[events]

terrorism + architecture symposium, Oct. 2001

[10.2001]

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In the immediate wake of 9-11, clearly the most significant architectural/political event of our time, Norman Klein and I organized a conference of designers, artists and theorists to discuss possible ways to speak to a wound that was, in those weeks, itself unspeakable.

I went to sleep on the night of September 10, working on much longer manuscript on the anti-architecture of Al Qaeda that had been solicited by the British journal Angelaki (though never published with them) and woke to the sounds of the television shrieking with fear as the Towers burned and fell. I then drove to my friend Katharine's house where she, I and Dick Hebdige tried to make sense of it all. The event anticipates the outpouring of interest in architecture to account for what happened by projecting and articulating alternatives for the site (and as Reinhold Martin pointed out, to monumentalize Empire accordingly).

Glenn Beck has his 9-12 project which seeks to keep alive the general sense of dread and confusion that pervaded American culture in the weeks after the attacks. The existential crisis of an exceptionalism in disarray, agoraphobia as patriotism, xenophobia as phenomenology, a new entitled sense of infinite vicitimhood, etc are the raw currency of his genre of populist fundamentalism, and so for that reason, his choice of making the paranoid wake of 9-11 into a true Event to which the fidelity of communion would form is well-chosen.

There was, you will recall, another cultural reaction to this apparent puncturing of illusions that drew diametrically opposing conclusions. It saw this as an event that might once and for all discredit the political theologies of Abrahamic monotheisms (that would nullify, not inaugurate the clash of civilizations) that would force by trauma a recognition by the United States that it is an nation and not the nation (a populist cosmopolitanism not jingoistic retrenchment), and for the more narrow and local concerns of design disciplines, a recognition of intrinsically political quality of the built environment and the necessarily mediated quality of political contestation (partially successful, but more as response to the excesses of counter-terrorist urbanism that appeared).

In retrospect, this seems utopian (and it was, but no more so than the idea that the attacks somehow closed the fissures inherent in Americna society). It easily could have been worse (If Gore had taken office, he would have been blamed for the porosity in national defenses, and a hard or soft military assumption of official power not unthinkable).

In some ways the various competitions to replace the WTC were the most interesting and dispiriting of design's responses to this maniacal act of anti-design.  Instead of a fundamental rethink of what cities are, what America is, and an positive projection for a renewed cosmopolitan future, we got 31 different corporate ice cream cones, underlining the underline that no matter how violent the break in the temporal flow of business-as-usual, no real change is possible. (CNN's open competition for entries from non-professionals gathered some truly remarkable visions and provides material for several psychanalytically-informed theses. See sample at bottom. The microsite at CNN.com is no longer live)





Terrorism + Architecture
Benjamin H. Bratton and Norman M. Klein
SCI_Arc
October 11, 2001

"The events of 9-11, have decisively reshaped the public figure of architecture.
Structures and networks are recast as sites of imminent violence to the social body.
Correspondingly, this crisis has made explicit how political and cultural institutions are embodied
by their architectural manifestations.

This moment poses several difficult and important challenges, and demands serious reflection on the new role of architectural discourse and practice in the months and years to come.
This symposium, planned for Nov ember 17, 2001 will ex amine terrorism as an inherently spatial program, and will turn the trope of terrorism + architecture toward the decoding radical spaces of cultural politics. The terrorism/ architecture fold is more than the spectacle of ex treme gesture, it is a strategic assault on the fabric of a particular configuration of inhabitation. It is an attack on the inhabitation of a space by bodies organized according to deeply habituated cultural, social, discursive, technological, and even topological lived patterns. What appears to be an attack on a habitat, or an attack on its inhabitants, is really an erasure of a mode and moment of occupation, of the meaningful structure of collective organization played out there.

It is precisely on these critical interrelations of architecture-as-politics and politics-as-architecture that this symposium will focus. We have invited a core group of prominent social theorists, architectural critics and media artists to gather at SCI_Arc on that Saturday morning and afternoon to share their v arious insights into these grave problematics. They represent a range of interested positions in the transdisciplinary agenda before us, and are ex cited to hav e the opportunity to come together at SCI_Arc for this event.

We hav e interest from several local architectural venues/ businesses interested in co-sponsoring the
publicity for this event. We have interest from students in designing the space of the symposium to reflect the difficult themes at hand. The symposium will serve as an outgrowth of a feature project on Archinect, which has drawn hundreds of readers, and toward a proposed course on Terrorism + Architecture planned for Spring semester.

This moment demands a critically architectural voice, that we as architecturalists bear a certain responsibility to respond to it, and that it presents a unique opportunity for SCI_Arc
to center the community ?s attention on the deep significance of architecture."



Presenters and Respondents:
Benjamin H. Bratton (program and moderator, SCI_Arc)
Norman Klein (author and cultural critic, program and moderator, CalArts)
Eric Owen Moss (architect, SCI_Arc)
Roger Friedland (sociologist of religion, UCSB)
Lida Abdul (artist, Kabul and Los Angeles)
Bill Barminksi (artist, Los Angeles)
Mariana Botey (artist and writer, Mexico City and Los Angeles)
Kazys Varnelis (architectural historian, SCI_Arc then, Columbia now)
Eddo Stern (video game designer and theorist, UCLA)
Adam Zaretsky (bio-artist)
Richard Wittman (architectural historian, UCSB)

thanks to Willea Ferris






My opening remarks, Oct 11, 2001, reconstructed from my handwritten notes:

     "This symposium focuses on a difficult topic at a difficult time. Tensions run high, nerves are rattled, and several wars are being waged. The spaces of terror, and the violences of space and structure, are, in varying ways, the preoccupying forces of our present moment.
     More than one person has asked me out of genuine concern how I could organize such a meeting at this time.  My response is that this moment has revealed, on such a dramatic scale, the core interrelations of institutions we had assumed to be separate, that we have act now, after 9-11,  has to happen.
     Because of what happened, the terms by which structure structures our worlds are now under siege and undergoing radical transformation. But this symposium is not a symposium on 9-11. is not for or about a single event, no matter how significant, but as a condition of space in a global culture.
     It is about the enormously difficult job of honestly retooling our languages, our practices, our perspectives, and our buildings toward accommodating the order of things in which we find now ourselves. This means looking far outside the architectonics of a single event, now matter how significant, and instead deep into the fabric in which that events reverberates, into the structural violence of history and the technologies of space that animate it.
     This symposium brings together this morning a group of architects, artists, cultural critics, and sociologists who have in very different ways been working through the painful issues that run through the overlaps of terrorism and architecture. We are grateful that they have joined us this morning and to share with us their words and their work.
     Many of them have expressed privately to me that they are worried that they might say something that will offend members of the audience. I don't ask you, as audience members to not be offended, but I do ask you to keep an open mind, and to help us defend the
     I will conclude these introductory remarks, and then move into my own contribution to our talks.
     Before we continue, however, I need to acknowledge the work and support of a few people without whom this symposium simply would not have happened. Our first applause should be for them.
     First our sponsors, Archinect and form zero. Paul not only runs the best architecture site online, he has been early and true supporter of this project from the very beginning. Without the feature, we wouldn't have likely generated the momentum to see this.
     Without his wit, his pushing, his tenacity, his relentless advocacy, and his support the initial momentum for the effort necessary to organize this event so quickly -he truly was the man behind the scenes- we wouldn't be here today: Kayzs Varnelis
    Without her generosity of time, intellect, humor, sympathy,  and skill, and her always gracious resolve to make this event, this room, into something very special, we might all be sitting on crates: Willea Ferris.
    Also our speakers, who have come because they wanted to..I am humbled and truly grateful..
    I'd like to beginning my own 'terror talk'  by sampling a bit of wisdom from Michael Taussig's essay on Walter Benjamin's theory of history as a state of siege. Talking terror is a matter of finding the right distance, holding it at arms length so it doesn't turn on you (after all talking terror is just a matter of words), and yet not putting it so far away in a clinical reality that we end up having substituted one form of terror for another.? And this too is our problem and task today, not to find a comfortable middle-ground that is ever always an unreal place, but to find a course together to oscillate between the different  ways we are each both inside and outside of both terrorism and architecture.That oscillation, I expect,  may come to look more like a knot than an arc.
    The very difficult task before us all as public intellectuals,  is to contribute in our ways toward the mapping of these spaces of terror, and of the violences of space and structure. This begins (or continues) we think through an indexing of positions and juxtapositions presented to us by the overlapping of terrorism and architecture.
    The refractions generated by terrorism (as the formation of a body-post-politic) and architecture (as the privileged body of collectively lived, structured space-time) accumulate before us faster than we can really make sense of them. The forms of erasure and the erasures of form that now bubble through all the surfaces of our social worlds simultaneously mirror and oppose and each other. They cancel and reveal each other. Terrorism is and is not an architectural practice, as architecture is and is not a freezing  in place of the violence of spatial agenda and control.
     And yet is is precisely the disruption of a particular flow of lived space-time, of everyday life,? that is the content of terrorism, the ontological disruption (of violence that unsettles and  prevents  settling to return.
     I think part of the uncanniness of terrorism, it's terrbleness, is its odd recognizability. It is the return of a repressed. Of an energy of action we don't have the discourses for, of a spatial agenda not necessarily expressible with our architectural vocabularies.This dynamic is of course not new at all. The returning of a repressed feels like the introduction of something new, but is rather of something significantly old. In 1922, in  Architecture or Revolution, Le Corbusier wrote that it is a question of building which lies at the root of the social unrest of today; architecture or revolution.
     This is not to say that architecture is anything other than a fundamental force for the reconstruction of the collective lived condition. Architecture, the architectural, does not represent the collective dynamics of the social body that inhabits it, it manifests and materializes them. I think Corbu's comment should be read that politics as we generally think of it, the content of revolution, as political revolution, is in fact not as fundamental to the roots of social unrest as the contours, textures, morphologies, skins, skeletons and shelters with which the collective social body fashions itself in the world. Architecture precedes the political, in this sense, and is thereby, as we would have it today, even more political than politics, more social than society.
     And that may be why terrorism, as politics beyond politics, realizes itself at, upon, against and through architecture.
     Today, on the other side of so many revolutions, political, social, technological, ecological, psychological, and in the wake of the events of 9-11, we again look to the architectural as an action-language of both the reproduction and challenging of power; as a root of both social unrest and vast sleep.
     The terrorism/ architecture circuit  is more than the spectacle of extreme gesture, it is a strategic assault on the fabric of a particular configuration of inhabitation. It is an attack on a particular regime of bodily-space, and the programmatic declaration of another to take its place. The architectures of terror are organized according to/against deeply habituated cultural, social, discursive, technological, and even topological lived patterns. What appears to be an attack on a habitat, or an attack on its inhabitants, is really an erasure of a mode and moment of occupation, of the meaningful structure of collective organization played out there. What re-emerges then is both the deeply architectonic character of political/ transpolitical action, and the universally contestational quality of space.
     Consider the events of 9-11,  for example, but others do just as well (in northern Ireland, el Salvador, chile, Indonesia, Spain, Palestine and Israel, etc.and here in Los Angeles as well) I read the program of the event, the design that animated them, and its execution as an act of restructuring space. What does it mean to call this architecture?  What does it mean not to?
     I point not just to the structural destruction as a kind of perverse anti-design, nor to the re-purposing  of a transportational technology into a murderous one. The architecture? here is  precisely the organized inversion, this monsterous folding, of the circulatory infrastructures, both machinic and symbolic,  of American-Western power/ Empire/ Global secular market culture, etc.,  and the staging of these inversions as a global media event.
     The 9-11 attack is, I suggest with real seriousness, an act of global architecture. It is one which should make us more sensitive to always deeply contestational quality of physical, symbolic and media space(s), and also more dissatisfied with conceptualizations of those spaces as merely aesthetic, cognitive, sculptural, linguistic or technical. Such space is not an extension of power and meaning, it is their very fabric! The space of global social politics is not just populated by architecture or housed by architecture, it is itself architectonic in its very elaboration.
     Terrorism is as we know all to well an enormously slippery thing to try to grasp. Of course, one person?s terrorist is another's freedom fighter; just as one person?s wall is another?s  barricade. But its really the conversion of those differences that ties to the knot between terrorism and architecture, the knot that signals something fundamental about the quality of the practice of everyday life, about the unequal play between structure is de-structure. From the deconstructive turn in the 70's and 80's we know that our linguisitc heritages are legacies of production. Our grammars and the subject positions they frame us by are terms of production, presenceing, of building something into an empty place, of a mark onto absence.  But the Delezean turn, among other routes, showed us that while language may be hung up on production, our bodies aren't. Despite our languages, we are, I think, accustomed to living in worlds that are unmade before us as much as they are made. We are, as we live, if not as we speak, always already as much subjects of de-production.as of production. Unbuilding, unmaking, disrupting, disettling, destruction, is  an irreducible, if also deeply repressed figure.
     Terrorism is a creature of several powers: of the State and against the state, outside it and/or through it; of Religion, piety, conversion and spiritual narrativization of space; and of Media, of the spectacle of radicalness as a consumable content-play and of the proliferation of media devices into the very body architecture (as surveillance, screening, and verification)  in the name of securing space from the terrorist program. What architecture is too, is equally mercurial, especially in relation to the practice of violence.
 
     As I think about the proliferation of Bin-Laden imagery throughout the pathways of global pop culture, like Warhol's winking portrait of Mao, but real, not coy,and  I am reminded  of Joe Strummer of the Clash saying that he stopped liking the Baader-Meinhof gang when he realized that they read their press clippings just like any other rock star.
     And this is the crucial ironic stitch that undoes attempts to read the assault on  Empire as merely the Islamization of anti-Globalism, but fundamentalism is a function of globalization, not its foil. It is a core reaction to the processes of disembedding social experience from particular space-time institutions, it is generated locally precisely in the converse image, but also co-integrated  image, of what it thinks has been displaced.
     In this sense, because terrorism is, in many ways, a deeply conservative imaginary, it cannot necessarily be understood as the dynamic force and architecture as the static.Nevertheless, terrorism, as spatial program, as a function of Modernity, whether we would like to think it this way or not, does work as architectural practice. Likewise, perhaps equally disturbing for some, is that, among all the things that architecture is, it is also medium of terror.
     I say this not for the sake of constructing linguistic equivalence machines, but because I believe that the conversion between these two practices, terrorism and architecture; these two institutions,two histories carries with it a enormously important series of lessons about what collective inhabitation is and means.
What it means for a social body in a state of seizure, and a State seizing on the moment to transform the public and private realm according the programs of imminent fear and control. What it means for architecture as a professional practice, in increasing danger of becoming a subsidiary of the Secure Space industry. What is means for the possibility (or even desirability) of resettling into some kind of clarity about the order of things.
     I have a lot more to say, but since I?ve asked the speakers to keep their initial comments to 10-15 minutes, I will do so as well, and look forward discussing what we are, together today, able to put on the table. I  turn it over to Norman."

Tags: mobility, theory, conferences

Published: 10.22.2006

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