On Money and the Lack of Same

I have a new interest. Typically this is a good thing for me. I move between obsessions and when I don't have one I get bored. Right now I'm interested in Jeremy Bentham - utilitarian philosopher, jurist, social critic, inventor of the panopticon and many other titles besides. Fascinating guy and one of the most prodigious commentators the Industrial Revolution produced. I'm interested in him because he came to architecture in an ass-backward way.

Old Bentham was right at the center of the political, economic, and social upheavals that accompanied the Industrial Revolution. And, being a very smart guy, figured out the Industrial Revolution wasn't really industrial at all. The changes between say 1750 and 1850 primarily in England but exported to first France, then the rest of Europe and England's colonies in North America are described as the Industrial Revolution because the people who first examined them from arm's length were historians in the early 20th century. And, for them, the most important product of those changes was the factory system and industrialization. Of course, that wasn't the only product. Someone looking at those years now would probably not see factories as the most important change - factories just aren't that important anymore. Yes, they completely changed the way we produce goods and yes, they raised the material standard of living immensely but factories have, to a large degree, been left behind. The industrial system invented during the Industrial Revolution is obsolete. Massive factories just aren't required for that many things anymore. The production of most things happens in little production centers that are either post-industrial (computer chips and hi-tec shit) or pre-industrial (garment factories and most consumer products).

For us, in our current circumstance, the most important development of the 100 years between 1750 and 1850 was the new mode of capital concentration and the related social factors, most of which Bentham was among the first to see or the first to try to influence. It's strange but most architectural histories cast Bentham as a hawkish unltra-conservative who was fascinated with prisons because he despised the lower classes. The opposite is more correct. Bentham was concerned by the fact the most efficient means of increasing productivity (one measure of wealth) is to concentrate capital in a few hands and pauperize the rest of the population. This is something we know a great deal about these days. That Bentham saw it as it was happening is a great credit to his perspicacity. Bentham was interested in prisons because he wanted to make them more humane. He designed his cooperatives and company towns for the same reasons. He arrived at architecture as the specific answer to a general social problem - one of a very short list of people who have done so.

I would like to dedicate some time to studying Bentham - his times, opinions, philosophy, contribution to both architecture and politics. The best place to do this is at University College London (UCL). Unfortunately, even if I could secure admission to UCL I would have to pay more per semester than I have ever earned in a year.

UCL isn't outrageously expensive if the comparison is strictly between first-rank graduate programs. By any other standard, it's insane. Tuition at most graduate programs in countries that don't heavily subsidize (Canada, the oil rich Middle Eastern countries, and the wonderfully socialist Scandinavian nations) is approximately $50 000 per semester, including living expenses. Some schools have the wonderfully absurd clause that the student can't pay tuition themselves, they have to get scholarships. My feelings about that are mixed; it is meant to increase the school's prestige but also prevents simple wealth from influencing the admission policy. Of course, that's only in a perfect world. In this world, wealth influences everything.

If I was 20 again I could perhaps face the idea of burdening myself with hundreds of thousands of dollars student debt with the confidence, ignorance, and all the counter-factual hope of youth. But I'm not 20. I'm middle aged. I have struggled out from under one massive debt burden. The idea of assuming another for no better reason than I am interested in something is ridiculous. Paradoxically, "no better reason than I am interested" is the best possible reason to want to study something. So I possess the best possible reason for doing something and that reason prevents me from doing it. Joseph Heller had a name for this situation.  

Philosophy of Education

I've been asked to write a piece on my "Philosophy of Architectural Education". I shouldn't be surprised how difficult it is to write but I am. I spent my 7 years in architecture school thinking a great deal about precisely this problem and reached only a few (tentative) solutions. One problem I'm having writing the piece is the question of how inclusive it should be: do I have to write I think plenty of space in well-lit studios is good? Surely everyone accepts that! Do I need to write there should be more books and fewer periodicals in the library? More than what and fewer than what? My difficulties come from the fact "architecture education" means the school I received my architecture education. What else do I know about the subject?

This wouldn't be a problem at all (or it would be a completely different problem) if I was writing for the University of Waterloo. I could write about all the things I thought the school did well, some suggestions for improvement, and then the difficult bit, the things they completely fucked up. See? Different problem but one I know how to solve.

Writing anything presumes some knowledge of either what is expected or who your readers will be. If you are writing for a newspaper, you don't need to know who reads the paper because you know what an article looks like and how it reads. Which isn't to say I could write one - I'd be shit at it. Too much passive voice, too few descriptions, and too much cursing.

The other difficulty, as if I needed another, is I have more than one teaching philosophy. Design studio is not taught the same way design history is taught, nor should it be. Both are taught completely differently from a course on literature, cultural history, or contemporary politics. Teaching design studio starts with giving the students scissors and telling them to go run around with them. Encourage them to fuck up then help them un-fuck themselves. This is not helpful in History of Modern Architecture. Students don't need scissors for that.

My way of dealing with anything I write is to start telling stories. Narrative is how we understand what we are. It is also a very big part of who we are. But I don't think my Philosophy should degenerate into "Story Time with Uncle Sean". Or maybe it should. If nothing else, it would be completely different from everyone else's solution to the problem. See how confused I am? I'm going back to watching reruns on the internets. 

"You will be googled"

I joined LinkedIn about a year ago. I don't know why. I strongly suspect it has no purpose. I have never heard of anyone getting a job or even a promotion based on the professionalism and competence demonstrated in their LinkedIn page. I asked my brother about it - he is my go to resource for all the things I don't understand about how modern capitalism works - he told me it is good for one thing. There are laws about what you can and cannot ask people in a job interview. I didn't know that. I suspect most of you didn't either. There are no laws about what you can ask job applicant's connections on LinkedIn. So if you want to know if you are about to hire a heroin addict - LinkedIn is there to help you out, assuming your applicant was dumb enough to include his or her dealer as a connection (and that person's listed profession is "Heroin Dealer").

LinkedIn's own efforts to assist me in my professional life have not been useful. I clicked on a link for "Top Employers Resume Tips". As you might expect, it contained such pearls of wisdom as "Your resume should not contain spelling mistakes." Thanks for that. It also stated, unequivocally, "You will be googled." This bothered me. I try not to google myself (or make lewd innuendos re same) and now I have to. Given I have a relatively uncommon name, this process involves thinking of every possible search combination of [my name] + [something relevant]. I should add, I never thought the problem with being googled might be insufficient web-presence. I only think in terms of unpleasant things I might have left in the ether, things I was foolish enough to publish under my own name.

The internet is a fantastic resource and I don't like to talk shit about it but I'm going to have to here. Because the evolution of our technology has, among its many effects, the tendency toward a universal expectation for involvement. When cellphones first became available, it was really bizarre to call someone and have them answer from their car. I couldn't get over that. One of my brother's friends was the first person I knew with a cell phone and I was completely blown away when he called our house from our own driveway. It seemed like the dawning of a new age. Now, of course, any time you don't answer your phone the caller assumes you are screening them. I don't have a landline but I don't carry my phone either. It has one advantage over a landline to me - it simplifies moving. Instead of having to deal with the phone company and wait around for an entire day so a technician can come to your house (does that still happen?) you just change your billing address online. But if I'm not at home, I can't answer my phone because it is at home. See where I'm heading?

Prospective employers expect me to have a webpage. Why? I would need a website if I was a company, or a store, or a celebrity. But between Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Blogger I have all the bases covered. The only reason to collate them in one site is vanity. My name on the page banner.

I'm surprised by the number of friends and acquaintances that have personal websites. I guess I shouldn't be. They get googled too. What isn't surprising is the likelihood a friend will have a personal website is inversely proportionate to age - people older than I am rarely have websites, people my age sometimes do, people ten years younger almost always do. A decade was all it took to remove the option of non-participation.

I don't have a problem with this per se. The internet is not like real space, there is no real sense of taking up space uselessly. It is completely different from physical geography in this way. Adding an enormous website with hundreds of pages does not decrease the available space the internet possesses. But it does generate a lot of meaningless shit. And it forces people to work at something they probably don't give a shit about. This is the extent of my complaint as it pertains to others. For myself, I resent the fact not having a website is now roughly equivalent to not having a telephone 30 years ago.

And I resent the obligation to construct a virtual persona. Companies are already obligate to do this - as collectives they do not possess any persona and so must construct some way of representing themselves. The internet is just another way to maximize their construct's exposure. As a person, I do have a persona (more accurately, a personality) and do not require digital representation. If anyone wants to find out about me they can call me, or email me, or go to my LinkedIn page and contact any or all of my hundreds of contacts.

The last point is that the internet is not subject to decay. Nor does time add perspective. A long time ago I was contacted by someone I tagged in a Facebook photo. He asked me to remove the tag. At the time I thought he must have become a criminal (or paranoid) or some kind. What other explanation could there be for wanting to remain internet-anonymous? Now I see the sense of it. During my self-googling I've found a lot of material I didn't realize was out there and even more I'd simply forgot about. Most of it was a pleasant surprise (hey, I was pretty clever in 2008!). Some I wish I had pursued more actively - several pieces on long lost blogs would have made nice journal articles. But there were also things that made me really cringe and wonder what the hell I was thinking when I put that online. The fairly obvious answer was I didn't give it much thought - the digital equivalent of a temper tantrum. That shit doesn't go away. It doesn't mellow with time. And its presence on the internet always seems like a calculated act, even when it was anything but.   

Final Reviews

I was lucky enough to be asked to participate in the final reviews for the University of Waterloo Architecture School's first-year studio yesterday. The quality of the work was extremely high - I met that class on their first day in architecture school and, 8 months later, they were presenting multi-unit housing projects on difficult sites. The best of the work wouldn't have been out of place in a presentation by a firm.

Whenever I sit on crit panels I learn a bit more about the subtle art of criticism. As a student I always wanted to be scheduled for the morning, before the critics got enough coffee in them to be properly awake. With the benefit of hindsight, I was fortunate to wind up late in the day so frequently - I don't know why that happened, some freak statistical effect?

The morning sessions were spent mostly on correctly small errors and delivering short lectures on the architects' responsibility to the city. I hope the students learned something. I didn't but maybe they did. One of the great things about working with students who are just starting their training is almost anything you tell them will be something they haven't heard before. That takes some of the pressure off. By the afternoon we (the critics) had slowly worked our way to as close to the heart of the matter as we were going to get. The best projects contained somewhere in them, often hidden or a seeming aberration, a thesis about how to live - a kind of projection completely out of place in the veneer of professionalism the rest of the project presented. I won't credit myself with this insight, it was the studio's coordinator who pointed it out. The most interesting thing about even the most polished project was the little error or subtle mistake - the faculty started calling it the monkey fist, in reference to the famous anecdote about how to catch a monkey with a coconut.

When I was thinking about the day after it was over, it seemed odd to me the students had tried so hard to bury that wish or instinct they had to create spatial relationships that didn't conform to their ideas of what was expected. But that's often how education works. I think about my four year old nephew. He has the seemingly-odd (and often amusing) habit of asking a question and then repeating the answer to you as if it was something you couldn't possibly know. The strangeness of it, and his limited acting range, is what makes it funny and odd. That's how high school works. And, unfortunately it is often how Universities work. They teach you the answers, then ask you the questions and reward you for delivering the answer they just provided you. It's kind of absurd.

I can remember countless times when, as an architecture student, I would complain, "Why don't they just tell us what they want?!?" In essence, I wanted to play the same game I now play with my nephew. I ought be ashamed of that I suppose. I'll use it as an example in the future to shame students who ask that question.

The weakest projects were those that dedicated themselves entirely to trying to provide what the student thought the professors wanted. They were frequently well done and well drawn, and will necessarily receive high marks - students who think that way are always careful to fill all the project requirements. My favourite projects were those that didn't give a fuck about what the professors might have wanted. The projects with plans that made no sense at all because all the attention and effort had gone into developing a really cool proposition about massing. Or the ones with no real effort to provide plans or elevations because all the effort had gone somewhere else entirely.

If you are an architecture student, this is the most important thing I can tell you about surviving and prospering in architecture school - what your professors want, more than anything else, is for you to care about the work you are doing. If you have to change the program they gave you to find something you can care about - do it. If you have to ignore the project requirements, do it. If they ask for a hotel but you want to do an elevator to space - do it. Your marks might suffer but you will prosper. Your profs will love you and you will enjoy yourself. I tell students follow your fascination every chance I get.

There is a story I could tell to prove this to you but I won't. I tell it too frequently. And it isn't really about me; it's about a friend. I sometimes fear my friends will get resentful about how much of their lives I turn into stories. Anyway...

James Franco and Anne Hathaway Should Marry

Why? It's a eugenics experiment to see if insufferable smugness is genetic.

I really can't stand either of these people. The French (at least the Quebecois) have an expression I can't spell in French, the translation is "a face to smack". Some people have faces made to smack. There's no particular reason, you just want to smack them. On the face. For me, it's often Gingers.

James Franco is the example I use most frequently when trying to illustrate the face to smack. Every time I see him I want to stick my arm through the screen and smack him. Wipe that smug, self-satisfied little smirk right off his face. He could make a very good career playing people who get beat up frequently - those would be movies I would pay to see. Unfortunately he is already making a very good career. Doing whatever he does. Which seems to be getting high and smirking at the camera.

Anne Hathaway is also insufferably self-satisfied. I hesitate to say she has a face to smack because society has a pretty low opinion of men who smack women (and rightly so). Ideally, I'd have a female compatriot who could smack her while I smack James Franco. My niece has volunteered for this position should it ever become available.

The infuriating thing about both of them is people seem to like them. This is particularly disturbing to me in the case of Mr. Franco. My favourite blogger (Annie Choi from AnnieTown) has gone so far as to admit fancying Franco. This is so completely beyond my comprehension I sometimes think she must have his name confused with someone else - like the dude who played Thor. I hear a lot of women think he's hot. Ok, he's hot as hell. I'm straight but that guy is sexy as fuck.

I hope you aren't expecting anything intelligent from this post. If you are prepare to be disappointed. I have nothing smart to say on this subject. There are two celebrities I think deserve to be slapped. That's it. Nothing more.

Except this. According to the internet (so this might be totally untrue) a professor was ordered to pass Franco in his class despite Franco missing almost all the lectures. Everybody knows Franco is making some kind of name for himself as an intellectual celebrity by going to about 15 schools at once. I'd be a lot more impressed if he graduated from one but that's me. Still, it bugs the fuck out of me that a prof would be ordered by the administration not to fail a stoner jackass just because the papers might print a story about it. Why not just capitulate totally and give him a PhD? Fuck, give him five and pretend he earned them all. That will get in the papers!

I guess I should add I am deeply conflicted about the new Franco movie, This is the End. It looks really funny. I can't see it in a theatre because I'll need one of those hand-held blow horns for whenever Franco talks - and that will kind of ruin the experience for others. Maybe someone will be kind enough to make an edit with all the Franco bits cut out. Or with his voice removed and replaced with subtitles. That would be ok, I guess.

On The Iron Lady

It's been a while since I posted anything. I wish I had a good reason for this but unless laziness counts, I don't.

Margaret Thatcher's death seems like something that requires comment. I've read a few articles lately about how respect for the dead should (and shouldn't) stop us from thinking and speaking clearly about the legacy of public figures. As you might imagine, the people who argue respect for the dead trumps political argument are on the Right this time. They had no such scruples when Hugo Chavez died. Or when Osama bin Laden was murdered. But consistency has never been one of the Right's strengths.

Those who argue the legacy of public figures deserves consideration despite the taboo against speaking ill of the dead all seem to be employed (or published) by the Manchester Guardian. I love the Guardian - one of the last bastions of the working class Left. Shit, I accidentally punned (or is that a double entendre?) I think public comment about public figures is fine, whether they are alive or dead. Going to Mrs. Thatcher's funeral and screaming nasty things at her family would be a genuinely shitty thing to do. Her family deserve their grief and it is wrong to disturb the dignity of their private grieving. All public figures have a public and a private life (except in the United States where anything goes) and that separation should remain after they die.

Having said that, Margaret Thatcher was as nasty a bitch as ever lived. She was cruel to those with the least ability to defend themselves. The exception she made to this rule was for ousted dictators, to whom she showed immense kindness.

She was the person most responsible for two decades of murder in Iraq. For those of you who don't know this piece of political trivia (which isn't trivial at all), the American government gave Saddam the green light to invade Kuwait. The Kuwaitis were ignoring their OPEC quota, driving the price of oil down to a level insufficient to maintain Iraq's economy. Saddam had a private meeting with the American ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie. During that meeting (25 July, 1990) he asked three separate times what American policy vis a vis the conflict between Iraq and Kuwait was, each time the response was, "We [the United States] have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts." Saddam correctly interpreted this as tacit permission to invade. He launched the invasion (2 August, 1990) and there was no response from the US. But the next day Bush met with Thatcher. When he emerged from the meeting he told a group of reporters (and some very surprised senior White House staff) that unchecked aggression will not stand. The rest, as they say, is history. Very brutal and ugly history of the systematic destruction of a people by hi-tech weaponry, sanctions and trade embargoes, and some more hi-tech weaponry. A history of deceit and murder.

There are plenty of other reasons to hate Thatcher's politics. They were the politics of greed, divisive and brutal. She waged a not-very civil war against all forms of social protection in her own country and inspired the leaders of other countries to do the same.

Society, in various degrees, operates on the Neighbour Principle - the basic belief the person who lives next door might not like you but has no specific wish to harm you. And, in times on great need, will help you. This is such a basic element of being human no one had to think of a name for it until the previous century. It wasn't a principle, it was what people did without thought or question. Thatcher's greatest war was against this most fundamental aspect of humanity. Her most famous quote, "There is no such thing as society. There are only individuals." strikes right at the heart of that which allows us to live together without killing each other.

So, as individuals, you might chose to mourn her death. As a society I think we should all dance on her grave. If nothing else, such an expression of collective feeling and social solidarity would give the lie to her most pernicious contribution to political thought.

Something Basic

Before I got involved in this whole architecture thing, I got a BA in psychology. Because I was drinking at the time I forget almost everything I learned. I remember some of the perceptual illusions and the stress-performance inverted U. Mostly I remember the freak cases.

Every once in a while a person will suffer a completely bizarre brain injury - and the psychologists of the world go bat shit probing and prodding them. The one I remember best was a person who had part of their brain severed in a car crash. It was still in their head (the damaged part of their brain) and still working fine but it wasn't attached to anything else. Like a computer without a modem. The particular portion of the brain that was isolated from all the rest was responsible for emotional reactions (or generating emotions or dealing with the output of the emotions part, I forget which). The point is that person effectively lost the ability to emote. He became like the perfect Vulcan.

He could still perform all the manual tasks he had mastered before the accident. And his performance on cognitive tasks wasn't much reduced. It suffered a bit because the victim didn't have any desire to solve cognitive problems and was almost impossible to motivate. The researchers would ask him to do something and either he did it (compliance as a vestigial learned behaviour) or he ignored them.

What makes the case so bizarre is the effect the injury had on the victim's life. You might imagine he'd become like Spock, a clear thinking, logical mofo. But he didn't. He lost the ability to do almost everything - including simple tasks like feeding himself - with any reliability. Think about it, how do you decide what to eat? You ask yourself what you want, or how much effort you want to put into feeding yourself. You make decisions based on priorities and those priorities are not established cognitively (as the car crash victim proved). They are established emotionally.

Mr. Car Crash Victim is a perfect example of a thing we learn that makes us so uncomfortable we all agree to pretend we never learned it. A more famous example of this is G. G. Berry's paradox - "least integer not describable using less than nineteen syllables" - doesn't seem like a big deal but Russell ignored it when he wrote Principia Mathematica. What Mr. C. C. Victim demonstrates is humans think much less than we'd like to think we do. Most of what we do is not the result of logic, training, behavioural conditioning, or reasoning. It is motivated by emotion. "I think therefore I am" is much less accurate than "I emote therefore I am."

So what's the big deal? Why should we care about this? What difference can it possibly make?

Reflect honestly for just a few minutes on the nature of human emotions and the answer should become clear.

People say shit like, "Kids are so cruel" because the fat kid gets picked on. I'm not saying that's ok. But I will say it isn't cruel. It's mean. Kids get angry and because they don't really understand it, that anger tends to splash around a lot. If you're near an angry kid, you're going to get some of it. But it's just anger. As they get older they learn dominance and submission. That's when they flirt with cruelty. But they aren't socialized enough to react against that socialization. They are recreating what they see in the adult world - hierarchy based on power. That's the limit of their cruelty; as soon as the hierarchy is established they go back to being normal. Kids don't have hate in the pure savage way adults do. I don't know when they learn that.

Adults are savage as fuck. We all possess some element of monstrosity within us. We do all we can to ignore it, to pretend it doesn't exist but it is there. Everything awful that we can imagine in others exists in some part in you and in me.

Why focus on the most savage aspects of humanity when we are capable of great dignity and compassion? I think the reason I keep thinking about this shit lately is there is an expectation (an unbelievably naive one) that people will behave well. That we want to do the right thing and protect the environment and stop sweat shop labour and make a fairer society. I believe we do want those things (so long as they don't conflict with stronger and more immediate desires) but the expectation is dangerous. Because we also want to watch the world burn.

This is going to lead me back to zombies and vampires. I'll save that for another post.