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TRANQUILITY IN DISORDER
Notes regarding Ecology, Planning and Laissez-Faire
Alexander the Great : Is there any favour I might do for you ?
Diogenes of Sinope : Yes, stand out of my light.
Alexander : Aren’t you afraid of me ?
Diogenes : Who are you ? good or evil ?
Alexander : Good.
Diogenes : Who shall thus fear good ? 1
The liberal idea of Laissez-faire dates from 18th century Europe and the
first decline of monarchic power. This economic and political idea is an
injunction to governments not to interfere with transactions between
private parties. According to it, if we leave individuals in total liberty,
they will pursue their own interests with enlightenment, and will at
the same time promote the general interest. Being more critical, John
Maynard Keynes summarised its consequences as followed : « those
individuals who move in the right direction will destroy by competition
those who move in the wrong direction. This implies that there must
be no mercy or protection for those who embark their capital or
their labour in the wrong direction. It is a method of bringing the
most successful profit-makers to the top by a ruthless struggle for
survival, which selects the most efficient by the bankruptcy of the less
efficient.» 2
We may also mention a spatial Laissez-faire. This notion refers at
the same time to the impact of economic Laissez-faire upon physical
environments as well as the attitude that seeks to reduce planning to
a strict minimum. Spatial (or urban) Laissez-faire usually results in
extreme fragmentation of urban space, in widespread discontinuity,
in a dissolution and disappearance of public space. As architects and
designers, but also as simple citizens, overwhelmed by the economic
disparities which have become endemic in our contemporary societies,
we can unfortunately only assess the damage of this phenomenon.
John William Waterhouse,
Diogenes, 1882
The compatibility of the Laissez-faire idea with Ecology creates an issue
and presents an inherent paradox. It can be perceived as Ecology’s
most ferocious enemy, for it allows an uncontrolled consumption
of territories and resources by irresponsible and often irreversible
developments ; it can also be perceived as the very idea of Ecology,
considering that man is a part of his own natural ecosystem and that
his frenetic agitation participates in the game of species. Keynes
himself emphasised the inf luence of darwinist theories upon Laissezfaire economists, according to which free competition built London, free
competition had even built man. 3 This paradox troubles the natural
architectural tendency towards interventionist planning. Although
contemporary territories prompt feelings of dysphoria 4 , where
apparent disorder materialises the failure of a spatial project, most of
contemporary architects will agree with the idea that most of the time
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interventionist planning does not seem to work, in any case not in liberal
societies.
In this coming together of economy and space, we are often victims of
our cultural compulsion to distinguish Cosmos and Chaos, respectively
in terms of absolute order et disorder, sense and nonsense. If, on one
hand, planning expresses the desire to find a geometrical extension
to the clarity of ideas, the Laissez-faire expresses itself passively, as a
form of apathy receiving everything indifferently, without order nor
hierarchy. In the effort of synthesis, that architects, planners, and other
stakeholders do daily, we can notice a look for compromise, where
the Laissez-faire is a part of the project that one has to give away, in
sacrifice to the market, deprived of any aesthetic or intellectual value, a
business issue and not an architectural one.
The following examples, will try to sketch some possible active values
of Laissez-faire, without for all that advocate for it. In order to go
beyond the simple rejection of an economic approach that have been
dominant in the last thirty years, it seems important to put forwards
the beauty and pertinence of it as a philosophical attitude that implies
a certain relation to the world and to things. It’s not about judging the
pertinence of the forces in presence, to whom we might laisser faire, but
the philosophical attitude (the disposition) of the one that laisse faire,
that is to say not to discuss the pros and cons of it as an approach, but
its intellectual value for the project.
1. SUMMERHILL
I believe that to impose anything by authority is wrong. The child should
not do anything until he comes to the opinion – his own opinion – that it
should be done. The curse of humanity is the external compulsion, whether
it comes from the Pope or the state or the teacher or the parent. It is fascism
in toto. 5
Alexander Sutherland Neill was a scottish psychoanalyst and pedagog
who founded Summerhill school in 1921. Summerhill gave children
total liberty, renouncing on the way all discipline, all direction,
all suggestion, all moral training, and all religious instruction. Its
fundamental idea was that any practised authority, on behalf of
the parents or the teachers, was only repressing the child’s natural
capacity for autonomy and auto-regulation and producing a deep and
irrevocable unhappiness. This authority is usually the consequence of
the parent’s fear of the future : « this fear, oddly enough, shows itself
in the desire that his children should learn more than he has learned.
This kind of parent is not content to leave Willie to learn to read when
he wants to, but nervously fears that Willie will be a failure in life unless
he is pushed.» 6
A.S. Neill and his daughter Zoe
in Summerhill
Summerhill school welcomes 75 children, from 5 to 16 years old. 7 The
children are divided into three age groups and live two, three or four
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to a room. Lessons are optional. Children can go to them or stay away
from them according to their will. Neill was inf luenced by the ideas
of Tolstoy, who condemned the master-pupil intrusion, refusing the
« forced inf luence of one person on another, in the aim of shaping
a man that will fit with one’s standards », to such an extent that he
denied « the right to educate». 8 Neill therefore founded Summerhill
around the idea of noninterference with the growth of the child and
non-pressure on him, estimating that children do not need education
as such, but rather love, comprehension, approbation and liberty to
come out healthily. This radical permissiveness might be perceived
as an obstacle to the child’s intellectual evolution, but Neill refused
this vision : « Summerhill is a place in which people who have the
innate ability and wish to be scholars will be scholars ; while those
who are only fit to sweep the streets will sweep the streets. But we have
not produced a street cleaner so far. Nor do I write this snobbishly,
for I would rather see a school produce a happy street cleaner than a
neurotic scholar.» 9
Summerhill today
The word authority stands for the power to act on one other. Parental
authority, which is nowadays often considered as a necessary frame
for the child’s evolution is categorically rejected by Neill as oppressive
power. « Why should a child obey ? My answer is : He must obey
to satisfy the adult’s desire for power» 10. The child’s obedience is
necessary, according to him, for commodity reasons, so that the parents
can have some peace, as evoked by this too familiar phrase : go and see
what baby is doing and tell him he mustn’t.
Neill was nonetheless not an anarchist theoretician, but a practitioner
educator who had to daily cope with dozens of frenetic children
for more than 50 years. Obedience is necessary at Summerhill as
everywhere else, but it’s a courteous obedience, « it must come from
within – not be imposed from without». 11 Following this idea further,
Neill puts a clear limit between liberty and anomie. 12 Thus, Saturday
evenings are reserved to general assemblies. During these meetings,
presides over by an elected pupil, children expose their problem and
issues, debate, elaborate common rules. In this assembly, neither
Neill’s voice nor any other adult’s one weights more than a child’s
voice. Similar activities, like theatre, help to maintain a strong social
structure without using authority.
A general assembly
in Summerhill
Alexander Neill went much further than Montessori, Decroly or
Freinet. His attention was turned towards the child, but also towards
the adult, and the work he needed to accomplish upon himself. He
required from parents something extremely difficult, to renounce on
what they considered to be as the most important for them, but it’s
only through renunciation that they will find, according to him, life,
progress and happiness : « Parents must renounce. They must renounce
hate that is disguised as authority and criticism [...] Let the child be
himself. Don’t push him around. Don’t teach him. Don’t lecture him.
Don’t elevate him. Don’t force him to do anything.» 13
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2. WU-WEI
Practice non-action
Work without doing
Taste the tasteless
Magnify the small, increase the few
Achieve greatness in little things. 14
Wu-wei, Non-action, is one of the most fundamental notions in Taoism.
Non-action represents ultimate wisdom : try not to thwart the natural
movement of the sky and the earth. Unlike western cultures, in which
dominates the moral ideology of the will, of willing (to posses, to
dominate, to live, to impose one’s truth, etc.), Taoism is a pegan
philosophy of weakness : the taoist wise man does not struggle. He
avoids using his intelligence, his wisdom, his knowledge, or he uses it
to the minimum, within the limits of a pure concern for protection, for
prudence. 15 As the world follows the rule of alternation, it is not just
useless, but dangerous to thwart this rule, « therefore the sage goes
about doing nothing, teaching without talking. Ten thousand things
rise and fall without cease». 16 This specific form of Laissez-faire, one
of radical restraint, is different from other western expressions, like
in example the Greek sceptics or cynics, where we find a propensity to
reason and to discuss, as always in Greece, which is infinitely distant
from the great taoists. 17
To discuss Wu-wei, which is close to a form of apathy, Lao-Tze often uses
the metaphor of water : « man of superior virtue is like water. Water
brings wealth to people and never struggles» ; and also : « everywhere
and always, it is the soft that wears away the hard (water wears away
stone). That which has no substance enters into that which has no
opening. From this I know the benefits of non-action.» 18 The wise man
lets himself be tossed by any waves whatever. He, himself is inert, but he lets
himself drift along chaotic forces surrounding him. This subtle image
evokes a contradictory immobility in movement, an individual apathy
towards chaos. This image is also used by Zhuang Zhou : « He was
ready to follow everything ; he was ready to receive everything. For him,
everything was in destruction, everything was in construction. That’s
what one calls tranquillity in disorder. Tranquillity in disorder means
perfection.» 19
Other evocative image of Non-action is that of a mirror. Not the mirror
in its western connotation, as a symbol of the ego, but in its weak form
: « The perfect uses his mind as a mirror ; he doesn’t accompany things
back when they leave nor does he go toward them when they arrive (as
politeness would demand) ; he replies to them without retaining them.
It’s what makes him able to carry all things without them damaging
him [...] To the one who stays within himself without things remaining
in him, things show themselves such as they are ; his movement is
apathetic as is that of water, his immobility is that of the mirror, his
reply is that of the echo.» 20
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The idea of nonintervention in the course of things has, needless
to say, a social and political significance. First, regarding education
once again, Tao manifests a natural suspicion towards it, close to that
of Tolstoy or Neill. It contests the Confucianist vision according to
which man is perfectible. Taoists maintain that the most important
for man is to return to natural simplicity, or even better, to maintain
it inside of him. A similar suspicion is expressed towards the idea of
governance. Taoists tend towards avoiding the acceptance of potentially
authoritarian functions, 21 but, if necessary the taoist statesman seems
to have little to do. He rather holds the role of a regulator, a role that
requires a perpetual activity in non-activity. 22 From an economic point
of view, following a rather quick historical shortcut, this position might
be assimilated to ultra-liberalism, because neither production, nor
consumption, nor exchanges mustn’t be subjected to any regulation.
Hereunto, Jean Grenier emphasises a fundamental difference between
Adam Smith’s and Lao-Tze’s liberalisms : « the first relies upon Nature
in order to increase to volume of exchanges, the second relies upon
Nature in order to decrease it. If taoist politics takes the liberty to
intervene – very indirectly – it will be in order to repress excess and to
train a moderating inf luence, unlike the victorian statesman.» 23
3. NON-PLAN
I think more architects should keep the words clarity, coherence, mood,
quality, conviction, presence and power to themselves. 24
In March 1969 the English review New Society publish an article cowritten by Reyner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall and Cedric Price
under the title Non-Plan : An Experiment in Freedom. The article is a
manifesto against the very idea of skilful or scientific planning and its
presumed benefits. It maintains that the use of the word planning is
dissimulative and hypocrite, for it hides physical arrangements that are
guided by value judgements and prejudices, and that interventionist
planning is, most of the time, aristocratic and oligarchic in its methods
as in its goals. Planners should research and try to know instead of
impose, but unfortunately, they do not seem capable of just laisser
faire things around them in a natural and ordinary way : « Somehow,
everything must be watched ; nothing can be allowed simply to happen.
No house can be allowed to be commonplace in the way that things just
are commonplace : each project must be weighed, planned, approved
and only then built, and only after that discovered to be commonplace
after all. » 25
New Society cover
The article was published three years before Learning from Las-Vegas,
at the same time as when Venturi, Scott-Brown and their students
examined and photographed every corner along the Strip. It was
illustrated mainly with night-time photographs of illuminated signs in
and around London : for petrol stations, launderettes, supermarkets,
burger bars. It clearly manifests an aesthetic fascination for the
american city invasion to Europe : « if you drive down the French
5
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Rhone valley motorway – not so planned as ours – one of the most
memorable sights is a Total petrol station, writing the letters
T-O-T-A-L huge across the valley, with a f lutter of f lags underneath.
Stay in Moscow, and you end up yearning to see an Esso sign.» 26
However, beyond some clear similarities with the pop culture of the
60’s, this sensitivity also ref lects a premonitory vision of the increased
role of mobility and it’s capacity to jeopardise spatial planning. They
noted that « as people become richer they demand more space ; and
because they become at the same time more mobile, they will be more
able to command it. They will want this extra space in and around their
houses, around their shops, around their offices and factories, and
in the places where they go for recreation. To impose rigid controls,
in order to frustrate people in achieving the space standards they
require, represents simply the received personal or class judgements
of the people who are making the decision.» 27 This coexistence of
mobility and individual liberty on one hand and the call for restraint
on the other, seems close enough, once more, to that of tranquillity in
disorder.
Banham, Barker, Hall and Price were not fully satisfied with having a
critical position. They were conscious that the posture of opposition
and negation might be perceived as a non-productive counter culture,
without any real interest for real life. As taoists, they affirmed nonaction as action and the non-project as a project : « This is what we’re
now proposing : a precise and carefully observed experiment in nonplanning.» 28 Thus, Laissez-faire attitude is joined by observation,
taking the place of authoritarian action. They chose three regions
in England on which they operated spatial speculations that tried to
evaluate what would happen if we laisse faire. At Lawrence Country,
it is the forces, already strong, of dispersion and mobility, that would
create more regularly scattered and less geometrically tidy patterns of
urbanisation : « it would not look like a planner’s dream, but it would
work». At Constable Country, named after the romantic painter John
Constable and notorious for its important historical and landscape
value, they did not take any particular precautions, and criticised the
attitude of planners who try to contain the impact of urbanisation :
« Constable-type country is supposed, by bodies of opinion as like the
Architectural Review, to be able to absorb practically anything that is
not taller than a grown tree [...] it [the result] might be quite graceful
to the eye ; certainly more so than the quasi-regimented squalor of
our present suburban industrial concentration camps». And finally at
Montagu Country : « with Non-Plan, industrial sites would be likely to
spread more freely along the coast west of Southampton/Fawley. So
would housing. But there would also be a spread of pleasure. It’s cut out
to be a zone where work-life and recreation intermingle : the Forest, the
boats, the Isle of Wight...» 29
Constable Country illustration
Montagu Country illustration
We might today reproach Non-plan, as A.S. Neill, for a certain
libertarian naivety, not devoid of arrogance, characteristic of the
European left of that period : « The characteristic tone of the 60’s
was that of overweening confidence : we knew just how to fix the
6
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world. It was this note of unmerited arrogance that partly accounts
for the reactionary backlash that followed. » 30 We might equally
note, as Benjamin Franks, 31 the numerous shared features between
Non-plan and the economic theories of Friedrich Hayek and the New
Right despite the four authors’ left wing affiliation. Nevertheless, the
experimental spirit that Non-Plan brought out seem to have been
disappeared from our contemporary universe while probably we would
highly need it today.
4. CHAOSMOS
In his essay, The End of Laissez-Faire, Keynes does not entirely reject
liberal thinking. However, he doubts the capacity of liberalism to
find solutions in a period of economic and social insecurity, because
« insecurity breeds fear – fear of change, fear of decline, fear of
strangers and an unfamiliar world – is corroding the trust and
interdependence on which civil societies rest.» 32 In his economic
writings Keynes focused on the problem of uncertainty. The most
difficult role of public authority, according to him, is to know
where one should intervene and where one should laisser-faire : « the
important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals
are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse ; but to
do those things which at present are not done at all». 33 Keynes insists
on the fact that his interventionist propositions are not, in any case,
incompatible with what seems to be for him the principal motor of the
economic machine, namely individual’s desire to make money. Their
necessity, however, lies on ethical needs as much as on economic ones.
Instead of searching for a synthesis between liberalism and socialism,
Keynes tries to think both of them simultaneously as a dynamic
opposition, potentially complementary.
The interwar years, during which Keynes wrote his text, resembles
the period of uncertainty that we live through today. An uncertainty
that forces us to think the two ideas, apparently opposed, at the same
time. It’s precisely at the moment of coexistence of abyssal public debts
on one hand and ethical interrogations on the other, that we might
meditate radically, experimentally and non-ideologically upon Laissezfaire and planning, soft and hard.
Chaosmos is a portmanteau word invented by James Joyce to
simultaneously evoke chaos and the organised world (or cosmos in
greek), disorder and order, movement and immobility. In his novel
Finnegans Wake, these notions are not opposed but are part of a long
continuum. The book, known for being one of the most difficult, even
unreadable, works of fictions of the 20th century, leaves to the reader to
do his own work and establish his own connections. The novel does not
make sense, but a a multiplicity of sense. John Cage, who often referred
to Finnegans Wake, evokes an analog notion that he calls a tremulous
non-figure or multiple unity : « it’s not the unity of a multiplicity or
diversity [...] You don’t revert to a duality of figure and background, or
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determinacy and indeterminacy, etc. You remain between one and two.
You can’t choose, because everything comes at once – there is temporal
simultaneity.» 34
And as for Diogenes, and his Stand out of my sunlight, a sort of
temperamental and selfish Summerhill child, he resists to Alexander,
but through him he also resists to a philosophy that tries to put things
in their place. Neither Socrates nor Plato can deal with Diogenes,
according to Peter Sloterdijk, because he answers the imprisoning
language of abstract concepts with a terminology of f lesh and blood. 35
INITIALLY PUBLISHED IN SAN ROCCO # 10, «ECOLOGY», WINTER 2014
Notes
(1) quoted by Diogenes Laërtius.
(2) John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-faire. (Marseille : Agone
Éditeur, 1999), 17.
(3) Ibid., 9.
(4) opposed to euphoria, dysphoria describes a state of psychological
unease, dominated by the feeling the things are not in place.
(5) Alexander Sutherland Neill, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child
Rearing. (Oxford : Hart Publishing Company, 1960), 80.
(6) Ibid., 29.
(7) Summerhill school still exists and functions today ; it is actually
headed by Zoe Readhead, A.S. Neill’s daughter.
(8) Jean-Claude Filloux, Tolstoï Pédagogue. (Paris : Presses
universitaires de France, 1996), 87.
(9) Neill, 14.
(10) Ibid., 104.
(11) Ibid., 105.
(12) anomie is the disintegration of norms that regulate human
behaviour and insure social order.
(13) Neill, 115, 185.
(14) Lao-Tze, Tao Te Ching. (Paris : Gallimard, 1967), 122.
(15) Roland Barthes, The Neutral, Lecture Course at the Collège de France,
1977-78. (New York : Columbia University Press, 2005), 176.
(16) Lao-Tze, 12.
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(17) Jean Grenier, L’esprit du Tao. (Paris : Flammarion, 1973), 116 -117
(18) Ibid., 169, 175.
(19) Ibid., 68.
(20) Barthes, 182.
(21) Yang-Tchou enacted the rules of behaviour (based on Wu-wei) : Do
nothing evil, for fear of being punished ; do nothing good, for fear, having
acquired a good reputation, of being charged with time-consuming and
dangerous functions... Act as if you were good at nothing.
(22) Grenier, 142-143.
(23) Ibid., 140-141.
(24) Cedric Price, Life-Conditioning in AD, october 1966.
(25) Reyner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall, Cedric Price, Non-Plan :
An Experiment in Freedom in New Society n° 338. 20 March 1969,
435.
(26) Ibid., 437.
(27) Ibid., 442.
(28) Ibid., 436.
(29) Ibid., 438-441.
(30) Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land. (New York : The Penguin Press, 2010),
21.
(31) Benjamin Franks, New Right / New Left in Non-Plan, Essays on
Freedom Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and
Urbanism. (Oxford : Architectural Press, 2000), 32-43.
(32) Judt, 26.
(33) Keynes, The End of Laissez-faire, 30-31.
(34) John Cage. For the Birds. (Londres : Marion Boyars, 1976), 198-199.
(35) Adam Kirch. Against Cynicism in New Republic, 19 Juillet 2013.
(www.newrepublic.com/article/113387/peter-sloterdijksphilosophy-gives-reasons-living)
9