I agree with a lot of aspects being brought forward in Badiou`s text "This crisis is the spectacle: where is the real?" from Alain Badiou`s book The Communist Hypothesis (2010). It is a critique on finance capitalism. He asks for the real. National economies have removed so far from the people ("the real") that they have become abstract spectacles to us. We find ourselves witnessing the financial crisis on television as if it was some kind of bad Hollywood Blockbuster:
"(…) It’s all there: the gradual spectacle of the disaster, the crude manipulation of suspense, the exoticism of the identical – the Jakarta stock exchange in the same spectacular boat as New York, the link between Moscow and Sao Paulo, the same banks going up in the same flames the terrifying repercussions: ouch, ouch, the best laid ‘plans’ could not prevent Black Friday, everything is collapsing, everything is going to collapse… But there is still hope: the little squad of the powerful has taken centre stage. They are as haggard and as intent on what they are doing as characters in a disaster movie. The Sarkozys, the Paulsons, the Merkels, the Browns , the Trichets – the monetary fire-fighters, pouring billions upon billions into the central Hole. One day we will ask ourselves (this is for future episodes) where they got the money from, because whenever the poor ask for a little something, they’ve said for years as they turn their pockets out that they haven’t got a penny. For the moment, that doesn’t matter. ‘Save the banks!’ That noble, humanist and democratic cry springs from the breast of every politician and all the media. Save them at any price! You’ve said it! Because none of this comes cheap."
The financial crisis appears to us as an abstract catastrophe that no one really seems to understand. However, almost any politician we see talking about it, argues for that we must save the banks. We must spend 400 billion Euros of European tax money to keep them working and fluctuating.
I relate to what Badiou is saying about the banks; simply because I don't understand the link between what he calls the "real economy" (production, assemblage, transport, consumption) and the "unreal economy" (trading, financial services etc.). The letter seems to use the real economy as a dynamic playground to speculate on whether companies are doing good or bad. In effect, traders (whose only aim is to make profit) can make money by betting on the downfall of a certain economy or company and it seems they will do so with any means and without responsibility towards whose money they are using. The ideal of any bank trader is to use someone else`s money to make profit at high risk. However, if the maneuver fails they are not being made responsible for their acts. In this sense Badiou is quite right when he argues that "(…) capitalism is nothing but banditry, and it is irrational in its essence and devastating in its becoming."
However, Badiou doesn't convince me entirely. Towards the end of his writing he argues that we should return to the "real", the lives of the people. He becomes ideological and proclaims a new communism. He says:
"Of course the word communism, which was for a long time the name of that power, has been cheapened and prostituted. But if we allow it to disappear, we surrender to the supporters of order, to the febrile actors in the disaster movie. We are going to resuscitate that name in all its new clarity. Which was also its old virtue, as it was when Marx said of communism that it `involves the most radical rupture with traditional associations` and will give rise to `an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."
I think the reason for communism has never worked is the fact that it is in the human nature to achieve something better than one`s neighbor. There will always be people striving for the seduction of power and money. And since we live in societies that work on very large scales (millions of people have to be governed) there will always be someone using his power for his own benefits. But capitalism has always evolved in a natural way since it was about people`s individual benefit. And that`s when people become creative and inventive: when they see their own interest. In opposition, communism has always been forced onto people and never evolved naturally.
However, the text by Jonathan Meades on Zaha Hadid raises a similar question towards architecture and our society at large: What is the social responsibility of the architect? To what extend do we as architects have to explain our design?
Again, I agree with the authors opinion, that architects are spending others people`s money (like bankers), they involve many people`s lives (in terms of occupants but also in terms of construction) and their buildings reflect on the current political, economic and social situation of their context. Architects often have the same problem as bankers or politicians to explain their endeavors to the public in a way that can be understood by anyone. Meades points out:
"Architecture is the most public of endeavours, yet it is a smugly hermetic world. Architects, architectural critics and theorists, and the architectural press (which is little more than a deferential PR machine) are cosily conjoined by an ingrown, verruca-like jargon which derives from the cretinous end of American academe: "Emerging from the now-concluding work on single-surface organisations, animated form, data-scapes, and box-in-box organisations are investigations into the critical consequences of complex vector networks of movement and specularity..." They're only talking about buildings. This is the cant of pseudo-science--self-referential, inelegant, obfuscatingly exclusive: it attempts to elevate architecture yet makes a mockery of it. (…)"
There is a whole vocabulary invented by architects to describe their designs which is pretty much not understandable to anyone apart from themselves. These words supposedly make their design sound more "professional" and "creative". I completely agree with Meades saying that they make a mockery of architecture by acting in that way. Maybe the problem nower days is that architects do not take themselves seriously enough or too serious. The architect´s ability should be to base their design on current social, economic, political and climate issues. Much architecture (like Zaha´s) has derived from itself by putting forward ideas that much rather reflect the architects ego than his engagement with the site and its context.
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