This article was originally published in Domus 951, October 2011
The phone hacking scandal burnt like wildfire
through British society with devastating
speed. It engulfed media, politics, celebrity,
global corporate culture, and the private lives of
those unfortunate to be involved in apparently
newsworthy tragedies. Its overreaching scope is
as dark and disturbing as if it had been scripted
by James Ellroy. The conspiratorial relationships
that were revealed between press, politicians and
police represent nothing less than a failure of the
architecture of British democratic society—
a complete collapse of civic infrastructure.
That this crisis should flow from a global media
corporation should be no surprise. Rupert Murdoch's
News Corporation combines radical corporate
capitalism with technologies of communication that
are evolving with incredible speed. In this murky
imbroglio the distinct spaces of the personal, the
political, the press and the police have been blurred
by News Corp's activities. Its operation and influence
has systematically transgressed boundaries within
the organisational structure of society.
The flashpoint of the affair was the revelation
that private investigators working for the News
of the World had hacked a murdered schoolgirl's
voicemail. This horrific invasion of privacy, the
cracking open of the most tragic and despairing of
spaces—the messages of desperation left by those
who loved her, never to be heard, intercepted by
a news organisation in pursuit of a circulation-boosting
scoop—was the key moment when
the phone hacking story boiled over into public
outrage. This was the moment of realisation that a
fundamental threshold had been transgressed.
Milly Dowler's case may set the underlying
disturbing phenomenon in horrific and tragic light,
but the real narrative of the story is the apparent
complete erosion of thresholds and boundaries
between spheres we imagined were distinct—
spheres that must be distinct for a democratic
society to function. When these thresholds are
compromised, the conceptual architecture of the
state, of law, of power, as well as our own sense of
personal privacy evaporates.
Conspiracy, as Kevin Costner's character puts it
in Oliver Stone's JFK, is like a looking glass. It is a
landscape of opposites where "white is black and
black is white". Here, that means institutions that
operate in a manner opposite to their apparent
remit: the media manipulating the political agenda,
politics serving private corporate interest, the
police operating with favour, the private becoming
public. Conspiracy like this rearranges the spatial
organisation of the institutions of power. The
significance of this spatial organisation is its
establishment of the autonomy of institutions—the
separation of church and state, the relationship of
the judiciary to parliament and so on.
Here we have seen the distinct spaces between
a commercial organisation, the press, police and
politics merge in ways that have compromised
their proper function and perverted the powers
invested in them. We could then regard this
conspiracy as News Corp's clandestine redrawing
of the cartography of governance, a remapping of
the institutional spatiality of British society that
introduces wormholes, secret passages, trap doors,
erects dead ends, blockades and diversions.
In the unfolding phone hacking scandal, the idea
of the architecture of power became both literal
and metaphorical. In the dcms select committee
hearing, for example, Rupert Murdoch was asked
about the nature of his visits to Downing Street:
question 211
Jim Sheridan: Mr Murdoch senior, I have a number
of short questions for you. Why did you enter the
back door at No. 10 when you visited the Prime
Minister following the last general election?
Rupert Murdoch: Because I was asked to.
question 212
Jim Sheridan: You were asked to go in the back door
of No. 10?
Rupert Murdoch: Yes.
question 213
Jim Sheridan: Why would that be?
Rupert Murdoch: To avoid photographers at the
front, I imagine. I don't know. I was asked; I just did
what I was told.
question 214
Jim Sheridan: It is strange, given that Heads of State manage to go in the front door.
Rupert Murdoch: Yes.
question 215
Jim Sheridan: Yet you have to go in the back door.
Rupert Murdoch: That is the choice of the Prime
Minister, or his staff or whoever does these things.
question 216
Jim Sheridan: So was it under the Prime Minister's
direct instructions that you came in the back door?
Rupert Murdoch: I was asked would I please come
in through the back door.[1]
The significance of the back door is its position
within the architectural hierarchy of 10 Downing
Street, bypassing the normal sequence of entry to a
terraced house. Evading the thresholds of entrance
sequences (front door, hallway, etc.), entry by the
back door at once enables Murdoch's passage and
conceals it from view. Here, the occupation and use
of the architecture of No. 10 literally describes the
transgression of normal public/private threshold.
The language of the discourse around the hacking
scandal suggests other architectural conditions. A
key example is the often-quoted phrase describing
the "revolving doors" between News International
and the Metropolitan Police, and between News
International and Downing Street. This phrase
highlights the architectural condition of threshold.
The image suggests a door between institutions
that should remain spatially distinct, and a
revolving door suggests an even more specific kind of relationship. A revolving door never shuts, it
blurs the threshold condition even more, giving
way when pushed, rotating to allow entry without
the formality of opening and greeting or the
mechanical threshold of the lock. The architectural
imagery suggests boundaries of such porosity that
one space bleeds into another, that the point where
New Scotland Yard becomes Fortress Wapping or
No. 10 is indeterminate.
The underlying fear within the conspiracy
is that the public spheres of politics and law
enforcement—as well as the private space
of intimate communication—were not only
breached but also completely absorbed by the
corporate entity of News Corp. The hierarchies
and thresholds of civic life were dissolved into
the undifferentiated horizontality of Murdoch's
corporate space.
In the wake of this conspiracy comes the
suggestion that this presents a moment of change,
an alteration in the relationship of the media and
politicians that has existed for the last 30 years or
so, and a chance to reconfigure the mechanisms
of democracy. In relation to this idea, the image
of transparency is often invoked. It is a word that conjures an image where the machinations
of society, institution or organisation are made
visible, placed into the public domain.
The rhetoric of transparency seems to derive from
an architectural condition. More specifically,
its corrective quality echoes architecture's
own interest in transparency. For modernist
architecture, the idea of transparency challenged
traditional notions of interior and exterior,
and in doing so reconfigured the relationship
between public and private. Dissolving the
barrier of the wall, so it might be argued,
dissolved the hierarchies of the old order—
actually and rhetorically. Transparency then
is an architectural strategy that makes public,
and thus apparently accountable, the private
spaces once concealed within neoclassical
or Beaux-Arts solidity. Transparency then, is
part of modernism's rhetoric of truth. And it is
this simplistic notion of transparency that is
mobilised in current political discussion.
If we are looking either to understand or extend
the metaphor of "transparency" as used in
contemporary political discussion, perhaps we
should learn from architecture's own experience of the limits of transparencies in ideological
operation. Think perhaps of Dan Graham's
pavilions, or perhaps in SANAA's conception of
transparency. Here, the idea of transparency
becomes more complex. The glass surface, once
employed because of its see-through-ness,
amplifies other characteristics. Manipulations
of curve, angle, lighting, and so on, so that its
properties of reflection become the spectacle,
promoted over direct transparency. Rather than
seeing through, we find ourselves looking at an
image of ourselves and our circumstance reflected
back, sometimes clearly, sometimes as a distorted
or ghostly image.
The contemporary interpretation of transparency
is then very different to its modernist root. Rather
than assume an idealised positive effect, it
presents transparency as a problem, suggesting
that as much as we might see through, we also end
up looking in the opposite direction, that as soon as
we train our gaze on a subject through something,
it becomes framed, obscured and mediated by the
very mechanism that is allowing us to look.
The phone hacking scandal also sets into relief
the way in which communication and media have radically altered traditional spatial and
organisational principles. An entity like News
Corp constructs a continuous space that extends
from the voicemails of Milly Dowler to clandestine
discussions with Prime Ministers, to the hectoring
rhetoric of a Sun headline to the apparent
respectability of a Wall Street Journal leader, to
geostationary satellites, to its nasdaq stock listing
and far beyond.
This corporatised media space both extends and
challenges Marshall McLuhan's understanding
of media as an extension of our nervous system.
He argues that, for example, TV is an extension of
our optic nerve and radio extends our ears. This
anthropomorphic image of distended sensory
organs suggests a naturalisation of media: that
TV cameras, microphones, broadcast installations,
the electromagnetic spectrum and the full array of
broadcast technologies are in effect no different from
our own bodies, and that contemporary media is, in
effect, an inevitable techno-biological evolution.
In casting media as an extension of human sense,
McLuhan attempts to position media as a natural
condition of the human habitat. Yet media is
an entirely unnatural invention, pure culture rather than an inevitable consequence of technobiological
determinism. Media, as Rupert Murdoch
understands it, is not natural but something that
must be continuously constructed.
McLuhan is right though to describe media as
a spatial phenomenon. It performs spatially by
collecting and distributing information that
distorts our experience of geography. Media
forms connections, relationships, adjacencies; it
alters distances in time and space and collapses
geography. Its techniques of assembly and
editing (the jump cut, fade and juxtaposition,
for example) and its sequencing of experience
into genre and schedule remake the world in its
own image. Think for example of the corporate
slogans: Microsoft's "Where do you want to go
today" or Starbucks "Geography is a flavour". These
trademarked mantras suggest the physical world
reorganised by technology, media and experience;
they propose that the base architecture of the
planet is no longer a function of cosmology and
geology but of the techniques and effects of media.
This effect then allows an entity like News
Corp to exist—this is the ecosystem that it both
inhabits and generates. It is also the condition that traditional spatial organisations find themselves
within, subsumed by the flows and currents of
globalised corporate media. The scandals that have
rocked such fundamental institutions in the uk
are a function of the tension between these two
conceptions of space, the effect of erosion on the
static edifices of traditional governance by the
dynamic flows of contemporary media.
We should, though, be careful to distinguish
media's many forms. Here, McLuhan may help us
again. He describes a light bulb as information, but
suggests that we don't recognise it as information
because it is information in pure form. In reality,
media is seldom pure. In the processing of a raw
event into media, information is transformed
from its pure state into, to use the journalistic
term, "story". We might imagine then a spectrum
that to one side originates with this pure form of
information, becomes media and darkens towards
propaganda at the other end of the spectrum.
Elements of News Corp's empire—the Sun, the
News of the World, Fox News, and so on—operate
as entities that while presenting themselves
as sources of information are in fact a form of
partisan politics, leveraged lobbying and devices that attempt to influence political policy in
ways that often serve Murdoch's self-interested
commercial interests (in the uk this is evidenced
most explicitly by News Corp's agenda against
the BBC and the euro). Against this hyperprocessed
media, we might cite Wikileaks as its
polar opposite. Here, its information dumps of
pure, unrefined information exist without the
contextualisation, analysis, editing or framing
that traditional media bring to bear.
Though they may be entirely different types of
information, Wikileaks and News Corp's phone
hacking suggests there is a crisis in the ability to
construct a functioning architecture of the state
within the field of modern media. Both obliterate
the boundary between the public and private—
be it state secrets or a celebrity's extra-marital
shenanigans. Both suggest a transformation of the
idea of the private driven by the technologies of
media and communication.
Increasingly data is cached on remote servers
protected by encryption and passwords. These
distant servers are always accessible through the
omnipresent "cloud". Here we begin to perceive
the pretzel logic of contemporary media space:
that our private data already exists everywhere.
This is a radical counterintuitive spatial inversion,
a prolapse of the traditional relationship of public
and private, that reminds us again of the looking
glass: "White is black and black is white."
The phone hacking scandal exposed the failures of
traditional institutions to maintain boundaries,
distinctions and thresholds against the spectrallike
entity of contemporary corporate media. It
has demonstrated their inability to control the
pervasive flows that have ghosted through their
structures, distorted their operation, and bent
their purpose. The radically transforming nature
of information, media and communication and
the rise of corporate entities challenge the very
idea of the state, threatening to dissolve its body
into their flux. They are phenomena that have
altered the dynamics of contemporary power
and democracy profoundly, have remapped
its topography and spatial organisation and
transformed the ecosystem within which
democracy attempts to exist.
In the wake of the scandal, politicians—and
media—are calling for the re-establishment
of what they term "trust" in the fundamental
institutions of society. Coming after scandals of
MPs' expenses and the banking crisis, consistent
institutional failure has become a hallmark
of early-21st-century culture. Without serious
reconstruction of the architecture of state, the
rhetoric of trust will be absorbed and assimilated
by the very interests that it seeks to control. In
the absence of a new architecture of state, one
that recognises the new landscape of virtual
information as a spatial crisis, the simplistic
demand for transparency will be reflected
back in a looking-glass inversion that will only
accelerate the dominance of corporate media over
democracy.
—Sam Jacob
[1] Excerpt from the transcript
of oral evidence taken before
the Culture, Media and Sport
Committee on Tuesday 19
July 2011.
Sam Jacob is a director
of FAT (Fashion Architecture
Taste). Current projects include
the BBC Drama Production
Village and CIAC, an 80-unit
housing scheme in the north
of England. He is professor of
architecture at UIC, Chicago, and
Unit Master at the Architectural
Association, London. He is codirector
of the Architectural
Doppelgangers Research
Cluster at the AA. He writes
and edits Strangeharvest.com.
Revolving Doors: The Architecture of Corporate Media
With the Murdoch phone hacking scandal ever widening and facing inquiry panels again, Sam Jacob deciphers the architectural logic of contemporary corporate linguistics.
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- Sam Jacob
- 15 November 2011
- London