philippe morel

8/13/2019 Philippe Morel

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26/11/13 Rhizome | An Interview with Philippe Morel

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AB: With the populariza tion of free software li ke SketchUp, Grasshopper and P rocessing, a rchitecture is increasingly being produced by a huge number of non-professional prosumers who rew rite the discipline's rules based on online community opinions and a ttention parameters. Does architecture (like j ournalism, perhaps)have a problem of a uthorship or a uthority today?

PM: I slightly disagree on that since most of the people who are really producing architecture in todays world are architects. They graduated as architects or consider themselvesarchitects. And the ones who are not architects, being either developers or regular people building their own shelters and homes, are not more influenced by new software as they areby standard materials produced by the building industry. Therefore, if we consider that third parties actors are architecture producers, we should simply say that architecture hasalways been produced by such actors. Nevertheless, you might be right on another level when comparing the crisis of architecture and the one of journalism. Like personal secretariesrendered obsolete by Word and Excel, journalism is made unnecessary by a state of transparent information. That is why the people who are now considered as good journalist are notclassical ones but hackers like Julian Assange. They are simply making the information transparent. They dont go into interpretation and romance. This is the first half of my answer onauthorship.

The second half has to deal with a deeper root for the crisis of journalism, architecture or art. It was envisioned by LIsle-Adam one hundred and thirty years ago when he stated that themachine is the replacement of multiple intelligences by one great Intelligence. In art, unlike science (and architecture as well as journalism are closer to art than to any kind of science)the lack of such an Intelligence is not compensated by multiples intelligences. Thousands of Koolhaas followers are not equivalent to one Rem (should I say that it is worse than no

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follower). Art is not about quantity, neither is architecture as soon as you address the issue of authorship. Historically, this problem was solved by the very nature of vernacular architecture, which is about sharing common rules and cultural values. Today these rules and values defining a common visual or non-visual language have to be found within iPad andFacebook applications. Twenty or thirty years ago, a Build your own Le Corbusier House application wouldnt have been as a good architect as a Le Corbusier pupil, but today suchan application would probably provide a better architecture. Against all evidence provided by the state of architecture in European suburbs, people still believe that architecture producedby isolated architects according to cultural values are better than something a computer would do It is deeply wrong. It is something that Russian constructivists and people likeBranzi well understood. To a certain extend it is also understood by the FabLab-based approaches, but most of them will fail because of their political romanticism. Ultimately, thecrisis of authorship is related to our lack of understanding of the nature of technology, and this is why architectural intelligence is about producing new technology-based rules and notabout isolated buildings that identify themselves with the latest formal tendencies. Architecture is about producing new concepts of construction (like the Domino house) as computer science is about producing new concepts of computation (quantum computing, reversible computing, etc.). We must not confuse what happens inside a computer chip with the designof laptop computers.

AB: You defined computation as a social discourse. Could you ple ase ex plain what do you me an by that?

PM: I mentioned this idea of computation as a social discourse already, but let me go a bit further. In the past, when the French government was introducing the metric system of measurement and the Mtre talon those evolution were heavily associated to a certain idea of distributing justice throughout the country. Thanks to these universal measurementapparatus even analphabet people could make reasonably fair transactions. Today, thanks to Wikipedia, even people having a poor access to education can discover and learn amazingthings. I am not idealizing such a platform but y ou cannot underestimate what it represents. Because technology always has non-technological consequences any discourse dealingwith technology is intrinsically a social disc ourse. This is what I mean by saying t hat computation is a social dis course.

On one side on which non-scientists have no influence, computation is about very abstract scientific knowledge, and on the other side it is about everyday life. This seems so obviousto all of us that we usually dont spend any time on thatBut we should. Indeed, such a distinction is necessary because it is associated with another one between technology asknowledge and technology as machines. As knowledge, technology is changing multiple things but does not concern everybody. Take the example of the effects of PCs on education.Not all of the people spend their time in s tudying. Students do, as well as sc ientist and sc holars. But as general purpose machines, computers are associated with productivity gainsand ultimately with the concept of labor.

Labor concerns more or less everybody. On one side technology is perceived as a certain kind of progress, allowing for example more and more scientific discoveries, while on theother side it is perceived as harmful, being the ultimate job killing feature produced by capitalism. Both are true, but while more and more people think that there is no way to makethese two parallel co-evolutions work together, I believe that we should keep thinking that it is possible. Therefore we should produce the right theory for that, based on the study of thestrongest arguments coming from the proponents of anti-technological movements. One of them, Ted Kaczynski, believes that there is no way to think of better uses of our technological knowledge since ultimately the industrial society is destroying everything including the nature itself. On many points he is right and the only argument that we can opposeis the one of a technological society that would have absolutely nothing to do with the actual concept of work and nothing to do as well with our still machine-oriented postindustrialsociety. Nevertheless, if we cannot produce more convincing arguments in favor of such a society than the existing ones, either rational anti-technological thinkers or obscurantistmovements will keep having more and more followers. The problem we have to face is related to the fact that technology became a religion to which less and less people adhere. Either because they are tired of smart mobs like gadgets, or because they cannot deal with the pace of evolution of knowledge, or because they are not interested in the kind of logic-mathematical knowledge that is intrinsically related to the contemporary technologies, or because they think that having good computers is not enough to compensate the lack of freshair and water. At the moment, the way our society is dealing with the issue of technology is very much similar to the way we were dealing with the new possibilities offered by technicsin Versailles or Saint-Petersburg. We all know that some people came up soon with very different applications in mindKinds of applications that today are neither proposed by right-wing affiliated thinkers, who want to put people back on assembly lines for producing stupid ecological cars, nor by left-wing affiliated philosophers who want them scripting webmarketing applications In fact, instead of developing moralistic critiques of the most advanced phenomena associated with the power of computation, like algorithmic trading, in favor of social practices of which the only difference is that they are as associated with an older version of capitalism, we should learn from them. We should ask ourselves if trading is not arealization of Nietzsches prediction asserting that one day we will practice the buying and selling as a luxury of our sensibility. We should question ourselves about the potential of new concepts of labor much closer to the conceptual idea of labor of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol than to the productive labor of computer literate Multitudes. This leads me toanswer as a temporary conclusion the following important question you first asked me in a separate list, about the relationship between technology, work and leisure.


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AB: In the 60s, Italian Operaist theorists were preoccupied with the advent of computers in manufacture and production at large. Many were in favour, as they sawcomputers as liberating the worker from production alienation therefore implementing freetime and allowing a sort of computer enabled "refusal to work," but we seethat nowadays computers and internet have eliminated the very idea of free-time. What do you think of that?

PM: This is something I addressed in The Integral Capitalism by quoting O. Spengler but most of all by bringing back the attention on the fact that Adorno himself, a known opponent toSpenglers philosophy, understood the relation between technology, work and knowledge as a fundamental problem. In his book Man and Technics, Spengler wrote that "It is not truethat human technics s aves labor. For it i s an essential characteristic of the personal and modifiable technics of man, in contrast to genustechnics, that every discovery c ontains thepossibility and NECESSITY of new discoveries, every fulfilled wish awakens a thousand more, every triumph over Nature incites to yet others. The spirit of this beast of prey isincessantly greedy, its will is never appeased: such is the curse that is attached to this k ind of life, but herein is also the greatness inherent in its destiny As I mentioned before withthe example of trading, if you want to address the relationship between society and technology in a creative way you cannot keep thinking within old categories. You need to

conceptualize an inversion of many things. Instead of treating the computer as a traditional machine saving labor you need to treat him as an ever expending block of both abstractknowledge and concrete physical (nanoscale) constructions, calling for more and more discoveries; much like mathematics, physics, chemistry or medicine. By doing so, you avoidshort view understandings of the nature of technology and you realize that there is no reasonably attractive technological future in which technology would be something else than asole knowledge, this knowledge being constantly its own end.


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