INTRODUCTION

«[…] ‘less is more’ celebrates the ethical and aesthetic value of a self-imposed economy of means. Mies’s strippedbare architecture, in which formal expression was reduceed to a simple composition of readymade industrial elements, implied that beauty could only arise through refusal of everything that was not strictly necessary.» (p.7)

«Creativity depends not just on the investor finding ways to spare resources but on the worker’s capacity to adapt to difficult situations. These two aspects of industriousness and creativity are interlinked: the worker’s creativity forcibly becomes more pronounced when capital decides to reduce the costs of production and economic conditions become uncertain. Indeed it is creativity, as the most generic faculty of human life, that capital has always exploited as its main labour power. And in an economic crisis, what capital’s austerity measures demand is that people do more with less: more work for less money, more creativity with less social security. In this context, the principle of ‘less is more’ runs the risk of becoming a cynical celebration of the ethos of austerity and budget cuts to social programmes.» (pp.8-9)

«Asceticism is here understood as abstinence and self-discipline, as a willingness to sacrifice our present in order to earn our future–something which goes beyond the religious meaning of the term and has more to do with the ethics of entrepreneurial capitalism.» (p.10)

«[…] there is no end in sight, either in terms of satisfying personal needs or even in the mere process of accumulation. […] the practice of asceticism addresses the transformation of the self, I argue that it can be both a means of oppression and also a form of resistance to the subjective power of capitalism.
When we talk about resistance to power we understand this concept in terms of ideology or belief, but rarely as a matter of habits, customs and even the most humble aspects of everyday life. What is interesting about asceticism is that it allows subjects to focus on their life as the core of their own practice, by structuring it according to a self-chosen form made of specific habits and rules. This process often involves architecture and design as a device for self-enactment. Because asceticism allows subjects to focus on their self as the core of their activity, the architecture focused not on representation, but on life itself–on bios, as the most generic substratum of human existence. […] However, it is especially within asceticism that the enactment of forms of life becomes explicit. This is evident, for example, within the history of monasticism, where the architecture of the monastery was expressely designed to define life in all its most immanent details. Although monasticism ultimately spawned such disciplinary and repressive typologies as the Hôtel-Dieu, the hospital, the garrison, the prison and even the factory, at the outset the main purpose of its asceticism was to achieve a form of reciprocity between subjects freed from the social contract imposed by established forms of power. And this is why this tradition still stands as a paradigm for our time, when capital is becoming not only increasingly repressive but also increasingly unable to ‘take care’ of its subalterns as it did in the heyday of the welfare state. We will see that asceticism is not the preserve of monks in cells but, on the contrary, suffuses everything from the logic of capitalism itself to the concept of ‘social’ housing and the ideological rhetoric of minimalist design. The question is, cab it lead us towards a different way of life than the one forced upon us by the status quo?» (pp.11-13)

CHAPTER I

«Asceticism is a way of life in which the self is the main object of human activity.» (p.15)

«Philosophers were thus individuals who, through their chosen form of life, deeply informed by their thinking, inevitably challenged accepted habits and social conditions.» (p.15)

«Asceticism is […] a way to radically question given social and political conditions in a search for different way to live one’s life.» (p.15)

«From the outset, monasticism manifested itself as an inevitable and radical critique of power, not by fighting against it, but by leaving it: the form of life of the monk was to be homeless, to be foreign, to refuse any role within society. […] early monasticism manifested itself as the refusal of any institution and as a desire to live an ascetic life freed from social constraints.» (pp.16-17)

«In doing so he [Nietzsche] rediscovers the original meaning of asceticism as control of oneself and, by extension, a necessary precondition for political power of others.» (p.17)

«[…] the human species preserves itsalf by negating itself […].» (p.17)

«[…] for Nietzsche the life of asceticism reveals the fundamental datum of human existence that is the never-resolved tension between desire and restraint, where neither prevails over the other but both coexist in a constant precarious equilibrium.» (p.18)

CHAPTER II

«The idea of a structure where individual and collective life are juxtaposed without being merged is also evident in Carthusian monasticisim, which attemted to combine eremitic and cenobitic life in the same place. One of the most remarkable examples of this tradition is the Monastery of Galluzzo, near Florence, which had a strong influence on Le Corbusier idea of collective housing. In this monastery, the cloister binds together nine distinct houses, each of them equipped with a garden and basic facilities for individual living. The architecture is modest and austere, but the possibility of individual seclusion supported by the necessary equipment to live alone gives these lilliputian houses an air of luxury. Luxury not in the sense of possession: there is nothing to possess here apart from a few books and the food necessary to survive. Rather, in these houses, luxury is the possibility for the inhabitants to live according to their own proper rhythm. […] In this way the individual houses were not fully independent but were completed by more collective programmes. The concentration of collective facilities allowed the individual houses to be minimal spaces for living.
The balance between individual and collective life is the fundamental issue within monastic life, as became clear with the rise of the cenobitic monastery, when communal life became the dominant way of living. Initiated by the Coptic monk Pachomius, perfected by St Benedict, and radically reformed by St Francis, the common life of the cenobium can only be experienced through the sharing of a rule.
Like performing arts such as acting and dance, monasticism is an art that does not leave behind a product but coincides with the performance itself. […] The cenobitic monastery provides us with the first instance of management of time through strict scheduling. Bells give the hours a specific sound (which we can still hear in many Western cities), which regulates the sequence of activities with the same precision as a Taylorist factory.
[…] Like a functionalist building, the typical form of the medieval monastery is simply an extrusion of the ritual activities that take place within. If we observe the plan of the monastery we see a perfect coincidence of time and space: each segment of the day is ritualised through a specific activity that takes place in a specific part of the monastery. The introverted space of the cloister, the point of access to most of the facilities, gives a precise form to communal life and the sense of sharing, while the simple unobstructed rectangular plan of the chapterhouse defines the gathering together of the monks in the most essential way. The dormitories are large rooms divided into cubicles by fabric. The cubicles offer a measure of privacy but at the same time the light materiality of the walls, which can be removed, is a reminder that individual space is always the sharing of a larger collective space.
Rather than a generic container or a symbolic monument, the architecture of the monastery is an apparatus that obsessively frames and identifies living activities. […]
The plan of the monastery suggest an architecture that is conceived to be completely self-sufficient, and self-sufficiency is central to communal life. The monastery shows in clear terms that a truly communitarian life can only be achieved through a consistent organisation of time and space. […] Moreover, it is not difficult to see how the scheduling of time and its management are the foundation of modern and contemporary forms of production. […] Through a return to the ascetic principles of early monasticism, mendicant orders such as the Cisteerciand and the Franciscans would radically reform monastic life, opposing the entrepreneurialism and ethos of production that plagued the Benedictine tradition. As has been noted, this reform gave rise to one of the most radical experiments in living, one that was completely antithetical to the principle that has regulated modern forms of power, namely the concept of private propoerty.» (pp.20-25)

CHAPTER III

«[…] the early Franciscans openly rejected the idea of private property, meaning not just individual possessions but, above all, the possibility of owning the work of others–of owning potential capital, in the form of land or tools. […] The concept of use, in this sense, is the antithesis of the concept of private property.
[…] Here use was understood not as a value but as the act of sharing things, as the supreme form of living in common. Use implied the temporary appropriation of an object by an individual; after its use, the object would be released and thus shared with others. In its simplicity, this conception of use implied a radical abdicatioiuris, given that the whole modern conception of rights is fundamentally shaped by the individual’s right to private property. The Franciscan concept of altissima paupertas (poverty as a self-imposed and thus desired form of life) was inspired by the life of animals, in which the concept of ownership does not exist. The early Franciscans proposed a radical experiment: a form of life devoid of private property, in which coexistence and sharing would become the main object of an ascetic practice. […] the very thing that the Franciscans wanted at all costs to avoid–had become the defining aspect of the modern way of living. The meaning of asceticism changed. With the rise of property as a fundamental social asset, it was no longer a self-chosen practice, but more an ethical and moral condition whose goal was to ensure social control and increase dedication to work. Private property and its accumulation became not simply a means of power, but a sort of transcendental instigation for people to become more focused, and thus dependent, on their economic condition.» (pp.27-28)

CHAPTER IV

«The house was no longer just a shelter, or the ancient oikos, the private household clearly separated from public space. It was now both a space of inhabitation and the economic and legal apparatus through which the rising modern state governed citizens by defining their most intimate conditions, that is their habits, customs and social and economic relationships. From the vantage point of governing institutions, property in the form of housing serves a two-fold purpose. On the one hand, it binds the individual to a place and thus reduces the risks of social deviance. On the other, it allows subjects to use thier minimum possession as an economic asset, with the capacity for investment. This is why housing became a fundamental project for modern architecture, a project focused not only on sheltering individuals but on making household management productive.» (p.30)

«[…] asceticism was conceived to allow autonomy from systems of power. It offers the possibility of designing a form of life that challenges established modes of governance.» (p.33)

CHAPTER V

«At the beginning of the 1930s Walter Benjamin wrote several essays in which he attacked nineteenth-century bourgeois interiors. For Benjamin, the bourgeois apartment was filled with objects whose sole purpose was to reaffirm the ideology of the private home. He observed how furniture and interior design were driven not by necessity but by the inhabitants’ urge to leave their own traces, that is to make the living space familiar, to claim it as their own. The result was a forced domesticity in which every object was meant to speak of the life of the inhabitants. […] Benjamin understood the subjective dimension of private property, which entails not only greed and appropriation, but also the illusion of permanence, rootedness and identity.
Against this model of inhabitation, Benjamin proposed the possibility of emptiness in the form of ‘tabula rasa’, a space devoid of identity, possession or a sense of belonging. […] For Benjamin, poverty of experience does not imply personal poverty, or even abstinence from the abundance of things and ideas that a capitalistic society produces. On the contrary, poverty of experience is precisely the effect of this abundance. Inundated by all sorts of information, stories and beliefs–’the oppresive wealth of ideas that has been spread among people, or rather has swamped them entirely’, as Benjamin put it–we can no longer trust the depth and richness of human experience.» (pp.35-36)

«Refusing to work methodically, Baudelaire made his aimless wandering in the metropolis his very life’s work. […] Baudelaire reduce his personal belongings to a minimum in order to use the city itself as a vast habitation, a place large enough to be adrift. […] Instead of owning their own homes, Muscovites owned rooms, and their possessions were so drastically reduced that they could reinvent their way of inhabiting their own space almost every day. As Benjamin observed, this condition pushed people to dwell in communal spaces such as the club and the street. […] And yet for Benjamin the more this condition was made explicit in the architecture of the interior, the more it would offer the ground for a radical way of living.» (pp.38-39)

«In the Co-op Zimmer furniture is reduced to the minimum necessary for inhabitation by one person: a case, folded chairs that can be hung on the wall, and a single bed. The only ‘superfluous’ object is a gramophone whose curvy shapes are in contrast with the restrained atmosphere of the room. And yet the gramophone is important because it shows that the minimal living of the Co-op Zimmer is not only dictated by necessity, but is also a space to reclaim an element of ‘unproductive’ time. […] Unlike the private house, which is the origin of the real-estate logic of the city, the room is implicitly a space that is never self-sufficient. Like the monastic cell, the Co-op Zimmer is not a form of possession but rather the minimal space that allows each individual person to live by sharing the rest of the dwelling space. Here, privacy is not property, but rather the possibility of solitude and concentration–a possibility that our ‘productive’ and ‘social’ lives often tend to eliminate. […] For Meyer, unlike Mies, less is not more, less is just enough. […] Meyer seems to realise the idea of communism as it was defined by Bertolt Brecht: ‘the equal distribution of poverty’. Brecht’s statement not only mocks the very idea of capitalism as the best way to manage a situation of scarcity but understands poverty as a value, as a desired form of life which can become a luxury, paradoxically, only when it is shared by all. And yet it is here that we also find the great danger of asceticism, which is its mere aestheticisation, as a style, as an atmosphere.» (pp.40-41)

CHAPTER VI

«‘With this tremendous development of technology a completely new poverty has descended on mankind. And the reverse of this poverty is the oppressive wealth that has been spread among people, or rather has swamped them entirely–ideas that have come with the revival of astrology, and the wisdom of yoga, Christian science and chiromancy, vegetarianism and gnosis, scholasticism and spirituality.'» (p.49)

CHAPTER VII

«As we have seen, the perversion of asceticism is not simply its translation as ‘austerity’ but also its branding as image, which in times of austerity has become not only fashionable but also ideological. […] If art and design play a fundamental role in amplifying the ideological overtones of austerity, they can also offer the clue to radical alternatives. As Hölderlin famously wrote, ‘But where the danger is, also grows the saving power.'» (p.51)

«[…] Absalon did not design his residential architecture for the masses: he insisted that these cells were conceived for himself and that he did not intend others to live in them.» (p.54)

«Contrary to the easy romanticism of self-organisation that is so popular among architects and designers, it requires a lot of effort and self-discipline to exit a pre-existing social order. Presenting the concept of these houses in a lecture, Absalon affirmed: ‘I can’t imagine a life without structure, I’m sure that I have to create new rules to escape from other rules. It is a kind of techinque of living. Inventing new rules, constraints, despite the fact that it can be restrictive, creating one’s own constraints, I think that is the best way, I can’t imagine any other way.’
It is interesting to note that Absalon did not want his projects to be understood as a utopian gesture. He affirmed several times that he had no interest in addressing any broader social programme. His only goal was to change his own life, consciously. Unlike many artists and designers, he focused on his own life as the ultimate form of his own work.» (p.55)

«Today many artists, architects and designers feel the urge to promote social change through their proposals, but they rarely look at their own existence, which is what really constitutes the main source of their production. Many people working in the field of architecture, art and design live in very precarious conditions, doing unpaid work and having no social security. Their lives are increasingly characterised by anxiety, anguish, frustration, and sometimes depression. In spite of the socially minded agenda that curators, architects and artists eagerly endorse in their initiatives, we know that the field of the creative industries is highly competitive and has no mercy for those who refuse to stay in tune with it. And yet these creative workers have difficulty admitting this reality, and because the field is so competitive, it seems almost impossible for them to organise themselves within something like a union or a social organisation that would protect them from exploitation. Ironically, many of these people already live an ascetic life but unwillingly, without being capable of giving this life a more autonomous structure, a structure that would enable them, like the early monks, to live according to their own idiorrhythmy, rather than the frantic schedules of post-fordist modes of production. Within this condition the slogan ‘less is more’ appears, at best, a sarcastic commentary on our increasingly preacarious condition, because we now know that less is just less and there is very little about it that can still be romanticised. At the same time it is precisely in creative work, where the boundary between work and non-work is impossible to trace, that life itself has become the main source of production (and exploitation)–and this should be seen as the opportunity to focus on ars vivendi as a fundamental form of resistance. The legacy of ascetic practices should be understood as giving us the means to change the status quo by focusing on our lives–or better, to see our lives in all their material and organisational aspects as a possibility for change.» (pp. 56-57)

«Asceticism is thus the possibility of reclaiming a good life and with it the hope that we can live–and live better–with less. Only when we are able to reach beyond its ideological aura, can less be the starting point for an alternative form of life that is independent of both the false needs imposed by the market and the austerity policies imposed by debt. To say less is enough is to refuse the moral blackmail of the debt economy, which threatens us on the basis of our own expectations of greater wealth. While economy can only assess social wealth in terms of more – that is, more development and more growth–to say less is enough is an attempt to define a way of living that is beyond both the promise of growth and the threatening rhetoric of scarcity. But this way of living has to be developed, not through the wishful thinking of utopian visions, but by focusing on us, by trying to redefine our lives starting from the most basic daily routines. Such an ascetic focus may be indispensable if we really want to try to live together with others.
There is an increasing interest in more socially oriented ways of living such as co-housing or sharing domestic space beyond the compound of the family apartment. But what is seldom discussed is that this way of life requires some effort. To live together requires less individual freedom, although that may be no bad thing. The question is whether such a way of life might only be developed out of economic necessity, or because it is only by sharing and coexisting that we can reclaim the true subjectivity that Marx beautifully described with the oxymoron ‘social individuals’–individuals who only become so among other individuals. Here, less means precisely the recalibration of a form of reciprocity that is no longer driven by possession but by sharing; the less we have in terms of possessions, the more we’ll be able to share. To say enough (instead of more) means to redifine what we really need in order to live a good life–that is, a life detached from the social ethos of property, from the anxiety of production and possession, and where less is just enough.» (pp.58-59)