourgeois enlightenment turns into its opposite. The radical character of the bourgeoisie pertains to its movement from below. But this movement soon becomes contradictory in as much as it - while still moving forward against the feudal order and the aristocracy - it already engages in a reargarde movement of containing the lower orders. This reargarde aspect becomes more pronounced as the bourgeoisie consolidates its power, also through striking a deal and compromise with sections of the aristocracy.But let me try to rehearse and historically interpret in detail the logic of morality which Kant articulates at this historical juncture. will reverse the order of Kant's presentation in the "Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals" and start with what he ends with, namely freedom and free will as the most fundamental premise of morality. Before elaborating Kants notion want to pose Marx's reminder to remain in the back of our minds that the freedom the bourgeoisie stands for has an economic rationale: the freedom of labour from the feudal bond to become freely hireable and fireable, the freedom to choose one's profession, the freedom to buy or sell anything including land, free markets and free trade. n a formulation closest to Kants discourse one would say: the freedom to engage freely in realations by contract.n the Groundwork Kant analyses a network of related terms - freedom, morality, autonomy, universality and reciprocity - as dependent upon each other as each others necessary presupposition. Some of Kants reconstructions seem prima facie counterintuitive but would second his claim that he adds nothing that is not already implicit within ordinary moral judgement. Freedom he claims exists only within and through the rational selfsubjection to a selfimposed universal moral maxim or law. Freedom - is the very opposite of that state where we do as we please and fancy. Freedom of the will can only exist where we are free from empirical and contigent moods, inclinations and desires: "it is just this freedom from dependence on interested motives, for otherwise we would have to be regarded as subject only to the law of nature - the law of our own needs." The free act is thus the act which demonstrates the resistance to natural determination through rational volition. t is clear that the criterion of such conduct can only be absolute selflessnes and thus points towards the necessary moral dimension of freedom. Only if determine my will and action on the basis of a universal moral law which is essentially defined through the exclusion of any personal or special interest can be sure that my actions are free. And can test the necessary universality of the unfderlying maxim of my action by posing the question of the consistency of my will relative to an assumed universal reciprocity. Kant poses this criterion as the categorical imperative of practical reason: "Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." This imperative obviously avoids any specific moral tenet. t neither defines the moral act through its results. t furnishes a formal criterion for moral qualifications: the possible universality of its principle. The most convincing and recurring example Kant gives relates to the capitalist institution of credit: He demonstrates that any maxim that would allow me (in moments of existential need) to resort to the borrowing of money without the full ability and commitment to the promise of paying back is selfcontradictory since such an allowance - if universalised - would dissolve the very institution of borrowing want to rely on. "it would make promising , and the very purpose of promising itself impossible, since no one would believe he was being promised anything, but laugh at utterances of this kind as empty shams."(p.85)Abstract universality is the form social rules of intercourse have to take in the anonymous mass society of capitalism. Personal relations no longer stretch far enough. n this light one might read the following statement which relates morality to abstract rational beings and excludes reference to any notion of allegiance to specific human, cultural or national qualities of character. "The practically good is that which determines the will by concepts of reason, and therefore not by subjective causes, but objectively - that is on grounds valid for every rational being as such." (p.77)This reflects the need of capitalist anonymous mass society where personal relations have ben replaced by abstract money relations, where strangers enter the market of exchange and contractual obligation, without personal loyalty, bondage or means of coercion. The universality of bourgeois morality depends historicaly of the universality of money relations superceding feudal loyalty. The freedom presupposed by bourgeois morality is the freedom of the capitalist market again superceding feudal bondage. n bourgeois morality and law freedom of will is and free choice of action is a precondition for being guilty and accountable. The only good (or evil) is the good (or evil) will, rather than the results of action. This is what Kant starts with. Such a sophisticated practise of validation and sanction which inquires into underlying intentions operates as a more productive mode of social regulation, approriate for a more complex social organisation, but also presupposing a relatively generalised regularity of law, knowledge of and adherence to it.What these remarks should hint at is the possibility to explain notions of morality as modes of social regulation relative to historically attained relations of production. But so far my remarks set the bourgeois morality off against the older feudal order.So far those priniples of bourgeois morality seem now uncontentious and recuperable in a socialist society: Universality, reciprocity and the presupposition of freedom. The first thing one would have to say here that capitalist class society and 9/93 - Patrik Schumacher - Theoriesimperialism consistently and substantially fall short of delivering even the explicitly bourgeois ideals of justice: universal recirocity, universal rule of law, exposed through the universal and free use of public deliberation, equality before the law, equality of rights and opportunity etc. My claim here is that capitalist class society -i.e. the system of private property of the means of production and the private appropriation of the results of combined and integrated production - is a systemic obstacle to the realization of those rational ideals. This was already clearly understood by Trotsky and Lenin, who realised that the bourgeoisie under imperialism could no longer universalise its own revolution. That the bourgeoisie outside the advanced imperialist core , i.e. also the russian bourgeoisie, could no longer fulfill the historical tasks of the classical bourgeois revolutions. They themselves had to take over and move through this stage. On a politcal level theories of economic liberalism of perfect and purely economic that is productive competion have to be exposed as ideological in as much as they consistently fail to analyse to acknowledge the systematic drive towards monopoly and the systematic instrumentalization of the national state against the principle of a universally regulated world market for capital, goods and labour, against true economic competition, replacing it with diplomatic coercion and military regulation. The ideological nature of neo-liberal discourse is exposed in its hypocrisy aligning themselves and systematically failing to indict the very forces of imperialism, exemplified by Thatcher and Reagan and their heirs, actively utilizing all the possibilities of diplomatic and military competion, which crucially includes the restriction of movement and imigration through the establishment of policed national borders.The second thing one would have to say is that marxism also proposes a substantial critique of the essence of bourgeois morality and justice.The abstractness and formal character of universal bourgeois right allows for and legitimizes substantial material inequalities. Bourgeois equality of treatment is understood as equality of treatment of people in equal positions allowing for extreme material differences and differences in the power of decision making as long as in abstract principle no one is excluded from access to any of those positions. For each according to his or her due relates to the principle of private economic exchange, where any contribution to the integrated production processs has to individually negotiate and extract its renumeration. At a certain stage of developement it might be worth while to speculate about the rationality or overall efficiency of this process of production distribution where every productive effort engenders a sand universal scramble for preveledge and perrennial efforts to secure, legally protect, and police the always precarious means of private survival. And the more under post-fordism economic relations become fluid the more time and energy has to be spend on reestablishing and renegotiating the various differential private claims upon the results of production. The capitalist system is forced by threat of total stoppage to relentlessly and unambiguously determine the private ownership for any economic move and particle within the complex and long since global web of interdependend productive activities. The resources going into this unproductive effort, this shadoe economy of differential distribution, might be counted as costs imposed by the social system of capitalism. This unproductive economy comprises large parts of the state administration, foreign office, the judiciary, the whole legal profession, the police , the penal system, tax administration, the banking system, the whole military, all private security services and systems. The percentage of total labour of those activities must be substantial. This is the light in which materialism asks us to evaluate the communist proposal to replace the capitalist - for each according to his due - with the principle: from each according to ability to each according to need. The fetishistic notion of justice is thrown out of court here in this argument , although the new regulatory principal will also attain the status of justice as an internalised rationality.The more and more irrational capitalist insistence and obsession with rightful property derives its legitimacy from the originally rational and plausible but long since gone economy of individual or family producers exchnging their products in the market.Beyond the mounting of directly professionalised unproductive labour the capitalist imposition of the scramble for preveledge potentially distracts and distorts all of productive efforts from the productive rational that makes work effective only as integrated work. Under capitalism producers are always induced to keep knowledge in reserve, and the need to continously hedge in productive capacity and information acts as barrier of communication and scientific progress.The materialist question of socialism or communism concerns the conditions and prospects of radical egalitarian democracy and its potential ability to sustain and propell the next stage in the developement of global industrial civilization. And to pose this question ultimately on the level of the world economic system is not hybris but the inevitable and really real context for any practical reflection. n the last section of the lecture want to make the distinction between historically arguable and materialistacally questionable moralities and the always aldeady practical - and if you like the 'moral' or prefer to it the political principle, which is the precondition and implicit presupposition of materialism or marxism, and can not be questioned within marxist discourse, or any other discourse for that matter. This principle which is already contained in Kants discourse and is historical achievement of the enlightenment - is the principle of undiscriminatory access to public reason and exposure of any practical or truth-claim to public critique. This principles reflects and poses the practical and political condition of the very institution of discourse and science. That is the essence of discourse ethics which was the central target of Chantal Mouffe's critique here.However much the ideological abuses of this aproach might merit critique, Chantal Mouffe failed to allow us to understand the fundamental hrust of this insight which for me becomes one more and may be the fundamental element of the necessary and urgent critique of capitalism. The very institution of science and rationality already embodies and implies a whole series of historically battled moral positions:- the rejection of authority and hierarchy in the establishment of thruth and knowledge. - the n on-discriminatory and universal access to discourse, which is embodied in the scientific requirement of the universal reproducability of a scientific effect, as its precondition to enter the body of scientific knowledge- the absence of involvement of any vested or special interest in the scientific inquiry. any suspicion here suspends the results of any inquiry until impartial procedures are insuredAny suspicion of power-relations existing between the participants of a discussion a priori devalues and annulls any outcome of the discussion. Even those in power would not know if their argument really is valid or just succeeds through intimidation. Under such conditions nobody gains knowledge. (This is by the way a serious problem for corporate as well as bourgeois academic rationality where power presides and the neccessary drift has been towards dehierachisation and democratisation, always compromised by what is possible under the capitalist class system, which is an inherent obstacle to science. This is not so much evident in the politically largely uncontentious natural sciences, but all the more obvious in the social sciences of psychology, history, economics and politics.Under capitalism which continously cuts the already materially fully integrated and existentially interdependent world population into opposed vested interests the evident question of the shared interest of an efficient world production - which is of course no zero sum game - can not even be theoretically posed never mind comprehensively discussed, even less of course are there means of implementing any possible recommendation of such deliberation. All decisions arec atomized and h