Theories of hegemony attempt to represent both the contradictory cleavages and the instrumental realities that allow certain social arrangements to persist. This includes the variegated conflicts between labour and capital, disjunctions between national and international determinations, and between regimes of production and consumption. What often remains unclear, however, are the causal relations embedded in these representations of the world as a partitioned totality, as well as whether there are any constitutive gaps, any subalternities which escape this representation. Once a picture of the relation between the part and the whole emerges, how does one adjudicate and apportion agency and causality? And how to do this in a way that does not reify either specific parts – materials, technologies, industries, nations, ideologies, events, corporations, classes, etc. – or the totality as a whole – capitalism, socialism, the Cold War, Empire, etc.?

In architectural historiography, U.S. hegemony in the 'postwar period' has predominantly been analysed as a cultural phenomenon, not least because significant material resources were indeed dispensed by the U.S. toward the aim of hegemonic cultural dominance. Thus, as Greg Castillo acknowledges in his review of the 'soft power of midcentury design,' his account is not primarily focused on material conditions and struggles, but on their cultural expressions; he does not examine 'postwar consumption as put into practice, but as proposed and hypothesised by propagandists representing interest groups ranging from states and their administrative organisations to private enterprise.' Castillo’s ultimate objective is 'to reconstruct the cultural discourses that informed' the midcentury design of the modern home as a cypher for 'soft power.'[1]

Other scholars, such as the business historian, Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., use an opposite approach: to focus almost exclusively on the techno-economic determinations that allow companies (and, by extension, states) to accrue 'hard' power and dominance through managerial techniques of efficiency and optimisation, including the full cycle of production and consumption.[2] Both approaches, however, avoid the problem of articulation – how exactly should 'hard' and 'soft' power be weighed and correlated, both theoretically and in particular historical contexts? As well as of subalternity: how can any single approach account for the part that has no part, no jurisdiction?

Marx addresses this correlation through a historical materialist account of the rise of capitalism in Western Europe: the process of capitalist modernisation is synonymous with migration from the countryside to the city. This is what Spivak calls 'Marx’s urbanist teleology.' As the 'base' industries of society develop – where surplus value is 'pumped out of the direct producer,' such as in commercial agriculture or factory production – a series of cultural, legal, political, and ideological 'superstructures' dialectically compel the acceleration of this process by commodifying more land and life, thus proletarianising rural populations that have hitherto remained outside of capitalist social relations, and thus moving to the industrial metropolis for work. Whether this process is led by (hard) 'forces' – technological capabilities, direct coercion, and organised resistance – or by (soft) 'relations' of production – modes of property, contracts of employment, trade agreements, institutional arrangements, and cultural movements for or against commodification – is a major question in Marxist thought. With the rise of dependency and world-systems theories in the 1960s and 70s, the base-superstructure model was effectively scaled up into world 'cores' and 'peripheries,' functionally reproducing capitalist relations at the scale of the whole world.

Yet, these historical changes – from the reservation to the city, from national to global concerns, and from oppression to liberation – necessarily involve particular spatial articulations, not just abstract or universalising ideological projections. Furthermore, they are still (not just historically) grounded on so-called primitive accumulations, not least the neo-colonial plunder of Indigenous lifeworlds. Thus, if we want to avoid unwarranted reifications in our attempt to theorise a decolonial platform urbanism, we have to ask how the different elements materially relate to each other – how would a potentially counter-hegemonic platform urbanism be disaggregated and its different components assessed? In other words, what processes and agents constitute everything between the worlds of production and consumption? What are the architectural conditions that would flesh out the relation between forces and relations as a material – logistical and jurisdictional, not just cultural – apparatus?

Within the canon of modern architectural historiography, we can discern at least three approaches to the problem of how to both visualise and harness the totality of capitalist development – using architecture as a figure-system of hegemony – through the variable of scale. At the scale of the nation, one model was pioneered by architects following in the footsteps of the corporate-state integrations begun by the Deutsche Werkbund, and then further inspired by New Deal projects of large-scale planning. For example, in A. Lawrence Kocher and Howard Dearstyne’s 1943 proposal for 'The Architectural Center' described earlier, architecture becomes the beating heart of a fully-planned (if not entirely nationalised) system of building production. Here, the parts of the system are the different occupations of the national building market and its constitutive institutional relations.[3]

At the scale of the building itself, another approach involved the self-conscious articulation of architecture into component parts and typological wholes for the sake of organisational efficiency and productivity, but also as an epistemic device to sort the art of 'architecture' from mere 'building.' In this scheme, parts were 'machinic' – being able to be compared to each other in purely economic terms, according to criteria of utility – while organically-conceived buildings could not actually be disaggregated, and were thus cultural, poetic wholes. This was Henry Russell Hitchcock’s intent in 1947, when he distinguished between Albert Kahn’s and Frank Lloyd Wright’s oeuvres – the bureaucratic firm versus the artistic one.[4]

Finally, at the scale of the architect as individual producer, Walter Gropius developed a theory that emphasised the role of modern architecture in uniting the artistic with the technological through different forms of collaboration. This was as much a humanistic argument as it was an economic one, though in Gropius’s case – unlike Hitchcock – a synthesis seemed possible through a rational pedagogy; one that would guarantee the architect’s position of leadership at the helm of the construction industry, while also ensuring maximum, albeit humane, productivity.[5]

What all three modes of analysis had in common, however, was not just a cultural commitment to architectural or capitalist development, but rather the generalised proposal of using prefabricated and standardised components to affect social change at the level of the totality – the nation-state. In other words, modern architecture’s translation of the problem of economic growth – in economics, the most efficient and productive organisation of the factors of production – took the discursive and material form of standardisation and prefabrication. [6] This language – both literally and symbolically, through techniques of modularisation and of collaboration or competition, depending on the context – also made possible total visualisations of the national economy, now capable of being disaggregated into three distinct but interconnected scales.

Yet, by the 1930s, the representation of the economy as a whole, or in particular sectors, had become a highly contested and politicised project.[7] If Gropius argued that economic growth could be all but guaranteed via the right integrations between the arts, the humanities, and the engineering sciences on the one hand, and between different corporate and state institutions on the other, neoclassical economists like Ronald Coase pointed to the irreducibility of the institutional form of the capitalist firm itself as the key motor of economic growth.[8] The firm existed as the singular most effective mode of organisation constituted by the boundary between the total heterogeneity of the (external) market, and the space of almost total determination and control made possible by (internal) labour contracts. Using the example of the many different parts required to build a house, the liberal theorist Friedrich Hayek took this boundary to be absolute, positing the epistemological non-knowability – beyond the firm itself – of objective market conditions.[9] For these authors, the figure of 'the economy' as a totality thus seemed intrinsically vexing, if not entirely doomed.

However, both Coase’s and Hayek’s meditations on the epistemology of economic parts and wholes were shaped within a proto-neoliberal milieu that was inherently skeptical about attempts to visualise – and thus plan – the social. Specifically, both authors were reacting to the 'Socialist Calculation Debate' that emerged after the Russian Revolution: the controversy surrounding the Soviet Union’s attempts to plan the entirety of the nation’s economy or, as Coase put it, planning the nation itself as a large firm.[10] On the other hand, both neoliberal and socialist thinkers were growing concerned that the rise of large monopolistic corporations would effectively concentrate capitalist power in massive bureaucracies, thus impinging on both competitive capitalism and socialist planning.[11]

The rise of technological platforms precisely recalls this intellectual and political contest: what gets to be 'in' the platform, who gets to be represented, how are these decisions made, and what is the reproductive context – socially and environmentally – that supports the whole endeavour? How does a particular set of parts come to be platformed? What is the techno-social link that sustains this particular articulation of geopolitics and epistemology?

Historically, urban and architectural monopolies have not offered equitable approaches to these questions. Instead, they have substituted brute logistical force for democratic deliberation and accountability. Logistical network integrations that configure a whole design-construction-assembly-marketing process promise to overcome the contradictions that tend to emerge between ‘forces’ and ‘relations’ through sheer monopoly power. The inherent tensions between a base of labour in production/reproduction and its superstructural management under capitalist property relations are thus neutralised through sheer growth, or more coercively, through intense union-busting. The historical lesson in relation to monopolies is that only unremitting material opposition can effectively challenge this type of power. Ameliorative design here is often just co-option. The recent failures of Google in Toronto or Amazon in New York, after strong grassroots organising efforts, are cases in point.

Economic determinists have often prioritised productive 'forces' over superstructural 'relations.' However, as Ellen Meiksins Wood eloquently argued (following the labour historian E.P. Thompson), the relation is dialectical: 'The concept of productive forces can include more than simply "material" forces and technologies' – in fact these are always irreducibly material, legal and social at once – 'the instruments, techniques and organisational forms which have the effect of increasing productive capacity.' [12] The 'contradiction' arises because capitalist property relations – with means of production privately owned – artificially constrain the full capacities of productive forces. The intrinsically social nature of production comes up against the restrictive instruments of private property, such as copyright contracts limiting the sharing of useful technical information to protect rentier profits, or the managerial separation of workers in order to prevent collectivisation of means, thus also hampering more efficient production arrangements.

The response to this inherent contradiction is thus further capitalist integrations and attempts to enlarge the extractive and dispossessive base of capital – either through labour offshoring, automation, and/or through neo-colonial appropriations of further resources.

In the next (final) post I will examine the decolonial potentials of trying to think platform urbanism in this context as a counter-logistical power articulated through modes of socialisation rather than private integrations.