Let’s begin with
ABC or The interdependency of ARCHITECTURE BEUREAUCRACY CAPTIALISM
Introduction Today there are increasing requests for the cutting of red tape, for the reduction of redundant bureaucratic processes and protocols. Proponents from the whole political spectrum are in favor of reducing red tape that has led to excessive bureaucracy with no purpose other than filling paperwork. Particularly critical and high voiced are free market proponents and big business leaders that say red tape is damaging businesses and economic growth. Also more populist politicians who in election campaigns promise the removing of regulations for individuals and businesses are vocal in their campaign against red tape. Within large bureaucratic organizations such as the UN and the EU, both internal and external critics point at inefficient, costly and time-consuming procedures that waste money of its member countries. There are even rewards announced to the best ideas for cutting red tape with the underlying motif that reduction of bureaucracy and regulation would always be better. This could certainly be questioned, not the least when the reason for putting regulations or working procedures in place are (most often) to secure something of common belief, be it social or environmental protection from abuse or pollution, or national or regional protection and regulations to favor your own country or allies. But what, really, is red tape? Red tape often means something like “excessive regulation or rigid conformity to formal rules that is considered redundant or bureaucratic and hinders or prevents action or decision-making.”1 There are also national differences in meaning of the phrase as well as differences between various fields. In the U.K. red tape has come to mean “wasteful and inefficient processes, excessive bureaucracy, and inflexible organizational structures and professional practices” whereas in the U.S. the term is seen as “structural complexity, excessive rules, and task delays.”2 In the international community, red tape has been associated with corruption and declining trust in government. With these definitions we realize
that red tape is an overwhelmingly negative term that is used to express the problems within organizations. But it was not always the case. The historical origin of the term red tape goes back to the 16th century and the courts of Spanish and English kings,3 and their use of red tape (ribbon) to bundle the documents of the most important errands. This was to single them out from other errands – that were bound with ordinary ropes – and to speed up the handling of these important matters.4 The usage of the phrase later on came to stand for “official formality” and was subsequently popularized by 19th century British authors such as Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle,5 and has since then predominantly been used as a derogatory term pointing at the problems with too much regulations and bureaucracy. My intentions with using the term red tape in the title of the present research project has been to question the simplified picture that inefficiency and meaningless paperwork is in direct relation to the amount of regulations and rules, and instead suggest that the worth of red tape is relative to specific professions’ work duties and professional expertise. The dominance of rational choice theories in determining what is meaningful and meaningless is undermining the differences of various professions. Rationality does not mean the same thing for different fields or disciplines, and rationality is arguably dependent on ideological and scientific affiliations. And is really rationality always desirable? During recent years there has been increased criticisms of the administrative-economic organization of public work in Sweden, especially the sectors traditionally associated with welfare state services such as health and education.6 What is often described as a system for securing cost-effectiveness of public money is primarily variations of New Public Management (NPM) models that aim at evaluating results and
assessing performance. The models’ inner logics are built on rational decision-making in which there are choices of ways to achieve certain goals, and methods in which to decide what way would be most costeffective and cost-beneficial to pursue. The systems arguable favor economic perspectives, and generally quantifiable justifications, over other perspectives and legitimizations. This dominance (economism) is not new but has today reached into every part of public work and permeates most areas of citizen life. It simultaneously disfavoring professions of the public sector which professional knowledge, skills and expertise are not equally based on rational quantification, or at least, professional qualities that is not easy transferable to quantitative statements. Similarly, we find that within disciplines in the humanities and social sciences there is a never-ending frustration that politicians and university leaders insist (at least rhetorically) on “measuring” the quality of research through quantity. But in a world of evaluations and assessments that lead to scores and points, academics are forced to find ways of making research quantifiable. This has led social scientist to return to (find new ways to, or at least longing back to) more consequentialist type of research and practice after a long period of more process focused or procedural type of work. Perhaps we could describe this development simply as if the pendulum has swung back and now we react to the shortage of ideology, absence of meta-stories, and the end of history. In a longer perspective, the pendulum argument might be a simplification (or a misleading generalization) and we could possibly more accurately assert that it has been, for a long time, a rather persisting development towards a more rational society – a society that today is obsessed by efficiency and maximization (or surplus thinking). This development has been going on more or less forceful since early modern times or at the least since the breakthrough of industrialism. We could view Max Weber’s argument that rationalization is the key
characteristic of modernization as an example of this line of thought, where the development of modern society is synonymous with the development of modern capitalism in which market logics govern the society’s general development towards economic growth (economic development and surplus thinking/practices). In such a perspective, divergent economic policies and political ideologies are united in the idea of the importance of efficiency, productivity and rationalization – in a historical perspective, regardless of Soviet five-year plan, Keynesian welfare state or Thatcherism. Hence, Weber’s characterization of rationalization as being the most significant feature of modernization is a crucial starting point in a study of the effects of different ideologies’ ways of rationalizing and making society more efficient. What could be said to characterize the period here in question, 1960s and 1970s, in relation to earlier periods is that economics was “freed from the dictates of politics”7 and instead, economics, as a field outside of politics, influenced politics to a larger degree than before. Another way to look at the transitional moment in the case of politics and economics is that both before and after 1970 economic policy is central to all areas of politics, but that the politicians’ position on the role of the State changed, from big State and big interventions, to small state and less political steering, or from Keynesian welfare state to post-Keynesian liberal economy. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello are analyzing these types of changes of capitalism during the latter half of the 20th century in their book The New Spirit of Capitalism in which they show that from 1960s to the 1990s the spirit of capitalism “changed from goal-centered management to networking within undertaking; the ideal of security gave way to flexibility.”8 With their particular focus on the structural and organizational changes of organizations/businesses and the labor market – often described as going from Fordism to post-Fordism – the book is an invaluable resource when comparing the
specific changes of the Swedish architecture profession to more general changes and trends of professions and the labor market in the 1960s and 1970s. Boltanski & Chiapello also argue that “capitalism included, and even absorbed, the “artistic critique” by making the ideals of autonomy, creativity, mobility and networking into directing impulses for any undertaking, leading to a new “site” or rather “site plan” (that is, the ideal world of networking and flexibility as constructed by management theorists).”9 Architecture’s Red Tape is a study of the rationalization efforts of the Swedish Government in its strive to make public work more efficient and predictable. The research is focusing on how the rationalization strive effected architecture and the role of the architect specifically through examining the building process. My interest is not in architecture or building as representation of politics or ideology, but rather, how aesthetics of ideology becomes the form of both bureaucracy and architecture. Both public administration and architecture sought to find more flexible structures that could accommodate other political and architectural ideologies than the predominant modernist view. The present project is formulated out of the conviction that it is time to anew pay attention to Swedish modern architecture’s relation to the welfare state. In particular, the recent deregulation of the governmental apparatus calls for a renewed examination of what now is dismantled. Architects and politicians were in agreement on the importance of building construction for the development of a new modern country, but were they in agreement of the aims (ends) of architecture, and in the ways (means) of achieving good? The research is focusing on the work of the Swedish National Board of Public Building, KBS, during the 1960s and 1970s, and aims at elucidating the State’s dealings with building construction in Sweden in general and more specifically with public buildings
and the Government’s own construction of public buildings. A particular focus is placed on KBS’ construction of the Garnisonen office complex in Stockholm, which was one of its most significant building projects. The building was a sort of case study for KBS in its work with rationalizing construction and developing new working procedures and building systems. The building becomes this investigation’s natural physical manifestation of KBS’ ideas and the project gives the opportunity to examine KBS’ theories in relation to built form. Without being the sole building example of this study, Garnisonen lends its construction start and end dates, 1964-1972, to this research project as these years encompass highly significant changes of KBS and of Swedish public architecture. The research is set against the light of the growing critique of the State and of public building construction, and the parallel rising critique of the architecture profession during the 1960s (and which accelerated during the 1970s). As such, the study is a contribution to the historical research of architecture’s “crisis” in the 1970s with specific emphasis on public architecture and the building programming of the State. Throughout the studied period, building construction remained an important area in the grand project of the welfare state, although politicians had different priorities and ways of working with architecture and the construction industry towards the advancement of the Swedish model. This research project is a story of the shifting political concerns with architecture as means for developing the welfare state and how architects and architecture then relate to these matters, at large and in specific building projects. The study brings ideological and organizational aspects of architecture to the fore, and, as such, it argues that the comprehension of changes in the organization and functioning of a political-economic system are fundamental for the understanding of an architectural past.
1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_tape, accessed on March 26, 2013. 2 Brewer & Walker, “What you see depends on where you sit. Managerial perceptions of red tape in English local Government,” paper prepared for the 8th Public Management Research Conference, School of Policy, Planning, and Development, University of Southern California – Los Angeles, September 29 – October 1, 2005. 3 See Red Tape, 1955 and Ben Kafka, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (New York: Zone Books, 2012). 4 Ref needed. 5 E. Cobham Brewer, Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, originally published in 1898, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992). 6 The Swedish daily paper Dagens Nyheter, DN, has featured a series of articles on public health administration during the spring of 2013, and in various papers, radio and TV, there have been major debates on the last decade’s school and health reforms and critique of defective administrative duties. See specifically, Maciej Zaremba, “Patienten och prislappen” a series of four articles in DN, published on Feb 17, Feb 25, Mar 3, Mar 5, 2013. 7 Tahl Kaminer, Architecture, Crisis and Resusciation: The reproduction of post-Fordism in late-twentieth-century architecture (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2011). 8 Luc Boltanski & Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, originally published in 1999 as Le nouvel esprit du capitalism (London: Verso, 2005). 9 Ibid. For quote on “artistic critique” see Frédéric Lebaron, “The State and the Market: the Rise of the Economic Rationale” in Contemporary European History, Vol. 0, Issue 3, 2000, pp. 463-473.
Disagreement and Agonism What interests me in this conceptual cluster is the historical implication of the political order of consensus. Jacques Rancière suggests that the collapse of the Soviet system was “an internal weakening of the very democracy that was assumed to have triumphed” and that it, opposed to what we would think, “reduced democratic life to the management of local consequences of global economic necessity.”1 Instead of a reappraisal of the political dimensions of Western democracy the logics of the liberal market order became the dominant model of democracy. This political-economic structure or what Rancière calls “the consensual order” was favored on both left and right and turned “political forms into instruments of economic interests and necessities.”2 Chantal Mouffe also recognizes a weakening of democracy in recent years and similarly argues that this is due to the dominance of liberalism, in which political questions are depoliticized to mere “technical issues” to be settled by experts. She defines the dominant tendency of liberal thought as rationalist and individualist that is “unable to grasp adequately the pluralistic nature of the social world.”3 Mouffe argues that in the political world of liberalism antagonism is negated, as the conflicts posed by social pluralism cannot be dealt with through the universal consensus of reason. The observations of what the consensus of economic necessity is doing to marginalized alternative ideologies or social movements in opposition to this leading identification of democracy is not new. In the world before the fall of the iron curtain, both left and right – i.e. the Soviet five-year plan and the Western capitalist economies practiced the ideology of equilibrium although in very different localized (nationalized) versions. Neither could we assert that the depolitization of politics through rationalist decisionmaking came with the neo-liberal politics of the 1990s but was observed already by Max Weber in the
CLUSTER 2 beginning of the 20th century. However, what is clear with the reasoning of both Mouffe and Rancière, although they never say this explicitly, is that the mainstreaming of ideology in parliamentary politics is disarming any opposition to the consensual order – especially that on economic policy – through the apolitical system of public administration. In the light of such concern with the future of parliamentary politics, rather than the Mouffe’s concern with artistic practice, I think that both Rancière’s and Mouffe’s dismissal of, for instance, Hannah Arendt’s agonistic public space is rather problematic. The rejection rests, I believe, foremost in their total refusal of any a political structure based on coming to an agreement, and secondly, in the scope of concern. We could see Arendt’s critique of the bureaucratic systems of political governing revealing “the banality of evil” in another historical context than Rancière and Mouffe, but nevertheless criticizing at a consensual order in which plurality of thought, opinion, and action is undermined. The possibility to reach into the center of politics with marginalized issues is according to Rancière impossible in a consensus democracy, as it consensus means “erasing the contestatory, conflictual nature of the very givens of common life.”4 Yet he believes that that it is “possible and necessary to oppose a thought of political precariousness” (and consensual stability) as “[p]olitics is a local, precarious, contingent activity – an activity which is always on the point of disappearing, and thus perhaps also on the point of reappearing.”5 I do agree. 1
Jacques Rancière, “Introducing Disagreement”, in Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 9, No. 3, 2004, p. 4. Ibid. 3 Chantal Mouffe “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces”, in Art and Research, vol. 1, no. 2, Summer 2007, p. 2. 4 Rancière 2004, p. 7. 5 Ibid. p. 8. 2
Has critique run out of steam? Bruno Latour is offering a convincing argument of why critique has “run out of steam” and maintains, “critical theory died away a long time ago.” His thoughtprovoking, yet incomplete, analysis of how we might anew be truly critical is pointing in a realist direction, in which the previous, and current, social scientists’ selective critique through “matters of concern” should instead be more “matter of fact[ual]” and thus directly dealing with what is being criticized. The argument is not merely an idea that the humanities ought to be more like the natural sciences, or that the critique lack solid arguments. Instead, Latour argues that cultural and social critique operates through the debunking of things, phenomena, actions and behaviors as either superstitious belief in external forces (religion, idolism, etc.), or that things that seem as “free power of your own will” instead are explained as “unwillingly activated” through the powers of desires and interests, or alternatively, actions out of confidence in an unfettered liberation are debunked by the fact the decisions are predetermined through hegemonic structural powers. This type of critique is moving away from the matter of fact to a matter of concern, and is most often a structural explanation of behaviors, or a revealing of structural configurations of things in our society. For Latour this is not only missing the point of addressing what is really critiqued but also ridiculing both the subjects and the objects of the critique. The starting point of Latour’s analysis is that “the enemies” (of social sciences and humanities?) are using the same techniques of social construction for “bad” purposes as the humanists or critics for “good” purposes. He stresses that it is time for critics to find new battles to combat and find new strategies for the attacks. But what if critique actually has a role to play as revealing structural inequalities and hegemonic power relations. Critics aren’t perhaps firstly critical of the “things” consumed or idols adored, but instead only really questioning the structural construction of such
CLUSTER 5 phenomena? Isn’t it so, that the things only get their deeper meanings, beyond the individual, through its connection to a larger whole, to a structural logic of society? Sure, even an individual’s independent racist action is for sure a racist action, but if we could determine that this action is part of a structural pattern it is indeed a larger problem beyond the individual, and beyond matters of law to hamper individual’s wrongdoing. It is unclear how Latour would go about arguing against another ideological perspective in for instance the debate on global warming. It seems as if he would suggests a sort of over-powering the other side with either more “objective” totalizing view or a more pervasive relativist argument leaving the “facts” of the enemies. The observation that social critique is inverted in big science questions and in ideological cultural debates should not come as a surprise. In fact, isn’t this the type of appropriation that ad-makers and branding consultant have been using for quite some time, and whose strategies and services today are common practices everywhere, even in parliamentary politics, far beyond the writing of election campaigns. But perhaps this is the reason why critique has run out of steam? Nevertheless, I do not side with Latour that critique might have lost its previous role, and instead think that it would be even more important to continue the critical practice, not the least towards the dreadful systematic perversion of public representation and our democratic system.
The Capsule and the Network In the sort of “new spirit of capitalism” (Boltanski & Chiapello) that has emerged after 1968 – in which capitalism restructures from industrial to informal, production goes from fordist to post-Fordist, labor is individualized and outsourced – flexibility is (was) the new catchword. This shift also demarcates the transformation from disciplinary society (Foucault) to control society (Deleuze) where old structures defined by hierarchies and markets are blurred and confused (but still present and operational) into the network society (Castells). The informational capitalism of networks is highly mediated and visual and as such design and architecture play leading roles in lubricating the system – and arguably, could also play leading roles in opposing the neo-liberal maelstrom. With this background, Lieven De Cauter’s text on society’s historical (and present) development of what he calls “capsularization” is very interesting. Particularly interesting for me is the concept’s inherent abundance as it demarcates matter, form, space, thinking, designing, making, and further, and both process and idea. De Cauter’s own definition of capsular spaces is also including the virtual and those spaces that our minds create and separate from the world outside, regardless of configuration of physical space. De Cauter is depicting a “general theory” of the rise of a capsular civilization, or rather, doom prophesies of negative tendencies (albeit often architecturally fascinating) in society. In this transformation towards “high-intensity capsularization” he identifies two basic developments, “the technological logic of capsularization and the logic of exclusion in a polarized society,” that perhaps only could be avoided, De Cauter notice, through strong political will. Although concluding by identifying these two main developments, De Cauter presents eight points, or mechanisms for the rise of a capsular civilization, which are all directly or indirectly tied to the modern developments of capitalism. Less directly linked is the
CLUSTER 7 human need for protection and the use of defensive capsular devices in protection of hostile climate, environment and speed. The technological advancements of such capsules, whether real or virtual, are however directly tied to economic systems of production and consumption. If we for a moment equal capsularization with the making of architecture, the eight points are obvious warning signs of us becoming what De Caulter calls “voluntary prisoners of architecture.” And indeed, the reading remains pessimistic as there today is no sign of a political determination to, what De Caulter identifies as our hope, “impose social corrections upon transcendental capitalism” nor to “defend and spread the welfare state.” Hence there is an individual “scramble for protection” that at large is driven by fear. De Cauter states: “fear leads to capsularization and capsularization enhances fear.” In architecture, this logic arguably moves beyond password restrictions and gated communities and creates new building standards, features and trends that are introduced, sanctioned, popularized and regulated through the logic of today’s capitalism, namely; liberalization, deregulation, and privatization. In this reading De Cauter is placing design and architecture in the midst of capitalism and globalization and tries to point to the relevance of the comprehension of the physical environment’s dependency on matters of concern beyond shelter and protection, outside the conventional realm of architecture.
Situated knowledge What is situated knowledge today? Donna Haraway’s seminal text from 1988 certainly has relevance for us today, but there are some observations to be made regarding the road travelled since the writing of the piece. There have been some disruptive and fundamental changes of society since the late 1980s that in many ways have adopted the practices of Haraway, but in a sort of capitalist cultural logic of misappropriation that have made partial seeing and situated knowledges instead disfavoring the subjugated and the marginal. Similar though, to the 1980s, perhaps, is that resistance and critique remain central in the social sciences but marginal in big science and the world outside of academics. Without trying to in-depth elaborate on how the writing stands today I would like to focus on Haraway’s highlighting of the importance of “positioning.” Donna Haraway’s pursuit is to make research (and activism, critique and other practices) strive for objectivity that is not reductionist nor totalizing, but “situated knowledges.” For Haraway the practice of “positioning” is fundamental for making objective claims. Instead of identifying dichotomies she suggests, “a map of tensions and resonances between the fixed ends of a charged dichotomy better represents the potent politics and epistemologies of embodied, therefore accountable, objectivity.” Embodied would at first glance signal subjectivity rather than objectivity, but Haraway points at “local knowledges have also to be in tension with the productive structurings that force unequal translations and exchanges – material and semiotic – within the webs of knowledge and power.” Therefore, her argument is that the search for subjectivities of personal, localized, embodied knowledge. It is not a position(s) of “scientific authority” neither one of the “various forms of relativism,” but instead an alternative that is “partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and
CLUSTER 10 shared conversations in epistemology.” Haraway refuses “to theorize the world” but claim that “we do need an earth-wide network of connections, including the ability partially to translate knowledges among very different […] communities.” To maintain these “webs of connections” ought to be a central responsibility of scientific research in order to seriously position yourself and your research. Yet, we could certainly question the type of “situated knowledges” of partial research which is very difficult to translate into any other community, and sometimes even untranslatable within its own research community. Is it then enough to do careful “positioning” of projects in order to legitimize research? I think Haraway would argue that if a positioning (of situated knowledge) were not finding resonance in a (social) purpose of research it would remain reductionist, unable to convey significance of the particular subjectivity in question.
Noopolitics (Hauptmann, Lazzarato, Deleuze) In his article “The Concepts of Life and the Living in the Societies of Control” Maurizio Lazzarato describes a chronological development from disciplinary societies to control societies – following Foucault’s acknowledgment of this difference when developing his biopower analysis of the disciplinary states of prisons, hospitals, etc., and distinguishes bio-power and bio-politics on the one hand from noo-politics on the other. Institutional and political control are performed through various means and techniques in disciplinary societies and societies of control, from “the moulding of the body ensured by disciplines (prisons, school, factory, etc.), the management of life organized by biopower (Welfare State, politics of health, etc.), and the modulation of memory and its virtual powers regulated by noo-politics (Herzian, audio-visual and telematics networks, constitution of public opinion, of perception and of collective intelligence).” Connected to these makings, Lazzarato draw attention to a sociological sequence – “working class (as one of the modalities of confinement), population, publics” – in which the various stages pay attention to individuals and groups through categorizations (Lazzarato, p. 186). And indeed, also through architectural history we do recognize this sequence as particular attention paid to the working class, population and publics in the making of buildings and cities. In the text by Deborah Hauptmann (which is an introduction to an anthology titled Cognitive Architecture: From Biopolitics to Noopolitics), she emphasizes the importance of Lazzarato’s text specifically in its distinction between bio- and noopolitics and his assertion that even though societies of today are increasingly controlled (and governed) through our minds, the bodily control as described by Foucault’s disciplines are not obsolete but function in parallel with more contemporary confinements of mediation.
CLUSTER 12 Lazzarato condemns the labor movement and its persistence of focusing on work, which points at Marxism’s current impotence. It is true, as Lazzarato concludes his article, that the labor movement “has nothing to put in the place of praxis” and that “[i]t can’t imagine a process of constitution of world and self which is not centered around work.” Marxist ideology, as different to the current politics of the labor movement, is also centered around the concept of work, and with this, its compatibleness with disciplinary societies is obvious. Similarly, it is perhaps equally clear that it is incompatible with the current control societies? Lazzarato is, however, omitting the (primary) function Marxist ideology has (have had) as critique. Although he has written extensively on capitalism and consumerism in relation to the historical changes of work and production, Lazzarato is not in this text linking praxis and critique. Deleuze, on the other hand, tie the changes from disciplinary to control society directly to the mutations of capitalism, from production to metaproduction. In the latter, capitalism is “no longer directed toward production but toward products, that is, toward sales or markets.” Deleuze is asking (in 1990) “whether trade unions still have any role”? Similarly, we could questioned Lazzarato’s view that the labor movement should find a replacement of praxis – this is what they are all about – but instead put out a quest for something replacing labor, a perspective that is able to critique the current guises of capitalism in the same way the labor movement put forward an alternative mode of production. If production (and then employment) was key to both capitalist and Marxist organization of work, perhaps it is the mediation and subjectivation of publics that (at the moment) is the central aspects of capitalist transformation? But what kind of alternative is coming out of (architectural) mediation or subjectivation? Perhaps an effective capitalist critique? Or something that make us come to terms with the
current “fluid politics” and the “modulation” of capitalism? It seems clear that such “publics” will not be compatible with the institutional organization of parliamentary politics which arguably still is too rooted in a disciplinary state of control. I find Lazzarato’s final passing reference on labor’s failure to shift focus from work to employment very interesting. He mentions it as a “sad chapter in the decline of the labor movement.” Without knowing his argument for why it is sad, it seems to me that it failed exactly because it was a compromised, alternative put forward, by the labor movement in response to capitalism’s transformation towards employment, which resulted in individuals previously pursuing work careers with job security where found without social security and forced to promote their individual status as employable. After reading Lazzarato and Deleuze, one is easily fooled to believe that the formation of publics and acting from a distance through networks of flows are also responses to confinement and the answers to resist control (also for the labor movement) whereas both in fact point at the danger of (uncritically) mimicking the seductive mechanisms of the present society of control. Yet, current architectural practice does not seem to point at any wider critical awareness of such a danger...
New Materialism Jane Bennett ends chapter two of her book Vibrant Matter with two questions regarding “the political ecology of things,” asking: “Should we acknowledge the distributive quality of agency to address the power of human-nonhuman assemblages and to resist a politics of blame? Or should we persist with a strategic understatement of material agency in the hopes of enhancing the accountability of specific humans?” The questions clearly lead to Bennett arguing for recognizing “the distributive quality of agency” in order to get a more updated view on complex networks and move away from organicist models of understanding. To me these questions are also revealing the biases of Bennett’s view of the two perspectives as one could clearly also claim the opposite: “efficiacy, trajectory and causality” are all terms that (could) lead to “the politics of blame” as the analyses of the chain of events are focusing on tendencies and outcomes, trajectories and effects (although Bennett points out that agencies of assemblages do this less than the Augustinian or Kanitian “strong agency”), whereas “strategic understatement of material agency” is not automatically leading to a “politics of blame” or assigning accountable humans. Instead, it could reveal a structural distribution of politics and human agency that instead point at systematic problems instead of individuals’ wrongdoing or bad judgments. The dichotomy of structure and agency is related to that of criticality and projection, or critique and action, in which the potential of the action rely on the abilities to understand structures. Bennett’s text is manifesting the current opportune view of the untimeliness of poststructuralist critique, but it offers very little refuge from the danger of making cause-and-effect explanations of historical trajectories. Networks have in many areas of our society replaced the old “structures” of market and hierarchy, although these structures are still highly present and
CLUSTER 13 complicated by the forces of agents in networks. In this perspective it is true that Marxist and poststructuralist critique of for instance capitalism are not sufficient in understanding the complexity of the today’s capitalism. Bennett writes: “Actors are ‘socially constituted,’ but the ‘constitutive’ or productive power of structures derives from the human wills or intentions within them. /…/ Structures, surroundings, and contexts make a difference to outcomes, but they are not quite vibrant matter.” Nevertheless, structural power relations and inequalities do need to be acknowledged as such, and this is, in my opinion, the most fundamental starting point of material research.