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START A — WHY DOES IT MEAN TO LIVE TODAY ? i

Rules

The strapline ‘what it means to live today’ is rhetoric on the way life is currently administered, it appeals to the rules by which we are governed; the moment any conflicts crop up, both parties will automatically appeal to the rule-book instead of sorting things out between themselves. The whole idea that one can make a strict division between means and ends, between facts and values, is itself a product of the administrative mind-set; because administrations are the first and only social institution that treats the means of doing things as separate from what it is that’s being done. They make social relations far simpler and of the schematic kind, “cross this line and I will shoot you”; when maintaining these relations actually requires a constant and often subtle work of imagination.

This makes a whole lot of sense, yet paradoxically, these very rules can temporarily render anyone into an idiot. Insofar as demands are set, wherein any administration believes them to be reasonable, on discovering that a significant number of people are unable to perform as expected, conclude that the problem lies with the individual inadequacy of each particular human being who fails to live up to them; vice versa.

The abstractions created by rules turn out to be useful in defining relationships; we can compare one individual to another, or even staple them together the same way we do with “the public” or “people” or “we”. By following these rules, not only can any individual’s respective value be quantified by what it is they supposedly possess—— making their application a sign of arbitrary power——but also, and perhaps most spectacularly; everyone insists that we apply these rules onto ourselves. 1 But, what could a relation between a person and a rule actually consist of? ii

Home Economics

The Venice Architecture Biennale’s British Pavilion of 2016 is a recent example where living is quantified through a measurement of time——time often being a quality imperative to an essentially market logic. 5 different imaginary relations between people and property are proposed; hours, days, months, years, and decades.

The thing is, imaginary relations themselves form the pictures we have in our heads; such as workers who dutifully punch the clock at 8:00 a.m.——and receive regular remuneration every Friday, on the basis of a temporary contract that either party is free to break off at any time——actually began with utopian visions, and has never, at any point, been the main way of organising production for the market, ever, anywhere.

Such imaginary constructs are, of course, what scientists refer to as “models”, and there is nothing intrinsically wrong with them, since it is arguably through models that we think. The problem with such models——at least, it always seems to happen when we model something called “the market”——is that, once created, we have a tendency to treat them as objective realities. Effectively, they can go from a running and fleeting thought to the backbones of our social realities, to the things by what we are convinced to be truths, and in turn make decisions. iii

Homeoconomics

Brief: To propose a new location for the mosque inside the City of Melbourne combined in some way with a residential development. As such, the main question is “what lets a mosque be a mosque?” considering morphology itself is arbitrary in the making of a mosque. Project: HOMEOCONOMICS – a schema of imaginary constructs for assuring the administration of architecture; wherein the mosque itself is made into another relationship rather than a function. Context: 1-39 Hobson’s Road, Kensington, Melbourne. iv

schema of Ownerships 0: Common Ownership

In 1886, the members of the Gomzin commission sought to legitimise the Russian acquisition of conquered Islamic land, by appealing to local forms of land tenure, wherein they distinguished “property” right to land, from “possession” and “use”; and regarded the latter two categories as insufficient to determine the former. As the Russian bureaucracy conferred exclusive probative value on deeds attesting to ownership rights, specifically to tax arable land, it effectively disempowered individuals who had enjoyed, only, the rights of disposal to communal property and groups traditionally practicing seasonal pastoralism.

Local sources indicate that, before the Russian conquest, Central Asian rulers, landowners, and tenants viewed land less in terms of property relations than in terms of its produce. For them, land was not just a commodity that could be exchanged and monetised. In fact, peasants could sell their proprietary entitlements to a land by claiming to have planted trees or erected a warehouse or a barn, for instance. Hence, Islamic legal deeds tell us that individuals sold and purchased property in the form of improvements on the land. It is unlikely that a peasant would boast the ownership of a tree, but they must have known that their share of the produce gave them rights to the land; such that landowners could not easily evict them.

1: Three-Ring-Binder Property

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MacPherson first referred to it as an ideology of “possessive individualism,” one by which people increasingly came to see themselves as isolated beings who defined their relationship with the world not in terms of social relations but in terms of property rights. It was only then that the problem of how one could “have” things, or——for that matter——experiences (“we’ll always have Paris”), could really become a crisis.

Aesthetic – “aesthetics” assures state type entities; the denomination of ‘state’ refers—

—in essence——to the imaginative reconstruction of the ‘self’, a process fraught with dangers of destroying social relations or turning it into some kind of terrible conflict.

It is manifest from ideology. Program - it is the commitment to invest in material—— wherein we speak of materials as objects we wish to make into something else—— such that its ownership is that of dominium, the logic of sovereignty. ∫unction - the property works through the recognition of something which has enough potential ‘as is’, and simply needs a good finish; aesthetics are these finishes. The state type entities will often consider these properties as assets, it is binder property. It is because of this need to appeal to the ‘state’ that we must always carry our “papers”; just in case. Form - the property model is the appropriated ‘bare property’ model, wherein one pays for a unit’s shell value, fixtures and fittings are the occupants, to be taken with them, recycled, or resold once they leave.

2: Furniture Property

A – “programme” assures collective type entities; the denomination of ‘collective’ re-

fers to a symbolic representation of a person, it would be more accurate to describe it as a collective-agreement/social-convention of a person. P – the history of the word “symbol” itself derives from the Greek word for “tally”——an object broken in half to mark a contract or agreement or debts; the object itself is arbitrary, it could be absolutely anything as long that there was a way to break it in half. This kind of ownership is that of usufruct, the logic of rights and obligations, be it a guarantee or evidence of. ∫ - works through a radical simplification of things into ideas, or digestible concepts.

For example, in order for an institute to properly define a park, a layer of codification is still necessary by which it will be recognised, such as park benches, prohibitions of fires; Freud himself called parks/reservations a fantasy because they perform the same function for society that fantasies do for individuals. F – the property model is the appropriated ‘boarding house’ model, all domestic labour is included in an occupant’s rent, the furniture and interior are presented as a showroom, wherein the existing community infers the value of these rooms to that of the development.

3: Tally Stick Property

A – “function” assures individual type entities, the denomination of ‘individual’ refers

to a unique person; such as in a human economy, where each person is unique, and of incomparable value, because each is a unique nexus of relations with others——if one person is to be exchanged for another person, then first of all it was required that this person be torn away from their context, from that web of relations that made them the unique conflux of relations that they were. P – an individual is a measured value of a person, usually by what it is that they possessed——such that if these possessions were violently taken away, the person would be left with nothing. This kind of ownership is possessive, as in, how one is joined to some thing. ∫ - the thing is, for it to be like any modern——and thus egalitarian——society, it requires that there be no basis for saying that anyone is intrinsically superior to anybody else. This means the amount one resident pays in relation to others can is driven by solidarity, every resident requires an equal stake, and its overall success becomes a common concern. F – the property model is one where servicing cores are distributed every few meters such that there is a maximum of two private rooms possible per core. Every inch of space is to be negotiated, and temporary partition walls themselves erected; though after some time, it is expected that neighbours would become more willing to negotiate the distribution of space without needing to rely on partition walls, such that there becomes a paradoxical inclusion to the classic exclusion of all others——“all the world”— —from access to a certain power tool, or shirt, or corridor, or bed; where property is made private.

4: Infrastructure Property

A – “form” assures common type entities, the denomination of “common” explicitly refers to nobody, albeit it generally infers a transformation of one thing into another.

I will define common through ‘communism’, which is any human relationship that operates on the principles of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”; which allows us to look past the question of individual or private ownership (which is often little more than formal legality anyway) and at much more immediate and practical questions of who has access to what sorts of things and under what conditions. 2 P – a common ownership where ‘nobody’ owns something is radically different to a collective ownership where ‘everybody’ owns something; it refers to a loss of ownership, such as in gift economies, or labour and exercise——nobody explicitly owns violence, but Modern states, like sovereignties, can lay claim to a ‘legitimate’ use of violence. ∫ - whenever it is the operative principle, even if it’s just two people who are interacting, we can say we are in the presence of a sort of communism. Almost everyone follows this principle if they are collaborating on some common project. If someone fixing a broken water pipe says, “Hand me the wrench,” his co-worker will not, generally speaking, say “And what do I get for it”; though this is only possible between people who do not consider each other fundamentally different sorts of beings, a certain equality of status being essential. 3 F – the property model involves explicitly removing all circulation from each individual property model, to explicitly displace the hierarchies of use; and be potentially extended for future developments.

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B — WHY DOES IT MEAN TO MAKE TODAY ?

generic project description for a compliant office building

Location: 81-89 Bouverie St, Carlton, VIC, 3053.

“Communism” itself does not have anything to do with ownership of the means of production, it is something that exists right now—that exists, to some degree, in any human society, although there has never been one in which everything has been organised in that way, and it would be difficult to imagine how there could be.

3 Even if they are working for ExxonMobil, Burger King, or Goldman Sachs; the reason is simple efficiency.

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The site context is one under construction, in development. The prospects of a Melbourne Innovation District, XL residential developments, and other significant cultural changes occurring in inner-city Carlton have shifted the focus from a local community of students and immigrant families, to that of an international community. The future pressures to deal with a large influx of new residents have yet to be addressed. The presence of commune-oriented spaces has been left to the ambiguity of parks, leaving the existing architectural framework to adapt to more usufructuary applications, in the hope of easing/gaining-from an increased pedestrian and road traffics.This speculative office development offers a simple idea; shifting the inherent focus of street intersections towards an architectural gesture. This kind of proposal brings into question a developments’ capacity to facilitate the changes of/on the homogeneity of a street block.

The sloping ground level pushes inwards to offer a generous veranda, whilst the ground plane underneath is elevated slightly to break away from the asphalt pedestrian corridor; being a trafficable grill surface, it holds a vegetated space. The sloping ground level is shared between a bar and gallery tenancies, which accentuate the dichromatic transition between street condition and building.

The sloping first floor inverts the topographic influence of the site to directly confront the aforementioned condition of the intersection, creating a certain perspectival relationship between the buildings opposite. Its interior space maintains an allegiance to the public sphere, by facilitating the programs of informal meeting, resting, work, lecture, and presentation spaces. This floor attempts to blur the distinction between what we recognise as institutional and that which is corporate.

The general office floor arrangements are catalogued without the specifications of subdivisions of internal space; instead, it is distinguished with an undulating boundary of glass, immediately eliminating the concept of edge or corner. The undulating glass itself internalises the space by effectively controlling both external and internal noise and light.

The façade system separates itself from the curtainwall system, contextualising itself in terms of a light fabric by use of expanded mesh panels. The material creates another layer to the face of the building, blurring the visual impact neighbouring future developments will have on this intersection; a Carlton Apologist…

C — WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO LIVE TODAY ? i

Infrastructure

Etymologically, ‘infrastructure’ implies ‘that which holds up societies’; a state of mind of its people, wherein it radically simplifies their reality into digestible concepts. Infrastructure is not necessarily limited to concrete things, since it is the very rules and regulations by which we all operate. We know ‘infrastructure’ was not invented to manage scale——as in, ways of organising societies that became too big for face-toface interaction——instead, they seem to have been what encouraged people to assemble in such large communities to begin with.

Infrastructure matters, since it operates under a logic of improvements. It does not attempt to prove its own faults or the faults onto what it operates, it will obliterate the things that were already there, often subjugating everyone and everything around it.

Paradoxically, a by-product of this attitude are dead zones, places utterly devoid of potential. These dead zones riddle our lives, areas so devoid of any possibility of interpretive depth that they repel every attempt to give them value or meaning. ii

Comfort in the Metropolis

Toyo Ito’s ‘Tower of Wind’ (1986) is a project which explicitly ‘reacted’ and supposed something which could be approximated to an infrastructural consciousness. This case was a commission adorn a ventilation shaft for an underground shopping complex, wherein Ito wrapped the concrete extrusion with an elliptical seamless cladding of perforated steel sheets, fitting dozens of LED pipes and hundreds of lightbulbs inside. Using photosensors, it shifted from solid to opaque or translucent depending on the Yokohama traffic interchange. In 1988, Toyo Ito would judge the annual Shinkenchiku competition organised by Japan Architect, wherein he chose the same theme Peter Cook had set ten years prior; ‘Comfort in the Metropolis’. The winning submission ‘Electronic Shadow’ by Peter Wilson, is its complete opposite; impossibly black, a residence wrapped to block all ephemera (including electromagnetic fields), comfort to found in the shadow of an ‘Electronic Tokyo’.

These are polarising projects, they evoke the way we conceptualise the difference between the outside an inside, public or private, one having boundaries and the other defined by these boundaries; supposedly, these boundaries being an adequate definition for property. Though——from an analytical perspective——property is simply a social relation, an arrangement between person and collectivities concerning the disposition of valuable goods. Private property being one in particular that entails one individual’s right to exclude “all the world” from access to a certain house or shirt or piece of land; the relation of ‘others’ being those who are bounded by infrastructure. iii

La Mancha Negra

Brief: The brief is one of claiming a recreational terrain vague which was made from another terrain vague; the city trail bike path. The claim is to introduce residences into a primarily non-residential enclave. Here we imply a new kind of residence; one which decides to live on volatile ground, ground which historically had been reserved for ghettos and slums. Project: LA MANCHA NEGRA – the domestic exterior as a means to develop terrain vague. Context: 167-9 Cremorne St (Cremorne), a portion

of the extended Monash Freeway——the portion described by Robin Boyd in the amended prints of his canonical The Australian Ugliness (pg132). 4 iv

Land Improvements 1: Levee

The site itself used to be an undefinably large lake a condition inherent to the fact the entire edge of Richmond/Cremorne is itself a floodplain. It has since been infilled with boulders from the Richmond quarry upstream. To regulate flooding, a levee is erected underneath the bike trail; it includes a large half-bell-mouth spillway (doubling as an access point), and several smaller buoyed chute spillways.

2: Hortus Sitting underneath the highway is proposed a large system of water sensitive urban design. Using the integrates systems of controlled environment agriculture, the premise is that this landscape introduces prior biodiversity to a completely superficial site and suburb.

3: Domestic Exteriors Water closet; appropriates Ito’s Tower of Winds, serves as the piece of vertical circulation, wherein the sink, shower, toilet, and exits, are appendages.

Vermeer room; a room for domestic labour where the window is replaced by a fiberglass Fresnel lens, and the door is replaced by a mobile large-glass.

Windpumps; pumps stored filtered water to periodically clean the (i) and (ii). (i), (ii), & (iii) face the existing Monash Freeway.

Changeroom; with apertures and a retractable jetbridge, this element creates a fold into the adjacent module residences.

Dominium; a non-structural veiled jagged-brick façade, facing a half-oval, defines the edge facing the existing suburb of Cremorne.

D — WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE TODAY ? i

a Theory of Education

In the process of educating oneself, one will learn to rely on the inertia of social conventions, since the very weight of its imposed obligations explicitly differentiates one’s actions between ‘correct’ and ‘extraneous’. An education begins with the asseveration of fictional models, such as “the economy” or “the architecture”, with its own fields of study. In being educated, the subject is expected to produce an affirmation of these fictions, and then indeed their own relation to it; wherein being ‘welleducated’ then means to be well integrated into these fields of study.

To be ‘educated’ is the assertion of one’s capacity to be discursive on such subjects, since it is imperative that one be able to point to stuff that has already happened; to be articulate and clear. An ‘education’ is then——to be blunt——one’s relation to a craft, where one becomes attached to certain tools organised by present technologies. 5 Any ‘architects’ architecture must, in principle, affirm an authority of “the architecture”, which is itself an affirmation of another more dominant power; wherein a constituent of peers are always at the ready to dismiss anything ‘extraneous’.

So, like administrations which assume their authority by exercising a right to discipline, architects themselves reaffirm a supposed authority by exercising this/their discipline. Yet this affirmation is only effectual in a master onto subject relationship; a dominant authority has little or no care for the affirmations of individuals, since these individuals have had——from the onset——all rights stripped from them. ii

Trends

Consider how it is architects use diagrams to clarify what and where “the architecture” might be found in their propositions, even though these diagrams are radical simplifications of what is being proposed in reality.

It is one thing to discuss how when a master whips a slave, they are engaging in a form of meaningful and communicative action, conveying the need for unquestioning obedience; and at the same time trying to create a terrifying mythic image of absolute and arbitrary power. All this is true. It is quite another to insist that that is all that is happening, or all that we need to talk about. After all, if we never explore what “unquestioning” 6 actually means, are we not, in however small a way, doing the same work as the whip? It is not really about making its victims talk. Ultimately, it is about participating in the process that shuts them up. iii

”Institute”

Brief: an “institute of illegitimate endeavour”, the implication being that either (a) the programme or (b) the architecture itself is illegitimate. Project: “Institute” – Curiously, the term ‘institute’ implies that it would be absent of any kind of agenda, which is not the case. Instead the term refers to the application of this very condition; where in

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Coincidentally, it is the portion visible (via binoculars) from his Walsh Street House.

The technologies themselves are formulated through social factors, an attachment to these tools does not have much to do with the fiction of “the economy”, but rather, a cyclical dependence on the capacity to be—and produce—a discourse on the fiction. To do so necessarily means to embrace an intellectual industry, which intends to entitle one into a potential ‘economist’ or ‘doctor’.

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The master’s ability to remain completely unaware of the salve’s inability to say anything even when she becomes aware of some dire practical flaw in the master’s reasoning, the forms of blindness or stupidity that results, the fact this obliges slaves to devote even more energy trying to understand and anticipate the master’s confused perceptions.

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engaging with an institute would immediately stifle and empty anything that is considered ‘you’. In a similar sense, projects themselves are reused the same as we do to ideas through the arbitrary use of the diagram, stifling anything that would be considered ‘the project’. Context: Jussieu – Two Libraries (1992) and Tres Grande Bibliothèque (1989) by the Office of Metropolitan Architecture. More specifically, it takes the schematic model of the Jussieu project, while appropriating the processes of the Bibliothèque project.

E — HOW DOES IT MEAN TO LIVE TODAY ? i

Value

We’re often led to exaggerate to such an extent that we take our exaggeration to be the only logical fact, with the result that we don’t perceive the real facts at all, only monstrous exaggeration. Even if one were to make a statement as apparently innocuous as “ritual can take forms in many places,” one is still asserting “ritual” is a meaningful cross-cultural category, implying that we can assume all human beings have engaged in some kind of ritual activity at some point or another, that ritual is an inherent aspect of human sociality, even if there’s no scholarly consensus whatsoever as to what, precisely, a ritual is or what it says about us that we are all in some sense ritual producing beings. Any theoretical term is an implicit statement about human nature; kinship, authority, labour, symbol, the body, performance, or anything else.

Arguably, it is in analogous processes by which we accept a value of things. Value also always happens through kinds of concrete mediums, meaning that these objects can be almost anything: wampum, oratorical performances, sumptuous tableware, Egyptian pyramids, etc. In being a measurement, these tend to incorporate into their own structure a kind of schematic model, such that it records the forms of creative action which brings them into being.

Value will necessarily be a key issue if we see social worlds not just as a collection of persons and things but rather as a project of mutual creation, as something collectively made and remade. This is why most debates over Marx’s deployment of the “labour theory of value” completely miss the mark. Marx’s theory of value was above all a way of asking the following question: assuming that we do collectively make our world, that we collectively remake it daily, then why is it that we somehow end up creating a world that few of us particularly like, most find unjust, and over which no one feels they have any ultimate control? This is not an attempt to produce a scientific law, which can demonstrate how specific units of labour ultimately determine the prices of specific of commodities, but rather, an attempt to answer a fundamental existential question. ii

Grotesque

When the fictional Land of Cockaigne was translated into reality, it was in the form of popular festivals such as Carnival; almost any increase in popular wealth was immediately diverted into communal feasts, parades, and collective indulgences. One of the processes that made capitalism possible, then, was a combination of the highly individualistic perspectives of the elite and the materialistic indulgences of the “material lower stratum”——where objects are reborn in the light of the use made of them.

Exaggeration, hyperbolism, and excessiveness is generally considered fundamental attributes of the grotesque style, grotesqueness starting when the exaggeration reaches fantastic dimensions, the human nose being transformed into a snout or beak; the essential principle being degradation——degradation of the abstract, spiritual and noble; bad rulers given the nickname of “people-eater.”

Hence the underlying logic of making a parallel between contact between people (looking, touching, speaking, striking, sexual relation) and eating, excretion, running noses, decomposition, open sores——all of which refer to different sorts of stuff and substances passing into, and out of, the physical person, with contrast between bodies and the world. iii

Toy

Brief: a hypothetical (visual) revision of ARM’s Storey Hall renovation, through the input of Roland Snooks’ emergent flocking scripts, and computer sculpting technologies; to derive a formal language by which one can discuss its existing program and circulation. Project: TOY – Often, we are compelled to extrapolate so we might find something in nothing. Project briefs are often nothing more than seemingly particular cases articulated in a kind of conventional language that extends a ruler of outcome, that it may be conventional. Yet, while architects are indeed capable transforming a few words into an endeavour, it seems a little strange to think this outcome could be anything but extrapolation. A project such as this one attempts the very same feat, though the effort is in reviewing this prior ruling, this prior attempt to extrapolate. Albeit, while this doesn’t attempt to question present bureaucratic regulation, it does its best to question the attitudes which have made them. Context: RMIT University Storey Hall, Building 16, 336-348 Swanston St, Melbourne F— WHERE DOES IT MEAN TO LIVE TODAY ? i

Wanting

Insofar as it is useful to distinguish something called “desire” from needs, urges, or intentions; then, it would be because desire (a) is always rooted in imagination; and (b) tends to direct itself towards some social relation, real or imaginary.

Social relation generally entails a desire for some kind of recognition, and hence an imaginative reconstruction of the self. It is a process fraught with dangers of destroying that social relation or turning it into a kind of terrible conflict. It is then that the modern concept of “consumption”——which carries with it the tacit assumption that there is no end to what anyone might want——could really only take form once certain

elite concepts of desire, such as the pursuit of ephemera and phantasms; fused, effectively, with the popular emphasis on food.

Consumption in the contemporary sense really appears in the political economy literature only in the late eighteenth century, when authors began to use it as the opposite of “production”. One of the crucial features of the industrial capitalism emerging at the time was a growing separation between the places in which people——or men, at least——worked and the places in which they lived. This in turn made it possible to imagine that the “economy” was divided into two completely separate spheres: the workplace, in which goods were “produced,” and the household, in which they were “consumed.”

It was only around the time of the industrial revolution and the full split between workplace and household that this sort of rhetoric was largely set aside and women—— proper bourgeois women, anyway——were redefined as innocent, largely sexless creatures, guardians of homes that were no longer seen as places of production but as “havens in a heartless world.” The legacy of this shift is still with us. As feminist theorists emphasise, women in contemporary consumer culture remain caught in a perpetual suspension between embodying the extremes of both spirit and matter, transcendent image and reality, that seems to play itself out in impossible dilemmas about food. It is not even most eating that is the model; it is the midnight snack, the piece of pie snarfed from the fridge when no one else is looking, the sandwich you have at the train station, the morning coffee, possibly the candy bar you buy when you are depressed. In a way, that last one tells you everything. ii

Properties

In Rem Koolhaas’ seminal ‘Delirious New York’ is inscribed the exploitation of laws by which architects realise their imagination. The suggestion here is that this exploitation of the supposed real and consequential by which we deliberate or even authenticate a role for architecture, if flipped around, reveals a certain perversity to questions such as “can I hold (let alone own) architecture?”.

The English word property itself has two meanings: that which I own, that is, some thing which takes on its identity from me and that which makes something what it is and gives it its identity (“it is a property of fire to be hot”).

One might call this property in its semiotic mode, insofar as it serves mainly to convey meaning. But what I want to emphasise is that even here, one finds the same logic of exclusion. Consider the Lau Islands: Only aristocratic clans “owned” species of animals or bird. Commoner clans did not; they were referred to collectively as “owners of the land”.

The etymology of the word person is itself suggestive; deriving from the Etruscan word meaning mask; and considering property is so closely related to avoidance, and if two principles of identification and exclusion really are so consistently at play, then is it really so daring to suggest that the person, in the domain of avoidance, is constructed out of property? Or, at least, of properties? iii

MINE

Brief: a residence for an outsider artist, outsider referring to those outside of institutional regulation, thus an artist whose produce has no value to this institution. Project: MINE – the ‘common’ as outsider artists, their residence being the institution of cities.

Context: n/a iv

Consumption

The project starts with a treatise; the significance of oil/petroleum in the ‘maintenance of survival of modern industrialised civilisation’ is paralleled to the function of buildings. As such, there is an investigation into the severity of the built environment in a perspective of how off-shore oil rigs are supremely organised and considered——the building of a self-sufficient artificial island——each object carefully maintained, the risk from failing to do so resulting in the tragedy of an explosion and the catastrophe of an oil spill. The thing is, there is enthusiasm of marine biologists debating the postoccupant adaptability of these oil rigs, their retention and subsequent adaptation into artificial rigs. Here, we are supposed to stop the ill thought of what is was that buildings are ‘extracting’, and instead wonder how building themselves could be resources; as in, such that we could have conversations of consuming buildings in a literal way, not in how architecture discourse operates.

This is not to sat that everything has to be considered a form of either production or consumption, but it at least allows us to open up some neglected questions, such as that of alienated and nonalienated forms of labour. Rather than looking at people in Zambia and Brazil and saying “Look! They are using consumption to construct identities!” and thus implying they are willingly or perhaps unknowingly submitting to the logic of neoliberal capitalism, perhaps we should consider that in many of the societies we study, the production of material products has always been subordinate to the mutual construction of human beings and what they are doing, at least in part, is simply insisting on continuing to act as if this were the case when using objects manufactured elsewhere.

One thing I think we can certainly assert. Insofar as social life is and always has been about the mutual creation of human beings, the ideology of consumption has been endlessly effective in helping us forget this. Most of all it does so by suggesting that (a) human desire is essentially a matter not of relations between people but of relations between individuals and phantasms; (b) our primary relation with other individuals is an endless struggle to establish autonomy by incorporating and destroying aspects of the world around them; (c) for the in c, any genuine relation with other people is problematic (the problem of “the Other”); and (d) society can thus be seen as a gigantic engine of production and destruction in which the only significant human activity is either manufacturing things or engaging in acts of ceremonial destruction so as to make way for more. This is a vision that, in fact, sidelines most things that real people actually do, and insofar as it is translated into actual economic behaviour is obviously unsustainable.

Sexual relations, after all, need not be represented as a matter of one partner consuming the other; it can also be imagined as two people sharing food.

END