The object revolution

While in Europe, the German far right is renewing its criticism of the Bauhaus in favour of a return to tradition, in the United States, one of Donald Trump’s first decrees concerns public buildings whose architecture must be “traditional, regional and classical”. Over and above the reactionary atmosphere, this renewed interest in architectural form is violently questioning our relationship with the object, raising the question of a way of thinking that is based less on the subjectivity of interpretation than on the objectivity of the constructed.

These two recent positions are based on the symbolism of the object: architecture is a sign. More than form, they critic, above all, the discipline (as the Bauhaus was in the 1930s) and the “intellectual” dimension of an architecture that is thought up by the elite and imposed on the masses. If this ever-growing populism is taking advantage of networks where opinion and comment have supplanted criticism, perhaps we should be questioning our relationship with production at a time when contemporary thinking continues to separate the so-called “intellectual” and “manual” professions, particularly on the social scale? Beyond architecture, this dissociation of making and thinking prevents us from seeing making as a meaningful act, and sows the seeds of a society divided and hierarchical between producers and others, leaving fertile ground for the extreme right.

However, the objectification of complex thought around the subject of assembly is not new. In France, Gilbert Simondon theorised about it as early as 1958 with the first edition of his book Du mode d’existence des objets techniques¹, a work that Gilles Deleuze built on, for example in his development of the idea of machines (notably in Différence et répétition²), and Jean Baudrillard in Le système des objets³, two works published in 1968. Even more radically, François Dagognet worked on this between the 1970s and 2000: “We therefore need to bring about a real revolution, by realising that it is on the side of the objects that the mind is to be found, much more than on the side of the subject.⁴” Intellectual evidence on the one hand and revolutionary proposal on the other: shouldn’t we question the way in which production and construction (agricultural, craft, architectural, etc.) can be considered not simply as study areas for researchers, but as research objects in their own right? In other words, how can we rethink the act of making as an intellectual act, considered for its cultural interest, on the one hand, and to try to reduce this social distinction between producing and thinking, on the other?

Between 1974 and 1984, Annick Pardailhé-Galabrun, a research engineer at the CNRS, worked with students at Paris IV as part of Pierre Chaumu’s seminar, “La révolution des objets. Le Paris des inventaires après-décès (XVII^e – XVIII^e siècles)”. This huge collection brought together “50,000 pages of notarial archives analysed, 110 studies (out of 122) examined, one house in ten visited (Paris had around 25,000 houses on the eve of the Revolution). In all, 2,783 post-death inventories were studied between 1600 and 1790, using standard index cards divided into 9 sections, based on the content of the deed and a uniform set of research questions.⁵” This inventory work produced a concrete and objective representation of pre-Revolutionary Paris, in terms of its architecture, economy and lifestyles, published in Annick Pardailhé-Galabrun’s book, La naissance de l’intime (The birth of privacy), published in 1988 by Presses Universitaires de France.

This almost archaeological work demonstrates the obvious ability of objects and constructions to tell the story of our world. This way of thinking challenges the dominant Western subjective approach by abandoning “the cult of the ego alone” turning towards the object and the material conditions of existence to understand the subject. Moreover, it is no coincidence that François Dagognet was not “only” a philosopher but also a doctor when he developed this hypothesis of an understanding of the world through matter 6 and objective thought and the “rematerialisation⁷” of culture. Even though this radical proposition has been forgotten to some extent, and that it seriously questions the validity of the human and social narrative as a means of representing a situation, it now seems essential to reintroduce this objectification of the world and the associated material and scientific skills (craftsmanship, construction, agriculture, etc.) into the intellectual debate.

The contemporary question of the place of the built and of production is perhaps emerging as a new necessity in response to the loss of craft skills, the denigration of manual work and the weakness of a society that is gradually dissociating doing and thinking.