Uselessness: Humankind’s most valuable tool? 9783110679830, 9783110679816

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
CONTRIBUTORS
PREFACE. USELESSNESS IS A RAREFIED THING
INFREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS: Excavating Obsolete Migrant Skills
REFUSING TO PERFORM: Trans-Utility, or the contemporary value of uselessness in architecture
USELESSNESS AND PURPOSELESSNESS: On central norms and imperatives of Western aesthetics
USELESS, AND THEN DANGEROUS: Public Space and Property in 20th century British Modernist Housing
USELESS ARCHITECTURE
USE–LESS–LAND: Two centuries of defending Tempelhofer Field in Berlin
IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS USELESSNESS
CONQUEST OF THE USELESS
ART—USE— USEFULNESS. Two Discourses: Use Value and Instrumentalization
EPILOGUE: USELESSNESS, XXXXXi

Citation preview

USE LESS NESS

USELESSNESS

Humankind’s most valuable tool? Edited by Michelle Howard and Luciano Parodi

Editors Michelle Howard, Luciano Parodi Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, IKA Institute für Kunst und Architektur, https://ika.akbild.ac.at Printed with financial support from Academy of Fine Arts Vienna With contributions by Ebru Kurbak, Miguel Paredes Maldonado, Ruth Sonderegger, Owen Hatherley, Ryan Stec, Kerstin Meyer, Friedemann Schrenk, Sonia Leimer, Diedrich Diederichsen Acquisitions Editor: David Marold, Birkhäuser Verlag, A—Vienna Content & Production Editor: Angelika Gaal, Birkhäuser Verlag, A—Vienna Proof reading: Roderick O’Donovan, A—Vienna Translation from German into English: James Gussen, USA—Boston Layout and typesetting: Carla Veltman, A—Vienna Printing: Beltz, D—Bad Langensalza Library of Congress Control Number: 2019956256 Bibliographic information published by the German National Library The German National Library lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, re-use of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in other ways, and storage in databases. For any kind of use, permission of the copyright owner must be obtained. ISBN 978-3-11-067981-6 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-067983-0 © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston www.degruyter.com

CONTENTS Preface

/ 08

Michelle Howard / USELESSNESSS IS A RAREFIED THING

/ 22

Ebru Kurbak / INFREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS: Excavating Obsolete Migrant Skills

/ 33

Miguel Paredes Maldonado / REFUSING TO PERFORM: Transutility, or the contemporary value of uselessness in architecture

/ 49

Ruth Sonderegger / USELESSNESS AND PURPOSELESSNESS: On the Central Norms and Imperatives of Western Aesthetics

/ 64

Owen Hatherley / USELESS, AND THEN DANGEROUS: Public Space and Property in 20th century British Modernist Housing

/ 84

Ryan Stec / USELESS ARCHITECTURE

/ 94

Kerstin Meyer / USE–LESS–LAND: Two centuries of defending the Tempelhofer Field in Berlin

/ 106

Friedemann Schrenk / IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS USELESSNESS

/ 123

Sonia Leimer / CONQUEST OF THE USELESS

/ 134

Diedrich Diederichsen / ART—USE—USEFULNESS: Two Discourses: Use Value and Instrumentalization

Epilogue / 144

Luciano Parodi / USELESSNESS, XXXXXi

CONTRIBUTORS MICHELLE HOWARD (co-editor) is an architect with a practice in Berlin and a professorship at the Institute of Art and Architecture at Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. She spent her early career on long-term collaborations, first with the Renzo Piano Building Workshop and then in the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. She is a founding member of wirmachendas, an alliance of initiatives united by the common goal of facing up to worldwide migration with humanity and expertise. EBRU KURBAK is an artist and designer. She is driven by her interest in the hidden political nature of everyday spaces, technologies, and routines, and by how the design of the ordinary is involved in shaping values, practices, and ideologies. Most recently, she led the arts-based research project Stitching Worlds. at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. MIGUEL PAREDES MALDONADO is a Lecturer in Architectural Design at the University of Edinburgh, and a partner in the award-winning research and design studio Cuartoymitad Architecture & Landscape. In his professional studio practice, he deals primarily with the themes of ephemerality and the development of the urban public commons. RUTH SONDEREGGER is an Austrian philosopher and Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetic Theory at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her research focuses on aesthetics and art theory, cultural studies, political philosophy, critical theories, and theories of resistance.

OWEN HATHERLEY is a British author and journalist based in London who

writes primarily on architecture, politics and culture. Hatherley has written for Dezeen, Building Design, The Guardian, Icon, London Review of Books, New Humanist, New Statesman, Socialist Review, Socialist Worker, and Jacobin.

RYAN STEC is an artist, producer and designer working in both research and

production. Beginning his relationship to the moving image through documentary, his

practice has slowly expanded off the edges of the screen, increasingly combining light, colour, structure and material with a deeper consideration of the site and the city.

KERSTIN MEYER is a political economist and activist who works in Berlin,

Benin and Senegal. She has written about the process of merging the constitutions of the two Berlins after 1989. One remnant of the constitution of East Berlin permits the passing of laws by referendum. She was part a small group that campaigned to keep the old airport grounds of Tempelhofer (Air)Field in Berlin free of building development.

FRIEDEMANN SCHRENK is a German paleoanthropologist. On August 11, 1991, one of his helpers in Malawi found the toothed lower jaw UR 501 of a 2.4-million-year-old hominid. The fossil was classified as Homo rudolfensis in the journal Nature in 1993 and, until the description of the lower jaw fragment LD 350-1 in March 2015, was regarded as the oldest representative of the genus Homo.

SONIA LEIMER is an artist who lives and works in Vienna and trained as an

architect. In her installations she addresses questions about the foundations of our perception, which are formed on the basis of individual, historical and medial patterns of experience. Spaces and objects undergo a transformation that makes history and social change tangible.

DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN is a German author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is one of Germany′s most renowned intellectual writers at the crossroads of the arts, politics, and pop culture. After teaching at the Merz Academy in Stuttgart for several years, he was appointed Professor for Theory, Practice and Communication of Contemporary Art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2006.

LUCIANO PARODI (co-editor) is an Argentinian architect who lives and works

as Senior Scientist at the Institute for Art and Architecture of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. After long years of collaboration on the conception and realization of buildings with various offices in Buenos Aires and Vienna, he devoted himself to teaching. His area of interest extends between innovative construction and technology while also including radical ecology and cultural heritage.

Michelle Howard

USELESSNESS IS A RAREFIED THING The point at which it became clear to me that we had to redefine uselessness was after having read the bestseller, Sapiens /01, by the historian Yuval Noah Harari, in which he predicts that the rise of Artificial Intelligence will produce a useless class that will not only be unemployed but unemployable. Initially, many of the arguments presented seemed convincing but in the course of the next few weeks and months they began to become seriously irksome. In June 2018 I attended a conference held by the German Ethics Council /02 at which Harari was the keynote speaker and where he showed an image of his useless class. This image depicted white males with zombielike expressions who resembled factory workers in old photographs of the Great Depression of 1929, they bore no resemblance to the working class of today and rendered the non-white-male world invisible. It seemed that an attempt was being made to predict the future based on concepts first formulated in the 18th century when the world was more firmly ordered by class, race and gender. As someone at the conference remarked, either this implied that the people unrepresented in the image were not in danger of entering the useless class or that the message was much darker. Indeed, what seemed to be happening here was not a paradigm shift but a tighter alignment to eighteenth century prejudices, one which had been arduously fought against in the postwar period. Uselessness was in danger of being deprived of any value whatsoever. Clearly, this narrowness of definition had to be addressed. Luciano Parodi and I began our attempts to address uselessness when we conducted a design studio with 18 students of art and architecture in the winter semester of 2017–18. The design studio was simply called, useless, and will be discussed later in this essay. The following semester we curated a lecture series for the academic year 2018–19 which had the same title as this book. We invited speakers from diverse professions to give us their point of view. Those experiences emboldened us to devise this publication, which gathers the ideas of some of those speakers and other thinkers we discovered and contacted in the ensuing months.

USELESSNESS IS A RAREFIED THING

Conference German Ethics Council, June 2018. Yuval Noah Harari with an illustration of the “Useless Class”. Image (c) Michelle Howard

The most common question I am asked is how I would define uselessness; but the more I attempt to define what uselessness could be, the more rarefied it becomes, particularly when that attempt is applied to a specific object or phenomenon. Every foray serves only to reveal new possibilities for the representative uselessness of a decided object, and every step taken to decipher and define the opposite seems only to increase its value and reveal more ancillary attributes. Invariably on closer observation, the moment arrives when the useless thing provokes a perceptive tilt, and its ineffable value becomes impossible to ignore. In the preface to his Gothic novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray /03, Oscar Wilde first made the claim that, ‘all art is useless’, /04 a claim that has been instrumentalised in debates centred around capitalism and the modern world ever since. When an admirer /05 wrote to him in 1890 asking him to clarify what he meant, he replied that, ‘A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. […] Of course, man may sell the flower, and so make it useful to him, but this has nothing to do with the flower. It is not part of its essence. It is accidental. It is a misuse. All this is I fear very obscure. But the subject is a long one.’ As is often the case with Oscar Wilde, what first seems like a clarification purely based on aesthetics and wit, is actually an advocacy for greater depth of insight and a challenging of social mores. At the time he wrote his answer, the blossoming of flowers was well-known to be of utmost importance for their reproduction. Already in

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Michelle Howard 1735, the botanist Carl Linnaeus had published, Systema Naturae /06, in which he made the first attempt to give ‘order’ to the natural world by classification and established the system of binomial nomenclature, in which the first part of any named organic thing identifies the genus and the second the species within the genus, effectively feeding our passion for more knowledge certainly, but also a form of conquest by description, even though the description is relatively primitive. One could argue that the ‘classification’ of nature presaged subsequent changes in the classification of value. Ryan Stec /07 shows how powerfully systems of description can affect our perception and how they too can and have been usurped to enrich our view of the world. So, when Oscar Wilde says that a flower blossoms for its own joy, he is not ignorant of the reproductive cycle of flowers, rather he emphasises the simultaneous worth of the “magic” of the act of blossoming and cautions against the dangers of a loss of wonder when the order of things is revealed. Diedrich Diederichsen /08 is of a similar opinion when he says that ‘knowledge emancipated from magic destroys the world (while magic merely gets it wrong)’. Following this train of thought, one could argue that the uselessness of any phenomenon or object depends on our lack of knowledge and the primitiveness of the means we use to divest ourselves of our ignorance. To paraphrase the architect Le Corbusier in Vers une Architecture /09, in which he addressed the idea of ‘primitive’ man, there is no such thing as uselessness, only useless resources. Wilde’s care for the seemingly useless could have something to do with the fact that, at the time of composing this preface, he was also studying the work of the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu who lived from the 4th to the 3rd centuries BCE. Wilde wrote a review of the first translation of the philosopher’s work /10 into English in the guise of A Critic in Pall Mall. In it he wrote that ‘Chuang Tzu spent his life in preaching the great creed of inaction, and in pointing out the uselessness of all things.’ Chuang Tzu’s teachings are in the form of parables, one such parable is that of the Useless Tree. /11 It tells the story of a wandering carpenter who saw a gigantic old oak tree standing in a field. The carpenter said to his apprentice, ‘This is a useless tree. If you wanted to make a ship, it would soon rot; if you wanted to make tools, they would break. You cannot do anything useful with this tree.’ That same evening, the old oak tree appeared to him in his dream and said: ‘Why do you compare me to your cultivated trees? Even before they can ripen their fruit, people attack and violate them. Their branches are broken, their twigs are torn. Their own gifts bring harm to them,

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and they cannot live out their natural span. That is what happens everywhere, and that is why I have long since tried to become completely useless. Finally, I am useless, and this is very useful to me.’ Most of the scientific world /12 now at last agrees that the only really effective way to combat climate change is to reforest the earth. This agreement on the importance of reforestation was only reached after having exhausted all other possible measures, in particular geo-engineering on a global level. Proposals for geo-engineering against climate change range from the seemingly innocuous, such as seeding clouds to produce rain to the highly questionable such as injecting huge clouds of ash into the atmosphere /13 or even wrapping the atmosphere in reflective film to deflect sunlight and heat. The possible side effects of these methods are not known, on the other hand, we do know what trees do and have lived with them for all of our existence. In fact, they prepared the way for us. For example: trees carry water from the sea to the innermost landmasses, thus if we could connect forests we could eliminate deserts. /14 Recent studies even observe trees in order to develop simple cost-effective methods of transporting water upwards against gravity. /15 Furthermore, many studies explain that trees and forests become more effective at fighting climate change the more they are allowed to grow independently and free from our intervention, in short, the more we leave them alone /16. Indeed, even areas which, on being left alone, have managed only small shrubs and bushes are more valuable in this respect than commercial forests. The useless tree thus seeks uselessness not only for its own survival but ours as well. Owen Hatherley /17 argues that the true defining element of classic British landscaped outdoor space, those soft rolling grassy hills punctuated by compositions of groups of trees and shrubs and the occasional folly, is that they were made to be looked at and enjoyed from a distance. One could take a leisurely stroll through them along gravel paths and enjoy their expanses, in strong contrast to much of modern landscaping which attaches value to the touchability of every inch of gardened space. This very British uselessness of outdoor space defined both the gardens of the stately homes of the aristocracy and those of the 20th century housing estates. One of these, a modernist masterpiece, the Alton Estate at Roehampton actually sits in a garden planned by Capability Brown, the most famous 18th century landscape architect in Europe. Such housing estates set in rolling countryside are one of the most valuable legacies left by the Labour governments after the end of the Second World War. Housing estates remain enjoyable if they are well maintained, and this can be

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Michelle Howard ensured unproblematically if the apartments are rented out by the state, as the state assumes responsibility for their maintenance. However, in the 1980’s, Margaret Thatcher found a sure-fire way both to destroy this legacy and to ensure votes for Tories in the forthcoming general election. She created the right-to-buy scheme, which has since become infamous. It offered all tenants of social housing in these estates the right to buy their apartment at rock bottom prices, an offer which the overwhelming majority accepted, (indeed, in her broadcast about the scheme she used the word ‘house’, although millions of tenants actually lived in apartments, itself an indictment of the housing estate). Naturally, a huge amount of the population took advantage of this scheme. However, there were no regulations as to what would happen to the spaces held in common, such as the access routes to the apartments or the green spaces which surrounded them. These paths and spaces quickly became neglected and thus a particularly valuable and ancient British form of useless outdoor space fell out of favour. The architectural folly was often the crowning piece in the composition of the gardens of the British aristocracy. Folly derives from the French word, folie, which describes both madness and extravagance, an apt term for a piece of flamboyant architecture constructed primarily for decoration and the enjoyment of the landed gentry. But enjoyment was not always the sole concern when follies were constructed on plantation estates in Ireland and Scotland in the 18th and 19th centuries. Over that period of time, a succession of droughts and sicknesses had pauperised the local tenants, whose right to stay on the land was dependant on the tithes they paid to landlords, most of whom were absentees. The construction of such follies was used in the same way as the public works schemes instigated by the Whig government as a response to the potato famine in 1846, which sought to compel the Irish to work for the money and food relief they were given. In the minds of such landlords building the follies would keep the starving classes occupied so that they would have no time for organisation and insurrections. This unfortunately compelled a half-starving population to engage in hard physical work for long hours under difficult conditions and most were so weakened by starvation that the hard labour greatly hastened their deaths. Such constructions, which curiously are among the most frivolous in existence, later became infamous as ‘Famine Follies’. Thus, as is the case in Qatar with the elaborate constructions for the upcoming football World Cup (where the building work is carried out by a migrant population that cannot leave because their passports

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are taken from them), an indifference to social justice culminated in works that fulfil the ambitions for uselessness as hoped for by the darkest forces of capitalism. The word useless does not appear in the English language until circa 1590 /18 whereas as the word use exists since circa 1200 /19 One suspects that there is something more profound to this nearly 300-year gap than simply a lack of written records. Use replaced the old English word brucan, which was closely related to the German word brauchen, which in its purest and most ancient form meant ‘to enjoy’, a sense far removed from our current utilitarian understanding of the word. In his seminal work, Culture and Society /20, the progressive socialist writer Raymond Williams puts forward the theory that the industrial revolution imposed a transformation of meaning on many key words in our civilisation, he singles out five words in particular which, on hindsight, are inextricably linked to the transformation of use as enjoyment, an extremely communal activity into use as, to take advantage of a correspondingly individualistic one. Those words were; Industry, which no longer just meant a human attribute associated with hard work but became a collective word for manufacturing and productive institutions; Democracy, which ceased to be just a literary term and with the French Revolution became a part of political terminology in practice; Class, which ceased to be a division or group in schools and colleges and referred to broad social divisions; Art, which ceased to mean skill and became the imaginative and creative arts; the term Culture was more complex because, according to Williams, it underwent a number of transformations, it began as the ‘tending of natural growth’ , and then by analogy, a process of human training’. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century it became ‘a general state or habit of the mind’, until later in the nineteenth century it came to mean ‘a whole way of life, material, intellectual, and spiritual.’ The journey that use made from enjoyment to the act of employing follows the journey of meaning described by Williams in the sense that the concept of collective good (to enjoy something rather than to employ it) is steadily replaced by the profit for the individual or the few. Ruth Sonderegger /21 explores the idea of a redefinition of uselessness as applied to the taste of the white male bourgeoisie where, using surprising examples, she recounts how art was elevated to uselessness by the proponents of capitalism in order to obfuscate its horrors. Art until then had been at the centre of society. Moreover, until the end of the eighteenth century, there was no such thing as art, art theory or aesthetic theory in the (collective) singular but a plurality of arts and rulebooks for

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each of them. Also, rulebooks presupposed that artistic skills could be taught and learned: ‘art was a profession like any other. The beginning of capitalism nourished the idea of the artist or sculptor alone in their garret, free from market forces following only their vocation and the forces inside their souls. She argues that ‘the emergence of both aesthetic autonomy and uselessness served a purpose after all: that of supporting the implementation of capitalism and, more particularly, the purpose of legitimising violent divisions along racist, sexist, and classist hierarchies that were necessary for the then new capitalist order to come into existence.’ To use a Marxist term, philosophical aesthetics contributed to ‘primitive accumulation’. /22 Ruth uses the example of art being hung in orphanages founded by charitable institutions, which on the face of it seems a worthy undertaking. However, this activity is placed in perspective when we learn that hanging this art only served to increase its value and that those orphanages often became art galleries themselves, for example the famous Whitechapel Art Gallery in London. No profession is free of prejudice, the paleoanthropologist, Friedemann Schrenk, /23 reminds us that new knowledge is often prevented from reaching an audience because that same knowledge contradicts prejudices that are so engrained that they have become core beliefs. This is most apparent in the slowness of the scientific world to accept the overwhelming evidence that the cradle of mankind from the first hominin to homo-sapiens lies in Africa. A similarly tenaciously held belief is that our evolution moved in a straight, efficient and persistent line until arriving at our present superior form today. Our high opinion of our evolution would have us jump from the trees in order to stand and fashion the twigs from those trees into a bow and arrow. Such concepts are a common among ab-ovo theories on the origins of architecture, particularly in the earliest known texts on architecture by Vitruvius. ‘The men of ancient times’, he says, ‘bred like wild beasts in woods and caves and groves and eked out their lives with wild food. At a certain moment it so happened that thick, crowded trees buffeted by storm and wind, rubbed their branches together so that they caught fire: such men as witnessed this were terrified and fled. After the flames had calmed down, they came nearer, and having realized the comfort their bodies drew from the warmth of the fire, they added wood to it, and so keeping it alive they summoned others and pointed it out with signs showing how useful it might be. In this meeting of men sounds were uttered at different pitch, to which, through continued daily exercise, they gave customary value to the chance syllables. Then, by

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pointing to the things in most common use, they began to talk to each other because of this accident. Since the invention of fire brought about the congress of men, and their counsel together and cohabitation, and since many people now met in one place, and had moreover been given a gift by nature above that of other animals, that they did not walk with their heads down, but upright, and could see the splendour of the world and the stars; and since they could make whatever they wished with their hands and fingers easily, some of that company began to make roofs of leaves, others to dig hollows under the hills, yet others made places for shelter in imitation of the nests and buildings of swallows out of mud and wattle. Then, observing the construction of others, and by their own reasoning adding new things, as time went on they built better dwellings.’ /24 Friedemann explains that not only was our progress very much hit and miss (we evolved attributes that we subsequently abandoned, and our bodies have still not shed all of the abandoned parts), but also that we would not have evolved if climate change had not forced us to. Thus, we would not have left the trees if the forests had not shrunk and would not have walked upright if we had not been forced to wade through wetlands. Often, rather than adapting to climate change in our current place of rest, we preferred to migrate to more conducive climates and so, eventually, we left the African continent for the rest of the world. One could argue that it is our tendency to ignore the problems we create by searching for new places to inhabit—even to the extent of searching on other planets—which is leading to the destruction of the planet we have. In April 26 1895, the month that Oscar Wilde’s trial for homosexuality began, H. G. Wells published his famous work of fiction, The Time Machine, where the time traveller arrived in a future world depicted as it would be if evolution had been allowed to take its course alone, untouched by the tempering effects of human civilisation. H.G. Wells was a pupil of Thomas Henry Huxley, a biologist and anthropologist known as ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ because of his advocacy of the theory of evolution. In 1893 in one of the most famous scientific lectures of the nineteenth century, entitled Evolution and Ethics, Huxley presented the theory that evolution does not reward intelligence, goodness or other aspects of civilisation but suitability to its environment, and the two often do not concur. In the world portrayed in The Time Machine, the time traveller arrives in a world occupied by two types of hominoids, the Eloi (small, elegant, child-like adults lacking in curiosity or discipline who live above ground in small, elegantly designed communities) and the Morlocks (ape-like creatures who

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live underground and only surface at night). In time he comes to realise that the Morlocks are effectively farming the Eloi for their flesh in order to consume them. They have engineered this elegant world in order to maintain the Eloi’s lack of interest in developing those skills that would allow them to sustain and defend themselves. The useless class is here the perceived elite. Ebru Kurbak /25 observed that ‘All people develop skills to survive in their particular physical, social and cultural environments. Once a person migrates to another place, however, some of these skills become entirely obsolete’, in other words, useless. This is an excerpt from her artwork called, IFAQ (infrequently answered questions), which provided much of the inspiration for this publication. We discovered it in 2017 while thinking and working on architecture and migration, inspiring us to interweave those ideas with our fascination with Gottfried Semper’s proposal that the wall-fitter or weaver of mats has a most important role to play in the history of art. Because of his political convictions, Semper himself was forced to migrate repeatedly. Migration is part of our evolutionary process, but fear of and antipathy to migrating peoples is just as old and because of this, migrating peoples were often prevented from practising the skills of settled peoples. One exception was the weaving of baskets, which fits the migratory lifestyle in that the raw material was free and could be transported easily. At the time when we discovered Ebru’s work, the Mannheimer Multihalle, /26 a ground-breaking wooden gridshell that represented one of the wonders of modern architecture, was at risk. Having withstood over 40 years of neglect this ultra-thin and lightweight wooden lattice structure was threatened with demolition because popular opinion had deemed it useless. Miguel Paredes Maldonado /27 suggests that the narrowness of definition of classical utility according to which ‘any work of architecture where no permanent alignment of formal organisation and functional performance can be found would be considered useless. […] Accordingly, there seems to be no greater sin for a work of architecture than to be useless. This is further exacerbated in our current planetary context of ecological crisis and resource scarcity, where uselessness is very often regarded as a manifestation of wastefulness.’ The truth about the space of the Multihalle is not that it was useless but that it was a space with which they had little or no experience. Even today we still have little experience of such spaces, very little has been built using similar principles, and they have been studied as a problem to solve rather than investigating their potential. The Multihalle was conceived in the 1970’s, a time of fuel crisis. Today, at a time of climate crisis

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there is a pressing need for further study into skilfully made woven wooden structures like this, structures that sit lightly on the earth, use a minimum of materials, that can easily migrate and be recycled. To this end we conducted a design studio entitled useless with our students, starting with the development of weaving techniques using folded newspaper, that vital carrier of news on a particular day, the next day discarded as useless. Then we continued with the construction of woven vessels whose dimensions related to the human body, later progressing to the thinnest, most easily bent plywood available. The woven wooden spaces that were produced were as light as a feather, encompassed space in a truly delicate diaphanous fashion and even though some could, with a little modification, have been translated into spaces, they were proudly useless. The students remarked on how, once their own weaving skills had been activated, very little material was needed, and they gave the studio a further name, Use–Less… Kerstin Meyer /28, an economist and activist who works in Berlin, Benin and Senegal, calls her description of the fight to save Tempelhof field in Berlin, Use–less– land. She also wrote a guide to the constitution of the City of Berlin, /29 which came about after the fall of the wall in 1989 and attempted to incorporate aspects of the laws of both east and west. Although most of the rights that allowed the public a voice were eliminated, one survived, the right to a legally binding people’s referendum. Armed with this knowledge she became part of a people’s movement to protect the former airfield at Tempelhof in Berlin from development and to preserve it as a public space. It was an exceptional grass roots campaign and it seemed doomed from the start because at that time Berlin badly needed to build more housing and all the major political parties supported the use of the Tempelhof field for building. But, after thousands of hours of direct one-on-one conversations with Berliners, holding placards in the streets, subways and parks (without Facebook, Twitter or Instagram), on May 25, 2014, Berliners voted by an overwhelming majority to keep the field free of building. And not only free of building, the law stipulated that the field must be kept free of any long-term design. A few basic facilities are provided, such as bathrooms and maintenance cabins, and sometimes areas are mowed to keep the grass down but otherwise it is up to the visitors to decide how they use and enjoy it. In hindsight, the key to the continued success of this wonderful space is the continual maintenance required by the law. One can only wish that things had been the same for the green spaces of the British housing estates.

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Design Studio “Useless”, woven structures from newspaper and plywood. Image (c) IKA

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Michelle Howard From the summer of 1973 onwards, the artist Gordon Matta Clark (who graduated as an architect in 1968), having discovered that the city of New York was auctioning off tiny irregular pieces of land that were the result of zoning and surveying errors and anomalies, managed to buy 15 of these “gutterspaces”. He appears in a video from 1975 by his friend Jaime Davidovich /30 in which he wanders around trying

to locate his properties with the help of the maps that he acquired through ownership. The video records acrobatics of measuring and chalking, encounters with neighbours and passers-by and overcoming the difficulties of access. All seemingly normal pursuits in useful properties but rendered farcical when they are useless. Matta-Clark often talked about these properties but when he died they were forgotten, and the properties reverted back to the City of New York. The invalid documents which represented proof of ownership were later found again by his widow and assembled into collages, which were quickly acquired by the art market with titles such as Reality Properties: Fake Estates, Little Alley Block 2497, Lot 42, their monetary value far outweighing the properties themselves. The work and the fact that it was bought and lost again has become a lodestone in other subversive work which challenges one of the cornerstones of capitalism, the intrinsic usefulness of privately held real estate. In a similar way, the concept of the Hyperart: Thomasson /31 was invented by the Japanese artist Genpei Akasegawa in the 1970s when he started to record parts of buildings and landscapes that might once have had a purpose but were now useless. To qualify as Hyperart the object of study had to have lost its original reason for being, to have remained useless and to have been lovingly maintained. Akasegawa was preoccupied with the ambiguity attached to the definition of art as useless, he said ‘… Art is actually a utilitarian thing that serves a purpose. An artistic purpose, […] Hyperart, on the other hand, doesn’t even serve an artistic purpose. It serves none of the myriad purposes that a thing can serve in life.’ I use the word rarefied to describe uselessness in this essay, not to elevate it as a subject matter for the elite but to throw light on the fact that it is little understood, too often abused and transfigured but veritably heady with promise. Just as Sonia Leimer’s /32 large useless pieces are conquered by human embrace, I hope that the essays in this little book can contribute to a greater appreciation of the hidden potential that can be discovered by searching for alternative values which embrace rather than exclude people, things and phenomena because of their supposed uselessness.

USELESSNESS IS A RAREFIED THING / 01 / 02 / 03 / 04 / 05 / 06

/ 07 / 08 / 09

/ 10 / 11 / 12

/ 13 / 14

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/ Harari , Y. N., trans. With the help of Purcell. J Watzmann.H, Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind (Harper Collins, 2014) / Human Dignity in Our Hands – Challenges from New Technologies. Annual meeting of the German Ethics Council 2018 / Wilde, O., The Picture of Dorian Gray (preface) (Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 13 chapters, 1890). / The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart Davis. (UK edition: Fourth Estate, 2000). / Bernulf Clegg / Linnaeus, C., Systema Naturae, sive regna tria naturae systematice proposita per classes, ordines, genera & species (Leiden: 1st edition 1735, Systema naturæ per regna tria naturæ, secundum classes, ordines, genera, species, cum characteribus, differentiis, synonymis, locis, 10th edition Stockholm, 1758). / Stec, R., ‘Useless architecture’. / Diederichsen, D., ‘Art—Use—Usefulness; Two Discourses: Use Value and Instrumentalization’. / Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture (Paris: éditions G. Crès, 1923) p. 66. ‘There is no such thing as primitive man; There are primitive resources. The Idea is constant, in full sway from the beginning’. / Herbert, G. A., (trans) Chuang Tzu: Mystic, Moralist, and Social Reformer (Bernard Quaritch 1889) / We told this parable in the introduction to the last lecture in the series. / Chaplin, D. (2018) ‘Trees and Climate Change: Why Reforestation is Vital.’ One Tree Planted. [Online] Available from: https://onetreeplanted.org/blogs/stories/ trees-climate-change-reforestation / Keith, D., A Case for Climate Engineering (Boston Review Books) (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2013) / Ellison, D. et al., ‘Trees, forests and water: Cool insights for a hot world.’ Global Environmental Change, 2017 [Online] 43, 51–61. Available from: https://www. sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/ S0959378017300134 / Zyga, L., ‘Antigravity water transport system inspired by trees.’ Phys.org. 2019 [Online] Available from: https://phys.org/ news/2019-07-antigravity-trees.html / Elbein, S., ‘Tree–planting programs can

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do more harm than good.’ National Geographic. 2019 [Online]. Available from https://www.nationalgeographic.com/ environment/2019/04/how-to-regrow-forest-right-way-minimize-fire-water-use / Hatherley, O., ‘Useless and then dangerous: public space and property in 20th century British modernist housing’. / Available from: https://www.etymonline. com/word/useless / Available from: https://www.etymonline. com/word/use / Williams, R., Culture and Society, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958) pp. 13–18. / Sonderegger, S., ‘Uselessness and purposelessness: On central norms and imperatives of Western aesthetics’. / Marx, K., Capital. A Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 2015), vol. 1, p. 508. online version: https:// www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/ download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf. / Schrenk, F., ‘In the beginning there was uselessness’. / Vitruvius Pollio, M., On Architecture: Edited from the Harleian Manuscript 2767, trans. Frank Granger, The Loeb Classical Library (London: W. Heinemann 1931). / Kurbak, E., ‘Infrequently asked questions: Excavating obsolete migrant skills’. / The Mannheim Multihalle, designed 1975 by Frei Otto and Carl Mutschler for the German National Garden Show / Miguel Paredes Maldonado ‘Refusing to perform: Trans-utility, or the contemporary value of uselessness in architecture’. / Meyer, K., ‘Use–less–land: Two centuries of defending Tempelhofer Field in Berlin’. / Zur Verfassung. Recherchen, Dokumente 1989–2017 ( On the Constitution – Berlin Booklets on the History and Present of the City – 2017) in the series Berliner Hefte zu Geschichte und Gegenwart der Stadt. / Quiles, D. R., ‘The avant-garde videos of Jaime Davidovich’, 2017, Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisnero. [Online]. Available from: https://www.coleccioncisneros.org/ editorial/cite-site-sights/avant-garde-videos-jaime-davidovich / Genpei Akasegawa, Hyperart: Thomasson, trans. Matt Fargo, (Los Angeles: Kaya Press, 2010). / Leimer, S., ‘Conquest of the Useless’.

Ebru Kurbak

INFREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS:

Excavating Obsolete Migrant Skills All Photographs by kollektiv fischka/kramar.

‘Non-EU migrants residing in the EU have a lower than average level of skills and qualifications’, the European Commission boldly asserts in the various pamphlets of their initiative called New Skills Agenda for Europe. Action is deemed necessary migrants with skills that would enable their integration into the labour market and non-EU migrants are encouraged to get p‘upskilled’ and ‘reskilled’ and to obtain the ‘right skills’ that would make them employable. All people develop skills to survive in their particular physical, social and cultural environments. Once a person migrates to another place, however, some of these skills become entirely obsolete. The person might be confronted with a new climate, a new language and a new set of rules in terms of social behaviour, customs and attitudes. Under these trying circumstances they are often expected to enter an endless learning process that involves attempting ceaselessly to catch up. Unfortunately, confronted with one-sided expectations of this kind, it is more than likely that that person will constantly feel like they are falling behind. Infrequently Asked Questions is an artistic work created by asking people who migrated to Austria from different parts of the world a simple question—what are you good at? Through a number of workshops and interviews, a selection of migrant skills was excavated and visualized to be then shared with the local audience. The selection process was carried out with critical intentions. Skills and knowledge that were seemingly useless were preferred to those that quickly led to new business ideas for financial profit.

INFREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS The work intends to reveal something that we often forget: values of things are social constructs and not always universal facts. What is considered a useful skill or knowledge depends on where, when and by whom that evaluation is made. Our assumptions and values are what shape the way we deal with the world. The transformation we undergo through seeing ‘other’ ways of thinking and doing is normally something we look for when we visit anthropology museums and archaeological sites, or read speculative fiction. Living in the mobile and heterogeneous societies of our times, we have, on an everyday basis, the opportunity to encounter people who simply do things differently. These encounters could be treasured mutually, as possible ways of recognizing one’s own unquestioned values, presumptions and habits. Infrequently Asked Questions was created in scope of the Stadtarbeit format of VIENNA DESIGN WEEK 2015 in cooperation with Caritas and was awarded the Erste Bank MoreValue Design Award 2015.

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/ HOW TO PICK A GOOD WATERMELON Hamit from Turkey, in Austria for twenty-one years The shape of a watermelon does not say much. A ripe watermelon would have a cream-coloured to yellowish surface on the side that had been lying on the ground. A watermelon with a matte exterior is usually better than a shiny one. First, try to estimate the weight. A good watermelon feels heavier than it looks. Press the watermelon with a finger. The rind should be hard. Tap on the watermelon while holding it. You should feel a vibration and hear a full sound.

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/ HOW TO WEAVE PALM LEAVES Shukri from Somalia, in Austria for five years

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/ NATURAL TOOLS FROM THE WILDERNESS Amina from Somalia, in Austria for two years and four months Udub A piece of wood with a V-shaped end. It is used as a support when building fences and huts. Hangool A piece of wood, V-shaped at one end and with a hook at the other. One end is used to push things away and the other is used to pull things closer. It is used as a means of support when clearing a path or interacting with animals.

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/ HOW TO FILLET A SWORDFISH Nurto from Somalia, in Austria for three years

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Detail from the exhibition at the Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art (Volkskundemuseum Wien), Vienna, 30 September–16 October 2016. Infrequently Asked Questions (2015–2016), Ebru Kurbak. Photograph by kollektiv fischka/kramar.

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Detail from the exhibition at the Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art. Infrequently Asked Questions (2015–2016), Ebru Kurbak. Photograph by kollektiv fischka/kramar.

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Detail from the workshop in which Amina from Somalia showed how to build a Somalian hut out of tree branches and scrap fabrics. Photograph (c) Ebru Kurbak.

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Miguel Paredes Maldonado

REFUSING TO PERFORM: Trans-Utility, or the contemporary value of uselessness in architecture UTILITY, VALUE AND ARCHITECTURAL PRODUCTION This chapter kicks off by posing the question of architectural uselessness in reverse: What does being useful entail in the context of a work of architecture? And, how is being useful conceptualised as an indicator of value in contemporary critical discourses? In what follows, I will endeavour to unpack the status of architectural utility as the hegemonic paradigm of architectural evaluation. To that extent, I will situate both utility and uselessness in architecture as two particular points within a broader spectrum of potential spatial manifestations that pertain to the construction of architectural ‘value’. In the following sections, I will argue that this spectrum emerges from the variable interactions of three parameters (function, organisation and time), resulting in varying degrees of alignment with the socially sanctioned means of allocating value to works of architecture. Moreover, I will posit that the particular combination of architectural parameters that is socially validated as having a positive ‘value’ draws from conditions that were originally established by the lineage of Western classical tradition. These conditions define what I will be referring to as classical Utility throughout this chapter. At its core, the socially validated combination of parameters that we associate with classical Utility appears to be expressed in terms of ‘performance’—the capability of a work of architecture to fulfil its allocated use in the most efficient way possible. However, as the chapter progresses I will attempt to explain how the alignment of classical Utility with ‘positive’ criteria of architectural appreciation constitutes

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only a very specific ‘moment’ within a much broader range of spatial practices in relation to the normative conventions of critical assessment. In other words, it is possible to find non-performative forms of ‘value’ in the multiplicity of architectural approaches that deviate from classical Utility. To this extent, I will put forward two examples in which a ‘domain of uselessness’ is successfully mobilised beyond the comparatively narrow goals posed by enforcing performance as a form of maximised architectural efficiency. FUNCTION, ORGANISATION AND TIME At present, it would be safe to say that in terms of its ability to accrue positive value no other quality of architecture remains as undisputed as utility. Whereas the classical framework of architectural evaluation refers to Beauty, Stability and Utility as equally fundamental qualities in any ‘good’ work of architecture, Utility seems to have gained more importance than the other two in recent times. On the one hand, from the perspective of social norms aesthetic qualities are—at least to a certain extent— dependent on taste and context, and therefore seem less reliable as objective indicators of value. On the other hand, contemporary construction technologies have become both highly sophisticated and increasingly standardised, and therefore the structural stability of a work of architecture is often either taken for granted for the purposes of evaluation, or alternatively absorbed as yet another aspect of the aesthetic discourse. /01 However, the capability of a work of architecture to be used effectively is still unanimously considered to be of paramount importance. In keeping with the spirit of Louis Sullivan’s pre-modernist maxim Form follows Function, it would seem that contemporary architecture must first and foremost serve a purpose. Accordingly, for a work of architecture there seems to be no greater sin than to be ‘useless’. This is further exacerbated in our current planetary context of ecological crisis and resource scarcity, where uselessness is very often regarded as a manifestation of wastefulness. In spite of the socially sanctioned drive to elevate utility as the fundamental index of value in architectural production, in practice there is often only some superficial knowledge of the conditions under which it actually operates. Moreover—and as noted earlier—the notion of architectural utility is, to this day, still discussed in the terms set by the framework of the Western classical tradition. This ‘classical Utility’ is first and foremost exemplified by Vitruvius’ Utilitas, which was predicated on the hierarchical, univocal correspondence of a particular spatial arrangement with a specific

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functional allocation. /02 As architectural theorist Anthony Vidler reminds us, although it originated in classical antiquity this conceptualisation of Utility is also echoed through every historical instance of rediscovery and reappraisal of classical culture. /03 Vidler also notes that, in the case of architecture as a discipline, the Western Enlightenment arguably carried out the most recent re-instatement of the classical canon. Thus, I will use it as a marker to outline what a modern take on classical utility might look like. If we look at the work produced during the Western Enlightenment by theorists such as Quatremère de Quincy, we will notice that the explicit linkage between the function of a work of architecture and its formal organisation is already discussed in no uncertain terms as the fundamental basis of utility. /04 Moreover, this linkage appears to operate mono-directionally: Functional requirements are meant to drive the organisational principles that articulate architectural form—and not the other way around. According to this, the classical condition of Utility can be met only when a given spatial organisation is correctly aligned with its allocated function. It should be noted that, in contrast to the narrative of dialectical opposition between function and formal ornamentation championed by the early Modernists of the 20th Century, /05 ‘form’ in the classical context of the Enlightenment is not associated with the epithelial aspects of architecture. On the contrary, it is conceptualised as a structuring principle of organisation. In 1980—and drawing from this classical take on architectural utility—Bernard Tschumi put forward a revision of the explicit linkage of form and function, which the classical tradition had always understood as being permanent. In contrast to this, Tschumi ventures that the mapping of functional performance against formal organisation does not necessarily have to remain unchanged over time. Following this line of thought, it is possible to regard architectural utility as an oscillatory condition, whereby different alignments of form and function (as well as the temporary absence of any alignment) may take place over a period of time. /06 In Tschumi’s proposed scenario, classical Utility would be only a particular case of extended temporal persistence of a function-organisation alignment within an otherwise oscillatory arrangement. This focus on ‘temporal persistence’ highlights a very important aspect in regards to the mechanisms for the accrual of value in classical Utility: the assumption that a continued alignment of function and organisation over time constitutes an indicator of the performance of the architectural object. /07 Put differently, classical Utility articulates the value of any work of architecture in performative terms by looking into

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its capability to satisfactorily carry out a defined series of operations (which amount to a specific architectural function) in accordance to a pre-set spatial protocol. Interestingly, this emphasis on functional performativity runs parallel to Karl Marx’s notion of use-value, inasmuch as it is also predicated on performative conditions. For Marx, the use-value in an object appears only when its use is mobilised or ‘activated’, but not when it is ‘accumulated’ by deferring it as a potentiality (thus transforming its potential use in exchange-value). /08 Critically, much like Marx’s use-value, classical Utility has strong moral connotations: such a form of ‘pure’ utility—expressed as a permanent alignment of architectural function and spatial organisation that facilitates efficient use—is often regarded as virtuous, while any misalignments are seen as aberrations. /09 If we look at the argument above from the perspective of these ‘aberrations’, we may start to wonder what the implications of falling outside the framework of classical Utility are. Does it mean that the work of architecture in question is completely devoid of performative capabilities—and thus unable to be have its use-value activated? Alternatively, does it mean that it is somehow temporarily ‘downgraded’ to an undervalued status—with the potential to become re-valued by entering into some form of ‘correct’, permanent alignment? The questions above only make it apparent that this classical framework posits a strictly dualist approach to use and value in architecture. According to this approach uselessness may only be defined as the opposite quality of utility. Following this line of thought, any work of architecture where no permanent alignment of formal organisation and functional performance can be found would be considered useless. From the perspective of contemporary criticism, I would argue that such a dualist, monolithic approach has substantial limitations, inasmuch as it is fixated on the very specific forms of performativity that are afforded through univocal alignments of function and organisation in classical Utility. ALTERNATIVE VECTORS TO CLASSICAL UTILITY Looking further into this dualist framework, it quickly becomes apparent that one of its poles carries significantly more weight than the other. In an unequivocal Platonist twist, /10 classical Utility is posed as a highly specific, idealised concept—the essence of all that is useful—whereas uselessness simply refers to anything else. In other words, if something is not useful according to the restricted conditions of classical Utility, then it becomes useless by default. This is also reflected in the understanding

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of architectural ‘value’ as a conditional quality solely predicated on performance, which is also firmly embedded in the framework of classical Utility. Following this logic, by being unable to activate performance through optimised use, uselessness can only mobilise worthlessness—a negative form of value. As a first step to outline a potential alternative to this dualist framework, I will put forward a more nuanced take on the useless. Critically, my intent is to describe uselessness as a category that is formulated independently—albeit still on the basis of organisation, function and time—and not as a simple, negative image of classical Utility. In that respect, I have already established that the parameter of time articulates the alignment of organisation and function in terms of ‘permanence’ or ‘impermanence’ and that, following Bernard Tschumi’s reflections, such an alignment may well be oscillatory. That is to say, organisation and function may enter into different modes of alignment at different points in time, or even become temporarily misaligned. However, there is more to the relationship of function and spatial organisation than its permanence over time. This is particularly true insofar as this relationship articulates a modality of performance—which we had previously defined as the efficient fulfilment of a function in space—and thus has the potential to mobilise ‘value’. With this in mind, a suitable way to unpack this relationship beyond the idealist framework is to activate modalities of articulating ‘value’ that are not restricted to the performative logics of use-value and exchange-value. To this extent, I suggest that an alternative conceptual vector to formulate ‘value’ can be found in Georges Bataille’s theory of the ‘General Economy’, which in turn tapped into the ethnographical work of Marcel Mauss on what he referred to as ‘gift economies’. /11 Bataille’s theory postulated that, contrary to Marx’s arguments, not all economic frameworks were exclusively organised around the opposing vectors of productive use and deferred use. He argued that, in fact, any closed economic cycles of production, immediate use and subsequent reinvestment of the remaining surplus were bound to reach a potentially catastrophic saturation point. As a way to counter-balance this endless loop of accumulative group and its potentially explosive exhaustion, Bataille pointed out that some of the non-Western societies studied by Mauss had successfully formalised vectors of non-productive expenditure of available surplus. Considered from an architectural standpoint, Bataille’s reflections would suggest that the systematic, reciprocal reinforcement of the relationship between productive function and spatial organisation—materialised through an ever-increasing

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alignment of both terms—is not necessarily a desirable permanent condition. Following Bataille’s argument, this relationship entails that the parameters of function and organisation exacerbate and consolidate one another in an endless loop of mutual correspondence. Critically, such a closed system seems to lack any counterbalancing vectors of dissipation, and thus according to Bataille’s views its relentless process of alignment would be bound to reach a point of eventual exhaustion. This interpretation is highly resonant with Bataille’s own views of architecture, which he considered to be an action of ‘petrification’ of existing social and political powers—a system of superimposed order (a ‘formal coat’, as he referred to it) that consolidated hierarchical norms into material regimes through formal homologies. /12 Notwithstanding this, rather than dismissing architecture altogether, Bataille incorporated the events that affected architecture into its very own disciplinary framework: If works of architecture are made of consolidated accumulations of productive effort (be it material, capital or human effort) they are also equally constituted by associated phenomena of expenditure through exhaustion or dissipation. Dust, fire, decay and eventually ruin were posed by Bataille as architectural vectors, inasmuch as they disrupted and counterbalanced the closed accumulative logics of socially sanctioned modes of architectural production by incorporating components of non-productive expenditure into their generative processes. As argued earlier, classical Utility in architecture is an inherently performative and accumulative condition. Its functional framework is predicated on efficient use, and this is simultaneously reflected on and informed by its organisational solicitations. Within this formulation time appears as a ‘standstill’ parameter that enforces continuity and reiteration by closing the feedback loop between functional production and organisational reproduction. In line with this logic, we can say that classical Utility generates ‘value’ inasmuch as it guarantees ever-increasing ‘performance’. In contrast to this, Bataille reframed the parameter of time as an alternating sequence of cycles of functional production and cycles of non-productive expenditure. By incorporating Bataille’s exhaustive and dissipative architectural vectors, production is never accumulated and use is never deferred as a form of exchange value. Therefore, both exhaustion and dissipation can be considered as functional forms of ‘value’, equivalent to the actions of performance and conservation. Having looked at the ways in which the parameters of time and function may be reinterpreted in the previous paragraphs, I will now consider how the parameter of

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organisation can also be unpacked in order to help reformulate the useless beyond a simple opposition to classical Utility. From a classical standpoint, different formal organisations are understood to correspond to different building typologies unequivocally. /13 In this manner, the linkage of organisation and function is extended to a tripartite linkage of organisation, function and meaning. That is to say, banks, cathedrals and hospitals are not only organised as banks, cathedrals and hospitals; they also ‘look like’ banks, cathedrals and hospital—and unequivocally so. Through this mechanism, form and function articulate a univocal semantic unit. /14 As a consequence of this, any mode of architectural organisation embedded into classical Utility is strictly hierarchical. First, some constituent elements within such organisations will be more important than others, insofar as they will determine the overarching organisational structure of the architectural work at stake. Second, all constituent elements will have to be arranged according to a pre-determined order, replicating the order enforced by an originating architectural type. /15 This is not only meant to point towards a single function, but also to render the resulting, ‘composed’ whole univocally readable as a manifestation of an idealised architectural type. A counterbalance to this system of univocal signification through permanent organisational hierarchy can be found in the interlinked notions of displacement and re-signification—as outlined in the written work of architects Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efrén García Grinda. Whereas their take on ‘displacement’ refers to the notion that contextual changes can be propagated into cultural materials—such as works of architecture—their neologism ‘re-signification’ suggests that those cultural materials can also be connected to different sets of symbolic functions. Through this two-step mechanism the hierarchical organisations embedded into a work of architecture may not necessarily be physically transformed, but rather symbolically de-activated and re-activated according to different associative orders. As a consequence, architectural production becomes no longer predicated on the notions of ‘looking like’ or ‘being arranged as’—at least not in any permanent manner. On the contrary, both composition and meaning give rise to a dissolved, fluid hierarchy that, importantly, can also be enforced with varying degrees of intensity. To sum up, in this section I have tried to establish that time, function and organisation can be framed as parameters that yield a range of potential configurations. Thus, they do not need to be framed in the specific terms that correspond to classical Utility—which means that other, non-classical vectors of development are possible

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Miguel Paredes Maldonado across their respective ranges. Likewise, these three parameters do not need to remain aligned according to the particular combinatorial solicitations corresponding to classical Utility. Even more importantly, such alignment is not the only way of accruing value. It is important to emphasise that the non-classical vectors of organisation, time and function outlined in this section are not simply opposing usefulness. On the contrary, they constitute alternative modes of accruing architectural ‘value’ beyond those established by classical Utility. As such, I will refer to them as vectors of trans-utility. Nonetheless, as long as we continue to consider this framework of trans-utility through a classical, dualistic mode of evaluation—whereby alternative vectors are posed in opposition to a classical ideal—it will be impossible to mobilise it successfully as a generative model for architecture. THE PHASE SPACE OF TRANS-UTILITY In an attempt to overcome the aforementioned limitations, I will put forward an alternative framework for utility that is not structured as a series of dualisms. At its core, this framework draws from the philosophical toolset of New Materialism, which intends to break away from classical idealism by resituating absolute classical categories into non-hierarchical, relational discourses. More specifically, I tap into Manuel DeLanda’s ontological construction of ‘phase spaces’: generative, continuous domains that provide organised structures of combinatorial variation. Conceptualising architectural utility as a phase space allows us to look into the tripartite relationship of function, organisation and time in the same manner as we would look into a continuous material domain—such as that of aggregate rocks. That is, insofar as the composition, combination and proportion of rock components is variable, a potentially infinite multiplicity of aggregates is possible (although some can be more prevalent than others). Proceeding in this manner, it is possible to outline an extended notion of utility that works as an oscillatory domain. This domain can be represented as a three-dimensional volume, structured by three vectors of variability: function, organisation and permanence over time. We should be able to situate different works of architecture as different particular positions within this domain, expressing each of them as the combinatorial result of variation along the aforementioned dimensions. Drawing from Manuel DeLanda’s visual conceptualisations of phase spaces, we can picture these dimensional vector parameters as the sliding volume controls or rotating radio knobs in an audio system, allowing us to explore different positions within their respective ranges. /16

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In order to populate this proposed phase space of trans-utility, I will now proceed to elaborate on what the boundaries of its dimensional ranges are. First, the dimension corresponding to functional performativity oscillates between ‘productive’ and ‘dissipative’ modalities of use, mirroring the tension between spatial-economic regimes outlined in the previous section. Second, the dimension pertaining to formal organisation will oscillate between fully hierarchical and fully non-hierarchical configurations. Third, the dimension regulating time will oscillate between full permanence and continuous variation in the alignment of the previous two dimensions. Once the full range of dimensional variations in the phase space of transutility has been populated, it is time to consider how it might be explored beyond the particular position of classical Utility. To that extent, I will pose the relationship between the dimensional components of this phase space through philosopher Alfred North Whitehead’s notion of causality. The reason for this is that, using Whitehead’s terminology, in classical Utility the relationship between organisation and function can be neatly expressed through linear causation: ‘function’ causes ‘organisation’, always (i.e. the same function always causes the same organisation). However, linear causation is not the only way to articulate the relationship of function and organisation, and to reflect this Whitehead outlined the concepts of both linear and non-linear causation. If the direction of causation changes, or the number of effects that emerge from a given cause vary, or the condition of repeatability embedded into always is not fulfilled, causal linearity is broken. In such case, we can anticipate that nonclassical manifestations of utility may emerge through varying combinations of function, organisation and permanence over time. Insofar as these manifestations are situated beyond the limited range of dimensional conditions allowed by classical Utility, we can argue that they articulate the extended phase space of trans-utility. Following this line of thought, and whereas the singular position of classical Utility in this extended phase space emerges from linear causation, non-linear causation populates any other potential combinations pertaining to of trans-utility. Drawing again from Whitehead, I shall emphasise that non-linear causation is no less generative than linear causation. However, it is not necessarily finalist or performative. With no direct, univocal relationship between cause and effect, the relationship of function and organisation over time in trans-utility is complex and ever-changing.

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Miguel Paredes Maldonado TRANS-UTILITY AT WORK To elaborate further on the above, a non-linear relationship between function and organisation does not preclude production in architectural processes. In fact, the contemporary application of non-linear computational methods to architectural design seems to prove the very opposite. These methods are generative insofar as they develop through a series of production loops that respond to pre-set series of functional and organisational conditions. Each potential spatial response is evaluated against the original conditions, and this evaluation is fed back into the production process in order to help fine-tune subsequent responses. The caveat is that the goal of these recursive generative processes is the gradual consolidation of a ‘final’ combinatorial configuration that responds optimally to the original organisational and functional conditions. In doing so, non-linear, computational processes explore organisation in relation to function over time until a static solution emerges. Thus, they only differ from the conditional framework classical Utility in the fact that their univocal solutions are developed in a non-static manner. Moreover, inasmuch as these modalities of computational development tend to pursue a maximum activation of use-value by posing it as their index of performativity, we could argue that they conceptually are no more than simple reformulations of the classical framework of Utility. However, it is also important to note that performance-oriented generative processes are only a particular subset of all the possible non-linear relationships of function, organisation and time embedded into the phase space of trans-utility. As I mentioned earlier, the particular focus of interest in this chapter is the subset of processes that do not pursue any alignment of function and organisation whatsoever, and consequently are not oriented towards performative use. To this extent, we may ask ourselves: How does this ‘refusal to perform’ play out? How can this ‘non-alignment’ be materialised as a spatial intervention? In an attempt to address both questions, I will put forward two possible architectural instances of performative refusal. Whereas they can be considered ‘useless’ from the perspective of classical Utility, both articulate alternative modes of value through vectors of trans-utility. The first trans-useful architectural instance operates at a metropolitan scale, and encompasses the circulatory space formed by the accumulated trajectories of individuals over time in dense urban fields. An example of this is the geo-localised, urban plan of the German city of Karlsruhe (Figure 1) developed by myself in collaboration with students and staff from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in October 2019.

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This plan is constructed by plotting the traces of dozens of geo-localised displacement logs, which were captured and assembled together over the course of a one-week workshop. These individual trajectory logs were obtained from two main sources: urban walks undertaken by myself, KIT faculty and students, and a series of publicly available personal logs extracted from open-source urban mobility databases. The resulting trajectories were collated together into a series of ‘dynamic urban drawings’, spanning various scales (metropolitan, urban and local), and formalised as vector-based video animations. Although at first glance the shapes of the animated trajectories seem to reflect the boundaries of built masses, a more attentive observation brings other, more granular organisational conditions to the fore: The accumulated trajectories reconstruct the fabric of Karlsruhe / Fig. 01 through the subjective urban experiences of the individuals that produced them. In so doing, they reveal a multiplicity of personal patterns of access to the urban field, which emerge from a combination of physical, infrastructural and social conditions. As Michel De Certeau put it ‘trajectories trace out the ruses of other interests and desires that are neither determined nor captured by the systems in which they develop’. /17 This urban architecture is not intrinsically material, but nonetheless it is undoubtedly spatial. It emerges gradually as an architectural organisation through granular, heterogeneous urban multiplicities. Paraphrasing Felix Guattari, /18 its forms of spatialized enunciation emerge from collective angles, with an emphasis on the shared commonalities of our individual experiences. A second example of architectural trans-utility can be found in the recent body of work of New-Territories / François Roche and Camille Lacadee, which puts forward responsive, accumulative spatial assemblies of human and robotic interaction. Their approach to trans-utility is particularly well exemplified by ‘[the virgin Case]’ (2016). Originally installed at the FRAC Orleans as part of a retrospective exhibition, this particular spatial assembly is referred to by its authors as ‘an artifact of procedures set into motion’. The core component of this intervention is a large robot arm, equipped with a custom extruding head that ‘pumps’ recycled polyester plastic. Neither the sequence of movements carried out by the robot arm nor its extruding actions are pre-determined: they are partially randomised, and partially emerge from the geometric conditions of the installation itself. In order to achieve this, a series of 3D scanning devices situate in real time the position of the robot arm in relation to the

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Miguel Paredes Maldonado growing volumetric ‘heap’ of extruded polyester that it is producing. This positional relationship does, in turn, inform the subsequent movements of the robot, as well as its extruding action. Thus, the organisational outcome of this dynamic spatial intervention is fixed. On the contrary, it is predicated on an iterative ‘dialogue’ between the robot and its own formal productions, extended over a substantial period of time. Roche and Lacadee refer to this process as a gradual extraction of the underlying logics of the generative system at stake, which incorporates disruption, contingency and indetermination by design. /19 Unlike the accumulative urban plan of Karlsruhe, ‘[the virgin Case]’ is primarily a material intervention. Also, in contrast to the Karlsruhe plan, the locus of spatial organisation in this installation is not human agency, but rather a non-deterministic machinic process. / Fig. 02 TRANS-UTILITY AND THE REFUSAL TO PERFORM To avoid doubt, I do not claim that the two architectural interventions discussed above lack functionality. In fact, it could possibly be argued that both are actually highly functional—for their own purposes, and in different ways. Nonetheless (and returning to the dimensional parameters of trans-utility) it seems apparent that that they advance frameworks of organisation that do not ‘perform’ in alignment with function as would be expected in the context of classical Utility. Both examples are undoubtedly not static from the point of view of their development over time. But, how are they specifically situated in regards to the other two parameters of the phase space of trans-utility? From the point of view of its functional character, the collectively assembled urban plan of Karlsruhe can be regarded as a non-accumulative piece of work, insofar as it is constructed by fleeting actions of movement that are instantaneously recorded, and disappear immediately afterwards. The movements and actions carried out in the city by its inhabitants are continuously dissipated, leaving no physical traces at the end of the day. Further to this, in this assembled plan the parameter of ‘function’ as an index of use appears as an undetermined and serendipitous contingency: Human agencies do incorporate goals and intentions, but these are neither concurrent nor visible when observed at the urban scale. The spatial organisation that emerges from all these accumulated agencies is, therefore, not stratified in any hierarchical order. Whereas it is still possible to recognise some traces of the existing built masses when considering the urban plan as a whole, they appear as disjointed fragments that do not reflect any form of superimposed, hierarchical urban order.

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The productive processes carried out by the robotic arm in ‘[the virgin Case]’ follow a different pattern. In this case, the development of a formal organisation (the ‘heap’ of extruded plastic) determines the functional operation of the robot, insofar as the latter constitutes a ‘reaction’ to the accumulation of built mass in real time. In turn, this functional response ‘feeds back’ into the organisation of the extruded volume by adding to its mass, therefore completing a closed production loop. In terms of use and performativity—and drawing again from Bataille’s terminology—the processes carried out in ‘[the virgin Case]’ are accumulative, but not meaningfully conservative: Neither is the accumulation of any benefit to the global organisation of the piece, nor is the process improved in any way by accumulating matter—if anything, it is made more complicated and prone to collapse. Furthermore, and as was the case in the urban plan of Karlsruhe, the formal organisation of this spatial intervention is non-hierarchical: The action of accumulation produces an indistinct agglomeration of matter, where there are no elements of higher importance than others—in fact, there are no ‘elements’ to speak of. Furthermore, and considered in terms of causality, both examples operate in a non-linear manner inasmuch as they avoid enforcing univocal relationships between function and organisation. In the case of the Karlsruhe urban plan, it is not possible to speak of any distinct overarching alignment of functional and organisational productions at the scale of the city. Although the plan does indeed emerge from a multiplicity of smaller alignments operating at more granular, individual levels, there are no univocal linkages between specific functions and specific organisations. In other words: one single functional production can be the cause of many different formal organisations and, conversely, different productions can yield identical organisations. Thus, the condition of repeatability that characterises linear causation is not enforced here. This also holds true in ‘[the virgin Case]’, where organisation inflects function as much as function inflects organisation. In fact, as an architectural proposition ‘[the virgin Case]’ is fully predicated on this ever-evolving, generative dialogue between two parameters of trans-utility. To wrap up the argument presented in this chapter, it is necessary to offer an additional clarification: Neither of the two instances of architectural trans-utility presented above should be confused with examples of architectural flexibility (which constitutes the pursuit of momentary optimised alignments over time). On the contrary, in both of the instances I presented the terms that articulate organisation and function are simultaneously highly specific and explicitly unaligned towards recognisable goals. Both

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Miguel Paredes Maldonado interventions are constructed through the intertwining of multiple agencies, which feed back to one another over time, albeit with no manifest objectives. In so doing, the paradigm of use-value that I situated at the core of classical Utility is undermined, and a new category of architectures that ‘refuse to perform’ is insinuated. As a closing remark, I would like to argue that these non-performative architectural mechanisms constitute a serious opportunity to articulate a conceptual counterbalance to the majority of contemporary positions in architectural discourse, which seem to concern themselves exclusively with issues of optimization, conservation and streamlining.

Urban plan of Karlsruhe (DE), assembled by plotting 167 individual, geo-localised displacement logs. Metropolitan scale. Developed by the author. Fig. 01

‘[the virgin Case]’. Representation of robot trajectories process using informed by the readings of a 3D scan. Drawing by Devin Jernigan Fig. 02

REFUSING TO PERFORM / 01

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/ This is particularly apparent in recent works of architecture such as the Yokohama Port Terminal, by Foreign Office Architects (2002). In this project, the structural conditions that drove the spatial organisation of the building were translated into an explicit visual and tectonic language, which was manifested recursively and at all scales of the project: from urban siting to construction detail. / Vitruvius’ De Architectura notes that usefulness in a building is achieved through the convergence of two different conditions: disposition and decorum. This convergence translates into a hierarchical, univocal assembly of space and function. See: Vitruvius Pollio, M., On Architecture: Edited from the Harleian Manuscript 2767, trans. by Frank Granger, The Loeb Classical Library (London: W. Heinemann, 1931). / Vidler, A., The Writing of the Walls (London: Butterworth, 1987), p. 148. / de Quincy, Q., ‘Tipo’, Encyclopèdie Methodique, 1825. / This is clearly exemplified in Adolf Loos’ essay Ornament and Crime, originally published in 1913 in French. This attitude can also be extended to Le Corbusier’s dismissal of ‘craft’ as being obstructive to ‘pure’ use, and his subsequent adoption of the aesthetics of 20th century machinic functionality. / Tschumi, B., ‘Architecture and Limits’, in Architecture and disjunction (Boston: Massachussets Institute of Technology, 1994), pp. 102–118. / This alignment of function and organisation is clearly exemplified in the project for the Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1775). According to Anthony Vidler, this machine-inspired alignment of function and organisation is also the fundamental basis for the development of the modern notion of architectural ‘type’ towards the second half of the 18th century. See: Vidler, A., ‘The Third Typology’, in Rational Architecture: The Reconstruction of the European City (Brussels: Editions des Archives d’architecture moderne, 1978). / A simple way to articulate this difference in the context of architecture would be thinking of inhabiting a building (therefore activating its use-value) versus speculat-

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ing with it as a piece of real estate (which would constitute an accumulation of exchange-value). See: Marx, K., Theories of Surplus Value (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2000). / Writing about the relationships we establish with the objects of everyday life that surround us, Giorgio Agamben has presented a compelling explanation of how their functional performance is often redeployed as a moral imperative. See: Agamben, G., ‘Beau Brummell; or, The Appropriation of Unreality’, in Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 47–55. / I am referring here to the Platonist distinction between Ideas, Copies and Simulacra. For Plato, only Ideas are ‘true’ beings. Plato’s Ideas do not ‘represent’ any abstract notions: they are the ‘things’ themselves. See: Plato, Statesman, trans. by H. N. Fowler (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1921). / Bataille, G., The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy (New York: Zone Books, 1991). / Hollier, D., Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989). / This is what Anthony Vidler refers to as the Second Typology, which he situated at the heart of the Western Enlightenment. Nonetheless, it should be noted that Vidler argued that its machinic approach had eventually been superseded by a more self-referential disciplinary logic that adopted the city as both the main subject and the organisational unit of architecture. See: Vidler, A., ‘The Third Typology’, in Rational Architecture: The Reconstruction of the European City (Brussels: Editions des Archives d’architecture moderne, 1978). / Vidler, A., The Writing of the Walls (London: Butterworth, 1987). / Drawing from Anthony Vidler’s notion of the Second Typology, ‘Hierarchy’ is understood here as a compositional system based on the correspondence of parts, whereby those parts are assembled to articulate a single compositional whole. To this extent, a series of relational correspondences within the organization must be enforced. Each part must conform to a pre-determined proportional ratio, which in turn must be harmonised with the pro-

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/ 16 / 17 / 18 / 19

portional ratios of both the parts and the whole. The underlying principle of such a hierarchical organization is that this set of nested correspondences ‘adds up’ to a singular, legible compositional whole. / DeLanda, M., Assemblage Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). / Certeau, M. de and Rendall, S., The Practice of Everyday Life (Oakland: University of California Press, 1984). / Guattari, F., Schizoanalitic Cartographies (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). / Roche, F. and others, She Would Rather Do FICTION MAKER (FRAC Orleans, 2018). Roche, F. and Lacadee, C., ‘_1001_ Shadow ROOM / [the Virgin Case]’, 2016 [accessed 18 November 2019].

BIBLIOGRAPHY /

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/ Agamben, Giorgio, ‘Beau Brummell; or, The Appropriation of Unreality’, in Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 47–55 / Bataille, Georges, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy (New York: Zone Books, 1991) / Certeau, Michel de, and Steven Rendall, The Practice of Everyday Life (Oakland: University of California Press, 1984) / DeLanda, Manuel, Assemblage Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016) / Guattari, Félix, Schizoanalitic Cartographies (London: Bloomsbury, 2012) Hollier, Denis, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989) / Marx, Karl, Theories of Surplus Value (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2000) Plato, Statesman, trans. by H. N. Fowler (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1921) de Quincy, Quatremère, ‘Tipo’, Encyclopèdie Methodique, 1825 / Roche, Francois, Matias Del Campo, Sandra Manninger, Ezio Blasetti, Danielle WIllems, Roland Snooks, and others, She Would Rather Do FICTION MAKER (FRAC Orleans, 2018) / Roche, François, and Camille Lacadee, ‘_1001_ Shadow ROOM / [the Virgin Case]’, 2016 [accessed 18 November 2019] / Tschumi, Bernard, ‘Architecture and Limits’, in Architecture and disjunction (Boston: Massachussets Institute of Technology, 1994), pp. 102–118 / Vidler, Anthony, ‘The Third Typology’, in Rational Architecture: The Reconstruction of the European City (Brussels: Editions des Archives d’architecture moderne, 1978) / Vidler, Anthony, The Writing of the Walls (London: Butterworth, 1987) / Vitruvius Pollio, Marco, On Architecture: Edited from the Harleian Manuscript 2767, trans. by Frank Granger, The Loeb Classical Library (London: W. Heinemann, 1931)

Ruth Sonderegger

USELESSNESS AND PURPOSELESSNESS: On central norms and imperatives of Western aesthetics / 01

01/ INTRODUCTORY REMARKS AND PROVISIONAL CLAIMS Let me start with some indication as to why I began to engage with the emergence of the idea of aesthetic uselessness in Western Europe and why I think that studying the beginnings of its success story is also relevant for the present. After quite some years of giving lecture courses on the history of philosophical aesthetics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna I began to wonder why such theory emerged, or rather, is said to have been invented in the eighteenth century. A myriad of aesthetic treatises and rule books had been put together before, but usually by artists or artisans themselves, not by philosophers. Moreover, until the end of the eighteenth century, there was no such thing as art, art theory or aesthetic theory in the (collective) singular but a plurality of arts and rulebooks for each of them. Also, rulebooks presupposed that artistic skills could be taught and learned. With what is described as the invention of philosophical aesthetics, or, more precisely, Western philosophical aesthetics in the eighteenth century, however, production was no longer theorized. Rather, artistic production was left to geniuses and hence considered to be beyond learning and the only ones that needed to be (endlessly) educated and theorized were the recipients of art and their taste. Taste, on the other hand, as it has been theorized in Westernized aesthetics since the eighteenth century, has everything to do with autonomy and uselessness. I would even venture to say that the two most important and mutually intertwined elements of the new Western aesthetic regime that emerged in the eighteenth century

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Ruth Sonderegger are its claims to aesthetic autonomy and uselessness. These claims swiftly lead to the divorce of art from craft, science, ethics, politics, and—most importantly—from economics—or so it was made to seem. For, in what follows, I will argue that the emergence of both aesthetic autonomy and uselessness did, in fact, serve a purpose: that of supporting the implementation of capitalism and, more particularly, the purpose of legitimating violent divisions along racist, sexist, and classist hierarchies that enabled the newly emerging capitalist order to come into existence. To use a Marxist term, philosophical aesthetics contributed to ‘primitive accumulation’. /02 Marx uses this term to refer to an ensemble of violent political as well as legal measures, but also beliefs and practices that jointly contributed to naturalize the newly imposed differences between the rich and the poor, between paid male productive and unpaid female reproductive labour; but also the differences between human beings that were racialized, enslaved and then treated as ‘cattle’ and ‘cargo’ on legal grounds as opposed to bourgeois subjects whose ultimate norm was autonomy. /03 It was only in the wake of primitive accumulation, which started in England at the turn of the seventeenth century, that it became possible for some to own means of production, seemingly because of their industriousness and striving, while on the other hand there were those who had no other option but to sell their bodies, i.e. their labour power. In contrast to the philosopher and economist Adam Smith, who claimed that industriousness was the natural reason for the affluence of the owners of the means of production, Karl Marx insisted that the division between these owners, on the one hand, and those who had to labour or die, on the other was violently imposed. According to Marx, primitive accumulation was achieved for the most part by a re-ordering of the English rent system that, until then, had allowed a large part of the poorer parts of society to support themselves as peasants on cheaply rented land. After the reorganization of the rent system to the benefit of big landowners, however, the peasantry could no longer pay the rent for the land they had worked throughout their life. As a result, the peasantry was forced to flee to the colonies as indentured workers or to move to the emerging capitalist centres at home in order to sell their bodies for survival in the newly established factories. Very often the new jobs found by these former peasants could not prevent pauperization or even death, as the wages were impossibly low. Supplementing Marx’s arguments I will try to show that the invention of philosophical aesthetics also played a role in the process of primitive accumulation, namely

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through this discipline’s contribution to creating and naturalizing divisions between allegedly different human beings; most notably racialized differences that, in their turn, were conducive to the establishment of the bourgeois class and its privileges. On the other hand, aesthetic taste in general and the pleasure of uselessness (as an essential feature of taste) in particular were also invoked by capitalism’s profiteers as a means of mitigating the violence that spread rapidly in the wake of the onslaught of capitalism. Here I am thinking of the violence of relentless profit-seeking, which seemed to destroy all ethical and moral relations and, at the same time, communities no less than the emerging nation states. For example, in his letters on aesthetic education Friedrich Schiller recommended aesthetic experience and aesthetic education against the destructive forces of capitalism. /04 At the same time, however, he wished to confine the soothing power of aesthetic experiences to bourgeois subjects. This is why Simon Gikandi, who has published widely on the relationship between slavery and the emergence of European aesthetic theory in the eighteenth century, writes in his Slavery and the Culture of Taste: ‘Still, as major scholars of the order of art in the eighteenth century have noted, the category of taste and the idea of the aesthetic in general arose as part of a concerted attempt to stabilize the potentially excessive and disruptive aspects of commerce. […] it was precisely because the culture of taste was being asked to perform the task of harmonizing culture at odds with the lived experiences of modern society that it [i.e. taste, R. S.] could not exist outside the pressures of everyday life and by extension its materiality.’ /05 To summarise, my hypothesis is that aesthetics and aesthetic uselessness played a pivotal role both in the process of the original enforcement of capitalism and, later on, in mitigating its devastatingly brutalizing effects. In the light of this, I will revisit the intertwined beginnings of capitalism and philosophical aesthetics, i.e. the period in which primitive accumulation first came to fruition and when its brutal effects became more than apparent. In so doing, I wish to warn against embracing aesthetic uselessness in and of itself as an anti-capitalist or emancipatory gesture. However, this does not amount to saying that uselessness cannot be put to (self-)critical use. I will return to this at the very end of this essay. 02/ THE EMERGENCE OF WESTERN AESTHETICS But let me now jump to the eighteenth century in order to summarize briefly the most prominent changes effected by the invention of philosophical aesthetics. This

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Ruth Sonderegger should also serve to explain why I believe that there is a strong link between the emergence of philosophical aesthetics with its emphasis on uselessness and primitive accumulation. 01 ) Aesthetic theory, particularly in its Kantian version which is to be my focus, contributed to what is called the modern division of society into seemingly autonomous societal spheres. Such division implies the depoliticization of all of these spheres because even the area of politics becomes ideological. Conceived as an autonomous, i.e. enhanced domain, politics implies that it should stay out of the fields of e. g. art or economics, /06 which are said to have their own, apolitical rules. Societies

that do not buy into such differentiation are consequently regarded as primitive. 02 ) Eighteenth century aesthetic theory functions as an apparatus that powerfully contributes to the establishment of the supremacy of the bourgeois subject, above all the white male bourgeois subject, which is distinguished by its aesthetic taste—‘taste’ being the master category that sutures French, British and German debates. /07 Making taste their outstanding characteristic also contributed to glossing over their accumulated wealth (as a distinguishing feature). 03 ) The underside of the construction of such superiority of subjects with taste is not only that it reinforces hierarchical class and gender division, but also (and I wish to emphasise this under-researched aspect) that European eighteenth century aesthetic theories play a pivotal role in the invention of racial thinking. A racial way of thinking that could conceive of enslaved humans as ‘cargo’, ‘cattle’ or ‘tools’ and hence make possible the outsourcing of capitalist violence to the colonized parts of the world. There is, for instance, hardly any aesthetician in the eighteenth century who has not written on the colour and perception of the Black. /08 04 ) The aesthetic regime invented by aesthetic theory in the eighteenth century provided ideal opportunities to obscure classist, sexist and colonial violence and to whitewash the profits resulting from such violence so that expropriation, extractivism, exploitation and downright mass killings could appear as nothing but charity work. The newly established sphere of autonomous art and its emerging institutions, most notably the art market, provided ample opportunities to invest capitalist profit in something seen as innocuous, if not indeed liberating and emancipatory. For instance, Carmen Mörsch’s research on the history of art education in Britain has convincingly shown that such seemingly emancipatory practices began in the foundling hospitals of 18th century London, where pauperized street children were transformed—by

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way of artworks, it should be said—into civilized beings ready for capitalist exploitation. However, the artworks on display in such hospitals—loan items provided by the charitable bourgeoisie—were also regularly shown to the public in order to sell them to emerging collectors. In other words: what looked like almsgiving to the foundling hospitals was an apparatus used to whitewash profit and, incidentally, to establish the British art market. One of the former foundling hospitals researched by Carmen Mörsch is today known today as the Whitechapel Gallery in London. /09 05 ) Finally, to those with access to art aesthetic theory promised freedom, autonomy and emancipation, a soothing timeout in the most brutal of times; times, that is, when bourgeois fear of insurrections, not only in the colonies but also at home, was pervasive. The acceptance of white supremacy seemed to falter somewhat; not least because the abolitionist movement was gathering pace. In this context, the possession of aesthetic taste became a kind of assurance that the bourgeois subject was, indeed, above both the corrupt feudal subject and the allegedly violent villains in the colonies and on the streets of English cities. In a later essay, when my research in this field has advanced further, I will prove my preliminary claims in greater detail by discussing a wide range of treaties, international and indeed intercontinental debates, as well as national peculiarities. However, I will try to substantiate my claims by commenting on Kant’s Critique of Judgment /10—not least because uselessness figures prominently in Kant’s most influential aesthetic theory. In the wake of the Critique of Judgment aesthetics became an official part of philosophy, which previously had consisted solely of theoretical and practical philosophy. 03 / KANT’S AESTHETIC THEORY OF USELESSNESS After having clearly stated that matters of beauty need to be categorically separated from questions of knowledge and morality, /11 i.e. after his defence of the modern division between seemingly autonomous spheres of society, Kant reconstructs two transcendental presuppositions or characteristics which, he maintains, are implied in all aesthetic judgments: according to Kant aesthetic judgments are both disinterested, due to the uselessness and purposelessness of aesthetic experiences, and universally valid. In other words, if I judge an object to be beautiful (in the Kantian sense), I don’t want to eat, touch, buy, or possess it. Moreover, I assume that all other human beings will agree with my judgement.

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Much could be said and indeed much has been written about the provocation inherent in the principle of disinterestedness, which is also a principle of abstinence from any use and, also, about the exclusion that this principle advocates on seemingly transcendental grounds. Kant’s account of aesthetic judgments not only dismisses all forms of sensualism but also any kind of epistemological or moral improvement through aesthetic experiences although aesthetic experiences had been so important in English debates about taste of which Kant was well aware. Moreover, the principle of disinterestedness presupposes aesthetic subjects whose basic needs are satisfied, who are beyond any desires to use the aesthetic object, and who have ample spare time. Those, on the other hand, who suffer from hunger like the Iroquois Sachem, to whom Kant refers in § 2, might find it difficult to contemplate a bountiful table. /12 Moreover, there is vast amount of research that argues that the concept of aesthetic disinterestedness is more a reaction to the growth of an affluent bourgeois upper class with plenty of spare time than an ingenious invention. /13 In contrast to the principle of disinterestedness, which implies abstinence from use, the second feature of aesthetic judgements, their universality, seems to be less hierarchical than Kantian disinterestedness or indeed even the sheer opposite of it. All the more so as it seems, (at least at the beginning of Kant’s discussion of the universality of aesthetic judgements), that the universality in question is guaranteed by the mere fact that nothing but a certain relation between the human cognitive faculties of imagination and understanding (their anti-hierarchical, a-teleological free play) is involved in aesthetic experiences. To put it differently: Aesthetic judgements free of any further interests and all desires to use their object depend on nothing but a beautiful object and the human faculties of understanding and imagination. And as nothing but the human cognitive faculties that I share with all human beings are involved, my judgment, or so Kant seems to argue, ought to be everybody else’s too. To quote Kant: ‘[…] a person who describes something as beautiful insists that everyone ought to give the object in question his approval […]. We are suitors for agreement from everyone else, because we are fortified with a ground common to all.’ /14 According to such an account of aesthetic judgments, taste does not presuppose any special knowledge or education except the cognitive faculties of imagination and understanding. This seems to open up the realm of aesthetics in a truly emancipatory, indeed unheard-of, way to all human beings. However, Kant proceeds

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by discussing the problem that we might deceive ourselves as far as hidden or not so hidden interests, desires to use etc. are concerned and mistakenly assume that nothing but our cognitive faculties were involved when we judged an object as beautiful. Therefore, a certain test is needed in order to find out whether nothing other than imagination and understanding are involved in aesthetic experiences and the judgments that ensue from them. The test that Kant proposes goes by the name of sensus communis or ‘a public sense’. /15 It consists of judging a potentially beautiful object not only from one’s own perspective but also from the perspective of ‘everyone else, in order, as it were, to weigh [the] judgment with the collective reason of mankind, and thereby avoid the illusion arising from subjective and personal conditions which could readily be taken for objective, an illusion that would exert a prejudicial influence upon its judgment.’ /16 When Kant first refers to the sensus communis in § 22 he leaves it open as to whether it is an intrinsic part of the cognitive faculties of imagination and understanding (that all human beings share) or something to be learned in the course of an individual life or through the process he calls civilization. However, the question left unanswered in § 22 is taken up again in § 41, where Kant clearly advocates a sensus communis that is the result of a learning process which separates ‘merely […] human being[s]’ from ‘a human being refined in his own way (the beginning of civilization)’. /17 As in § 2 it is the Iroquois who is used to exemplify what it means to be ‘merely a human being’ and not know the refinements of civilization, taste, purposeless and uselessness. Here is Kant: ‘And thus, no doubt, at first only charms, e.g. colours for painting oneself (roucou among the Caribs and cinnabar among the Iroquois), flowers, sea-shells, beautifully coloured feathers, then, in the course of time, also forms (as in canoes, apparel, etc.), which convey no gratification, i.e. the delight of enjoyment, become of moment in society and attract considerable interest. Eventually, when civilization has reached its height it makes this work of communication almost the main business of refined inclination, and the entire value of sensations is judged by the degree to which they permit universal communication. At this stage, then, even where the pleasure which each one has in an object is insignificant and possesses of itself no conspicuous interest, still the idea of its universal communicability almost indefinitely augments its value.’ /18 The interleaving of aesthetic education with a racialised idea of civilization that § 41 advocates is problematic enough, however the next and last paragraph on

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Ruth Sonderegger taste as sensus communis argues in favour of an even more appalling division. Instead of only differentiating between stages of the civilizational progress this section excludes some human beings from the process of acquiring taste as interest in pure formal and useless beauty altogether. For Kant writes: ‘But, first of all, this immediate interest in the beauty of nature’—the epitome of formal beauty—‘is not in fact common. It is peculiar to those whose habits of thought are already trained to the good or else are eminently susceptible to such training’. /19 Kant’s concluding remarks on the principle of sensus communis thus imply that some human beings are already refined, i.e. have taste and a sense for uselessness, whereas others are, at least, susceptible to being trained towards refinement. However, there is a third group of beings that remain completely insusceptible. In arguing in favour of such division, Kant’s seemingly emancipatory steps towards a conception of aesthetics that is no longer tied to privileges of class, gender or race does not (despite the so-called critical turn that divides his early writings from the three critiques) go beyond his earlier and notorious essay Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764). In this essay it is women who are said to be susceptible to acquiring taste as sensus communis (in the future), whereas Black people are excluded altogether. ‘The N*s of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the ridiculous. Mr. Hume challenges anyone to adduce a single example where a N* has demonstrated talents, and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who have been transported elsewhere from their countries, although very many of them have been set free, nevertheless not one has ever been found who has accomplished something great in art or science or shown any other praiseworthy quality […].’ /20 Apart from the fact, which I will return to later, that Hume and Kant knew of Black writers and philosophers but obviously deemed their achievements trifling one cannot but conclude that the idea of taste that Kant and Hume advocate is the privilege of white, well-educated men, i.e. of human beings like themselves. To put it more paradoxically: The test of the universalizability of aesthetic judgments, i.e. the seemingly cosmopolitan attitude of thinking from the perspective of everybody else, appears as a privilege of the favoured few white bourgeois gentlemen. I am even inclined to say that the sensus communis is located at that very point in the line of argument of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, where Kant pronounces the harshest divisions and exclusions; /21 divisions that elevate men of taste and their sense for uselessness.

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On the other hand, however, the said divisions condemn millions of people to the status of mere tools to use and abuse for profit. In other words: those who use and abuse nature and other human beings most relentlessly are, according the Kantian aesthetic theory, the only ones who have acquired a taste for formal, useless beauty. This is why Kant’s account of taste or sensus communis works towards closing the in-group of the subjects of taste as well as the valorisation of these very subjects. This is nothing other than a reinforcement of the division that Adam Smith called primitive accumulation whereas Marx had rightfully spoken of a supposedly [‘angebliche’] primitive accumulation. In a virtually Smithian way Kant no less than Hume and, five years later, Friedrich Schiller, proclaims that taste is the result of striving and learning. However, on closer inspection, it is clear that the taste assigned to the happy few is the result of the brutal exclusion of a myriad of aesthetic practices and practitioners. One would also have to speak here of the exclusion of folk arts and the entire female readership who were accused by Schiller and many other aestheticians of being addicted to novels and identificatory ways of reception that contravene the rule of uselessness. /22 One would also need to further elaborate on the fact that theories of (primarily gentlemen’s) taste revolving around uselessness were invented at the very moment when the ethical and political integrity of the new rich began to be publicly questioned. 04 / PRELIMINARY CONCLUSIONS AND AN OVERTURE FOR ALTERNATIVES What I have said so far prompts the question as to whether art theory’s emancipatory promises, which are invoked to this very day, are nothing but a proof of aesthetic ideology; also the question as to whether these promises are anything more than a tool to reproduce and reinforce the existing division of the social—directed against the lower classes, non-male genders as well as non-Westernized subjects in general; subjects—or rather objects—, that is, that are first expropriated in order then to be blamed for having no sense for aesthetic objects in their uselessness and purposelessness. But why, then, is art and aesthetic theory so often credited with emancipatory power, even by contemporary theorists as critical as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Jacques Rancière? Why would these contemporaries engage with the legacy of Kant and Schiller particularly and place so much hope in them? /23 In spite of the fact that there is ample evidence that Kant and Schiller’s ideas were not mere visions but rather materialized into powerful, indeed violent institu-

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tions and processes of subjectivation within only a few years, those who have been partly or entirely excluded still emerge—against all odds. The poet Phillis Wheatley (1753—1784), a contemporary of Kant, might be a good case in point. Wheatley was the first African American female poet who authored a book. Entitled Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral her book was released in London in 1773, at a time, it should be remembered, when most African Americans were condemned to death if caught reading or writing. Brought from West Africa on the slave ship called The Phillis, Phillis Wheatley was sold to John Wheatley in Boston who named her after the said ship. John Wheatley allowed Phillis, his enslaved housemaid, to receive the same education as his own children. And when, at the age of twelve, she appeared to be fluent in in Greek and Latin, the Wheatleys began to show off Phillis’ achievements in public poetry performances and supported her, albeit in a selfish way. /24 Despite the support and protection of her owners, Phillis Wheatley had to prove in court that she was the author of her poems and was actually capable or reading and writing Greek and Latin. At the same time, however, she was lauded for her unique combination of ancient rhetorical figures and metres with a proto-romantic style and it is not for nothing that the English romanticists held her in very high esteem. /25 One of her most famous poems is entitled On Imagination and gives ample evidence of her mastery of classical metres with almost psychedelic whirls and flows of colour and light. However, the stark contrast between the poem’s opening and concluding lines could only be understood by contemporary readers as a fierce criticism of Phillis Wheatley’s social position as well as that of so many other enslaved people. On Imagination Thy various works, imperial queen, we see, How bright their forms! how deck’d with pomp by thee! Thy wond’rous acts in beauteous order stand, And all attest how potent is thine hand. [...] Her cheeks all glowing with celestial dies, While a pure stream of light o’erflows the skies. The monarch of the day I might behold, And all the mountains tipt with radiant gold, But I reluctant leave the pleasing views,

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Which Fancy dresses to delight the Muse [= imagination, R. S.]; Winter austere forbids me to aspire, And northern tempests damp the rising fire; They chill the tides of Fancy’s flowing sea, Cease then, my song, cease the unequal lay. /26 Phillis Wheatley’s remarkable artistic achievements are not my only reason for mentioning her as an instance of aesthetic self-emancipation and empowerment by a person denied access to the art-field by Hume, Kant and many others aestheticians’ theories. Wheatley’s way of successfully putting art to her own use, namely by making a living and finding refuge in the imagination of an alternative world are equally impressive. However, I bring her into play, first of all, because Kant knew of Wheatley. Kant held the natural scientist, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752—1840) in very high esteem and wrote in a letter to this physician and anthropologist that he found his Beyträge zur Naturgeschichte (1790) invaluable. /27 Blumenbach was also an abolition activist in Germany and one of the reasons why he examined questions of ‘race’, albeit in a rather strange way, was that he wanted to prove that Black people could become as excellent scientists and artists as whites. As proof of this he mentions, amongst many others, Phillis Wheatley, who was not only famous in the 1770s and 80s in England and its North American colonies but also in Germany. This makes the fact that Kant held Black people and their artistic abilities in such low esteem even more questionable and the excuse offered that he was just a child of his time seems rather lame. But let me return to Phillis Wheatley. In light of what I briefly mentioned about her achievements, one might be inclined to surmise that her artistic practice mainly displays how her aesthetic education is the outcome of an adaption to the canonical standards of bourgeois high art. However, against the backdrop of such legitimate objections it is important to bear in mind that Wheatley did not simply reiterate and reinforce an existing canon of high art. In fact, she challenged the canon and the purported autonomy of the bourgeois art institutions of her day. Wheatley wrote poems and grave inscriptions for money; she fought for payment for female poets and pioneered in making a modest living as a writer. In other words, she questioned the prevalent understanding of the autonomy of the art field that was in the making in Wheatley’s day; /28 an autonomy, that is, which nobody defended more fiercely and helped to come into existence than Kant.

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Ruth Sonderegger By emphasizing Wheatley’s engagement with the means and conditions of production of art it is not my intention to belittle the fact that Wheatley also added new form and content to the aesthetic canon. Rather, I wish to argue that her artistic innovations actually cannot be detached from her political engagement with the means of aesthetic production. Wheatley invented new worlds in light of which the conditions of her most precarious life were both criticized and transcended. She saw such aesthetic refuge as essential for both survival and critique, which, in its turn, implies a critique of Kantian cornerstones such as aesthetic disinterestedness, uselessness and aesthetic autonomy. However, such praise of imagination should not blind us to the possibility that even the most provocative inventions like those of Wheatley can easily be aestheticized and celebrated as sheer uselessness and integrated into a seemingly ahistorical canon. Neither can this ever be excluded—it is rather part and parcel of art as the social institution that Kant and Schiller, amongst others, shaped with their conceptualizations—nor does such danger diminish the achievements of Wheatley and countless others. After all, the transformative and critical power of her poems can be activated in ever-new, unforeseeable contexts. Imaginary worlds, oftentimes bordering the useless, in particular appear to be located on the fine line between a downright aestheticist denial of the brutalities of the here and now, on the one hand, and preparations for radical alternatives on the other. Let me conclude by making some final remarks on aesthetic uselessness. Although aesthetic uselessness is clearly a reaction to an emerging world ruled by capitalist profit, use and abuse, aesthetic theory swiftly transformed this compensatory, indeed ideological reaction into eternal if not ontological traits of art and its reception; most notably in the writings of Kant and their popularization through Schiller. And, what is more, to this very day aesthetic theorists defend aesthetic uselessness together with aesthetic autonomy without any reservations. In the German-speaking world this is the case in the writings of Christoph Menke, for example, who in his Die Kraft der Kunst /29 wrote that the power of art ought not to be linked to any purpose, be

it knowledge, politics or critique. Another case in point is Jacques Rancière who, lately, has defended aesthetic autonomy more fiercely than ever. /30 The belief that art is beyond profit, function, or use is also mirrored in more mundane claims, frequently made by art-lovers and collectors, such as that art has no price, i.e. cannot be expressed in terms of money.

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The aesthetic theorist however, who is probably most famous for praising the uselessness of art, is Theodor W. Adorno who wrote: „Soweit von Kunstwerken eine gesellschaftliche Funktion sich prädizieren läßt, ist es ihre Funktionslosigkeit“ (ÄT 336). /31 And yet, Adorno always emphasized that ‚Funktionslosigkeit‘ (purposelessness) was not an eternal feature of art but only of art in times of high capitalism, when each and everything is functionalized and can be expressed in terms of monetary worth. Moreover, he took into consideration the paradox that the critique inherent in artistic uselessness can only be issued and enjoyed by those who enjoy the privilege of possessing the time and money required for uselessness. In light of this, the critical or at least provocative idler—be it an artwork, an artist, or an activist—remains, after all, a problem. Adorno even went so far as claiming that the paradox of aesthetic uselessness is a sort of a proof that the field of art as a whole has lost its critical power because it has been transformed into a well fenced-in reserve (Naturschutzpark) for a critique doomed to remain impotent. /32 Adorno did not consider that, time and time again, artists and cultural workers like Phillis Wheatley and many others did put aesthetic practices to subversive use by leaving uselessness and autonomy behind them. Adorno himself, in contrast, was not capable of thinking beyond the artistic autonomy that has indeed become so thoroughly, indeed perversely, institutionalized in the wake of Kant and Schiller that its purportedly subversive claim to uselessness is more than questionable. /33

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/ This essay is based on research, some of which I have already published in German. See: Ruth Sonderegger, ‘Kants Ästhetik im Kontext des kolonial gestützten Kapitalismus. Ein Fragment zur Entstehung der philosophischen Ästhetik als Sensibilisierungsprojekt’, in: Liebsch. B., (ed.), Sensibilität der Gegenwart. Wahrnehmung, Ethik und politische Sensibilisierung im Kontext westlicher Gewaltgeschichte. Sonderheft 17 der Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (Hamburg, 2018), pp. 109–125. / Marx, K., Capital. A Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 2015), vol. 1, p. 508; online version: https://

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/ 03

/ 04

/ 05 / 06

/ 07

/ 08

/ 09

/ 10 / 11 / 12

www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/ download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf / For the division of the genders that is only randomly mentioned in Marx, see Federici, S., Caliban and the Witch. Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004). / Schiller F., trans. Snell, R., On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (New Haven and Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1954). / Gikandi, S., Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton Univ. Press, 2011), p. 59. / Cf. Buckel S. and Martin D., ‘Aspekte einer gesellschaftskritischen Theorie der Politik’, in: Bohmann/Sörensen (eds.): Kritische Theorie der Politik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2019), pp. 243–266. / In 1755 a scholarly society in Edinburgh set up an essay competition, in the context of which such notorious texts as Hume’s ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ and chapter 25 of Lord Kames’ Elements of Criticism, entitled ‘Standard of Taste’, were drafted. Both essays can be accessed online: https:// web.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/361r15.html; http://lf-oll.s3.amazonaws.com/titles/ 1431/1252-02_LFeBk.pdf; Kernbauer, E., Der Platz des Publikums. Modelle für Kunstöffentlichkeit im 18. Jahrhundert (Köln/ Weimar/Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2011). / Gilman, S. L., ‘The Figure of the Black in German Aesthetic Theory’, in: Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 8, no. 4 (Summer, 1975), pp. 373–39. / Cf. Mörsch,C., Die Bildung der Anderen mit Kunst: Ein Beitrag zu einer postkolonialen Geschichte der Kulturellen Bildung (= Kunstpädagogische Positionen 35), ed. by Sabisch, A., Meyer, T., Lüber, H., Sturm, E., (Universitätsdruckerei Hamburg, 2017), (http://kunst.uni-koeln.de/_kpp_daten/ pdf/KPP35_Moersch.pdf); Mörsch, C., Die Bildung der A_n_d_e_r_e_n durch Kunst (Wien: Zaglossus, 2019). / Kant, I. Critique of Judgement (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2007). / Kant, Critique, § 1. / ‘[...] the Iroquois were represented in Dutch, French, British, and U.S. colonial discourses as a politically savvy and militarily brutal empire. This dual interpretation of the Iroquois as a politically ad-

/ 13

/ 14 / 15 / 16 / 17 / 18 / 19 / 20

/ 21

/ 22 / 23

/ 24

/ 25 / 26

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vanced federation but a socially barbaric or underdeveloped people persists with remarkable consistence, continuing to appear in the twentieth century.’ Kazanjian, D., The Colonizing Trick. National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minneapolis/London, 2003), p. 156. / Cf. e. g. Woodmansee, M., The Author, Art, and the Market. Rereading the History of Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). / Kant, Critique, § 19, p. 68. / Kant, Critique, § 40, p. 123. / Kant, Critique, § 40, p. 123. / Kant, Critique, p. 126. / Kant, Critique, p. 127. / Kant, Critique, p. 130. / Kant, I., Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings (Cambridge: University Press, 2011), pp. 11–62, p. 58 f. Kant here refers to David Hume who at that time was famous for similar claims. Cf. editors’ fn. 82, in: ibid., p. 83. / Shusterman, R., ‘On the scandal of taste: social privilege as nature in the aesthetic theories of Hume and Kant’, in: Mattick, Paul Jr. (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics and the Reconstruction of Art (Cambridge et al., Cambridge University Press 1993), pp. 96–119, p. 110 and p. 117. / Cf. Woodmansee, M., The Author, Art, and the Market pp. 57–86. / Cf. Rancière, J. ‘The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes. Emplotments of Autonomy and Heteronomy’, in: New Left Review, 14, 2002, pp. 133–151; Rancière, J., The Politics of Aesthetics. The Distribution of the Sensible (London et al.: Bloomsbury Press, 2005); Spivak, G. C, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Harvard University Press, 2013). / Zuck Raineri, R.,‘Poetic Economics: Phillis Wheatley and the Production of the Black Artist in the Early Atlantic World’, in: Ethnic Studies Review, vol. 33, 2010, pp. 143–168. / Shields, J. C., Phillis Wheatley and the Romantics (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2010). / Shields, J. (ed.) The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers (New York / Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), p. 65 ff. / Cf. chapter 5 ‘Kant and Wheatley’, in:

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/ 29 / 30 / 31

/ 32 / 33

Shields, Phillis Wheatley and the Romantics, pp. 85–95. / Cf. Shields, J. C., Phillis Wheatley’s Poetics of Liberation. Backgrounds and Contexts (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2008). / Menke, C., Die Kraft der Kunst (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2013), p. 11. / See fn. 23. / Adorno, Th. W., Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), p. 336. (‘Insofar as a social function can be predicated for artworks, it is their purposelessness.’), Adorno, Th. W., Aesthetic Theory. Newly translated, edited, and with a translator’s introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor ( New York: Continuum, 1997), p. 297.) / Adorno, Th. W., Ästhetik (1958/59) (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009), p. 83. / For more on this cf. Ruth Sonderegger, ‘Für eine Episteme sinnlicher Praktiken jenseits der kunsttheoretischen Ästhetik’, in: Dellheim, J., Demirović, A., Pühl,K., Sablowski , Th., and Solty, I. (eds.), Auf den Schultern von Marx (Münster: Verlag Westfälisches Dampfboot, forthcoming).

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USELESS, AND THEN DANGEROUS: Public Space and Property in 20th century British Modernist Housing EXPROPRIATING THE EXPROPRIATORS At the start of the third novel of her ‘Bristol trilogy’, Love (1971), Angela Carter writes about her mentally disturbed heroine’s experience of an unnamed municipal park: ‘In the system of correspondences by which she interpreted the world around her, this park had a special significance, and she walked around its overgrown paths with nervous pleasure... An eighteenth-century landscape gardener planned the park to surround a mansion which had been pulled down long ago and now the once harmonious artificial wilderness, randomly dishevelled by time, spread its green tangles across the high shoulder of a hill only a stone’s throw from a busy road that ran through city dockland. All that remained of the former mansion were a few architectural accessories now the property of the city museum. There was a stable built on the lines of a miniature Parthenon, housing for Houyhnhms rather than natural horses; the pillared portico, especially effective under the light of a full moon, never to be entered again by any horse, functioned only as a pure piece of design, a focal point in the green composition on the south side of the hill... these pretty whimsies were kept securely locked for fear of the despoliation of vandals but their presence still performed its original role, transforming the park into a premeditated theatre where the romantic imagination could act out any performance it chose amongst settings of classic harmony or crabbed quaintness... the presence all around of the sprawling, turbulent city, however muffled its noises, lent such haunted, breathless quiet an unnatural quality.’ /01

USELESS, AND THEN DANGEROUS What this paragraph does is capture the particular strangeness of the transformation of a private landscape of power into a public landscape, owned by a mundane local authority and slightly ineptly looked after, and used in ways that are apparently far from those intended. A stoned plebeian young woman is wandering around somewhere made by some Uvedale Price or Capability Brown, now encroached by docks and high rises, and she is making it her own, in her head. The park is a microcosm of a place that has fallen out of joint, where people do not know their place, and where the old systems of power and privilege have started to falter—but haven’t fallen yet. The meanings that were attributed to those spaces when they were designed as the places for aristocrats, magnates, industrialists and successful landowning spivs to enjoy themselves have been supplanted by those that her damaged heroine imparts to them—they have become her own private/public dreamspace, where the municipal ownership and her own vivid subjectivity uneasily coexist and clash. Carter later described the protagonists of this novel as ‘not quite the children of Marx and Coca-Cola, more the children of Nescafe and the Welfare State’ /02, and this park is without doubt a Welfare State space. Usually, these are presented as having emerged ex nihilo, whether positively or negatively, but very frequently they are overdetermined by what was there before and by how oligarchic spaces have been adapted and re-imagined. Private gardens, hunting grounds, forests and productive fields have become public parks, interstitial spaces between housing estates, and the backdrops of New Towns. Everywhere in Britain has spaces like this—the result of a twentieth century where a partial transfer of power from landed, oligarchic rule to democratic rule started to take place, but was never completed, a shift that has substantially been reversed in the last few decades. Because so many of us know these spaces so well, it’s incumbent on us to work out where they had come from, what they were for, what the ideas behind them were, and why they have been presented as alienating—precisely the opposite of what was expected. An honest reactionary like the journalist Simon Jenkins, for instance, recommends the (very probably non-aristocratic) users of his guides to oligarchic houses to visit those that are still owned and lived in by actual oligarchs, because they preserve ‘atmosphere’. /03 There is for Jenkins something very uncomfortable about stately homes that have been municipalised, run as museums, wholly publicly owned, and have become ‘ours’—what happens then is that what Walter Benjamin would have called their ‘aura’, their intangible miasma of pastness, has disappeared, and they can be judged and experienced

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Owen Hatherley coldly, without mystique—a mystique that defenders of the existing order are usually keen to maintain. Here we will try and understand these uncanny spaces and defend them against those who would reverse the shift in power they represented. To realise the radicalism of the idea, now familiar, of the ‘tower in the park’, one could turn to a 1940 popular paperback, Town Planning, by Thomas Sharp. This involves a plea for monumentality, as against the vague and straggling landscapes of suburbia, on the following grounds: ‘while the monumental set-piece of the autocrat’s town was offensive in the past because it had little or no relation to the lives of the citizens, the use of the striking vista in a town that was truly planned as a communal home would be a joy and an inspiration to those citizens because it was genuinely theirs. /04 This is encapsulated in his sketched image of a modern slab of ‘Flats in a

Country Park’, which he presents as an alternative to the blandness of conventional suburban development—and to the banal capitalist reckoning behind it. ‘What happens nowadays, if such a place does not just go to dereliction and ruin, is that some estate development company buys it up lock, stock and barrel, and proceeds to carve it into bits for “ideal little homes”, each with its own little garden. And so, in a week or two there perishes a beauty, in trees and greensward, that it has taken a hundred or two hundred years to bring about, and in place of that beauty we get “a scrabble of ugly pettiness over the face of the land”. Yet by building a block of flats on the site of the old mansion all the people who are now housed in their petty little scrabble could enjoy the park as their own majestic common garden. What an inspiring ideal, indeed, this is!—that on the site of a mansion, from whose windows one solitary family and its dozen retainers once enjoyed the unique beauty of an English country park, there should rise the communal home of five hundred or five thousand people sharing that beauty as their own and at the same time maintaining an essential feature of the English countryside for others to look at and enjoy.’ /05 Sharp’s imaginary ‘slab-in-the-country’ is very probably based on a photomontage of a block of flats in the grounds of Blenheim Palace, ‘created in 1935 for an article by W.A Eden in the Architectural Review’ /06, which historian Alan Powers considers a very early example that attempts to anglicise the ideas of modern planning and architecture, which in the 1930s were very frequently regarded as incorrigibly Bolshevik and Continental. ‘These images’, Powers writes, ‘subtly helped to insert the large housing slab within a cultural tradition of English landscape design, promising the worker the amenities of a duke’. That is, there is an intriguing coexistence here

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between something politically very radical—the appropriation, physically, often by compulsory purchase, of the spaces of the ruling class for transformation into working class space, a ‘communal home’ made out of a private one—and something that stresses aesthetic continuity. Many critics of the ‘30s and ‘40s, when these ideas were being established, were keen to point to the illusory continuity of the British landscape, and then try to create a continuity with that lack of continuity. For J.M. Richards, in his Introduction to Modern Architecture, England was actually most suited to a modern landscape, because it already had one. ‘It is often said that the great open spaces of America or Russia may be suitable for a new architecture, but that in this country, with our intensive use of space of which every square yard is part of our history, innovation should be looked at differently.’ However, this is a simple misunderstanding of what the English countryside actually is. ‘Our landscape is not wild nature but is a manmade setting for a well-established way of living... the typical English landscape as we know it is entirely the creation of the late eighteenth century when the design of the whole view was first regarded as an art’. /07 In that case, rupture actually was continuity. The major statement of this is in Nikolaus Pevsner’s 1955 lectures on ‘The Englishness of English Art’, which tried to chart a pathway between English Gothic, eighteenth century landscape design, William Blake, and the housing estates of the London County Council, all as examples of a warm, informal, consciously irrational approach to design and space. ‘The winding path and the serpentine lake are the equivalent of Hogarth’s Line of Beauty, that long, gentle, double curve which dominates one kind of English art from the decorated style to William Blake and beyond’. /08 He sees these ideas continued in ‘certain parts of Harlow New Town... the Market Place of Stevenage New Town... and the superb LCC housing estate for 10,000 at Roehampton’. These should be supported ‘against the stupid prejudice that newfangled ideas as would give England modern and worthy town centres must be outlandish. It has, I hope, been demonstrated how thoroughly inlandish they are’. /09 In order to make these new places, they have had to be taken from their previous owners, something which other critics of the time were less shy about. For Edward Carter in his 1962 Pelican The Future of London, this was fundamentally about class. ‘Open space is not a clinic for delinquent boys and girls: its possession is the absolute right of all the hundreds of thousands of perfectly normal citizens, and it is they who can expect, and should learn how to demand, their sports grounds in their own neighbourhoods and regions... when the London working class areas in the east and south,

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and the ‘clerk-class’ areas, north and west, were built, no one thought about play space: games were the peculiar speciality of public-school boys.’ /10 What happened when their old spaces were given over to state school boys and state school girls? RADIANT CITIES The key example of this actually happening is the Alton Estate in south-west London, in which, for Alan Powers, ‘modern sculpture punctuates the parkland at intervals, recreating the Arcadian feeling of a Capability Brown park’. /11 What Powers doesn’t note is that this is actually because part of it is a Capability Brown park. The Alton Estate is often discussed in architectural history, described by the American critic G.E. Kidder-Smith as the ‘finest low-cost housing estate in the world’, and pivotal in an architectural fashion fight between Scandinavian design and Le Corbusier-influenced Brutalism, but what is so often missed there is the fact that it entailed building working class housing literally in the gardens of the rich. As Bridget Cherry points out, ‘despite the disappearance of some of these houses in the earlier twentieth century, and the buildings in the grounds of the survivors, there is still nothing like Roehampton anywhere in London to get an impression of the aristocratic Georgian villa’. /12 The main example of ‘buildings in the grounds’ is a council estate which represented ‘the marriage of economic, rational buildings with sensitive grouping and generous landscaping, of social purpose with aesthetics’, though its imitators would be ‘without the compensation of the unique landscape that this estate was able to exploit’. /13 Alton East, the ‘Scandinavian’ style part, designed under the direction of Rosemary Sjernstedt, with its tile and brick maisonettes and towers in informal layouts is on site of a ‘bosky slope which had been covered by large Victorian gardens’ /14; this became quite common in the post-war decades, with Chamberlain Gardens in Birmingham or Sceaux Gardens in Camberwell being among the most interesting examples, but the more monumental Alton West, designed by a team led by Colin Lucas, is something else. It was built on ‘the grounds of the mansions of Mount Clare, Downshire House, and Manresa House, which were all preserved... it was the preservation of the open space of the Downshire Field that conditioned the layout’ /15, so what could casually be seen as an assemblage of mammoth, rough concrete grids of high-rise towers and slabs have actually been determined in a very literal way by the landscapers of the eighteenth century. The ‘extensive formal gardens’ /16 of Downshire House, laid out by its owners, flow through one part of the estate, whereas the

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grounds of Mount Clare, designed by Capability Brown himself, flow through another. This is the realisation of Thomas Sharp’s dream that workers would live in the spaces of the squires, and it is worth noting that the landscape is still well used and well looked after, more than 60 years later, as the in-between spaces of council flats. In an era of architecture and a form of housing usually assumed to be determined by a straightforward, utilitarian Functionalism, where what you see is what you get and only what is useful is important, a further distinctive aspect of these spaces is that they are for pure contemplation. This irritated some observers at the time. Edward Carter, for instance, pointed out that ‘Alton West is directly adjacent to Richmond Park, and none of the Alton open space is used for playgrounds, but is a delectable scenic feature in an architect’s day-dream’. /17 What it does is assume that the way an aristocrat, a landowner, an architect, perceives space is the same as that of a working class mother—a space not to ‘use’ as such, but to survey with the eye, contemplate, and enjoy walking through for its own sake. The success of such a thing is intrinsically subjective and intangible, and hard to uncover through the sociological cudgel usually used to investigate ‘the council estate’ as a genre and problem. If Alton represents the building of new proletarian space in old aristocratic space, in the post-war era councils and their architects and planners were able to avail of another option—building new spaces that were informed by the principles of t aristocratic eighteenth century planning, designing a council estate in the 1950s while thinking about how a landscape designer in the 1750s might have approached it. Here, the prime achievement is the Gleadless Valley estate in Sheffield, designed by J.L. Womersley in the late 1950s. Ruth Harman and John Minnis call Gleadless ‘the supreme, but often overlooked, achievement’ of post-war Sheffield. The estate ‘combined urban housing types and the natural landscape so effectively that it still looks stunning, especially on a bright winter’s day.’ Overall, the city’s replanning in the 1950s and 1960s was an experiment in landscape: ‘Tower blocks were carefully placed to act as landscapes across the city and even from the Peak District. Equally significant was the visual relationship of one development to another. In all these schemes, Womersley applied his favourite maxim from Capability Brown: ‘flood the valleys, plant the tops’’. /18 With much of the results destroyed in the 1990s, Gleadless is defined by the way around a dozen different housing types are inserted strategically into the landscape in order to preserve its variety and sweep, while remaining intimate and neighbourly. The site, which had ‘remained entirely rural until the building

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Owen Hatherley of the estate’, is treated in such a way that ‘there are views not only within the valley, across it and up it, but also outside it, to the moors on the west of the city and northeast to the city centre’. /19 For the planners themselves, ‘the woodlands between and around these neighbourhoods provide a natural and definite stop to development and encourage a compact form of development within. Sprawl is avoided and the woodlands have thus already become an important addition to the fine Park system for which Sheffield is well known’ /20, so an extension of a Victorian civic spirit into completely new space. But that new space, as at Alton, includes remnants of the past, this time more demotic: ‘the “Herdings” shopping centre. The thirteenth century farmhouse now converted to a youth club gives this neighbourhood its name. High and low flats, shops, the farmhouse and retaining walls create the enclosure’. /21 A farmhouse, rather than a stately home. And most of all, this was not intended to be a suburb, a part of a ‘conurbation’, but something that could be taken in all at once by the eye, as a whole, made possible by the fact that ‘the development ends abruptly, natural park and woodland separating the neighbourhoods.’ /22 But why, some would ask by the 1960s, should working class people—or any people, really—want to live in the grounds of a country house? What was it for? Jane Jacobs, for instance, found that when she asked planners what the purpose of this space was, they couldn’t tell her. ‘In orthodox city planning, neighbourhood open spaces are venerated in an amazingly uncritical fashion, much as savages venerate magical fetishes. Ask a houser how his planned neighbourhood improves on an old city and he will cite, as a self-evident virtue, More Open Space.’ /23 This space is its own reward—you aren’t meant to do anything with it. That, for Jacobs, is precisely the problem, an essential part of the anti-urban ideology she calls ‘Radiant Garden City Beautiful’. She laments: ‘the Garden City planners and their ever-increasing following among housing reformers, students, and architects were indefatigably popularising the ideas of the super-block, the project neighbourhood, the unchangeable plan, and grass, grass, grass; what is more, they were successfully establishing such attributes as the hallmarks of humane, socially responsible, functional, high-minded planning.... the great object of city-planning was that Christopher Robin might go hippety-hoppety on the grass’. /24 To argue that these new landscapes were useless was one thing, and represented a ‘flaw’ which their devisers could happily have owned up to. But what happened next was to argue that they were dangerous.

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In this area, the most influential voice in British planning has been that of Alice Coleman, whose ‘Disadvantagement Team’ at Kings College London went around housing estates counting broken windows and turds in order to establish where ‘planned housing’ and its spaces worked and didn’t work. Her bête noire was public space of any kind—the ideal had already been established by the free market, the semi-detached house with a big front garden—precisely the hate object of Thomas Sharp, J.M. Richards, Edward Carter and all those other social reformers of the ‘40s to ‘60s, for its wastage of space, its meanness, its lack of public or civic spirit. But for Coleman, it did what planned space didn’t—it established a clear demarcation line between private (the home, the garden) and public (little more than pavements and roads). In one image, she shows a tree-filled space between mid-rise brick tenement blocks, which look rather delightful if misty, with balconies to look at the view. ‘Confused spatial organisation implies grounds shared between different blocks, with a supposed maximisation of use. One of the Disadvantagement Team has walked past the confused-space lawn above twice daily for 16 years, without once seeing anyone using it.’ /25 But then, a page later, we find the following comments on an in-between space in a Southwark council estate. ‘A facet of the site’s confused spatial organisation is the fact that it provides short cuts to five different flanking roads, two visible here, with no proper fencing. A third access route is from behind the camera, under the shafts of the high-rise block there. In the foreground is a children’s play area. Attracting hordes of anonymous children, this is associated with a deterioration in all our test measures’. /26 What we have here is the parameters, only apparently contradictory, by which public space in publicly owned housing is judged. If it is empty, it is bad, useless and desolate. If it is full, it is bad, full of ‘hordes of anonymous children’, threatening youth, loiterers and assorted ne’er do wells. What is wrong with it is the people who are in it, the people who look in and at it, and the fact that it is not privately owned. It can do no right. GREEN GRIDS Milton Keynes is the definitive town of post-war ‘open space’ at its most extreme. Jane Jacobs’s main insight into urban space was to argue that there was nothing particularly wrong with density, with noise, physical closeness, or with children playing in the street. Milton Keynes, however, was based on an idea of ‘community without pro-

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Owen Hatherley pinquity’, extremely low density, with hardly anything resembling streets at all. Rather than the clatter and visual drama of a historic city, we have a city where, until the recent building of an indoor ski-slope as an accidental Stadtkrone, no building was taller than the tallest tree, and where you could—and in many cases still can—drive or cycle from one end of the town to the other without knowing that it was a town you were passing through. It is the culmination of the turning over of the private delights of landscape into the public sector. However, it is also a city built in response to the critiques that were made of the likes of the Alton Estate and Gleadless Valley for their drastic planning methods and their monumental appearance. For Alan Powers, the city is ‘a bridge between the post-war welfare state and the new social, economic and artistic world of late capitalism that was coming into being. While the earlier New Towns were prescriptive in what was seen as a benevolent way, Milton Keynes reflected new ideas about the consumer society and the range of architecture that it should allow’. Architecture aside, the particular landscape ideas were the consequence of a recognition—now deeply dated—that ‘the people’ didn’t want ‘the city’, but wanted something which combined its amenities with the visual pleasures of the country park—this time, without a slab block in it. Powers comments that the masterplan by Llewelyn-Davies, Weeks, Forestier-Walker and Bor ‘was influenced by the writings of the American sociologist Melvin Webber, who commended Los Angeles as the model for future cities on account of the priority given to cars and roads in a low-density settlement, described as a “non-place urban realm’’ /27, where “ease of access was more important than actually living side by side”’ /28 This time, it wouldn’t just be the principles of a private garden, but the new space would actually look like one. Unlike in Alton and Gleadless, survivals are limited mostly to the small market towns and industrial towns that were incorporated into Milton Keynes, like Stony Stratford, Wolverton and Bletchley, with nary a stately home dragged into it. That’s partly because of the nature of this landscape, made up of ‘heavy and unproductive clay’, ‘not only a virtually flat site, but also waterlogged’. /29 Here, what was originally industrial and nineteenth century was made into something resembling the country set pieces of the eighteenth century, as ‘extensive brick clay pits created in the days of local brick manufacture were adopted as ready-made lakes.’ /30 As in Pevsner’s idea of what exemplifies ‘Englishness’, Milton Keynes’ grid is curved, in a way that is only apparently irrational. The researcher Roland Jeffrey notes that ‘the author of the road grid was

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the landscape architect Peter Youngman,... (who) walked the site with colleagues and persuaded them to abandon their initial vision of a geometric grid for a curvaceous one’, which was intended to be ‘not only picturesque, but practical’, meaning that intersections could be roundabouts. /31 Within each grid, Youngman insisted upon at least ‘one forest tree, one small tree and one shrub as the distinguishing species, comprising seventy percent of all planting’, so it would actually be quite homogeneous. What he himself described as his ‘compositional approach’ meant ‘always leaving ‘wild landscape’ as the main green setting of the city’. /32 The centre, meanwhile, partly responds to Sharp’s call for the monumental—‘more like a Beaux Arts scheme in modern dress, employing axial vistas and grand features such as crescents’, /33 again a very eighteenth century approach. There is something quite new here—this is not just a landscape to be looked at when walking, but now, when driving through, with ‘the road grid treated as a huge but designed public urban landscape’. /34 Each district within the grid was surrounded by trees, so that you couldn’t see it when you drove past, maintaining the illusion, but once inside, you note that there are similar ideas at work. Perhaps the most emblematic here are two early grids, Eaglestone, designed by the Anglo-Swedish Christian Socialist Ralph Erskine, and Netherfield, designed by the Architectural Association’s ‘Grunt Group’, Edward Jones, Jeremy Dixon, Christopher Cross and Michael Gold. If, as Robert Maxwell wrote in 1975 in the Architects Journal, the Milton Keynes ideal was to be ‘private yet matey, buried in green countryside yet handy to school, clinic and shops’, then Eaglestone did this best. ‘It comes plumb in the line of descent’, Maxwell argued ‘through William Morris and Patrick Geddes, the moral mainstream of what was to be termed the garden city tradition. This line runs backwards through time to a romantic medievalism and the image of the city of God. It speaks of regeneration, of the retrieval of wholesomeness, of sharing of beliefs and habits. Garden city socialism is both genteel and pious. It is an escapism which questions consumerism but underlines the virtues of family and home. Escapism, nonetheless.’ /35 Netherfield, on the other hand, is not woolly or Artsy-Craftsy but rigorous, determined by eighteenth century neoclassical rationalism reincarnated as neo-1920s modernism, with everything in its design being determined by the continuous datum line as the landscape dips and rises along it, so the terraces go from one to four storeys. The architects’ own montages showed ‘wide ‘natural landscapes’ around a very schematic impression of housing’, which ‘captures well the idealism, impatience with de-

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Owen Hatherley tail and the ultimate inhumanity of this approach’, in Jeffrey’s words. /36 Or, in the designers’ own summary, the idea was elicited by ‘the large scale interplay between informal landscape (existing hedges and trees reinforced by new planting) and the harder geometry of buildings—English landscape tradition.’ The curve of the landscape went alongside the straight line of the terraced houses, ‘to make the most of the formal collective qualities of social repetition. The straight line of the terrace accentuating the low curves of natural topography; the sum of the parts etc as in the 18th to 19th century street architecture.’ For Maxwell, the results ‘deploy a clear formal order’ that ‘revives and recasts an eighteenth century aesthetic’; a different form of nostalgia, a different interpretation of the past, to Eaglestone, ‘which deploys an expressionist language of nooks and crannies, and revives and recasts a medieval aesthetic’. If you visit these two places today, what you notice is the different effects caused by the new balance of public and private created by the return of the notion that private space is always superior to public. The easiest of these to point out, and the least important, is the modifications that residents have made to the houses when they’ve taken advantage of the ‘Right to Buy’ their council house; this personalisation was, of course, unimaginable in the eighteenth century models the architects were aiming at—in Bath, if you make your house in the wider ‘communal home’ into something distinct and original, you are likely to have the ire of the other residents, and of sundry planning bodies and conservation groups fall upon your head. In spaces built by the public sector, curiously, this seldom happens, the additions to stand out and make your individuality known tend more to be celebrated as embodiments of ‘freedom’, presumably limited by the awful and dehumanising process of having secure housing kept at an extremely low rent. More interesting and important is what is happening to the landscape itself, as local authority budgets are cut to shreds, here as much as everywhere else, leading to the municipal landscape being sold off and destroyed with great speed. The informal landscape of densely clustered Eaglestone, which is in no way eighteenth century and which refuses vistas, views, grandeur of any kind, has taken the decline reasonably well, because the sense of neglect is perceptible only in tiny little spaces. Netherfield, on the other hand, can never live down the fact that the lawns in front of the houses are mean and scrubby, while the rolling hills that frame them are lush and now overgrown and even more wild. But a visit to any of the new estates of the old new towns reveals a total lack of interest in landscape of any kind. In somewhere like Oxley Woods, the role of a famous

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firm of architects (Rogers Stirk Harbour, Richard Rogers’ firm) has been limited to the houses themselves, which were a relatively daring experiment in mass production— that was quickly abandoned by the developers who own the place—but in-between them there is neither green space nor the intimacy and noise of Jane Jacobs’s alternative. Instead, there are just looping roads, with the occasional sad little sapling. This is the result of the end of the project whereby the change from oligarchy to democracy would have entailed the design of a new public landscape, in which the smug view of possession was replaced with the enjoyment of a vista of communal luxury. It is what has happened when democracy has curdled back into oligarchy, and the power of landowners, developers and magnates once again calls the tune. And as the useless and dangerous open spaces of the housing estates are built upon by private capital in order to become vibrant and productive, we have the exact reversal— oligarchic space eating up democratic space.

Chamberlain Gardens, Birmingham

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Netherfield, Milton Keynes

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W. A. Eden, ‘The English tradition in the countryside’, Architectural Review, 27/461 (April 1935)

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Alton West, London

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Gleadless Valley, Sheffield

all Photographs by Owen Hatherley.

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/ Carter, A., Love (London: Vintage Classics, 2006), pp. 1–2. / ibid, p. 111. / Jenkins, S., England’s Thousand Best Houses (London: Penguin 2001), where the author repeatedly complains about the deadening effect of public ownership on aristocratic houses... / Sharp, T., Town Planning (London: Pelican, 1940), p.104. / Sharp, Town Planning, pp. 122–3. / Powers, A., Britain – Modern Architectures in History (London: Reaktion, 2007), p. 65. / Richards, J.M. An Introduction to Modern Architecture (London: Pelican, 1953), p. 123. / Pevsner, N.; The Englishness of English Art (London: Peregrine, 1964), p. 174. / Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art. p.192. / Carter, E., The Future of London (London: Pelican, 1962), p.133 / 11 Powers, Britain – Modern Architectures in History, p.112 / Cherry, B. and Pevsner N., The Buildings

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of England – London: South (Yale: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 687. / Cherry and Pevsner, The Buildings of England – London: South. p. 689. / Cherry and Pevsner, The Buildings of England – London: South. p. 689. / Cherry and Pevsner, p. 690. / Cherry and Pevsner, p. 692. / Carter, E., The Future of London (London: Pelican, 1962), p. 126. / Harman R. and Minnis, J., Sheffield – Pevsner Architectural Guides (Yale:Yale University Press, 2004), p. 35. / Harman and Minnis, Sheffield. p. 243. / The Housing Development Committee of the Corporation of Sheffield, Ten Years of Housing in Sheffield (Sheffield: Sheffield Corporation, 1962), p. 14 / Ten Years of Housing in Sheffield, p. 20. / Ten Years of Housing in Sheffield, p. 23. / Jacobs, J., The Death and Life of Great American Cities (London: Pelican, 1974), p. 99. / Jacobs, The Death and Life. pp. 32–33. / Coleman, A., Utopia on Trial – Vision and Reality in Planned Housing (London: Hilary Shipman, 1985), p.45. / Coleman, Utopia on Trial, p. 47. / Powers, Britain – Modern Architectures, p. 175. / Powers, p. 176. / Powers, p. 176. / Jeffrey, R., ‘The Centrality of Milton Keynes’, in Harwood E. and Powers A., (eds), Twentieth Century Architecture: The Seventies (London: 20th Century Society, 2012), p. 109. / Jeffrey, ‘The Centrality of Milton Keynes’, p. 104. / Jeffrey, ‘The Centrality of Milton Keynes’, pp. 106–7. / Powers, Britain – Modern Architectures, p. 178. / Jeffrey, ‘The Centrality of Milton Keynes’, p. 106. / I owe these references to Iqbal Aalam’s excellent blog posts ‘Early Grids of Milton Keynes, Netherfield and Eaglestone’, available online at https://iqbalaalam. wordpress.com/2010/10/12/early-gridsof-milton-keyne-eaglestone-and-netherfield-i-architects-approach/ / Jeffrey, ‘The Centrality of Milton Keynes’, p. 107.

Ryan Stec

USELESS ARCHITECTURE Text by Ryan Stec Drawings by Ryan Stec and Véronique Couillard

Lewis Carroll The Hunting of the Snark, 1876. [From: Fit the Second. The Bellman’s Speech.] ‘ Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes! But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank,’ (so the crew would protest) ‘that he’s bought us the best— a perfect and absolute blank!’

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     I’m not going to give you a map for where we are headed.   If I do offer something that looks like a map, it is best not to trust it, as it is most likely a useless map.  We are not going to try and get somewhere specific.  Our goal is to get lost.  Let’s start with early medieval churches and their elegant order juxtaposed against the chaos of the city. Surrounding the original constructions was what one might call zones of sanctuary. This void was a manifestation of the separation between the godly nature of the church and the chaos of our world, but it was also where the beggar and the sick would come and where abandoned children would be left. In many ways the zone was a resting place for those considered useless to humanity. /01  Useless space for the useless, and so I ask: where do the useless take shelter now in our cities?



The empty spaces of the city, the square, the sidewalk and street, the park,

contain some of its greatest potential.  A space of appearance where we come together in our best (and also darkest) moments, together for the sake of being together, to declare our presence to each other. /02 This is perhaps why the empty spaces of the city are targeted, narrowed in on, closed off, controlled.

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Geographer Steven Flusty’s has categorized these spatial tactics of fear and control under the title ‘Interdictory Spaces’ of a ‘post-public’ world. /03 The list is as follows: SLIPPERY SPACE is space that cannot be reached... STEALTHY SPACE is space that cannot be found… CRUSTY SPACE is space that cannot be accessed…  PRICKLY SPACE is space that cannot be comfortable occupied… JITTERY SPACE is space that cannot be utilized unobserved… /04 One might be bamboozled into thinking that this is a list of ways of making space useless, but I think the opposite is true. It seems that this is a categorization of the complete instrumentalization of space for control. /05 A narrowing of purpose that should weigh heavy on us. Is the useless body one of the ways we resist this hyperbolic utility?  A body that sits and rest in the flow of a city that is oriented elsewhere.  This functional city.  This productive city. /06  Or a body that protests and disrupts the functional city.  Or one that we understand the least, one which has moved beyond disruption and thinks only of destruction. Senseless and without purpose.  This, however, is not the purposelessness we are searching for.  We are searching for the one which transforms the user of the building to the being in the architecture, the one that opens up to the idea of dwelling in the city. Can we find useless space in the city? What does that mean? Is it unused space or just space that is not yet used. Is it forgotten or discarded or already used up? How do we find useless space? 

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There are maps. What do the maps tell us? Do we think it is possible to find useless space with a very useful map? Is it possible to identify the useless with useful tools? Maybe if we layer the maps together. If we put them in the way of themselves, will they reveal something interesting? Is standing in the way of utility an essential part of considering the useless? /07 Artists are always standing in the way of utility. /08 Take Armelle Caron’s map of Paris. /09 Broken apart and restructured to identify an entirely different order. Or Guy Debord’s The Naked City, a different fragmented Paris documenting psycho-geographic drifting. /10 Or Terry Atkinson and Michael Baldwin’s ‘Map To Not Indicate …’ /11. Ontario, James Bay, St-Lawrence River, Quebec, New Brunswick, Manitoba and so the list of that which is not indicated goes on.

These maps will not help you find what you are looking for. Unless what you are looking for is nothing in particular. Or perhaps, to put it better: they will help you get nowhere, as John Cage points out in his Lecture on Nothing: /12 we are getting nowhere and that is a pleasure . It is not irritating to be where one is . It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.

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If useless representation is a creative attempt to prevent us from looking directly at the idea at hand, it is still only one component of our consideration. Let us also consider obscurity in a spatial context. Berlin-based Raumlabor produced a collection of experimental monuments for a French city including a Trojan horse with an inflatable appendage. The pneumatic expansion gave it the capacity to redefine the useful space of a shopping mall as a useless one. /13 Or Rebar and their Park(ing) project, because it denies the functional role of public parking spots and offers a tiny park, a symbolic void given back to the city. /14 Or, at the monumental scale, in 1995 Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrap the Reichstag and render the whole building useless. For a moment the building is stripped of its function and becomes purposeless, an object of contemplation. /15

If intervention in functionality can make the useless real, then architecture is not without its designed uselessness. /16 Consider Washington DC and its concentration of colossal monuments, not its monumental buildings but those buildings that are, in fact, exclusively monuments. The Lincoln Memorial is an astounding example with its overwhelmingly excessive steps, its room for a single speech and its symbolic 38 columns, one for each of the states of the union at the time of Lincoln’s presidency. Here, Robert Harbison has this to say of the columns, “A more truthful monument would have found a way of representing architecturally the determined effort by eleven of these to leave the building. Like many others this monument represents an interesting conflict as stasis.” /17

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The monument attempts to instrumentalize time. It attempts to fix it, to stop it and orient your perspective somewhere specific. For you to contemplate that moment in time now solidified for your consideration. Uselessness, however, does not orient us towards the past. Uselessness does not attempt to fix time but invites us to be in this moment. If a useless thing is of the moment, then perhaps its opposite, a useful thing, is oriented towards the future. Its goal is outside of itself, even if it is the smallest of moments like a fork to bring food to mouth, use is in motion towards a point beyond the now. Like a staircase to nowhere, the useless interrupts the flow towards the future and attempts to unite the here and now.  For the ruin the path to shedding the weight of functionality is different. In a perpetual state of loss, the architecture dissolves bit by bit and an incredible tension is drawn between the reminders of the past and its inevitable drift into the future and further decay. In this way the ruin invites a more imaginative, but also more dangerous, climb to nowhere. One could lose one’s footing in the shifting decay. The risks of true discovery could be felt in the body. /18 The sculpture, the ruin and the monument—architecture that finds its place deeply opposed to utility. Can we learn from them? Can we learn to make something undefined that we still understand as architecture? Not a faux ruin or a mock chaos, but truly indeterminate. Not a mixed-use or multi-purpose space but one of complete purposelessness. Not a happen-stance of construction or an architecture without architects, but designed uselessness.  Does the possibility of going nowhere open up a world between us? Can this uselessness interrupt our attention just long enough to discover something unexpected in ourselves? In each other? Can architecture discover something for the world it was not asked to find?

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/ Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (W. W. Norton, 1992). / Hannah Arendt’s concept of the ‘space of appearance’, elaborated on in the Human Condition, continues to play an important role in how we understand the shared spaces of the city. Noted scholars such as George Baird (The Space of Appearance (MIT Press, 1995)) and Kenneth Frampton (“The Status of Man and the Status of His Objects: A Reading of ‘The Human Condition,’” in Hannah Arendt : The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvin A. Hill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 362.) brought her political theory into architectural discourse in the later part of the 20th century, and her ideas continue to play an influential role. The space of appearance along with the common world are essential components of the public realm for Arendt. Where the space of appearance is the conceptual space arising between us through speech and action, the common world is the constructed world of human artifice, both of things and apparatuses. There is a spatial component to the public sphere, but it is not entirely material; the

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space of appearance is not a physical condition, but it is connected to our togetherness, and although the common world is not exclusively a world of things, “To live together in the world means essentially a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.” Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Second Ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 52. Arendt builds her argument for the intrinsic value of speech and action on a clear opposition to utility and instrumentality in the early part of her text. Her description of homo faber, the maker of the world of things, is a being that must be driven by utility in order to make this world of things. What this text attempts to do is provide ground for an argument against the utility of making by questioning how problematic it is to allow the making of things to be the exclusive domain of Arendt’s homo faber. / Steven Flusty, Building Paranoia: The Proliferation of Interdictory Space and the Erosion of Spatial Justice (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, 1994), pp. 15. / Flusty, pp. 16–18. / The provocation for a useless architecture is partially set upon the philosophical foundations of Martin Heidegger’s text, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays (HarperCollins, 1977). This remains one of the most important critiques of our relationship to technology, asserting that its essence lies outside the machine itself and in the ‘enframing’ of reality as a standing reserve. He gives us the example of how a dam on a river changes the running water from river to resource, and reasons that the essence of technology is how it transforms the earth around us into utility. In the context of this text, it would be said that it defines the world by its use, by its capacity to be employed for a purpose. Heidegger’s reasoning in the essay pushes beyond the view of technology as a collection of tools and machines that are simply means to ends, suggesting instead that it is a way of thinking that instrumentalizes the world

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itself. If we wish to resist this thinking, to re-balance our perspective and shift away from the ‘enframing’ of the world as standing reserve, what relationship do we have to the material products of technological thinking? For instance, in the case offered by Heidegger of the dam and the river, is there a site of this reframing? Is it within the dam? Does it begin in the plans for the dam? The components? Its history? As architects, almost everything begins with site and so we must inquire as to where we locate this ‘enframing’? And if we want to ‘deinstrumentalize’ the river, how and where do we begin? / The ‘functional city’ is used here as more than shorthand for the reductive functional ideas driving the CIAM Anthens Charter of 1933 (Charles Edouard Jeannneret-Gris, Athens Charter (New York, Grossman, 1973). While these ideas seem like a legitimate source for many urban planning problems of the 21st century, I would surmise that this is giving architects and planners too much credit and power. The notion of the ‘functional city’ is more indicative of our tendency to try to reduce the city into a theoretical framework, and while many have sought to challenge the early modernist principals driving ‘the functional city’, often with an adjective of their own, the city itself resists. This resistance, with its dynamic and contradictory energy is what makes the city such a wonderful terrain to grow and develop theory. Each spatial theory of the city is a map with which to navigate and discover elements and dimensions of the city, sometimes, however, problems arise when the makers of the maps confuse them with the territory of the city itself. / I undertake a deeper consideration of maps, and how we might challenge the dominance of cartographies’ obsession with spatial precision, in the journal article, “Organized Time: Temporal Representations and the Possibilities of the Database,” Drain 15, no. 1 (2018), http://drainmag.com/organized-timetemporal-representations-and-the-possibilities-of-the-database. Much of the important foundations for critical or counter cartography are captured in a number of Denis Wood books. The notion of a useless

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map and more broadly useless representation is reinforced by Wood as he reminds us that “… far from being pictures of the world maps are instruments for its creation; that is, they are not representations but systems of propositions, arguments about what the world might be.” Denis Wood, Rethinking the Power of Maps (Guilford Press, 2010), pp. 8. / See, for instance, Sander Bax, Pascal Gielen, and Bram Ieven, Interrupting the City: Artistic Constitutions of the Public Sphere (Valiz, 2016) or Vikram C. Bhatt, Mirko Zardini, and Giovanna Borasi, Ations: What You Can Do with the City (Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2008). However, perhaps many types of artistic interventions are being instrumentalized as urban design and planning profesionals seek to replicate and amplify the effects of temporary artistic projects. For examples of this, see Jeroen Beekmans and Joop de Boer, Pop-up City: City-Making in a Fluid World (Amsterdam, the Netherlands: BIS, 2014) or Mike Lydon, Anthony Garcia, and Andres Duany, Tactical Urbanism: Short-Term Action for Long-Term Change (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2015). / Armelle Caron, Paris/Paris Rangé, 2008 2005, digital print on canvas, 90 cm x 120 cm, 2008 2005. / Guy Debord, The Naked City, 1957, Lithographe, ink on paper, 33.3 cm x 48.3 cm, 1957. / Art & Language (Terry Atkinson, born 1939; Michael Baldwin, born 1945), Map to Not Indicate., Linotype on paper, 50.8 cm x 62.9 cm, 1967. / John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition (Wesleyan University Press, 2011), pp. 118–119. (Adapted from the original four-column structure.) / Raumlabor, MONUMENTS, 2013, http:// raumlabor.net/28062013-monuments/. / Rebar Group, Park(Ing), 2005. / Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Wrapped Reichstag, 1998. / Many iterations of architectural uselessness have been proposed both on paper and in construction. This particular consideration of architectural uselessness is influenced by the work of John Hejduk and his explorations of the poetic dimension of

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architecture. His projects feel like architectural fiction constructing character buildings, spirits, people and questionable machines. In the 1993 project, Soundings: A Work (Random House Incorporated, 1993), Hejduk draws on and draws out a world of architecture as, what could be argued to be a useless but profound tale. Alongside the drawn lines in Hejduk’s world, language, and most specifically poetry, play a key to role in the unfolding of its story. The first pages of Soundings begin with this, “Feel my body architect, so your plans will not be so rigid…” Hejduk, pp. 29. Through the text and drawings, Hejduk draws out an opposition between rationality and romance and pulls us into an open-ended narrative, challenging us to grapple with architectural representation that so clear stands against utility. / Robert Harbison, The Built, the Unbuilt, and the Unbuildable: In Pursuit of Architectural Meaning (MIT Press, 1993), pp. 41. / Rose McAulay has explored this tension deeply in her book The Pleasure of the Ruin. In her consideration of the new ruin, that is architecture that stands on the emerging edge of its dissolution, she describes the drama unfolding in a house recently touched by fire, “But often the ruin has put on, in its catastrophic tipsy chaos, a bizarre new charm. What was last week a drab little house has become a steep flight of stairs winding up in the open between gaily-coloured walls, tiled lavatories, interiors bright and intimate like a Dutch picture or a stage set; the stairway climbs up and up, undaunted, to the roofless summit where it meets the sky. The house has put on melodrama…” Rose Macaulay, The Pleasure of the Ruin (New York: Walker and Company, 1953), pp. 453–454. The house has made its first steps into ruin. Accelerated into uselessness through catastrophe, it begins to cultivate mystery in its collapsing structure. The old ruin has long distanced itself from its particular crisis. It sits at a safer distance in time to the source of its collapse, but the material decay nonetheless contains both the mystery of its past and the instability of its present.

Kerstin Meyer

USE–LESS–LAND Two centuries of defending Tempelhofer Field in Berlin My favorite shot of Berlin was twittered from the international space station by Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield in March 2013. We can identify Tempelhofer Field as a white (snow-covered) opening in the city’s concrete monotony, piercing through space and time.

Tempelhofer Field from space, March 2013. Tempelhofer Field is the white (snow-covered) circular spot. The long white shape in the northern part of the city is Tegel Airport

Fig. 01

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USE–LESS–LAND On 25 May 2014, a majority of Berliners voted in favour of the Tempelhofer Field Conservation Act, by which the Berlin state authorities /01 are bound to refrain from selling or developing the 300-ha former airfield. The Tempelhofer Field Conservation Act spells out what needs legal protection: the climatic cooling function that Tempelhofer Field performs for the densely built city; the landscape of meadows as a habitat for plant and animal life; the wide horizon for the senses; the freedom from car traffic for play, recreation and sports; accessible space—for free, for all and without exception; and the preservation of the memory of abuse and murder that took place in forced labour camps on Tempelhofer Field under fascist Germany. With nearly three quarters of a million ‘yes’ votes, the people’s referendum /02 was a landslide defeat for those in power, who had counted on masterminding an urban development program of a scale unprecedented, even in post-1989 Berlin. I was part of the citizen group “100% Tempelhofer Feld” that had proposed the law and campaigned for it in the streets of Berlin. Involved as we had been in the action, it felt like a singular victory. But as I learned afterwards, we were far from being the first to fight for Tempelhofer Field and the fight was certainly not a new one. Historically, because it served the Prussian military and the king as a parade and training ground, Tempelhofer Field had been exempted from normal land use development since the mid-eighteenth century.

Military parade on Tempelhofer Field. 1913

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Towards the end of the nineteenth century, when, as the result of migration and industrialisation, the city grew rapidly into a metropolis, land speculation in Berlin took extreme forms. /03 Prussian authorities allowed unscrupulous exploitation of the urban ground in the making of the city. In this iteration, there was an explosion of building notorious tenements /04, designed to minimize costs for the Prussian state (by allowing deep plots with rows of up to five tiny backyards rather than separating houses by streets), while appeasing landowners by allowing them to build densely (up to 70% of the plot area) and high (five storeys for the front and back buildings). /05 For the interests of capital, this set the tone: with the expectation of solid profits from rents, land prices rose and banks and insurance companies became the drivers of urban development. By 1900, 40 newly founded real estate consortiums /06 had bought 3400 ha of developable land in the vicinity of Berlin, had laid out streets and squares, and in some cases had even developed transportation infrastructure, and re-sold individual plots of land to contractors, who developed and resold the plots again at a profit. The costs were passed on in the form of loans, with the result that almost all of Berlin’s tenement houses were mortgaged at 80% and more of their value. /07 The Prussian state participated in this gold rush by selling land and, especially, forests around Berlin to the developers and banks. Public resistance to the Prussian state’s ruthless land policy of siding with capital interests and brushing all other considerations aside became acute in 1904, when the intention to sell part of the Grunewald, a popular forest in the west of Berlin, to make space for high-end settlements was announced. Citizens collected 30,000 signatures to protest the plans of the Prussian Forest Treasury, saying ‘to develop it means to devastate it’. /08 The outcry for Grunewald prompted the first German environmental movement, which fought for the remaining green lungs in a city already stressed by extreme and continuous growth. /09 The movement continued to campaign for more than ten years by collecting signatures, issuing pamphlets, holding conferences, and by introducing the Berlin Forest Protection Days in 1909 and 1911. Today it is humbling to read just how far-sighted the activists’ reasoning was one hundred years ago. They explicitly demanded consideration of the future needs of the people of Berlin, and of their health and wellbeing, as well as calling for the preservation of functioning ecosystems encompassing rain, soil, air, and temperature in the city. The movement also insisted on the usefulness of Tempelhofer Field for the well-being of the city and its citizens. By that time Tempelhofer Field was already an

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“Sunday on Tempelhofer Field”. 1907. A painting by Hans Baluschek (1780-1935). Baluschek gave this painting to the city of Schöneberg in 1914; it disappeare d from the Tempelhof district office during the Second World War. Fig. 04

important and historical recreational area and a traditional sports ground. In the nineteenth century, it included a horseracing track that was very popular with Berliners, while dozens of soccer associations used the Field for training and tournaments. /10 And whenever the military was not using the Field, thousands of Berliners, fleeing their dark tenements, would flock there to stroll, picknick and play on Tempelhofer Field under the large sky, just as we do today. Not surprisingly while land prices were spiraling in the process of building the metropolis, the usefulness of Tempelhofer Field to the Prussian king was dwindling. The Prussian State soon relocated its military parades and in 1909 sold the western half of the Tempelhofer Field to the newly created borough of Tempelhof. ‘Few events in the pre-war period caused more uproar than the conduct of the military authorities in the sale of Tempelhofer Field’, recalls the critical urbanist Walter Hegeman (1924). The public witnessed with outrage how the insatiable Prussian Treasury realized a price for the land that was twenty times what corporations had paid for plots in Grunewald. To maximize the price, the Prussian state had even colluded with the planning authority so that the plot construction density rose from 50%

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to 70%. /11 And indeed, starting in 1912, the borough of Tempelhof began erecting tenements on what used to be the western part of Tempelhofer Field. /12 The citizen activists were fully aware of the mechanisms of land speculation behind the loss of important green and free spaces, and their pamphlets spell out a hope that the urban public would grow conscious of the dangers of treating urban land as a commodity. /13 Consequently, and possibly to prevent the raising of collective consciousness about the sell-off of ground and land in the metropolis, concessions were made to the environmentalist movement. When steps were taken in 1911 to regulate the rapid urbanization by creating a communal association /14 one of three communal tasks inscribed in the founding document was to support the acquisition and maintenance of larger areas to be kept free of buildings, such as forests, parks, meadows, lakes, public squares, playgrounds and sports grounds. As a reaction to the mobilisation of citizens, continuous public debate, and years of negotiation, the Prussian Treasury eventually changed its position and in 1914 agreed to sell 10,000 ha of forest in and around the metropolitan area, including most of Grunewald, to the communal authorities of Berlin for a modest price. The conditions of the sale were that the communal authorities, in turn, would be obliged to protect and to care for the forests forever (!) and to maintain them as a space for the well-being of the people. This peculiar agreement, the so-called permanent tenure forest contract /15, protects the forests in Berlin to the present day, making it one of the few cities in Europe that is rich in forests. /16 The legal protection given to the forests did not extend to Tempelhofer Field. But the First World War and the revolution that followed in 1918 put an end to the Prussian monarchy and to any further land deals by its administration, so that the remaining 400 ha of Tempelhofer Field were spared. As we now know, Tempelhofer Field was to be exempted from capitalist land use for almost a further century. Because of its slightly elevated topological location and the wind conditions there, Tempelhofer Field had been a popular spot for early aviation pioneers. In 1923 a first airport was built by the young aviation industry, which was soon enlarged to satisfy the growing demand for air travel, and for some years Berlin Tempelhof was the busiest civil airport in Europe. When state power was passed to the Nazis , they ran a prison notorious for the torture of detainees and later a concentration camp on the northern side of Tempelhofer Field from 1933 until 1936. Then the Nazi regime engaged the architect Sagebiel to erect a giant air terminal on

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A huge crowd watches the Graf Zeppelin airship over Tempelhofer Field in 1909. Postcard. Fig. 04

the north-eastern side of Tempelhofer Field, a building that the Nazis never finished and never used as an airport. /17 From 1940, Tempelhofer Field became a site of war production and labour camps, as, like most of the German economy at that time, the armament industry relied heavily on forced labour. After the war, Tempelhof Airport was the air base of the American Forces in Berlin, famous for the ‘Berlin airlift’. Until the opening of Tegel Airport in 1975, in the divided city of Berlin civilian and military aircraft of the western political hemisphere took off and landed from Tempelhof Central Airport. When the citizens of the GDR finally overturned their government in 1989, the days of the airport, which was too small for modern planes and which depended financially on the American Forces, were clearly numbered. Nevertheless, twenty years passed before all conflicts about continuity or closure could be resolved, and the last plane took off from Tempelhof Central Airport in 2008. Then all was quiet on Tempelhofer Field. Too quiet. This was the imagery that the groups ‘Tempelhof für alle’ and ‘Squat Tempelhof’ used in their call for action, which was intended to make clear to the Berlin government that the fenced-in and now useless airfield should be opened to the public. The squat action failed, as the protesters were confronted by a hugely disproportionate deployment of 1800 riot police. /18 But the message from the more than 5000 participants in the march was heard. A year later, in May 2010, the airfield was officially opened as a

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“Squat Tempelhof”, poster call for action On 6 June, 2009, a large dark spaceship hovered over Berlin, ready to land. From its mouth a light shone down on Tempelhofer Field.

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park with a minimal infrastructure: benches, toilets, dog runs—but also with maximal freedom: meadows, runways, sky. People quickly came to love Tempelhofer Field for these qualities and, as the numbers tell, they love it to this day: at the last count in 2014, 50,000 people visited “das Feld” (as it is affectionately called) on any ordinary, sunny weekend. But the opening of the park was only to be temporary; a master plan for large scale development was in the pipeline. Architects and developers dreamt of the project of their lives. Banks and investors were waiting in the wings with financing. What could be done? Incidentally, in 2011, for the first time in Berlin, a law—against the privatisation of water management—was passed by a people’s referendum, in accordance with a procedure laid down in the Berlin state constitution of 1996. /19 This outcome was powerful enough to inspire a group of environmental activists working for the preservation of Tempelhofer Field to use the legislative authority of direct democracy for their cause. They wrote a draft law, the Tempelhofer Field Conservation Act, and, in accordance with the procedural rules, collected 20,000 signatures in support of it. The first step had been taken. Parliament declined to even debate the proposal, triggering the next step, when 200,000 supporting signatures had to be collected within four months—more than 1500 signatures a day. For such an undertaking, a city-wide debate was necessary: a debate on the larger political dimensions of keeping a 300ha landscape of meadows in the city free and undeveloped, while affordable housing had grown scarce and gentrification was crowding out residents. For some, the benefits of a free Tempelhofer Field for the present and the future were already obvious. But in the course of collecting signatures in the streets, parks and canteens, the trains, the stations, the queues, at shop counters, in classrooms and at dinner tables, further questions were discussed: Why had there been no public debate on the plans to sell off the largest remaining piece of public land in the city, and to turn it into a building site of unprecedented scale? Who would end up living in the planned urban districts? Why was there a scarcity of affordable living space in the first place? Why focus on Tempelhofer Field? Why was there no public information on the cost of the project and who would be making the profits? And, last but not at all least: who should decide? Thus the debate spread, mostly under the radar of the political elites and powerful social circles of Berlin, until the Electoral Commission declared the number of signatures sufficient to trigger a referendum. During the months in the run-up to

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the vote, the public—now the de facto legislators—debated and scrutinized the masterplan for the development of Tempelhofer Field. Those who usually get a sizable slice of the cake of Berlin’s urban development industry grew nervous. Money was spent, strings were pulled, /20 and a counter-campaign was launched that focussed on the apparent uselessness of this vast stretch of land, Tempelhofer Field, by employing an image of the Field turned into desert. “Standstill”—it threatened—no more real estate development!

Last chance to save the Field. Days before the vote we carried signs through the streets and trains.

Fig. 06

And indeed, real estate development, this final and, as was said a hundred years ago, devastating use of land and earth is now prohibited there. The political administration, unused to laws made through direct democracy, remains sulky. In Berlin’s land-use plan today, a chain of pearls is drawn around Tempelhofer Field to represent the Tempelhofer Field Conservation Act—not a part of the plan, but a sort of lucky charm that protects the area.

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Sunset on Tempelhofer Field, 2019

Fig. 07

Stepping out of the world of walls, leaving noise, cars, commerce, and the need to be useful behind, I am immersed in open air, the climate of Tempelhofer Field. Some say it changes you. /21 Sure enough, it is a political experience I share with all the others that are here, like marching together for a cause, though here we don’t march, we can just be—and here we can grow conscious, collectively, of land and soil in the metropolis, and of our temporary use of it.

In Berlin’s current land use plan, Tempelhofer Field is still marked as developable land but adorned with a chain of beads, like a lucky charm, representing the area protected by the Tempelhofer Field Conservation Act. Downloaded on 01.09.2019, highlight by the author Fig. 08

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/ German: Land Berlin / A people’s referendum (German: Volksentscheid) as laid down by the Berlin state constitution is a direct democratic way of passing legislation without going through Parliament: by collecting an increasing number of signatures in two phases and then arriving at a universal and direct vote on the draft law, which is enacted if the vote is won. / Cit. in: von Lührte, A., Hintergrundinformationen zum Berliner Dauerwaldvertrag (Berlin: BUND Berlin, 2015). / German: Mietshauskasernen. Composite term made up of the words for ‘tenement house’ (Mietshaus) and ‘military barracks’ (Kaserne). / Hegemann, W., ‘Die Rettung des Tempelhofer Feldes’. In: Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst. 8. Jg. (1924), Nr. 11/12, pp 333–345. http://opus.kobv.de/zlb/volltexte/2006/921/pdf/WMB_1924_11–12.pdf. / German: Terraingesellschaften, founded by banks or bank consortia. / von Lührte, Hintergrundinformationen, p. 3. / ‘Wir ....erheben Protest gegen die Absicht des Fiskus, einen wesentlichen Teil des Grunewalds, den man mit Recht die Lunge Berlins genannt hat, der ‘Bebauung zu erschließen‘, d.h. zu vernichten.’ Mielke. H. J. 1971: Die Kulturlandschaftsgeschichte des Grunewaldgebiets. (Berlin: Verlag D. Reimer, 1971), p. 98, cit. in von Lührte, Hintegrundinformationen. p. 5. / From 500,000 to 2 million residents over a period of 50 years. See: Hegemann, W., ‘Die Rettung des Tempelhofer Feldes’ in: Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst. 8.  Jg., Nr.  11/12, (Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth, 1924) p. 333. / Hegemann, ‘Die Rettung’. / Hegemann, ‘Die Rettung’. / The First World War and the 1918 revolution stopped the construction of further tenements on the western part of Tempelhofer Feld; in the 1920s a garden city was laid out on these plots. Hegemann, ‘Die Rettung’. / ‘Die öffentliche Meinung muß sich aber auch immer mehr klar werden über den engen Zusammenhang, der zwischen der ständigen Gefahr, und unserer ganzen so verderblichen Art und Weise, den künftigen

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städtischen Ansiedlungsboden rein als Ware zu betrachten und zu behandeln, besteht. Hier gilt es einzugreifen’ in: Berliner Centralausschuss für die Wald– und Ansiedlungsfrage 1909: Der Kampf um unsere Wälder. Verhandlungen und Materialien des Zweiten Berliner Waldschutztags am 16. Januar 1909. (Berlin: Springer Verlag). Cit. in von Lührte, Hintergrundinformationen, p. 6. / German: Zweckverband / German: Dauerwaldvertrag / Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung und Umwelt. 2015: Berliner Waldzeitung. www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/forsten/ freizeit/waldzeitung/download/waldzeitung_2015_1.pdf / The terminal building is still today the second largest ‘continuous’ building on earth, after the Pentagon. See: http://www. dieselpunks.org/profiles/blogs/tempelhof-a-story-of-an / Available at: https://www.tip-berlin.de/ squat-tempelhof-1800-polizisten-verteidigen-eine-leere-wiese / For an overview of the history of people’s legislation in Berlin see: Meyer, K., ‘Gründend auf der revolutionären Erneuerung. Geschichte der Volksgesetzgebung in Berlin‘, in Rosenfels E., Meyer K., Franzbecker J. Zur Verfassung. Recherchen, Dokumente 1989–2017. (Berlin: Berliner Hefte zu Geschichte und Gegenwart der Stadt #5, 2017). / Schwarzbeck M., ‘Die Finale Schlacht’ in: Zitty 11 – 2014. (Berlin: Zitty Verlag 2014), p. 22. / Lautenschläger R., ‘Stadt in Cinemascope’, taz vom 14.09.2013, https://taz. de/!450641/

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USE–LESS–LAND Fig. 01 / NASA ISS034-E-67777 Fig. 02 / Photograph: unknown. Source: Museen Tempelhof-Schöneberg/Archiv Fig. 03 / Wood engraving after drawing by Georg Koch (born 1857). From a series: Berliner Bilder. From: Illustrirte newspaper, 93rd vol., no. 2412, Leipzig and Berlin, 21 September 1889, p. 295. Fig. 04 / Photograph: unknown. Source: Postcard Fig. 05 / “Tempelhof für alle” and “Squat Tempelhof”. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Fig. 06 / Initiative “100% Tempelhofer Feld”. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Fig. 07 / Stefanie Schöpke Fig. 08 / Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung und Wohnen, Berlin. Flächennutzungsplan

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/ Rosenfels Elske, Meyer Kerstin, Franzbecker Joerg: Zur Verfassung. Recherchen, Dokumente 1989–2017. (Berlin: Berliner Hefte zu Geschichte und Gegenwart der Stadt #5, 2017). / Lautenschläger Rolf, ‘Stadt in Cinemascope’, taz vom 14.09.2013 https://taz.de/!450641/ (Berlin:2013). / von Lührte, Angela., Hintergrundinformationen zum Berliner Dauerwaldvertrag (Berlin: BUND Berlin, 2015) / Kötschke, Hermann, Die Berliner Waldverwüstung und verwandte Fragen. (Berlin-Schöneberg: Verlag des Ansiedlungsvereins Groß-Berlin, 1910). / Hegemann, Werner, Das steinerne Berlin: 1930; Geschichte der größten Mietskasernenstadt d. Welt. Reprint 1988, Braunschweig/Wiesbaden / Hegemann, Werner, ‘Die Rettung des Tempelhofer Feldes’, in: Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst. 8. Jg., Nr. 11/12, (Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth, 1924), pp.  333–345. http://opus.kobv.de/zlb/volltexte/2006/ 921/pdf/WMB_1924_11-12.pdf / Schwarzbeck, Martin, ‘Die Finale Schlacht’ in: Zitty 11 – 2014 (Berlin: Zitty Verlag, 2014)

Friedemann Schrenk

IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS USELESSNESS Since 1921 fossilized hominin remains have been recovered in Africa. Initially, the proposition that these were human ancestors was met with ignorance, as this suggestion conflicted with a predominant Eurocentric worldview. Today, after numerous further finds in southern, eastern, north-eastern, and central Africa, it is unequivocally accepted that the cradle of both the earliest hominins and the earliest humans was Africa. But what were the underlying causes of the emergence of humans? Was their origin unavoidable due to the obvious usefulness of humans populating the Earth? The answer actually is more interesting than that: It was the initial uselessness of environmental and biogeographic variability that triggered the two most crucial stages of early hominin evolution, the beginning of upright walking (8 to 6 million years ago) and the onset of cultural evolution between 3 and 2.5 million years ago. Homo sapiens emerged from innumerable changes and interactions between the biological abilities of its organism and the conditions of its constantly changing environments. It is only through interaction with environmental factors such as habitat, food, competition and a complex social environment that the recent biocultural diversity of our species Homo sapiens developed—almost to a point where extinction is inevitable. BIOCULTURAL EVOLUTION AND CLIMATE IN AFRICA The history of hominin evolution can only be understood by integrating paleoanthropological, paleontological, geological, archaeological and environmental data on seasonal, intergenerational and evolutionary time scales. The first African hominin remains were found in Zimbabwe in 1921 (Woodward 1921) and in 1924 in South

IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS USELESSNESS Africa (Dart 1925). Today, thousands of fragments from more than 50 African sites represent about 10 genera and 20 species of early hominins / Figs. 01, 02 from different climatic zones. One of the major challenges is to relate global and regional climate to changes in paleoenvironments and species occurrence, distribution and development (Levin 2015). After three generations of research, however, there is little doubt today, that the two most important developments in human history are closely related to, and were even triggered by climate changes: the emergence of upright walking about 300,000 generations (6 million years) ago, and the origin of biocultural evolution and diversity about 130,000 generations ago (2.6 million years) ago. These climate crises must have been pretty useless for those primates living at the time. Yet, by creating challenges, they triggered profound evolutionary changes, some of which occurred independently more than once, as in the case of upright walking. Even more mind-boggling are three profoundly different evolutionary reactions to climate changes 2.6 million years ago: Migration, Biology, Culture. All three solutions were realized in different groups of early hominins. We modern humans prefer to believe that the biocultural solution leading to Homo sapiens was the most successful one. Yet, we shouldn’t be overly enthusiastic: we have not yet proven to be nearly as successful as our many extinct cousins in hominin history, all of whom actually existed for much longer than we have so far. BIPEDALITY: ORIGIN OF HOMININS Already 30 million years ago, the first anthropoid apes lived in the rainforests of tropical Africa. Their geographical distribution was relatively stable until a global cooling event led to drastic environmental changes in the Middle Miocene, about 10 million years ago. Seasonality became increasingly pronounced in Africa, characterized by seasonal dry and wet seasons in tropical areas. The rising East African Rift System created regional climate change that further intensified the impact of global climate change, and enhanced habitat diversity. The tropical rainforest that once covered Africa from its west to its east coast shrank dramatically, giving rise to what is still one of the largest continuous ecosystems on earth: the African savannas (Fig. 3). As aridity further increased in the late Miocene (c. 8 to 6 million years ago), some ape populations found themselves being pushed to the periphery of the tropical rainforest, living in areas adjacent to expanding wooded savannas (Schrenk et al., 2004).

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Friedemann Schrenk Apes now settled in the savannas of bush, lake and river landscapes and used trees, shore areas and grasslands as their habitat. However, the rich tropical forest food resources, especially fruits, were no longer available there. Savannas yield edible underground storage units (USO), like tubers, but these were almost useless at the time—at least for hominins. In fact, it was not until many million years and some 200,000 generations later, that early humans found a way of utilizing them efficiently: by cooking. In those new environment hominin ancestors had to meet their requirements, especially for omega-3 fatty acids, through other sources. In a savannah environment, rivers and lakes provide rich food resources in the form of aquatic animals and plants. Since great apes cannot swim—except by the cultural achievement of learning how to do so—the quadrupedal apes waded through the water seeking food in shallow bodies of water. Being capable of moving on two legs for a short time, as can be observed in today’s chimpanzees when carrying food, moving around in the water stabilized upright walking until it also prevailed on land, a few ten thousand generations later. According to this ‘wading hypothesis’ (Niemitz 2004), the riparian zones in the savannahs with water bodies were the ideal habitat for upright walking. According to molecular genetics, the split between the ape and the hominin lineages occurred about 8 to 7 million years ago. Until the end of the twentieth century, however, there was hardly any paleoanthropological evidence from the Upper Miocene of Africa (about 11–5 Ma). Then, In quick succession, three important finds came to light / Figs. 02, 03: in Kenya, the approximately 6 million year old Millennium Man

(Orrorin tugenensis) (Senut et al., 2001), in Ethiopia the c. 8 million-year-old Ardipithecus kedabba (White et al 1994, Haile-Selassie 2001), and the oldest hominin fossils in the Chad basin (Sahelanthropus tchadensis) with an age of just under seven million years (Brunet et al., 2002). The fact that all three of these earliest hominins developed upright walking in morpho-functionally slightly different ways can only mean that the much sought-after ‘missing link’ never existed. Ironically, the term itself is equally useless, as a link can only be ‘missing’—as long as it has not been found. If bipedal locomotion was an appropriate adaptive strategy for living in savannahs—which extended geographically over more than 5 million square kilometres— it is highly unlikely that upright walking started only once. Rather, it can be assumed that different geographical variants of earliest bipedal pre-humans developed, and

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potentially hybridized at the edges of their distribution ranges—as is observed in African baboon populations today. It is highly likely that different geographical variants of hominin precursor populations were intertwined in time and space along the borders of the shrinking tropical rainforest (Schrenk et al., 2004). In early stages of developing bipedality, climbing abilities were still well developed, as trees provided the best available shelter. About 200,000 generations later, when the savannas opened even more and grasslands spread, climbing skills declined to be replaced by continuous upright walking and even running (see below). Besides upright walking, hominin origins are also evident in the reduction of the large canines, which in male apes have mainly social functions of manipulating females. Although the loss of large canines has led some researchers to attest early events of pair bonding (Lovejoy 2009), it is more likely that female choice then started to be based on attractiveness, rather than on aggression. In fact, not only did the canines become smaller, but the cheeks simultaneously became wider (Weston et al. 2004)—an indicator of attractiveness at least in some societies of Homo sapiens today. FIRST PAN-AFRICAN DISTRIBUTION OF PRE-HUMANS Around 3.5 million years ago, early hominins with small brains and reduced canines, but that walked upright and lived in savannahs, successfully spread throughout Africa, and developed several geographical variants / Fig. 02. Their big molar teeth generally had thick enamel, the evolutionary basis for a diet that allowed them to colonize various habitats from forests to grass savannahs. The large teeth and strong jaws of the pre-human genera Australopithecus and Kenyanthropus were unsuitable for chewing tough fruits, leaves and flesh, but were rather designed to chew hard and brittle food and to crush nuts and other seeds between their flat, broad molars. Food selection may have been relatively unspecialized. Some fruits, berries, nuts, seeds, shoots, buds and mushrooms were available. Underground roots and tubers could be excavated; small reptiles, young birds, eggs, molluscs, insects and small mammals were not spurned. Living in seasonal changes between dry and humid climates meant that not all the food was available year-round. Early humans developed strategies to opportunistically and optimally exploit the diverse food supply, according to availability in a seasonal habitat. This behaviour implies an information

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always maintaining a close connection to the wide riverside and lake habitats. A subpopulation expanded into the area of today’s Chad, Australopithecus bahrelgazali (Brunet et al., 1995). In periods of relatively warm and humid climates, about 3.5 to 3 million years ago, some populations of Australopithecus afarenis spread along riparian ‘corridors’ into Southern Africa, where they established themselves as Australopithecus africanus. CHALLENGE CLIMATE CHANGE— THE MIGRATION SOLUTION A phase of global cooling began about 2.8 million years ago and brought about drastic climatic changes (deMenocal 2004, Bonnefille 2010) The effects of increasing climate extremes and aridification led to a geographical shift in vegetation areas and habitats. Tropical forest biomes narrowed towards the equator from north and south, open savannah and grassland biomes spread out (Vrba 1999). This, of course, also had serious effects on food resources. Pronounced seasonal extremes set in, and many organisms retained their preference for weak seasonal changes and the vegetation of the subtropical climate by expanding equatorially along with the shrinking biome. However, this was more a passive displacement of populations through time, rather than active migration. Among these ‘passive migrants’ was Australopithecus africanus / Fig. 04, who lived in the temperate climate of Southern Africa. After half a million years of continuous cooling the habitats suitable for the species had shifted to the north of the African Rift Valley. Part of the population followed a specific habitat, the wooded areas. It spread north along the riparian zone corridor into the Malawi Rift, where a wider variety of non-vegetarian food was available. Selection processes resulted in greater flexibility of behaviour in the new habitat. The descendant of Australopithecus africanus was a new species, documented by the almost 2 million-year-old findings of Homo habilis (Leakey et al., 1964, Tobias 1991) in Eastern Africa.

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CHALLENGE CLIMATE CHANGE— BIOLOGICAL SOLUTION: THE ‘NUTCRACKER PEOPLE’ For Australopithecus afarensis in Eastern Africa the changing climate meant that its habitat was divided into more remote ecotonal riparian areas and closed lakeshore areas. Between about 2.8 and 2.5 million years ago, this resulted in larger open habitats that carried more hardy and harder vegetation around the remaining riverine forests. Some populations initially maintained contact with the fruit-rich, aquiferous zones, especially during dry seasons, but were also able to utilize the harder food that was abundantly available in the open habitats during the more favourable seasons. The resulting selection pressure led to the increased survival of megadont organisms that—with larger teeth—could feed on harder diets from open savannas. Over time, these specialized hominins also developed a more robust facial skull and huge chewing muscles. The possession of very large teeth and extremely strong chewing musculature earned them the name ‘nutcracker people’ / Fig. 05, who have been classified into several species within the genus Paranthropus. Their appearance was a rather fast evolutionary process that took only about 10,000 generations. Already 2.6 million years ago, Paranthropus aethiopicus was established in Eastern Africa / Fig. 02 (Walker et al. 1986). All nutcracker people shared essential features in the construction of their skull and dentition / Fig 5. The facial skull is very wide. The zygomatic arches, on which the masticatory muscles that pull the lower jaw upwards originate, are strong and large. Most striking is the formation of a bony structure on the top of the skull. The chewing muscles, which reached a multiple thickness of the chewing muscles of today’s humans, had extended so far to the top of the skull, that both sides met at the midline, forming a sagittal crest / Fig. 05. These peculiarities, which distinguish the nutcracker people from all other hominins, are related to a specialization in predominantly vegetarian food, including hard and coarse plant material, such as seeds and hard plant fibres. Since plant food always contains quartz particles from sand, the teeth of Paranthropus experienced strong wear, and therefore had to be large. Their crown areas are twice the size of those of modern humans. Accidentally, the ability to break hard shells could have been beneficial in consuming aquatic food (such as mussels) (Joordens 2014). About 2 million years ago, a reversal began in Africa from a relatively cool and dry climate to warmer and wetter conditions. This was followed by a period of expansion of tropical habitats. Paranthropus spread to Southern Africa (Paranthro-

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pus robustus), as did Homo habilis (Bromage & Schrenk 1995) / Fig. 04. About 1 million years ago, however, specialized herbivores among the large mammals such as pigs and antelopes, had established themselves in Africa around the same time, when the genus Homo (see below) had already invented very effective tool cultures. The nutcracker people became sandwiched in between these more efficient competitors, finally becoming extinct around 1 million years ago. Thus, evolutionary specialisations may prove useless in the long run, if they lead to an overspecialisation that cannot be reversed. CHALLENGE CLIMATE CHANGE— CULTURAL SOLUTION: ORIGINS OF HOMO, THE EARLIEST HUMANS The oldest fossils of the genus Homo (2.8–2.75 Ma) were found in Ethiopia (Villamoare et al., 2015), and northern Malawi (2.6–2.4 Ma, Schrenk et al., 1993). For about 15,000 generations, from around 2.8 to 2.5 million years ago, early humans lived in increasingly extreme climatic and environmental conditions, which led to a profound change in their food resources. In this period, both the nutcracker people (see above) and the earliest humans, the genus Homo, emerged. From the simultaneity of events it can be concluded that there was an alternative to the development of a hyper robust masticatory apparatus, which was equally suitable for crushing increasingly hard food in drought conditions: a systematic stone tool culture. The roots of the oldest stone tools of Western Turkana, Kenya (Harmand et al., 2015) and animal bones with cross-sectional cut marks from Ethiopia (McPherron et al., 2010, Thompson et al., 2015) reach back more than 3 million years. For over a million years little changed in the original way of making tools by cutting off a few splinters. Long before this the use of unprocessed stones to break up the bones of dead animals or hard fruits must have been common. Tools in the sense of implements are widely used by animals, too, above all by great apes. Yet, under the pressure of severe habitat changes around 2.5 million years ago, it was not only the hominin’s ability to invent culture, but also passing on and learning the use of the tools across the entire population that led to the origin of the genus Homo. The main advantage of Homo was the retention of a rather unspecialized body structure, which was open for a large range of cultural specializations, leading to an extremely high biocultural diversity. Thus, the beginning of a systematic tool culture opened up the potential of a completely new quality: the almost immeasurable

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spheres of biocultural evolution of Homo sapiens. An essential prerequisite was the refinement of communication. It was only with the help of language that it become possible to pass on complex cultural experiences, from individual to individual and from generation to generation. The earliest indications of speech centres in the brain were found in 2-million-year-old endocranial casts (Tobias 1987). The earliest humans lived in small groups. In addition to the collection of vegetable food, obtaining meat became increasingly important. At Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, as well as at Koobi Fora, Kenya / Fig. 01 sites were discovered at which large game had been dissected (Bunn 1986). Stone artefacts were found among the animal bones, some of which were still in their anatomical connection, some of them had cut marks. It seems possible that a social division of labour already existed nearly two million years ago: the meat was brought in by the male members of the group and shared at a place that served as a home base. Through the systematic use of stones the earliest humans gained an immense advantage over all other hominins: an ever-increasing independence from direct environmental influences. Although ‘typical human’ behaviour such as consciousness, art or music is not even detectable in its beginnings, this marks the beginning of the genus Homo. The increasing independence from the environment that resulted from the use of tools inevitably led and still leads to growing dependence on these tools. The most useless long-term effect of biocultural evolution is that these tools have developed into technological systems which damage the environment to such an extent that it can only recover if Homo sapiens becomes extinct. EARLY HUMANS AND FIRST EXPANSIONS About two million years ago, hominin types evolved in Africa that had stronger and larger skeletons and massive skull bones, the typical features of Homo erectus (early humans). The brain volume increased: starting from the Australopithecines (about 500 cc), it measures about 800–900 cc in the oldest skulls of the genus Homo almost 2 million years ago, and then increases to 900–1000 cc about 1 million years ago. The leg and foot bones were well developed. This suggests that Homo erectus had great strength and endurance for carrying material and food to home bases. For the first time in human history, anatomical features show that people were capable of running. Running, however, was only possible by developing sweat glands for cooling the body. It was only then that much of the useless body hair,

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inherited from ape ancestors and carried around for hundreds of thousands of generations, was evolutionarily reduced in order to allow space for more sweat glands to be incorporated in the skin of early humans—an indication that even uselessness can be successful, as long as there is no reward for change. Hunting techniques continued to develop rapidly, as did the ability to use fire. The earliest evidence of the controlled use of fire is from Koobi Fora in East Turkana, Kenya, about 1.5 million years ago. Direct evidence was found in Swartkrans, South Africa / Fig. 01, where burnt bones with an age of 1 million years have been analysed. Their microstructural changes show that they were heated to temperatures of around 800°C, which is much higher than the 200° C that a bushfire would have produced (Brain & Sillent 1988). In savannahs fires often occur naturally, for example they can be caused by lightning. Therefore, fire must have been well-known to early humans as a destructive force. It was not only the heat of the fire that was important, especially later when expanding to cooler continents, but also the protection it afforded against wild animals as well as the possibility it offered of heating food. The control of fire was and still is a task that is regulated not only technically but also socially. For Homo erectus, therefore, we can infer a functioning social structure and clearly enhanced foresighted consciousness. The invention of cooking must have been somewhat accidental: early humans, who found and ate tubers that had just been roasted in a natural bush fire, could immediately feel the effect of the fast energy release that resulted from ‘natural’cooking. It was probably only a matter of generations before hominins tried to reproduce this effect artificially. Other innovations in the tool culture of Homo erectus started to emerge at shorter intervals than ever before. Since it is individuals making inventions, it is possible, that syndromes like Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), seemingly useless today, but present in 5 percent of modern adult Homo sapiens, were once major driving forces for new discoveries among early humans (Shelley-Tremblay et al. 1996). EARLY EURASIANS It was only a matter of a few thousand generations before the first expansions ‘out of Africa’ occurred ​​/ Fig. 04. At least two million years ago, early humans left the African continent. This is in line with climatic data from the Levant and the eastern Mediterra-

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nean, which for 2 million years indicate the extent of food rich savannah-type habitats. Hunting was probably the driving force, leading to the search for prey in more remote areas and the slow expansion of living areas. With maybe 5 km per generation even these seemingly useless expansions within just 2.000 generations (ca. 40,000 years) reached remote areas such as Java and China, where palaeontological finds date back about 1.8 million years (Han et al. 2017). A similar age was determined for the discovery of the earliest Europeans in Georgia (Dmanisi) (Lorkipanidze et al. 2013). The Ice Age of Europe, expressed by tendencies of cooling and intensification of temperature fluctuations, formed the climatic frame for the spread of humans in the northern hemisphere. About 1.4 million years ago, hominins had become native to southern Europe, as is evidenced by stone tools in Spain and Italy (Azarrolla et al. 2007). Thereafter, the intensity of the cold periods continued to increase. These were interspersed with milder and warmer periods, during which humans were able to penetrate Europe north of the Alps for the first time (Stringer 2012). Ante-Neanderthals (Homo steinheimensis) first appeared about 300,000 years ago. Still in a warm phase of the Ice Age and at least 90,000 years ago, the classic Neanderthals had emerged. As a geographic variant of early Eurasians Denisova people are known from DNA evidence discovered in Siberia (Krause et al., 2010). Also, extinct humans inhabited the islands of Flores 50.000 years ago (Homo floresiensis, Brown 2005) and the Philippines (Détroit et al. 2019). At the height of their development, Neanderthals were widespread in Europe and beyond. They were able to colonize even extreme habitats. Neanderthals and modern humans met in the Middle East around 90,000 years ago. They even mixed: Homo sapiens with Neanderthals in Europe and with Denisova people in southeast Asia, as well as Neanderthals with Denisovans (Stringer 2016). Modern humans from Africa finally prevail worldwide, while all other human forms have not been anatomically detectable for at least 27,000 years. ORIGIN AND FUTURE OF HOMO SAPIENS A few hundred thousand years ago, a synergy effect of independent factors of biological and cultural evolution, such as tool culture, communication, social behaviour and brain structure began to take off. These factors existed individually throughout the entire history of great apes / Fig. 06. They were present for more than 30 million years, yet their combination was seemingly useless all this time. Only about 1,000 genera-

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Friedemann Schrenk tions ago, the overlap and mutual influence of the effects of those factors, together with an increase in social organization, resulted in a new species, Homo sapiens in Africa—at around 300,000 years ago (Hublin et al. 2017), when Neanderthals in Europe had not yet reached their evolutionary peak. Modern genetics clearly show that races in humans do not exist. Despite some regional variants, in Homo sapiens the genetic similarities outweigh so clearly worldwide that they make the concept of human races—by far the worst and most evil of the useless concepts in human history—obsolete (Cann et al 1987). Of course, still there are biological variabilities in geographical variants of modern humans. In northern latitudes, the dark pigments (melanin) in the skin were reduced: UV radiation destroys the vital folic acid but at the same time supports the development of the equally vital vitamin D. (Jablonski & Chaplin 2000). In order to obtain the necessary balance, the optimal skin colour for certain areas of life on Earth corresponds to the respective local radiation intensity of UVB radiation (Jablonski & Chaplin 2010). Whereas the effects of anatomical and locomotion changes were strongest at the beginning of human evolution around 6 million years ago / Fig. 06, morphologically humans have not changed much during the last 300,000 years. The overpopulation of our species and constant genetic drift around the globe does not allow for further biological evolutionary processes, as there are no areas on earth today where a genetic separation of a Homo sapiens population would be possible for a few thousand generations. Africa is the origin of our common biological, social and cultural evolutionary history and thus also the origin of our knowledge and value systems (McBrearthy & Brooks 2000). With the expansion of cognitive spaces and increased social learning both language and material-symbolic communication emerged. This includes the ability to plan ahead, the sense of time, the development of physical culture and healing, the use of plants for food production, the willingness to share food with others, awareness of forms of relationships, the ability to make inventions, the construction of houses, the emergence of funerals, the production of jewellery and clothing, the beginnings of dancing, and an awareness of life history, to name just a few. The cultural differences between today’s human societies do not represent different levels of development. Their diversity is a consequence of complex biocultural, relationships, specializations, historical processes and autonomous decisions. The identity-creating origin of Homo sapiens is attributed to a continent, which

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the rest of the world often still denies the ability to develop. The current foreclosure of affluent regions, aimed at keeping their wealth to themselves, will prove useless. In light of recent challenges such as the biodiversity- and climate-crisis, only a global cultural and social network can extend the life span of our species—at least for a few generations.

Important early hominin sites in Africa (Drawing: Christine Hemm)

Fig. 01

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Chronology and biogeography of early hominins (Drawings: A. Marie Rahn, Christine Hemm)

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Fig. 02

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Reduction of tropical rainforest and origins of savannahs 8–5 million years ago. Sites and find of earliest hominins in the upper Miocene. Red: East African Rift System (EARS).

Fig. 03

Climate triggered migrations of early hominins in Africa and earliest expansions out of Africa (reconstructions: WildLifeArt Nina Kieser & Wolfgang Schnaubelt)

Fig. 04

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Co-existence of new species in the hominin tree from around 2.5 million years (Drawings: A. Marie Rahn) up: Paranthropus aethiopicus (Black skull, KNM-ER WT 17000), nutcracker people (with sagittal crest for attachment of lateral chewing muscles on top of the skull) down: Homo rudolfensis (KNM-ER ER 1470), earliest humans

Fig. 05

Important evolutionary factors of hominin evolution. Width of columns represents amount of change during the last 7 million years (reconstructions: WildLifeArt Nina Kieser & Wolfgang Schnaubelt).

Fig. 06

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Sonia Leimer

CONQUEST OF THE USELESS Excerpt from Chris Sharp’s text, Conquest of the Useless All Photographs by autoterritorium (c) Marina Faust Inspired by the video documentation of an experiment from 1959 involving a chimpanzee and a series of sculptural objects, Eroberung des Nutzlosen [Conquest of the Useless] 2016 is an interactive, performative sculptural installation. The work consists of stainless-steel replicas of the objects originally manipulated by the chimpanzee. Presented on a padded dance floor, the objects are periodically activated by a group of performers according to a specific open-ended choreography—e.g., loving the object; carrying the object; building and dismantling; and dancing for the object— or, when a performance is not taking place, the viewers are welcome to activate the objects themselves. The implications of this work are manifold. While it might initially seem preoccupied with subject and object relations, it also deals with issues of space, how it is defined and demarcated, and, perhaps even more importantly, how these objects also become metaphors for space itself. They, and the way they are manipulated speak to the same potential investiture of meaning with which space is known to be always arbitrarily filled. This is most obviously communicated by the title of the piece—Conquest of the Useless, which is borrowed from a book by Werner Herzog—in which the word conquest itself signifies in two very specific ways: in terms of subjugation, as in a subject over an object or a given people, and spatially, as in the domination, the conquest of it. In both cases, the vanity of the conceit (to conquer) is clearly at play but becomes more conspicuous in the latter case, as if humanity could ever permanently subjugate, demarcate any given space, bend it definitively to their will. Anything but cynical, the title, especially vis-à-vis the work it designates, contains a complex, if playful bouquet of emotions, from an acknowledgement of the vanity of human ambition to a compassion for its irrepressible existence. That said, Leimer’s critique, for lack of a better word, of this vanity, this very human folly is anything but dismissive. She addresses it with great humor—picture the group of performers affectionately hugging the objects—and even compassion. Indeed, the compassion

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Sonia Leimer registers through both dead pan humor and the methodicalness with which the work is presented. The methodicalness itself can be seen in how the objects are constructed, the real weight and density they occupy in the world, and the systematic way they are manipulated, e.g., loving the object; etc. It is precisely this methodicalness which prevents the work itself from being a mere idea or so-called critique, and thus moves it into the realm of redemption (method, as in commitment, is integral to artistic redemption, which occurs the moment the work takes on a life of its own, transcending its author’s intentions).

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ART—USE— USEFULNESS Two Discourses: Use Value and Instrumentalization Translated by James Gussen

The classical terrain of uselessness is art. An idleness that had previously been cultivated could no longer be morally and socially sustained in a capitalism dominated by Protestantism, although of course the ruling classes continued to produce an occasional good-for-nothing, and they did look positively on many embodiments of an unconstrained, unhurried lifestyle. By 1800 at the latest, however, doing nothing was frowned upon in Europe, while at the same time it began to gain a new lease on life in art. It did so on the one hand as the subject of Romantic texts in which wandering, itinerant figures, who were then given names like good-for-nothing, gradually established a new type of hero, and on the other with the invention of the independent artist and above all of fine art, whose paramount requirement was that it serve no useful purpose. A peculiar historical correlation that I will return to later on is the fact that it was around this same time that the idea that the state—the nation state—should collect artworks and exhibit them publicly began its triumphant ascent. Regarding art and its useful- or uselessness, there are two broadly left-wing or critical discourses today. One of them criticizes art for its uselessness. It claims that the bourgeoisie invented an autonomous art, that is, one subject only to its own laws, in part because it had no need for art’s usefulness; moreover, that usefulness would be a form of heteronomy, a view which implies that art has no inherent usefulness and that following that uselessness would be autonomous, that is, would mean following its own law. The bourgeoisie initially invented autonomy as a secular weapon against religion and ceremony—hence old and repressive forms of use—but later it explicitly

ART—USE—USEFULNESS celebrates non-use, not least in order to show that it already has everything. According to this logic, anyone who can look at a Dutch still life without getting hungry and can launch into leisurely rhapsodies about peinture is at the very least already full. Autonomy would then be just another word for a transformation of the use, sacrificed in the bourgeois era, that art formerly had in precapitalist religious, ceremonial, magical, and even courtly contexts (even if this usefulness may have been a function rather than a use) into a commodity governed exclusively by exchange value. Like all commodities, when it first began to be commodified it still displayed strong traces of its former use value but then gradually lost them. Today, when super-rich collectors hoard their art commodities in giant duty-free zones within easy reach of the airport so they can be quickly flown to art fairs and auctions where they are briefly shown and disposed of, and withdraw them from public view the rest of the time, the dominance of art’s exchange value over its use value is complete. A possible counterargument against this commodity-critical skepticism regarding autonomy might be the claim that only an art freed from tasks and functions—on analogy with the human being freed from labor—would be in a position to fully realize its potential and to register and realize the specific utility and use value precisely of a free or liberated art, and to recognize at a fundamental level what is subject to no external constraint because it is itself not subject to any external constraint. The effect of autonomy thus conceived would not be a supposed subordination to exchange value. On the contrary, only in this way could art’s true use value emerge, beyond its dubious harnessing to rituals and other practices whose meaning and purpose was always determined independently of the art involved. The fact that the ability to produce and consume this kind of art is subject to certain privileges is really only an argument against those privileges, not against what they make possible. Good wine is not made worse by the fact that only a few can afford it. On the contrary, the better it tastes, the more scandalous is the privilege that prevents the many from tasting it. Whereas the first and now widespread anti-autonomy discourse has a positive view of use value and the use of art and attaches all kinds of hopes to it (in activist art, for example), the second, pro-autonomy discourse generally refers—negatively—to another concept of use: instrumentalization. It accuses the friends of a used and usable art, the proponents of its use value, of instrumentalizing art. Instrumentalization, it is always assumed, is bad, while use value (this is the assumption of

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the opposing side) is fundamentally good. The proper use of a thing is regarded as the ultimate goal of every form of liberation from capitalist commodity culture. Both assumptions have their origin in classical left-wing convictions. The defense of use value comes directly out of Marx’s political economy, but unlike other elements of that philosophy, it has aged well. Today, of course, an appeal to proper use against improper exchange in dealing with resources is the quintessential ecological argument. The destruction of the planet can be described in almost all of its aspects as a catastrophe caused by the dominance of exchange value (cattle farming instead of rain forest). But even the critique of instrumentalization—of instrumental, goal-oriented reason—is itself already a proto-ecological text at its beginnings in Adorno/ Horkheimer. It is precisely the use of nature for human purposes (nourishment, etc.) and hence as an instrument that constitutes the original sin. Knowledge emancipated from magic destroys the world (while magic merely gets it wrong). Conversely, methods ascribed to art, especially avant-garde art, are often turned to as a source of metaphors for an ecologically desirable approach to so-called nature. Thus, it is often the same or closely related discourses, with similar left-wing or critical origins, that argue in the one case against instrumentalization and in favor of autonomy and hence in favor of a certain uselessness of art, and that argue in the other against the disappearance and neglect of art’s use value and the rise of profiteering with its exchange value stripped of any social use or community context. Both camps seem to be in the right, and the fact that they nonetheless seem to argue in such opposite ways may be due more to the discourse itself, to its concepts, history, and lack of clarity—in other words, to the use that is made of the arguments: it is their use that renders them vague and interchangeable. And yet they are nothing without that use, and it may be that this insight points toward an answer to the question of the beneficial and harmful effects of art’s usefulness. ART IN THE ABSTRACT SINGULAR AS A SOCIAL AND ANTISOCIAL MEANS The discussion of art’s use value and the critique of its instrumentalization operate with an abstract singular that has thankfully completely disappeared from other discourses. There is no longer anyone trying to explain to me what “the human being” as such is or does or should be doing, but art in its abstract singularity is still alive and well in the arts and culture sections.

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But if I now invoke the multitude of things, movements, and relationships that can be described and regarded as artworks in current parlance, my intention is not to defend the confusingly colorful world of the concrete against unacceptable abstraction and generality. The topic I am addressing is a different one: Precisely the fact that art cannot be reduced to the concept of an art has something to do with its use value and instrumentalizability. The reason I have placed such emphasis on the positive infinity of the concept of art is thatet it shows me the world as something that can be accessed in a limitless variety of ways and thus opens it up to me. I am able to access and experience it precisely because I have no idea what a boundary of my use of artworks might be. Precisely this openness, however, borders in its lack of concepts on the type of ostensibly non-economic bourgeois values—such as peace, love, and creativity—which are not only constantly instrumentalized but in a certain sense actually deserve to be, since there is nothing about them that resists cheap cooptation and ideology building, hence nothing left to be ruined; they are already ruined. There are many today who think that even contemporary art’s commitment to critique and reflexivity belongs in this category, and that the only things still worth utilizing are forms of absolute clarity, confession, and aggression that leave the classically ambiguous (and/or conceptually infinite) nature of the artwork behind them or relinquish and abandon it altogether. But could ambiguity be used—and if so, how? (More on this later.) For some time now, what resists in contemporary art today has once again been structured around a use—use by communities. Communities, even more massively than institutions, are every bit as concerned with art-in-the-singular as bourgeois non-use. Countless projects of various political persuasions seek to use art and artistic techniques to solve the social and political problems of communities: from classical instruments like murals, memorials, and monuments to practical interventions such as artist-organized workshops, artist-designed exercises in cultivating self-awareness, and artist-led efforts at self-organization. All this has existed since at least the 1930s with major highlights in the 1960s and ‘70s; the most recent documenta brought together a series of historical projects of this kind, including for example the one by Lawrence and Anna Halprin on the US West Coast and then again on a massive scale in the last fifteen or twenty years. Just as the bourgeois use of art produces this openness that on the one hand deserves to be defended but on the other is open to objection since it operates with hollow, ideological concepts, so

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community art produces a very clear concept of utility and use that dominates all other aspects and hence the point of any particular use. That concept is utilitarian and formulated in advance: the projects unfold on the basis of a preexisting concept of social utility. However, an interesting feature of most models of community art is that the orientation toward usefulness eliminates the producer-recipient distinction and hence, especially in recent years, reconfigures the participants’ roles around notions like assemblage and entanglement. What disappears—and perhaps that’s a good thing—is the openness. And of course the newly achieved participation unintentionally resembles the standards and forms of domination of a new algorithmic network capitalism. Yet to the extent that they actually take part in these debates and do not simply carry out projects without any conceptual framework, community art and social artistic strategies, whether in the public space or not, continue to think in terms of a singular entity, just like the classical bourgeois philosophy of art. However, if instead of starting with this collective singular “Art” we start with artworks, or, in more modern terms, with aesthetic objects, we become able to deal more flexibly with the traditional conceptual frameworks, including, for example, those that distinguish between fine art and applied art. Now, a free and flexible approach of this kind does not in itself necessarily constitute an advance, any more than does imprecision or a lack of conceptuality. But it may be that the non-identity of artworks and public, social, and political strategies with a homogeneous concept of art is conceptually constitutive of artworks, that is to say, of elements that can be assigned to the set “art.” Elements of that set would then be distinguished by the fact that, individually, they always differ in at least one characteristic from the generic identity of artworks as prescribed by the concept that gives the set its name. It would then be, among other things, the use value and use form of artworks that could be qualified—or in normative terms would have to be qualified—as inherently unpredictable. INFINITY AND AMBIGUITY Classically, the meta-term for this is aesthetic experience. The fact that this notion is closely linked, historically, to Western and bourgeois ways of organizing the reception of art is not, in purely conceptual terms, a compelling argument against it. Aesthetic experience is normally described as a subject’s reflexive and unending engagement with its own subjectivity on the basis of an object, in a process that is not

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tied to the temporality of its experience of the aesthetic object. However, what most people automatically think of when they hear this is a white, Western, middle-class person strolling through white rooms and casually reflecting back and forth in his or her head. But it could also be a participant in a community project in a so-called home for girls in Poland, in which sixteen-year-old so-called “at-risk” and para-criminal young women are introduced to the basic ideas of feminism in an experiment that revives the avant-garde pedagogy of Janus Korczak, organized and filmed by an American photographer and filmmaker (this example refers to a series of works by the American photographer and filmmaker Sharon Lockhart). Even if this young woman—if all goes well—directly employs one of these feminist ideas in her everyday life and solves a problem, and despite the fact that, as an immediate application, this does not conform to the classical notion of aesthetic experience as something undefined, her encounter with that idea is nevertheless the result of a broadly conceived social art project which had many encounters and moments of reflection on its agenda that were by no means oriented toward predictable and univocal benefits. It is thus conceivable and may even be imperative that the concept of aesthetic experience on the one hand and certain substrates of the ideological discourse of openness, ambiguity, and autonomy on the other be redefined, without forgetting or rejecting them entirely, if we don’t wish to end up with an extremely narrow idea of the artwork dictated by instrumentality. Nevertheless, there is clearly another problem here as well: concepts do not just live in ideal and—if you like—autonomous discussions. They also have their own histories, which continue to adhere to them. A subtly treacherous phenomenon in this respect is use value, which both strikes fear into the bourgeois concept of art but has often been heavily romanticized in anti-bourgeois circles, even if new life can now be breathed into it by the ecological camp; the concept of value generally remains undertheorized in it, while the concept of use itself is kept highly abstract so as not to drift too close to instrumentality. If we leave art aside for a moment and stare into the heaven of generality, there are three things I can do with an object: 1. I can use it as long as it is functional, that is, until I have used it up, eaten it up, or worn it until it has holes in it. 2. I can refrain from using it altogether and exchange it instead. And finally, I can 3. neither use nor exchange it but save it, collect it, hoard it. The latter option is central to art’s use as well as its exchange value. The first case of pure use is precisely the one I discussed in the first section of this essay: something ideally unpredictable, free, and

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open, which of course is repeatedly captured by exchange and the market but is also visibly in conflict with market exchange and longs for other forms of the liberation of use—and in the process becomes either romantic or crudely utilitarian. The second case is the market. It is the final case, however, that of hoarding and saving, which may be the most instructive—beyond rebellion, romanticism, and cynicism. Those who collect have a very high opinion of the use of artworks or other objects they collect. However, that opinion is so high that it postpones their proper use for the future. Accumulation of this kind has very bad press at the moment. Hoarding is regarded as antisocial; the hoarder or clutterer is a pathological figure in need of therapy from Marie Kondo. Living in empty minimal lofts or Japanese temples is the current social norm. By contrast, those who hoard exchange values, which of course have less and less material form—from gold bars to banknotes to Bitcoin— and which as artworks have brought forth ideals like minimalism and abstraction, enjoy tremendous social prestige. But the hoarder of artworks is usually both: an institutional clutterer who manages huge dusty archives and warehouses, and an administrator of radically reduced aesthetic exchange values, often, as suggested earlier, in the name of a certain social abstractness built around inclusion and exclusion. This contradictory place, which has its origins in the revolutionary idea of making the nobility’s cabinets of wonders accessible to the masses, the site of accumulation, whether for speculative or hedonistic reasons or reasons of state—that is, the museum, the gallery, the Kunsthalle—is also the conceptual prison of the opposition between use and instrumentalization, since on the one hand it is constantly producing something like official versions and positions, while on the other it is constantly concealing precisely that fact. The museum and the gallery never openly admit all the things they are doing and in what proportions, because only one side of their many activities is actually a showing: that showing (despite the interventions of the Michael Ashers and Andrea Frasers of this world) is always also a not-showing, and hence a concealing, of everything else, and it is a highly specific suggestion for use, which, however, is made in the shadow of an unspoken instrumentalization. This is not to say that curators, gallerists, and even politicians have not repeatedly tried to work on these problems, and there is no question that one can do bad or good museum work. Nevertheless, there is a fundamental problem with collecting and preserving, with saving things for later: it is incapable of conceptualizing the always unpredictable use of art and incorporating it into its institutional frame-

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work. It can resolve to be open to it; it can explicitly call upon artists to practice institutional critique and expose the engine room, as is fashionable today, but that won’t solve the fundamental problem. Of course, once in a great while a clutterer hoarding old plastic bags will actually use one of them or will actually read one of the old newspapers piling up in his or her office—I’m talking about myself here. Similarly, once in a while a person, generally young, will go to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, see a certain historical painting for the first time, and experience a legitimate epiphany. But this situation, which is something like the unspoken, normative standard scenario of art’s use in the global West, is not a problem as a possibility but rather as a conceptual institution, not least because everyone who thinks seriously about the use and experiences of art regards it as something to be combatted: with clever pedagogical ideas, mercilessly rehearsed spontaneity, and blessings forced upon the excluded. The use of art, however, and its individual and social utility reside in the fact that it cannot and will not conform to any metadiscourse. This doesn’t mean that one cannot and should not strive for approximations, including built approximations, of better critical metadiscourses (and hence also museums), but these are no help in the effort to determine art’s utility, an effort that must metadiscursively ascertain what makes the new idea possible. The result of that effort, however, can only be something that cannot be depended on. It has no operating hours. THE USE VALUE OF DANCE AND WEAPONS What I am after here, however, is not existentialist kitsch. There is a saying that many in the art world are extremely fond of; for a long time, there was an event and exhibition series named after it. I find this saying appalling; it supposedly comes from the anarchist Emma Goldmann: “If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution.” In my view, the insistence that one should be able to dance to the revolution perfectly captures the arrogance of the hedonistic left. One might counter by saying: because you want to dance to the revolution, you’re never going to actually carry one off. Political upheavals are serious social crises and to conceptualize them as entertainment is to postpone them indefinitely. “The revolution will not go better with coke,” Gil Scott-Heron used to respond in a very danceable song. The idea that one could conduct a revolution to good music or good art is similarly absurd, but when these ideas are stripped of their sloganlike quality and the transparent motives of a feel-good, artsy

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politicization, what’s left is two extremes of the use of art in a more general sense: dancing to something or feeling inspired to shape major political events: this is the field within which art’s usefulness would have to be delineated. By identifying an infinity of points that are located in a field of individual and social practice and hardly deserve a common identifier like use—expect perhaps to differentiate and demarcate the latter from exchange on the one hand and instrumentality on the other. Art is used by those who neither exchange (or wish to exchange) it nor instrumentalize it—hence not by the market and not by the state. So as not to end on this classical and broadly unobjectionable note—there is no way to get around working with either of them. One more final thought on usefulness. When the hippie entrepreneur Stewart Brand came out with his meta-department-store-catalogue The Whole Earth Catalogue in the late 1960s, he wrote the slogan “Access to Tools” underneath the title. As a traveling hippie department store, Brand had sold things to the early rural communes of California that they absolutely needed, pickaxes as well as books on revolutionary child rearing; the collective term for all of it: tools. That sounded almost Marxist: I am bringing you use values. But then he published a catalogue that explained where these things could be purchased and ordered, together with texts on their usefulness. Things for use, but also for sale. He took the idea for the catalogue from the Communists and Fluxus artists Henry Flynt and George Maciunas, who had published a short pamphlet a year earlier called “Communists Must Give Revolutionary Leadership in Culture.” In it, Maciunas and Flynt criticized the US Communists of the 1960s for failing to recognize that precisely mass produced commodities often contained the most important revolutionary use values, which the puritanical Communists simply ignored; among them were the Citroen 2CV, the Hammond organ, and the records of black soul musicians like Martha and the Vandellas. Look for use value in glamour and mass products too! The Whole Earth Catalogue was later praised by Steve Jobs as the model for Apple as well as for the idea of the search engine. Today, after the victory of Silicon Valley and in a world where, at least theoretically, one can still imagine an infinity of possible uses, the goal would be to develop a notion of use and usefulness for which there can be no tools or apps because they are not and cannot be conceptualized. Tools like these should be produced by artists. Unimaginable use, use that transcends itself, anti-use. I’m not sure about that last one.

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In one of the best cinematic comedies of remarriage, Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, a ruthless but likable newspaper editor interested only in circulation figures attempts to persuade his ex-wife and formerly his paper’s finest reporter, on her wedding day, to come back to work for him as well as, of course, not to marry her new boyfriend. The extremely quick-witted comedy is set almost entirely in the press room of a prison which also houses a convicted murderer awaiting his execution. This naïve and somewhat doltish murderer has shot a passerby for no apparent reason. His lawyer has tried to defend him by pointing out that the naïve man had fallen under the spell of a dangerous cult leader. The latter, a young socialist, preached the virtues of use value against the consumer society already emerging in 1937 with its fixation on exchange value and its capitalist soullessness. His slogan was “Production for Use!” The poor simpleton now on death row happened to own a gun, and since he had learned that things should only be produced for use, for practical application, he sought to morally vindicate his pistol by using it. Where weapons are concerned, of course, every debate about use value hits a wall—or perhaps it doesn’t. Weapons show that not only can one produce things that lack any use value whatsoever; one can also produce things with a clearcut but negative use value. Only if someone had declared this revolver a readymade in time could it have been prevented from one day being fired. Even autonomous art can make itself useful and save lives.

Luciano Parodi

USELESSNESS, XXXX XXXXXXi.

1. Things, products, prototypes and inventions for which a use has not yet been found will rapidly be regarded as useless, and eventually discarded. Uselessness apparently lacks value. Even though uselessness can be just a momentary lapse in the existence of things. Left to themselves for long enough, they can eventually be rediscovered or reinvented. Imperative use-value systems seem not to have the time, the patience or the understanding to cope with the fact that a simple change of context might lead useless artefacts to become fruitful again. Could we propose integrating uselessness in the contemporary course of economics and politics, thus disrupting the dialectic attributes of ‘useful-useless’? Uselessness is neither the opposite to nor the counterpart of usefulness but is one half of a pair and it should also be able to exist and perform as it is. Useless. When it comes to people and living creatures, uselessness becomes delicate and more complex. It is not their body but its performance that is at stake. However, for an economic evaluation in terms of profit this is indistinctly appraised: a person is their useful skills. By changing conditions, a person will rapidly become redundant instead of opening the possibility of either reassessing their skills or defining the potential of their new ‘useless’ condition. Ebru Kurbak’s research on migrants, Infrequently asked questions, shows clearly that the value of things is a social construct. You won´t probably need to know how to milk a camel in Vienna, unless you consider the procedure and not its object. This art-based research opened a possibility to explore and

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enquire how a closed system of values not only stumbles against diversity but also can only survive its own colonial anachronism with violence. Uselessness suddenly articulates a means for dialogue and communication. Once the question has been raised about how we could perceive these ‘useless’ skills differently than in an ethnological museum, we could probably go further by asking how we could we perceive uselessness differently than in an art museum. In the eighteenth century uselessness, as an autonomous entity, made its way into the world of consumable goods as art. Described in the essay Art—Use—Usefulness by Diedrich Diederichsen early industrial bourgeoisie urged the necessity to have it all... including uselessness. Autonomous fine art was freed at a first moment from old and repressive forms of use such as religion. On second instance, art liberated from tasks and function should be able to realize its full potential and lose subordination to exchange value. Theoretically. After all, uselessness in art is highly paid. Counterarguments claim for a heteronomous art and demand art, or an art, back to use and usefulness. This time, however, not as institutional representation but widespread, for example as activist art interventions, ‘Kunst am Bau’, research art practices etc. The discussion in art or, to put it better, art-worlds about autonomy, use, value and instrumentalization is obviously neither isolated nor exclusive of it/them. Uselessness is the political project of our times /01. Robotisation, digitalisation, and automation are some of the contemporary instruments used to reduce labour, but clearly not only perusing precision or to free humans from hazardous occupations; increasingly it is solely the reduction of production or administration costs that leads this transformation. This is not new. The logic of ‘less is more’ /02, which once defined an architecture stripped down to the bare minimum, defines the future of politics and politics of production. Prognoses based on the direction that capitalist economies are taking, are tainted with tacit negative uselessness. 01 / / Richard Sennett closes his article ‘Out with the Old’ [The Guardian, 11 Feb. 2006] with the sentence: ‘Usefulness is the political project of our times’, in order to explain contemporary political tendencies and to briefly describe the actual task of politicians in the near future. But one could argue that if automation is taking control, there is a chance to transform the system via uselessness, as a (constructive) attribute, and not by reinserting population as useful individuals.

02 / / “I heard it in Behrens’s office for the first time,” he later recalled. “I had to make a drawing for a façade for a factory. There was nothing to do on this thing. The columns were 5.75 meters (19 feet). I will remember that until I die. I showed him a bunch of drawings of what could be done and then he said, ‘Less is more’,” but “he meant it in another way than I use it.” See Detlef Mertins, Mies, (London: Phaidon Press, 2014)

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‘Define Violence!’ ‘What?’ ‘Violence. Define it. You’re making a movie about it, shouldn’t you know what it is?’ The End of Violence, Wim Wenders, 1997

2. In order to define or to attempt a possible answer to the thought whether uselessness is, could be or could become humankind’s most valuable tool, we probably need to first define both terms. According to the Cambridge Dictionary /03 uselessness a fact. ‘The fact of being of no use, or of not working or achieving what is needed’. A tool is a piece of equipment. ‘A piece of equipment that you use with your hands to make or repair something’ /04. In the praise of contradictions, we aim to think and use a fact as a piece of equipment to make something. We aim to give use to the fact of being of no use, and thus with our hands make or repair something. Let’s make rather than repair. And if we have something to repair, we had better leave it alone, useless for long enough, so that it heals and maybe in this way endures. It will be left to an eternal present. As Ryan Stec posits in his essay Useless Architecture uselessness invite us to be in this moment, Usefulness to be in the future. So, through their constant ‘presentness’ (due to uselessness) things left behind to survive have the possibility to shift the consistency of our futures. And, following his argumentation, we will probably be allowing these ruins, distant by then, to hopefully open up novel worlds between us. Returning to the definition of uselessness, it seems important to understand its 03 / / CambridgeDictionary:https://dictionary. cambridge.org/dictionary 04 /

/ Language is very specific when it comes

to the definition of uselessness. ‘Nutzlosigkeit’ in German or ‘Inutilidad’ in Spanish, for example, are also defined as the fact of being of no use. But they both refer more to utility than to use.

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meaning, the fact that there should be a need to refer to. As counteract Ryan Stec asks whether we can learn to make something undefined that we still understand, in this specific case as architecture. Maybe an architecture liberated from needs. Maybe useless architecture. Architecture as political space, if one still believes in the relevance of space in architecture, or uselessness as political space, like in the case of Tempelhof. Use–less–land, Kerstin Meyer’s photo essay about the grounds of a former airport in Berlin, describes the genealogy of the fight for the usufruct of uselessness. In this case uselessness is pejoratively defined as not achieving what is needed from outside the plot of land, by the stakeholders, by the city planning. But the campaign to keep the Tempelhofer Field open and free of buildings demonstrated how positive uselessness in this case achieved what was needed from within: more free un-normed space. Rather than asking what it is, it is probably more interesting to ask what uselessness refers to and, more precisely, how does it move us? /05 Because our appreciation of it is immediate, a spontaneous emotional response. Sonias Leimer’s work Conquest of the Useless might offer us a hint about where we should look. In a series of performative interactions between human and object-sculptures, on an abstract laboratory-sterile white environment, the basics of spatial perception and the object-subject relation are investigated. The performers’ approach to the objects is meticulous, mechanical but sensitive. We are moved towards a system in which physical and emotional coordinates need to be defined spontaneously by ourselves. To embrace uselessness is to expose the body to feelings of uncertainty. /06 05 / / Christian Borch introduces the topic of atmospheres in architecture in addressing the same questions. As answers C. Borch look at two statements by Peter Zumthor from his book Atmospheres: Architectural Environments, Surrounding Object, 2006. P. Zumthor posits that we perceive atmospheres through our emotional sensibility and that encounters with buildings are very much bodily. Walter Benjamin states that the bodily approach to buildings is a way of appropriation. But tactile approximation happens by habit, not through attention. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, , (Shocken Edition, USA,1969). In this sense, I draw an analogy between atmospheres and uselessness, and even recognise atmospheric qualities of uselessness e.g. when related to spaces, but also to objects. I think here of Ryan Stec, who in his essay reflects

on the possibility for uselessness to ‘interrupt our attention just long enough to discover something unexpected in ourselves’. This is the moment when uselessness looks at us and becomes physical. see: Architectural Atmospheres, On the Experience and Politics of Architecture, Christian Borch (ed.), (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag Gmbh, 2014). 06 / / We could as well read the conquest of the useless as the conquest of uselessness (and Dietrich Diederichsen would say autonomy) in the work of art by a transaction or exchange with it. But the transaction happens within the work of art and the world is left outside. Uselessness remains inaccessible, autonomous, unless we regard the performers as not being part of the art piece.

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3. Uselessness makes room for an expanded field of thought that cannot be reached through value systems linked to commodities. Although these systems confirm the existence of uselessness and are indispensable for its differentiation. This relation is nevertheless unbalanced and unequal. Most contemporary western societies at some point seemed to have built upon feelings towards unconsumable, inconspicuous and/or un-graspable items that are range from indifferent to negative or even rejecting. Owen Hatherley argues in Useless and then dangerous that things were once different in Britain and could be definitely different again. In the eighteenth century parks were designed in great detail for pure contemplation, and open spaces in the city as a reward in its own. This attitude was still alive in the second half of the twentieth century, when housing estates were built on the footprints of

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demolished mansions. However, in the last few decades whenever parks happened to take the form public land between housing estates, they were frowned upon and underrated. A plot of land is regarded either as useless, if it is empty, or dangerous wherever it is full. In any case contemplation is neither material nor profitable enough. Uselessness thus remains an uncharted phenomenon. It constitutes a state in which an entity, from objects to humans to ideas, lacks use for its coetaneous society or potential users and therefore it is withdrawn value. Value cannot be assigned to things that cannot be exchanged. But what if this is just a make-believe of capitalism and there are unmentioned multiple borders between uselessness, usefulness, valueless and valuefulness? If the systems of use-value confirm the existence of uselessness and are indispensable for its differentiation, the domain of usefulness will also be defined by the extension of uselessness. Its borders in terms of value began to be traced by the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Ruth Sonderegger delineates a path that shows the consequences, still felt today, of the invention of aesthetic uselessness in the eighteenth century as a counteract to violent capitalism. Capitalism and uselessness proved to be just complementary agents. Together they constituted a force that excluded everything that was not white and male, thus making the expanded fields of uselessness segregational and vicious in nature. As emphasized in Sonderegger’s Uselessness and purposelessness its boundaries were ultimately burst open by artists like Phillis Wheatley whose ‘artistic innovations actually cannot be detached from her political engagement with the means of aesthetic production’. It would be interesting to ask at this point, what else might await us in the expanded fields of uselessness? It is for sure not an idle dreamland where abstruse beings and objects perform on a whim. Ultimately, we want uselessness to become a tool and its realm a fruitful laboratory. In Architectures refusing to perform Miguel Paredes proposes expanded fields as a mean of evading and overcoming the present constant dualities when judging the utility of a building. He proposes a broader and ‘trans-utilitarian’ environment for uselessness, in which architecture can refuse to perform, as a counterbalance to contemporary architecture’s discourse of optimisation, conservation and streamlining. Thinking of uselessness as a tool might open up the possibility of acting radically and making a call for free space. Uselessness should be re-framed beyond the limits of the binary system ‘useless/useful’ by claiming its own space, or should at least be able, as said earlier, to evade appreciation based on the comparison or evaluation of its exchange potential.

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I see a box. A black box. A black metal box with a silver switch on top. A finger moves the switch forward. A lid opens. A mechanical finger comes out and push the switch back. The lid closes. A silly game. A useless object … with disruptive capacity.

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4. The notion of uselessness is exceptionally difficult to grasp and therefore a considerable amount of conceptual work is needed to pin it down. We proposed one prologue and one epilogue /07, and a collection of essays, which ranges from palaeoanthropology to architecture, from philosophy to economics, and from art to politics. We began examining uselessness with a design studio in winter 2017 at the Institute of Art and Architecture in the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. We observed that some skills, specifically weaving techniques, though forgotten, neglected or just simply regarded as useless, could unfold and unravel creativity if considered anew (i.e. from a new perspective). This allowed our students to develop novel wide-spanning structures made of wood, using innovative construction methods. We discovered that useless was neither the basket nor the fabric nor the weave but the act of weaving and the knowledge behind it. Experience of how to do things has, recently, been rendered increasingly useless, and thus unappreciated and replaceable. Experience has become heavy, expensive luggage, at odds with current work policies in a society busy with the useful, the new and the instant. A society busy with retelling the story of the hunter but not of the gatherer. What if the first tool was actually a woven bag and not a weapon? /08 Here one can’t avoid thinking of Friedemann Schrenk´s picture of a Homo sapiens as a smiling woman, at the same time recalling his argument that it was not usefulness or overspecialisation that brought us where we are now. Was it, perhaps, the contrary? If uselessness of environmental and biographic variability triggered hominids to evolve, what kind of uselessness will trigger us today to evolve... or to revolt… or maybe to regress?

07 / / Common writing might become one of the most unfruitful activities. Or at least that was what ‘we’ felt when thinking how to write the introduction to this book. Two prologues? Blurry. Hierarchical. Boring. Useless. Like in evolution: successful until it found a reward for a change, as stated by Friedemann Schrenk. And suddenly we put all essays in brackets. Neither beginning, nor end.

08 / / In her essay ‘The carrier bag theory of fiction’ in Dancing at the Edge of the World, ( New York: Grove Press, 1989) Ursula K. Le Guin posits that the first tool was a carrier bag for food rather than a weapon. The ‘carrier bag theory’ lends weight to the idea of women being the earliest creators of tools.

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i/ / While writing a text, potential developments are temporarily expressed through XXXXXX place holders. These allow us to go on with a line of thought and promise us that we will find what our intuition couldn’t immediately utter. Though often,

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we just come back to this spot and realize that they are useless. Positively useless. They acted as an anticipation of our desire, but remained a scar of the untold. A black canvas. A fruitful place for new projections.