We
must start speaking about workers again, with programmes and projects
that concern them directly, existentially.
Mario
Tronti, ‘Politics at Work’, 2008
In
her book The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt distinguishes labour from
work. While work is the production of things that may be more
enduring than the life of its producer (like a pot or a poem), labour
is the sheer unending business of life reproduction: cooking,
cleaning, giving birth, raising kids, taking care of the household.
According to Arendt, labour is merely a performative activity
confined within the space of the house that does not leave anything
material behind. With the rise of industrialisation and the
increasing division of labour, the distinction between labour and
work does not exist anymore and the subjectivity of animal laborans
becomes the fundamental datum of modern society. Within modernity
labour no longer addresses a specific sphere of the human condition
but the totality of life, since under capitalism it is life as bios
that is put to work and made productive. As Karl Marx wrote in a
crucial passage of Das Kapital ‘labour power is the aggregate of
those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form,
the living personality, of a human being’. This means that what is
at stake in the concept of labour is not the production of things,
but the production of the most crucial commodity within a
capitalistic economy: subjectivity. Production of subjectivity
becomes the fundamental goal of a capitalistic economy.
In
this sense it is impossible to define the modern city and its
architecture without understanding it through the lens of labour. And
yet until today, with very few notable exceptions, very little has
been written on the relationship between labour and architecture.
While issues such as public space, politics, capitalism,
neoliberalism and the commodification of the built environment are
widely discussed, labour has rarely been confronted by the culture of
architecture. The reason for this lack of discussion may be the
ubiquity of labour itself as both spatial and social condition of our
life. The symposium gathers for the first time a group of researchers
who will attempt to read the relationship between labour and
architecture in different contexts, from the intimacy of domestic
space to the abstraction of post-industrial forms of production, to
the role of the architect as producer. Rather than offering a
comprehensive historical mapping, the symposium will offer critical
insights towards a new understanding of architecture through the
concept of labour.
- Pier Vittorio Aureli
A
Symposium organised by Pier Vittorio Aureli and the PhD programme
‘City/Architecture’
Pier
Vittorio Aureli, Fabrizio Ballabio, Peggy Deamer, Fabrizio Gallanti,
Maria S. Giudici, Peer Ilner, Francesco Marullo, Andreas Rumpfhuber
13/11/2015,
Architectural Association School of Architecture
