Architecture as such: Notes on Generic(ness) and Labor-sans-phrase

According to Carl Schmitt, XX century was the result of a series of secular progressive “neutralisations and de-politicisations” aimed at dissolving antagonism within the sedating domain of market competition and technological religion. Liberalism was nothing but the replacement of politics with policy, conflict with civilisation, enmity with humanity, State with Society and, in this sense, the present “post-political” Empire, which governs through an extended universal neutral democracy made of control apparatuses, management and mass manipulation, seems the outcome of the economical prophecies of modernity, whose fundamental project was to subsume and tame the human generic nature – the innate engendering faculty – as fundamental source for production and development of its system of exploitation.

But if contemporary capitalism undermined any distinction between labor and life, salary and income, consumption and reproduction, work and political action, then precisely labor, in its precarious and most generic form, would offer the most profitable battlefield to elaborate new strategies of exodus “to make the brain of the system mad”. This essay is thus an attempt to redefine the factory as the architectural paradigm of the modern metropolis, reconsidering “genericness” not as its mere steady default status but rather as its proper ontological source, which provides the conditions for any further evolution and, therefore, the possibility for politically acting within and against the total reality of production.