A Materialist Analysis of Ugliness in the Modern World

This is a paper that I've been faffing around with for about 40 years.

A Materialist Analysis of Ugliness in the Modern World  Taking the Tower Block as an Exemplar 

The full paper can be found here.


Here is the abstract

The proposition being investigated here is that those things in the world that cause us distress, have that Affect in relation to some idea - an ideal - about how we would things should be. 


All buildings generate information about the processes and practices through which they were produced and of certain characteristics of the society for which they were produced. 

If some or other built form disturbs us, it is because it betrays aspects of the context of its production that jar with our ideals. 


This runs counter to the common sense interpretation in which ugliness is found in the physical  characteristics of the object itself, and is produced through the ignorance and perversity of its perpetrators


In past eras attempts were made to disguise the reality of industrial capitalism - a reality that jarred with contemporary ideals - with styles and motifs that referenced some pre-industrial age. 


Modernists believed that modern technology and systems of organization would banish want and squalor, and usher in a new era of universal wellbeing. Here the immanent reality was the ideal - and this immanent reality was to be given expression "without art or disguise" in rational built form making use of the very latest technologies.


The system built tower blocks of the 1960s and 70s displayed in an extreme form just this reality. 


The universal dislike of the high rise council estates of the sixties and seventies betrays a shared abhorrence of the tangible effects, not merely of how men operated in the processes though which the estates were conceived and produced, but abhorrence of the social order that compelled them to act as in fact they did act.


The widespread recognition of this correlation might constitute a serious threat to the social structure. Better then that we should be provided with a de-politicized explanation that diverts attention away from the character of the social order itself, and onto the supposed character defect of individuals


This represents a tentative attempt to cut through the jungle of bourgeois ideology and to set out a materialist explanation of the ugliness of our times, taking the council tower block as an exemplar.    


                           jonathanjomorton@gmail.com


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