For many years, ‘less is more’ has been the catchphrase of minimalist design. Instantly associated with the restrained work of the German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who borrowed this dictum from a poem by Robert Browning,1 ‘less is more’ celebrates the ethical and aesthetic value of a self-imposed economy of means. Mies’s stripped-bare architecture, in which formal expression was reduced to a simple composition of readymade industrial elements, implied that beauty could only arise through refusal of everything that was not strictly necessary. In recent years, but especially since the 2008 economic recession, the ‘less is more’ attitude has become fashionable again, this time advocated by critics, architects and designers in a slightly moralistic tone.2
If in the late 1990s and early 2000s architecture was driven by the irrational exuberance of the real-estate market towards the production of increasingly redundant iconic objects, with the onset of the recession the situation started to change. Those who had previously acclaimed (or even produced) the acrobatics of architecture in the previous decade now took to complaining about architecture’s shameful waste of resources and budgets. 3 This change of sensibility has provoked two kinds of reaction. Some architects have tried to translate the ethos of austerity in merely formal terms.4 Others have advocated a more socially minded approach, trying to go beyond the traditional boundaries of architecture.5 It would be unfair to put these positions on the same level (as the second may be more plausible than the first), but what they seem to share is the idea that the current crisis is an opportunity to do – as an Italian architect turned politician put it – ‘more with less’.6 It is for this reason that ‘less is more’ is no longer just an aesthetic principle but the kernel of the ideology of something else, something where economy of means is not just a design strategy but an economic imperative tout court.
Within the history of capitalism, ‘less is more’ defines the advantages of reducing the costs of production. Capitalists have always tried to obtain more with less. Capitalism is not just a process of accumulation but also, and especially, the incessant optimisation of the productive process towards a situation in which less capital investment equals more capital accumulation. Technological innovation has always been driven by the imperative to reduce the costs of production, the need for wage earners. The very notion of industry is based on this idea: to be industrious means being able to obtain the best results with fewer means.7 Here we see how creativity itself is at the very root of the notion of industry. 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.
In what follows I would like to address the condition of less not by rejecting it but by critically assessing its ambiguity. Both the ‘less is more’ attitude in design and the ethos of austerity politics seem to converge within the tradition of asceticism, which is commonly understood as a practice of abstinence from worldly pleasures. In recent years asceticism has indeed been identified as the source, both ideological and moral, of the idea of austerity.8 A major argument put forward in favour of cutting public spending is that we have been living beyond our means and that from now on we will have to lower our expectations of future wealth and social security. Only by making ‘sacrifices’ will we find the path to salvation and avoid economic armageddon. In an economy driven by public debt asceticism has a particular resonance, in the form of moral guilt. Debt is not only about economy but is first and foremost a moral contract between creditor and debtor. As Maurizio Lazzarato has recently argued, the neoliberal economy is a subjective economy that is no longer based – as classical economics was – on the producer and the barterer. 9 A fundamental figure of the neoliberal economy is the ‘indebted man’ – that is, the indebted consumer, the indebted user of the welfare state and, in the case of nation state debt, the indebted citizen. To be indebted does not only mean owing something to someone; it is also the feeling of guilt, and thus of inferiority, towards the creditor. It is precisely the subject’s sense of guilt and longing for atonement that is often understood to constitute the meaning of ascetic practices.
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. In his famous book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber identifies two kind of asceticism: inner-worldly and other-worldly. 10 In the first instance, asceticism denotes withdrawal from the world, as in the case of hermits and monks; in the second case, asceticism becomes more secular and addresses the possibility of an existence that frees itself from mundane distractions in order to dedicate itself fully to the ethics of work and production. Weber sees other-worldly asceticism as one of the fundamental sources of the ethics of capitalism: with the advent of Calvinism, he notes, asceticism spread beyond the confines of the monastery and became a diffuse mentality within the city. Asceticism required the repression of natural instincts and adherence to a strict discipline of ethical rationality. For Weber this ethical rationality was both the foundation of the bourgeois life-style and the very ‘spirit’ of capitalism as later manifested in Benjamin Franklin’s economic utilitarianism, which was concerned not only with the rational acquisition of means towards an end, but was in itself a transcendental ethical goal.