Utopia Povera
Apr. 12th, 2005 10:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus4pm: Subject was observed in a Thai grocery store on the Alexanderplatz. Instead of shopping for okra, prawns, bok choi and tofu, Subject was photographing a 10 euro broom imported from Vietnam. Interviewed by Researcher, Subject confessed that the broom was the most beautiful thing he had seen all week.
4.12pm: Subject was spotted making a digital audio recording of Thai pop song being played over shop hifi. Asked why, Subject told Researcher he hadn't heard any Western pop music this beautiful in years. Interview was arranged at Subject's home to investigate these matters further.
6.15pm: Notes from Interview: Subject told Researcher that the last film he'd seen was in a little cinema behind a bar not far from his house. The film was called Carpatia, and it was "a documentary about the poor people of the Carpathian mountain range that runs through Slovakia, Southern Poland, Ukraine, Romania and Hungary". Subject waxed lyrical about the faces, the carts, the kitchens, the music, and the haystacks: "Carpathian haystacks are a more gorgeous example of organic design than anything by Ushida Findlay," he proclaimed, adding "If you take the logic of Ushida Finlay's organic architecture to its most refined point, that's what you get: a Carpathian haystack! This stuff is the future, and the future is Utopia Povera!"
Pressed on what he meant, Subject said that Utopia Povera was the belief that poor forms are more beautiful and more moral than rich ones, that nature is still a better designer than man, and that more expensive is not necessarily better. Subject said that most religions elevate poverty over wealth, and that our sense of beauty is tied up with our spiritual values. Poverty is usually associated with the past and with necessity, but in fact poverty may be our future, as the population grows and the Earth's resources become exhausted.
6.32pm: Subject spoke about the Japanese movement known as Slow Life as exemplary because it's a voluntary adoption of Utopia Povera values. The trouble, said Subject, is that many things which are virtuous and beautiful -- riding bicycles, living in high density urban environments -- are only embraced while people are poor. As soon as people earn enough money to buy a car and move out to low density suburbs, they tend to do it. That's why it'll be the shrinking economies from which movements like Slow Life and Utopia Povera emerge, not the expanding ones. The expanding economies, because they remain wedded to the idea that nature is not cost effective, will destroy it and finally themselves, which means that they will eventually have to embrace Povera values too, but in the form of Dystopia Povera rather than Utopia Povera.
6.45pm: Subject added that design had to evolve beyond its role as "flagship for consumer capitalism". Warming to his theme, Subject sat Researcher down and played him clips from The House of the Future, a recent BBC Radio 4 programme. Researcher's notes:
C.J. Lim's Clone House has only one window, a periscope, that brings the same view into all four rooms. The walls retain the shape of everyone who leans against them. Lim wanted to make a sociable house that didn't depend on the technology we have now. "We're absolutely bombarded by technology, by microwaves, by the most expensive plasma screen that you can get, but we can all exist within a store cupboard and order everything in. We don't even need a kitchen. We can actually sleep in a store cupboard and everything could be delivered, from eggs from Sainsbury's to virtual sex." Subject began talking about roomic cubes, the post-bit atom, and lunch wallahs. Researcher began to feel a bit hungry.
6.57pm: Subject played a tape of David Greene of Archigram describing the house of 2050. "I think it would contain a garden. I think I would make a house of the future now -- and in fact I have done a project like this, not built of course -- which virtually looks like a garden. But in fact the garden consists of lots of hi-tech sort of worked into the berries and fruits. The kitchen area is in amongst the bushes and some of the seating actually looks like vegetation but is comfortable if you sit on it. But it is actually like living in the garden. And some of it, of course, is garden garden. And it has glades and arbours and things. So that the actual tradition of the garden joins into the tradition of the house. It's always been my ideal to sort of live in the garden, as it were. It's about weaving technology and nature together, so that your veg-based things and your wire or wireless-based things become morphed together. You don't have a category that says "That's the garden, this is furniture, these are appliances, that's a gadget, that's a roof." But you try and bring them together. That would be my model aspiration for this week. Next week it might change, but I've been pretty pre-occupied with the idea of the vegetable house for some time."
7.02pm: Researcher glanced at Rolex, made excuses, and took taxi back to Hotel Intercontinental.
4.12pm: Subject was spotted making a digital audio recording of Thai pop song being played over shop hifi. Asked why, Subject told Researcher he hadn't heard any Western pop music this beautiful in years. Interview was arranged at Subject's home to investigate these matters further.
6.15pm: Notes from Interview: Subject told Researcher that the last film he'd seen was in a little cinema behind a bar not far from his house. The film was called Carpatia, and it was "a documentary about the poor people of the Carpathian mountain range that runs through Slovakia, Southern Poland, Ukraine, Romania and Hungary". Subject waxed lyrical about the faces, the carts, the kitchens, the music, and the haystacks: "Carpathian haystacks are a more gorgeous example of organic design than anything by Ushida Findlay," he proclaimed, adding "If you take the logic of Ushida Finlay's organic architecture to its most refined point, that's what you get: a Carpathian haystack! This stuff is the future, and the future is Utopia Povera!"
Pressed on what he meant, Subject said that Utopia Povera was the belief that poor forms are more beautiful and more moral than rich ones, that nature is still a better designer than man, and that more expensive is not necessarily better. Subject said that most religions elevate poverty over wealth, and that our sense of beauty is tied up with our spiritual values. Poverty is usually associated with the past and with necessity, but in fact poverty may be our future, as the population grows and the Earth's resources become exhausted.6.32pm: Subject spoke about the Japanese movement known as Slow Life as exemplary because it's a voluntary adoption of Utopia Povera values. The trouble, said Subject, is that many things which are virtuous and beautiful -- riding bicycles, living in high density urban environments -- are only embraced while people are poor. As soon as people earn enough money to buy a car and move out to low density suburbs, they tend to do it. That's why it'll be the shrinking economies from which movements like Slow Life and Utopia Povera emerge, not the expanding ones. The expanding economies, because they remain wedded to the idea that nature is not cost effective, will destroy it and finally themselves, which means that they will eventually have to embrace Povera values too, but in the form of Dystopia Povera rather than Utopia Povera.
6.45pm: Subject added that design had to evolve beyond its role as "flagship for consumer capitalism". Warming to his theme, Subject sat Researcher down and played him clips from The House of the Future, a recent BBC Radio 4 programme. Researcher's notes:
C.J. Lim's Clone House has only one window, a periscope, that brings the same view into all four rooms. The walls retain the shape of everyone who leans against them. Lim wanted to make a sociable house that didn't depend on the technology we have now. "We're absolutely bombarded by technology, by microwaves, by the most expensive plasma screen that you can get, but we can all exist within a store cupboard and order everything in. We don't even need a kitchen. We can actually sleep in a store cupboard and everything could be delivered, from eggs from Sainsbury's to virtual sex." Subject began talking about roomic cubes, the post-bit atom, and lunch wallahs. Researcher began to feel a bit hungry.
6.57pm: Subject played a tape of David Greene of Archigram describing the house of 2050. "I think it would contain a garden. I think I would make a house of the future now -- and in fact I have done a project like this, not built of course -- which virtually looks like a garden. But in fact the garden consists of lots of hi-tech sort of worked into the berries and fruits. The kitchen area is in amongst the bushes and some of the seating actually looks like vegetation but is comfortable if you sit on it. But it is actually like living in the garden. And some of it, of course, is garden garden. And it has glades and arbours and things. So that the actual tradition of the garden joins into the tradition of the house. It's always been my ideal to sort of live in the garden, as it were. It's about weaving technology and nature together, so that your veg-based things and your wire or wireless-based things become morphed together. You don't have a category that says "That's the garden, this is furniture, these are appliances, that's a gadget, that's a roof." But you try and bring them together. That would be my model aspiration for this week. Next week it might change, but I've been pretty pre-occupied with the idea of the vegetable house for some time."
7.02pm: Researcher glanced at Rolex, made excuses, and took taxi back to Hotel Intercontinental.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-12 09:10 am (UTC)That Rolex watch could support a Lao family for a decade.
You done been
Date: 2005-04-12 09:29 am (UTC)http://pitchforkmedia.com/features/weekly/05-04-11-my-favorite-band.shtml
(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-12 09:32 am (UTC)I wonder how well those Carpathian haystacks and their associated technologies, which struck me in similar way when I was living in southern Poland and then Romania twenty years ago, will survive with possible EU subsidies for state of the art baling machines and similar. As far as I understand it, communism didn't wreck smallholdings in Poland as it had in many parts of the USSR. Entry into the EU might.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-12 10:04 am (UTC)"How many generations will pass before our nomad cousins climb the ladder of consumer sophistication high enough to want to enter a Cocue store and buy exactly the clothes their ancestors wore decades or centuries before? The correct answer is, of course, 4.8 generations given a 6% annual rise in GDP."
(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-12 10:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-12 10:42 am (UTC)"$9 (Can.) a day may not seem much. But Raman shrugs: "Yes, I live in a slum shack, but I have whatever I need - a table fan, running water, (siphoned illegally off a water main, as is his electric supply) a charpoy (reed mat) to sleep on, dal and roti to eat, my two shirts, a pant--even a pair of chappals (sandals)" He adds. "My friend has a TV and we watch "Kaun Banega Crorepati" (a popular Indian version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire") and I think what mosebath (hardship) all those rich people must be suffering, always worrying about their big-big investments and afraid of thieves taking their jewellery. Too much garh-barh! (trouble). Me? I have nothing and everything. I go home, chat in the evenings with my neighbours, sometimes go to the movies, and send money to my wife in the village. No problems!"
(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-12 11:09 am (UTC)H.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-12 11:12 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-12 11:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-12 11:03 pm (UTC)So is the point to push forward to a certain point where we have our nice developed lives in terms of these basic matters, then step back selectively, weeding out the excess whilst keeping the benefits that were produced side by side with the production of the excess?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-12 11:37 am (UTC)I ring a Georgian friend and suggest as much. "You are joking?" he says.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-12 11:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-12 11:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-12 12:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-12 12:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-12 01:23 pm (UTC)Hey - I thought you might be writing about Andrea Dworkin today?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-12 01:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-12 03:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-12 02:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-12 03:06 pm (UTC)My girlfriend asked me the same question the other night at bedtime, and I gave her the same answer. I certainly wouldn't name a cat without seeing it first, so why would I treat a human any differently?
It was a mostly harmless question, but still... you gotta be concerned when a woman springs such a question at bedtime.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-12 03:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-12 06:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-12 05:20 pm (UTC)The broom, in its own way, is just as foriegn. The same brooms are available in massive quantities in many of the Vietnamese markets around this area, and usually cost around $6. Sure, they look authentically rural, but they're mass produced in a Vietnamese factory somewhere in a city, no doubt... and the existence of that factory -- and many others like it -- set the stage for no end of problems, such as sprawling urbanism, pollution, deforestation, and a general cheapening of that which is rural.
(Raw materials become cheap and grossly undervalued by society, while finished products based on those commodities hold most of the value. The cost of advertising a box of breakfast cereal is usually more than the cost of the grain that goes into the cereal itself. Devaluing raw materials kills rural farming, making factory farming a necessity.)
As Phillip Glass would say -- koyaanisqatsi (http://www.koyaanisqatsi.org/films/koyaanisqatsi.php): life out of balance.
The broom might look, feel, and act authentic, but its true nature is rather foriegn. There it is, wrapped in plastic manufactured using foriegn oil, using palm strands that probably went through some kind of automated cutting or processing in order to prepare them, held together by some kind of dyed, chemically treated twine, and labeled in German for export.
I don't argue that nature is a better designer than man. The best garden I ever had came from hand-plucking all of those things naturally growing in a garden that I didn't like, while encouraging all the rest. Likewise, my favorite architecture is highly aware of and meant to coexist with nature.
"Poverty may be our future, as the population grows and the Earth's resources become exhausted."
I cannot imagine any such future where people didn't have immensely powerful "poverty-friendly" luxuries. Flexible, disposable solar-powered computerized devices, manufactured using printing techniques or grown organically -- in a dish or like crystals -- connected to everything else. Efficient communities, possibly something like what is envisioned at Arcosanti (http://www.arcosanti.org/). Global markets for information, but a more localized market for raw materials. There nay be limited resources, but those non-renewable resources wouldn't be needed anymore. There would be no true scarcity, except for time.
While this is the utopian vision, there are dystopian alternatives... but dystopias have a tendency to die out. What survived would eventually learn to coexist.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-12 05:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-12 07:41 pm (UTC)Oh, absolutely. That said, it's still problematic.
The price is low because someone is getting cheated. You're getting a little cheated, because you aren't getting the truely authentic broom, handmade by a wizened old lady using traditional methods passed down for centuries. They're getting cheated, because it's made in a factory that underpays and overworks its workers. The world in general is getting cheated, because the factory is doing its part to unsustainably impact the world.
But other than that, it's a steal, isn't it?! In some sense, it's a bit like falling in love with a legal recording of an artist's work, but not buying their album/art/etc.
That's one of the big issues that people have been having over here with WalMart (and over in England with Tesco's.) You get a big company with a huge percent of the marketplace that sells everything and, by doing so, devalues everything. They are able to negotiate the prices down to such a low level that the only way to affordably produce anything is "on the cheap". What's more, as such businesses expand, they also see a market for the high end, so they start selling cheap goods that are actually, in many cases, quite good.
Economists would argue that they are creating market efficiencies and bringing us more for less, and indeed they are. They're also allowing us to more efficiently pillage the earth, however, while actually decreasing the market for that which is both beautiful and sustainable. And yet despite this fact (some would argue because of it) there is more and more excess production capacity worldwide and a greater disparity between the rich and the poor. People are investing in limited commodities -- oil, precious metals, land -- to the point that these commodities have an artificially inflated value, not supported by the economy. After all, how can the economy support much of anything when profit margins are getting smaller all the time?
I suspect we can all live quite well... but what we lack is the incentive to do so sustainably.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-12 08:34 pm (UTC)That being said, are ass-spraying toilets sustainable? and who could go back after such luxury?
I propose the sustainable version: a set of tubes, one tube for each member of the household and a guest tube, set next to a bucket of water with ladle from which water is spit through the tube that is set and aimed to please...hold the water in your mouth longer for a warm jet...
This should be incentive enough, this alternative.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-13 01:12 am (UTC)This excess of productive capacity is being used to produce goods which have a shorter and shorter lifespan. Think of the kind of cheaper-than-cheap goods you buy in Walmart and in those local Chinese supermarkets which have sprung up everywhere in the last few years. Now when those first appeared I assumed they were just the same as the everything-for-a-pound shops, essentially gimmicks. But they're not, they are in fact part of the real economy, selling things that people buy and use. I think that through globalisation capitalism has found a way to include all but the very poorest people in the economy by producing goods of very low quality at very low prices. It is actually cheaper for the very poor in Britain to buy processed food from Aldis or Iceland than to buy fresh produce. After all, the 12p they're spending on their can of baked beans is worth something wherever the beans were produced. In the same way a lot of people in China buy processed white bread from the supermaket instead of buying local produce from the markets or food from street vendors, partly because they aspire to the status of consumers but also because a lot of the time it's cheaper. In the future, fresh food and products of anything other than the poorest quality will increasingly become a luxury in most parts of the world.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-13 01:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-12 08:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-12 08:50 pm (UTC)things done right in the past need not be done again so authenticity could be seen as "efficiency"...your choice of affectation and method an armature of this, Whimsy? To suck dry from the pulp all the that can be? efficiency of actions/experience for economicly limited, such as the wallah man? all these half-chewed experiences of the wasteful rich, so much expenditure to get something they're not sure they even want or need since they acted before thinking all the way through it. not pulling out may be driven by the biggest payout/profit, but there's exponentially more 'losses' if its not one's intention to take on the growing seed.
momus godard
Date: 2005-04-13 03:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-19 11:04 pm (UTC)"We envy them, the simple men
The simple men we envy them
We envy the simple men"
Or maybe I misinterpret what you're saying.