COMPANION

COMPANION
MANIfestA 7
The european Biennial of ConTemporary arT
19 July 2 November 2008
TrenTino SouTh Tyrol, iTaly
CurAtOrs
adam Budak (prinCiple hope)
ANselm FrANke & HilA Peleg (THe soul)
raqS Media ColleCTive (The reST of now)
edItOrs
rana dasgupTa (The resT of now)
NiNA mNTmANN (PriNciPle HoPe)
avi PiTChon (The Soul)
6 fOrewOrd
8 the rest Of NOw
138 the sOul, Or, MuCh trOuble IN
the trANsPOrtAtION Of sOuls
266 PrINCIPle hOPe
dAYdreAMING the reGION
398 COlOPhON
CONteNts
manifesta 7 is the concept and name of a series of interdisciplinary events
and projects launched by the international Foundation manifesta and the Prov
inces of Trento and bozen / bolzano to investigate the practice and potential
of contemporary visual culture against the backdrop of europes political, geo
graphical and social situation. The Trentino south Tyrol region is recognized
by manifesta for its extraordinary industrial heritage and cultural infrastructure,
and this has constituted the basis for formulating the artistic context of mani
festa 7. The venues that will be used are located on one of europes most impor
tant travel routes between North and south: the fortress of Franzensfeste /
Fortezza that dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century, three indus
trial buildings from the frst decades of the twentieth century, the exAlumix
(bozen / bolzano) and the manifattura Tabacchi and exPeterlini (both located in
rovereto) as well as the Post offce building in Trento, an edifce constructed
in the rationalist style of the 1930s. The curatorial team of manifesta 7 consists
of Adam budak (krakow / graz), Anselm Franke (Antwerp / berlin) / Hila Peleg
(Tel Aviv / berlin) and the members of the raqs media collective (Delhi), a
collective of artists and multimedia theoreticians. each artistic unit is concen
trating on venues selected by the organization in a particular city and together
they will jointly work on one project at the venue called the Fortress. in
keeping with its tradition for innovation, manifesta has moved from a represen
tational format, such as was used in various forms for the frst fve editions
of the biennial, to a more refective format, characterized by the experimental
school proposed for manifesta 6 to incorporate a new emphasis on education
and artistic production. For manifesta 7 the focus is on the use of existing
historical buildings.
manifesta 7 creates a context that invites artists, curators, intellectuals and
diverse publics to consider the region of Trentino south Tyrol as a zone of
contact. Trentino south Tyrol has a long history as frontier region, as a place
of multicultural coexistence. by demonstrating an awareness of history and
the transcendence of nationalist divisions, manifesta 7 creates a context for a
serious analysis of the reality of a multiethnic europe. manifesta 7 wants to
think of the frontier as the skin of our time and our world.
manifesta began its activities in the early 90s in the course of important po
litical changes in europe, when one part of the continent was, at the end of
the cold War, determined to free itself from its former political system. it was
born out of the confict between east and West, focusing on a paneuropean
representation of its professional cultural scene and art practices and in dialogue
with the territorys social and geopolitical specifcities. Here, at manifesta 7,
curators and cultural producers have set out to develop and expand links
between the contemporary art scene and the architectural, performative and
social landscape of europe and beyond. With the gradual opening up of bor
ders in europe towards its neighbours and india and china, manifesta 7 aims
to join together the various art communities as well as outside infuences,
developing a framework to facilitate interaction and collaboration with partici
pants from europe, Asia, North America and latin America.
For the frst time in such an international enterprise, by selecting two
provincesTrentino and south Tyrolas cooperational partners, manifesta 7
facilitates direct links between these regions and other artistic hubs in the
world, by activating and integrating different models of crosscultural ferment
through the production of art works that tend to respond to local conditions.
The perpetual dislocation and relocation of manifesta 7 also attempts to
question the very nature and the objectives of the project, forcing all partici
pants to truly embrace the dialogue with the local representatives of existing
organizations and to adapt each time with a fresh disposition in which
locality and internationality can create a new form of synergy. much empha
sis is placed on the belief that this synergy can continue to fourish after
manifesta 7 has left.
The Fortezza / Franzensfeste, the exAlumix building and exPeterlini
should ideally be destined to host cultural institutions and future events after
manifesta 7 has moved on. in this sense manifesta 7 can be considered as
a kind of praeludium to a dynamic, active cultural life. in a region where collab
oration has not always been automat ically trusted, or regarded as a natural,
organic procedures, the fact that the two provinces worked so closely together
signifes an important step towards a constructive future. manifesta 7 is not
supposed to be seen as an uFo landing from outer space, bringing a cargo of
international contemporary art. manifesta always seeks dialogue with local
communities. in the Trentinosouth Tyrol region, more than one hundred cul
tural associations are involved in Parallel events accompanying the activities of
manifesta 7. manifesta 7 does not need to end with a conventional euro pean
model of homogenization on economic, cultural and political levels. A modest
approach to transregional collaboration seems to be the only way to escape
the limits and disillusions of the concept of nationality in the posteuropean
integration process.
New thematic approaches, alternative models of organisation, slowing
down our current attitude of reinforcing the art world using our constantly
changing behaviour towards cultural policy and artistic productionthese do
not take away manifestas urgency to create conditions for artists to enlarge
their scope and mobility, broaden common goals between producers and
artists and promote an exchange of knowledge between social and political
in novators in europe.
fOrewOrd
Joint Forces
Hedwig Fijen
ANDreAs HAPkemeyer
fabio CavalluCCi
6 7
the rest
of now
edIted bY
rana dasgupTa
WiTH rAQs
Media ColleCTive
12 Preface by rANA DAsguPTA
90 ave ObliviO by rAQs meDiA collecTive
rIsING frOM resIdue
23 What shall We dO With the fOrest under sOcialism? by ANDers kreuger
26 tO destrOy mOuntains by Felix PADel
32 acts Of letting and creatiOn by mATTHeW Fuller
34 autOmObile executed by TeresA mArgolles
35 death On the byPass by rAvi suNDArAm
41 missiOn rePOrt by ursulA biemANN
45 in Kabul ZOO, the liOn by JeeT THAyil
IN sPIte Of erAsure
49 brevity by J. roberT leNNoN
50 the sKOlt smi language memOry PrOject by esPeN sommer eiDe
54 dOmi magistrOrum linguae latinae islandicOrum by DANel mAgNssoN
58 enthusiasts sPeaKing by Neil cummiNgs & mArysiA leWANDoWskA
61 a lifetime by lAkHmi cHAND koHli
66 amPhibian man by NAeem moHAiemeN
71 the ghOst Of fOrmOsa by cDric viNceNT
76 un-titled by ove kvAvik
78 threshOlds by coNTemPorAry culTure iNDex
81 mixing memOry and desire by lAWreNce liANg
84 the ethics Of dust by Jorge oTeroPAilos
the AfterlIfe Of INdustrY
90 bildraum by WAlTer NieDermAyr
95 the rOmance Of cOffee & aluminium by JeFFrey scHNAPP
102 stOries Of ganga building by ruPAli guPTe & PrAsAD sHeTTy
108 file: aluminium.Pl by grAHAm HArWooD
110 industrial ruins by Tim eDeNsor
111 the institute Of innOvative technOlOgies
by reiNHArD kroPF & siv HeleNe sTANgelAND
112 the nine gardens in the banK Of nOrWay
by iNgriD book AND cAriNA HeDN
115 the last message frOm tOblinO by AsHok sukumArAN
AuGurIes ANd reVerIes
118 a reading list by ProFessor bAD TriP
119 seastOries: seastate 2 as evil disaPPears by cHArles lim li yoNg
124 the artist as idiOt by iriNA ArisTArkHovA
128 intrOducing gaPs by ivANA FrANke
133 the Pirate bay manifestO by PirATbyrN (THe bureAu oF PirAcy)
135 NoTes oN coNTribuTors
137 AckNoWleDgmeNTs
CONteNts
12 13
i First, let a map be drawn. let a cadastral
reckoning be inked of who owns what,
who owes what to whom. let empty lots
yield. let letters and numbers do the talking.
let the land be silent.
Who has ever heard the land speak?
ii Next, let the draughtsman sharpen his
pencils. let a scale be computed. An
adequate scale. A scale that proportions
a factory somewhere between a mountain
and a human being. let no person stain
the drawing. let there be precision. but let
precision not thwart grandeur.
let there be grandeur. even more grandeur.
Having lost our tradition, we have nothing behind us but the past,
Hannah Arendt tells usand so we wonder what it means to live
in mere time. Digital time, comprised of infnite identical units,
where there is no lingering, no haggling, no coming round again.
The great signifcance of things persists, but it is hard to fsh out of
this relentless current: it can be grasped only in the aftermath,
when absence, like a clean shape in the dust, reveals the outline
of what has been.
When ordinary objects are pushed aside by time to become rem
nants or wreckage, they acquire a new and solemn power. They
pronounce, fnally, what they never could while they were inside the
clean room: time has passed. Now that time has become invisible
and odourless, now it has become, in fact, undetectable, this message
carries such solemn beauty that we can hardly resist the impulse
to seek out such wornout objects for our own melancholy contem
plationno matter how ironic this may seem in an era as rapacious
and destructive as our own. even as time uproots everything
around us, leaving domineering scars and traces, we still feel the
need to discover it again, and make it our own.
These pages are about the residue that accumulates from times
passing. They arise from a number of enriching conversations
between myself and raqs media collective and all our colleagues
in this project about the stuff that is not the product: what is sloughed
off, melted down or given up, what is abandoned, forgotten, dis
avowed, exiled or recycled. but the contributors to the rest of now
artists, writers, curators, librarians, musicians, architects and
other theoristsare not concerned by the merely derelict. in these
essays and photo essays, sometimes in a single quotation or a found
image, they make visible everything that dances in the outskirts
of reality, tantalizing it with what it is not, and, in so doing, making
it complete.
PrefACe
rANA DAsguPTA
AVe OblIVIO
rAQs meDiA collecTive
raqs media collective overhears the ghost of a provincial prefect.
14 15
iii Now, let the clerk in. let him fgure. let
the tables be turned. There were no peasants
here. They had no claim. elsewhere, there
were some. maybe, there were some. Who
said there were some? They moved up
the mountain, sometime in the ice age. We
found one in a snowdrift. you can see him
in the museum, frozen. All outstanding clai ms
have been settled. Was it a bag of rice for an
acre, or was it a shovelful of beans for a fstful
of soil? The clerk is so clever. And look at his
penmanship.He deserves a promotion.
He does it with elegance. He does it in italics.
iV Hurry, let the road be laid. let the shade
of a tree not distract. bring surveyors, have
them measure. cut that tree down. And that
one, outside the picture. bring stone, dig
earth, bring poor men from the south. let
them breed. give each of them a handful of
resentment. let them fester in the sun.
let them build roads so automobiles can
speed past them.
V Wait, let the foundation stone be raised be
fore anything else is done. let it tower. let
it mark words of power and carve them deep.
let it be immortal.
remember me. i havent gone away. i am
carved in stone. i will return. i always return.
Vi Then, let there be more digging. let the
road stretch longer. Dig more roads, and then
some more. let no stone remain unturned.
Dig canals and trenches. Dig war, dig prosper
ity, dig peace, dig perils, dig bones, dig mines,
dig mountains, dig money, dig, dig, dig your
own dogs grave.
every man his own dog. every dog has his day.
every day has its dog.
16 17
Vii build, let the scaffolding ascend. let the
water tower rise. let bricks be laid. Pour con
crete, lay foundations and crossbeams.
Architecture is the impress of power on a
landscape. Who said that?
i say it better in italian. so much better.
Viii commence! let production begin. let
turbines turn, let engines hum, let alloys sing
high voltage anthems to electric accompani
ment. let smelter, furnace, forge and anvil
burn incandescent. let every muscle surren
der to the production target.
Targets go to heaven, dead workers go to the
morgue. Who haunts the factory?
18 19
Xi beware, let the workers know the conse
quences of their actions. let them understand
that a strike is only an overture to a lockout.
let a mass be said for an end to strife.
benedictus. Workers are leaving the factory,
again. sanctus. bicycles are not tanks.
sanctissimus. cloth caps are not steel hel
mets. Workers are not soldiers. misericordiae.
but a strike is a war.
And i have the soldiers, the helmets, the tanks
and the priests and the policemen and the Tv.
amen.
iX rise, let there be altitude, let there be
distance. only when you look down with the
eyes of a bomber at all that stretchedout
industrial symmetry will you know its true val
ue. Did i hear someone say something about
labour? That is marginal to the calculation.
insurance is investment. Destruction is Pro
duction. War is Accumulation.
i want coffee. coffee, coffee, coffee.
more coffee. doppio espresso. read the cof
fee grounds. look at what they say.
X shine! let there be light! let there be radi
ance! Panoramas delight. They dignify the
earth by optical reassemblage. every valley is
exalted. The crooked is made straight.
A landscape is to be coveted, if not pos
sessed, only by the deserving, discerning eye.
20
rIsING frOM
THe resiDue
Xii Finally, let there be dynamite, and then,
let the dust settle. And when all is done,
when the rest of now is over, let a map be
drawn again. And another architectural
plan. make it bigger.
As if nothing really happened. As if no
one remembered. As if no trace was left.
ave Oblivio.
22 23
ever since July 1987, when i frst crossed from Finland into soviet karelia by train, i have
wondered about the peculiar state of nature in socialist (now already postsocialist) countries.
How can it be that we immediately recognize the legacy of real socialism in an unkempt
meadow, a patch of unused suburban land or a stretch of forest unfolding outside our train
win dow? even the dried dirt on roadside thistles seems dryer and dirtier east of the old
iron curtain.
it is not just that there are few visible traces of human care and affection for the environ
ment when we travel through the countryside in, say, latvia or romania or central russia; what
the postsocialist landscape fundamentally lacks is visible evidence of rational use. it has lost
the visual poetry of husbandry, and therefore strikes us as less natural, more overwritten with
political code, than nature in the established capitalist economieshowever absurd this may
seem when we remember what effects the First Worlds policies are now having on the planets
forests and agricultural land.
is the depressed identity of postsocialist nature an optical illusion, encouraged by our
prejudice and cultural arrogance as outside viewers, or is it a visual residue, a telling remainder
of the departed system?
of course there are also instances that contradict these observations. Wetlands, swamps
and virgin forests have often survived longer in eastern europe and russia than in the West,
precisely because of the irrationality of the nowdefunct economic system, which never
managed, despite its military organization, to fully mobilize natural resources. yet even the
relatively unspoilt margins of the postsocialist landscape somehow look and feel traumatized.
Fifteen years of change have clearly not been enough to produce a more upbeat counter
visuality outside the major cities.
There is a passage in the longrepressed novel chevengur by Andrei Platonov (written in
192629 but not published in russia until 1988) that i think illuminates the origins of socialist
nature. The novel is set in the early 1920s, the chaotic and destructive years of the civil war.
i have translated an extract which i think makes the point clearly: nature in eastern europe
is the visual leftover of a system where contingent human reactions to the social and natural
environmentoften fuelled by vanity, incompetence and lowgrade emotions such as envy
or lust for revengewere aggressively packaged as historical necessities and signs of
rational progress.
you tell me, what shall we do with the forest under socialism? sighed kopenkin with
despondent thoughtfulness.
Tell us, comrade, how much income does a forest give per acre? Dvanov asked the
watchman.
whAt shAll we dO wIth
the fOrest uNder sOCIAlIsM?
ANDers kreuger
serious, serious, serious,
uNTil DeATH sToPs you beiNg serious.
Text by Francis Picabia selected by
marcos chaves
my TrAvel kiT, leFT by THe roAD AT THe
eND oF my TriP.ocTober 25, 2007. rePublic
oF uDmurTiA, russiA.
image by Darius Ziura.
24 25
image by Nikolaus Hirsch & michel mller
youll bring it tomorrow to the nearest village, and the others will fnd out by themselves,
kopenkin said to the forest watchman as he handed him the paper.
And what am i supposed to do after the forest? the instructed watchman asked.
kopenkin ordered:
you, too, must work the earth and feed yourself! im sure you used to receive so many
complaints in one year that theyd fll a whole cottage. Now live like the masses.
it was already late. The deep revolutionary night already lay over the doomed forest.
before the revolution kopenkin did not take careful notice of anything: forests, people and
windblown expanses were of no concern to him, and he did not interfere with them.
Now change had been brought about. kopenkin listened to the even howl of the winter
night, and wished it would pass successfully over the soviet land.
1
1. Andrei Platonov, chevengur (moscow:
khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1988), 140142.
it depends, replied the watchman with some deliberation, what kind of forest, how old it is
and in what shape; there are many circumstances here...
but in general?
in general... youd have to calculate ten to ffteen roubles.
only? And rye, i guess, would be more?
The watchman started to become afraid and took care not to make a mistake.
rye would be a little bit more... A farmer would get twentythirty roubles of pure income
per acre. Not less, id say.
kopenkins face showed the rage of a man who has been deceived.
Then we must fell the forest at once and have the land ploughed! These trees only stand in
the way for the autumn rye...
The watchman fell silent and followed the upset kopenkin with fnely attuned eyes.
Dvanov was calculating the losses from forestry with a pencil on Arsakovs book. He asked the
watchman how many acres his forest comprised, and did the sums.
The men are losing around ten thousand a year on this forest, Dvanov pronounced calmly.
rye would seem to be more advantageous.
of course it will more advantageous, kopenkin exploded. The forester himself told you so.
This whole hill must be totally cut down and sown with rye. Write an order, comrade Dvanov!
Dvanov remembered that he had not been in touch with shumilin for a long time. but surely
shumilin would not judge him for direct actions so obviously in accordance with revolutionary
usefulness.
The watchman picked up the courage to disagree a little:
i wanted to tell you that unauthorized felling has anyway strongly increased lately, and
there should be no more felling of such sturdy trees.
so, even better, kopenkin retorted with hostility. Were treading in the Peoples footsteps,
not guiding it. The People itself, that is, feels that rye is more useful than trees. Write the order,
sasha, to fell the forest.
Dvanov wrote a long imperative address to all the poor peasants of the verkhnemotinsk
district. The address proposed, in the name of the Provincial executive committee, to survey the
situation of the poor and to cut down the forest of the bitterman estate forthwith. This, it said
in the instruction, would build two roads towards socialism at once. on the one hand, the poor
peasants would get timber for building new soviet cities on the high steppe, and, on the other,
land would be liberated for sowing rye and other cultures more useful than slowgrowing trees.
kopenkin read the order.
excellent! he concluded. let me also sign here below, to make it more frightening. many
people remember me around here. im a man in arms, you see.
And he signed with his full title: commander of the bolshevik rosa luxemburg Field
Detachment of the verkhnemotinsk District stepan efmovich kopenkin.
26
A littleknown text that encapsulates this policy is aluminum for defence and Prosperity,
published by the Truman administration in 1951, which reveals much about the industry that
has not been openly discussed since: Aluminum has become the most important single
bulk material of modern warfare. No fghting is possible, and no war can be carried to a suc
cessful conclusion today, without using and destroying vast quantities of aluminum []
Aluminum is needed in atomic weapons, both in their manufacture and in their delivery.
4
Aluminium forms part of a nuclear missiles explosion technology and casing, as well as its
fuel. missile propellants have been based on aluminium powder since the 1950s. From the
1990s, the use of exceedingly fne aluminium powder in rocket fuel was extended through nan
otechnology. Nanoparticles of aluminium from spent rocket fuel have already introduced
serious pollution to outer space, a leftover of the satellite industry.
Aluminium is subsidized in many ways, on account of its importance for defence. it is
anything but a green metal. And it is priced far too cheaply. The real cost of its electricity,
water, transport systems and pollutants are all externalised onto manufacturing regions
such as india, even as aluminium plants are closing down fast in europe.
in the indian state of orissa, some of the biggest mountains are capped with a layer of
highquality bauxite. Attempts to possess and mine this ore have entailed the particularly dire
repression of indigenous people as well as huge threats to the environment.
The industries being promoted in orissa and the neighbouring states of eastern india are
providing fuel for the worlds wars, as well as feeding a lifestyle of cars, packaging and mega
scale construction that is increasingly recognised as completely unsustainable in the long
term. As bhagavan majhi, one of the tribal leaders opposed to aluminium mining in orissa, says:
i put a question to the superintendent of Police. i asked him, sir, what do you mean by develop-
ment? is it development to displace people? the people, for whom development is meant,
should reap benefts. after them, the succeeding generations should reap benefts. that is devel-
opment. it should not cater merely to the greed of a few offcials. to destroy mountains that
are millions of years old is not development. if the government has decided that we need alumina,
and we need to mine bauxite, they should oblige us with replacement land. We are cultivators.
We cannot live without land [] if they need it so badly, they need to tell us why they
need it. how many missiles will our bauxite be used for? What bombs will you make? how many
military aeroplanes? you must give us a complete account.
5
1. P. mccully, silenced rivers: the ecology and Politics of large
dams (london: Zed books, 1996).
2. Albert Heiner, Henry J. kaiser: Western colossus
(Halo books, 1981), 112.
3. g.D. smith, from monopoly to competition: the transformation
of alcoa 18881986 (cambridge: cambridge university Press,
1988), 150.
4. Dewey Anderson, aluminum for defence and Prosperity
(Washington: u.s. Public Affairs institute, 1951), 35.
5. From an interview in the flm matiro Poko, company loko (earth
Worm, company man) by Amarendra and samarendra Das (2005).
Aluminiums countless applications in modern civilian life tend to mask its numerous uses
in weapons technology, which make it one of a handful of metals classed as strategic by
the Pentagonmeaning that a top priority of the worlds most powerful governments is to
ensure its constant supply at the lowest possible cost. To this end, new bauxite mines, alumina
re fneries and aluminium smelters are being promoted in many countries with enormous
hidden pressure.
Discoveries of thermite and duralumin in 1901 and 1908 led swiftly to the commercialization
of aluminiums potential for use in bombs and aircraft. The First and second World Wars
boosted aluminium sales hugely, as has every war since. Aluminium is at the heart of the mili
taryindustrial complex, and defnes the scale of modern warfare in a way few people realize.
even the standard kalashnikov assault rife has had an aluminium frame since 1961.
in the 1920s, aluminium alloys took humans to the skies, starting with duralumin (used in
First World War aircraft). An unfurnished jumbo jet or military aircraft still consists of about
80 per cent aluminium, though the alloys used in aerospace have become far more sophisticated,
especially the lithium range and metals matrix composites (mixtures with oil/plastic derivatives).
Dams and aluminium are closely intertwined. The real purpose of many of the worlds
biggest dams is to supply cheap hydropower for aluminium smelting, which consumes vast
quantities of electricity. electricity from the big Western dams helped to win the second World
Warby producing aluminium for arms and aircraft, and later plutonium for the atom bomb.
1
Thermite bombs exploit the latent explosive power in aluminium, using its high heat of
formation (the temperature at which it is separated from oxygen) to increase the size of explo
sions. it formed the basis of seventy thousand hand grenades used in the First World War.
incendiary bombs and napalm were mostly aluminiumbased: 48 per cent in napalm, 313
per cent in the incendiary or goop bombs manufactured by u.s. industrialist Henry kaiser.
Fortyone thousand tons of goop bombs were dropped on Japan and germany by 1944. The
chemical Warfare service used them to burn out the heart o
f
Japan and save thousands
of American lives.
2
Half the british bombs dropped on Dresden in 1945 were napalm, which killed about twen
tyfve thousand civilians. Napalm and incendiary bombs became standard in korea and
vietnam. The latter war introduced a fearsome new weapon: the eightton blu2, or daisy
cutter, whose aluminiumslurry explosive power was invented by a creationist (i.e. christian
fundamentalist) named melville cook in 1956. This is the weapon that has been used for
carpetbombing vast areas from korea to Afghanistan.
After 1945, aluminium demand suddenly dropped. Henry kaisers brilliance was to gamble
on a war in korea, and his frst customer was boeing. His factories were soon making the b36
bombers used in korea. His bet on this war paid off, and it marked the start of eisenhowers
permanent war industry that has never looked back. u.s. aluminium production more than
tripled between 1948 and 1958, ushering in a golden new age for aluminium companies.
3
tO destrOY MOuNtAINs
Felix PADel
mAP oF euroPe AND
NorTH AFricA iN 1000 A.D.
image selected by David Adjaye.
olD DusT is sTill oN
my FiNger (DeTour: romeukrAiNe)
image by Alexander Vaindorf
32 33
beginning in 1649 and continuing into the following year, a number of land occupations
were made in england by homeless, poor, hungry or pissedoff people. They became known as
Diggers because they organized together to farm underused common land, to build rough
settlements and plant food crops. This period of time, after the decapitation of king charles and
before the commonwealth collapsed into a dictatorship, witnessed great enthusiasm and
experimentation.
The Diggers saw three broad kinds of land: wild nature, which was the woods, marshes,
rivers, and other parts of land that were not used for farming; proprietary or enclosed land, sur
rounded by hedges and walls for the use of landowners, handed down by the law of the
eldest son and ultimately deriving from conquest; and a third categorycommon land, areas
of land which had complex systems of traditional rights of use attached to them. such rights
were always partial, but might include, depending on the location: the right to pasture animals;
gather fallen frewood; harvest rushes, willow branches, or other materials for building; or
gather fruits, berries and nuts. in other words, rights to the commons were always specifc.
What the Diggers proposed was to maximize the use of the commons. They proposed that
such land be given over as a common treasury for all peopleto be improved, to be farmed and
to accommodate storehouses for food and raiments open to all labouring people.
much of the existing commentary on the Diggers, and on the other movements looking
for a reconstitution of society during and following the english revolution, focuses on reassem
bling their political thoughts and marking their actions and consequences.
1
Alongside these
aspects of the movement, however, it is also possible to consider a certain style of speech and
silence, of action and inaction that underlies their behaviour and the behaviour of those who
responded to them. it is interesting to note how struggles over food and land (and over the very
meaning of those terms, since they were at least temporarily freed from kingly law) and the
creation of a new form of politics were partly carried out through various processes of letting.
letting was a means of bringing something into play through virtue of its powers, through
the allowance of its action. causation was deferred or rendered unnecessary, ends were
achieved or achieved themselves without any necessary intervention. Acts of letting were kinds
of inaction, the knowing allowance of something without direct responsibility. As well as the
clear use of reason, argument, and direct action in the classic anarchist sense, in the episodes
and events of the Digger movement there were a number of ways in which indirect action
occured through various processes of letting.
letting should be seen not simply as an identifer of those who were good.
2
it was a domain
of active inaction that was essentially beyond good and evil, but the different modalities by
which it was set in play implied certain relations to power, and an understanding of the dynam
ics by which the world constituted itself. letting occured in the events around the Digger
movement in ways that we would now register as richly machiavellian, but that also that imply
a certain vision of ecology. crucially, certain kinds of letting aligned these two registers by
means of a reading and reinvention of power, and a setting into play of previously unaligned
capacities of people, seeds, tools, manure and rethought land.
local landlords used various means for the destruction of the Diggers efforts. There were
several direct violent assaults on encampments, involving the breaking up and stealing of
clothes, shacks, tools and animals. An important weapon was the courts, which resolved to
fne the Diggers ten pounds each, thus making their few cattle and any other property subject
to seizure for the payment of this unattainable sum, and forcing the Diggers to move to a
new site in cobham. but in addition to such direct intervention, the landlords also acted by
establishing the means by which something might arise by chance. Thus the residues of
inactionof letting something occurwere mobilized as action. such indirect approaches in
cluded the deliberate loosing of cattle onto the Diggers eleven acres of barley, which was
naturally ruined. it was an accident, a residue of inaction. on another occasion, villagers were
given quantities of tobacco and wine and were incited by the church into another form of
inactionto boycott the trade of the Digger settlement. in such cases, letting functioned to
allow those in power to achieve their ends whilst absolving them of responsibility.
For the Diggers, letting involved the interplay of two registers. The frst was at the level of
politics, and the organization of property. in a text called The True levellers standard
Advanced they called upon their contemporaries, to Take notice that england is not a free
people, till the poor that have no land have a free allowance to dig and labour in the commons,
and so live as comfortably as the landlords that live in their enclosures (emphasis mine).
3

The crucial problem they were trying to tackle was how to fnd forms of freedom that would
let people eat and thrive after the formal declaration of a muchcontested commonwealth.
They were trying to fnd a modern form to the traditional rights to the commons that would
maintain their power of letting whilst refecting the exigencies of their times. instead,
following the return to kingly law, the commons were subject to a different form of moderniza
tion: that of enclosure.
more importantly for the Diggers, a further form of lettingletting as it occurs at the scale
of, or despite, human intentionwas implied in their vision of the world. The growth of plants,
the earths feeding of the people, was part of creation: something that could not be owned
because it was a force of nature, a manifestation of the spirit, that spirit which they saw also as
reason. creation was not a oneoff event but rather a present power active in all things. cre
ation was what was alive and released in the dispersal of seeds. by taking up spades and ma
nuring and planting the land Diggers were simply letting further creation come to pass. The
seeds of barley (and those of wheat, rye, parsnips, turnips and beans that were also planted in
the settlements) with their fructiferous capacity, their affordance of food, nourishment and
further planting were allies to, and embodiments of, these acts of creation. As confrmation of
the power of this idea of letting, Digger barley can still be harvested on george Hill in surrey,
the frst of the Digger sites.
4
ACts Of lettING ANd Of CreAtION
mATTHeW Fuller
1. see christopher Hill, the World turned upside down: radical
ideas during the english revolution (london: Penguin, 1975); David
W. Petegorsky, left-Wing democracy in the english civil War (lon
don: left book club); David c. Taylor, gerrard Winstanley in elm-
bridge (cobham: Appleton Publications, 2000). see also the flm Win-
stanley (1975), directed by kevin brownlow and Andrew mollo.
2. see eyal Weizmans hollow land: israels architecture of Occupa-
tion (london: verso, 2007) for a contemporary version of this, where
the occupation and shaping of space act is carried out by political
means that are variously obfuscated and deniable, direct and indirect.
3. gerrard Winstanley, The True levellers standard Advanced (20
April 1649), in leonard Hamilton, ed., selections from the Works of
gerrard Winstanley (london: The cresset Press, 1940), 40.
4. in The rest of Now, matthew Fullers digger barley presents a
small distribution of barley seeds harvested from george Hill, which
visitors may take away.
34 35
daily life is becoming a kaleidoscope of incidents and accidents, catastrophes and cataclysms,
in which we are endlessly running up against the unexpected, which occurs out of the blue, so
to speak.
Paul virilio, Foreword to The museum of Accidents
At some point in the late 1980s, that grand postcolonial dream of the rational citythe urban
masterplanslowly and undeniably unmade itself in the city of Delhi. For the Delhi elites
this was the postcolonial Fall. Along with sympathetic law courts, they saw with horror upon
the vast surface of a previously hidden and illegal city. This included unauthorized neighbour
hoods, squatter settlements, and a vast network of small markets and neighbourhood factories.
if this was not enough, a greatly intensifed media fux spread over the city, giving the urban
experience a visceral, overimaged feel, and imploding the classic morphology of the planned
city. As Delhi realigned with global fows, new commodities and images crowded streets, there
was a sense of the city as a delirious, outofcontrol landscape of effects.
The masterplan gave way to something that still does not have a name. urban practices that
emerged on the ruins of modernist planning in the postcolonial world in the 1980s have no
language yet, consisting of a series of mutating situations. For practical reasons i will call these
the bypass. The bypass emerged as a pragmatic appropriation of the city, perhaps more in
medias res than marginal. The bypass does not ft classic representations of political technolo
gies: the resistant, the tactical, the marginal, the multitude or the movement. The old modernist
urban archive of the twentieth century produced the dualisms of plan and counterplan, the
public and the private, control and resistance. in contrast, the bypass lacks substance in the
philosophical sense: it radiates no positivity, but draws parasitically from all older urban forms
and then mutates with kinetic energy into entirely new ones. bypass situations produced a
disorienting zone of attractions for all in the city, sometimes at great costs, particularly for the
subaltern populations of the city.
A fastchanging assembly of practices, the bypass imaged the productive and disturbed lives
of Delhi in the long decade of the 1990s. As a form of life indifferent to the law of the Plan,
the bypass became for elites an allegory of the decline of Delhi. The bypass was equally the site
of vast everyday violent encounters between urban populations and speeding road machines,
exposing public displays of technological death. This site of the bypass was the accident. in
every sense, the accident captured the mixture of death, commodity worlds, technology and
desire that marked the last decade of Delhis twentieth century.
i remember the frst accident i saw in Delhi, in 1983, barely four years after i moved to the
deAth ON the bYPAss
rAvi suNDArAm
AutOMObIle exeCuted
TeresA mArgolles
36 37
city. A friend and i were standing near the All india radio building at night, waiting for a bus. in
the days before mass car ownership in the city, Delhi became eerily silent at night. suddenly,
a familiar greenandyellow Delhi Transport corporation bus raced towards us, ignoring the red
traffc light. There was a sickening thud; a cyclist who was crossing the road was mown
down by the bus. i remember blood everywhere when we rushed to the accident, the blue and
white rubber slippers of the victim, his fresh white cotton pants now stickyred with blood.
The bicycle was twisted beyond recognition. my friend and i took the victim to the nearby
Willingdon Hospital in an autorickshaw, but he was already dead. When we returned, still dazed,
after flling out the complicated forms at the police post in the hospital, the bus was still in
the middle of the road.
Writing these lines i think of that night, and the dead workercyclist, the terror of the contin
gent irrupting upon the calm of the night. in contrast, my memories of the dead on Delhis
roads in the 1990s come as a series of discontinuous images: a dead scooterist on the road, a
solitary helmet in a pool of blood, a body with face covered by a white sheet. At that time we
were assaulted almost every day by scenes of death and tragedy on the road. And time i
drove home at night across the Nizamuddin bridge in east Delhi, there were broken or stalled
machines on the highway: a truck with a broken axle, or a goods vehicle with its contents
spilled obscenely across the road. every friend seemed to have lost someone in a road acci
dent, families of twowheelers and cyclists waited anxiously for their return home in the evening.
it was a feeling of generalized anxiety and dread, a schizophrenic disturbance at a time the
city was booming economically.
As the city globalized in the 1990s, the growth of machine mobility paralleled urban crisis,
and the ecstasies of private vehicle ownership went hand in hand with perceived deatheffects
of road machines. The middle and upper classes had been migrating to private cars from the
1980s, and public transport was now largely used by the lower middle classes and workers.
The state bus corporation was privatized in 1988 and the new private redline (later blueline)
buses became the focus of public anger due to the number of road deaths they inficted. An
average of 2000 people have been killed by traffc accidents in Delhi every year since 1990, the
bulk of them from the working poor. The bloody drama of road culture involved buses, passen
gers, drivers, bystanders and almost everyone in the city. Though buses never exceeded
more than one percent of the motor vehicle population, they were at the centre of a public
violence that moved between the bodies of broken buses, humans, and the enactment of an
uncontrollable subjective force that sometimes seemed to emanate from machines, at other
times from the actions of human beings.
sPeeD
The commissioner of Police, maxwell Pereira, once suggested that Delhis wide roads with
their smooth surface encouraged drivers to speed. The invention of asphalt in the nineteenth
century by english engineer John loudon mcAdam radically transformed the experience of
road travel. cheap frictionless travel and the dream of endless circulation now emerged in the
modern travel imaginary along with parallel innovations in vehicle suspension design, side
walks, traffc management, and social divisions between the motorized and the pedestrian
classes. Aided by the wide asphalt roads of the capital, motor culture in 1990s Delhi intimated
a new kinetic subjectivity, where speed was part of a citys accelerating rhythm and time for
both passengers and drivers became meaningful in powerfully new ways. combined with the
competitive, calculating world of the new commodity explosion, drivers and passengers raced
against each other in a new addictive loop that broke every formalrational rule of an ordered
transportation system.
As drivers of buses, trucks and cars got caught in this cycle of speed, they imitated each
others acts, and courted death. With the population of drivers and machines growing in leaps
and bounds, the risks increased. in the emerging urban order of tremendous acceleration,
reaching destinations on time became critical. A complex system of daily quotas was imposed
by private bus owners on their staff along with the insistence that a minimum number of trips
be completed. buses fought with each other to get passengers, and to maintain time sched
ules. in the ensuing frenzy of movement, buses were accused of suddenly changing routes in
order to cruise bus stops with more passengers. Along with speeding, buses were also ac
cused of standing overtime at bus stops in order to fulfl passenger quotas. To evade the eyes
of the traffc police, buses would keep moving every few minutes at stops, but they would
not leave until their passenger quotas had been flled. Private buses were attacked both ways:
for speeding up and bypassing stops to make more trips, and for stopping excessively to fll
the bus with passengers. This became the commodity form of speed in Delhis public buses:
endless circulation, disruption of any rational mapping of the transportation grid, and suspend
ing circulation in order to realize passengers and proft. This dialectic of speed and disorder
did not even spare the bus stop. The disorderly rush of passengers towards the bus doors
matched the familiar rhythm of the bus speeding into the stop. orderly lines of passengers that
were common in mumbai were out of the question in Delhi. Passengers and buses rushed
into the frenzy of circulation, pushing away anything that stood in their way. cars, auto
rickshaws and motorcycles often ignored signals when they could, and drove against the fow
of lanes to circumvent traffc jams.
38 39
in its disregard for all clean visual architectures of traffc plans and routes, Delhis speed culture
ironically recalled michel de certeaus famous evocation of everyday tactics, when he praised
inventive moments of practice for their tactile apprehension and kinesic appropriation.
1
De
certeau was of course not talking of machines; he detested travel on trains and buses. only a
rationalized cell travels, wrote de certeau, calling much mechanized mobility travelling incar
ceration. De certeaus residual humanism was based on a separation of the sphere of practice
(generated in human encounters) and the machinic (representational/visual/panoptic) that
was a product of a specifc postwar european encounter. in Delhis road culture, where the dis
tinctions between machines and humans often blurred, de certeaus powerful image of the
ordinary man squeezed by the larger forces of rationality is diffcult to hold on to. The evasive
tactics that de certeau celebrated were deployed all the time on Delhis roads by speeding
humanmachine ensembleswith disturbing effects
DeATH AND THe AcciDeNT
the human organism is an atrocity exhibition at which he is a willing spectator.
J. g. ballard
in his experimental novel life of the automobile, published in 1928, the russian writer ilya
ehrenburg begins with the car accident. in ehrenburgs story, charles bernard, an introvert and
a man of letters, becomes a lover of cinema and begins to admire the speed of travel as
depicted in flms of that time. He buys a car, learns how to drive and is on his frst motor trip
to the countryside. When the car takes over; it had gone crazy. The inevitable crash happens.
The linnets warbled and the lavender was sweet and fragrant. car No. 18074iron splinters,
glass shards, a lump of warm feshlay unstirring beneath the solemn midday sun.
2
The
oppositions are stark: between human and machine, cold metal and warm fesh, commodity
and life. ehrenburgs novel stands between two worlds, the emerging era of mechanized com
modity culture and the lost romantic dreams of childhood and the countryside. The accident
connects a fragile dream of the nineteenthcentury european countryside with the terrifying
exhilaration of the new era of mass commodities.
in the central origin myth of italian futurism, marinetti and his colleagues got into a speed
ing automobile in 1909 and crashed on the outskirts of the milan, an accident that generated
the futurist manifesto. in futurist recreation human and machine merge as the poet raced
through the city, and the subsequent accident generates a new technological identity and cel
ebration of speed. Futurisms embrace of speed machines immediately marked it from older
critiques of modernity that saw machines as an assault on the body and nature. in futurism the
technological becomes a prosthetic enhancement to the human body, a shield against shock,
all complicit in the drive for war. The cleansing acts of the technological drove marinetti and the
futurists to fascism. The futurist myth of the accident combined speed, thrills and the fusing of
fesh and machine leading to a rebirth. This equation was inverted in J.g. ballards underground
novel crash, where the themes of sexual desire, death and technology were brought together.
3

in crash the car is desirable because it fuses metal and fesh: marinettis terrible wager with
the machine comes to fruition, and the automobile consumes the organic body. Human fesh in
crash merges with chrome and leather, sexual fuids with machine emissions; we are witness
to derealized bodies, and a world of surfaces, where the older distinctions between outer
reality and inner dreams evaporate. reversing the original Futurist dream, the body becomes
the supplement to the machine.
road culture of the 1990s dramatized the emerging constellation of technological life in
urban Delhi. Narrated through accident stories, statistics, and tales of terrible deaths by uncon
trolled machines and cruel driver subjects, the accident and the entanglement of humans
and machines emerged as a traumatic site of the city. These were everyday scenes of a wound
culture, where smashed and dented automobiles, fallen bodies and the endless cycle of
death revealed the scars of the encounter. The divisions between private and public tragedy
blurred, suggesting a traumatic collapse between inner worlds and the shock of public encoun
ters. As the body developed techniques of parrying the shock of urban sensations, it became
more and more complicit in a technological world, contemplating a threatening collapse of the
boundary between nature and artifce. These were the atrocity exhibitions of urban life in
Delhi, ever visible in image, text, and the screams of the dying as they met their untimely end.
1. michel de certeau, the Practice of everyday life
(university of california Press, 1984), 105.
2. ilya ehrenburg, life of the automobile (serpents
Tail reprint edition, 1999), 6.
3. J.g. ballard, crash (New york: vintage, 1973).
40 41
For many people, life is now about fnding a way to survive in the cracks of our world system of
nationstates. extraterritorial zones, where people live or work with few guarantees of their
security or dignity, keep materializing for diverse purposes. corporations continue to seek pro
duction conditions outside the context of national regulatory systems, while nation states
fnd ways of handling asylum seekers outside the framework of their commitments to human
rights. The condition of extraterritoriality manifests itself in new community forms: clandestine
networks of migrant communities who live an existence as noncitizens.
These zones are no longer singular events located along territorial borders, but constitute
extraterritorial pockets dispersed across territories, eroding the national concept from above and
below. These pockets may be translocal in nature but they are not isolated and constantly
gain greater signifcance. We need to tell the story of these places, which are alienated from
local cultures but connected across continents, be it through corporate structures or impro
vised migratory systems. They are places of desire and violence, conceived through a vision of
their difference from what surrounds them but characterized, ultimately, by the survival practic
es that emerge in and around them. much of my research has gone into representing this
relational space, and the biopolitical subject that constitutes it by complying with, resisting or
reinventing its conditions. it is through such struggles that the new order has to defne itself.
The building of nationstates, whose sovereignty is notionally based in the citizen, has
produced a mass of noncitizens, stateless persons and refugees every time. There are simply
too many people who lose or resist the sort of categorization that would guarantee them mem
bership for us to assume they are merely a regrettable side effect. such people make up a
sizeable part of the world population. The refugee comes forth as the walking proof of just how
fallible and incomplete the world organization of nationstates truly is. This is why my attention
has turned to supranational concepts that are able to tackle massive statelessness, and to
forms of postnational resistance and agency. it is in this spirit that i engage in my research on
the politics of the refugee.
mission report is the title of a video i am currently making, which explores the logic of the
refugee campone of the oldest extraterritorial zones under international law. Focusing on
the situation of Palestinian refugees, the video essay engages with the camp as a philosophical
and spatial entity, and envisions extraterritorial models of nation, constituted through the
networked matrix of a widely dispersed community. Finally, it refects on the artists mission
as a particular sort of feldwork that embraces a moral component.
The Palestinians are of particular interest here, because their case is not only the oldest and
largest refugee case in international law, but it helped to constitute the international refugee
regime after the second World War. This case exemplifes how international law itself failed to
maintain a legal framework of protection, frst depriving the Palestinians of their political rights
as citizens by turning them, perhaps too quickly, into a speechless mass of refugees, and sub
sequently dispossessing them of the right of international protection guaranteed to all refugees.
MIssION rePOrt
ursulA biemANN
As i look For someTHiNg uNDer THe WATer
image by stefano bernardi
42 43
because it was the united Nations that created the problem of the Palestinian refugees in the
frst place, it set up a regime of heightened protection for them.
1
From the beginning in 1948,
the Palestinians were to have two agencies devoted exclusively to them: the uNccP, entrusted
with a complete international protection and resolution mandate, and uNrWA, whose job
was to provide food, clothing and shelter.
2
because the Palestinians were thus taken care of, the
charter of the uNHcrthe uN refugee agency founded in 1950had a special clause
excluding the Palestinians from the new bodys mandate. When it became clear that the
uNccP was unable to resolve the Palestinian confict, its funding was truncated substantially,
which also incapacitated it in its role as protector. Within four years, the Palestinians were
left without the international protection provided by the uNHcr to all other refugee groups in
the world. This means that they have no agency for interventions on the international level
or access to the international court of Justice. The protection gap has never been closed to this
day, not least because the absence of any legal framework has been very convenient for the
power politics behind the negotiations. in the quietness of budgetary decisions, a major refugee
case was manoeuvred outside the international laws and parked there for decades.
This exceptional condition has made the Palestinian refugees particularly vulnerable to
arbitrary reimpositions of the state of exception in host countries, as a recent incident in Nahr
el bared, a camp in northern lebanon, demonstrates. Nahr el bared is one of the twelve
Palestinian refugee camps in lebanon still in existence from 1948 and the years immediately
after; several others have been destroyed. Together, these camps form a network of juridical
enclaves. Allocated by the uN, the plot of land near the syrian border frst accommodated tent
settlements which were gradually replaced by cinder block houses as the refugees could
afford to build them. The urban fabric grew organically without a master plan. Fifty years later,
the population has multiplied but the surface of the camp was not allowed to increase,
resulting in one of the most densely populated places on earth. in juridical terms, this is uN
territory, but it is Palestinian in terms of identity, and lebanese for matters of security.
For sociologist sari Hanaf, Nahr el bared is the epitome of how the lebanese authorities
conceive of such extraterritorial space: The camp is located outside the city of Tripoli but they
allow no infrastructure to connect the camp to the city; they marginalize it, govern it by
emergency law and then abandon it. This is the very condition under which the refugee camps
in lebanon are turned into a place where other extraterritorial elements like al Qaeda can
come and establish their microcosm.
3
in the summer of 2007, the lebanese Army breached
international conventions and entered Nahr el bared to eradicate a small number of foreign
islamists who had settled in the isolated camp. The operation grew vastly out of proportion. in
stead of securing the refugees habitat, the army razed the whole camp to the ground and
declared it a zone of exception. The forty thousand refugees lost all their belongings and had to
fee to another overpopulated camp in the region. This is how easily the uN juridical status is
1. The circumstances of the funding years of these institutions are
extracted from a video interview i conducted in February 2008 with
susan Akram, Professor for international and Human rights laws at
the boston university law school.
2. The uN conciliation commission on Palestine, established in 1948,
and the uN relief and Work Agency, established in 1949.
suspended by the selfauthorized imposition of another regime, when an international protection
mandate is lacking.
but rather than focusing on the stratifed and often ambivalent apparatus of sovereignty that
rules this space, i suggest we pay attention to the fexible process through which the refugees
have begun to reinscribe themselves into the political fabric.
While the battle over Nahr el bared was still underway, a communitybased reconstruction
committee was established to research the state of the camp before its destruction and to
draw an accurate plan that would serve as a basis for negotiations.
4
in a collective process sup
ported by voluntary architects, the camp dwellers defned the shape and limits of their parcels.
The reconstruction of a refugee camp poses the interesting question of how the refugees
themselves would plan their housing and urban organization if they had a say. even though
there are many general complaints about the lack of space and sunlight in the camps, it turned
out that for the dwellers, the architectural form of the old camp made a lot of sense. When
all the people from the Palestinian village safuri arrived at the camp in 1948, they settled next
to each other and gave the neighborhood its name. They wish to preserve this arrangement
because it relates to their origins, to their right of return, and to their sense of community. usu
ally, families own the roof of their building which allows them to add another foor for the
next generation. Another feature they want to hold on to is that the camp is to a great extent
a pedestrian zone made of an intricate system of bending alleys. in islamic society, and particu
larly in the crowded camps, the alleys are used as semipublic, semiprivate spaces where
women and children can appreciate a sense of enclosure and privacy.
The lebanese state and army, however, have altogether different plans for the reconstruc
tion of Nahr el bared. All they see in the organic system of narrow alleys is an obstacle for
entering the camp with their vehicles; they perceive the camp as a military zone, when in fact
it is an urban zone. Armies shouldnt do planning, ismael sheikh Hassan argues, because
they want to solve political issues through urban design. The result is a good security plan,
perhaps, but a city where nobody wants to live. The international donor community for the re
construction supports the plans of the refugee collective and opposes the imposition of
lebanese state power on uN landso this is a rare occasion where an extraterritorial commu
nity fnds a way to elude state power and to implement its political decisions.
The common struggle for defning the refugee space suggests that the camp, in this in
stance, is not the site of bare life, existing outside of all political and cultural distinctions, but
on the contrary, a highly juridical space of dispossession and repossession. it lays open resi
dues that evade sovereign decisions and reveals a place where the Palestinian refugees who
are literally placed on the outer reaches of international law, can unfold selfauthorized, con
structive means to reinscribe themselves into the wider political fabric which is composed, by
now, of a complex mix of postnational considerations.
3. interview conducted with sari Hanaf, sociologist at the American
university in beirut and himself a Palestinian refugee, in beirut in
December 2007.
4. interview conducted in beirut in December 2007 with ismael
sheikh Hassan, architect and urbanist involved in the Nahr el bared
reconstruction committee.
44 45
sigN ouTsiDe THe AbANDoNeD NATioNAl
securiTy AgeNcy builDiNg iN gruNeWAlD
ForesT, berliN.
images by Helena sidiropoulos selected by TeuFelsgroup.
so this is fear: tracers faring
above the pens, the fat thud
of bullets, and the bigger sound
of animals leaving our lives.
sadeyed, the widow elephant
saw a cluster of shells
explode her enclosure.
she screamed in narrowing circles.
shrapnel stopped her and she dropped,
the frst to fall.
everything burned:
the tiger shrugged fre
off his shoulders.
The capuchins tried
to escape their burning tails.
The hyacinth macaws,
spoonbills and hoot owls,
famingos afame
only the llamas stood dumb
in that madness, stupid
to the end. i envied their emptiness.
blind in one eye,
my jaw in shreds, my mane
singed to a useless crop,
im still here.
i wait for these men
to come to me.
At KAbul ZOO, the lION
JeeT THAyil
46
IN sPIte Of
erAsure
image by Anawana Haloba
THereFore Do NoT Worry AbouT
TomorroW, For TomorroW Will Worry
AbouT iTselF. eAcH DAy HAs eNougH
Trouble oF iTs oWN.
mATTHeW 6:34, NeW TesTAmeNT, the bible
Text selected by kristina brin
glue From Pig boNes is useD To imProve
THe QuAliTy oF leATHer For THe
ProDucTioN oF sHoes AND oTHer ProDucTs.
48 49
image by yves Netzhammer
selected by etoy.corPorATioN
A local novelist spent ten years writing a book about our region and its inhabitants, which,
when completed, added up to more than a thousand pages. exhausted by her effort, she at last
sent it off to a publisher, only to be told that it would have to be cut by nearly half. Though
daunted by the work ahead of her, the novelist was encouraged by the publishers interest and
spent more than a year excising material.
but by the time she reached the requested length, the novelist found it diffcult to stop. in the
early days of her editing, she would struggle for hours to remove words from a sentence, only
to discover that a paragraph was better off without it. soon she discovered that removing
sentences from a paragraph was rarely as effective as cutting entire paragraphs, nor was selec
tively erasing paragraphs from a chapter as satisfying as eliminating chapters entirely. After
another year, she had whittled the book down into a short story, which she sent to magazines.
multiple rejections, however, drove her back to the chopping block, where she reduced her
story to a vignette, the vignette to an anecdote, the anecdote to an aphorism, and the aphorism,
at last, to this haiku:
Tiny upstate town
undergoes many changes
Nonetheless endures
unfortunately, no magazine would publish the haiku. The novelist has printed it on note cards,
which she can be found giving away to passersby in our town park, where she is also known
sometimes to sleep, except when the police, whose thuggish tactics she so neatly parodied
in her original manuscript, bring her in on charges of vagrancy. i have a copy of the haiku
pinned above my desk, its note card grimy and furred along the edges from multiple profferings,
and i read it frequently, sometimes with pity but always with awe.
breVItY
J. roberT leNNoN
50 51
eNTry #1
i feel my eyes drying up. i am lost in a desert of broken letters.
struck by a sudden premonition i see my next two weeks before me: working day and night
proofreading a dictionary that translates between two languages, neither of which i understand
a single word.
Today has been a technical research day. How to digitize a dictionary. How to wield the
computing power for my needs. How to teach a blind computer to read.
The frst goal: to build a database of the skolt smi language. An endangered language in
the arctic regions of northern Norway, Finland and russia.
The next goal: to travel to northern Finland and russia and collect samples of all the words
of the skolt smi language. To record one informant per letter of the alphabet reading the
words to the camera.
The fnal goal: to construct an art installation for the east smi museum currently being
built in Neiden, Norwayan exhibition of the totality of a language. one by one the words will
be given to the visitors. one word each, given as a taskfor the visitor to take responsibility
for and remember for the future.
eNTry #2THe beAuTy oF ToTAliTy
by now i probably own the largest library of skolt smi to Finnish language dictionaries in
the world. except for a few eighteenthcentury skoltgerman dictionaries that i saw in the
Humboldt university library in berlin last month, i have gathered all i could fnd.
The sum total is four books and one bad photocopy from the 80s.
They vary greatly in size and quality, and i have tested my way through them all in the
hope of fnding a candidate for scanning and optical character recognition.
Finally today, a breakthrough. A 1988 dictionary by mosnikoff and sammallahti seems to
have all the necessary ingredients: the copy is in strong black and white ink, the c does
not look like an e (who would have thought that this would be the greatest of challenges for
the digitizing community?) and in this copy all the special letters of the skolt smi language
are possible to separate from each other. The d from the d, the k from the k, the from the ,
the and , and and , not to mention the , , and g .
The younger a writing system is, the closer the relationship between the letters and their
corresponding phonetic sounds. Nothing is hidden in the written language of the skolt smi.
No silent characters or mysterious pronunciationswhat you read is what you hear.
After a week of proofreading i am starting to get a close relationship with these characters.
Their sounds roll silently in my mouth while i stare at the enlarged scans. Teaching the com
puter to understand them all takes patience, but gives a rare glimpse into the microscopic
world of the letter. The shapes of the characters are blown up until i see every molecule of ink
traversing the topography of the paper.
eNTry #3Numbers
The number of words in skolt (as in all other living languages) is infnite, explains michael
riessler, head of the kola saami Documentation Project in our frst email exchange.
And besides this every skolt speaker has a different stock of words in her or his mind. if you
restrict yourself only to the stock of words found in the existing skolt dictionaries (ignoring the
fact that not all words found in the dictionaries are representative of an individual skolt smi
speakers language) you end up with about 10,000 recorded words multiplied by more than
thirty letters of the alphabet. Any linguist would envy you such a collection of recorded words!
The facts are not very uplifting: Among the 6,500 living languages in the world, there are
four smi languages spoken in the kola region (including northern Finland): skolt, Akkala, kildin,
and Ter. of these, Akkala is now extinct, its last speaker having passed away in 2003. Ter smi
in the murmansk region has about thirty speakers, all aged over ffty. kildin smi has about
three hundred active speakers. skolt smi has around three hundred speakers on the Finnish
side of the border and about twenty, all old, on the russian side (who speak a special russian
dialect of skolt).
but michaels comments make me rethink my melancholic impression of skolt smi as a
dying language. infnity is a powerful concept to bring into any refection. if every speakers vo
cabulary is potentially infnite or to be regarded as a part of infnity (which in itself would be
infnite), then a dying language is not ceasing to exist by slowly shrinking in size as one would
expect (due to forgetfulness, language shift or some other kind of deterioration of the collective
memory). it is still present and alive in its vibrant infnity even with only one speaker left on
earth (or maybe two? Does not a language need a listener? or maybe it is suffcient with only
one subject speaking to him or herself? i guess that would be the perfect communication:
the last speaker of a dead language muttering to himself).
eNTry #4PHoNeTic AlcHemy
The metaphor of dying and living languages is based on an outdated romantic notion of the
organic nature of languages. Thus there is a need to revisit the dialectic of the death and life of
languages to view the languageimage from a fresh angle. The philosopher Walter benjamin
writes in the introduction to his essay on goethes elective affnities:
The history of works prepares for their critique, and thus historical distance increases their
power. if, to use a simile, one views the growing work as a burning funeral pyre, then the com
mentator stands before it like a chemist, the critic like an alchemist. Whereas, for the former,
wood and ash remain the sole objects of his analysis, for the latter only the fame itself preserves
an enigma: that of what is alive. Thus, the critic inquires into the truth, whose living fame
continues to burn over the heavy logs of what is past and the light ashes of what has been
experienced.
the sKOlt sMI lANGuAGe MeMOrY PrOjeCt
esPeN sommer eiDe
52 53
in the analogy given by benjamin, it would appear that the critic does the same historic and
linguistic analysis as the historian, or commentator. but their aims and effects are vastly
different. While the commentator wishes only to enlighten the reader about the possible mean
ings of old words and passages, the critics detailed analysis destroys the wholeness of the
work and rekindles the fre of what is alive. The process is made more potent by the history that
has prepared it: the more obscure and forgotten the work the better suited it is for a philo
sophical and artistic critique.
replacing the concept of work with language one can perhaps glimpse a more complex
dialectic at play. in the realm of language, benjamins destructionthroughanalysis is compara
ble to the effect of the archive: a dictionary or database of language samples, each analysed
into every last phoneme. The archive kills the living language in order to preserve it, but at the
same moment creates its potential alchemical transformation into new life.
eNTry #5AuToDAF
Today: the frst tests of the recording and archiving system. everything has to work perfectly
before we take it into the feld in a couple of months. The skolt speakers will be flmed in their
home surroundings looking into the camera. The words of the dictionary will appear on the
screen before them and they will read them aloud one by one. each word will be stored as a
separate video fle on the computer.
A dictionary is in essence artifcial. only some rare kinds of poetry can bring life into a list
of words starting with the same letter, and even then it is seldom systematically alphabetical in
its construction. The sorting of a language alphabetically is like taking apart a human body
and then stitching it together by placing the organs and limbs next to each other by similar size
or some other secondary property.
The choice of the dictionary as the image of language is the complete opposite of language
aslife. if languages are organic and alive by nature then the language memory Project would
seem to spell out a death sentence for the skolt smi language.
To make matters worse i am asking thirty representatives of the language to become
dictionary robots, reading aloud only individual wordsthe atoms of their living languagein
a room with no listeners. on the Finnish side this will involve about 10% of the skolt smi com
munity, on the russian side, 100%. in effect they will be atomizing their own language into
a list of dead, alphabetized items.
All the while i will be there silently flming the spectaclethis burning funeral pyre of a
selfdestructing language.
eNTry #6lANguAge AND Time
usually one considers language to be distributed in space, by its agents in their geographical
area. The informants we have contacted are living along a 230 km route from Neiden in Norway
to Nellim in Finland. lake after lake. NtmkirakkajrvisevettijrvisupruNitsijrviand
then a longer stretch to the areas of ivalo and Nellim.
in this project a language will instead be distributed in time. one word at a timethroughout
the months, or yearsthe installation in the east smi museum will parse the dictionary de
pending on the number of visitors passing by. The beginning of the skolt smi language mem
ory Project speeds up history, that is, the inevitable entropy of an endangered language. The
end of the project slows it down again to the point of exhibiting a frozen distribution of a lan
guage in time.
(one side effect of this distribution will be the dissociation of the language from the normal
identity discourse of indigenous people. legally, to be counted as smi you have to document
that your parents, grandparents or greatgrandparents spoke a smi language. language is
the principal marker of your identity, which may increase cultural isolation. in this case the lan
guage will be given to allputting into question this identity marker. An alphabet revolution).
eNTry #7THe mAgicAl ProPerTies oF AN ArcHive
Dismembering the semiotic, communicative from the phonetic, lexical aspect of language
opens up the possibility of magical correspondences. The onomatopoetic, the alphabetic, the
mimetic. The mysterious shapes of individual letters, the picture puzzle of the word. language
becomes an archive of unintentional similarities ready for a reader who will connect the dots.
The reader then becomes a bearer, a medium for the magical aspect of a shadow language.
54 55
dOMI MAGIstrOruM
lINGuAe lAtINAe IslANdICOruM
DANel mAgNssoN
Homes of latin teachers in iceland
56 57
58 59
sceNe 1
a hot summer day. industrial premises surrounded by a blue wire fence. a freestanding sign,
also blue, with plain white letters: the chybie sugar factOry.
an old redbrick building full of obsolete flmmaking equipment: a flm editing table, storage
for canned flm reels, and a makeshift cinema with projection booth
four big, swivel armchairs placed around a low table from the 1980s. a tall, middle-aged
man, franciszek dzida, founder of amateur film club Klaps, chybie (1966), places a box of
sugar cubes from the factory on the table.
FrANcisZek DZiDA
i was employed as a technician in the sugar factory; around me there were metal workers and
electricians. i proposed setting up a flm club in the factory. This was to become our window
onto the world, to allow us to break away from our provincial vision and this smalltown men
tality. i needed it immensely, not because i felt oppressed by the systemeveryone could fnd
a way around that!
laughter
it was a chance to mark our presence. being an artist was one way of marking that presence.
When my colleagues joined the klaps club, it changed them enormously. cinema transformed
them.
We felt like different people, exactly as it was shown by kieslowski in that famous fnal
scene of camera buff when Filip turns the camera towards himself. He changes as a person
when the camera starts to record his own life instead of being simply a toy.
i would like to emphasize that this place, this club, thanks to celluloid flm, was a place
where another world ruled.
it was a magical place. People who used to attend our meetings realized they were entering
another reality, the real world as created by us. its where our love for feature flms originated.
you stopped being a metal worker or an electrician and became an artist. regardless of
your skills, here you could express something; here you had something to say.
sceNe 2
Poznan. a clear, sunny winters day, smoke from a distant factory chimney smears the horizon.
a typical socialist cultural centre, and off a long corridor a door with a small plastic sign:
aKf (flm club) aWa, Poznan.
a typical club room, dusty equipment, a shelf with trophies, a notice board with photographs
documenting visits from Kieslowski, Karabasz, Zagroba, a wall of old festival posters, a low
table, shabby armchairs.
a group of middle-aged men chat. the eldest, jerzy jernas, starts telling his story about the
beginnings of the club. Others listen, taking turns to join in.
JerZy JerNAs
it was important that we actually belonged to the club. spending time there occupied a consid
erable part of our lives. it was our second home. We formed a strong community, talked
about flms and about life and hung out a lot. We travelled to festivals together, went on holiday,
and went camping at the summer flm festival in Agw for many years. strong emotional
bonds still exist amongst the former club members.
As with the majority of beginners, our attempts at making feature flms were embarrassing.
We had problems with sound and there was no dialogue. but, perhaps this was benefcial
because all those limitations forced us to think.
The most common practice was to make an amateur flm collectively, in cooperation with
friends. Zinczuk and i were partners but the fnal decision was usually taken by one of us. if we
had three minutes of flm and a springwinding camera could hold only thirty seconds, it taught
us a great discipline. if you have only three minutes to use, you have to think ten times about
what to shoot. videotape which costs almost nothing is a curse; you shoot a lot, thinking it will
be edited somehow later. but its not true, it never gets edited, and a lot of trash remains.
learning from the classics was a lesson of discipline.
We werent forced to do anything, we only occasionally had to make a flm celebrating the
factorys anniversary. something similar to a commercial nowadays. This was taken for granted
and in no way interfered with the making of our own flms. We didnt identify with those
commissioned jobs but at the same time we were aware that flm can serve as propaganda.
We wanted to talk about our own lives and our own worlds, which didnt resemble what was
shown by the offcial city or factory newsreels.
eNthusIAsts sPeAKING
Neil cummiNgs & mArysiA leWANDoWskA
60 61
shivram would often bring his autorickshaw to the cremation ground in the mornings, to wash
it at the tap. The cremation ground was very quiet at that time. if, while he was there, a dead
body happened to be brought in, shivram would halt his cleaning and step into the procession
of mourners. soon, he began to leave his autorickshaw at the cremation ground in the evening,
after his work was over for the day. every evening, he saw a pyre burning. often there would
be people standing around it. but at times there were pyres that burned unattended, fickering
in solitude.
taa-ta-taa... tha-tha-thaiyya... here, where there are no listeners, no one chases them away.
it is here that one can often fnd himthe one known in the neighbourhood by different names,
each one more disparaging than the last. his gatherings have no fxed time, no schedule.
When the city administration ordered that autorickshaws run on a new fuel, the change was
too extreme for shivram. He began to spend his entire day at the cremation ground.
Flour, lentils, rice, clothes, and all the things people gave away in the name of the one who
had died, would be used by the priests wife. shivram would get his afternoon meal from her.
He didnt have to do much to earn this mealjust show a dead body to an empty place, and get
the priests signature on the slip authorising the cremation. He wasnt paid to do this.
shivram would sleep at the cremation ground at night. His salary had tied him to his home,
and this fragile tie was now broken. His hands were empty.
hands would beat the drum, and hearing this sound, he would cross every threshold of
drunkenness. his frenzied feet swifter than lightening; his nimble body like a weed swaying
dangerously in a ferce, unforeseen storm.
When someone spends time in a place, he begins to show signs of belonging to it, and even
a passerby notices and responds. The people who came to the cremation ground in the com
pany of a dead body were not prepared to fnd someone like shivram there. some of the things
they previously offered to a dead body before it was set on fre they now began to give to him.
it is dark in the lane now. the bottle is empty. this roof is on the seventh foor. like countless
nights that have passed, and all those nights still to come, it begins from his feet. tha-tha-thai-
yya... till his hips gyrate to a rhythm that he alone knows. then the tips of his bodyhis head,
his fngersstir. his torso sways. every pore of his body secretes a music, each cell that makes
him stirs. he begins to dance.
A lIfetIMe
lAkHmi cHAND koHli
3rD PeloToN PoNToNNiers coNsTrucTiNg
A bAiley briDge Across THe river mAAs AT
Well limburg iN 1953.
image selected by Harold de bree.
62 63
he cant piece together how things changed for him. but he knows something inside him was
cast away, was slowly pushed aside and locked out by his surroundings. the climb up the
forty steps to the roof on the seventh foor was a daily passage to solitude, so he could be alone
with what was precious to him.
The bier of a woman. many came with it. she was young. many saris adorned her bier. over
them lay glass bangles, sandals, a makeup boxobjects that accompany a bride. everyone was
crying. They had brought the wood for the pyre with them. everyone does. The man carrying
a little boy seemed to be her husband, and the little boy her son.
she was laid beside cremation lot number 9, the place that had been assigned to her.
Her body was placed over the pyre. Those who accompanied her slowly began to move away,
and sat down on the benches by the room where they keep the objects left over from a
cremation. The pyre continued to burn.
there was a time when the roof was not all he had.
the courtyard was open to the sky. it was past midnight, and there was no sign of sleep in
his eyes. the drum beat loudly. voices sang. among these, another voicebut it didnt sound
like someone was singing; it sounded like a beast letting out a wail. it was his voice.
everyone waited for the ash to cool down. When the last wisp of smoke had risen from the
ashes, the ones waiting to take away the leftovers rushed forward. shivram stopped them,
Dont you dare! He quietly gathered up the clothes and objects, and took them to the priests
house. The priests wife selected some saris and said to shivram, Here, you take the rest.
he stood barefoot in the courtyard. the night was ice-cold. many of the guests were snuggled
inside blankets. he danced before them, his feet trembling on the thin carpet rolled out on the foor.
the frst woman who danced up to him was the grandmother of the newborn. she danced
along with him for a while to celebrate, then withdrew. another woman got up to dance, then
another. they soon tired. he was the axis around which everyone twirled. he drew his moves
from a repertoire that had been chiselled over generations. they needed him, needed all that he
brought with him that night. all night, they admired him, trying to get their own moves to reso-
nate with his. he was their cupbearer for the night.
by the time dawn broke, the entire gathering had joined him. caught in the throes of the
nights last remaining breath, everyone danced as if to pass him their own strength. even those
who didnt know the songs sang along.
The next morning, the priests wife asked him, so, did your wife like the saris?
His wife had refused to allow the packet to be brought inside her home. The saris had
lain outside the door the entire night, and in the morning they were given away to the frst person
who came asking for alms.
shivram went up to lot number 9. it was his task to gather up the remains in a black cloth,
write the number of the cremation lot, the time of cremation and the gender of the deceased
on the cloth, and deposit the bundle in the room where many peoples remains hang in small
black bags.
every night, he climbs the stairs to the roof, his body swaying. sometimes he brings his glass
of drink up with him. his brother knows he is unmindful of the steps, inattentive to the climb. he
stays close behind. their footsteps echo in the dark. he mumbles to himself, but his voice turns
quiet as he passes the open doors on all those foors. the rebukes are not new to his ears. there
he goes again! however softly he tries to go, he can hear someone say this. he continues up
the stairs and disappears onto the roof.
then it is his voice that echoes down the stairs.
my lover, he beats the drums, yes the drums.
Oh, but i have been cursed by some wretched widower!
The outer walls of the room have an uneven texture. its unpaved ground is hard. unpainted
from inside, the room draws colour from the slant of the suns rays. At night it becomes deep,
dark black. A dungeon from which there can never be a way out.
All the things that come into the cremation ground with a dead body are kept here. A haze
hangs over them. red bangles, saris, shoes, earthen pots, cots, clothes, a broken cot. This
room, which has no door, is their custodian. once they enter this room, these objects disappear
from the world. even ragpickers forget they exist.
he stops and reaches out for the drum. he is shivering slightly, as if softly surrendering himself
to the energy of the things that still remain inside him, letting his body heed their call. he starts
to sing and beat the drum, summoning the gatherings of the time that has passed. gatherings
which used to sing, sway, danceand which warded off the time when all this would be lost.
now roused, he begins to dance, returning to the drum, playing on it again and again. One can
hear the drum beating on the roof far into the night. there is no easy way of keeping those
worlds, which he had once known, alive inside him.
64 65
shivram was looking for a hook on which to hang the small black bundle he had made to hold
the remains. Thick smoke crept into the room. His eyes caught sight of the dates written
on four bundles hanging from a hook. Three were from september 2004. The one he held in his
hand was of 2007.
shivram went deeper into the room. many bags hung on one of the walls. As if someone
had hung his precious things there, so he may not forget them. or as if they are totems to keep
the evil spirit away. The dates on these bags were hidden beneath layers of dust. shivram
cleared the dust with the tips of his fngers. 2001, 1999, 1998, 1995.
the door creaks and shuts.
it has now been eight years since he began climbing up to this roof. rain or hail, nothing
has ever been able to stop him.
shivrams eyes swept over the room. Along a black bundle hung a sari, here a knife, here a
waistcloth. one black bundle was fat, another thinner than the others. He stood there, trying to
make out which was from a man, which from a woman, who had been thin and who had
died fat. everyone hung there through the logic of dates. When someone had died could be
known, but not how many generations he had seen in his lifetime.
AlmosT every NigHT, my FATHer useD To lAy mANy sHeeTs oF
PAPer eNDToeND Across our lArge kiTcHeN, WHere THe resT oF
THe FAmily WAs PlAyiNg Poker. He WoulD THeN cAligrAPH A
TexT Across THe WHole roW oF PAges, oNly breAkiNg oFF WHeN
He reAcHeD THe WAll.
He WoulD sPeND THe eNTire eveNiNg WorkiNg oN His PAges.
AFTerWArDs, He WoulD DesTroy THem.
image and text by Hiwa k.
Text translated from the Hindi by shveta sarda
66 67
every time i translate syed mujtoba Ali, i start with a recitation of facts. Familiar to bengalis,
unknown to everyone else. This time as well...?
mujtoba was one of the famous indian writers, emerging from the bengal renaissance and
the end of the british colonies. unusually for a muslim, he penetrated deep inside Hindu
bhadralok (genteel) circles, reaching the bastion of exclusivity by becoming a professor at
shantiniketan. He pulled off a delicate taskrespect in indias literary circles, and popularity
among the plebsand he was a roving artist in europe in the 1930s, existing seamlessly in
many cities and countries. He was not the familiar fgure of todays economic or political refu
gee, but an intellectual and cultural exile, his bohemian nature putting him at odds with the
indian middle class, but at home on european streets.
This many decades later, translating his text or his life is an uphill task. The genius of his
chosen forma cocktail of languages, puns, double entendres, insider references, and
metanarrativesis lost in translation. i get wistful when i reread mujtobas stories.
1
cafs, din
ner parties, card games, Herrs and Frauleins and mademoiselles. Now, when bangladeshis
are scattered all over the world, selling fowers in italy and postcards in london, i wonder how
mujtoba passed with such ease in that society. stories of oldworld, melancholy afternoons
in Parisian cafs sit uneasily with schengen zone realities.
consider his story of a showdown with italian customs. His friend Jhanduda is carrying a
tin of vacuumpacked sweetsthe mythic bengali dessert roshogolla (literally, orb full of juice).
When a customs offcer insists on checking the tin, the following scene breaks out. can we
imagine a world where we can squash a sweet into a customs offcers face and not immediately
get arrested? How delicious then, this slice of mujtobas europe.
immigrATioN (1960)
2
the devil immediately pulled out a tin-opener from under the counter. there was no lack of
guillotines during the french revolution either. jhandu-da studied the tin-opener and repeated,
remember, you have to taste the sweets to make sure they are real. the customs offcer
gave a thin little smile. the sort of smile we give if our lips are cracked from the winter chill.
jhandu-da cut the tin open. Well, what else would come out? roshogolla. forgetting any
formalities with fork and knife, he started picking sweets with two arched fngers and giving them
out. first to the bengalis, then all the indians, then fnally the french, germans, italians
and spaniards.
the french went, epat! the germans, fantastisch! italians, of course, said bravo!
spaniards, delicioso, delicioso! finally, the arabs, ya salam, ya salam!
the entire customs offce was swallowing roshogolla. the air was full of that sweet scent.
Only with cubist or dadaist techniques could you draw a picture of that scene. meanwhile,
jhandu-da was leaning heavily against the counter and saying to the offcer, in bengali, come
on, just try one. in his hand was a juicy roshogolla. the offcer put on a serious face and shook
his head.
jhandu-da leaned forward even more and said, look, everyone is eating it. its not cocaine,
not opium after all. the offcer shook his head again.
suddenly, jhandu-da slid his entire belly on the counter, grabbed the offcers collar and
squashed the roshogolla into his nose.
damn you, you wont eat it? your whole family will eat it! you think this is a joke? i told you
a million times, dont make me open it, they will all spoil, the little one will be crushed! but no
you wouldnt listen
by then the customs house was in chaos. in a strangled voice the offcer started screaming
for help. he cried not just for guards, but il duce mussolini, consuls, ministers, ambassadors,
and even Plenipotentiaries. mother mary, holy jesus and the Pope thrown in for good measure.
and why shouldnt there be a fuss? this was a totally illegal act. if you try to stop a government
offcial by crushing him with your one-hundred-and-twenty-kilo body and force-feeding him,
whether you feed him sweets or arsenic is irrelevantyou can defnitely go to jail for this. in italy,
you could hang for lesser crimes.
five of us grabbed jhandus waist and tried to drag him off the counter. jhandu-das voice
kept rising octave after octave, Oh you wont eat it, sweetheart? you wont? ill make you eat it
now! the customs offcer kept calling for the police. but his cries were so weak, i felt like i was
receiving a long distance call from my golden homeland india. but where on earth were the
police? the french lawyer raised two hands in prayer and offered unsolicited commentary, this
is truly a holy land, this venice, this italy. even the indian sweet can create miracles by making
all offcials disappear. this tops even the miracle of milan! this is the miracle of roshogolla!
by now, we had managed to get jhandu-da off the counter. as the offcer pulled out a hand-
kerchief to wipe off the debris, jhandu-da yelled, dont you dare wipe that off. that will serve as
your witness in courtexhibit number one!
Within three minutes, the head offcer made his way through the crowd. Walking up to the
offcer, with an open box, jhandu-da said, signor, before you proceed with your cross-
examination, please try one of these indian sweets.
the offcer put one sweet inside his mouth and closed his eyes for two-and-a-half minutes.
With eyes still closed, he held out his hand. again. another. now jhandu-da said, a drop of
chianti? like an agonized Kadambini came the cry, no. more sweets. finally. the tin was empty.
the customs offcer made his complaint at last.
the head offcer replied, you did very well to open that tin, otherwise how would we get to
taste it? then looking at us, he yelped, What are you all staring at? go get some more ro-
shogollas! as we quietly crept out, we heard him berating his junior offcer, you are an absolute
ass! you open the tin and you dont try this delicious object?
the italian poet vincenzo de filicaja wrote,
AMPhIbIAN MAN
NAeem moHAiemeN
1. in the eightvolume revised edition from Dhaka /
Dacca or the elevenvolume original from kolkata / calcutta.
2. roshogolla, monthly basumati, chaitra 1363
(bengali year) (1960).
68 69
italy italy, why did you hold such beauty in you
there must be tragedies written in your fate.
and so i say
O roshogolla, why did you hold such sweetness in you
italians forget their true christian religion
and fall at your feet today.
People fnd many reasons to resurrect historic fgures. mujtobas breakthrough novel deshe
bideshe (home and abroad) was an extended travel journal that brought him instant fame
in bengal. but as the travel genre became dated, literary historians focused on his muslim iden
tity. such an identity is too narrow, because mujtoba broke out of every proscribed confne
(sylheti, muslim, bengali, bangladeshi, indian, Asian). like Nobel laureate rabrindanath Tagore,
who insisted on translating his own works from bengali into english, mujtoba embraced
english, French, german, and in fact europe itself, just at the time when muslim revivalists
were insisting that english was the language of the colonizers, and that decolonization warriors
must learn Arabic and urdu.
mADemoiselles (1952)
3
you cant spend all your time at the national library or guimet museum. i had already enjoyed
all the joie-de-vivre of Paris. i was walking among the crowds on Place de la madeleine when
suddenly i heard behind me, bonsoir, monsieur le docteur!
i turned and saw a girl who looked like one of the millions of french beauties. With a ready
pout on her face, she said, Oh, now you dont remember me! but you knew me even before you
met your new love, Paris!
as a schoolboy, a sudden slap from the teacher would remind me what the capital of
montenegro was. just like that, it came to meof course, i had met her on the train from
marseilles when i frst arrived in france. my hat was already off, now i added a bow and plead-
ed, a thousand pardons and i beg your forgiveness, mademoiselle chatineau! When it comes
to high courtesy, there is much similarity between Paris and lucknow. if you ever leave
your book of Parisian etiquette at home, dont hesitate for a secondjust start using that an-
tique lucknow style. it works like a charm.
my memories of mujtoba start with my mother. These things always do. mother sits and
embroiders complicated designs on saris. mother talks about my eldest aunt dressing up to
meet mujtobas german girlfriend.
Waithe had a german girlfriend?
Not one, several... Well, no one used words like that.
Words like what?
girlfriend.
right, ok (i brush it aside)but was there really?
Well i know they got dressed up to meet her. i never heard anything more.
you never heard if she was pretty or not? How could that be?
Well i did hear that she was older. but wait dont talk about this. This is not an interesting story.
its interesting to me.
iTAliAN WomeN (1956)
4
in english, you say carrying coals to newcastle, in gujarati full pitcher to the river, and in
french, why, taking your wife to Paris. the french phrase is tasty. but the question remains,
are french beauties really that generous?
first, french women are truly beautiful. english women have boy faces, german women are
blunt, italian women look a bit like indians (why go to europe for that?). and balkan girls,
their lovers are always in a killing mood (saving oneself is the frst rule). and one more thing
french girls really know how to dress, with very little money, very little material.
but beauty is not always the frst thing that pulls us in. in countries where courtship is the
norm (not ours), i have often see beauties go wanting while plain girls tear up the town with
fantastic husbands. so is it that people look for beauty for love, but something else for marriage.
are they two different instincts? its possible, i suppose.
a german girl will treat a guest very well, maybe even fall in love deeper than the french.
but you will always remain an auslander to her, always the foreigner. the french girl divides the
world in a different way. for her there are two types of peoplecultivated and uncultivated.
The reason for this conversation. mother worries (occasionally). Her son has vague work and a
roving life. A bit too similar to stories she heard about her uncle, mujtoba Ali. of course its
preposterous, looking for mujtoba traces in my life. but as the joke goes, every bengali mother
thinks her son is Jesus
in mothers memory, mujtoba was too brilliant to be a family man. He was always in Paris,
berlin, london, vienna. Hardly ever in his hometown Dacca.
so you see, it is not good to have too many girlfriends (mother says).
He seems to have had a grand time.
yes grand time, but in the end he came back to marry a bengali girl. After all that.
Well why did he?
He knew the german girlfriend would not work. No one would accept it.
How do you know no one would?
i know these things.
3. Punoshcho, desh magazine, sharadiya issue 1355
(bengali) (1952).
4. Paris, Panchatantra, bengal Publishers, calcutta,
70 71
lADies oF THe NigHT (1952)
5
in india, the hindus go to Kashi, the muslims go to mecca, in europe all the disciples head to
Paris in search of the meaning of life.
as the disciples walked down the streets, at every step you would hear the sweet tones
of bonsoir monsieur, may your evening go well. if you responded to the siren callwell, what
happens next, i have no personal experience, nor do i crave that experience. i have no need
to become emile Zolas tragic hero. i still havent been able to digest what sarat chatterji wrote,
leave alone Zola.
i was a little lost in thought, otherwise i would have never replied to that last bonsoir. as
soon as the words were out of my mouth, i realized i had made a mistake. handling two beauties
in one night was beyond my meagre strength. my ancestors handled four beauties at the same
time. my generations fall from those heights was quite pronounced.
What was such a fawless vision doing on the streets? it is true, what tulsi das once said,
the universe travels along such strange paths. the bartender sits in his tavern and sells wine,
and there is no end to the crowds. yet the poor milk-seller has to go from door to door to
try to sell his milk.
i said, Please dont be offended, but i cant quite place where i met you.
What to do now, she had started to walk with me. if she wasnt one of the vendors of life, why
was she walking with me? and why not say somethinggood or bad? no more of this, i would
leave Paris tomorrow! i prefer my crosswords to be in the morning newspaper, not on the streets.
crosswords and puzzles. Teasing out memories of mujtoba. Paradoxically, though there are
many more possibilities for travel today, mujtobas easy and intimate relationship to europe ac
quires a sharp edge in the light of contemporary discomforts with outsiders. in the era of
Fortress europe, he seems an improbable fgurealmost as the title character of a russian nov
el popular in 1970s Dhaka: ubhochor manobfsh in water, man on land. swimming in and
out of cultural spaces, across borders, with impossible ease.
i pretend not to give you a perfect and complete history of my island, because i was a meer
youth when i left it, but nineteen years of age, and therefore incapable of giving an exact
account of it. besides, i have now six years from home, so many things of moment may perhaps
slip my memory.
Preface to Psalmanazars Description of Formosa, 1704
in 1764 a book appeared in london with the title memoirs of ****, commonly Known by
the name of george Psalmanazar; a reputed native of formosa. in accordance with the authors
instructions it was published after his death, and it would probably have attracted little
interest today had it not contained surprising revelations about a celebrated book published
sixty years earlier.
When it came out in April 1704, an historical and geographical description of formosa
was applauded as the most thorough study yet written of Formosa (presentday Taiwan). The
book described in minute detail the history of the island, as well as its political system,
customs, economy, language, architecture and forms of dress. it also recounted the life of the
author, a native of the island who was newly converted to Anglicanism after having escaped
the Jesuit inquisition. Part ethnographic study emphasizing the strangeness of the Formosan
culture, part satire of the Jesuit order, and part confession of an authentic Formosan native, the
book quickly gained an avid audience all across europe. For a while the authors name was
on every lip. He received the offcial protection of the bishop of london. He taught the Formosan
language at oxford university. certain passages of a modest Proposal (1729) by Jonathan
swift were inspired by Psalmanazars book. in his biography of samuel Johnson, one of the
most infuential literary critics of his age, James boswell reports: When i asked Dr Johnson, who
was the best man he had known? Psalmanazar, was the unexpected reply: he said; likewise.
1

Despite all this, george Psalmanazar (1679?1753) never went to Formosa. His Formosa was
a pure invention, and only his posthumous confession revealed the deception.
We know little about Psalmanazar. even his real name remains unknown.
2
everything is as
if he wanted to ensure that all the information we have about him today came from his own
writing. At the end of his life, his autobiography provided a coherence that his deceptions and
omissions had previously made impossible. it gave a unity to his lifes journey, which he
presented as a succession of games of identity, fuid and fexible.
Psalmanazar was born in the south of France, a region with strong heretic traditions, in about
1679. He was brought up by Franciscans at frst, then Jesuits and then Dominicans. Then,
assuming the identity of an irishman persecuted in his own country, he travelled around the
south of France and germany, earning his money from begging. He was drafted as a soldier, and
escaped being executed as a spy when he passed himself off as a Japanese man from Formosa,
already using the name Psalmanazar. in 1702, his regiment arrived in sluis in the Netherlands,
where he met a scottish chaplain, William innes. innes invited the Japanese man to his
the GhOst Of fOrMOsA
cDric viNceNT
5. Punoshcho, op. cit.
72 73
home and, seeing through his deception, forced him to confess. but rather than denouncing
him, innes saw an opportunity for money and fame, and decided instead to support him in his
dissimulation. He forced the young Psalmanazar to convert to Anglicanism, and chose george
as his baptismal name. From Japanese he became Formosan. in 1703, innes took him to
london where, as the frst Formosan to join the Anglican church, he received a warm welcome
from the church authorities. description of formosa, written in the space of two months,
and initially in latin, came out in english in 1704. Psalmanazar continued to play the Formosan
until 1728 when, after a serious illness, he decided to begin another life. He left london and
renounced his stipends. To earn a living he found employment carrying out obscure tasks for
librarians. He acquired a justifed reputation as a man of erudition. He had always had a gift for
languages, and now he learned syrian and Hebrew, which he used in his collaboration with
Archibald bower on an universal history, from the earliest account of time. bower then asked
him to edit the articles concerning china and Japan for his complete system of geography
(1747). in the course of this writing he denounced the machinations of a supposed native of
Formosa named Psalmanazar, alerting the public to the impostor. but no one noticed.
Psalmanazar was the embodiment of his own deception, unlike other famous eighteenth
century frauds such as Thomas chatterton and James macpherson, whose pretence rested on
the discovery of medieval or celtic poetry they had in fact written themselves. He did not pose
as an explorer publishing the journals of his travels in Formosa; he chose to be a Formosan
bearing witness to his own life. His life remained the primary evidence for the authenticity of his
descriptions of Formosa, and the deception required daring. He had to be different, but not
so much that he would appear dissonant, and beyond assimilation. As a member of the
Formosan nobility converted to Anglicanism, Psalmanazar seems to have found a reassuring
balance between the exotic and the familiar. The more he emphasized the savagery of
Formosan society, the more he was taken for a sincere informant who would not hesitate to
denounce the crimes of his people, and the more he demonstrated how successful was
his adaptation to european society. Nonetheless, it is true that his alien identity kept him on
the margins of society, and relegated him to a very circumscribed position. moreover, we have
to consider the reasons why the deception of this noble savage was not revealed by his
physical appearance, especially as some witnesses attested that he had blond hair. in fact, the
ability of eighteenthcentury europeans to analyse or even to perceive other cultures worked
on very different principles than those that might obtain today. in many cases, geographical
origins were not denoted by physical appearance, especially by skin colour. if Psalmanazar was
able to satisfy his european audience as to his Formosan origins, it was by more contingent
qualities such as behaviour, dress, religious practicesand language, the frst item in his exhi
bition.
3
The second was description of formosa, which he called his geographical novel.
The book forms part of a family of protoorientalist literature from that period, among which
socalled tales from the antipodes and robinsonnades were highly popular genres, even if
they were read with some mistrust. These texts were received variously as fact or fction.
robinson crusoe (1719), for example, was read by many as a factual account.
4
While Daniel
Defoe warned his readers against fake chroniclers, he was prepared to use their strategies
to give his plot extra dramatic verisimilitude. description of formosa followed the procedures and
conventions of factual writing, and its reports were appropriately illustrated with engravings.
The authority of the printed word extended the fame of the books author and helped to further
authenticate his imposture. but the book also went so far as to establish the norms by which
the authenticity of future manifestations of Formosanness would be judged. After the publica
tion of his book, Psalmanazar would be obliged to eat raw meat and roots on occasion, to con
form with its descriptions of Formosans, and he would speak and write Formosan on request.
To those sceptics who cast doubts on his stories, Psalmanazar would respond with an
argument of irresistible logic: if i did not know my subject, or if i had invented the things i tell,
is it imaginable that i would contradict everything my predecessors said? The very fact that i
am in complete disagreement with their accounts is enough to prove my own veracity, without
me having to bore my readers with fastidious explanations. Psalmanazar wished to provide a
description as new and surprising as possible of Formosa, that is to say, as different as possible
from those of earlier travellersfor example by asserting that the island belonged to Japan,
while they were unanimous in declaring that it was occupied by china.
5
it is precisely in his
confrontations with those who thought his accounts lacked verisimilitude, or who pointed out
the differences between his account and those of witnesses returning from the island, that
Psalmanazars imposture gained the most strength, benefting from a sort of transfer of authority.
one of his greatest talents as an impostor was that he never contradicted himself, and never
retreated from his statements even in the face of the most destabilizing attacks. His most for
midable opponent was george candidius, a Dutch missionary who had spent ten years on For
mosa, and whose journals were also published in english in 1704. These writings represented
at that time the most trustworthy account of life in Formosa. Nevertheless, it was Psalmanazars
Formosa that gained the upper hand, for he argued that the missionary had not had access
to the heart of Formosan society, beyond the mountains. moreover, his Formosa was the one
that best corresponded to the horizon of expectations of the time, effectively providing words
for an existing fantasy, and feeding into the architecture of rumour, which disseminated his
vision of the island and kept it alive.
Psalmanazars Formosans transgressed all the most established of european taboos: he re
ported that they were polygamous, ate dead bodies and practised human sacrifce. At the very
beginning of the enlightenment and of the emergence of evolutionism, such horrible details
served to confrm europes sense of its own superiority. in this sense Psalmanazars deception
affrmed the dominant discourse and the future rationale of colonialism. it was in accordance
with the interests of the government, and it legitimized the coercion carried out against
socalled barbarism and the moral duty of evangelism. in this sense, Psalmanazars writing,
3. on these points see in particular michael keevak, the Pretended
asian. george Psalmanazars eighteenth-century hoax (Detroit:
Wayne university Press, 2004).
4. David Faucett, images of the antipodes in the eighteenth century:
a study in stereotyping (Amsterdam: rodopi, 1995).
5. Formosa had been under chinese control since 1683.
1. Quoted in Frederic J. Foley, the great formosan impostor
(Taipei: mei ya Publications, 1968), 62. This biographical work pro
vides my main informational basis, even though Foley does not
actually analyse the deception. The biographical summary given
here, and the quotations that follow, are taken from his book.
2. Psalmanazar derived his name from salmanazar,
an old Testament Assyrian king.
74 75
like other travel writing of the time, produced the rest of the world for european readers. The
mechanism of this process has been described well by mary louise Pratt: it did not report on
Formosa; it produced a Formosa for european consumption.
6
Travel writing produced places
that could be thought of as barren, empty, undeveloped, inconceivable, needful of european
infuence and control, ready to serve european industrial, intellectual, and commercial interests.
Psalmanazars false accounts also won favour for the way they played on more local issues.
in londons Protestant society, he obliquely criticized catholic ideas of the mass by describing
a distant isle where they were supposedly taken literally. His unrestrained descriptions of
the sacrifce of children caused a strong reaction in europe, not only because of what they re
vealed about distant Pacifc islands, but also for their implicit caricature of catholics, which
was much appreciated by Protestants.
by conforming his accounts to certain concerns prevalent in europe at the beginning of the
eighteenth century, Psalmanazar made Formosa exist as a placeworld, in conformity with what
such a place could produce in the imagination of european high societywhich, for its part,
could fnd in his reports the confrmation of its own representations. Thus Psalmanazar was able
to play on the expectations of his audiences in order to be Formosan. The trueseeming is
sometimes at odds with the true. The infuence of Psalmanazars descriptions was such that as
late as 1808 boucher de la richarderies bibliothque universelle des voyages would still draw
all its information about Formosa from them for want of other documents. Psalmanazar was still
the last word on the question, and retained his credibility.
ePilogue
Far from putting an end to the story, the posthumous confession of Psalmanazar transformed
it into a fascinating mystery. The shift from a serious simulation to one that was playful and
shared gave new power to the story by making Psalmanazar an extreme impostor whose
deception was no less than an exploit. Having captured the attention of the beginning of the
eighteenth century with his truth, his lies fed the imagination of the centuries that followed.
This arrogant trick, seemingly so impossible to pull off, has become an enigma, and his
story has never been completely forgotten. studies of impostors and false literary accounts
naturally give him a prominent place, whilst studies of mythical geography put him back into
the context of his time.
7
He inspired writers as different as swift, leibniz and Hemingway.
At the beginning of the twentieth century Psalmanazar would be taken up as a precursor of
surrealism, or a fou littraire. At the end of the same century, when anthropologists interrogated
themselves about the politics of their representations of the other, he represented a kind of
negative image of the ethnographer: the fake ethnographer.
8
Nevertheless, as michael keevak
points out, in so many ways his remarkable odyssey hardly seems to have gotten beyond
the letstellthestoryonemore time stage.
9

Partly because memoirs is the only source we have about Psalmanazars life, even if we are
justifably doubtful about the truthfulness of its contents. There is little chance now of discover
ing new facts, so there remains a good dose of mystery. it is as if the story demanded that
each generation rediscovered it, told it again, and interpreted it again according to its own
demands and preoccupations. in every instance, however, Psalmanazars extraordinary decep
tion is understood to be an anomalyan anomaly that confrms all our most dearly held
certainties, a return of the repressed whose causes need to be mastered in order for things to
return to normal.
6. mary louise Pratt, imperial eyes: travel Writing and
transculturation (london: routledge, 1992).
7. For instance in the dizionario delle lingue immaginarie by
Paolo Albani and berlinghiero buonarroti, or the dictionary
of imaginary Places by Alberto manguel.
8. Among these studies see rodney Needham, examplars (berkeley:
university of california Press, 1985); susan stewart, Antipodal
expectations: Notes on the Formosan ethnography of george
Psalmanazar, in georges W. stoking, ed., romantic motives: essays
on anthropological sensibility (madison: university of Wisconsin
Press, 1989), 4473; and Justin stagl, a history of curiosity: the
theory of travel 15501800 (Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995).
9. keevak, the Pretended asian, 13.
76 77
imAges oF youTH boxers TAkeN momeNTs
AFTer THeir DeFeAT iN THe NorWegiAN
NATioNAl cHAmPioNsHiP
uN-tItled
ove kvAvik
we get here? And what tools do we need to understand the shifts that have occurred, and
our current condition?
The great modernist notions of culturethe literary sense of culture as arts and letters and
the anthropological sense of culture as habits and customswere entirely inadequate to under
stand the culture industries and ideological state apparatuses that dominated the age of three
worlds. so new concepts, new frameworks were forged.
6
A bibliographical database as a new concept, a new framework? or is it a tool to trace
their creation and current state?
one of us wrote this paragraph to raqs media collective, while preparing our participation
in The rest of Now:
i am especially attracted to the slowing down and concentration aspects of your proposal, as
ccindex spurs from an acknowledgment of a lack of attention: to materials, to contexts, to dis-
courses, to histories, to the past and to the present. One of the paradoxes i fnd myself in is how
to address it through what might be considered yet another instance of information overload.
how to address it? i gather that it is important to make a distinction between knowledge and in-
formation and its access, but this is something that the tool itself cannot do. the database is
only activated by the intended user, and its purpose fulflled only if what is retrieved from it can be
accessed, seen and read. and this takes us back to concentration and time, which i would
imagine to be one of the required characteristics of scholarship and of the curious mind.
of the curious mind? How do curious minds get formed?
A groWiNg orgANism
What prompts us to ride a train to Queens to locate a british periodical published at the end of
the 1970s in london, black Phoenix: journal of contemporary art & culture in the third World?
7
We are prepared. We have previously made an appointment to use the library. We sit there,
in a dark space, for hours while we go through the periodical, read the articles, type the con
tents and the details, assign subject headings, fnd links that direct you to the source, and then
we post it in our database for you to go and encounter it.
We didnt know about black Phoenix a few months ago; we dont know many things. but
we are learning, and driven to diffuse what we encounter.
What has happenedthe process of labour described abovewas a fairly common practice
for librarians before they were transformed into digital content managers. engagement with
materials, physical or digital, a slow process of accretion with hardly any fnal results; these
practices existed before us, and will continue after us. A process of refnement.
A process of loss? Are we complicit in the fetishization of information, or are we producing
knowledge?
taoista (madrid: Alianza, 1983); e.r. Hughes, ed., chinese Philosophy
in classical times, (london: Dutton, 1942); Wuchi liu and irving
yucheng lo, eds., sunfower splendor: three thousand years of
chinese Poetry (garden city: Anchor books, 1975); maggie keswick,
the chinese garden (New york: rizzoli, 1978); xiao chi, the chinese
garden as lyric enclave: a generic study of the story of the stone
(Ann Arbor: university of michigan, 2001); and the threefold lotus
sutra: innumerable meanings; the lotus flower of Wonderful
law, and meditation on the boddhisatva universal virtue (Tokyo:
kosai, 1986).
3. jetsun mila (lovely music, 1987, 2007); far-West news (blue
chopsticks, 1999); improvement (elektra Nonsuch, 1992); life is
splendid (Total energy, 1999); the Wire (Hbo, 20042008). A cursory
list of areas of knowledge opened by these works could be: Jetsun
milarepa, Tibetan buddhism, The spotless Practice lineage, Arp
synthesizer, land sound art, from Page to the grand canyon, musique
concrte, from Prescott to los Angeles, Florian Hecker, united states
subconscious soundscapes, black Panthers, White Panthers, free
jazz, The solar myth Arkestra, saturn, The magic city, baltimore...
one of us just returned from the garden of Total vision, or Prospect garden, as David Hawkes
translated the name of the kaleidoscopic garden at the centre of cao xueqins the story of the
stone, also known as the dream of the red chamber.
1
it took fve months to traverse that
universe, where space and time expand and contract depending on who is telling the story, or
on whose thoughts we are allowed to glimpse. Five months of daily refuge during which our
other reading excursions had to do with what was going on in, and around, the garden:
secondary sources helping us to understand, and visualize, a monumental object of knowledge.
2
We report: it was delightful.
What kind of time do we have that we can give a book this kind of attention? What do we
gain from this process? What does it mean to slow down, now, in 2008, and listen for one
hour and a half to eliane radigues jetsun mila, luc Ferraris far-West news, robert Ashleys
improvement, or sun ras life is splendid? or to engage with the u.s. Tv series the Wire, fve
seasons, where we are prompted to listen carefully?
3
What do they give us that we surrender?
Wecontemporary culture indexproduce information. We spend our days with comput
ers, querying remote databases, reading and indexing journals and periodicals. current periodi
cals, deceased journals. We are creating a database. can we call it an archive?
upon reading about archives this heading came to mind: everything / nothing: negation in
abundance. Particular examples of attempts at collecting and the subsequent ordering of
masses of materialincluding fctive attemptsled to a feeling not merely of bewonderment,
but also of fatigue, attention defcit. negation in abundance can be read as the cancelling-out
effect which is possible when confronted with more than is comprehensible, that which is
mind-numbing, more than one can bear. it can also be read as a multitude of negation, many
minuses. What im referring to as a cancelling-out effect can also be thought in relation to
absences, lacunae, holes which occur in the midst of densities of information, as well as amidst
their lack. the lacunae referenced in this text are those which allude to that which is beyond
understanding, and understanding can be thought here in terms of how it might be possible to
perceive as well as the boundaries of such. it is exactly at these locations of limit and even
fatigue where it may be necessary to search. What impossibility is faced beyond the more super-
fcial fatigue?
4
but we are not the archons. We do not have hermeneutic right and competence, we do not
have the power to interpret the archives. We might present materials, give directions or hints,
but we are not guarding anything. contrary to archives which could not do without residence,
we exist anywhere theres an internet connection. We are not under house arrest.
5
We live in global times, we are told. How did that happen? Were there local processes that
we are already forgetting? What new lacunae have been created during this process? How did
threshOlds
coNTemPorAry culTure iNDex
1. cao xueqin, the story of the stone, (also known as the dream
of the red chamber), trans. David Hawkes (london: Penguin, 1973
1986). The Penguin edition has fve volumes: 1. the golden days; 2.
the crab-flower club; 3. the Warning voice; 4. the debt of tears; 5.
the dreamer Wakes. volumes 45 edited by gao e, translated by
John minford. Published in French by gallimard in la Pliade
collection, le rve dans le Pavillon rouge is described as follows:
la richesse de la matire a pouss la critique marxiste qualifer le
hong lou meng dencyclopdie du monde fodal son dclin
Another reading.
2. A selective list: Dore l. levy, ideal and actual in The story of the
stone (New york: columbia university Press, 1999); Anthony c. yu,
rereading the stone: desire and the making of fiction in Dream of
the red chamber (Princeton: Princeton university Press, 1997);
ccile and michel beurdeley, giuseppe castiglione, a jesuit Painter at
the court of the chinese emperors (rutland: c.e. Tuttle, 1971); Henri
maspero, el taoismo y las religiones chinas (madrid: Trotta, 2000); J.J.
clarke, the tao of the West: Western transformations of taoist
thought (london: routledge, 2000); confucius, mencius, los cuatro
libros (madrid: Alfaguara, 1995); luis racionero, textos de esttica
81
in the late 1940s, roja muthiah chettiar, a painter of signs, set up a signboard shop in madras,
in the south indian state of Tamil Nadu. He had moved to madras from a small town, kottaiyur,
some three hundred kilometres away. A selfeducated man, chettiar was fascinated by visual
culture, and began to build up a personal collection of print material about art and popular visual
culture. over a period of time he extended his area of interest, and started collecting books,
magazines, pamphlets, posters, letters, reports, event announcements and even wedding invi
tations. chettiar became a wellknown fgure amongst the old booksellers and the scrap
dealers in moore road in madras, as the man who would buy garbage. chettiar paid far greater
attention to his collection than to his business, and as a result he eventually had to shut his
sign shop and move back to kottaiyur. once back, he set up the india library services, a read
ing room, where for a rupee visitors would be allowed to consult the archives and provided
with coffee and lunch.
His family thought he was insane, and would constantly throw away the junk that chettiar
had accumulated. chettiar would then have to chase his treasures as they travelled from
garbage bin to scrap dealer, recovering some, losing others. every time he ran into fnancial
diffculties, he would dig out a rare stamp from among his old envelopes and send it to a
philatelist with a covering letter asking for money.
in 1983, there was a pogrom against Tamils in sri lanka, and chettiar heard about the
burning of the Jaffna library. chettiar was aware that the Jaffna library contained some of the
oldest and rarest Tamil manuscripts in the world. He borrowed money and travelled to Jaffna
to see what he could recover, but was devastated to learn that most of the documents had
been destroyed in the burning of the library. chettiar had gone to Jaffna as an eccentric
collector, and he returned an obsessive archivist, determined to collect whatever he could of
Tamil print culture.
Worried about the state of his health and his ability to preserve his collection, he offered
to sell it to the Tamil Nadu state archives. by then it comprised over one hundred thousand items,
and included many publications dating back to the early nineteenth century. The state refused
to pay him two hundred thousand rupees for what it considered to be junk. one of the regular
visitors to the india library services was c.s. lakshmi (Ambai), a wellknown Tamil writer
and feminist scholar. When Ambai was a visiting scholar at the university of chicago, she in
formed the south Asian studies department about this eccentric archive. They immediately sent
a team to evaluate the archive and offered to buy the archive for ten million rupees.
muthiah chettiar himself never saw any of the money, since he died by the time the trans
action was complete. chettiar died of DDT poisoning as a result of years of breathing the fumes
of the insecticide that he regularly used to prevent his collection from being destroyed by
insects and worms.
1
chettiars love for time is a bit of a curious puzzle. The beginning of his interest in collecting
old and discarded objects coincides with the birth of the new nation and yet it seems that he
MIxING MeMOrY ANd desIre
lAWreNce liANg
in our case, we are exempt from this fetishism. We are not calling attention to our process,
to our labour, to our product. We want to become a discreet threshold, to welcome users
somewhere else.
reTurN To THe gArDeN: FooTNoTes
typically, the entire literature of china, say, is represented by a couple of chapters of The
Dream of the red chamber and a few pages of poetry.
8
Attention, readers of details: minutia. The footnotes accompanying this essay could be read
as a portrait of our garden traveller. What could be discerned from them? A physical location?
language profciency? musical tastes? Attention to detail? Thought processes?
That could be one reading. but these footnotes also are information, which can be used to
gain more knowledge, to access materials. Primary information, secondary sources.
in both instances, one would need to care. A curious mind, trained to read entry points,
able to navigate thresholds.
A threshold is defned as any place or point of entering or beginning. librarians, archivists:
we are engaged in the creation of thresholds, abstract distillations, most of them of arid beau
ty. Tools to take us somewhere else.
To compile these footnotes a multitude of resources have been used, most of them digital:
bibliographical databases, collective library catalogues, public libraries, image databanks
and bookstores. And the texts themselves. Time was spent circulating through masses of infor
mation, applying and learning new and established thought processes (i.e. cataloguing rules)
that would allow us to fnd whats desired. No two library catalogues or databases are alike.
Fortuitous encounters are the norm, as thought processes are always subjective. in a bibliogra
phy or in a library catalogue different times collide: records made last century coexist with
records made last week. For us, these layers are beautiful, threshold details, but nonetheless
minutia in the path to somewhere else.
What might be the difference between the time of research and the time of engagement
with the work, the object of knowledge? What kind of wonder can arise with the realization of
a network of thought, a history of inquiry surrounding and emanating from these objects? How
might this form of pleasure differ from that derived from an actual engagement with the work?
could we think of these forms together? The object of knowledge, its hermeneutics, and
the processes that allow encountering both. Would their combination allow us entrance into
The garden of Total vision? And what could be the beneft?
in its Penguin edition, the story of the stones last volume is the only one using an action verb
in its title: the dreamer Wakes. An indication of what knowledge and its processes can ignite.
4. rene green, survival: ruminations on Archival lacunae. Adapta
tions, rereadings, and New readings. introduction to the Following
Accretive Process, in beatrice von bismarck et al., eds., interarchive:
archival Practices and sites in the contemporary art field (lneburg:
kunstraum der universitt lneburg; cologne: Walther knig, 2002).
An edited excerpt is published in the archive, ed. charles mereweth
er (london: Whitechapel gallery; cambridge, mass.: miT Press,
2006).
5. Words in quotations are extrapolated from Jacques Derridas mal
darchive. english translation: archive fever, trans. eric Prenowitz
(chicago: university of chicago Press, 1996), 2.
6. michael Denning, culture in the age of three Worlds (london: ver
so, 2004), 3.
7. http://www.ccindex.info (browse Journal = black phoenix).
8. gayatri chakravorty spivak, death of a discipline (New york: co
lumbia university Press, 2003), xii.
82 83
had no relation to the immediacy of national time and its obsession with the new. it was not
the new that interested chettiar, bur precisely those things that had been discarded because
they did not ft into the new, and had lost their value.
How do we begin to make sense of chettiars relation to the scattered objects which
seemed to tell a story of their time? They were not garrulous storytellers and it was likely that
if anything was said at all, it was said in whispers, and required the patient ear of the collector
to decipher what was being said. This coming together of the fgure of the collector and the
storyteller perhaps offers us a clue for understanding chettiars archive fever, and also brings
him close to Walter benjamin, who died a few years before chettiars trips to moore road began.
benjamins fgure of the threatened storyteller stands at the threshold of modernity. in
his account, the decline of storytelling was symptomatic of the decline in our ability to share
experience. The assaults of modernity had diminished the transmissibility of culture and
redefned the relationship to the past. benjamins invocation of the fragile human body standing
beneath a force feld of destructive torrents and explosions testifes to the experience of a
person lost in time. The helplessness of this fgure stems from the fact that, unlike his ancestors,
he lacks the comfort of tradition, in which there is no break between experience and the
chain of transmission. At the same time, he is haunted by the past that accumulates around
him as history and debris. He has neither access to this history, nor to a future that seems
completely uncertain.
And yet this person lost in time is condemned to fnd new coordinates with which he can
at least partially access the past. The storyteller and the collector meet in the world of discarded
objects, where the act of collecting stands in for the loss of narrative. Through its mediation
between memory and materiality, the object composes a past through its silent testimony. but
the object is also evidence of the irretrievability of the past, and stands at an ironic distance
no matter how hard one attempts to fully grasp it. History thus becomes the elusive and slippery
thing present in the surface of the object, threatening to disappear if you come too close.
The objects chettiar was drawn to were the ones that had not been rendered completely in
telligible by systems of classifcation and order. When the state archives refused to buy his
collection, it was precisely because these objects had not attained the status of historical arte
facts. They exist instead as mythical things that hold out the possibility of a narrative. They are
based not on conditions of factual representation, but on the evidence of the pasts irretrievability.
giorgio Agamben remarked that in a traditional social system, culture exists only in the act
of its transmission, or in the living act of its tradition. There is no discontinuity between past
and present, between old and new, because every object transmits at every moment, without
residue, the system of beliefs and notions that has found expression in it. When the transmissi
bility of culture and experience has become diffcult or impossible, scattered objects become
mnemonic devices through which the fragments of a story are rendered possible. one can
imagine chettiar on his visit to Jaffna, standing amidst the ruins and ashes of a library, looking
for traces, only to fnd that the burning of the library was now an event consigned to the past
and available to us only via history.
in his novel austerlitz, W.g. sebald evokes another destruction of a library:
The old library in the rue richelieu has been closed, as i saw for myself not long ago, said
Austerlitz, the domed hall with its green porcelain lampshades which cast such a soothing,
pleasant light is deserted, the books have been taken off the shelves, and the readers, who once
sat at the desks numbered with little enamel plates, in close contact with their neighbours
and silent harmony with those who had gone before them, might have vanished from the face
of the earth.
2
How was chettiar to make sense of his present, when he had witnessed how fragile it
could be? chettiars fever arose from the desire to be in close contact and silent harmony with
those who had gone before him. it consisted of a love for time, a love that was nonetheless
acutely aware of how fckle and unforgiving this particular lover could be.
1. The roja muthiah memorial library and Archive which was estab
lished in madras (now chennai) is now one of the most important re
sources for people working on south indian history and contains in
valuable resources including the oldest published Tamil text. The cur
rent director of the archive, g. sundar, may have the best
preservation technologies available, but every three months he is
awoken by nightmares in which he sees the archive on fre and
drives twenty kilometers to ensure that the materials are intact. i
want to thank sundar for telling me the story of roja muthiah, and
for the care he displays for the past.
2. W.g. sebald, austerlitz, trans. Anthea bell (New york: modern li
brary, 2002), 275.
84 85
the ethICs Of dust
Jorge oTeroPAilos
86 87
88
the AfterlIfe
oF iNDusTry
gelATiNe From Pig boNes is useD To HelP iNserT THe
ProPellANT corDiTe or guNPoWDer iNTo bulleTs.
90 91
The Alumix buildings, built between 1932 and 1936, are among the most impressive buildings
built in the south Tyrol at that time, and bear witness to important strains of twentieth
century history. They are also diffcult to speak about: they represent a repression chamber
of what has been, and what remains.
the products of daily progress, economically optimised for short-term gain, transform the city
into a world of appearances in which everything is continuously displaced by the new. there has
been a loss of things, buildings and places that were indispensable elements of our visual
memory, and this has led to an increase of the invisiblea process of immense repression, a
retreat into ignorance and uncertainty about the present. What is remembered has been saved
from nothingness. What is forgotten has been abandoned.
John berger, about looking
bIldrAuM
WAlTer NieDermAyr
92 93
94 95
viewed in hindsight, the coming together of coffee and aluminium seems inevitable. They
shared certain common associations right from the start: associations with lightness, speed,
mobility, strength, energy, and electricity. but fated or not, the meeting was long in coming.
it had to wait until the mid1930s, the golden era of aluminium designs for the kitchen and the
beginning of fascist italys pursuit of economic autarchy, at which time it gave birth to a
domestic object that can still be found in nearly every italian home and in many a kitchen
throughout the world: the bialetti moka express.
1
industrial objects may appear forgetful and therefore reducible to function. yet such under
standings strip away the actual density that characterizes the object world: the subtle incrusta
tions of intention and invention, fantasy and ideology, tradition and accident that, like a family
history that can be recovered only by means of exacting genealogical research, an object
carries in the train of its existence. Things may be opaque, but they are rarely dull, and the stories
of imaginary and material investments that they tell conjoin the minutia of history to largescale
social processes in ways that expose the workings of history within everyday forms of
communion like the morning cup of coffee that you and i imbibe before heading off to work.
Heretical though it may seem to admit it, espresso coffee is not an italian invention,
experiments with steam pressure brewing having been undertaken in britain and France as far
back as the early 1800s. Nor is the word espresso a genuinely italian word. The label was
borrowed from the english express via the French exprs, meaning something made to order
and, by extension, produced and delivered with dispatch. This meaning was modifed by
the rise in midnineteenthcentury england of special trains running expressly to single loca
tions without making intervening stops, trains that soon came to be known throughout europe
as expresses.
2
The connection with coffee brewing may not appear obvious. but it was
prefgured by a subgenre of coffeemakers known as coffee locomotives, manufactured be
tween 1840 and 1870, that played upon the functional analogy between the boilers of steam
engines and the boilers in coffee machines.
3
so when in 1901 luigi bezzera fled his patent
for the frst restaurantstyle espresso machine, a machine consisting in a large boiler with four
double pumps subsequently commercialized by the la Pavoni company, he could pretty
much count on the fact that consumers would understand the symbolic valences of drinking
a product bearing the designation caff espresso.
The new espresso machines were designed to dazzle through their size and speed, with
rumbling boilers, brass fttings, enamelled ornaments, vulcanized rubber knobs, and gleaming
metallic lines all at the command of the caffeinated double of the train conductorengineer
the barista. They reinforced and reinterpreted the longstanding conviction that strong coffee
was the virile liquor with which modern men powered their corporeal and corporate boilers.
And even if the steambrewed coffee that these behemoths turned out often tasted burnt,
the brew was powerpacked, intense, and quickly consumed. it translated the values of eff
ciency and excitement associated with the express train into an everyday beverage in
the rOMANCe Of CAffeINe ANd AluMINIuM
JeFFrey scHNAPP
ArT AlWAys HAs A Problem, AN ANAlysis, AND A coNclusioN.
THe coNclusioN THeN becomes THe NexT Problem.
Text by Will insley selected by Jrgen svensson
meg sTuArT, THe oNly Possible ciTy, viDeo
ProDucTioN iN THe Former Alumix FAcTory, 2008.
image by Jorge lon.
yugoslavia. The governmental campaign hinged on the principle of autarchy, which is to say
on the pursuit of economic selfsuffciency by means of a heroic overcoming of italys defcien
cies in the domains of raw materials and natural resources.
italy was poor in iron ore, coal and petroleum. but it was far richer in bauxite and leucite. so,
even before the league of Nations imposed trade sanctions in retribution for mussolinis 1935
invasion of ethiopia, leading to an intensifcation of the autarchy campaign, aluminium had
emerged as the autarchic metal of choice. Two reviews were launched to promote its diffusion:
metalli leggeri e loro applicazioni, an industry review established in 1931; and a government
counterpart, alluminio, founded in the following year.
5
both set out to codify what would
become one of the defning propagandistic credos of the decade: aluminium is italys national
metal, a populist metal, the real material of the unreal velocities and accelerated progress
achieved thanks to the fascist revolution.
Whether or not Alfonso bialetti was susceptible to this campaign to establish the latinity
of aluminium, the earlier cited portrait of the italian craftsman at ease with the complex
technical principles of working with light metals fts him like a glove. bialetti was a better
craftsman, however, than a businessman, for the 1930s would prove a decade of limited suc
cess for his invention. The reasons had nothing to do with a decline in coffee drinking. The
contrary was true, especially after 1935 when coffee came to fgure ever more prominently in
the mythology both of empire and of autarchy: of empire because ethiopia, the nation italy had
invaded, was a major coffee producer of mokatype coffee beans; of autarchy because brazil
refused to follow the league of Nations sanctions imposed by the world community and
continued to furnish italy with its coffee beans. Nor were fascisms regressive gender politics
to blame, favoring as they did womens roles as housewives and mothers over public roles.
6

rather, the problem was bialettis only partial understanding of the importance of marketing.
initially moka expresses were sold by the inventor himself, who set up stands at weekly public
markets in the Piedmont region. later, the coffeemakers were delivered directly from the
factory to regional retailers. No effort to industrialize their production or to market them on a
national (not to mention international) scale was undertaken. bialettis shop continued to
turn out an array of other products, all on an equally small scale. The result was that a mere
seventy thousand units were produced between 1934 and 1940. Then came the war. imports
ceased and italys national metal became italys military metal, unavailable for civilian purposes.
coffee too became scarce. bialetti shut down his shop, oiled up his casting moulds, and
safely packed them away in the basement of his home for the duration of the confict.
There exists a secondary reason for the diffculties encountered by the moka express: the
relatively high cost of italian aluminium until the 1950s. The industry had grown under the
umbrella of autarchy and expanded even more rapidly thanks to the war effort. but tariff barriers
and montecatinis virtual monopoly had eliminated pressures to contain costs or improve
effciency. As a result, in 1946 domestically produced aluminium averaged about 140 lire per
5. metalli leggeri e loro applicazioni had a silver foil cover and claimed
that it was the only italian review exclusively dedicated to the devel
opment of light metal industries, product applications, and manufac
tured goods. every issue had on its cover a quote from the engineer
giuseppe belluzzo, formerly minister of the National economy (1925
1928) and of Public instruction (19281929): italy has abundant raw
materials, abundant enough to forge the new productive civilization
that is already shining on the horizon: a civilization
principally based upon the ubiquity of light metals and their alloys
in everything including national defense.
6. on this subject, see victoria de grazia, how fascism ruled
Women, italy, 19221945 (berkeley, 1992), esp. 201203.
comparison to which domestic coffee was but a slow and pallid imitation.
enter Alfonso bialetti, freshly returned from a decadelong stint of work in the French alu
minium industry. in 1918 bialetti founded a small metal and machine shop in crusinallo,
in his native Piedmont.
4
As corporate lore would have it, bialetti begins with a small industrial
oven, an anvil, and a milling machine, fabricating pieces to order for industrial clients by
making use of a technique he acquired in France: that of gravity casting aluminium in reusable
cast iron moulds. A decade passes during which he becomes intrigued with how local
housewives boil their linens in tubs built around a central conduit that draws the boiling soapy
water upwards and redistributes it across the linens through a radial opening.
lightning strikes: why not adapt this simple physical principle to coffee making? Why
not transform the unwieldy and complex restaurant espresso machine into a light, troublefree,
inexpensive domestic appliance? Why not democratize espresso coffee by introducing it into
every italian home? bialettis solution was elegant and simple. Design an entirely selfcontained
aluminium unit made up of three principal pieces that, on the model of the napolitana, could
be heated on a mere stovetop, but capable of making precisely the same intensely favourful
coffee heretofore limited to restaurants and cafs. so much for baristashowmen and ritual trips
to the caff. so much also for the humble napolitana and the milanese. Domestic coffee
making would be raised to the dignity of the local coffeehouse; domestic coffeemakers, which
is to say housewives, would be raised to the dignity of the barista.
For several years bialetti tinkered with his invention. There were technical glitches to con
front: among them, the need to achieve the proper fow of coffee through the apparatus
and to overcome the tendency for boilers to crack under pressure or blow up. There were also
design questions to resolve. but once solutions were arrived at, in 1933, the tinkering ended.
The moral of the story is that, for all its current ubiquity, the moka express remains a character
istic design of the mid1930s marooned in the 1950s and 1960s. That is, its triumph as a
massmarket appliance would have to be delayed, for reasons that i will shortly adumbrate,
until the italian postwar economic miracle.
The context within which bialettis invention came about had rendered aluminium no
ordinary metal. From the standpoint of global production and the international market for alu
minium, particularly in the domains of transportation, household products, furniture, and
architecture, the thirties represent something of a golden age. And italy aspired to be among
the leaders of this golden age, despite its belated entry into aluminium production and
despite the still relatively small scale of its national aluminium industry at the end of the 1920s.
The fascist government set out to improve the situation by favouring the montecatini groups
gradual takeover from various American, swiss and german interests of the entire italian
aluminium industry, concentrated around production facilities in mori and marghera and bauxite
mines in istria, campania, and sicily. A de facto monopoly resulted by decades end, with
italy rising to the modest rank of fourthlargest european producer behind France, Hungary and
1. on aluminiums emergence as a domestic metal, see Penny
sparke, cookware to cocktail shakers: The Domestication of Alu
minium in the united states, 19001939, in aluminium by design,
ed. sarah Nichols (exhibition catalogue, carnegie museum of Art,
Pittsburgh, 2000), 112139.
2. The picture is actually slightly more complex, inasmuch as the
word express was, before the era of trains, already associated with
express messengers who could be counted upon to deliver messages
at speeds superior to those of the ordinary mail service. so express
train services were themselves tapping into a prior usage.
3. on coffee locomotives, see edward and Joan bramah, coffeemak-
ers: three hundred years of art and design (london, 1989), 104109,
which also contains a comprehensive history of coffeemaker design.
4. Although there is some confusion about the matter among current
bialetti employees, it may be that bialettis shop evolved into the frm
known as metallurgica lombardaPiemontese dei Fratelli bialetti
Piedimulera, listed in the review metalli leggeri e loro applicazioni 1
(mayJune 1931) as specializing in latheturned products in billet
metal, stamped sheet metal, foundry services, laminates and metal
wire; in particular, casting in molds, especially of items for the
home and hotel supplies (p. 27).
98 99
advertising campaigns, the moka express placed itself at the centre of these cross currents. it
became the emblem of an increasingly egalitarian, doityourself attitude. Dove papa?
(Where is Daddy?) asks one ad, the answer being, Hes in the kitchen with the moka express,
whose simplicity permits a reversal of conventional gender roles.
i conclude with the fnal step in the transformation of the bialetti frm from craft workshop
into a modern mediumscale industry: namely, with the construction between 1952 and
1956 of a stateoftheart factory in omegna. by now profts were rising, the price of aluminium
was falling (due to a global aluminium glut), and the success of bialettis advertising blitzes
was such that the old facility would suffce no more. renato bialetti set about the task like a
true visionary, much like Adriano olivetti in the prewar period, insisting upon the rationalization
of every feature of the building and upon the streamlining of the bialetti production line. A
massive freight elevator was devised so that arriving trucks could dump their holds of alumini
um ingots not on the ground foor, as in a conventional factory, but directly into cauldrons
located up on the ffth foor. The entire production process consisted of a smooth lateral and
downward motion foor by foor, ending with the inspection and packaging of every item right
on the threshold of the groundfoor loading dock from which trucks could depart for their
destinations. Workers were assigned individual lockers and showers, as well as provided with
houses and with various other progressive amenities. renato expanded the bialetti product
line to include other household appliances (toasters, vacuum cleaners, meat grinders), but the
backbone of the company remained the production of a growing family of moka express
machines, now being turned out at the rhythm of eighteen thousand per day or four million per
year. yet, for all this emphasis upon modernization, there remained a paradoxical, charac
teristically italian touch that renders the romance between caffeine and aluminium also an
enduring marriage between the new and the old.
At the sparkling new production facility in omegna, the very heart of Alfonso bialettis
remarkable little invention, the boiler, continued to be produced precisely as it was in 1933: that
is, cast and then individually fnished, inspected, and sorted not by a production line worker
but instead by a skilled craftsman. Twenty years had passed and nothing had changed. Another
fortyseven have transpired since then and, once again, nothing has changed. When i visited
the current factory in the summer of 2000, i was amazed and requested an explanation.
bialettis head engineer reassured me: automated pressure casting and fnishing had been tried
many times and the result was too many faws; gravity casting and an intimate working
knowledge of aluminium were required to ensure a resistant and reliable product. i was in
no position to argue, given my limited understanding of materials science. but the contrast kept
me company all the way back to milan. on the one side, artisans; on the other, computer
actuated robots. The two working together on a hybrid artefact: an icon of the machine age that
is a throwback to the era of manual production. in short, a portrait in aluminium of the original
omino con i baff.
kilo while American aluminium (including shipping costs to genoa) was available at 42 lire
per kilo. The alarm was sounded by elio vittorinis militant ii politecnico, a new review dedicated
to the cultural, political and economic reconstruction of postwar italy. ii politecnico called for
a true democratization of aluminium, in keeping with its antifascist program of institutional re
forms. The anonymous author argued that aluminium this expensive will never give rise to
widespread popular consumption, whether for domestic or craft uses, for tools, bicycles, etc.
structural ineffciencies were to blame as well for the elevated costs. montecatini was also
in the electrical power business, and it was channelling a signifcant portion of the aluminium it
produced into its own (overpriced) power lines; montecatinis competitors, not wanting to aid
the industrial giant, were instead importing tin ones from abroad, thereby contributing to a
mushrooming trade defcit.
This was the new republican italy to which Alfonsos son, renato, returned in 1946, after
several years in a german prisonerofwar camp, to take over his fathers business. renato was
intimately acquainted with metallurgy, having worked alongside Alfonso before he was con
scripted into the army. but he brought an entirely new sensibility and understanding to manu
facturing and to marketing. Production was resumed in the same modest facility in crusinallo
in the late 1940s but with the bialetti product line narrowed down to a single object: the moka
express, now fabricated in a full range of sizes (from two cups to ten) and in larger numbers
(up to a thousand units per day). This exclusive focus on coffeemakers was buttressed by
national advertising campaigns on billboards, in newspapers and magazines, on the radio, and,
later, on television programs such as the wildly popular carosello. The campaigns were initially
fnanced by means of loans (daring for such a small concern) and strove to build a distinctive
brand identity in the minds both of vendors and consumers, as well as to differentiate the moka
express from the swarm of clones and competitors that were emerging as italys domestic
market came back to life thanks to the postwar boom. characteristic of the younger bialettis
bold approach were the publicity blitzes undertaken during italys most important trade fair, the
Fiera di milano. year after year, the company would purchase every available billboard in the
entire city of milan, literally saturating the city with images of its coffeemaker. bialettis booths
became legendary for their scale and inventiveness. in 1956, for instance, the indoor installa
tion was paired with an outdoor sculpture consisting of a giant moka express suspended in the
air by a stream of coffee above a cup sitting atop a faceted platform bearing its name. The
forging of a brand identity was completed with the creation in 1953, at renatos instigation, of
the bialetti mascot: the omino con i baff, the formally attired mustachioed man with his
index fnger upraised as if hailing a cab or ordering an espresso.
Times had changed. memories of the fascist debacle were conveniently fading, and con
sumerism was on the rise as italian homes were increasing in comfort and size thanks to the
economic boom of the 1950s. And a new Americaninfuenced social imaginary envisaged
them as activity and entertainment centres for a tightly knit nuclear family. Through bialettis
images selected by katerina ed from the
sketchbook of Jana ed, the artists grandmother
image selected by graham Harwood,
richard Wright & matsuko yokokoji

102 103
These are stories of ganga building, a labour housing block in mumbai.
1. THe logic oF yielD
by the beginning of the twentieth century, the landlord farmers of mumbai had realized it
was more proftable to sell their felds to builders of mills and labour housing than to continue
growing rice.
They had inherited these felds from their warrior ancestors who in turn had received them
as rewards for loyalty from local kings. At that time, the land was mostly forest, inhabited by
tribes, fshermen and small ricegrowing farmers. The warriors compelled the tribes to cut
down the forest and convert it into paddy felds. over time, the descendents of these warriors
became landlordfarmers and, with the growth in their numbers, their land was subdivided,
until it was a patchwork of small pockets. These properties were of irregular sizes and shapes,
but this did not matter to an agrarian community: it was the yield that was important. equal
claimants from a family received land of different sizes but with the same yield.
All this changed around the middle of nineteenth century, when largescale export of cotton
cloth from india began. There was a high demand for land to set up cotton mills and soon an
industrial city was born. Farmers started selling their irregularly shaped properties to developers
of mills and labour housing (chawls). These mills and chawls adjusted themselves over irreg
ular shapes of land whose boundaries had been drawn by the agrarian community following
the logic of the yield. The industrial city sat comfortably over agrarian property. The central part
of this city with high concentration of mills and chawls was called girangaonthe mill lands.
2. From sleePiNg PlAce To ProPerTy
ganga building was a chawl built in 1923 in front of a mill, from which it was separated by a
road. in the 1920s, three thousand workers worked in this mill in three shifts. like other
chawls, ganga building consisted of small (3m x 3m) tenements laid out along a corridor with
common toilets. The building was three storeys high with a courtyard in the centre. The side
facing the road had twenty shops on the ground foor. The remaining seventyfve tenements
housed mill workers. The labourers came from far afeldthere were fshermen from the
coastal lands, tribes from the hills, farmers from the plateaus, and many others. Typically, a
room in the chawl would be rented to one personthe main tenant, who would then share the
space and the rent with ten to twenty other men, mostly from the same place of origin. since
they worked different shifts, they all had places to sleep, except on holidays, when they would
spill out into the corridors.
until indias independence in 1947, such men did not have a strong sense of property.
but the partition of india and Pakistan resulted in large numbers of new migrants seeking hous
ing in bombay, and rents began to escalate. The rent control Act was passed by the govern
ment not only to control rents, but also to protect tenants from eviction. When they found that
they possessed a house from which they could not be evicted, the main tenants, who rented
directly from the owner, started pushing out the men who shared their tenements, and brought
their own families to live with them.
The original Jain owner of ganga building was tired of the meagre rents he was receiving
and sold the entire building to Jalal memona muslim sand trader. memon died in the late
1950s and his son yakub took over the chawls affairs.
3. clAims AND coNTesTs
on the ground foor of ganga building was a restaurant run by a south indian brahmin named
shenoy. His sons preferred to do prestigious government jobs than run the restaurant, and
when he died his widow allowed the restaurant manager, a migrant from south india named
shetty, to operate it on rent. shetty went into partnership with another south indian named
Dsouza and ran the restaurant until 1980.
eventually, Dsouza turned against shetty over money issues, poisoned him, and attempted
to take over the restaurant from shenoys widow. but shettys widow, vasanti, resisted
Dsouzas machinations, asked her brother to help her raise some money, and bought the res
taurant herself. but her brother now felt he should have a share in the property, since he had
raised the money. He bribed the owner of the building to insert his wifes name into the tenancy
document, as vasantis equal partner. vasanti was illiterate and at frst did not realize what
had happenedbut when she found out she was so upset she left bombay for her family home
in mangalore. There she told everyone what her brother had done. Her relatives took a dim view
of her brothers behaviour, and he was forced to give his share of the restaurant back to
vasantibut he also asked her to return the money he had given for the restaurants purchase.
vasanti went to meet baburao sathe, a friend of her husbands, who owned a bank. sathe pro
posed that he take over the restaurant and use it as bank premises for a period of twenty years.
in return he would pay a monthly rent to vasanti and make complete repayment to her brother.
4. ProPerTy ouT oF NoTHiNg
A small shop had been cut out of one of the restaurants external walls, which became a secu
rity concern for the bank. The shop was run by a soap seller, Abdul gani, a friend of shettys
who had lost his original shop in Dadar during the riots of 1974. shetty had allowed him to build
a small (1m x 2m) booth, half inside the restaurant and half outside. but by the 1980s ganis
fnancial condition had stabilized and he had bought a property nearby. vasanti asked gani to
move his shop to the new property, as the bank was insisting on its removal. but gani refused.
so the bank constructed a strong wall around the shop and opened for business. vasanti
sued gani, claiming that he had encroached on her premises. After sixteen years, the court
passed a judgement recognizing the rights of gani. He could not be legally evicted, but had to
pay rent to vasanti. A new property had been created out of nothing.
stOrIes Of GANGA buIldING
ruPAli guPTe & PrAsAD sHeTTy
104 105
vasanti realized that if one occupied a space for more than three years, nobody could evict
the occupier. she decided to encroach on the rear side of her own property. she built a tempo
rary structure with plywood about two metres wide and anchored it to her property such
that it lay partly within her space. she then rented that space to the neighbouring shop owner
who wanted some additional space. The agreement she entered into was complicated: the
new occupant would pay her rent for three years, after which she would complain about the
encroachment to the municipal authorities.
Three years later, she complained to the authorities, who came to demolish the encroachment.
After the demolition was recorded, vasanti asked her tenant to rebuild the encroachment
and resume paying her rent. This happened every three years. in this manner vasanti managed
to extract extra rent from her property whilst ensuring that the tenant never stayed enough
time to claim ownership over the encroachment.
5. iNTeNsiTies
From the mid1980s, the bombay mills started to close. There were several reasons: militant
labour unions demanding higher wages and ultimately ending up in strike; the high price of real
estate in the city pressuring landowners to redevelop the mill lands as commercial property;
government policies discouraging industry; obsolete technology that made bombay production
uncompetitive; and the overall change in the city economy, where formal industry was being
systematically dismantled. With the shutting of the mills, the workers staying in the chawls lost
their jobs. Now they had houses, but no work. some mill workers took up jobs as watchmen,
liftmen, hawkers, estate agents, etcbut most of them remained unemployed. The burden of
supporting the family fell mainly upon the women, who ran business activities from inside
the chawlsprivate tuition sessions, catering services, informal banking networks, etc.
After the death in 1992 of the owner of ganga building, yakub memon, his second son,
yusuf, took it over. He inherited an enormously complex physical and legal entity. because of the
intensity of commercial activities now going on there, tenants had made substantial modi
fcations to the building so that it better accommodated their business. every inch of the chawl
had a claimant. it had many kinds of occupants: tenants of shops living in residences behind,
shop workers staying in common corridors, tenants with families, subtenants without families,
people staying under staircases, on lofts, over the toilets, on the roof, and everywhere else.
yusuf was not experienced in handling rented property and was unable to recover rents
for months. The condition of the building deteriorated and though yusuf tried selling the property
he could not fnd a good buyer.
6. PoliTics oF reDeveloPmeNT
by the beginning of the 1990s there was consensus that the mills had no future, and the gov
ernment drafted a regulation allowing redevelopment of the mill lands. According to the
regulation, the land under the mills was to be divided into three partsone for commercial de
velopment, one for housing and one for amenities. This ensured that the gains from the
redevelopment were shared by the owners (who were allowed to develop real estate), labourers
(who were to get all their dues and a house in a highpriced locality), and the city (which was
to get additional amenities).
A few mill owners redeveloped the mills, but most did not. instead, they conspired with the
government to change the regulation so that they would get almost the entire property to
redevelop as real estate. This change was done surreptitiouslyit was announced in one of the
leastread newspapers and was referred to as a minor modifcation. only one single word
was added into the whole regulation, which now stated surplus land under the mills will be di
vided into three parts And there was very little surplus land under the mills: the owners
could keep now keep nearly everything.
The mills started changing rapidlytall chimneys and northlight sheds were replaced
by malls, call centres, art galleries, media studios and commercial offces. Prices started rising.
The fervour of development put immense pressure on the chawls. by the beginning of 2000,
developers had started working on several of them. The government had passed a regulation
decreeing that if the tenants of an old chawl were in favour of redevelopment, they could
build additional foor space for sale in the open market in order to pay for the cost of redevelop
ment. The owner would also get a share of these profts. but tenants were generally unable
to mobilize resources for such projects, and depended instead on a developer.
yusuf decided to redevelop ganga building, and began to look for a developer. but every
developer who came to ganga building declined the project because of the complexity of
its tenancies. No one knew exactly how many people needed to be rehabilitated. They all had
different degrees of claims on the building. moreover, they all kept increasing their demands
for space and money.
7. TeNure TAcTics
At this point, when yusuf was frustrated with his tenants for their noncooperation, he was
contacted by Hayat Ansari.
Hayat Ansari had been a part of the underworld during the 80s and specialised in extortion.
During the early 90s, after the underworld was restructured, Ansari entered politics, stood
unsuccessfully for election and then went into the construction industry in partnership with his
uncle ibrahim, a contractor. Ansari came to excel at dealing with problematic tenancies, for
which he had a structured strategy. He began by sending legal notices to all tenants to pay up
their dues. generally, these dues had accrued over long periods and amounted to signifcant
106 107
sums. The tenants hoped that they would be cleared once the redevelopment started. but
Ansari behaved like a strict landlord and, after few notices, would send his extortion men. Peo
ple who had the money got scared and paid up immediately; but the majority were forced to
enter into negotiations. in these discussions, tenants ultimately had few options: either agree to
redevelopment or vacate the premises.
With subtenants and illegal occupants, Ansari would be ruthless. He would use his full
muscle to evacuate them.
Ansari offered yusuf money and asked him to give him power of attorney for the building,
proposing to deal with the tenants himself. yusuf gladly accepted, took his money and disap
peared. Ansari took over ganga building in 2005 and managed to crush a lot of the tenancy
complications. unhappy with Ansaris tactics, some of the tenants turned for help to an Ngo
led by a local politician who claimed to provide support to tenants wishing to redevelop their
property. Along with the tenants, the Ngo submitted a redevelopment proposal to the munici
pal authorities and fled a petition against Ansari for harassment. With the help of the Ngo,
the tenants approached several developers to get the best possible deal. recently, Hayat Ansari
has begun to bribe some of the inhabitants of ganga building to come over to his side.
the story of ganga building is in many ways the story of mumbai and the mill lands. but ganga
is only one of the nineteen thousand chawls in mumbai. every chawl has its own multitudinous
stories of propertystories that refuse to allow the narrative of the mill lands to be shrunk into one
comprehensive conceptualization, as offcial accounts seek to do.
THe JourNey begiNs WHere i ArriveD. THe leNgTH oF roAD ive
covereD TurNs iNTo THe overcroWDeD room im AbouT To eNTer.
iT is A Home. or is iT THe WHiTe cube? HoW oFTeN HAve i resolveD
To cArry oN WAlkiNg JusT To Arrive Here? Does THe elePHANT
reAlly FiT THrougH THe eye oF A NeeDle? iN movemeNT i breAk
AWAy From reFlecTioN AND become A PermeAble boDy
Text by erik schmelz selected by Helen Jilavu
conservation laboratory in the
museum of the city of skopje, 2008.
image by yane calovski.
fIle: AluMINIuM.Pl
grAHAm HArWooD
1 #!/usr/bin/perl -w
2 #================================================================================
3 #
4 # FILE: aluminium.pl
5 #
6 # DESCRIPTION: If all objects make the world and take part in it and at the same time,
7 # synthesize, block, or make possible other worlds.
8 # How true is it for the CODE that creates a book.
9 #
10 # OPTIONS: collect every word before aluminium and every word after it -
11 # then work out the frequency of use
12 # REQUIREMENTS: futurism/manifesta/issuecrawler.org to generate the bulk of domains to be visited
13 # look for the relationship of the websites to each other
14 # NOTES: Search_id,, URL, Pages_returned -> network _ residue_of_Aluminium.
15 # AUTHOR: Harwood (trying), <harwood@gold.ac.uk>
16 # VERSION: 0.1
17 # CREATED: 05/16/2008 03:27:00 PM BST
18 #===============================================================================
19
20 use lib '/1909/futurist/Marinetti/';
21 use lib 'Manifesta08/RAQS/Bolzano/'
22
23 # !!!dont worry about this library now!!!
24 # use Mine::Blast::Extract::Exhaust::Aluminium.
25 #
26 use GetWebPage::Page;
27 use strict;
28 use Data::Dumper;
29 use Machine::Book;
30
31 # Recursively search through 2,000 WWW links returned from the issuecrawler.net
32 # Extract 8,000 sentences containing the word ALUMINIUM.
33 # Eg 'aluminium salts have often been used to reinforce babies vaccines,
34 # as they are not considered to be harmful to humans.' extracted from ?????.com
35
36 my @lines_of_text; # a line of text
37 my %wordlist; # key: prefx, value: array of suffxes
38
39 my $search_str = "ALUMINIUM";
40
41 # get the DATA returned from the issue crawler and put it into an array -
42 # *see ALUMINIUM_DATA @ the end of the fle
43
44 my @aluminium_domain_data = get_issuecrawler_data("issuecrawler.txt");
45
46 &search_www_pages(@aluminium_domain_data);
47
48 sub search_WWW_pages {
49 # extract the text from the issuecrawler data string
50 foreach my $domain_name ( @aluminium_domain_data) {
51 # edit out the google links
52 my @data_str = split(/,/,$domain_name);
53 my $WWW_page_href = $data_str[2];
54 if($WWW_page_href =~ /http:\/\// ){
55 #nothing
56 }else{
57 $WWW_page_href = "http://$WWW_page_href";
58 }
59 print "\n GOING TO GET: Aluminium domain $WWW_page_href";
60 my $WWW_page_get = GetWebPage::Page->new;
61
62 $WWW_page_get->init($WWW_page_href,$k,'SENTENCE' );
63 my @texts = $WWW_page_get->get_texts;
64 foreach my $txt (@texts)
65 {
66 # extract any sentence containing ALUMINIUM
67 add2list(lc $txt,'ALUMINIUM');
68 }
69 sleep 1;
70 }
71 }
72
73 # extract three words before aluminium and three words after aluminium.
74 # Eg "Quite a few planes get hit, but because theyre __made__ of aluminium, it __goes__ in one end and out the other."
75
76
77 # words associated with ALUMINIUM && there word frequency from edited.txt
78 # @keywords = qw ( chemical 32 reduction 34 european 36 century 36 designers 36 metallic 37 material 38 barrier 38 world 42 car
42 ingot 43 steel 44 designed 45 oxide 47 million 50 life 51 produced 52 beverage 56 packaging 57 during 58 products 62 process
65 cans 71 modern 73 recycling 84 production 92 primary
94 tonnes 90 industry 100 );
79
80
81 sub add2list {
82 my ($txt,$keyword) = @_;
83 my @words = split(/ /,$txt);
84 # this code will extract any sentence that contains the keyword ALUMINIUM
85 while ( @words > $pref_len ) {
86 my $pref = join(' ', @words[0..($pref_len-1)]);
87 if( @words[2] =~ m/$keyword/i){
88 push @{ $wordlist{$pref}}, $words[0],$words[2];
89 print "\n $words[0] $words[1] '$words[2]' $words[3] $words[4]";
90 }
91 shift @words; # next word on this line
92 }
93 }
94
95 sub get_issuecrawler_data {
96 my $data_fle= shift;
97 open(ALUMINIUM_DATA, $data_fle) || die("Could not open fle!");
98 my @raw_data=<ALUMINIUM_DATA>;
99 close(ALUMINIUM_DATA);
100
101 return @raw_data;
102 }
103
104 __ALUMINIUM_DATA__
105 [1843331,,abal.org.br,,ORG,14,0,t], [1843332,,alcan.com,,COM,272,0,t], [1843333,,alcoa.com,,COM,159,0,t], [1843334,,aleris.
com,,COM,13,0,t], [1843335,,alfed.org.uk,,ORG,45,0,t], [1843336,,alouette.qc.ca,,CA,4,0,t], [1843338,,alu-info.dk,,DK,29,0,t],
[1843339,,alu-verlag.com,,COM,1,0,t], [1843340,,alu.ch,,CH,13,0,t], [1843342,,aluar.com.ar,,COM,29,0,t], [1843343,,alucluster.
com,,COM,27,0,t], [1843344,,alucobond.com,,COM,2,0,t], [1843345,,alufenster.at,,AT,1,0,t], [1843346,,alufoil-sustainability.
org,,ORG,1,0,t], [1843347,,alufoil.com,,COM,1,0,t], [1843348,,alufoil.org,,ORG,42,0,t], [1843350,,aluinfo.de,,DE,64,0,t],
[1843351,,alumatter.info,,,36,0,t], [1843352,,alumbuild.ru,,RU,4,0,t]...
106 __ALUMINIUM_DATA__
107
108
109 }
110
111
112 1; # return true
~
~
~
~
110 111
it seems that in recent years, the desire to paper over the cityto fll in the blanks, to erase
the jagged remains of shells that were once flled buildingsis more manic. in this smoothed
over landscape, fssures within the urban fabric are more diffcult to identify. And the notion
that the city must put forward a seamless, smoothedover appearance to signify prosperity is not
only articulated by planners, bureaucrats and entrepreneurs but embedded in a wider con
sciousness where it shapes articulations of the public good.
Despite this frenetic impulse to smooth and encode, the longing for less regulated spaces
continues. industrial ruins are, in offcial parlance, scars on the landscape or wastelands
whose usevalue has disappearedbut ruins are the site of numerous activities, and very quick
ly become enmeshed within new social contexts. ruins may become spaces for leisure,
adventure, cultivation, acquisition, shelter and creativity. And as spaces that have been identi
fed as waste, as well as dangerous and unsightly, ruins also provide spaces where forms
of alternative public life may occur, activities characterized by an active and improvisational cre
ativity, a castingoff of selfconsciousness conditioned by the prying gaze of ccTv cameras
and fellow citizens, and by the pursuit of illicit and frownedupon practices. These uses contrast
with the preferred forms of urban activity in overdesigned and themed space: the consumption
of commodities and staged events, a toneddown, selfcontained ambling, and a distracted
gazing upon urban spectacle.
ruins are excess matter, containing superfuous energy and meaning, which, as disorderly
intrusions, always come back to haunt the planners vision of what the city should be. They
confound the normative spacings of things, practices and people and thus address the power
embodied in ordering space.
current hyperbole insists that the social world is inevitably speeding up, a claim which ne
glects slower processes, the divergent rhythms which compose the city, some of which
are organized to contest the imperative for speed. All activities, people and places are not
necessarily caught up by an immersion in fows of velocity. The ruin is not particularly penetrat
ed by the speededup mobilities and fows which typify this frantic scenario. instead, its
durability and existence is largely shaped by the rate at which it decays, and it is no longer the
site of a production process dominated by futureoriented projects and targets, although
these temporal constrictions may be evident enough in the remnants of clockingin stations,
dockets, scheduled programmes of work and delivery, and timetables. The ruin is a shadow
realm of slowness in which things are revealed at a less frantic pace. Within this relative
stillness, bypassed by the urban tumult, the intrusions from the past which penetrate the every
day life of the city are able to make themselves felt more keenly.
INdustrIAl ruINs
Tim eDeNsor
the institute for innovative technologies covers the whole parcel like a futuristic ship. the whole
complex appears to be a kind of monolith lying on the ground in memory of Kubrick, having
been rammed between the existing buildings with vehemence.
it is an ideal bridge, an element of transition, through the experienced human (the laboratories),
between the primitive (metaphorically represented by the workshops and associated with a
craft now being a thing of the past) and the modern human (the foating point projected upwards,
towards the unknown, towards higher knowledge).
such concepts have been executed in a three-dimensional structure; a clear, linear building
that is essential and pure, a black block reaching towards the sky on one side by an ambitious
gesture. the structure seems to implode, since it only opens up to the light by the fully glazed
courtyards.
in the second area, a kind of huge magnet of innovation is rising, a complex of offce space,
which is able to draw intellectual pioneers of analysis, inventiveness and experiment into the
interior of its feld. the building is foating on a place of water, an element that seems to reject
the upper structure due to its low magnetic permeability.
From the winning project description by architecture frm chapman Taylor llP of the institute
for innovative Technologies, to be built beside the Alumix factory in bolzano.
There is a long history of abandoned factories being redeveloped by and for artists. such proj
ects are usually characterized by selforganized growth and an ongoing negotiation between
informal and bureaucratic infuences. The integration of resources that emerges by chance
through such processes opens up new spatial dramaturgies, and so works against the universal
cloning of spaces and the imprisonment of architecture in a global cultural metastasis.
The institute of innovative Technologies has chosen another route. in the development of this
project, there was no exchange with local, sitespecifc intelligence. This is now a wellknown
tactic of large investments in urban renewal: reducing the complexity of local information,
which could threaten the predictability of the investment and the plainness of the political mes
sage. The competition is advertised and judged with a specifc agenda, and the winning
project aims towards total spatial, programmatic and economic control. in the case of the
institute for innovative Technologies, the structure literally swallows most of the site, including
the existing Alumix factory. in spite of its entirely generic character the description of the
architecture is semiotically armed with an arsenal of religious and artistic symbols and analogies.
This form of postmodernism lite seems to combine a pragmatic and interchangeable shell
with the need to appear unique and special.
Perhaps it is still possible to imagine a modifed or different version of the institute. The fu
ture potential of the site lies in exploring symbioses between massive urban renewal and letting
spaces unfold in their own way. This would need a relational sensibility for industrial residue,
a free space for experimentation, mutations and the ongoing production of strangeness.
the INstItute fOr INNOVAtIVe teChNOlOGIes
reiNHArD kroPF & siv HeleNe sTANgelAND
112 113
the NINe GArdeNs IN the bANK Of NOrwAY
iNgriD book & cAriNA HeDN
114 115
The upper building of the cardano hydroelectric power station conceals its sources: there is
no visible water here. The giant pipes coming down the mountainside appear out of nowhere:
no lakes or rain clouds surround them, no dams are in sight. much like clock towers in medi
eval europe, the empty building suggests a hidden connection to some greater force or idea.
The lower buildings at cardano conceal absence of a different order. Here we discover
that no one works at this power plant! its daytoday workings are managed over optic fbre from
a control room at lake Toblino, 100 km away.
This proposal for an artwork imagines the upper building as a clock tower, displaying the
last message from Toblino, with its timestamp. The difference between the time displayed and
the present time is the duration for which the station has been autonomousi.e. without
instruction from a human being.
For people passing on the highway, or living nearby, this is a proposal to think about the
syntax of this communication, and the strange remoteness of what is local.
the lAst MessAGe frOM tOblINO
AsHok sukumArAN
116
AuGurIes
AND reveries
image by Francesco gennari
Pig boNe AsH is ADDeD To FiNe boNe cHiNA iN
orDer To give iT A HigH Degree oF sTreNgTH AND TrANsluceNcy
HoT DeskiNg reFers To THe TemPorAry PHysicAl occuPATioN
oF A WorksTATioN or surFAce by A PArTiculAr emPloyee.
THe Term HoT DeskiNg is THougHT To be DeriveD From THe NAvAl
PrAcTice, cAlleD HoT rAckiNg, WHere sAilors oN DiFFereNT
sHiFTs sHAre buNks. origiNATiNg As A TreND iN THe lATe
1980seArly 1990s, HoT DeskiNg iNvolves oNe Desk sHAreD
beTWeeN severAl PeoPle WHo use THe Desk AT DiFFereNT Times.
A PrimAry moTivATioN For HoT DeskiNg is cosT reDucTioN
THrougH sPAce sAviNgsuP To 30% iN some cAses.
Text from Wikipedia selected by curatorlab
118 119
Favourite readings of the late gianluca lerici, also known as Professor bad Trip.
Jena Filaccio, his life companion, selected the books which, from the 1970s onwards,
helped the Professor to understand and draw the the world around him.
gotz Ariani, hannah hoch, collages, 18891978
enrico baj, Patafsica
J.g. ballard, the burning World
georges bataille, the dead man
Peter belsito, notes from the Pop underground
belisto, Davis, kester, street art: the Punk Poster in san francisco
Andr breton, anthology of black humour
William burroughs, the naked lunch
chumy chumez, chumy chumez. una biografa
crass collective, anok 4u
mario De micheli, manifesti rivoluzionari
guy Debord, society of the spectacle and The situationists and the New Forms
of Action Against Politics and Art
catalogue to the show jose guadalupe Posada which took place in the mexican embassy
and the italianlatin American institute in rome, 931 may 1980, edited by F. Di castro
Philip k. Dick, a scanner darkly
Jean Dubuffet, in Honour of savage values and other writings.
Albert Hofmann, insight Outlook
The plays of Alfred Jarry
The poems of Paul klee
richard langton gregory, the intelligent eye
Paul D. grushkin, the art of rock
giuseppe lippi, virgil finlay, bellezza, terrore e fantascienza
The stories of H.P. lovecraft
Frans masereel, the city: a vision in Woodcuts
Herbert read, art and alienation
raf valvola scelsi, cyberpunk antologia di testi politici
eckhard siepman, john heartfeld
max stirner, the ego and its Own
Dick voll, the art of basil Wolverton
Alan W. Watts, the Way of Zen
edgar Wind, art and anarchy
A reAdING lIst
ProFessor bAD TriP
in 2002, an island called Pulau sejahat disappeared from the nautical charts of singapore.
in response to the demand for additional land, singapores coast was being extended into the
sea, engulfng small islands.
billions of cubic metres of sand and granite were dredged from the bottom of the ocean
and dug out of indonesian quarries to make this new land for singapore.
in malay, sejahat means evil.
seAstOrIes: seAstAte 2As eVIl dIsAPPeArs
cHArles lim li yoNg
Quarry in karimun, indonesia
120 121
Hyundai dredging ship
designed to suck sand from
the seabed
singapore imported 68
million tonnes of sand from
indonesia each year
reclamation
122 123
An island surrounded by land,
as evil disappears
Trucks dumping soil onto site
to build up land from barges
machine to measure the softness
of the new ground
124 125
recollection. We are embarrassed at times to confess that we hang onto such residue. it
designates the value of what it refers to, and therefore makes us vulnerable to the potential
blackmail of desires.
in modern societies there are groups of people who were encouraged to live off residue
long before the current bourgeois environmentalism ever became a new Hollywood project: the
poor (especially urban homeless), mothers, wives, and children. They know the true value of
leftovers and thrown away things, and often fnd themselves competing with birds, animals
and decay.
in the world of contemporary art, residue is called found objects. From the world of ready
mades, with their emphasis on not having made it, or even not having bought it, we move
towards having found it accidentally. Artists have become scavengers of humanity. every kind
of residue is looked upon as a potential element of an art installation: objects found here
and there, or nonstop digital images of whatever comes along (essentially, other peoples lives).
Artists are becoming repositories of residue and they are therefore making themselves more
vulnerable. They keep our leftovers, they make art from them. artists love us like mothers!
Things have not been transformed into residue yet, you are still drinking this can of Pepsi, but
look there is an artist, waiting for you to fnish, and make it a part of her sculpture. Here
it is, take it.
Providing residence to leftovers is not the same process as collecting. gleaning, scavenging,
repurposing are not the same as being a collector. What turns up from this process is funda
mentally accidental, just like in the lost and found offce. collecting, on the other hand,
though it contains the pleasure of wandering among things, is essentially accidentalless, inten
tional in its drive. Providing refuge for residue does not necessarily transform it into value.
Things will make sense (probably) later, but even if not, they have value in how they are. reject
ed this is what artists want, competing with those who are paid to remove rubbish.
emily silver AND miTHu seN: oPeNiNgs
emily silver and mithu sen have both worked at various points with residue. While silver has
been interested in found objects ranging from road kill to her signature material, cardboard
packaging, mithu sen has explored the concept of the accidental in relation to precious per
sonal things. They are very different artists, of course, but something has brought them
together here. Their strategy could be summed up as an aesthetic of idiocy. emily silver and
mithu sen represent a new generation of artists (and nonartists), whose work represents
an alternative, but nonengaged, impulse within the art market (neither properly buying into
it nor fghting it heroically). idiocy risky and authentic Dostoevskystyle idiocy is a new strat
egy in contemporary art and should not be mistaken for irony or satire. This latter, ironic,
resistance is framed mostly by what has been called prank art. alike the famous reality show
Punkd (mTv 20032007), many artists fnd irony (either through mimicry or satire) to be the
Question: Why do you want to become an artist?
answer 1: to make pretty things for the rich folk.
answer 2: through making art i learn about life, and i want
to share these experiences with others. then see answer 1.
conversation in an Art school, April 2008
the simplest form of the circulation of commodities is c-m-c, the transformation of commodities
into money, and the change of the money back again into commodities; or selling in order to
buy. but alongside of this form we fnd another specifcally different form: m-c-m, the transfor-
mation of money into commodities, and the change of commodities back again into money;
or buying in order to sell. money that circulates in the latter manner is thereby transformed into,
becomes capital, and is already potentially capital.
karl marx, capital, from the section The general Formula for capital
WHere Does A resiDue resiDe?
An idiot is someone who operates outside of the capitalist mode of production. Not out of
refusal, but simply because she is an idiot. An idiot does not know real value of things, people
or situations. This idiotic ignorance of the difference between the valuable part and the
useless residue does not strive to become a part of a grand movement for example to subvert
capital and its empires. it just happens, accidentally.
The thoughtless nature of idiotic action is irritating, especially its stubborn lack of reasoning.
you cannot blame idiots for mixing rich folks with ordinary mortals: they do not know better.
This is what lisaveta Prokofevna learned when she called a house where hospitality was
extended in equal measure to the leftovers of society (otbrosy obschestva) and decent peo
ple (poryadochnye lyudi) a mad house, and hospitality complete idiocy, in Dostoevskys
novel the idiot.
contemporary art, together with a renewed political, intellectual and scientifc interest in
waste management, the recycling of leftovers, and trash repurposing of all kinds, makes residue
valuable once again. by trying to extract more value from residue, whether aesthetically or
not, one returns to the general formula for capital. unless one is an idiot. extending hospitality
to residual things and creatures, though an idiotic thing to do, is to understand that its origins
are the same as those of residence. residue needs a residence: it is by defnition residing,
resting. it is left somewhere, thrown away to fnd residence in another, more appropriate
place. or at least, someone who would take it in, since it is a thing out of place, without value.
Those who are left by others, often fnd sentimental value in residue. it reminds them of
the loved ones who are no longer with them or of the good old days. residue is a memory build
er, and serves as more than just a substitute for the real thing a fetish. residue can be
immaterial, like those memories themselves, preserved through the habit and pleasure of
the ArtIst As IdIOt
iriNA ArisTArkHovA
126 127
Just as in mithu sens aesthetic, this fundamental passivity of aesthetic statement today
carries undeniable strength. There is a difference between passivity as accusation (earlier per
formance art comes to mind) and passivity as a modus operandi. in mithu sens and emily
silvers openings there is no catch. Their actions do not reveal any important truth about the
inherent violence or goodness in man, neither do they ask to be remembered as a well
prepared and documented spectacle. The artists, probably, will protest my interpretation of
their work through their openings. After all, openings do not make it into an artists portfolio,
they do not have value as art, there is, really, nothing to buy and sell later (moneycommodity
money). but it is exactly at the openings, those events outside of the work proper, where
transactions happen, where value is being established or being denied.
When Dr. evil (in the 1997 movie austin Powers: international man of mystery) demanded
one million dollars for not destroying the world, his team member recommended that he
increase the amount. What he asked for was too little, and incongruent with the worlds current
value. No fool, Dr. evil quickly corrected himself by asking for one hundred billion dollars.
When artists fnd themselves in similar situations, they are not sure how much to ask for so
as not to look like a fool (from asking too little or too much). being called an idiot is nothing
new to an artist. Now it is an aesthetic: artist represents herself as an idiot, sentimental,
vulnerable and crazy protector of what is left.
only remaining critical strategy today, especially with regard to capitalist art. The idiotic
aesthetic, i argue, is another alternative which cannot be easily replicated (unlike irony). idiocy
is different from irony as it does not operate within a complex rhetoric of tropes and styles,
and it can be dead serious (unironically). moreover, irony as one of the tropes is seen as reach
ing beyond realism and therefore claiming a higher intelligence: i play a prank on you be
cause i am smarter than you, an idiot. While an idiot does not claim any intelligence at all, be
it realistic or fgurative, she can easily be taken in by ironic art. idiots do not judge but neither
do they neutrally observe and record the worlds evils as they are. They are too much into
themselves, by defnition isolated, private, disintegrated from contemporary society and its
phallologocentic intelligence.
While artworks might not themselves reveal much about the level or quality of the artists
aesthetic of idiocy, their openings surely do. mithu sen (its good to be Queen, bose Pacia,
New york, 2006) left her exhibition before the opening to wander wandered alone in the rain,
and then sent her audience a letter apologizing for her absence:
dear, i am sorry for not being sorry about my physical absence in my opening night
i am sad but not sorry for my act it was a conscious decision. i know it was announced
in the invitation card of doing an artists discussion during that evening with my viewer
AND i was away. (i did not escape or run away) i just took my physical presence off
from that very gallery site on that evening i will try to meet u before i leave. i promise.
i again hope that u did not miss me that night coz i was really with you thank u for bearing
with me. i love you. yours and only yours, mithu.
Without heroism and redemption, there remains a framing of the polis with its fortifed
walls and laws. lonely, shy, kind and generous, an idiot insists on her way of doing things,
while fully accepting public opinion and the law, refusing nothing, challenging nothing. in her
attempt to host residue (sen presented a number of found objects and photographs among her
own drawings and personal paraphernalia) she goes to completely unnecessary extremes,
rightfully idiotic and foolish. Without claiming an exceptional place in the public eye, without
visibly seeking recognition, rewards or inclusion, an artist such as mithu sen claims to be
queen. The word idiot derives from the idea of someone selfsh and distant from a community,
a residual subject who ultimately defnes our rules and regulations through not being con
cerned with them (the same rendering of an idiot one fnds in Aristotle).
emily silver invited magicians to her exhibition opening (cannavillastic, Zoller gallery,
Pennsylvania state university, 2008). outside the gallery doors, they performed tricks. A large
crowd watched while chewing on amusement park (rather than art exhibition) food served
nearby. The author of this text volunteered to tend a hotdog stall, giving away free hotdogs.
emily silvers opening ftted well with her work;s questioning of what is valuable and
what is residual in art making. Her ability to stage our stuff and our moment in her (un)bal
anced installations without judgment but also without forgiveness, feels at times unbearable.
INtrOduCING GAPs
ivANA FrANke
132 133
legAl / illegAl
copying takes place everywhere and all the time. To use digital data is to copy it. No matter if
its from hard drive to rAm memory, from one portable device to another or from peer to
peer. No matter if the physical distance of the copy is measured in millimetres or miles. still
some people prefer to speak for or against flesharing, as if it was an isolated phenomenon. As
if the alternatives were no more than two: fle sharing networks or selling digital fles.
yesterday we walked around with megabytes in our pockets, today with gigabytes and
tomorrow terabytes. The day after tomorrow, for a reasonable price, we will have tiny storage
devices that contain more flm, music, text and images than we can ever incorporate into
our lives. everything ready for immediate transfer to another persons device.
Here / THere
There is no longer an archive that is yours entirely. Nor an archive completely open to all. The
divide between private and public networks, copies and performances does not apply anymore.
There is no fundamental difference between a copy from your external hard drive and one
from an open flesharing network.
File sharing has a potential to create meaning, community and contexta bigger potential
than most other forms of reproduction. We want to keep talking about how that potential may
be realized in the best manner possible, how cultural circulation can be organized and how the
unleashed forces of the open archives can be used for more than stacking a pile of objects
which we care less and less about. However, we want to stop explaining why fle sharing is
righteous or notas if there was a choice between copying and noncopying.
Free / cHArge
To ask if distribution of flm and music should be free or cost money is like asking if it should
be free or cost money to attend a party. sometimes, someone manages to charge a toll
for a party, but no one would even think of banning free parties. When do you actually have
a party, and when are you just having some fun?
The fles are already downloaded. The fles are already uploaded. Theyve been going up
and down and in and out in abundance. We want to talk about how to extract meaning from
this abundance.
ArT / TecHNology / liFe
The digital networks make processes, identities, contexts and works infnitely connected.
The division between creator, work and consumer is a bleak way of describing cultural circula
tion and digital life forms. The cost of upholding copyrights abstract relations between art,
technology and life is a world that is mute and ever more depopulated. Hence, we are not about
anticopyright but moreThank you and good bay (sic!). lets have a fucking party!
the PIrAte bAY MANIfestO
PirATbyrN (THe bureAu oF PirAcy)
image selected by Denis isaia
134
david adjaye is an architect based in london.
irina aristarkhova teaches at Pennsylvania state university
(university Park) and writes about new media aesthetics and compar
ative feminist theory.
stefano Bernardi is a freelance audiovisual professional and a rock
musician. He lives in bolzano.
ursula Biemann is an artist, curator and theorist based in Zurich.
Her work is particularly concerned with issues of migration, mobility,
technology and gender.
ingrid Book and Carina hedn are artists based in oslo. Their
projects include temporary utopias (2003), news from the field
(2004), geschichten fr leere schaufenster/stories for empty shop
Windows (2006), military landscapes (2008).
kristina Braein is an artist based in oslo.
yane Calovski (skopje, 1973) makes drawings, writes stories,
develops narrative strategies for public spaces and believes in ver
nacular knowledge. He is the founder of d, a journal of contemporary
drawing and, in collaboration with the artist Hristina ivanoska,
press to exit project space.
CandidaTV (Agnese Trocchi, Antonio veneziano and manuel bozzo)
is an extended group of videomakers, performers, mediactivists and
aesthetic researchers based in rome. since 1999 it has promoted an
unmediated approach to media: make your own Tv. Among
candidaTv activities are: workshops, lectures, documentaries, vJing
and video installations.
contemporary culture index (ccindex.info) is an online, open
access, multidisciplinary database of journals and periodicals that are
either ignored by other database vendors or absent from the internet.
ccindex was set up in 2001 by a team of librarians with extensive
experience in the academic research area. its headquarters are
currently located in san Francisco; nodes can be found in barcelona
and manhattan.
marcos Chaves is an artist based in rio de Janeiro.
neil Cummings and marysia lewandowska are artists and re
searchers based in london. They are the founders of enthusiasts: ar
chive (enthusiastsarchive.net), which resulted from the artists exten
sive research into the flms made by amateur flm clubs active in Po
land during the socialist period.
rana dasgupta is the author of tokyo cancelled. His novel solo will
appear in February 2009.
harold de Bree is an artist who mostly works on sitespecifc,
fullscale industrial and military objects and machinery. He is based
in The Hague.
Tim edensor is reader in cultural geography at manchester
metropolitan university. He is the author of industrial ruins: space,
aesthetics and materiality (2005) and national identity, Popular
culture and everyday life (2002). He is currently researching the
rhythms of space, landscapes of illumination and the materialities
of building stone.
espen sommer eide is a musician, artist and philosopher based
in bergen.
etoy.CorporaTion sa was founded in 1994 and is known for
its pioneering role in internet art, for controversial operations like the
digital hijack, for its etoy.TANks (mobile studios and exhibition units
built in standard shipping containers) or for its latest venture:
missioN eTerNiTya digital cult of the dead. etoy is all about
sharing and distributing (through etoy.sHAre) intangible assets: cul
tural value, risk and passion.
ivana franke is an artist based in Zagreb.
matthew fuller is a writer and artist whose work straddles many
domains, from software to architecture. He works at the centre for
cultural studies, goldsmiths, university of london.
francesco gennari is an artist based in milan and Pesaro.
rupali gupte and prasad shetty are architects, researchers and
writers based in mumbai. They are the cofounders of the collective
research initiatives Trust.
anawana haloba is a new media and multimedia artist based in
oslo and is currently a resident artist at the rjiksakademy in
Amsterdam.
graham harwood is an artist who has since the mid1980s explored
media systems from photocopiers to software systems, telephones
and networks. His approach is to make media strange, allowing it to
become a space of fun and experimentation. He works at the centre
for cultural studies, goldsmiths, university of london.
graham harwood, richard wright and matsuko yokokoji have
worked together since 2004, frstly as part of the internationally
recognised artist collective mongrel, in a fusion of art, electronic me
dia and open networks.
nikolaus hirsch and michel mller are architects, teachers and re
searchers based in Frankfurt. Their work is focused on experimental
art institutions such as the bockenheimer Depot Theater in Frankfurt
(with William Forsythe), unitednationsplaza (with Anton vidokle), the
european kunsthalle, the cybermohalla Hub in Delhi, and, currently,
a studio structure for The land in chiang mai (Thailand).
denis isaia is a curator based in bolzano.
i. helen Jilavu is an artist based in germany, founded and co
curates with erik schmelz the moguntia Projekt and the china Proj
ect, shortterm, sitespecifc exhibition places for different works
of art. she has worked together with andcompany&co. on a number
NOtes ON CONtrIbutOrs
iN THe 90s, iN osTiA, A smAll beAcH ToWN iN THe ouTskirTs oF
rome, A very AcTive creW cAlleD osTiA TekNo rioTers
WAs Well kNoWN For orgANiZiNg every yeAr AN illegAl rAve
PArTy iN exiNDusTriAl siTes. oN THe Flyer useD To PromoTe
THe PArTy oF 99 THe slogAN WAs: For A sociAl reuse oF THe
AbANDoNeD AreAs oF THe brAiN. iT WAs AN AmAZiNg
DescriPTioN oF THe FeeliNg risiNg iN THAT PerioD From THe
TemPorAry sQuATTiNg oF AbANDoNeD iNDusTriAl AreAs.

image selected by candidaTv
of performances and audiovisual installations including photography,
sound and text.
hiwa k is an iraqi artist based on his feet.
lakhmi Chand kohli is a writer based in Delhi.
anders kreuger is a curator and writer. He is Director of the malm
Art Academy, exhibition curator at lunds konsthall and member of
the Programme Team for the european kunsthalle in cologne.
reinhard kropf and siv helene stangeland work as architects and
artists. They run the architecture frm Helen & Hard and are based in
stavanger on the west coast of Norway.
ove kvavik is an artist based in Trondheim.
J. robert lennon is the author of six novels, including mailman and
castle (forthcoming), and a short story collection, Pieces for the left
hand. He lives in ithaca, New york.
lawrence liang is a legal theorist and founder of the Alternative
law Forum.
Charles lim li yong is an artist with useful skills for surviving at
sea that he picked up during his former profession as a sailor. He was
last hired to sail for the china Team in the Americas cup 2007. He
currently works in a squash court building, with the help of 7213
Theatreworks. He is the cofounder of tsunamii.net and p10.
danel magnsson is an artist based in reykjavik.
Teresa margolles is an artist based in mexico city.
Christien meindertsma is a designer, artist and writer based in
rotterdam. she runs the design studio These Flocks, and is the
author of checked baggage and Pig 05049.
naeem mohaiemen is a multimedia artist based between Dhaka
and New york city.
walter niedermayr is a photographer. He lives in bolzano.
Jorge otero-pailos is a New yorkbased architect and theorist
specialized in experimental forms of preservation. His projects and
writings present a new vision of preservation as a powerful counter
cultural practice that creates alternative futures for our world heri
tage. He is Assistant Professor of Historic Preservation at columbia
university in New york, and founder and editor of the journal
Future Anterior.
felix padel is a freelance anthropologist, writer and musician
living on a mountain in Wales. He is coauthor with samarendra Das
of an upcoming book about the political economy of the aluminium
industry and its impact on the indian state of orissa.
professor Bad Trip was a cult fgure in the world of underground
music and comics. Punk musician and artist, his psychedelic draw
ings and paintings circulated all over the world in magazines and po
litical manifestos, on album covers and Tshirts. He died in 2006.
piratbyrn is a group of theorists, artists, consultants, activists and
pranksters, concerned with the impact of digital information abun
dance on the creation of cultural meaning and economies of urban
life. They are based in sweden and known for initiating The Pirate
bay, which also takes part in their manifesta project.
raqs media Collective (Jeebesh bagchi, monica Narula and
shuddhabrata sengupta) are artists based in New Delhi. They are
curators of The rest of Now and cocurators of scenarios for
manifesta 7.
shveta sarda is a writer and translator based in Delhi.
Jeffrey schnapp is Professor of comparative literature at stanford
university, where he occupies the rosina Pierotti chair in italian
literature and directs the stanford Humanities lab.
katerina ed is an artist based in brnolen and Prague. she uses
provocative actions and the unlikely use of everyday materials to in
tervene creatively in the social life of the area where she lives.
meg stuart is a choreographer and dancer. born in New orleans in
1965, she now lives in berlin and works in brussels with her compa
ny, Damaged goods. she has created over twenty works for the
stage, and regularly collaborates with artists from the felds of video,
plastic art, music, and dance.
ashok sukumaran studied architecture and art, and now carries
out speculative technical and conceptual projects. He is a coinitiator
of cAmP, a new platform for artistic activity based in mumbai.
ravi sundaram is a writer and theorist and joint director of sarai,
centre for the study of Developing societies in New Delhi. His work
looks at the intersection of technocultures, globalization and the
urban experience in contemporary india.
Jrgen svensson is an artist based in gothenburg.
Teufelsgroup is a temporary, spontaneous ensemble interested
in the fctional architecture of the Teufelsberg in berlins grunewald
Forest.
Jeet Thayil is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently
english (2003) and these errors are correct (2008), and one half of an
experimental music duo, sridhar/Thayil. He lives in bangalore.
alexander Vaindorf is an artist currently based in stockholm. He
was born in odessa, ukraine and grew up in moscow in the former
soviet union.
Cdric Vincent is a writer, art theorist and freelance anthropologist
based in Paris.
darius Ziura is a photographer and video artist based in vilnius.
The images on pages 1320 are from the industrial Zone Department
(folder 15.1.4) and the Public Works Photography Department of the
Archive of the city of bolzano, courtesy Archive of the city of bolzano.
The images on pages 21, 47, 88 and 117 are from Pig 05049 by
christien meindertsma (rotterdam: Flocks, 2007), courtesy of
the author.
Who owns the mountains? by Felix Padel is adapted from his
article mining as a Fuel for War, the broken rife 77 (February 2008),
courtesy of the author.
image on pages 28 and 30 courtesy of euratlas.com.
Death on the bypass by ravi sundaram is from a chapter of his
upcoming book, after media: Pirate culture and urban life
(New york: routledge, 2009).
in kabul Zoo, the lion by Jeet Thayil is from his poetry collection,
english (New Delhi: Penguin books india; New york: rattapallax,
2004), courtesy of the author.
Automobile executed (lambda prints, 40cm x 60cm) by Teresa
margolles courtesy of the artist and galerie Peter kilchmann, Zurich.
image on page 48 courtesy of yves Netzhammer.
brevity by J. robert lennon is from his Pieces for the left hand
(london: granta books, 2005), courtesy of the author.
enthusiasts speaking by Neil cummings and marysia lewandows
ka is drawn from an archive of conversations with amateur flmmak
ers recorded during research trips to Poland between 2002 and 2004.
The full archive can be found at enthusiastsarchive.net

The images in bildraum by Walter Niedermayr are taken from a
longer series of the same name made in 1992.
The image on page 94 is by Jorge lon.
The romance of caffeine and Aluminium by Jeffrey schnapp is ex
tracted from his longer article of the same name originally published
in critical inquiry 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2001), courtesy of the author.
industrial ruins by Tim edensor is extracted from his book of the
same name (oxford: berg, 2005), courtesy of the author.
the nine gardens in the bank of norway by ingrid book & carina
Hedn is taken from the series the nine gardens in the bank of
norway 119 (cibachrome, 63cm x 77cm) shown in Temporary
utopias (museum of contemporary Art, oslo, 2003).
The Pirate bay manifesto on page 133 is adapted from
Four shreddings and a Funeral (piratbyran.org/walpurgis).
ACKNOwledGMeNts

138
the sOul,
or, Much
TrouBle in The
TrAnsporTATion
oF souls
edIted bY
anselm franke,
HilA Peleg
and avi PiTChon
141
This chapter of the manifesta 7 companion book corresponds to the exhibition
The soulor, much Trouble in the Transportation of souls in the Pallazzo
delle Poste in Trento. We have chosen the soul as a theme against the backdrop
of Trento, whose role as host city for the council of Trent,
1
which articulated
central conceptions of just what a soul is in early modernity, readily provided
a context for our enterprise. We didnt intend to invent a new paradigm, but
rather draw new connections between existing ideas and practices, and situate
them in a speculative historical context. it also wasnt our intention to enter
a debate on moral principles, or to suggest our own interpretation of the soul.
What interested us was a history leading to the particular carrier of the soul
that provided the grounds for the formation of the modern subject, and what
we have come to regard as the inner world, the individual interior.
The history of the concept of the soul is surely too complex to be recounted
within this restricted frame. We thus focus on a few specifc aspects of this
history, and leave the rest to all that has been said already, to further exegesis,
or preferably, to the imagination.
The soul has seemingly always and everywhere been conceived as a life
affrming principle, as the movement that makes all other motion possible, the
movements of sensation, emotion and consciousness. more specifcally,
the soul attracted us as an elusive center of european discourse, in which life
itself is at stake, and from which many of its formative dualisms seem to spring.
The soul is a border concept. The borders in which it partakes are not the
physicalpolitical borders of presentday europe, but surely no less signifcant.
They are the borders that determine the limits of sociality, of normality and
moralityborders whose establishment and reinforcement are the fundamental
manifestations of power, linked to the changing techniques of the governance
of souls, and moreover, the individual internalization of power and rule. These
borders are not natural, not a given. And merely understanding them as historical
or social constructions is equally insuffcient, as it fails to account for the specifc
ways in which they become naturalized, implicated and operative.
1. The council of Trent (15451563), in forging the catholic response to the Protestant reformation and
clarifying catholic doctrines, especially the use of the sacraments, is widely regarded as one of the
most important events at the outset of modernity.
PrefACe
anselm franke
AND HilA Peleg
141 PrefACe
by Anselm FrAnke And HilA Peleg
147 berlusCONI, huMPtY duMPtY ANd ubu rOI
FrAnco berArdi
164 MIddAY, tIMe Of the shOrtest shAdOw
micHAel TAussig
168 IN MOderNItY, the sOul CAlls
Itself subjeCtIVItY
mAurizio lAzzArATo
176 INNer lIMIts IN tIMes Of the
tYrANNY Of ChOICe
renATA sAlecl
186 665/the lesser eVIl
eyAl WeizmAn
200 A MAtter Of theft:
NOtes ON the Art Of steAlING A sOul
FloriAn scHneider
208 the heAd drAws, the hANd thINKs:
Anne-mie vAn kerckHoven inTervieWed by
gry dydeWAlle And JoHAn WAgemAns
214 ANGelA MelItOPOulOsthe lANGuAGe
Of thINGs:
A conversATion WiTH Avi PiTcHon
220 rOee rOseNCONfessIONs:
A conversATion WiTH Avi PiTcHon
225 bArbArA VIsserfOrMer futures:
A conversATion WiTH Avi PiTcHon
229 INterIOr desIGN
Tom HolerT
239 leArNING thINGs
brigid doHerTy
256 KINdred sOul
evA meyer
142 143
Today, the subjective side of things is seemingly no longer a threat to the domi
nant order, but one of its major productive drives. The subjects faculties are
no longer repressed and disciplined to confrm a rationalistobjectivist order, but
advertised as the true productive forces of the contemporary worldan individu
alized, individually conditioned world, whose character depends on subjective
attitude, in increasingly more privatized mirrorrelationships. As the old saying
goes, the way one shouts into the forest determines the reply. consequently,
utopian energies are no longer directed towards a change of external circum
stances, but have largely turned into a call for the transformation of the self. This
powerful ideological interpellation could be termed the transformative impera
tive. As the new saying goes, you cant change the world unless you change
yourself. The means to change the world are changing ones perception of it and
attitude towards it. This shift has profoundly altered all forms of resistance,
whether individual or collective.
operating as an entire ideological formation, this imperative accounts for an
unprecedented revival of all that is soulorientedvisible within a Prbased
(political) economy and in the conditioned environments of corporatism and
consumerism. This formation uses the soul (explicitly or implicitly) in order to
mask itself as natural, and to proft from the individualistic tradition wherein self
realization is associated with autonomy from subordination. The individual traits
of motion, emotion, sensation, the liberating potential of the imagination, have
all become the new fetishes of marketing and lifestyle. This call to selftransfor
mation embodies the most powerful contemporary ideological core of the
present regimes of power. it is so powerful because of its historical depth, its
borrowings from the mythical contents of (european) history.
in appropriating a good deal of the critical and emancipatory discourse of
the past, the latent ideological formation according to which subjective power is
unlimited in its capacity for transforming the world marks a decisive rupture in
the continuity of oppositional struggles. The language of negation is now inte
grated and embraced as a component of selfrealization, voluntarily or involun
tarily. The ability to say no and what saying no means, and therefore the condi
tions of resistance, are rewritten. our appeal to the soul is therefore ultimately
targeted at activating a continuity of negativity at a moment when this continuity
seems most endangered, when to presentday struggles it seems to be lost.
speaking of the soul today means to develop a sensitivity for the way the im
perative for selftransformation turns into a contemporary willingness to con
form. it means to observe how the language of possibility has come to mask
impossibility, for which no language, no vocabulary is available anymore.
The exhibition The soul emphasizes aesthetic strategies that are targeted at
making the normalized background conditions in which the self performs itself
today explicit, manifest or externalized. it is a theatrical exhibitiona space for
transformation and makebelieve, where the artifciality of emotions is celebrated
and the social relations like the apparatuses that produce them are exposed.
our desire is that the exhibition will unfold the history of negativity as it surfaces
feetingly in the history of the soul. in its context and space, impossible forms
of social and historical mobility will become thinkable, as the actor replaces the
The duality in which the soul in europe has been inscribed is that of morality.
The border drawn between good and evil cuts right through each soul, parting it
to a bright and a dark side. The christian doctrine entangles each soul in a
heroic struggle, its fnal salvation depending on the defeat of the forces and
temptations of evil, of its own dark side. This defeat is possible only through
self negation (and subsequent selftransformation), as the temptations of evil are
immanent to each desiring soul. europes battle over the soul takes place in
the frontline of the inner self, which is literally brought to see the light by way
of the knowledge of the church. A key in this implication of the inner self is
the ritual of confession.
in Trento, the scope of the confession was further expanded to include latent
thoughts and imaginations, the sins one had merely desired or fantasized
thus marking the beginning of the modern colonization of the imaginary. From
the inner monologue to public speechthe self, the modern individual, exists
only insofar as it can confess, insofar as it can be told and spoken out in an act of
selfrevelation, be objectifed and verbalized. The modern subject is formed
through the ritual of the continuous labor of explicating (and thus negating) all
that latently remains hidden in the darkness of the soul.
in the course of its modern exploration, the soul has never been contained by
positivist science, never entirely pinned down, its objective reality or nature
never completely determined in rationalobjectivist terms. metaphor of all meta
phors, this centre of intelligibility has remained ultimately elusive, fuelling the
assumption that it might never have been more than fction. in the course of the
enlightenment and in the wake of rationalist science, the soul became synony
mous with the opposition, the other, the negation of the enlightened world.
Negation is deprived of a proper language, dwelling in broken syntax, in
nonsense, in the displaced jargon of symptoms, and in the imagery with which
the negative is mediated and its concrete content signifed. The witchhunt,
phantasmagorias of the devil, the psychodrama of exorcisms, the demonic fable,
and performances of possession all made up the scenography of negation in
the aftermath of the council of Trent.
The world of the enlightenment appeared as composed of rationalized,
positive facts and a (troubled and troubling) subjective rest. in the socalled
disciplinary age, (which corresponds to the heyday of rationalist science),
this troubling subjective rest symbolized all that seemingly opposed the course
of modernitythe unreality of the imagination and fantasy, the irrationality
of emotions, femininity, infantility, madness or savagery, all corresponding to
the concrete histories of colonialism, gender, mental health and so forth.
Attempts at reanimating the repressed or excluded contents of the soul sur
faced frst in romanticism. romanticism triggered a reconstructive rehabilitation
of the subjective soul and its longdismissed faculties, beginning in the late nine
teenth century. The next phase is perhaps most powerfully manifest in Freuds
discovery of the unconscious. And only once the subjects soul had entered
reality again in its own right, the true exploration and colonization of the interior
begantogether with the great system of tests (Walter benjamin) by means
of which the psyche was measured and objectifed in the twentieth century.
144 145
both having their origins in the Trentino regionthe neuropsychiatrist beppino
Disertori and the architect Adalberto libera. Holert contributed an essay in
the form of an expanded collection of notes and quotations relating to and posi
tioning his research, which add up to a multifaceted refection on the relation
between architecture, politics and the interiorthe nervous system in relation
to the psychology of space.
We have in addition invited fve scholars, intellectuals and artists to conceive
miniature museums for the exhibition, each following a specifc concept relat
ing to the history of interiority or the soul. Three of the minimuseum curators
provide extended notes on their contributions: anthropologist michael Taussig,
who, together with maria Thereza Alves and Jimmie Durham curated the muse
um of european Normality, takes us on a historical journey through the never
understood soul as the realm of fantastic transformations and metaphorizations,
perhaps the logic of the imaginary, and concludes with a motif from Friedrich
Nietzsche, articulating the irresolvable interdependency of depth and surface.
Walter benjamin is at the center of the historical exploration contributed
to this publication by art historian brigid Doherty, also corresponding directly to
her curation of one of the miniature museumsthe museum of learning
Things. learning Things unfolds a panorama of the infuence of certain forms
of didactic imagery, in which a specifc, subtle investigation of interiority and
exteriority, examined through the conditioning of empathy and perception
in relation to things, is at stake. The essay takes its cue from a short text by
Walter benjamin entitled Dream kitsch, which is also reproduced here.
Florian schneider, flmmaker, activist and writer, contributes the museum
of the stealing of souls to the exhibition and the corresponding text to this
compilation, perhaps best termed a manifesto on the presentday status of images
in an imagebased economy. He opens by discussing the famous, persistent
myth that the camera steals the soul. A key question for him is the large number
of modern political and artistic movements, both reactionary and libertarian,
that have implicitly or explicitly referred to or reenacted this myth, and employed
a similar structure of argument based on an assumed soultheft or related mo
tifsdisenchantment, reifcation, zombifcationwhether through capitalism or
technocratic modernity in general. The text also opens up the more general
question: What is the relation between an image and the soul? schneiders text
touches upon the complex relationship of ones soul and the image of the self.
Annemie van kerckhoven contributed an interview that was conducted
with her in the course of a research project at the catholic university of leuven
by psychologists gry dydewalle and Johan Wagemans. The conversation
takes a detailed look at the process of the creation of van kerckhovens draw
ings, also referred to as mind maps, and through which associative principles
come to the fore.
our coeditor for the present collection, writer Avi Pitchon, has conducted
three interviews with participating artistsAngela melitopoulos, barbara visser,
and roee rosen. Departing from their individual contributions to the exhibition,
these provide an insight into the variety of references and attitudes with
which they have responded to our proposition, and the means by which they
proper individual, masquerade replaces stable identity and the negative energy
needed to keep hegemony and its symbolic order in place bursts forth.
The reader before you contains an idiosyncratic selection of original contribu
tions. it was frst and foremost important for us to position the project within
the intellectual landscape and heritage of the italian present and recent past. We
have invited Franco berardi, one of the protagonists of the Autonomia move
ment from bologna, to contribute an elaborate response to our proposition and
focus on presentday italy. sociologist maurizio lazzarato from the Parisbased
magazine multitudes contributes an instructive text on the relation between
soul and subjectivity in the history of modernity, from the catholic council of
Trent to the present. lazzarato uses michel Foucaults analysis of the govern
ment of souls and the genealogy of pastoral power as his conceptual back
dropcomponents that with the practice of confession at their center do not,
according to Foucault, legitimize the notion of a radical rupture between
modern and premodern consciousness.
Philosopher and legal scholar renata salecl contributes a text which further
deepens the contemporary analysis of psychic power. salecl analyses the com
plex if not paradoxical status of (social) prohibitions in the context of what she
calls the tyranny of choice, applying lacanian psychoanalytical methods as
well as Walter benjamins analysis of commodity culture.
eva meyer has in the past explored the realm of language, in the context
of what she calls free and indirect speecha modality in which one becomes
a medium of language, in which an exteriorized language begins to work on
its own, refusing to inhabit a single consciousness, and instead partaking in con
sciousness as such. For this reader, meyer uses the novel the robber by swiss
writer robert Walser as the backdrop of an investigation into the relation be
tween soul, world and narration. Walsers own work is characterized by deep
mistrust in the epistemological validity of the self (the individual me is only
a zero), and in the creation of a coherent world by means of characters, narra
tors or the causal linkage of events.
All other texts have been developed in correspondence to contributions to
the exhibitionbut here, they exist in their own right, not to be mistaken as cata
logue representations. Architect and writer eyal Weizmans chapter is a theoreti
cal inquiry into the concept of the lesser evilthe principle according to which
differing levels of evil or suffering can be measured and calculated against
one another, in situations in which an ideal choice seems impossible. The prin
ciple of the lesser evil, as Weizman shows, has not only become the dominant
political and ethical rationality; it further poses the question of complicity, of
affrmation or negation of a given situation, of ones ability or inability to
act positively within intolerable structures. The lesser evil also opens up yet
another window on the continuous presence of theological concepts and histo
ries in presentday reality. An installation of the same title and topic is to be
found in the exhibition.
Tom Holert, known predominantly as a writer and critic, also contributes
a work to the exhibition (in collaboration with claudia Honecker), a visual essay
that takes its cue from a montage of two characters set against one another,
146 147
Prologue
When i use a word it means just what i want it to meanneither more nor
less... The question is, which [meaning] is to be masterthats all. so says
lewis carrolls Humpty Dumpty, recognizing straightaway, like a good master,
that when you ask words to do overtime, you have to pay them more.
And Deleuze, who refers to Humpty Dumpty in the third series of logic of
sense, titled on the Proposition, comments: The last resort seems to be that
which identifes meaning with signifcation. Not sense, but the activity of
producing meaning through the innumerable shifts and slides that this process
involves. This is also said by greimas in his book, On sense.
in order to speak of the italian derive
1
of the last ffteen years we begin
from a semiotic of transgression and of sliding.
Derive. The priggish fear this expression because they dont know where it
will take them. but life is like that: you never know where it can take you.
life is a derive, history is a derive. Those who think that we can take refuge
from the contingencies of the drift cannot act successfully politically. This
is because they believe that the word is linked to its semantic referents and
are deluded that law and order safeguard the unpredictable.
For a good political practice society must defend its autonomy from the
predatory instincts of capitalism, and to do this it is not necessary to believe in
law, but only in the force of society itself. in the course of the twentieth century
social autonomy often had to surrender to the hegemony of left politics, whether
leninist social democracy or reformism. in all of its forms, the left was an
extremely bad ally. When seizing power, as ever, it used violence against society.
or, in its legalist reformist version, it forced a subaltern social autonomy to en
dure the laws of capital. Finally, the French, italian and british elections of 2007
berlusCONI,
humpTy dumpTy
AND ubu roi
franCo berardi
1. one of the basic situationist practices is the drive [literally: drifting], a technique of rapid passage
through varied ambiances. Drives involve playfulconstructive behavior and awareness of psychogeo
graphical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll. in a drive
one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all
their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of
the terrain and the encounters they fnd there. chance is a less important factor in this activity than one
might think: from a drive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents,
fxed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones. guy Debord,
Theory of derive (1956), http://library.nothingness.org/articles/all/all/display/314. (Translators note)
position themselves within this project in relation to their larger practice. barbara
visser, whose past work often explores the psychological structure of meaning
and the pitfalls of communication, talks about her interest in the relation
between the architect of the exhibitions site, rationalist Angiolo mazzoni, and
futurist artist Fortunato Depero, as an exemplary case study for the entangle
ment of artists in political movements. roee rosen answers questions about the
multiple references in his work thatimplicitly or explicitlyrelate to european
history and its internal otherness. The interview with Angela melitopoulos
hits upon yet another central questionthat of mediality and autonomy. condi
tions of mediality (as depicted in melitpoulos video the language of things) in
peoples momentary experience of immediacy and ecstasy in the accelerating
machine in an amusement park represents in melitopoulos description a being
in the language of technology.
in mediality, the binary oppositions of the soul, inside and outside, subject
and object, inner man and external world release their dialectical tension as
they collapse into one. To fnd in the resulting immanence not prosthetic
reconciliation (as the conditioned environments and imageworlds of capitalist
culture do), but the feld of potential agency and a relative autonomy is where
the concerns of these texts, and indeed the exhibition, ultimately converge.
148 149
production of aggression, religious fundamentalism, and competitive conformism.
in the flm bergman spoke of a future which today, in the new millennium, is
the present. Daily, the poisoning was carried out in our houses by a nerve gas
that acts on the psyche, on sensibility, on language, producing an effect of inter
minable infoproductive stimulation, of competitive mobilization of energy, as
well as panic and depressive crises. liberal economism has produced mutations
of the organism more profound than those of Nazism, because they do not act
on superfcial forms of behaviour but on the biological, cognitive dowry, on the
chemical composition of the psychosphere.
on 25 December 1977 charlie chaplin died; the man with the bowler hat who
recounted the dehumanization of modern industrialism from the point of view of
a humanity that still knew how to be human. There was no longer any place for
kindness. saturday night fever came out at the cinema in those months of au
tumn, presenting a new race of workers, happy to be exploited for the whole
week as long as they could gel their hair on a saturday night and win over the
dance foor.
in Japan, 1977 was the year of youth suicides: they numbered 784, and the
quick succession of a chain of juvenile suicides among primary school children
thirteen in the month of october aloneprovoked great consternation.
The year 1977 was a turning point in the history of modernity, the year in
which the perspective of the posthuman took shape. The generation that grew
up in the 1980s was destined to be the frst videoelectronic generation, the frst
formed in an environment where mediatization prevailed over contact between
human bodies. in the cultural styles and aesthetics of the following decades
we witnessed a process of purifcation, of decarnalizationthe beginning of a
long process of cultural sterilization in which the frst videoelectronic generation
was formed as both object and subject. cleanliness substituted for dust; the
hairless took the place of the hirsute.
During the following decade the dangerous epidemic of AiDs semiotized the
entire feld of corporeality. carnal contact carried danger and electricity, stigma
tizing, petrifying or overheating in a pathological manner. This is how, in the
last two decades of the twentieth century, a cognitive mutation was performed.
The organism became sensitized to the code and thus prepared for connection,
the permanent interfacing with the digital universe.
sensibilitynot reasonperceived this mutation, and reacted with an exer
cise of selfdestructive craziness of which heroin was the clearest signal. The
existential and artistic experience of the American No Wave, of london punk and
the german and italian autonomist movements signalled a fnal awakening of
consciousness in the face of the mutation in the sensible sphere and in the col
lective psyche, in the face of this pollution of the soul and the following deani
mation of the body.
in italy the year 1977 is remembered for the explosion of a movement that
created for the frst time in communication the primary terrain of its own expres
sion. it was the year of radio Alice, the frst free italian station, which broke the
state domination over systems of communication. but 1977 was also the year in
which, thanks to the smashing of the state monopoly, a private group called Fin
2008 erased the left from the geopolitical map. Today, social autonomy fnds
itself alone, and fnally it can fnd its own way without fear of it being a drift.
la derive is the title of a book by two italian journalists who strive to dress an
indecent world in underwear. in the book they lament the tendency of the coun
try to slide into decline, recession, disunity. but who said that decline is a bad
thing, recession a disgrace, and the end of national unity a danger to be con
jured away?
The word derive scares those who believe politics must respect a set of rules
and that law must be at the centre of social life, like those who think that words
have one meaning and only that, and that to understand one another in life it is
necessary to use words according to their established meaning. All wrong.
When we speak we do not respect the meanings of words but invent them. un
derstanding is not the exchange of signs supplied with a univocal referent. To
understand is to follow the slides in the relations between signs and referent, re
inventing signs as functions of new referents and creating new referents by cir
culating new signs. similarly politics does not have to respect any one law be
cause it invents the law when it creates new relations.
Following order is a good thing, but politics cannot be reduced to this, be
cause there is no rule that says rules must be respected. berlusconi understood
this, and won all he could possibly win. The left did not understand it and fnally
vanished, to leave space, lets hope, for a new social autonomy capable of in
venting new words, new referents and above all, new forms of relations.
I
THe egg And THe serPenT
in a flm of 1977 titled the egg and the serpent, ingmar bergman recounts the
development of Nazism in germany in the 1920s as a psychic poisoning of social
space, as an infltration of a venomous substance in the environment of the
relations of daily life. bergman, who has often dealt with the theme of alienation
as psychic suffering, the silent pain of the soul and incommunicability, proposes
a materialist vision of a monstrous chemical mutation that Nazism provokes in
the psychical and social sphere.
the egg and the serpent is not one of the best flms by the swedish director,
but it is interesting from the point of view of the coming culture of late moderni
ty, because it recounts the development of totalitarianism from the point of view
of a psychophysical pollution. social malaise is in the frst place a disturbance of
communication.
With the egg and the serpent bergman rethinks the question of incommunica
bility dear to existentialist thought: communication between ullmann and carra
dine is progressively poisoned because a toxic substance enters into their nostrils
and lungs and therefore into their brains. Thus, in a crowd scene of slow, hypnotic
movements, Nazism transforms the social mass into an amorphous mass, deprived
of their own will and ready to be led. The metaphor of a psychic submission, be
yond the example of german Nazism, is a valid one to characterize processes of
the pollution of the collective mind, like communism, television advertising, the
150 151
measurable value quantifable by socially necessary labour time. The postindus
trial economy is based on linguistic exchange, on the value of simulation. This
simulation becomes the decisive element in the determination of value. And
when simulation becomes central to the productive process, the lie, the deceit,
the fraud enter to play a part in economic life, not as exceptional transgressions
of the norm but as laws of production and exchange.
in the sphere of semiocapital the laws in force do not resemble the laws of
the glorious epoch of industry, the relations do not resemble those of the pro
ductive discipline, the ethics of work or the enterprise that dominated the world
of classical industrial capitalism, the Protestant capitalism that michel Albert
dubs of the rhine. A deep transformation took place in the last few decades,
starting with the separation of the fnancial circuit from the real economy.
The founding act of this process of separation was Nixons arbitrary decision
to abandon the system established at bretton Woods. in 1971, the American
president decided to rescind the rules on the convertibility of the dollar into gold
and to thus affrm the selfreferentiality of the American standard. Despite the
implications of vietnam, at this time American power still had credibility and the
strength to impose its decisions as if they were objective and incontrovertible.
Today that power and credibility have dissolved, the value of the dollar has fallen,
and the economy of simulation has thus entered into a phase of instability.
From the moment when Nixon told the world of the decision to unhook the
dollar from every gauge of objectivity, money fully became what it already was
in essence: a pure act of language. No longer a referential sign that relates to a
mass of commodities, to a quantity of gold, or to some other objective data,
money now relates to a factor of simulation, an agent capable of putting into
motion arbitrary processes independent of the real economy. Therefore semio
capital is a system of complete indeterminacy: fnancialization and immaterializa
tion have brought to the relations between social actors unpredictability and
chance elements never seen before in the history of the industrial economy.
in Fordist industrial production, the determination of the value of a commodi
ty was founded on a certain factor: the socially necessary labour time to produce
that commodity. but in semiocapitalism this is no longer true. When the main
feature of commodity production is cognitive labour, the labour of attention,
memory, language and imagination, the criteria of value are no longer objective
and cannot be quantifed on the basis of a fxed referent. labour time has ceased
to count as the absolute touchstone.
under aleatory conditions of referents, arbitrariness becomes the law: the lies,
the violence, the corruption are no longer marginal offshoots of economic life,
but tend to become the alpha and omega of the daily management of affairs.
bands of criminals decisively take over the place of command. economic power
belongs to those who possess more powerful language machines. The govern
ment of the mediascape, predominance in the production of software, and con
trol over fnancial information: these are the foundations of economic power.
And the domination of these sources of power cannot be established by means
of the dear old competition where the best possible management of available re
sources wins, but rather through lies, deceit and war. There is no longer any eco
invest, led by the man who got rich with fnancial help the origins of which
could never be established, embarked on the enterprise of commercial televi
sion. To the collective liberation of communication, of which the movement of
students and radio Alice had been the bearers, replied the privatization and
commercialization of communication systems. it was the beginning of a trans
formation of which today, thirty years later, we can measure the full signifcance.
II
in THe reAlm oF THe AleATory
one night in october 1977, whilst the fres of the student riots were dying out,
silvio berlusconi met mike buongiorno, a man who had featured on the screen
since the beginning of italian television. They dined together in a milan restau
rant, and out of their simple minds an extraordinary linguistic machine was born,
capable of a mutagenetic biopolitical penetration of the italian brain. since then
berlusconis capital has operated in a perfectly recombinatory manner: having
built its fnancial base on estates, it invested in advertising, insurance, football
and television. To put this enormous conglomerate into motion, silvio berlusco
ni, who was a member of the secret society P2 and friends with characters who
reeked of the mafa such as marcello Dellutri, violated many of the laws of the
italian republic: cooking the books, corruption of judges, conficts of interest.
For twenty years he outmanoeuvred magistrates, journalists and institutions that
accused him of breaking the law. but what is the law? A linguistic effect that dis
solves as common sense changes. And in three decades, common sense has
changed because berlusconis mediatic machine has inoculated linguistic sub
stances in perfect doses to produce white noise.
Far from being a backward, transitory anomaly, since the 80s and 90s the
berlusconi phenomenon has been a sign for a time to comeactually, a time
that has now come. in this time an infrastructure of the engineering of the psy
chosphere was constituted that was capable of modulating the public mood and
of producing opinion, but above all, capable of destroying psychic sensibility and
the empathetic sociability of the new generations, who are induced to mistake
the uninterrupted fow of television for the world.
contemporary capitalism can be defned as semiocapitalism, because the
general shape of commodities has a semiotic character and the process of pro
duction is increasingly the elaboration of signinformation. in the sphere of semi
ocapital, economic production is increasingly tightly interwoven with processes
of linguistic exchange, as is explained clearly in the books of christian marazzi
and Paolo virno.
Thanks to language we can create shared worlds, formulate ambiguous enun
ciations, elaborate metaphors, simulate events or simply lie. semioeconomics is
the creation of worlds, castles of metaphors, imagination, predictions, simula
tions and fabrications. What country besides the one that gave us commedia
dellarte could better insert itself in a productive system based on chatter, spec
tacle and exhibition?
The Fordist industrial economy was founded on the production of objectively
152 153
ing a clinical rather than a fnancial diagnosis. The exuberance was an effect of
drugs, of the nervous breakdown of a generation of cognitive workers, of the
saturation of attention that led it to the limits of panic.
The year 2000 saw the start of the Prozac crash. The beginning of the new
millennium saw a glorifed megafusion: Aol and Time Warner united their tenta
cles to meticulously innervate the planetary mind. in the following months the
telecoms of europe invested massive sums in the universal mobile Telecommu
nications system (umTs). These were the last blows before the crisis that en
gulfed Worldcom, enron and entire sectors of the net economy. The fnancial
crash was the manifestation of a psychic collapse that involved an army of cog
nitive workers increasingly strongly affected by stressrelated psychoses.
The apocalypse that was missed on New years eve 1999 arrived one morning
in september twentyone months later. like all apocalypses, that day revealed
a new world. All of a sudden we realized that the world was ridden with war ma
chines at every corner, and that the whole ethical and political universe known
as modern humanist universalism was dissolved, annihilated and destroyed.
IV
THe iTAliAn AnomAly
Providing a defnition of the regime that was established in italy in 1994the
year of the frst victory of Forza italia (the Tvfootball party)is more than
a question of naming. like other periods in the history of italy in the twentieth
century, the years of berlusconi are indicative of an italian anomaly and func
tioned as a laboratory for experimentation with social trends. other moments in
history when italy was the laboratory of new tendencies were 1922when
techniques of populist and totalitarian management were experimented with
under the appellation of fascismand the 1970s.
in the 1970s an anomalous though exemplary situation arose: the student
movement of 1968 gave rise to a long period of social insubordination and au
tonomy from work that changed the whole of society. Power responded to this
social autonomy by developing an authoritarian and closed system founded on
an alliance between the main churches in the country: catholicism and stalin
ism. This was the period of the historic compromise and of the judiciary repres
sion of dissent. The political closure of this regime and the repression of grass
roots movements resulted in a strengthening of armed factions and fed into a
wave of terrorism that culminated in the kidnapping and killing of Aldo moro.
but what is the italian anomaly today, and in what sense is italy a laboratory of
new forms of power? Are we confronted with a reinstatement of mussolinis re
gime, as many events in italian politics seem to suggest?
The answer is no: this is not a fascist regime. This regime is not founded on
the repression of dissent; nor does it rest on the enforcement of silence. on the
contrary, it relies on the proliferation of chatter, the irrelevance of opinion and
discourse, and on making thought, dissent and critique banal and ridiculous.
even though there have been and will continue to be instances of censorship
and direct repression of critical and free thought, these phenomena are rather
nomic power that is not criminal, that does not violate fundamental human
rightsfrst and foremost the right to education, selfknowledge, and the right to
an unpolluted infosphere.
III
THe soul AT Work
in the sphere of semiocapital, the soul is put to work. i use the word soul not at
all in a spiritualist sense, but to mean a condition of possibility for the happiness
and unhappiness of the body as well as the condition of possibility for productive
action, social action. What the body is capable of is its soul.
Foucault recounts the history of modernity as the discipline of the body, as
the construction of institutions and devices capable of subduing the body into
the machine of social production. in this manner he describes the process of
subjectivation that accompanies the development of industrial society. exploita
tion in industrial society concerns the body, the muscles, and the arms. but
these bodies would be worthless if they were not mobile, intelligent, reactive
animated. in the current epoch exploitation is exercised essentially on the semi
otic fow that the time of human labour is capable of emanating. No longer ani
mated bodies but the soul itself becomes the object of economic exploitation.
To continue the genealogical work of michel Foucault today means directing
our theoretical attention to the strategies and methods of the programming of
language, towards the automatization of mental responses, because through
them the mental labour of the web is disciplined.
Digital production is essentially semiotic emanation. The essential biosocial
innovation of the last decades is the bioinformatic network made possible by
digitalization. but the insertion of this network into interhuman linguistic circula
tion produces effects in subjectivity that involve the soul, the mind that feels itself.
The acceleration of the infosphere involves a change in the velocity of linguis
tic elaboration and existential rhythm: it concerns a real and proper process of
reformatting the human brain with psychopathological effects. The explosion of
the psychopharmacological sector and the explosion of the market for drugs are
naturally two essential functions of this mutation.
The frenzy let loose in the 90s in fnance, consumerism and lifestyles was also
due to the systematic use of euphoric drugs and substances for neuroprogram
ming. The stimulation of the soul was an integral part of the economic expansion
founded on the virtual economy. A major section of the population of every coun
try in the world began to be put through an uninterrupted nervous hyperexcita
tion, up to the point of the collapse evoked in the metropolitan legend of the mil
lennium bug, conjured up as an exorcism and symbol for the expectationas we
waited for midnight on the last day of 1999of an apocalypse that never came.
once the phantasmagoric danger of the millennium bug faded away, and ev
eryone breathed a sigh of relief, the real collapse arrived: the crisis in the fnan
cial sector of dotcom shares in April 2000. The collective psyche of the new
economy had already sensed that crisis was approaching. in 1999 Alan greens
pan had spoken of the irrational exuberance of the markets, his words suggest
154 155
power of the bourbon House, the churchs ally. From the 1800s onwards, the al
liance of the church with the rural classes acted as an antibourgeois conserva
tive force in the defence of the cultural hegemony of the church against all at
tempts at laicization of national life. in the years that followed the second World
War, the christian Democrats were the dominant political force, representing the
mediation in a permanent equilibrium between capitalist modernization and pop
ulist and reactionary resistance. However, it would be wrong to see the laxness
that derives from the spirit of the counterreformation as a purely regressive and
conservative energy.
in the 1970s, the italian anomaly was the expression used to underline the
peculiarity of a country where the social movements that had been exhausted in
1968 continued to dominate the political scene for over a decade. in the 1970s,
the workers resistance produced structures of mass organization and fuelled re
volts against capitalist modernization. At the time, the italian anomaly consisted
in the persistence of workers autonomy and social confict. italy underwent a
long season of proletarian struggles that embraced antimodernism in a dynamic
and paradoxically progressive way.
This process began in July 1960, when workers in many cities rose up against
the attempt to form a centreright government that included men linked to the
old fascist regime, and culminated in the antiauthoritarian and libertarian insur
rection of 1977. During the autonomous workers struggles against the patron
age of the government in cities and factories, we fnd a constant and recurring
element: the refusal of the subordination of life to work. This refusal was mani
fest in a manifold of different ways: frst of all as mediterranean idleness, the priv
ileging of sensuality and solar life over productivity and the economy. Then it
was expressed in the workers and the youths revolts against the rhythms of the
factory, and in the endemic absenteeism and the workers disaffection with their
labour. The movement of workers autonomy that fourished from 1967 to 1977
sums up this attitude of insubordination and resistance in the formula refusal of
labour.
The notion of refusal of labour, as it was adopted in italy during the 1970s,
was inserted in the framework of a progressive political strategy. Workers re
fused the effort and repetitiveness of mechanical labour, thus forcing companies
to keep restructuring. Workers resistance was an element of human progress
and freedom, as well as an accelerator of technological and organizational devel
opment.
VI
sHirkers
At the origin of the mass refusal of productive discipline lies an anticalvinist cul
ture. contrary to the Protestant idea of progress as founded on work discipline,
the autonomous antiwork spirit claims that progressbe it technological, cul
tural or socialis based on the refusal of discipline. Progress consists of the ap
plication of intelligence to the reduction of effort and dependency, and the ex
pansion of a sphere of idleness and individual freedom.
marginal when compared to what is essentially an immense informational over
load and an actual siege of attention, paralleled by an occupation of the sources
of information operated by the head of the company.
The present social composition cannot be assimilated to that of italy in the
1920s, which was predominantly comprised of peasant and country folk. in the
frst decades of the twentieth century, the futurist modernism of fascists intro
duced an element of innovation and social progress, whereas today the regime
of Forza italia carries no germ of progress and its political economy is based on
the dilapidation of the patrimony accumulated in the past. Whilst fascism initiat
ed a process of modernization of production in the country, the regime of Forza
italia wasted the resources accumulated in the years of industrial development,
like carlos menem in Argentina during the decade that preceded the collapse of
its economy and society. This drive to dissipation and waste is in perfect harmo
ny with the main tendency of the planet in the period of neoliberal indeterminacy.
To understand the specifc character of the italian situation of the past four
teen years, we need to look for what differentiated it from the rest of europe
throughout modernity, while also considering the postmodern peculiarity of the
italian transformation in the wider context of a change investing the system of
production and the global infosphere. To grasp this specifcity we would begin
with the counterreformation, which sanctioned the differential speeds of the
advancement of the christian world towards the colonization of the earth and
the construction of modern bourgeois capitalism. The temporality of the coun
tries invested by the counterreformation (italy, spain, Austria, and Poland) is
different from that of Protestant countries.
V
THe counTer-reFormATion And THe
iTAliAn sPeciFiciTy
According to max Weber, classical industrial development is sustained by the
Protestant mentality. After the Protestant reformation, the european bourgeoisie
was able to build the foundations of its power by subjecting itself to a rigid ethi
cal and existential discipline. The bourgeoisie assumes responsibility for its ac
tions and is accountable for them before men and god, but most of all before the
bank manager. economic fortune is a worldly confrmation of divine benevolence.
on the contrary, with the council of Trent (15451563) the catholic counter
reformation reinstated the primacy of the religious over the secular realm and
defended the conviction that respecting the ecclesiastic hierarchy is much more
important than productive discipline. The deep substratum of catholic culture re
sists productivity and bourgeois effciency. Whereas calvinism was based on the
observance of the law, the spirit of the counterreformation reinforced the pri
macy of mercy and the absolute value of repentance. The counterreformation
remained deeply engrained in the italian social imaginary throughout modernity
and manifested itself in all its reactionary force at decisive moments in the life of
the country. During the Neapolitan revolution of 1799, the enlightened bourgeoi
sie was isolated and defeated thanks to the complicity of the people with the
156 157
able to turn it into an anticipation of the creative potential that was to take centre
stage in postmodern and postindustrial production.
After the 70s, workers autonomy was defeated by police repression and the
capitalist offensive of the early 80s hit the factory working class with waves of
redundancies, paving the way for the adoption of a neoliberal ideology. but liber
alism italian style cannot be assimilated to the liberal bourgeois tradition of Prot
estant derivation that fourished in europe during modernity.
liberal culture never affrmed itself in italy as a majoritarian culture of govern
ment. During the nineteenth century, the liberal Party led the risorgimento, but
never actually became the majoritarian culture of the italian bourgeoisie. The
compromise of state and church and the alliance between the industrial bour
geoisie and reactionary landowners dominated italian politics in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. liberal culture always demanded a secular state and
represented a cultural component of political Protestantism, yet it always re
mained a minority. in the early 1900s Piero gobetti, a liberal, had to recognize
that the only way to free the italian state from the reactionary infuence of ca
tholicism was through an alliance between liberals and the workers movement.
That alliance could unfortunately never be realized, and fascism assailed and de
stroyed both the communist workers movement led by Antonio gramsci and the
liberal movement represented by Piero gobetti. Neoliberalism, as a hegemonic
political force, affrmed itself in the 80s and has nothing to do with the liberal
legacy; in fact, it proposes an alliance between all socially and culturally reaction
ary forces under the banner of the ultracapitalist principle of economic liberalism
of AngloAmerican derivation.
in the 80s, in the midst of a capitalist counteroffensive and the affrmation of
neoliberalism at the international level, italy gave life to a curious experiment in
political economy. After defeating workers autonomy, social radicalism, and
egalitarian and libertarian movements, an antiProtestant ethics permitted the
political class in government to tolerate economic illegalities, embezzlements,
corruption and mafa. These were the years of bettino craxi. Despite his socialist
and laic credentials, craxi was the representative of a convergence of the coun
terreformation spirit of tolerance and shirking with a cultural openness towards
neoliberal modernization. modernization and corruption, in craxis theory and
praxis, were not in contradiction; these trends were absolutely complementary,
integrated and functional.
in the 70s, the historic left (the communist Party and the catholic left) re
sponded to the refusal of labour of the youth and workers antiProtestantism
with violence. They accused the antiwork rebels of the factories and the metro
politan indians of the social centres of hooliganism.
2
in the 80s, catholics and
late communists rebelled against craxi, not because he was pursuing a neoliber
al policy of patronage, but because he tolerated corruption.
2. The metropolitan indians were a group of young proletarians active at the time of the historic com
promise between Pci (italian communist Party) and Dc (christian Democratic party) of the 1970s. in
spired by situationist dtournement, surrealist games, Dadaist nonsense and Futurist poetics, they en
ergized the symbolic political imaginary of the movement with an outburst of creativity based on the
performative power of words and bodies. of particular note was their political use of litotes, which in
1977 galvanized the hostility of union offcials towards the movement. (Translators note)
The technological, social and cultural progress of the country was stimulated
by this refusal of labour, and between the 60s and 70s italian civil society experi
enced the only authentically democratic period of an extraordinary fourishing of
culture, concomitant to when the refusal of labour was most intense and height
ened by the level of absenteeism in the factories.
obviously, the refusal of capitalist exploitation, the opposition to increases in
productivity and to workers subordination were not peculiar to italy. All around
the world workers demanded wage increases and more free time for their lives,
and opposed the masters will to subordinate life to work and work to proft.
However, in italy this insubordination joined the shirkers spirit of the southern
plebs to become an explicit, declared and politically relevant issue: that is, the re
fusal of labour and the demand for social autonomy, the autonomy of everyday
life from work discipline.
Towards the end of the 70s, tens of thousands of young southerners arrived
at the Fiat factory mirafori. With their new forms of struggle and antiwork atti
tude, they carried an extremism that was a danger to both the progressive bour
geoisie and the italian communist Party. This new draft of workers completely
ignored, if not derided, the work ethic and pride in productivity.
Did these young workers from Naples and calabria embody the same rascal
spirit, the individualist and antimodernist populism, that characterized 1799 and
led the Neapolitan people to oppose the revolutionary enlightened bourgeoisie?
yes, in part. but this shirkers spirit also expressed the new realization that the
society of industrial labour was nearing its end. This idea spread through youth
culture and invaded the whole of society: industrial labour was a remnant of the
past, the development of technologies and social knowledge opened up the pos
sibility of the liberation of society from labour. The most radical parts of the
workers movement expressed the belief that industrial labour was exhausted
and that the alienating and repetitive form of work was therefore no longer his
torically justifed. This idea was the most radical innovation of the italian work
ers movement of the 60s and 70s, thus differentiating it from the communist
tradition of the 1900s.
VII
THe double soul oF THe iTAliAn Workers
movemenT
Throughout the modernization of the twentieth century, the italian left was
pushed in two opposite directions. on the one hand, a Protestant, industrialist
and modernist soul motivated its protests against social backwardness and de
mands for more productivity and effciency in the system of production, at the
cost of increasing workers exploitation and subscribing to liberalist policies. on
the other hand, an antiproductivist, egalitarian and communitarian soul drove the
left to demonize capitalism and take refuge in forms of the welfare state that
helped create parasitical political clienteles. The workers autonomy of the 60s
and 70s wedged in between these two souls of the traditional left: it embodied
an antiproductive culture inscribed in italian culture in its shirkers form, but was
158 159
neat borders of industrial society faded out and broke down in atomized work
places, net slaves underwent two parallel processes. on the one hand, their exis
tence was individualized, both physically and culturally. each one had to follow
her trajectory and compete in the market individually. on the other hand, each
worker experienced a situation of permanent cellular connection. each individual
is a cell put in constant productive connection with others by the web, which en
sures a deterritorialized, fractal and fuid sociality. The cellular is the new assem
bly line, deprived of any carnal sociality.
simulation and fractalization are essentially baroque categories. in the shift to
postmodernity, the rationalist balance of industrial architecture gave way to the
proliferation of points of view. in the neo-baroque era (1994), omar calabrese
claims that the postmodern style recuperated aesthetic and discursive models
with which the culture of the baroque experimented in the 1600s. baroque was
essentially a proliferation of points of view. Whilst the Protestant rigour produces
an aesthetic of essential and austere images, baroque declares the divine gener
ation of forms to be irreducible to human laws, be they of the state, politics, ac
counting or architecture.
As Deleuze claims, the baroque is the fold: the poetics that best corresponds
to the chance character of fuctuating values. When the grand narratives of mo
dernity lose coherence, the law of value is dissolved in an endless proliferation of
productivity, infation and language, and the infosphere is expanded beyond
measure. mythologies intertwine in the social imaginary. Production and semio
sis are increasingly one and the same process. out of this process simultaneous
ly arise a crisis of economic reference (the relationship between value and nec
essary labour time), and a crisis of semiotic reference (the denotative relationship
between sign and meaning). value can no longer refer to labour time, because
unlike the labour of marxs times, the time of immaterial labour is not reducible
to a socially average norm. Parallel to this, the denotative relation of sign and
meaning is defnitely suspended in social communication. Advertising, politics
and the media speak a declaredly simulative language. Nobody has any belief in
some kind of truth of public statements. The value of the commodity is estab
lished on the basis of a simulation in a relation that no longer follows any rules.
Ix
beTWeen HumPTy dumPTy And ubu roi
silvio berlusconis behaviour is incomprehensible to the conservative right and
left, whose political reason follows traditional models. They see it as indispens
able to respect offcial language and cannot imagine a context for political action
outside of adherence to legality. but the strength of berlusconis mediapopulism
lies precisely in the systematic violation of the taboos linked to political offcial
dom and legality. With their glum seriousness, authoritative fgures such as os
car luigi scalfaro and carlo Azeglio ciampi are the best example of this miscom
prehension of the new character of postpolitical language championed by ber
lusconi. What seems most unbearable and provocative to the custodians of se
verity is berlusconis sly and systematic ridiculing of political rhetoric and its
bettino craxi had sensed what was to come with the affrmation of the neo
liberal doctrine. in the 80s and 90s, as neoliberalism wrote off all the old regula
tions of the welfare state, the defences society had built against the aggressive
ness of capitalists collapsed. craxi understood, with laic cynicism, that neoliber
alism inaugurated a period when the laws of violence, mafa, fraud, corruption
and simulation would be the only rules of the game. cathocommunism, in its
agony, desperately clung to the ethical question. instead of opposing neoliberal
ismwhich destroys societys defences, reduces workers wages, imposes a
culture of competitiveness and bargainingthe left opposed corruption, immo
rality and illegality. Paradoxically the left defended the Protestant ethics that
were being dissolved in the culture of large capital, as the traditional bourgeoisie
was disappearing to give room to a class of lumpen-predators.
VIII
AleATory vAlue in neo-bAroque socieTy
The principle of reality has coincided with a determinate stage of the
law of value. Today the whole system precipitates into indetermi
nacy; the whole of reality is absorbed by the hyperreality of the code
and of simulation. [] capital is no longer in the order of political
economy, it uses political economy as a model of simulation.
Jean baudrillard, symbolic exchange and death (1976)
For a long time, the crisis of the law of value has been corroding the foundation
of bourgeois society: the bourgeoisie lost its coherence due to the development
of postmechanical technologies and the growing autonomy of workers from
wage labour. in postindustrial economy, socially necessary labour time is no lon
ger the source of the determination of value, no longer its only source. The value
of a commodity is essentially determined by means of language, and the regime
of value determination of commodities is one of simulation. The explosion of the
new economy in the 90s was the perfect example of the economic power of
simulation. imaginary fows of capital were invested in the processes of the pro
duction of the imaginary. This does not mean, however, that it was all a blinding
illusion.
connective intelligence multiplied the power of social production, the world
of commodities became much larger, social desire was produced and mobilized
as an economic factor.
We have entered the regime of the aleatory fuctuation of values. The mathe
matical regularity of bookkeeping has given place to the indeterminacy of fnan
cial games and advertising communication, with its linguistic strategies and psy
chic implications. The economy has become an essentially semiotic process and
embodies the chance that characterizes the processes of assignment of meaning.
labour has become fractalized. With the end of large industrial monopolies,
now delocalized in the global peripheries, new workers start resembling comput
er terminals, cells in the process of circulation of the commoditysign. As the
160 161
because at this level the electorate understands him better than the representa
tives of institutions.
According to common sense, political language has always concealed reality
and provided hypocritical coverups to the arbitrariness and arrogance of the rich
and powerful. berlusconi paradoxically reveals this hypocrisy. He is the rich and
powerful one who shows that the law is capable of nothing; he is the rich and
powerful one who laughs at the hypocrisy of those who pretend that everyone is
equal before the law. We all know that not everyone is equal before the law; we
know from experience that the wealthy and powerful can afford expensive law
yers, impose their interests, and conquer spaces in power inaccessible to the
majority of the population. but this is usually hidden behind the smoke screens
of legalism and juridical formalism. berlusconi clearly states: i do what i want,
and laugh at the legalists who want to oppose their formalities to my will.
Now that the power of making and unmaking the law lies in his hands, he
uses it to show everyone the impotence of the law. like Humpty Dumpty, ber
lusconi knows that what matters is not what words mean, but who owns them.
Their meaning is decided by the master of words, not the semantic tribunals.
The interpretation of the law is decided by its master, not the law courts.
The spectators of politics (the electorate) seem to recognize themselves in
this game of the revelation of the hypocrisy of the language of politics, even
though the person revealing that the emperor has no clothes is paradoxically
wearing the emperors clothes. People laugh at what the Travicello king says,
but there is complicity in their laughter, because the king is denouncing the falsi
ty and hypocrisy of the words that he himself is uttering, with a smile that says:
Here i say it and deny it, or No one is a fool around here.
The boring opponents of berlusconi wish to reaffrm the sacredness of power,
but berlusconi has already discredited it with his exercise of a power that has no
need for sacredness. Despite being divested of offcial authority, the berlusconi
government enjoys the authoritativeness of transgression; it exercises its author
ity in the name of transgression, laying down laws on every issue, from immigra
tion to the right to work and the judiciary, imposing everywhere the logic of he
gemonic interests, reducing social expenditure, shifting wealth from the working
classes to the property owners. None of the devastating laws of this government
were stopped by parliamentary opposition or the protests of democratic and
priggish public opinion.
conclusion
Have we come close to a defnition of the regime that has governed italy since
1994? i believe so. This regime includes the behaviours of fascism (police brutali
ty, as we saw in genoa in 2001; the irresponsibility that led mussolinis italy to
the catastrophic war of 19401945; the servility that has always characterized
italian intellectual life). it also includes features that are proper to the mafa (the
contempt for public goods, the toleration of economic lawlessness).
but it cannot be defned as a mere repetition of the fascist regime, nor as a
mafa system. Aggressive neoliberalism and mediapopulism are its decisive
stagnant rituals. but there are reasons to believe that the large majority of people
who constitute the public of politics (the electorate) were amused by this ridi
culing and provocative gesture and in many cases conquered by it: they identifed
with the slightly crazy Premier, the rascal Prime minister who resembles them,
as at other times they had identifed with benito mussolini and bettino craxi.
The majority of the italian electorate grew up as Tv audiences at a time when
television became the primary vehicle for informality, vulgar and coarse allusive
ness, the language of ambiguity and aggressiveness. Thus they spontaneously
found themselves on the same cultural wavelength as berlusconi, with his lan
guage, words and gestures, but also with the deprecation of rules in the name of
a spontaneous energy that rules can no longer bridle. The crazy and cheerful fg
ure of ubu roi is irresistible to a public that is used to renouncing its individuality
in the name of collective irresponsibility.
To the plebeian coarseness of berlusconi and his perky banqueters in govern
ment, the left responded with prissiness and consternation in the face of the vio
lation of the language of political correctness. but calling out scandal! proved
to be a losing argument against the policies of the centreright government. in
fact, part of the secret of berlusconis success in politics lies precisely in the use
of excess. The excessiveness of the declarations and actions of this government
was a winner in the imaginary of the masses and in electoral decisions. events
that exceeded the framework of predictability, tolerability and codifed political
behaviour acted as a catalyst for consternation and indignation while creating a
safe passage for government legislation, the effective dilapidation of collective
property, the abolition of workers rights, the imposition of discriminatory and
racist laws. This technique of excess is now well tested: you have to talk big,
very big, in order to then enact what is essential for the accumulation of power
and the privatization of social spaces. A minister would take on the role of the
ham, the crazy one, and propose to bomb the ships carrying migrants to italian
shores. He generates scandal, but also an entertaining distraction, and soon
enough another minister, more moderate and realistic, demands military control
of the coast, and then a zealous functionary can expel kurdish and syrian politi
cal asylum seekers without even looking at their requests or knowing their
rightsthus comes about the possibility of trampling upon the most basic rights
of foreign workers.
berlusconis language appears to be suited to the ridiculing rather than
the denial or restatement of the truth and the affrmation of new principles. His
intention is to unveil the hypocrisy of political rules. For berlusconi, the mean
ing of words is not that important, so much so that he is used to denying his
own declarations in newspapers the day after making them. berlusconi has often
pretended to give his approval to the words of the President of the republic,
even though with all evidence these words blatantly contravened his own ac
tions or the legislative activities of his government. The political word is deval
ued, ridiculed, captured in a kind of game of three cards, in a semantic labyrinth
where every word can mean the opposite of the meaning attributed to it in
dictionaries. scandal at the informality, the vulgarity and the shallow lies is not
an effective reaction; on the contrary it strengthens berlusconi and his regime
162 163
There are rare moments when selfcontempt turns into a positive valorization
of tenderness, abandonment and idleness: these are the only times when italian
culture produced something original, when mediterranean femininity was
placated in a collective enjoyment of the potentialities matured by the collective
productive intelligence. in the 60s and 70s the predominant movement in society
veered towards abandoning all imperialist pretences and embracing a joyous
quality of life, freed from the urgency of economic productivity.
The movement in italy can start again from a declaration of absolute weak
ness, abandonment, and retreat. lets withdraw our intelligence from the race of
capitalist growth and national identity, lets withdraw our creativity and our
time from productive competition. lets inaugurate a period of passive sabotage,
of defnitive evacuation of the ridiculous box that is called italy.
Translated from the italian by Arianna bove and erik empson
features. it objectively functions as a laboratory for the cultural and political
forms crucial to the development of semiocapital.
The history of modern italy ought to be written taking the farcical proclama
tions of risorgimento, fascism and the democratic republic less seriously. A his
tory could be written starting from the work of lorenzo valla, his elegy of vile
ness and hedonism, and Niccol machiavelli, with his affrmation of the incom
patibility of morality and politics. This history could be centred around manzonis
don Abbondio, vittorio gassmann and Alberto sordi, who in the great War em
body the popular wisdom that always refused to believe that ones country is
more important than life. And it should take into account the mediterranean cult
of femininity, hedonism and tenderness.
The refusal of Protestant austerity and selfsacrifce is the salt of the italian
adventure, the elasticity and intelligence of a people who never believed in the
mother country or the general interest, and because of this remained irreducible
to the logic of capitalism that identifes the general interest with proft and growth.
This cowardice lacked the courage to reclaim itself, and remained a marginal
prerogative of the lower classes, excluded from history. offcial language identi
fed itself with rhetoric reminiscent of roman empires, thus creating the condi
tions for on the one hand the selfdeprecation that rules over italian public dis
course and on the other the pompous and empty affrmation of italian national
ism and the fascism that is its natural expression.
The main thread in the history of this country and of the selfperception of the
italian people is a mixture of unavowed cowardice and selfcontempt, the source
of the aggressiveness that fnds its full expression in fascism. The latin cult of vi
rility that aggressively posits itself above the tenderness and femininity of medi
terranean culture is both tragic and farcical.
cowardice is ambivalent: in its immediacy it signals the hedonist conscious
ness of the supremacy of pleasure over historical duty. but this consciousness
does not reconcile with the imperialist and macho mythologies embodied in the
tragic farce of fascism.
unable to accept cowardice as tenderness, unable to accept the predomi
nance of the feminine in mediterranean culture, italian history is full of farcical
characters who take on heroic tasks and inevitably cause tragedies, the ridicu
lous implications of which can never be concealed. The fgure of salandra, who
starts crying during the versailles congress because the british would not listen
to italian demands, fnds its counterpart in the fgure of mussolini, who wants to
vindicate the mutilated victory and exalts the masculine masses with the prom
ise of breakall military adventures, eventually leading the country to a cata
strophic war.
by comparing its present hedonism and subaltern status to a mythological
past of imperial superiority, italian culture revels in selfcontempt because it re
fuses to accept its feminine side. When it tried to react to selfcontempt by af
frming an improbable virility, it embarked on infamous and truly paltry adven
tures, such as the vile attack on France after it had already been defeated by Hit
ler in the late spring of 1940, or its habit of running to help the winners only to
discover that they end up losing with its help.
164 165
dislocated from the centre of the universe and from the heavens. The earth and
along with it Dantes cosmic geography were decentred from what we now call
the solar system. The soul of man lay in fragments. but in the recent decade this
has been reversed. No longer just a pretty or a religious metaphor, cosmos and
man are now welded together by global warming, by what used to be called the
Apocalypse.
As our bodies and outlook change in a dangerous world now subject to global
warming, rising seas, hurricanes and pestilence, heat detaches the senses from
the complacent view of the body as a fortress with peepholes and antennae
sensing externalities, and instead encourages us to take a worldcentred and not
a selfcentred point of view such that the self becomes part of that which is seen,
not a sovereign transcendent. To thus consciously see ourselves in the midst of
the world is to enter into ourselves as image, to exchange the god position, stand
ing above the fray, for some quite other position that is closer to Alice yet not
really a position at all but something more like swimming, more like nomads
adrift in the sea, mother of all metaphor, that sea i call the bodily unconscious.
This is like the sea marcel Proust described, allowing a sort of poetic messag
ing with the musculature, the organs, the breathing apparatusabove all the
travail of falling asleep in Proustpassing through alternating worlds like a diver
descending into the ocean, worlds far more revealing of reality, he thought,
than the conventionalized reality perceived by waking consciousness. indeed so
radical is the difference that to pass from one to the other is to die and then
come terribly alive, which is surely what Nietzsche had in mind when he wrote
that life means constantly transforming all that we are into light and fame.
1

For Proust this is a journey
in the organic and now translucent depths of the mysteriously lighted viscera.
Worlds of sleepin which our inner consciousness, subordinated to the distur
bances of our organs, accelerates the rhythm of the heart or the respiration,
because the same dose of terror, sorrow or remorse acts with a strength magni
fed a hundredfold if thus injected into our veins: as soon as, to traverse the ar
teries of the subterranean city, we have embarked upon the dark current of
our own blood as upon an inward lethe meandering sixfold, tall, solemn forms
appear to us, approach and glide away, leaving us in tears.
2

This is the new soul, not only of europe, but of the cosmos in the vast broad
sense Dante intended, joined to that of Alice in Wonderland. For the question
arises whether a new body will be formed as that other body we call planet earth
heats up? certainly changes are already happening down to the genetic level
with insects and plants. As regards us humans, equipped with a body whose
thermostat will be reset together with other basic adjustments, might we not
come to possess a new bodymind relationship, a new bodysoul relationship,
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Preface to the second edition, in the gay science, trans. Walter kaufmann (vin
tage, 1974), 36.
2. marcel Proust, sodom and gomorrah.
MIddAY,
Time of The
sHorTesT sHADoW
MiChael TauSSig
in the divine comedy Dante takes us on a harrowing journey that confates the
soul of man with the soul of the cosmos at the centre of which is the planet
earth. it was the great christian pilgrimage, not to a famous cathedral or humble
church, but into the earth itself with its many layers of sinners suffering punish
ment eternal, at the bottom of which lay the devil himself. in the end, Dante is
saved by two beings who manage to get him an audience with god. one is a
woman and the other a pagan, namely beatrice and virgil.
like alice in Wonderland six hundred years later, who dropped into a hole in
the ground shown to her by a bunny rabbit and went on her strangerthan
strange journey during which she grew abnormally large and then abnormally
small and met all manner of strange beings, such as playing cards that came
alive, Dante could not have made his journey without a guide. instead of a bunny
rabbit with a white waistcoat and a watch, Dantes guide, virgil, is not an animal
but what today we would call europes other. He could be muslim. He could be
a New World, African, or Pacifc island savage. Without this pagan guide re
turned from the remote past, from christianitys prehistory, Dante would have re
mained lost, confused, and unredeemed in the dark woods of everyday life. And
how interesting it is that Dante makes it through thanks to the combined exer
tions of the pagan and the christian woman, beatrice.
unlike Dante, Alice in Wonderland is a girl. unlike the poet Dante, the author
of Alice in Wonderland is a mathematician. yet it is the poet who constructs his
verse in strict mathematical logic, while the mathematician revels in unexpected
changes within a world in continuous fux. And while what Dante experiences is
an underground full of people, in Alices underground there are many animals
and objects that act as people, as well as people that seem quite unreal, such as
the mad Hatter. When we compare the two we can see how the Divine comedy
has metamorphosed into childrens literaturebeloved by adultsand thus get a
sense of how the european soul has changed along with it so as to become the
adults imagination of the childs imagination. rather than only a negative cri
tiquewhich it isthis switch is a marvellous example of how many crucial
things in the life of culture are owed to this type of imagination, and how we
might proceed further in imagining, postAlice, what a world shorn of soul might
be and hence what our very selves can be.
For today there is another, unprecedented change, planetary in scope. The di
vine vision of man and cosmos as organically interconnected has become mean
ingful as never before. Following the middle Ages in the West, the person was
166 167
told, and men follow and listen and learn them and sing them and make the
men in the north sick.
5
one of the deadliest songs is that of the whitefsh. The
breath of the victim becomes rapid and strained. This means that the fsh has
eaten the insides of that person, and the illness proceeds in a waxing and wan
ing rhythm according to the movement of the tides.
you may not care to believe this could happen, or you may care to wonder
about the stories anthropologists retell, it being the aim of my retelling of lloyd
Warners retelling to paint the big picture, so as to indicate and evoke the
poetry the bodily unconscious requires and provides.
At one stroke Freud swept the rug from under the maneuver i now wish to
make when he asserted that the world of myth, involving nature as an animate
being, retreated into the psychic unconscious of modern man. subject to the
codes and procedures of psychoanalytic jargon and hardened into dogma, this
shift from outer to inner worlds, same as the shift from the manifest to the latent
content of dreams, was a shift which effectively killed off the people of the south
where stones walk around and sing these songs. No! The bodily unconscious is
not the Freudian one. The bodily unconscious has more to do with the abundance
of ancient stone fgurines from the people of the south that sat on Freuds desk,
fgurines from ancient mesopotamia and egypt, which he loved to caress while
listening to his patients, as the poet H.D. tells in lavish detail in her tribute to Freud.
6
my sense of the bodily unconscious is that it now holds the future of the
world in the balance as much as the other way around; that we have reached a
time in world history when we can choose to press forward with the exploration
of this last frontier which would, like the study of work habits by scientifc man
agement from Taylorism to the present, exploit, disfgure, and even destroy it, or
else we fgure out a way of mastering our drive for mastery. That would mean
we need to catch up with the way that, in the West, history turned the senses
against themselves so as to control them and to achieve this invented the soul or
its equivalents as mysterious depths not directly ascertainable by the senses.
The problem before us now, therefore, is not simply to eviscerate the soula lot
easier said than donebut to imagine the realities that exist when such tena
cious support is removed.
imagine a chocolatecovered cake. you pull away the sponge basethat is,
the soul or depth, the mysterious underneath or behind, beloved of our metaphy
siciansand what happens? youre left with the chocolate, right? No! The
chocolate goes too, as it needed the underneath so as to be on top.
Nietzsche puts it well in his dramatic invocation in twilight of the idols at the
end of his sane life, in Turin, when he emphasizes that to eviscerate the depth
from the twolayered notion of the real as a composite of appearance and depth
does not simply leave you with appearance, because that will be eviscerated
along with the depth so that all you are left with is midday, time of the shortest
shadow. This is the challenge for manifesta 7, playing around with the soul of
europe. To help us imagine that time of the shortest shadow.
5. lloyd Warner, a black civilization (1937), rev. ed. (gloucester, mass.: Peter smith, 1969) 198.
6. Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), tribute to freud (New Directions, 1984).
such that our bodys understanding of itself will change? even more important
in changing the oldfashioned mindbody set up will be the cultural changes
that foreboding sense of cliffhanging insecurity in a world ever more engaged
with security in a climate gone terrorist.
The mere possibility that this could happen should be suffcient for us to con
sider other forms of the bodys knowing itself as a consequence of planetary
crisis and meltdown. it is when the machine begins to break down that you begin
to see how it works. likewise it is when authority is challenged that you begin
to see the otherwise concealed workings of the power structure. This we could
call apocalyptic knowledge, or preemptive apocalyptic knowledge, a thought
experiment we can now conduct on ourselves at manifesta 7, where Dante
meets Alice in Wonderland and like in virgils world, things such as playing cards
come alive and change into people.
This new soul composite of Dante and Alice that i call the bodily unconscious
is not the unconscious we have known since Freud, made dull with usage. What
i have in mind with the bodily unconscious is thought more like poetry which
proceeds outside of language and consciousness, what a famous student of
shock on the battlefelds of World War i by the name of cannon called the wis
dom of the body.
3
Perhaps this was all metaphor for cannon, this wisdom
but not for me, nor for Nietzsche, who argued that what we in the West call con
sciousness is but a tiny part of thought; that we think all the time and without
language but do not know it, and as such we are connected, as thinking bodies,
to the play of the world.
4
leaving the bloodsoaked felds of Flanders, cannon provided us with another
precious insight with his article voodoo Death in the 1942 volume of the
american anthropologist. Drawing on reports from medical doctors in Haiti and
remote Australia on deaths due to sorcery, he found confrmation of this wis
dom of the body as what the sorcerer taps into in order to kill people. No doubt
cannons essay could be interpreted as a scientifc explanation of mystical
phenomena, but to me it suggests something quite different as well, another
form of sorcery, perhaps, wherein and whereby bodies relate to other bodies,
human and nonhumananimals, plants, the seasons, tides, and the movement
of the stars and the windsforms of sensation, of bodily knowing, that exist be
low the radar of consciousness and are all the more powerful for so existing.
song is the great medium. it is there in Dante as learned from the Provenal
poets. As breath and rhythm it collates and connects the vibratory quality of be
ing. emanating from the chest and throat, connected to dream and to body
painting with red ochre supplied by virgil, it connects a wide arc of possibilities
and impossibilities. The song of the sorcerer in remote Australia from where
cannon drew his data was described by indigenous people in the late 1920s as
the deadliest of all magic. The worst songs come from the people of the south,
which turns out to be no defnite place but is where stones walk like men. These
stones walk around and sing these songs, the anthropologist lloyd Warner was
3. Walter b. cannon, the Wisdom of the body, (New york: Norton, 1932).
4. Nietzsche, the gay science, 211214.
168 169
1. see michel Foucault, security, territory, Population, ed. Arnold i. Davidson, trans. graham burchell
(london: Palgrave macmillan, 2007).
I
oF THe governmenT oF souls And THe
governmenT oF conducT
in modernity, the soul calls itself subjectivity. There are multiple ruptures and
continuities between the soul of antiquity and modern subjectivity, notably in re
gard to the modalities of the techniques of power exercised upon them. We will
reconstruct these continuities and these ruptures alongside the work of michel
Foucault before developing them with Deleuze and guattari.
in the last stage of his work, Foucault elaborates a theory of power as the
government of conduct. That which is proper to the art of governing can be
expressed through the questions: How does one direct and control the subjectiv
ity of another? How can one act upon her possible actions? The art of governing
consists of a set of techniques and procedures designed to guide the conduct of
citizens and plan for their probable actions.
1
The modern state inherits these
techniques from christian pastoral power; liberalism has infected, modifed,
and enriched them in transforming the techniques of the government of souls
into those of the government of conduct.
government is a strategic relation between the governing and the governed in
which the former attempt to determine the conduct of the latter and these latter
develop practices to not be governed, to be governed as little as possible, to be
governed in a different manner, by other procedures, according to other princi
ples, other techniques, and other knowledges, or even to govern themselves. Ac
cording to Foucault, contemporary struggles and conficts are grounded in the
modalities of this government of conduct or of subjectivities.
government as a form of power stretches back further than the juridical, dem
ocratic tradition established in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. it is spe
cifc to western europe, since pastoral power was set up by the church. it was
unknown in greek and roman society.
The pastoral power of the church is an individualizing power, oriented toward
individuals and intended to direct them in a continual and permanent manner.
The pastor exercises power over a fock rather than over a territory (or a city, as
in Athens or rome). The pastor assembles, guides, and conducts the fock and is
IN MOderNItY,
The soul Calls
iTselF subJecTiviTy
Maurizio lazzaraTo
supposed to ensure its salvation. This is not solely a matter of saving it as a
collective entity, but of saving each sheep one by one: the gospel parable tells of
how the shepherd abandons the fock to go in search of a single lost sheep.
in the christian conception, the pastor is supposed to account not only for
each of the faithful but for all their actions, for all the good or evil they are liable
to do and for everything that happens to them. The pastor should know what
goes on in the soul of each one, should know his secret sins and his progression
on the path of salvation. christianity conceives the relation between shepherd
and sheep as one of individual and complete dependence. in Foucaults view,
christianity is the only religion that developed these strange technologies of
power, dealing with the multitude of persons in the fock by way of a handful of
pastors (the clergy). Pastoral power establishes a series of complex, continual,
and paradoxical relations between people that are not political in the sense per
taining to democratic institutions and political philosophy.
The exercise of pastoral power upon the individual soul and its singularities has
been utterly ignored in the tradition of political philosophy and in the theory of
rights and sovereignty, but has always played a very large role in the organization
of our societies. The modern world emerged from politicalreligious battles whose
object was pastoral power. The council of Trent was at the centre of one of the
most important of these political struggles, which pitted the will of the church not
to loseon the contrary, to intensifyits power over the souls of its faithful
against the desire of these latter not to allow themselves to be governed by the
church, but to govern themselves. The confict between reformation and coun
terreformation rests precisely on the modalities of the exercise of pastoral power:
This great battle of pastorship traversed the West from the thirteenth
to the eighteenth century, and ultimately without ever really getting
rid of the pastorate. For if it is true that the reformation was un
doubtedly much more a great pastoral battle than a great doctrinal
battle, if it is true that what was at issue with the reformation was
actually the way in which pastoral power was exercised, then the
two worlds or series of worlds that issue from the reformation, that
is to say, a Protestant world, or a world of Protestant churches and
the counter reformation, were not worlds without a pastorate. What
resulted from the reformation was a formidable reinforcement of the
pastorate in two different types.
2
in the techniques of disciplinary power that, beginning in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, were exercised upon the body of the individual at school,
at work, in the army, the hospital, the prison, etc., and in the biopolitical or
security techniques exercised upon the population (policies for health, profes
sional education, housing, distribution of revenues, etc.), Foucault sees a legacy
of pastoral power whose objective is no longer to assure the salvation of
the individual soul but to implicate the body and subjectivity of each in the
2. ibid., 149.
170 171
structures and institutions of capitalism and to render them productive.
The government of souls is a highly specifc form of power reducible neither
to juridical power (the law) nor to the power of democratic institutions, for it is
not exercised upon a legal subject but rather upon a living subject, upon the
singularity of his behaviours, modes of acting, and manners of speaking. As a le
gal subject, you exercise your power in an intermittent manner by transferring it,
through your vote, to representatives. you thus delegate your power once and
for all to the institution, whereas as a living subject you are subject continually
and permanently to the exercise of modern pastoral power. At school, at work,
in the hospital, in the army, you are caught in human technologies that organize
and structure your space and your time, your gestures, movements and behav
iours. you are similarly subjected, continually and permanently, to policies of the
welfare state which in turnin the case of the management of the unemployed,
for examplemake an appeal to your conduct. your life and your subjectivity are
continually directed by a series of disciplinary and biopolitical techniques that es
tablish a dependence of the governed on those who govern, one that recalls the
dependence of the faithful sheep on the priestshepherd.
The principal objective of modern pastoral power is the production of the
individual by means of techniques that allow the pinning of the subjectfunction
onto its body and the enclosure of subjectivity within the limits of the subject,
the ego or the i.
II
THe relATion To selF
The shift that takes place around 1980 in Foucaults conception of power con
sists in viewing government or the art of governing no longer as solely a strategy
of power but also as an action by subjects upon themselves (which he terms
the relation to self). He furthermore tries to answer the question: how do sub-
jects become active? How does action upon oneself open onto processes of
subjectivation that might escape the art of governing? Thus the government of
souls is not the unilateral exercise of the power of those who govern over the
governed; it is rather that which is at stake in political struggles. The relevant
action is not merely that of the techniques of government upon our subjectivity,
but also the action of the self upon itself, the possibility of governing oneself
(individually as well as collectively).
gilles Deleuze has raised this question of the relation to self and the produc
tion of subjectivity even more radically than Foucault, and with Flix guattari has
made it the overwhelming problem of contemporary capitalism: todays global
capitalism is a producer of subjectivity; this is in fact its principal product, mate
rial production amounting to mere mediation visvis the mastery of subjectivi
typroduction.
3
According to Deleuze, Foucaults discovery of the relation to self was the
discovery of a new dimension, irreducible to the relations of power and of
3. Flix guattari, in chimres 23, no. 49 (my translationsHT).
knowledge.
4
The self is neither a formation of knowledge nor a product of pow
er; it is a process of individuation that effects groups or people and eludes both
established lines of force and constituted knowledge.
5
That the self should per
tain neither to knowledge nor to power signifes that a process of subjective
change is primarily not discursive but existential, affective. The relation to self, in
the frst place, defnes neither a knowledge nor a power because it expresses a
change in the manner of feeling that constitutes the support for a process of
subjectivityproduction from which new knowledges, new relations of power,
and a new discursive capacity will derive.
For Deleuze, the fact that power is individualizing and that it invests and pro
duces our everyday life and our interiority is not contradictory: it reveals a ca
pacity to approach the subject as much in the form of fight, trickery, diversion,
or open confict as in the form of the autonomous and independent subjectiva
tion that dictates its own norms. What is left for subjectivity, wonders Deleuze,
once the individualizing mechanisms act upon the subject? There never re
mains anything of the subject, since he is to be created on each occasion, like a
focal point of resistance.
6
III
subJecTiviTy is noT THe ProPerTy oF THe
individuAl or oF THe ego
if the production of subjectivity (of the relation to self) is what is at stake in mod
ern pastoral power, we must still defne the components that make up this pro
cess and its modalities. one of the objectives of the government of conduct is to
reduce subjectivity to the subject, the ego. individualism is the political theory
that has accompanied the progress of new disciplinary and biopolitical tech
niques of power. According to guattari, however, subjectivity and the processes
of selftransformation are always the result of a collective assemblage, such that
the components and the seat of subjectivation are not confned to the subject or
the individual. subjectivity is outside the subjectthat is, it lies decentred in pre
individual relations, but also in social, political, cultural, or mechanical relations
that overfow the subject. For guattari, this is merely one particular arrangement.
This conception of subjectivity bursts the unity of the individual subject (and of
the political subject) and redirects us to a complex of subjectivation he calls in
dividualgroupmachinemultiple exchange.
guattaris term collective assemblage thus refers to a multiplicity beyond the indi
vidual on the part of those great social, linguistic, technological, economic machines
which, before the individualamongst preverbal and preindividual intensitiesrest
upon a logic of affect. That subjectivity should be collective does not at all imply that
it becomes exclusively social. The collective does not result from interaction be
tween individuals. There is a constitution of subjectivity on a transindividual scale.
4. gilles Deleuze, foucault, tr. sean Hand (london: continuum, 2006), 84.
5. gilles Deleuze, What is a dispositif? in two regimes of madness: texts and interviews 19751995,
ed. David lapoujade, tr. Ames Hodges and mike Taormina (New york: semiotext(e), 2006).
6. Deleuze, foucault, 87.
172 173
This nonhuman, simultaneously mechanistic and affective aspect of subjectivity,
both before and beyond the individual, is essential insofar as it provides the basis
for ones transformation, ones heterogenesis. The individual is merely a termi
nal for components of subjectivation of which the majority completely evade
consciousness. subjectivity thus fnds itself dispersed in a multiplicity of rela
tions and materials, and produces itself at the crossing of prelinguistic and me
chanical foritselfs independent of the ego or of consciousness.
in the last years of his life, guattari made frequent reference to Daniel sterns
book the interpersonal World of the infant to draw a cartography of the compo
nents and seats of subjectivation (the foritselfs) that overfow the subject.
7

before the acquisition of language, infants, according to stern, actively construct
modalities of perception, communication, experience, and apprehension of the
world and of others that constitute so many vectors of subjectivation. stern
distinguishes three senses of self (emergent, core, intersubjective) that precede
the verbal sense of self and its autonomy and independence in relation to lan
guage and consciousness. sense of self in these three cases does not mean
concept of, knowledge of, or consciousness of self, because these experi
ences do not pass through language and consciousness.
8
For guattari they are
in no way stages in the Freudian sense, but levels of subjectivation that
manifest themselves in parallel to speech and consciousness over the entire
span of life. The prelinguistic and mechanical foritselfs (machines having for
guattari their own consistency and capacity for autoproduction) are nonhuman
selves which do not speak but which clearly enunciate something, even if
they do not express it using speech or signifers. These distinct selves or seats
of subjectivation are the objects of the modern government of souls, and in
these same vectors of subjectivation, the desire not to be governed can take root.
IV
THe modern exercise oF PoWer uPon subJecTiviTy
in contemporary societies, aside from disciplinary techniques (which are exer
cised upon the body in the closed space of the school, the offce, the prison,
etc.) and biopolitical techniques (which assure a certain level of health, training,
income, etc. for the population), we can observe the development, since the end
of the nineteenth century, of semiotic techniques for the production and control
of subjectivity. The art of governing enriches itself with new mechanisms, which
always function on a double register. The frst register is that of representation
and signifcation organized through signifying semiotics (language) with a view
to the production of the subject, the individual, the i. The second is the regis
ter of the machine, organized through asignifying semiotics (such as monetary
or fnancial signs, informatic languages, or languages of the images and sounds
of media technologies) with the capacity to employ signs that might in some cir
cumstances have a symbolic or signifying effect but whose functioning proper is
7. Daniel stern, the interpersonal World of the infant (New york: basic books, 1985).
8. see ibid., 7.
not symbolic or signifying. This second register does not aim at the constitution
of the subject, but rather captures and activates elements of the presubjective,
the preindividual (affects, emotions, perceptions), and the transindividual in or
der to make these function as pieces, cogs in the subjectivityproduction machine.
We will now lay out, very briefy, some distinctions between the government
of subjectivity and pastoral power (the government of souls). if individualization
remains, as in the church, the goal of the mechanisms of power, it is now pro
duced through entirely novel techniques.
contemporary capitalisms government of conduct produces and distributes
roles and functions, equips us with a subjectivity, and assigns us an individua
tion (identity, sex, profession, nationality, etc.) in such a way that everyone is
caught in a signifying and representative semiotic trap. This operation of social
subjection to established identities and roles passes through the subordination
of the multiplicity and heterogeneity of presignifying or presymbolic semiotics to
language and its functions of representation and signifcation.
corporal symbolic semiotics (all manner of preverbal, bodily, iconic expres
sion: dance, mimicry, music; a somatization, a crisis of nerves, tears, intensities,
movements, rhythms, etc.) depend neither on signifying language nor on con-
sciousness. They do not put into play a perfectly discernible locutor or auditor
as in the communicative languagemodeland speech does not appear in the
foreground. These semiotics are animated by the affects and give rise to relations
that are diffcult to assign to a subject, an ego, an individual. They overfow the
individualizing subjective limits (of persons, identities, social roles and functions)
within which language would enclose them and to which it would reduce them.
The act of folding these modalities of expression back onto signifying semiotics
is a political operation, since on the one hand, the assumption of signifcation is al
ways inseparable from an assumption of power, and on the other hand, there is no
signifcation or representation independent of the dominant signifcations and rep
resentations. The machineregister of the government of subjectivities functions
on the basis of asignifying semioticsthat is, on the basis of signs which, rather
than produce a signifcation, trigger an action, a reaction, a behaviour, an attitude,
a posture. These semiotics do not signify, but rather put in motion or activate.
To make explicit the function of machinesubjection, we will use brian
massumis description of it. in a beautiful article, he shows us that television,
since september 11, 2001, has become the privileged channel for collective af
fect modulation, in real time, at socially critical turning points; that is, after the
attacks on New york and Washington it has become the privileged channel of
machinesubjection.
9
The u.s. Department of Homeland security has put in
place a colourcoded alert system (from green to red) to calibrate public anxiety
in the face of the terrorist menace. This alert system addressed not subjects
cognition, but rather bodies irritabilitythat is, the preverbal and preindividual
components of subjectivity. Perceptual signals are utilized to activate direct bod
ily responsiveness rather than reproduce a form or transmit defnite content.
9. brian massumi, Fear (the spectrum said), in multitudes 23 (Winter 2006),

174 175
The alerts are signals without signifcation which in themselves carry no ideo
logical sense and no discourse but which activate each body refexively (that is
to say, nonrefectively). This selfdefensive refexresponse to perceptual cues
that the system was designed to train into the population wirelessly jacked cen
tral government functioning directly into each individuals nervous system. The
object of the government of conduct is always, as for Foucault, the population;
but here the whole population became a networked jumpiness, a distributed
neuronal network that reacts in the mode of a refex to the stimuli addressed to it.
According to massumi, it is not a question of the transmission of a message,
an exchange of information with ideological content, but an intervention at the
point where experience emerges. This system acts upon the conditions of the
emergence of emotion, speech, action. it affects subjectivity in its very process
of constitution, on the interior of the modalities of its own production. it is less
a communication than an assisted germination of potentials for action whose
outcome could not be accurately determined in advancebut whose variable
determination could be determined to occur, on hue. This system loses the
capacity for determination, as it cannot control its effects and individuals reac
tions; but it gains the possibility of formatting the development of subjectivity.
in contrast to the mechanisms of production of the i, the mechanisms of the
machine know neither persons, nor roles, nor subjects. Now that subjectivation
engages persons across the globe and easily manipulates mass subjective repre
sentations, machinesubjection arranges infrapersonal, infrasocial elements in
proportion to a molecular economy of desire. The force of these semiotics re
sides in the fact that they pass through the systems of representation and signif
cation in which individuated subjects recognize and alienate themselves.
machinesubjection is thus not the same thing as social subjection. if the lat
ter addresses itself to the mass individuated dimension of subjectivity, the
former activates its molecular, preindividual, transindividual dimension. in the
social instance, the system speaks and elicits speech. it indexes the multiplicity
of presignifying and presymbolic semiotics and folds them back upon language,
upon linguistic chains, privileging their representative functions. in the machinic
instance, however, it does not speak and produces no discourse, but it functions,
it sets in motion as it connects itself directly to the nervous system, the brain,
the memory, etc. and activates affective, transitive, transindividual relations not
limited to a subject, an individual, an ego. These two semiotic registers work to
gether on the production and control of subjectivity in its simultaneous mass and
molecular dimensions.
if there is continuity between pastoral power and the government of subjec
tivities, the discontinuities introduced from the seventeenth century on are no
less important.
V
models oF resisTAnce
To the historical singularity of the pastorate corresponds the specifcity of refus
al, of revolts, of resistances that express the will not to be governed or to govern
oneself. Which, as Foucault emphasizes, does not imply that there was frst the
pastorate and then the movement of resistance, revolt, counterconduct.
micropolitics and the microphysics of power open new dimensions of political
action by introducing practices that the classical tradition of political philosophy
as well as practically the entirety of revolutionary and critical theory defne as
nonpolitical. These latter, notably, are normative and dogmatic theories that do
not recognize more than one modality of the exercise of power and one modality
of political subjectivation. Foucault for his part, and Deleuze and guattari for
theirs, introduce remarkable novelty, not only because, as we know, they analyse
power as a multiplicity of dispositifs and relations of power, but also because
they affrm the multiplicity of the modalities of resistance and revolt and the mul
tiplicity of modes of subjectivation.
in the same struggle, different forms of resistance are at work: resistance to
power as the exercise of political sovereignty, resistance to power as economic
exploitation and resistance to power as the government of bodies and souls (as
direction of conduct and conscience). if the heterogeneous modalities of resis
tance always manifest themselves together in a revolt or in a revolutionary se
quence, they nonetheless retain their singularity and specifcity.
in every revolt, in every revolutionary sequence, there is always one of these
forms of resistance and subjectivation that predominates over the rest. in the
nineteenth century there prevailed, within the struggles led by the workers move
ment, the demand for political rights and universal suffrage. With the communist
movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, the question of sovereignty
(the taking of power) had preeminence. And with the strange revolution of 68
it was the resistance to modern pastoral power, the refusal of the government of
bodies and souls, that seems to have prevailed. Neither the demand for political
rights, nor the fght for sovereignty, nor the revolt against economic exploitation
came to the fore in the movements of 68although all these elements were
presentbut rather the struggle against the manner in which one was conduct
ed at school, in the factory, in relations with oneself and others (the relations
manwoman, teacherstudent, bossworker, doctorpatient). Here at the heart
of 68 we fnd once more the revolt against government and the management of
life (the modern direction of conscience by communication and consumption).
marxist commentators discard these behaviours when they separate the
wheat (the political labour struggle) from the chaff of womens and homosexual
movements etc., whose bleak ideology of festivity and sexualityto take a cari
catured version of Alain badiousuffces to deny them any political nature.
some nonmarxist analysts, no less lacking of the theoretical instruments to ap
prehend contemporary politics, put forth another version of the nonpolitical na
ture of these movements in reducing them to cultural phenomena. but the
struggle not to be governed or to govern oneself seems able to take them into
account as veritable dimensions of political action.
Translated from the French by stephen Haswell Todd
176 177
A simple look at advertising on the streets shows that nowadays our biggest
choice is who we want to be. one london university tries to attract new stu
dents with a poster, become what you want to be. A new music record is ad
vertised with the saying, i am who i am. even a beer company uses the slogan
be yourself! We live in a world that seems to have little social prohibition in re
gard to how one is supposed to achieve happiness, where there seem to be end
less possibilities to fnd fulflment in life and where we are supposed to be self
creators; that is, each is free to choose what he or she wants to become. in this
highly individualized society which gives priority to the individuals selffulflment
over submission to group causes, however, people face an important, anxiety
provoking dilemma: Who am i for myself? This question is especially troubling
in times when we seem to be experiencing a change in the nature of social pro
hibitions.
in recent years there has been growing debate as to whether something has
changed in our perception of the big other, the social symbolic structure that
operates in postindustrial capitalism. For one thing, it looks as if the subjects be
lief in the big other was altered when traditional authorities, which were often
perceived as the embodiment of the big other (like state, church, nation, etc.),
lost their power. Further, the subject appears more and more like a selfcreator
who can choose the direction of his or her life, invent his or her identity and
even try to change the nature of his or her body. Pierre legendre, already a dec
ade ago, expressed a catastrophic view about the lack of prohibitions related to
the way symbolic structure operates, warning: We do not understand that what
lies at the heart of ultramodern culture is only ever law; that this quintessentially
european notion entails a kind of atomic bond, whose disintegration carries along
side it the risk of collapsing the symbolic for those generations yet to come.
1
referring to psychoanalysis, legendre points out that a subjects entrance into
language involves an act of separation: What psychoanalysis designates by gen
eral formulas such as the original or the law of the father is nothing other than an
original separation which inaugurates subjective life (in a sense of a separation of
the infant from the maternal entity), as subject to the law of differentiation
INNer lIMIts
in Times of The
TyrANNy oF cHoice
renaTa SaleCl
1. Pierre legendre, The other Dimension of law, cardozo law review 16 (1995), 943ff.
through speech. Now separation supposes an aside (cart), a representation of
emptiness, the integration, both by society and by the subject, of the category of
negativity.
2
legendre explores whether Western culture has given up on intro
ducing the subject to the institution of the limit, while other authors ask if on top
of that we also gave up on the category of negativity. it is a common refection
today that the subject is under constant pressure to enjoyto fnd ways to fll up
his or her lack. media, especially, seems to contribute to this push to enjoyment.
What does it mean, therefore, when we hear philosophers like legendre say
ing that we are living in a world without limits, when psychoanalysts speculate
that a man is more and more without gravity, or when sociologists speculate
that people feel so insecure and unhappy precisely because they seem to have
far more choices in their lives than used to be the case?
3
Do we really live in a
limitless world? before we can make an attempt to answer this question, we
need to explain what we mean by a limit.
Psychoanalysis from its beginning has been thinking about the logic of the
limit that every speaking being needs to deal with. one of the cornerstones of
lacanian theory is the idea that the subject, by becoming a speaking being, goes
through the process of symbolic castration and becomes marked by a lack. it is
through the father that castration is passed on to the child. it is not that the fa
ther is a castrating fgure. The agent of castration is language itself. it is the sig
nifer that prohibits some primordial jouissance by replacing the thing with a
word. The role of the father is to be the agent of the signifer; that is, he utters
the prohibition. However, this prohibition does not come into being via a fathers
simple No! that limits the close relationship between a mother and a child. For
the prohibition to be installed, the actual father does not even need to be pres
ent, since what is crucial is the way prohibition is part of the very discourse with
which a mother (or another primary caregiver) addresses the child.
Although the lack that marks the subject is perceived by the latter as the loss
of some essential jouissance, it is actually a cornerstone of subjectivity: because
the subject is marked by a lack, he or she will constantly try to recuperate the
object that he or she perceives to embody the lost enjoyment and that might fll
up the lack. The very fact that the subject is marked by a lack is thus the engine
that keeps his or her desire alive.
When dealing with his or her lack, the subject also encounters the problem
that the other is lacking, meaning that social symbolic order is inconsistent and
that others, the subjects parents for example, are also marked by a lack. The
most anxietyproducing dilemma for the subject is how he or she appears in the
desire of the other. since there is no consistent other which will be able to ap
pease the subject and provide an answer as to what kind of an object the subject
is for the other, the subject constantly interprets, reads between the lines of
what others say, guesses others gestures, etc.
if these are all normal concerns that people have in regard to the lack that
2. ibid., 950.
3. see especially michel Tort, fin du dogme paternel (2005), charles melman, lhomme sagravit: jouir
tout prix (2002) and JeanPierre lebrun, un monde sans limite: essai pour une clinique psychanalytique
du social (2001).
178 179
marks them and the social symbolic order, what then changed in the nature of
our concerns in times of late capitalism? Walter benjamin took capitalism as a
form of religion, as the celebration of a cult which very much plays on the feeling
of guilt. His point is that worries become a mental illness characteristic of the
age of capitalism.
4
What kind of worries are we concerned with today? Does
benjamins prediction that feelings of guilt are a crucial part of capitalism hold
true today? or is something changing at the start of the twentyfrst century?
How come, in times of the limitless choice that capitalism promotes, it appears
that on the one hand people are encountering fewer and fewer external prohibi
tions, which in the past were transmitted with the help of traditional authorities,
while on the other hand people are imposing ever new prohibitions on themselves?
be yourselF
The answer to the question Who am i for myself? is in no way simple, which is
why there is a huge advice industry, which tries to guide people in their search
for their essence. on the cover of a cosmopolitan magazine, we can thus read a
promise to help you become yourself, only a better one; on the internet, various
astrology sites provide free samples of insight into the real you; and on televi
sion, one can undergo a total body makeover, which is supposed to allow people
to forge a body image in which they will feel comfortable with themselves.
President bush was reported to have said: i know who i am, and i want to
become who i am. The self is something to be aspired to, like the latest fashion
or the latest consumer object. selfaspiration and the created self are seductive.
The winner of one of the big brother contests in the united kingdom was a Por
tuguese transgender woman, Nadia Almada. When she was told that she had
won, her response was Now i am recognized as a woman. one question is why
Nadia found such popularity with british television audiences. it seems from an
ecdotal evidence that what many voters found seductive was the project of a
selfjourney, the realization of a desire to make something completely different of
oneself. With her selftransformation, she seemed to embody for the audience
the ideology of selfcreation that underpins todays consumerist society. it is per
haps not surprising that psychoanalysts report encountering numbers of people
who come into analysis with the demand: i want to reinvent myself.
However, in this attempt to remake oneself and become someone unique,
one can easily observe a pattern of sameness. Walter benjamin already envi
sioned this move towards sameness when he observed that
The commodity economy reinforces the phantasmagoria of same
ness which, as an attribute of intoxication, at the same time proves a
central fgure of semblanceThe price makes the commodity identi
cal to all the other commodities that can be purchased for the same
amount. The commodity empathizes not only and not so much
with buyers as with its price.
5
4. Walter benjamin, capitalism as religion, in Walter benjamin: selected Writings, volume 1, 1913
1926, ed. marcus bullock and michael Jennings (belknap Press, 1996), 288ff.
This phantasmagoria of sameness can easily be perceived in the way the ideolo
gy of selfcreation actually functions. Although people are constantly reminded
to make out of themselves what they want, they are actually following ideals of
sameness. one only needs to look at the results of body makeovers that one can
observe on television to confrm that for the price one pays to get a new body
one actually purchases a body image that everyone else adheres to.
The ideology that promotes the motto be yourself! and relies on the Nike ad
Just do it! also encourages the idea that people need to be able to manage
themselves. one is constantly reminded by the dominant media to work on rela
tionships, on parenting, to become a better person and especially to manage
ones emotions.
6
A simple search on amazon.com in regard to how to deal with
an emotion like anger gives us a list of 95,000 books. A quick look at the titles
gives the impression that anger is a huge problem in todays society. We live in
The Trap of Anger, The Dance of Anger; Anger kills; there is The enigma of
Anger, which causes Anger Disorders; and there are Angry Women who
seem to experience rage differently than men. but especially important is Help
ing your angry child to become angerfree. most of the books offer advice on
how to get rid of angry feelings: Anger management, overcoming Anger, be
yond Anger, conquering Anger, letting go of Anger, Anger control, Heal
ing Anger, Working with Anger, Taking charge of Anger are only some of the
titles of the books that are supposed to help us deal with this emotion. The next
step is to Honour your Anger, to go From Anger to Forgiveness, and especial
ly to realize that Anger is a choice.
The idea that we are supposed to be able to manage ourselves and that there
is a choice in how we deal with our emotions is linked to the very perception
of the self that dominates late capitalist society. Today, the true self is increasing
ly selfmade, and more than that, an individual project. in the 1980s and 1990s,
drawing on the work of michel Foucault, academic theories emphasized the
social construction of the self.
7
but now self construction has become a cultural
imperative in the West, and the emphasis is not on social determinations,
but on the individual project of selfmaking. This is related to what ulrich beck
and others have called individualization.
8
While individualization takes many
forms, it always involves a fetishization of the autonomous self, one that
refuses to acknowledge the idea that society can set limits on selfaspiration.
Paradoxically, the ideology of a limitless world is itself a product of late capitalism
and the relentless drive of consumer society with its emphasis on endless
choice and possibility.
if we live under the assumption that everything in life can be a matter of
choice (on top of consumer and usual political choices, we can choose not only
how we look, but our sexual orientation, whether or not to have children, what
5. Walter benjamin, exchange with Adorno on The Flneur, in Walter benjamin: selected Writings,
volume 4, 19381940, ed. Howard eiland and michael Jennings (belknap Press, 2003), 208.
6. on the idea of working on love, see laura kipnis, against love: a Polemic (2003).
7. see michel Foucault, the history of sexuality: the care of the self (1988).
8. see ulrich beck, risk society: towards a new modernity (1992); ulrich beck and elisabeth
beckgernsheim, individualization: institutionalized individualism and its social and Political
consequences (2002).
180 181
kind of medical treatment we want, etc.), the very choice seems to be anxiety
provoking
9
and deeply dissatisfying.
10
That is why we often hear in the popular
media that our society actually suffers from socalled tyranny of choice and an
abundance of freedom.
Troubles WiTH cHoice
consumer choice seems to be the most overwhelming problem in late capital
ism. barry schwartz starts his book the Paradox of choice with the diffculty
consumers face when they want to purchase a simple pair of jeans.
11
Does one
want slim ft, easy ft, relaxed ft, baggy or extra baggy ft? should the trousers
be anklelength, normal, or long; faded or regular; black or blue; with button fy
or zipper fy? consumer choice becomes even more anxietyprovoking when, in
any normal supermarket, we need to choose between 85 brands of crackers, 285
sorts of cookies, 360 shampoos, and 275 types of cereal; or when college stu
dents at American ivy league schools choose from 350 courses of general edu
cation. Although shopping is perceived as one of the favourite pastimes in to
days advanced capitalism, and people are spending more and more time in
malls, they seem to be enjoying it less and less.
one area where choice is especially traumatic is medicine. Doctors today no
longer play the role of authorities deciding what is best for the patients. rather,
they mostly inform the patient about his or her options, and then the patient
needs to make a decision and give socalled informed consent.
12
However, do
people really want to choose their treatment when they get seriously ill? The
idea of choice seems appealing before one faces a lifethreatening situation;
however, when things get tough, people hope that someone elsean authority
who supposedly knowswill choose for them. research has thus shown that
when a group of healthy people were asked whether they want to choose treat
ment if they get cancer, sixtyfve percent said yes. but among people who actu
ally did get cancer, only twelve percent wanted to make this choice.
13
Why is there such dissatisfaction in regard to choice? schwartz fnds the
problem to be too much choice. Quoting psychological research that shows how
people exposed to less choice are more satisfed, schwartz proposes various
forms of selflimitation that consumers should impose on themselves in order to
feel more content about their choices. one should choose when to choose, be a
chooser not a picker, be content with good enough, make decisions nonrevers
ible, practice an attitude of gratitude, regret less, anticipate adaptation, control
expectations, curtail social comparison, and especially learn to love constraints.
Why is it necessary that the person invent all these selfbinding tactics? When
9. For more on this, see renata salecl, On anxiety (2004).
10. There is also the socalled monte carlo effect in choosing (especially in gambling), which shows that
the longer the sequence of failure, the greater the expectation of success (which is why one increases
the stake with every loss).
11. see barry schwartz, the Paradox of choice (2004).
12. on the troubles with choice in todays medicine, see Atul gawande, complications: a surgeons
notes on an imperfect science (2003).
13. see schwartz, Paradox.
people complain that there is too much choice in todays society and that they
are often forced to make choices about things they do not want to choose (like
electricity providers), they often express the anxiety that no one is supposed to
be in charge in society at large or that someone (for example, corporations) is al
ready choosing in advance what people supposedly need. These complaints
very much concern peoples troubles with the big other. it is lacanian common
sense that the big other does not exist, which means the symbolic order we live
in is not coherent, but rather marked by lacks, inconsistent. There has been a
wide literature to think through what this inconsistency means, and one way to
perceive the lack that marks the social has been to think of it in terms of various
antagonisms.
14
in addition to stating that the big other does not exist, lacan
stressed the importance of peoples belief that it does. That is why lacan omi
nously concluded that although the big other does not exist, it nonetheless
functions; that is, peoples belief in it is essential for their selfperception.
The act of choosing is so traumatic precisely because there is no big other:
making a choice is always a leap of faith where there are no guaranties. When
we try to create selfbinding mechanisms which will help us feel content with
our choices and eventually help us to be less obsessed with choice, we are not
doing anything but choosing a big other, that is, inventing a symbolic structure
which we presuppose will alleviate our anxiety in front of the abyss of choice.
The problem, however, is that the very existence of the big other is always our
choicewe create a fantasy of its consistency. And by doing so, we choose the
possibility of not choosing.
The type of belief people have in the big other differs from subject to subject.
There are especially large differences between people to whom it might be pos
sible to ascribe a neurotic structure and psychotics. While neurotics have a lot of
doubts, uncertainties, and complaints in regard to the big other, psychotics
might develop a much more threatening perception of the big other and, for ex
ample, start perceiving themselves as persecuted by an invisible voice or gaze,
and are thus overwhelmed by the big others massive presence. The uncertain
ties that neurotics deal with very much prove that the big other does not exist as
a coherent whole, which is why neurotics often engage in a game of searching
for a master who seems to be in charge (and thus appears as a consistent oth
er), while at the same time they try to undermine the masters authority. With
the latter gesture, neurotics in a paradoxical way acknowledge the inconsistency
of the other.
THe neW PsycHoTics?
in the early seventies, lacan made the observation that in a developed capitalist
system, the subjects relationship to the social feld can be seen to form a partic
ular discourse. in this Discourse of capitalism,
15
the subject relates to the social
14. see ernesto laclau, emancipation(s) (1996); Jannis stavrakakis, lacan and the Political (1999).
15. Jacques lacan developed this theory in his lecture at the university of milan on 12 may 1972. The
original text is unpublished.
182 183
feld in such a way that he or she takes him or herself as a master. The subject
is not only perceived to be totally in charge of him or herself, he or she also ap
pears to have power to recuperate the loss of jouissance. in capitalism, the sub
ject is thus perceived as an agent with enormous power.
What does it mean that the subject is placed in the position of such an agent?
First, it looks as if this subject is free from subjection to his or her history and ge
nealogy and thus free from all signifying inscriptions. This seems to be the sub
ject who is free to choose not only objects that supposedly bring him or her sat
isfaction, but even the direction of his or her life; that is, the subject chooses
him or herself.
lacan points out that in the discourse of capitalism one fnds rejection, or bet
ter, foreclosure of castration. This foreclosure happens when society increasingly
functions without limits and where there seems to be a constant push towards
some kind of limitless jouissance. This push to jouissance at all costs is especial
ly visible in all forms of toxic maniafrom excessive consumption of alcohol and
drugs to shopping, workaholism, etc.
16
capitalism transforms the proletarian
slave into a free consumer. However, limitless consumption paradoxically pro
vokes the moment when the subject starts consuming himself.
And although the subject in the discourse of capitalism is perceived as being
totally in charge or him or herself and free to make numerous choices, one sees
the paradoxical trend by which this possibility of choice opens doors to an in
crease of anxiety. one of the ways to deal with this anxiety is a strong identifca
tion with the master. The latter allows the subject to relinquish his or her doubt,
to avoid choice and responsibility, and thus in some way to fnd relief for his or
her own existence.
While it is easy to admit that in todays society there have been changes in
subjects selfperception, as well as in their perception of the big other, is one
right to conclude that these changes have contributed to an increase of psycho
sis? Nowadays, some psychoanalysts are looking closely at cases of socalled
nontriggered psychosis, where there is no delirium to show that a person has a
psychotic structure. some are thus reviving Helen Deutschs idea of as if per
sonalities: people who might not actually develop a fullblown psychosis like
schreber,
17
but nonetheless have a psychotic structure. some analysts call these
cases ordinary psychosis or white psychosis. What distinguishes these indi
viduals from neurotics is that they often express enormous certainty with regard
to their perception of reality. They are people without doubts.
one French psychoanalyst describes the case of a male patient who had had
a number of successful careers in his life. As a young man, he had befriended a
lawyer in a prominent frm and became a successful lawyer himself. Then he met
a sailor on the street and followed him into the merchant navy. later he encoun
tered a businessman and turned himself into a successful businessman. unlike
16. one type of critique of late capitalism points out that the consumer is just a semblant of the agent,
following only a semblance of freedom. in reality, he or she is under the pressure of demand. This de
mand is not coming from the master signifer, but from the place of jouissancethe objet petit a.
17. Daniel Paul schrebers legendary case of psychosis is described in his 1903 book, memoirs of my
nervous illness. (editorial note)
schreber, this was not a delusional form of psychosis triggered by a particular
event. rather it was a series of successful identifcations where the patient not
only mimicked other individuals, but also used these powerful identifcations
with people he randomly encountered to transform his whole life without experi
encing any apparent anxiety or doubt about the path he had chosen. When the
psychoanalyst asked the patient why given his success he felt it necessary to en
ter analysis, he replied simply my wife told me to do so. Not surprisingly, he be
came a very successful patient!
in 1956, lacan took the asif (which is nowadays often referred to as border
line structure) as a mechanism of imaginary compensations to which subjects
have recourse who never enter into the play of signifers, except by a sort of ex
terior imitation. This form of imitation can easily be understood as another ver
sion of the simulacra and sameness that benjamin was talking about. When the
subject is caught in this imaginary dimension, he or she has lots of problems
with his or her identity (interweaving of identity, illusions of doubles, etc.). one
of the features of psychotics is that they are obsessed with mimicry, shaping
themselves according to one set of ideas and then just as quickly abandoning
them, especially by strongly identifying with other people.
Are we really living in a limitless world? We have increasingly interventionist
states, authoritarianleaning state leaders, and numerous other authorities in the
form of selfhelp gurus, religious leaders, and the like. in this case, why does the
ideology of the late capitalist self encourage us to live as if we were without
limits, in fact free? is the modern self out of touch with reality, delusional in
some sense? can we argue that late capitalism is producing more psychosis, as
some psychoanalysts want to suggest?
This would be a duly simplistic and pessimistic conclusion. There is certainly
some evidence for increasing plasticity in forms of identifcation. Players on the
internet rarely appear as themselves, preferring in many cases to change not
only their gender and sexual orientation, but also their race, religion, and age.
There is nothing new about fantasizing about being someone else, but modern
trends suggest something more profound. in the age group 1825 in the united
kingdom, more young people not only report having had a sexual experience
with both a person of the same sex and one of the opposite sex, but they are un
willing to classify or categorize their sexuality on the basis of sexual practice. The
gaystraight distinction appears to have little purchase for these young people in
terms of how they categorize themselves and others. As one commentator re
marked, Homosexuality is over!
18
However, refusing categorizations and playing with your sexual identity is not
the same thing in any sense as schrebers delusion that he had been turned into
a woman. schreber had no doubt about his bodily transformation. it is also not
the same thing as the mimicry in the case of the successful patient described
earlier, whose transformations caused him no anxiety or uncertainty. in contrast,
those of us who are ceaselessly remaking ourselves in the contemporary mo
ment have many doubts, and can often feel overwhelmed by the fear of failure.
18. i am indebted to Henrietta moore for this assessment of u.k. culture.
184 185
our play with identifcations is quite different from the mimicry of the psychotic.
His or her certitude is replaced in the contemporary moment with something
that looks more like the celebration of undecidability.
yet this undecidability is itself caught up in capitalist circuits, as evidenced by
the riseand subsequent marketingof the metrosexual. The metrosexual is
less a sexual identity than a set of consumer identifcations. so under late capi
talism, shifts in identity and indeed in identifcations are celebrated as the new
vogue and turned into proft.
if one cannot easily agree with pessimistic conclusions that psychosis seems
to be overwhelmingly present in late capitalism, one nonetheless needs to admit
that something has changed in the subjects relationship towards him or herself
as well as society at large, that there is a change in the nature of limits and a
push towards excessive jouissance.
let us look at how the lack of limits affects personal relationships today. in
the society determined by the idea of choice, matters of love and sexuality at
frst seem extremely liberating. What is better than envisioning freedom from so
cial prohibitions when it comes to our sexual enjoyment; how wonderful it ap
pears to fnally stop bothering about what parents and society at large fashion as
normal sexual relations; how liberating it seems to change our sexual orientation
or even the physical appearance of sexual difference. it is more than obvious that
such freedom does not bring satisfaction; on the contrary, it actually limits it.
in analysing human desires, psychoanalysis has from the beginning linked de
sire with prohibition. For the subject to develop desire, something has to be off
limits. When the subject struggles with everevolving dissatisfaction in the face
of the unattainability of his or her object of desire, the solution is not to get rid of
the limit in order to fnally fuse with the object of desire, but to be able to some
how cherish the very limit and perceive the object of desire as worthy of our
striving precisely because it is inaccessible.
When we look at how we deal with sexuality in this supposedly limitless soci
ety, it is easy to observe that limits did not actually disappear or that prohibitions
still exist; however, the locus where they originate has changed. if in the past
prohibitions were transmitted with the help of social rituals (like initiation rituals
in premodern society and the functioning of the paternal prohibition in the tradi
tional patriarchal society), today the subject sets his or her own limits. The con
temporary subject is thus not only selfcreator, but also his or her own prohibitor.
conclusion
When the subject deals with castration, he or she also deals with dissatisfaction.
However, what we are observing today is not so much an escalation of dissatis
faction as an increase in frustration. Frustration is, in a special way, linked to a
subjects problem with jouissance. in contemporary racism, for example, the
subject presupposes that the other has access to some full jouissance which
provokes frustration on the side of the subject. in personal relationships, the
problem is that the subject tries to get some excess enjoyment from the partner
(for men, a sexual one; for women, a narcissistic one) and after this attempt nec
essarily fails, the partner loses importance and becomes one of the objects one
can easily reject. For the subject who lacks stable identifcations, has a fuctuat
ing choice of objects and instability in affective investments, and who quickly
passes to act, one way to try to fnd the lost jouissance is with the help of addic
tive substances. The paradox thus is that on the one hand, the subject searches
for new forms of enjoyment and is thus under constant pressure to consume
(which sadly often brings him or her to selfconsumption), but on the other hand,
the subject desperately searches for new limits, even if they are selfimposed.
Although benjamin predicted that worries would become overconsuming in
capitalism, he also made the puzzling remark that The concept of progress
must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are status quo is ca
tastrophe. it is not an everpresent possibility but what in each case is given.
strindbergs idea: hell is not something that awaits us, but this life here and
now.
19
maybe the gloomy prediction that we are entering into a society domi
nated by psychosis expresses this very enjoyment in catastrophes. is the
biggest catastrophe of todays society that not much has radically changed in
the nature of our worries? However, we do feel that we have surpassed our
predecessors in our suffering.
19. Walter benjamin, central Park, in selected Writings 4, 185.
186 187
A few months ago a friend sent me the following lines by the italian comedian
beppe grillo: For a long time italians have been in a [political] coma. We are al
ways in search of the lesser evil. in fact, we should construct a monument for
the lesser evil. A huge monument in the middle of rome.
if anyone ever asked me to build such a monument, in rome or elsewhere, i
would probably look for a high hill and place the digits 665 (like giant Hollywood
letters) overlooking the city centrea notch less than evil, a counter displaying
the fact that our society has become a calculating machine.
indeed the principle of the lesser evil has become so prominently identifed with
the ethicopolitical foundations of liberal capitalism (and its political system that
we like to call democracy) and so frmly naturalized in common speech that it
seems to have become the new good. commenting upon the comparative mer
its of democracy shortly after the end of World War ii, Winston churchill may
have inaugurated this trend when he sardonically noted that it has been said that
democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that
have been tried from time to time. since then, and increasingly since soviet (and
Third World) horrors began to be exposed a decade into the cold War, the projec
tion of totalitarian horrors has been mobilized, beyond a frank concern for indi
vidual rights, to stop all search for a different form of politics. it was ultimately
the mediated spectre of these atrocities that compelled the public to constantly
weigh liberal disorder against the worse evils of totalitarian tyranny in favour of
the former. in comparison to the horrors of totalitarianism, this inegalitarian and
unjust regime was presented as a responsible lesser evil, the best of all worlds
665/
The lesser eVil
eyAl WeiZmAN
1. Alain badiou has been the strongest critic of this notion: if the lamentable state in which we fnd our
selves is nonetheless the best of all real states [] [if humanity] will not fnd anything better than cur
rently existing parliamentary states, and the forms of consciousness associated with them, this simply
proves that up to now the political history of men has only given birth to restricted innovations and we
are but characters in a prehistoric situation [] [that] will not rank much higher than ants and ele
phants. see Alain badiou, eight Theses on the universal, in theoretical Writings, ed. and trans. ray
brassier and Alberto Toscano (london: continuum, 2004), 237. renata salecl introduced badious work
to the discussion in a workshop titled lesser evils organized by Thomas keenan, eyal sivan and myself
in February 2008, hosted by bard college, manifesta 7 (Trento) and the goethe institute New york . Pre
sentations were given by the organizers and by Adi ophir, Ariella Azoulay, simon critchley, Joshua si
mon, olivia custer, renata salecl, karen sullivan and roger berkowitz. salecl introduced badious ideas
through a reading of an interview in two parts badiou gave to cabinet magazine before and after 9/11
(http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/5/alainbadiou.php). salecl added new doubts of her own: not
even knowing what good and evil are, how can we choose and calculate? When evil is so enjoyable,
what does lesser evil mean?
possible, and as a necessary barrier against regress to bloody dictatorships.
1

This multifaceted political shift within the left was largely promoted by post1968
western radicals who switched the focus of their political engagement to
criticizing lefttotalitarian regimes across the second and third worlds, while argu
ing for the autonomy of civil society at home. The notions espoused by these
largely French nouveaux philosopheslets hold on to what we have, because
there is worse elsewheredemonstrated that for liberals evil was always some
where else, lurking behind any attempt at political transformation.
2
Hannah Arendt, the thinker who has done most to analyze and compare the
political systems of totalitarianism, and whose work the Origins of totalitarian-
ism
3
was most often mobilized in relation to this antitotalitarian shift in the left,
saw the principle of the lesser evil strongly at work, not only in the makingdo
of liberal capitalism but in the way the totalitarian system tended to camoufage
its radical actions from those yet to be initiatedthe majority of bourgeois sub
jects needed to run things until a new man was created. Writing about the col
laboration and cooperation of ordinary germans with the Nazi regime, mainly by
those employed in the civil service (but also by the Jewish councils set up by
the Nazis), she showed how the argument for the lesser evil has become one of
the most important mechanisms built into the machinery of terror and crimes.
she explained that acceptance of lesser evils [has been] consciously used in
conditioning government offcials as well as the population at large to the ac
ceptance of evil as such, to the degree that those who choose the lesser evil
forget very quickly that they chose evil.
4
Against all those who stayed in germa
ny to make things better from within, against all acts of collaboration, especially
those undertaken for the sake of the moderation of harm, against the argument
that the lesser evil of collaboration with brutal regimes is acceptable if it might
prevent or divert greater evils, she called for individual disobedience and collec
tive disorder. Participation, she insisted, communicated consent; moreover, it
handed support to the oppressor. When nothing else was possible, to do nothing
was the last effective form of resistance, and the practical consequences of re
fusal were nearly always better if enough people refused. in her essay The eggs
speak up, a sarcastic reference to stalins dictum that you cant make an ome
let without breaking a few eggs, Arendt pleaded for a radical negation of the
whole concept of lesser evil in politics.
5
in Arendts writings the principle of the lesser evil is presented as a pragmatic
compromise and frequent exception to common ethics, to the degree that it
has become the most common justifcation for the very notion of exception. it is
2. For badiou, according to salecl, evil is when one lacks the strength to search for the good. The poli
tics of the lesser evil give up on the event, renounce the drive. At the bard workshop, she asked: is
there a new theory of the good ready to fght the selfcontents of liberalism?
3. Hannah Arendt, the Origins of totalitarianism (New york: Harvest books, 1973).
4. Hannah Arendt, responsibility and judgment (New york: schocken, 2005), 35. in his presentation to
the workshop, roger berkowitz presented Arendts argument against the lesser evil in the context of
her thought on judgment, as part of what she identifed as the crisis of judgment.
5. Hannah Arendt, The eggs speak up (1950), in essays in understanding, 19301954: formation, ex-
ile, and totalitarianism, ed. Jerome kohn (New york: schocken, 2005), 270284; see especially 271. Ar
endt claims that stalins only original contribution to socialism was to transform the breaking of eggs
from a tragic necessity into a revolutionary virtue.
188 189
in this seemingly pragmatic approach that the principle of the lesser evil natural
izes crimes and other forms of injustice, acting as a main argument in the states
regime of justifcationpeople and regimes tend to invent retroactive explana
tions for atrocious actions. Furthermore, Arendt saw the calculation and meas
urement of goods and evils, like statistical trends in the social sciences, as di
minishing the value of personal responsibility. once ethics is seen in the form of
an economy, when issues are put into numbers, they can be changed and turned
around endlessly. And lastly, the terms of the lesser evil are most often posed by
and from the point of view of power. using a formulation she conceived with
mary mccarthy, Arendt explained: if somebody points a gun at you and says,
kill your friend or i will kill you, he is tempting you, that is all.
6
it is important to note that when speaking about the political options available
to people living in the postwar western states, Arendt was much less damning
about the principle of the lesser evil. she implied that these options did include
various forms of compromise and measure.
7
in other words, she described the
lesser evil as a false dilemma when faced with a totalitarian regime that itself has
no concept of the lesser evil (totalitarians simply camoufage their acts as lesser
evils), but as a part of the very structure of politics in the context of cold War
western democracies. Whether we accept them or not, the distinctions she im
plied point to a possible differend within the term, and could lead us to open up
the concept further. The various historical and philosophical uses of the lesser
evil idiom demonstrate that it meant different things to different people at differ
ent periods in different situations. There is a difference between masking an act
of perpetration as a lesser evil, choosing the lesser of two evils and trying to
make the world a little less evil while still pursuing a cause.
***
i would like to divide the use of the idiom lesser evil into twoparticular and
general. The particular case is presented to a person or to a group of people as a
dilemma between two (or more) bad options in a given situation. The general
case is the structuring principle in an economy of ethical calculations, manifest
ed in attempts to reduce or lessen the bad and increase the good. both cases af
frm an economic model embedded at the heart of ethics according to which, in
absence of the possibility to avoid all harm, various forms of misfortune must be
calculated against each other (as if they were algorithms in a mathematical mini
mum problem), evaluated, and acted upon. The principle of the lesser evil im
plies that there is no way out of calculations.
As a dilemma, the lesser evil is presented as the necessity of a choice of ac
tion in situations where the available options are or seem to be limited. it is a di
lemma in the classical greek sense of the wordwhen both of the two options
6. see Arendt, responsibility and judgment.
7. in an article on segregation in southern schools, after making her readers understand she was against
all forms of racism, she voiced scepticism about federally enforced integration, claiming it politicized
the educational system, which she believed should be immune to such forces, and insisting that the
survival of the republic may require that the battle line be drawn somewhere else. Hannah Arendt, re
fections on little rock, dissent 6, no. 1 (1959): 4556.
presented to the tragic hero necessarily lead to different forms of suffering. The
dilemma implies a closed system in which the options presented for choice
could not be questioned or negotiated. regardless of what option is chosen, ac
cepting the terms of the question leaves the (political) power that presented
this choice unchallenged and even reinforced. it is in accepting the parameters
as given that the lesser evil argument is properly ideological. The dilemma,
if we are still to think in its terms, should thus not only be about which of the bad
options to choose, but whether to choose at all and thus accept the very terms
of the question. When asked to choose between the two horns of an angry
bull, robert Pirsig suggested alternatives: one can refuse to enter the arena,
throw sand in the bulls eyes, or even sing the bull to sleep.
8
THe PerPeTrATors oF lesser evils
The term lesser evil has recently been prominently invoked in the context of at
tempts to moderate the excesses of western states, in particular in relation to at
tempts to govern the economics of violence in the context of the War on Terror,
and in private organizations attempts to manoeuvre through the paradoxes and
complicities of human rights action and humanitarian aid. more specifcally, the
lesser evil has been most often invoked at the very intersection of these two
spheres of actionmilitary and humanitarian. in relation to the global War on
Terror, the terms of this argument were recently articulated in a book titled the
lesser evil by human rights scholar and now deputy leader of the liberal Party of
canada, michael ignatieff. in his book, ignatieff suggests that liberal states
should establish mechanisms to regulate the breach of some rights and allow
their security services to engage in forms of extrajuridical violencein his eyes,
lesser evilsin order to fend off or minimize potential greater evils, such as
further terror attacks on civilians of the western states. His conception of the
lesser evil is presented as a balancing act because its fexible regime of excep
tions should be regulated through a process of adversarial scrutiny of an open
democratic system and is thus also aimed to prevent the transformation,
through the temporary primacy given to the security services, of the liberal
state into a totalitarian one.
9
ignatieff calls for the security offcials of liberal de
mocracies to become the perpetrators of lesser evils.
10
These postmodern per
petrators (the lesser evil should surely replace the banality of evil as the con
temporary form of perpetration of crimes of state) should weigh various types of
destructive measures in a utilitarian fashion, in relation not to the damage they
produce but to the harm they purportedly prevent. The calculation, however, is
obviously most often about the suffering of somebody else.
ignatieffs conception of the lesser evil is problematic even according to the
utilitarian principles invoked. The very economy of violence assumes the possi
8. robert Pirsig, Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance (New york: bantam, 1974).
9. michael ignatieff, the lesser evil: Political ethics in an age of terror (Princeton: Princeton university
Press, 2004)
10. ibid., 152.
190 191
bility of less violent means and the risk of more violence, but questions of vio
lence are forever unpredictable and undetermined. The supposed lesser evil
may always be more violent than the violence it opposes, and there can be no
end to the challenges that stem from the impossibility of calculation.
11
A less
brutal measure is also one that can easily be naturalized, accepted and tolerat
ed.
12
When exceptional means are normalized, they can be more frequently ap
plied. The purported military ability to perform controlled, elegant, pinpoint
accurate, discriminate killing could bring about more destruction and death
than traditional strategies did because these methods, combined with the ma
nipulative and euphoric rhetoric used to promulgate them, induce decision mak
ers to authorize their frequent and extended use. The illusion of precision, part of
the states rhetoric of restraint, gives the militarypolitical apparatus the neces
sary justifcation to use explosives in civilian environments where they cannot be
used without injuring or killing civilians. This process, recalling Herbert mar
cuses analysis of repressive tolerance,
13
may explain the way western demo
cratic societies can maintain regimes of brutal military domination without this
brutality affecting their selfperception as enlightened liberals. elevating, for ex
ample, targeted assassinations (ignatieff considers targeted assassination to fall
within the effective moralpolitical framework of the lesser evil)
14
to a legally
and morally acceptable standard makes them part of the states legal options,
part of a list of counterterrorism techniques, with the result that all sense of hor
ror at the act of murder is now lost. The lower the threshold of violence attribut
ed to a certain means and the lower the threshold of horror implied in its use,
the more frequent its application could become. because they help normalize
lowintensity confict, the overall duration of this confict could be extended and
fnally more lesser evils could be committed, with the result of the greater evil
reached cumulatively.
15
11. in the lesser evils workshop at bard, reading ignatieffs book, Thomas keenan pointed to the im
possibility of calculating evils. rejecting the notion of grades of violence, he used a Derridean formula
tion when he argued: is not the slightest violence always already the greatest violence? He pointed as
well to the fallacy in the supposed difference between qualitative and quantitative judgment on evil,
asking whether the quantitative cannot cross a threshold and become qualitative itself.
12. Adi ophir, the Order of evils, section 7.100 as well as 7.2 and 7.3. see for example 7.335.
13. Herbert marcuse, repressive Tolerance (1965), http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/60spubs/
65repressivetolerance.htm. The essay examines the idea of tolerance in advanced industrial society.
marcuse claims that the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, atti
tudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed
or suppressed.
14. This under the following conditions: that they are applied to the smallest number of people, used as
a last resort, and kept under the adversarial scrutiny of an open democratic system. Furthermore, as
sassination can be justifed only if [] less violent alternatives, like arrest and capture, endanger []
personnel or civilians [or] are not possible, [and] where all reasonable precautions are taken to minimize
collateral damage and civilian harm. ignatieff, the lesser evil, 8, 129133.
15. it is this principle that guarantees, paradoxically, that all greater goods could necessarily become
greater evils. Health economists have a chilling and interesting version of this economy of calculations,
a value of statistical life, or vsl, to cope with what some of its proponents see as the following conun
drum: the prevention of every possible accidental death would be intolerably costly in terms of both
money and the quality of life. see Nina Power and Alberto Toscano, The Philosophy of restoration:
Alain badiou and the enemies of may, forthcoming in boundary 2.
THe HumAniTAriAn PArAdox oF THe lesser evil
From this perspective it is possible to see that the discourse and practice of hu
manitarianism and human rights might paradoxically turn against the people it
claims to help. When every soldier in what george W. bush has called the
armies of compassion becomes a proxy expert in humanitarianism, humanitari
an concerns could easily become a pretext to justify neutrality with respect to a
brutal confict (as in sarajevo) or an alibi for a political decision to mount a mili
tary intervention against a sovereign state (as in iraq).
beyond state agents, the perpetrators of lesser evil must also include non
state organizations. Putting an end to human rights violations has become, in
creasingly since the 1990s, the platform that allows for the possibility of collabo
ration between Ngo activists and western militaries. beyond the fact that the
moralization of politics through the terms freedom, human rights and liberal
democracy has led to a general depoliticization, the paradox is that human
rights and humanitarian action can in fact aggravate the situation of the very
people it purportedly comes to aid.
The paradox of the lesser evil impacts most independent nongovernmental or
ganizations that make up the various systems in the ecology of contemporary
war and crisis zones, in addition to the military and the government.
lesser evil is the common justifcation of the military offcer who attempts to
administer life (and death) in an enlightened manner; it is the brief of the securi
ty contractor who introduces new and more effcient weapons and spatiotech
nological means of domination and advertises them as humanitarian technolo
gy. lessening evil is moreover the logic defning the actions of the subjects of
this regime, who, sometimes assisted by human rights organizations, lodge peti
tions challenging the brutality of these means and powers. lesser evil is the ar
gument of the humanitarian agent as he seeks military permission for providing
life substances and medical help in places where it is in fact the duty of the mili
tary in control.
This logic of the lesser evil somewhat obscures the fundamental moral differ
ences between the various groups that compose the ecologies of confict and
crisis in allowing for the aforementioned moments of cooperation. signifcantly,
the western system of domination learned to use the work of local and interna
tional organizations to fll the void left by dysfunctional Third World govern
ments and manage life in their stead. indeed, the urgent and important criticism
that peace organizations often level at western militaries, to the effect that they
dehumanize their enemies, masks another process by which the military incorpo
rates into its operations the logic of, and even seeks to cooperate directly with,
the very humanitarian and human rights organizations that in the past opposed it.
At the core of the paradoxes of the lesser evil is a tactical compromise that
could deteriorate into a structural impossibilityone that would entangle the
state and its opposition in a mutual embrace, making nonstate organizations de
facto participants in a diffused system of government. in slavoj Zizeks words,
the state thus externalizes its ethical selfconsciousness in an extrastatal ethico
political agency, and this agency externalizes its claim to effectiveness in the
state.
16
in this manner, human rights and humanitarian Ngos could do the ethi
192 193
cal thinking and some of the ethical practice, while their state does the killing.
The spatial order of contemporary military power emerges not only from a se
ries of open acts of aggression, but through attempts at the moderation and re
straint of its own violence.
17
recently, western militaries began using the vocab
ulary of international law, with the effect that human rights principles such as pro
portionality have become compatible with military goals such as effciency.
18
THe governmenT oF evil (in souls)
The common use of the term lesser evil masks a rich history and various
intellectual trajectories. What may otherwise seem to be a perennial problem
endemic to ethics and political practice, a dilemma that simply reappears
at every period anew in the same shape and form, in fact reveals something
peculiar about each historical moment and situation. The different trajectories of
the term cast different shadows on the investigation of the lesser evil as one
of the problems of the politics of the present. What follows is not a sustained
history of the concept but rather several of its paradigmatic moments, the
beginning of a possible archive of probes into the lesser evil argument.
one of the trajectories of the concept of the lesser evil originated in early
christian theology and was secularized into the utilitarian foundations of liberal
ethics. it formed the basis for the philosophy of ethical realism, differently
formulated by george kennan and Hans morgenthau. ethical realism traces its
origins to saint Augustine and saint Thomas Aquinas and insists on some ethical
constraints on states and military action. it sees the role of liberal states and
especially that of the united states in the pursuit of moral goals such as
freedom, human rights and democracy. The destiny of the united states
in particular and the West in general is to fght radical evil, whose traces could
be found in any project predicated on an articulation of the idea of the good
(religious fundamentalism or communist egalitarianism).
one component in the idea of the lesser evil, however, has gone missing in its
secularization. For the christian fathers the toleration of the lesser evil, as i will
later show, should be understood in relation to the religious telos of salvation.
The immanent management of evil on behalf of the church was conceived as
part of a quest for perfection which forms a necessary stage on the way to tran
scendencethe replacement of the earthly kingdom with a heavenly one. unlike
the teachings of the christian fathers, the liberal striving for perfection is not
a quest for eventual transformation. Without transcendence it is locked within a
perpetual economy of immanence and could be better interpreted as a drive
for the optimization of the existing system of government.
19
16. slavoj Zizek, in defence of lost causes (london: verso, 2008), 349.
17. michel Feher, The governed in Politics, in nongovernmental Politics, ed. michel Feher (New york:
Zone, 2007), 1227, esp. 21.
18. David kennedy, the dark sides of virtue: reassessing international humanitarianism (Princeton:
Princeton university Press, 2004), 235323, esp. 295.
19. Anatol lieven and John Hulsman, ethical realism: a vision for americas role in the World (New
york: Pantheon books, 2006).
***
The vast extraterritorial institutional network of the ecclesiastical pastoratethe
church as it was formed and institutionalized from around the turn of the fourth
centurydealt with the problem of the lesser evil in the context of the practical
and intellectual problem of the government of souls. in his lectures on the
origins of governmentality michel Foucault analyzed the christian form of pastoral
power. economical theology sought to understand the management of both
human and divine orders, each with its immanent order of execution. in relation
to human action the divine management of evil is both general and particular,
bearing on both the individual and society, the multitude of people in the fock.
The christian order thus operated by simultaneously individualizing and collectiv
izinggranting as much value to a single person as to the community and
the multitude.
20
salvationdeliverance from the power and penalty of sin and
evil and the redemption of the soulmust thus address all and each. This form
of salvation is one of the aspects of general and particular providence. The
pastor must account not only for the wellbeing of individual and community
but for the totality of good or evil they perform personally and collectively.
Discussions of particular providence are organized around the question of
choice, or of free choicehow to identify and pursue good and avoid evil.
general providence, on the other hand, invokes a vastly complex intrapersonal
economy of merits and faultsof sin, vice and virtueoperating according
to specifc rules of circulation and transfer, with complex procedures, analyses,
calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specifc interplay
between conficting goods and degrees of evil.
21
but Foucault does not explain how evil could be understood in terms of an
economy. The source of this understanding is the teaching of saint Augustine. in
early christian theology evil is no longer seen as the equal opposite of good. in
the course of his break from manichaeism, Augustine no longer saw evil as glam
ourously demonic but rather merely as the absence of good, a defciency of be
ing that has no standing by itself. evil is relative and differential, an obstacle to per
fection, that which stands between man and the good. because evil is not abso
lute, demonic or perfect it is forever on a scale of less and more, lesser and greater.
it is through this conception of evil that Augustine addressed the problem of
the lesser evil. For Augustine, the lesser evil is not permissible, as it clearly
violates the Pauline principle do no evil that good may come. it could however
be tolerated in certain circumstances. For the lesser evil to be tolerated the
situation has to be defned in such a way that a possible resultant evil outcome
is a necessary and unavoidable consequence of the performance of individual
and collective duties.
20. michel Foucault, security, territory, Population: lectures at the college de france 19771978, ed. Ar
nold i. Davidson, trans. graham burchell (london: Palgrave macmillan, 2007), 164173. The immanent
disorder exercised by the pastorate was an art of conducting, directing, leading, guiding, taking in
hand, and manipulating men, an art of monitoring them and arranging them [] an art of taking charge
of men collectively and individually throughout their life and at every moment of their existence (173).
21. Foucault, security, territory, Population.19. Anatol lieven and John Hulsman, ethical realism: a vi-
sion for americas role in the World (New york: Pantheon books, 2006).
194 195
in his economy of lesser and greater evils, it is better to tolerate prostitutes in so
ciety than to risk adultery, and it is better to kill an assailant before he may kill an
innocent traveler.
22
in this way the principle of the lesser evil is confated with
the concept of preemption, and Augustines rationale for preemption is one of
justice. even war could be just under certain conditions. under the principles of
just war, a war should be considered just if those waging it do so with the in
tention of doing good or pursuing a just purpose (such as, centuries later, the
crusades), or with a desire to reach peace rather than wage wars for ones own
gain or as an exercise of power. Furthermore, just wars must be waged by prop
erly instituted authorities of organized arms.
it is thus not coincidental that the discourse of the lesser evil developed at a
time when the christian church acquired real appetite and the real ability to exer
cise political and military power. Augustine, a fourthcentury christian, was
teaching at the time christianity had acquired the power to govern larger socie
ties, and tried to reconcile christian pacifsm with the world of politics and the
obligations of roman citizens.
importantly, Augustine saw the lessening of evil as part of a general inclina
tion to pursue the good and a quest for transformation. unlike in the tradition of
liberal ethics that invoked him, in Augustines teachings progress towards a less
er imperfection is not produced by or content with a lesser imperfection. only
the desire for perfection could destroy in the soul these aspects of the evil that
defle it.
23
This progressthe lessening of evilis the only way towards perfec
tion and the ultimate transformation of the kingdom from earth to heaven. The
individual must strive for the kind of perfection that would put her closer to god,
overreach the earthly and thereby help transform it.
The general aspects of the problem of the lesser evil are also articulated in
other theological discussions about the economic basis of divine government
the question of the origins and management of evil. it addressed the perennial
question of theological philosophy: if god governs the world and if gods econo
my is necessarily the most perfect one, how can we explain evilnatural catas
trophe, illness, crimes?
in the context of his investigation of economia, a form of governmental pow
er, giorgio Agamben discussed one of the frst formulations of this question by
Alexander of Aphrodisia, a late Aristotelian commentator of the second century:
god in his providence establishes general laws which are always good, but evil
results from these laws as a collateral side effect. For example: rain is obviously
a good thing, but as a collateral effect of the rain there are foods. collateral ef
fectsthe bad effects of the divine governmentare thus not accidental, but de
fne the very structure of the action of government. Furthermore, it is through
these collateral effects that the divine government becomes effective.
A millennium and a half later, in his thodice, leibnitz attempted to resolve
the same perennial question in a somewhat different manner. His intention is
similarly to reconcile the apparent faults and imperfections in the world, which
he does by claiming that the world is optimal among all possible worlds: to
show that an architect could have done better is to fnd fault with his work []
[if] a lesser evil is relatively good, so a lesser good is relatively evil. leibnitz un
folds a conception of god in the creation and management of the world as a
mathematician who is solving a minimum problem in the calculus of variations.
The world must be the best possible and most balanced world because it was
created by a perfect god. god governs by determining and choosing, among an
infnite number of possible worlds, that one for which the sum of necessary evil
is at a minimum. in leibnitzs complex divine economy evil exists by defnition at
its minimum possible level. if evil is managed at its minimum level, then all evils
are in fact always lesser evils. The statement that we live in the best of all possi
ble worlds was famously parodied by voltaire in candide when he has a leib
nitzlike character, Dr. Pangloss, repeat it like a mantra.
A cAlculATing mAcHine For THe reducTion oF evil
Different aspects of the lesser evil argument were secularized into the modern
articulations of ethics and politics. Foucault argued that it is on the basis of eco
nomical theology that modern powerthe government of men and thingshas
taken the form of an economy: We pass from an art of governing whose princi
ples were derived from the traditional virtues (wisdom, justice, liberality, respect
for divine laws and human customs) [] to an art of governing that fnds the
principle of its rationality [] in the state.
24
He argued that from the end of the
sixteenth century to the eighteenth century, the legacy of pastoral power was as
similated into the practice of governmenta biopolitical form of power exercised
upon a population to regulate and manage its health, felicity, reproducibility and
productivitywhile the pastoral power over the individualparticular provi
dencehas evolved into disciplinary technology that subjectivizes the individual
in various institutions and buildings: the prison, the military barracks, the school
and the hospital.
continuing Foucaults work on governmentality and discipline and directly re
fecting on the question of the lesser evil, the philosopher Adi ophir has shown
how the panopticon, beyond being a mechanism of discipline, control and sub
jectivation, could also be interpreted as a closed system for the management
and reduction of evils.
25
Here it is necessary to mention that bentham no longer
24. Foucault, security, territory, Population, 163, 183.
25. Adi ophir in the lesser evils workshop at bard.
22. Augustine thought that prostitutes should be tolerated because they fulfl a similar function in soci
ety to that of the cesspool in the palace. speaking through evodius, Augustine says: it is much more
suitable that the man who attacks the life of another should be slain than he who defends his own life;
and it is much more cruel that a man should suffer violation than that the violator should be slain by his
intended victim (118, De lib. arb. i.v.12). in her presentation for the lesser evils workshop at bard, kar
en sullivan presented Augustines teachings against lying as one of the only cases in which a compro
mise for the lesser evil is not even possible. A lie is an offence against truth, perversion of speech, and
the imperative against it should in no case be breached, even to save innocent people. Having such uni
versal effect, lying is worse than killing; the latter is tolerated under certain conditions of the lesser evil
principle.
23. simone Weil, Oppression and liberty (Florence, ky: routledge, 2001), quoted in Peter Paik yoonsuk,
The Pessimist rearmed: Zizek on christianity and revolution, theory & event 8, no. 2 (2005). karen
sullivan made a similar point in her discussion of Augustine.
196 197
saw good and evil as metaphysical categories, but rather as the sum total of
good and bad things. He defned the task of government as minimizing the bad
things and maximizing the good ones. This economy is at the centre of the prin
ciple of utility. The general aspect of the lesser evil argument is thus one of the
forms by which the greater good expresses itself.
The panopticon, a closed system that regulates everything that fows in and
out of it, is according to ophir a mechanism whose purpose is to make the cal
culation (a kind of protocomputer?) and reduction of evils possible.
26
The panop
ticon is designed to bring to perfection the consequences of every action under
taken within it. The observation and control of individual actions that the panop
ticon produces is the very condition that makes the calculus possible. The sys
tem is constructed in such a way that however much evil is put in, less evil is
guaranteed to come out. Although the machine produces collateral eviland
bentham is clear that both punishment itself and the friction the machine pro
duces are evilit guarantees, so bentham tried to convince his contemporary
politicians, the reduction of these evils and of the pain of the treatment to the
necessary minimum. ophir thus interprets benthams panopticon as a Perpetu-
um mobile of utility, a precurser to a panoptical society that has in itself now be
come a machine for the calculation and reduction of evils, the very diagram of
biomorality (the necessary counterpart to biopolitics) which is focused on the in
crease of happiness and the reduction of suffering.
27
THe roAd To uToPiA is PAved WiTH lesser evils
lesser evil arguments are articulated not only from the point of view of Power
but also in relation to attempts to subvert and replace it. An interesting example
is provided in the discussion about the shortening of the working day in marxs
capital. unlike the revolutionary and militant communists who protested the drift
towards a timid, reformist politics of choosing the lesser evil, of making the kind
of compromises with capital that may divert the struggle from the absolute ideal
of communism, marx thought that the winning of the tenhour day was a huge
victory for the english proletariat. The tenhour working day reduces the duration
of evil, but normalizes and regularizes exploitation. According to marx, on the
other hand, a tenhour day allowed fourteen hours of nonwork, in which the
laborer can satisfy his intellectual and social wants and which would allow the
proletarians to organize and continue fghting. marxs argument was that this
lesser evil gives the proletarians the space to build an organizational platform,
the consciousness and experience needed to take over the means of production.
it created the productive forces capable of generating a suffcient surplus to ena
ble socialism and the proletariat to continue fghting and build something bet
26. benthams preface to the Panopticon opens with a list of the benefts to be obtained from this in
spection house: morals reformedhealth preservedindustry invigoratedinstruction diffusedpub
lic burthens lightenedeconomy seated [] all by a simple idea of architecture.
27. bentham believed the panopticon could correct itself instantly. ophir to the contrary observed that
closed systems which are run by imperfect agents and in which the costs of exit are high tend to pro
duce greater rather than lesser evils The term biomorality comes from Zizek, in defence, 50.
ter.
28
His ultimate aim was still of course to abolish the state. but advanced capi
talism was not only seen as a lesser evil compared to primitive manufacture, it
was also a transformation that made a better world possible. marx saw the
struggle for the shortened working day as one corridor, potentially opening into
future struggles: the limitation of the workingday is a preliminary condition
without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation must prove
abortive.
29
Paradoxically, as we now know, the greatest expansion of british in
dustry occurred after the deal for the normalization of the working day.
similarly, at different times, lenin, kautski, luxemburg, Trotsky (!) and grams
ci grappled with the problem of fghting for compromised gains here and now
on the one hand while also fghting for a better world on the other. At various
points they stood for tactical struggles for immediate gains, advocating trade
unions, whose function was to win a better deal for workers in an exploitative
system; but none of them thought that trade unions were all that was possible,
and none of them were satisfed with simply winning a better deal in this exploit
ative system.
Tensions between evolutionary and revolutionary marxism were articulated
differently in relation to different historical moments: throughout his World War i
polemics against the social patriots, lenin emphasized the difference between
various periods and trends:
[u]nlike yesterday, the struggle for socialist power is on the order
of the day in europe. The socialist working class is on the scene as
a contender for power itself. This means: There may still be lesser
and greater evils (there always will be) but we do not have to
choose between these evils, for we represent the alternative to both
of them, an alternative which is historically ripe. moreover, under
conditions of imperialism, only this revolutionary alternative offers
any really progressive way out, offers any possibility of an outcome
which is no evil at all. both war camps offer only reactionary conse
quences, to a lesser or greater degree.
30
The debate articulated by marxists in different periods was about how political
transformation should be brought about: in an evolutionary fashiona step by
step approach along a trajectory of improvement (a kind of Darwinian evolution
by which the reign of the proletarians is a historical necessity)or rather in a
revolutionary manner, with a fast and decisive break with the past. in other
words, marxists in various periods asked whether change arrives through the re
28. engels argues for the positive effect of the deal for the tenhour day on completely different
grounds: Were the Ten Hour Day bill a fnal measure, england would be ruined, but because it neces
sarily involves the passing of subsequent measures, which must lead england into a path quite different
from that she has traveled up till now, it will mean progress. if english industry were to succumb to for
eign competition the revolution would be unavoidable.
29. karl marx, capital, http://www.bibliomania.com/2/1/261/1294/frameset.html. see The Working
Day, especially sections 6 and 7.
30. Hal Draper, The myth of lenins revolutionary Defeatism, http://www.marxists.org/archive/drap
er/1953/defeat/chap1.htm.
198 199
duction of paindo things become gradually better until they become good,
with the danger that with the reduction of pain society should become content
and complicit? (in this case pain should be seen as a selfdisciplining device.) At
one end of the spectrum in which the lesser evil argument occupies the middle
are the utopian absolutists who believe that every possible gain at present is in
signifcant in light of the essentially compromised state of the world. Part of the
structure of this argument is found in the principle of the politique du pirethe
politics of making things worse in order to hasten political changeor the theory
of dolorism, which sees pain as a spiritual experience that allows people to see
reality more clearly. The danger was of course that things simply get worse and
worse. in fact marxists used these approaches alternately, in a tactical manner,
in different periods and situations.
The lesser evil argument was articulated in another way by Herbert marcuse in
the context of discussions regarding the marxist attitude to the danger of fascism:
compared with a neofascist society, defned in terms of a sus
pension of civil rights and liberties, suppression of all opposition,
militarization and totalitarian manipulation of the people, bourgeois
democracy, even in its monopolistic form, still provides a chance
(the last chance?) for the transition to socialism, for the education (in
theory and practice) and organization to prepare this transition. The
New left is therefore faced with the task of defending this democ
racy? Defend it as the lesser evil: lesser than suicide and suppres
sion. And it is faced with the task of defending this democracy while
attacking its capitalist foundations.
31
marcuse saw bourgeois democracy, with its freedom of speech and association,
with space for selforganization (of, for example, workers and women), as a less
er evil to dictatorship as such but also inasmuch as it would provide a real oppor
tunity for its subversion and eventual transformation. Defending democracy
while attacking its capitalist foundations is an articulation of a necessary para
dox: could one simultaneously defend democracy in its liberal form against the
encroaching evil of fascism, all the while attacking its foundations?
***
The problems articulated by marcuse are somewhat relevant to the political pre
dicaments pertaining to different kinds of contemporary nongovernmental activ
ists: being intransigently in opposition to the neoliberal global order and market
hegemony, for example, while at the same time using their (infra)structures, and
even momentarily cooperating with their institutions. Negotiating this paradox
and negotiation could only merit its name if it seeks to bring together incom
patible positionsmust be the most important challenge to these contemporary
31. Herbert marcuse, towards a critical theory of society, vol. 2 (Florence, ky: routledge, 2001), 169.
Joshua simons contribution to the lesser evils workshop at bard was a reading of marxs eighteenth
brumaire of louis bonaparte, where he made similar points about marxisms relation to fascism.
activists. How to engage in a practice of lesser evil, yet mobilize the effect of
these actions in the service of larger political claims; how to work from inside
systems while simultaneously seeing beyond them, even precipitating their end?
obviously, the argument that the principle of the lesser evil is dangerous be
cause it may produce more harm is a contradiction as blatant as saying that it is
a lesser evil to avoid the lesser evil argument.
32
i am also not suggesting that the
horrifc spectacles of greater evils should be preferred to the incremental dam
age of lesser ones, that the violence of the present conficts should be made
(even) more brutal in order to shock a complacent population into mobilizing re
sistance (the threshold of the intolerable is elastic enough to make most people
easily accommodate and domesticate a sense of an everworsening reality); rath
er, that opposition and resistance must dare to think beyond the economy and
the calculations of violence and suffering that liberal ethics touts. The political
ethics of the lesser evil could be articulated by bypassing the closed economy
that a particular dilemma presents with an insistence on the expansion of the
limits of the problem in both space and timethe former by seeking to identify
more extended and intricate political connections leading to the issue at stake
and the latter by looking further into the future.
i hope to say more about the predicament of contemporary nongovernmental or
ganizations in later versions of this text. The installation 665/the lesser evil at
manifesta 7 seeks to start unpacking this problem by presenting some of the his
tories and contemporary tactics of such attempts and the humanitarian and hu
man rights activists caught up in dilemmas and struggling, successfully or not,
to liberate themselves from a mutual embrace with the very organizations they
vehemently oppose. many of these activists clearly realize that it is counterpro
ductive to accept the myopic pragmatism of the lesser evil, one that leaves a giv
en mode of government intact, and seek ways to go beyond these actions. Their
contemporary deliberations refect historical ones.
strategically planned or spontaneous action would always inevitably put ac
tivists on the ground within an arena of political struggles in compromising situ
ations that can easily deteriorate into a counterproductive complicity, but these
forms of practice must look for ways to simultaneously and paradoxically chal
lenge the truth claims and thus the basis of the authority of the powers they
both cooperate with and confrontthe very regimes that placed their bulls be
fore us and then asked us to choose the lesser of their two horns.
This text originates in discussions around an ongoing programme of workshops, lectures and flms exploring the struc
ture of the lesser evil argument that i run together with Thomas keenan and eyal sivan. i would like to thank Alberto To
scano for his useful comments.
32. in the bard workshop, Adi ophir compared this to benthams own statement: The principle of utili
ty, (i have heard it said) is a dangerous principle: it is dangerous on certain occasions to consult it. This
is as much as to say, what? that it is not consonant to utility, to consult utility: in short, that it is not con
sulting it, to consult it. Jeremy bentham, an introduction to the Principles
200 201
I
There is a wellknown myth according to which indigenous people believe that
when a camera takes a picture of them, it captures a part of them, if not stealing
their soul. This has been repeated often enough, by the pioneers of ethnographic
photography as well as in online forums by todays amateur photographers; so
called natives have been credited with this belief in every part of the world and
across time. like many other popular assumptions from the feld of ethnography,
the idea of the theft of a soul by image has become a commonplace, free from
critical refection and questioning.
it proves what is supposed to be evident: the primitiveness of the other, of
those who are unfortunately doomed, as well as their originality as a rare, still
available and not yet fully exterminated example to whom the privilege of pos
sessing a soul has only recently been granted; the naivety of those who are not
familiar with new technologies, as well as the correlate power of those who
know how to handle them properly; the spiritual innocence of the noble savage,
as well as the guilty conscience of those who intrude upon their reservations...
it is not rational, since it is irrational, a selffulflling prejudice that reveals not
much about those who are supposed to hold the belief but quite a lot about
those who assign the belief to others. in that respect, the myth of the soulsteal
ing camera appears as a colonial projection constitutive for the exoticizing prac
tice of portraying indigenous people.
The innocent, noble savage does not only have to look and behave, wear
clothes, hold weapons, make gestures in order to fulfll the expectations of the
colonial photographer. The antipathy of indigenous people towards the camera
may not have derived from their alleged belief in its soulstealing capacity,
but rather from their own very concrete experiences: the camera has served as
a weapon in the process of photographic colonization that violates the silences
and secrets essential to our group survival (leslie marmon silko).
1
moreover, the indigenous were forced to believe what was in fact a bourgeois
fashion in the european capitals of the nineteenth century: with the emergence
of physiognomic studies the face was considered to express the interior
A MAtter Of theft
noTes on The arT
oF sTeAliNg A soul
florian SChneider
1. Quoted in victor masayesva and erin younger, eds., hopi Photographers, hopi images (Tucson, 1983), 10.
decoration of the mind to the public, to reveal the individual and the essential
truth of the subject. The face became the mirror of the soul.
Although at its outset and by its inventors photography was considered
illsuited to the rendering of faces and the art of portraiture, the technological de
velopment has been shaped according to the desire to capture the intimate
privacy of a person rather than stills of landscapes. While Daguerre still doubted
that the slow lenses, timeconsuming preparation, and long exposures required
would make his process suitable for portraits, by the mid1850s at the latest
the new medium had been bent towards the art of portraiture: reproducible paper
prints, natural lighting and faster lenses prepared the ground for the widespread
success of portrait studios.
As soon as photography was capable of taking the picture of a person, as
soon as it managed to reproduce the human face in a recognisable and identifa
ble way, resembling the subject and expressing his essence, honorable fgures
from balzac to baudelaire began to fear an uncanny technology that produces
doubles and doppelgngers, that materializes spirit, that manifests the soul in
the image of the subject.
in my life as a Photographer the former caricaturist and pioneering French
photographer Felix Nadar recalls a theory he heard from Honor de balzac: All
physical bodies are made up entirely of layers of ghostlike images, an infnite
number of leafike skins laid one on top of the other... repeated exposures entailed
the unavoidable loss of subsequent ghostly layers, that is, the very essence of life.
2
Apparently balzac borrowed his thoughts from the latin poet lucretius, who
suggested that images are flms, insubstantial shapes of things, which travel
through air: simulacra, atomthin and lightningfast images that stream from the sur
faces of solid objects and enter the eyes or mind to cause vision and visualization.
long before the triumph of wave theory in nineteenthcentury physics, lucre
tius proposed a materiality of the image that seems fundamental for any further
elaboration on soul theft and image production. balzacs adaptation appears con
fned within an logic of scarcity, while lucretius originally assumed an endless
production of simulacra based on the infnite existence of atoms. Furthermore,
for lucretius the soul is affected by the constant stream of simulacra off of each
object such that it is as if one were wounded, epileptic, or paralyzed.
What is the reason for balzacs greed? Why should there be only a limited
number of images as ghostly layers which disappear by exposure? What really
endangers the very essence of life? The antipathy or refusal of being photo
graphed resonates with a problem that must reside outside the feld of photo
graphic technology; another, yet unknown precariousness.
The soul that is stolen by exposure leaves an objectifed person behind that
has lost its subjectivity and become alien to itself. Hegel still used the term alien
ation as both a positive and a negative force of modern life, but the young karl
marx took that concept in order to lay out one of his foundational claims: in the
emerging industrial production under capitalism, workers lose control of their
2. Felix Nadar, my life as a Photographer, in October 5 (1978), 9.
202 203
lives and selvesin other words, of their souls, since they lose control of their
work. marx denounced the process of abstraction from use value to exchange
value as fetishismyet another metaphor that relates to allegedly primitive cul
tures, but this time it goes the other way around and it fnds its assignment in
the centres of industrial capitalism. based on the belief that inanimate things or
commodities have human powers, these things appear as able to rule the activi
ty of human beings, replacing concrete social relationships with the illusions or
artifcial character of the commodity form.
Thingifcation turns everything into commodities or objects to be owned.
The soul becomes a matter of property relations: through alienation and com
modity fetishism it turns into a thing that is concealed, exchanged, traded and
sold, after it has been stolen.
Postmodern capitalism has carried this idea to its extremes. The alienated la
bor force is not enough; the new managerialism demands the production of af
fects. The stolen soul reappears as the new productive force; it invests in creativ
ity, enthusiasm, commitment, loyalty, friendliness, motivation, dedication.
II
in the face of a social reality ruled by alienation and based on affective labour,
the theft of the soul through photography may itself sound like a nice, innocent,
harmless and naive metaphor. Nevertheless it corresponds to the irretrievable
loss of authentic life caused by the contradictions of an emerging, not yet fully
graspable technological change.
its incapacity or reluctance to cope with the contradictions of early capitalism
allowed the bourgeois subject to project its very own fears onto the noble sav
age or the primitive. With the help of the indigenous other and in the best tradi
tion of orientalism, the antimodern soul desperately sought to remain indispen
sable as the last resort of an individuality that should not be endangered or alien
ated. Todays criticism and latent concern about surveillance and control technol
ogies follows a similar pattern. At the frst glance, it seems that, after all, the soul
became a matter of privacywalled off, gated and protected against a hostile
public. What is supposed to be guarded against invasion and intrusion is con
ceived as constitutive for distinctiveness and individuality; it exists in solitude,
apart from company and being observed. The privation of privacy lies in the ab
sence of others, as Hannah Arendt pointed out.
3
since Augustine of Hippo, across romanticism and existentialism, maybe
even in parts of the neomarxist criticism of alienation, the soul can be perceived
as a hidden interior territory, home of an untroubled personality, an enclosure in
which authenticity is nourished, not bothered by interferences and unexpected
encounters: in the inward man dwells truth, as Augustine said.
4
As the head
quarters for the cultivation of emotional life it is the hotbed of personal prefer
ences, individual taste, and other partialities. in this view, the soul would stand
3. Hannah Arendt, the human condition (chicago, 1958), 58.
4. st. Augustine, Of true religion (chicago, 1966), xvii.
for the limits of manipulative access to subjective experience. Access is granted,
if at all, only through specifcally designed interfaces, and trespassing turns out
somehow equal to theft.
contemporary surveillance practices based on digital technologies are widely
considered such trespass on the soul. but today, the violation of the soul lies in
duplicating the self rather than intruding upon it. one of the main reasons for
that is the ongoing inversion of the classical notions of public and private. To
the extent communication became the key factor of production in the postfordist
age, the relationship between public and private seems to turn on its own axis:
what was considered publicly accessible gets privatized without any fuss, and
what was formerly known as private gets exposed to the scrutiny of a more and
more specifc public and everfragmented semipublic.
in the digital age, the soul is copied over and over again by means of data
mining and user profling: the tracking and tracing, examination and evaluation
of personalized settings, individual preferences, and habits within communica
tion networks. The digital double created by these practices can be perceived as
an attack on the alleged integrity and originality of the soul. The doppelgnger is
made of bad copies, owned by secondary possessors. Nevertheless, these spit
ting images resemble the idea of ones own; and this idea should comprehend
the relations and proportions constitutive of the internal essence.
This is probably what makes the society of control so scary: the privation of
privacy not only turns out to be the theft of the soul, but it marks precisely what
constitutes the postmodern individual as ancestor or previous owner of a self
that is indeed multiplied in all sorts of corporate and social networks; still, it re
lates back to the subject of a claim or pretenseand it does not matter so much
whether selfimages, profles, preferences and private data are voluntarily given
away or literally deprived.
III
What was formerly known as information society has shifted into an image
economy based on the techniques of imaging information or turning information
into images. At the same time, contemporary images are characterized by a pas
sage from visibility to legibility: constantly modulated, subjected to variations,
repetitions, alternations, recycling, and so on... as gilles Deleuze noted it.
5
such ambivalence refects the two potentialities of images that Jacques
rancire recently suggested: the image as a raw, material presence or pure
blocs of visibility and the image as discourse encoding a history. such duplicity
defnes specifc regimes of imageness: a particular regime of articulation
between the visible and the sayable.
6
Their relations are constantly redistributed
and by no means limited to the realm of the visual or the world of pictorial
representation. rancire for instance sees the invention of the double poetics
of images in novel writing.
5. gilles Deleuze, negotiations: 19721990 (New york, 1995), 53.
6. Jacques rancire, the future of the image (london, 2007), 11.
204 205
Todays search engines may be an example of another redistribution of the rela
tions between visible and sayable. Their crawlers and spiders replicate the con
tent of innumerable websites across the World Wide Web by wrenching them
out of their original context, imaging them by storing and caching them; but the
goal is to reduce their complexity into a specifc model of indexability by which
alone they become visible and accessible, according to the ranking algorithm.
The advance of portrait photography in the midnineteenth century, which
discovered the face as unique identifer and gateway to the bourgeois identity,
has found its presentday equivalent in the phenomena of selfexposure in social
networking platforms which culminates in googling ones own name. Further
more, in its digital form the image appears as a storage unit for framed portions
of psychic realities that can be duplicated without signifcant loss and distributed
nearly in real time. The image becomes subjected to processes of design as well
as designing processes of subjectivation.
The bourgeois or modern conception of property has been characterized by
anonymity and pure objectivity. The fundament of western individualism is the
ability to frst of all own or author ones soul, and therefore own up to ones
actions and transactions. but today, in the age of immaterial production, digital
reproduction, and networked distribution, there is increasing confusion about bio
political property relations. These relations need to be made visible in order to be
enforced. in order to keep faith with capitalism we need to believe in the pres
ence of property relations that appear ever more imaginary. And this marks pre
cisely what is at stake in contemporary image production. The actual content
matters less and less: it is copied, remade, replicated, stolen, looted, pirated,
faked anyway. What counts is the fact that its soul is still supposed to operate as
a commodity. or as benjamin once observed: if the soul of the commodity
which marx occasionally mentions in jest existed, it would be the most empa
thetic ever encountered in the realm of souls, for it would have to see in every
one the buyer in whose hand and house it wants to nestle.
7
Property exists frst of all as imagery and rapidly becomes a matter of imagi
nation: the desperate attempt of corporate networks to reidentify and reinforce
the abstract nature of the value of exchange while being confronted with the
overwhelming opulence of use value once the images are liberated from the fet
ters that arrested their freedom of movement, their capacity to circulate freely. in
a society after the spectacle, we are realizing that it makes no sense anymore to
criticize and expose the fetish character of nonthings or absurdities, since it
constitutes the very essence of the means of immaterial production. it is in
scribed directly into the process of imagination, since imagination turns out as
the labour power of the creative industries of late capitalism.
in the 1970s bernard edelman researched the development of intellectual
property laws parallel to the emergence of commercial cinema and industrial im
age production. French law of the nineteenth century had not considered pho
7. Walter benjamin, The Paris of the second empire, in charles baudelaire: a lyric Poet in the second
empire (New york, 1983), 55.
tography a creative act, since it was just a copy of reality: The product, the pho
tographic negative is soulless because only the machine works, and the photog
rapher has merely learned to get it to work properly. A few decades later, the
opposite is true. The photographic machine becomes pure mediation of the sub
jects production: The real belongs to the subject if the subject invests in it, or:
on the condition of bearing the intellectual mark of its author, the imprint nec
essary to the works having the characteristic of individuality necessary to its be
ing a creation.
8

To explain the transition from soulless labour to the soul of labour edelman
proposes the concept of the overappropriation of the real: The appropriation of
what has already been appropriated. All production is the production of a sub
ject, the category by which labour designates all mans production as produc
tion of private property. As soon as the productive forces demand that images
be protected by copyright law, it is suffcient for the law to say that the machine
transmits the soul of the subject.
Today, it is again the theft of the soul which turns images into property. but to
the extent that its property relations are inscribed into every image, we might also
experience a reconcretization of the commodity form. What has been extensively
abstracted in the space and time of modern capitalism returns in a perilously
concrete, almost tangible fashion. it might be such dereifcation or becoming
image which ironically turns out today to be the key obstacle to consciousness,
more or less in the opposite way as lukacs suspected reifcation to operate.
There is no way out of the imaginary. Not because the imaginary is equal to
the fctitious, faked or unreal, but because of the indiscernibility of real and un
real, as Deleuze mentions once in his very few remarks on this peculiar terminol
ogy. The two terms dont become interchangeable, they remain distinct, but the
distinction between them keeps changing round...
9
This could lead to a frst and fundamental characterization of imaginary prop
erty: as a set of exchanges it is based on the impossibility of discerning anymore
what is ones own and what is not. such indiscernibility certainly rests on the
persuasive power of the digital image, which promises to instantly provide loss
less and costfree copies while insisting on the identity of the copied content.
but more importantly, it introduces the urgency of a constant renegotiation and
exchange of meanings of ownership which remain distinct.
IV
if this idea is hostile to us, why do we acquiesce in it? give us those lovely
phantasms! lets be swindlers and beautifers of humanity! (Nietzsche)
10
8. bernard edelman, Ownership of the image: elements for a marxist theory of law (london, 1979), 51.
9 Deleuze, negotiations, 66.
10. Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the late notebooks (cambridge, 2003), 51.
206 207
V
in one of his recent essays, my self and my own. one and the same? tienne
balibar revisits John lockes essay on Human understanding, in particular the
chapter of identity and Diversity which locke wrote separately and included
only in the second edition. balibar shows how the vexed relationship between
the self and the own prepares the ground for Western theories of personal
identity, the self and the subject: There is nothing natural in the identifcation of
the self and the own, which is really a norm rather than a necessity, and reigns
by virtue of a postulate.
11
balibar comes to this conclusion via the detour of his own misreading of a
poem by robert browning. balibar considered the beginning of the verse my
own, confrm me! as a form of selfinterpellation, and originally thought he had
found an example where my self and my own were indeed one and the same,
identical. only later did he fnd out this was not the case and brownings my
own actually designates his beloved wife. my own is my wife, balibar realizes:
it is the other with whom i make one and the same precisely be
cause we can never become identifed, indiscernible, in other terms,
with whom i experience the uneasy relationship of identity and dif
ference, not only because it is confictual, but because the identifca
tion of what is shared or what is the same and of what is separated
or divorced can never be established in a clearcut and stable man
ner. The name of this uneasy experience conventionally is love.
12
balibars little mistake and the resulting rich elaboration on the production of a van
ishing difference or a vanishing duality that is neither unity nor multiplicity might
also pave the way for a less lamenting understanding of the art of stealing souls.
maybe taking an image is somehow like falling in love, except it is the soul
that is stolen instead of the heart? certainly it creates unease and tension, but at
the same time it leads to the very interesting question: what does it actually
mean, today, to own an image, especially once it is stolen or taken away?
From invention, creation and distribution to recognition, exhibition and con
servation, images are subject to an infnite variety of operations that are not only
characterized by conficting powers of producing, possessing and processing
them. ownership of images has turned into the challenge of implementing solu
tions in real time. it is a progressive appropriation, which is, as balibar might say
with locke, defned in terms of an intrinsic relationship to its other.
images appear as the products of struggles for imagination. it is not about the
relationship between the owner of some thing and the object that is owned.
imaginary property deals with the imagination of social relationships with others
who could also use it, enjoy it, play it or play with it. ownership is a matter of
communication and constant renegotiation, gained and performed on an in
11. etienne balibar, my self and my own: one and the same? in accelerating Possession: global fu-
tures of Property and Personhood, ed. bill maurer and gabriele schwab (New york, 2006), 41.
12. ibid., 33.
creasingly precarious basis rather than grounded on a stable set of eternally valid
laws which follow traditional ideas of property and personhood.
After all, taking an image and consequentially stealing a soul turns out to be
an impossible operation as such: giving what cannot be stolen to somebody
who cannot receive the stolen good. but into what could such double negation
possibly resolve?
VI
The image we take from the world has to deceive the senses and produce a se
ries of situations that occur to the cognitive subject: simulacra, images of imag
es, which are intentionally distorted and modulated in order to appear somehow
correct to the respective sensual capacities of the viewer. With the advent of dig
ital technologies which are supposed to produce perfect copies, the deceptive
and thievish nature of images has fnally become a matter of fact. There is no
such thing as an identical copy which is bit for bit one and the same.
The digital image pretends to be identical or at least equivalent, but it oper
ates on a rather pragmatic basis: in the end it is all about eliminating noise as the
disturbing presence of an inexplicable and unidentifable otherness. in signal
processing, sampling originally describes the reduction of a continuous signal to
a discrete signal: if the noise is less than the noise margin, then the system per
forms as if there were no noise at all. This is why digital signals can be regener
ated to achieve socalled lossless data transmission, within certain limits.
That means that the illusion of identity is produced by a concept of postmod
ern border management. in order to perform the supposed integrity, a dynamic
regime of continuous control and instant communication needs to decide
whether specifc information would be considered useful or useless in order to
behave as if there were no disturbance at all.
meanwhile, the stolen souls are focking together below the noise margin ig
nored by the system. it is neither above nor inside, it is with, as Deleuze stated:
it is on the road, exposed to all contacts, encounters, in the company of those
who follow the same way, feel with them, seize the vibration of their soul and
body as they pass, the opposite of a morality of salvation, teaching the soul to
live its life, not to save it.
13
VII
The formula could go like this: the soul that is stolen in the image that is taken is
the difference that is repeated.
13. gilles Deleuze and claire Panet, dialogues (New york, 1987), 62.
208 209
gry dydewalle you call this a special series of drawings, but still they are rela
tively characteristic, i think, of what we have already seen of yours.
anne-mie Van kerckhoven yes, but in fact this is the frst time ive made a
series of drawings on which ive worked this long. Working on this series was
a personal experiment for me because i had trouble fnding my ground back in
Antwerp. As it happens, i had lived just over a year in berlin, and after that a
month in shanghai. And i thought, let me see which unconscious drawings are
going to surface in the near future and then ill see whether i can possibly
link the whole to belgian spleen
1
with respect to content. my actions consisted
in examining how thoughts recorded at one time coincided with images that
originated from my unconscious on the same date, but years later. Are there
thoughts that come into existence time and time again on certain days of the
year, seasonally bound? And surprisingly it seems that in fact the one, the
drawing, simply addresses the same thing as the other, the thought. its often
the exact same issues regarding thinking or creativity.
[]
The fact is i usually start a series through trial and error. i start with something
that has no signifcance. There are however a number of books that im reading
at the moment or certain things that i have close to me. These have to be pres
ent. Depending on the inspiration of the moment, when im busy and i think,
i need another element, i look in a book until i fnd something that triggers me,
which i then use. in the beginning its really trial and error, but after a third, or
sometimes already after a second drawing, i notice ive found a system i can
work with and within which i can evolve.
Johan wagemans And then at that moment you know: im working on a series
and thats what you then build on?
the heAd drAws,
the hand thinks
anne-mie Van
KercKHoVen
iNTervieWeD by
gry dydeWAlle And
Johan wageManS
1. belgian spleen is a diary of thoughts that Annemie van kerckhoven collected from twelve years of
notes. it was fnished and printed in a very limited edition in 1992.
Van kerckhoven yes, but sometimes it stops after two and it doesnt work. or
ive said what there is to say within that system. but sometimes you feel theres
a fow, an apparent opening of possibilities. usually its very hard for me to con
centrate really consciously in daily life, and for me this is a way to dig in deep.
dydewalle but you are saying that in the end specifc issues arise. can you
put those issues into words?
Van kerckhoven No, because im usually occupied with those issues during
the normal course of the day, or when i observe people acting busy on the tram
or bus, or when i watch television. Then there are certain things i dont really
understand or that i fnd intriguing. And those are the very things that trouble
me, that actually stand in the way of making these drawings.
dydewalle Do you experience a release by making the drawing?
Van kerckhoven im not sure whether you can call it a release, but defnitely i
feel im becoming more grounded. its not a matter of trying to let go. i see a
specifc sheet of paper and it starts.
dydewalle What do you mean by it starts?
Van kerckhoven Well, then i feel like im turned on. When at that point i start
drawing, all kinds of things appear from my hand, not from my mind. Two years
ago i visited an exhibition at the kupferstichkabinett in berlin where i saw an
intriguing print from 1300 or 1400 with a foating, drawing hand fying over a
landscape. The palm of the hand shows the piercing gaze of an eye. At the bot
tom of the drawing is written: Der kopf zeignet, die Hand denkt [The head
draws, the hand thinks].
wagemans you set your mind free and let your hand do its work to bring
everything out?
Van kerckhoven yes, but the mind is not there. i dont free the mind, its
simply not there. its gone. The ego also is completely gone. Thats also why i
almost never think a drawing ive just made is any good. but the next day
i think its quite fantastic. im just as fascinated as any other spectator when
i look at them afterwards.
dydewalle A spectator looking at one of your artworks for the frst time cant
escape the impression that theyre all loose elements. its only after an intense
observation that you can record the coherence better. The texts for instance, the
link between text and the things youre drawing, its not that obvious.
Van kerckhoven The texts have the same right to exist as the drawn elements.
in the case of spleen its really checking whether everything is accurate: what
am i drawing on April 5, for instance, and what did i write on that day ten or
twentyfve years ago. Thats just a kind of little game. its just fun for me. but at
the same time, it originated from research. because i felt bad and without that
grounding. i thought: maybe i can fnd something that can actualize my pres
ence by fnding out if there is a connection between what im drawing now and
what i was writing at that time. The things i write are produced in the same way
as my drawings. i dont think about it. its in my mind and i write it down.
wagemans listening to you, i feel you must be both artist and scientist in a
certain way. in a frst phase, when you let go of things, you put them down on
paper and you simply let them act; thats when you are an artist in the precise
210 211
sense of the word. but if you subsequently want to give it a place and you want
to ground it as you call it, and you start to link it to texts and you try to structure
it somewhat, then you are actually a scientist. you say: i want to understand how
that comes about and how it works.
Van kerckhoven yes, its possible. Thats the reason scientists have been inter
ested in my work since the start of my artistic existence. Together with my then
boyfriend Hugo roelandt, i maintained, since the age of twenty, intense and
creative contacts with people such as luc steels, luc mishalle, Paul geladi, and
marc verreckt. These were all friends from the germanic studies and linguistics
department of the uiA (universitaire instelling Antwerpen), most of them part
scientists, part musicians and performers. They were all crossover people.
This is also the reason why, since i started drawing, i only wanted paper that
was absolutely smooth, because there would be no resistance. And i worked
with a rotring pen, a technical drawing pen. There were many people who
thought, in 1977, that my drawings were made by computer. i just wanted that
fow, that smooth motion of inspiration, of really undisturbed
dydewalle No resistance.
Van kerckhoven No resistance.
wagemans When the works completed, or when you have the feeling that
its all there, is that when you start to analyse and take on another role or posi
tion in order to link things to your texts?
Van kerckhoven When i started with the drawings it was the scientists who
said: Annemie, there has to be text with it, there has to be some text with it in
order to fnd an access, otherwise it has too much to do with imagination only.
For me it was something that was always disconnected, and i still have no
need for it. but by now its become such a routine that in fact i sometimes auto
matically see text added to it. sometimes theres a drawing in the series without
text. i feel they are things that exist by themselves.
wagemans Personally i think the text helps people who look at your work to
dig deeper. otherwise you easily lose attention and go on to the next drawing.
Now you are forced to look at what that text is and how you can connect it to
the drawing; in this way you dig deeper and deeper. i do think it works.
Van kerckhoven For me also. otherwise i move from drawing to drawing,
which is almost an oscillation, and then i get tangled up in myself.
dydewalle i was intrigued by the relation between the text and the drawing it
self, or the lack thereof. And then i tried to make comparisons with other artists.
im thinking of two. one where the literary content is more important than
the drawing and the other where the opposite is true. Take Paul van ostayen; he
also works with drawings, but they are of secondary importance to his writing.
Take ren magritte, where text is also very important, but subordinate to the
drawing. And in magrittes case the relationship between text and drawing
is not apparent. sometimes he does exactly the opposite of what the drawing
shows. ceci nest pas une pipe, for instance. you have none of that. in your
case, both are more autonomous.
Van kerckhoven With magritte its a refection. its a surrealistic poetical refec
tion about what language is and what an image is. ceci nest pas une pipe, you
know what that means. The word pipe is not the pipe. And Paul van ostayen,
of course, hes a tremendous infuence, and also magritte.
dydewalle in your case, the text doesnt rule. The drawing is primary.
Van kerckhoven The word is the boss. The image rules. Thats what i feel.
wagemans Perhaps you mean: the word or the text allows you to
structure things.
Van kerckhoven To make contact.
wagemans in this sense it rules, otherwise you get chaos.
[]
dydewalle one of the curators of manifesta requests explicitly we discuss the
collective unconscious. it is interesting historically. it is a concept, a term that
was mainly developed by carl Jung.
Van kerckhoven of course, i can recognize the collective unconscious in arte
facts of three, four, fve, ten thousand years ago. it originated with the faces that
people saw in the trees and the rocks and which they isolated. monoliths in hu
man form or in the shape of a face. There are places where you can see things,
they are sacred. There are specifc places, around sacred stones, where you can
see faces or distinct shapes, those are sacred and not the objects themselves.
Thats fantastic, i think, something like that. but thats not what this is about, is it?
[]
wagemans Do you always start off with the same things or does it vary from
drawing to drawing?
Van kerckhoven usually i start with a very small shape. i can get into my
studio and fnd myself charmed by a curve or by how one shape shades off into
another. And that in a way is the starting point of the drawing. When i started
drawing, for a long time, i would assign numbers to the different elements. i did
it also for me, because it was fun, to see what came after what. you see: one,
two and so on, they would sometimes be just dots.
wagemans Those numbers are in the order in which you drew them?
Van kerckhoven yes. That is why the transition to animation is not so strange.
ive wanted to make animated movies from an early age. im reading an interest
ing book: mlb. Plonge dans le sein maternel, by sergei eisenstein. underlying
the often formal, ideological aspects in the imagery of eisenstein is an attempt
to connect with the hidden treasures of the unconscious, a search for the source
of all inspiration. He reinterpreted all his work afterwards from the perspective of
that mlb, mutterleib [womb], in other words from the idea of the prima materia.
He looked into other artists too, for instance certain elements in the work of
matisse, Degas, the spirals, perforated spirals, concentric circles. Thats really
powerful, so many shapes and constructions which i fnd in my own work
its very confrontational. it was so powerful i couldnt go on reading because i
felt it was so shocking. i had to let that sink in for a little while. For the montage
of movies he utilizes specifc systems which directly affect the unconscious. it
reminds me of my everrecurring need to animate my drawings the animation
of still pictures, to search for new ways of transmitting knowledge.
wagemans An important aspect of what you just saidand this has to do with
perceptionis the idea of a primitive form, or a core theme that always recurs,
212 213
which is clearly present in your work. over a long stretch of time similar things
keep coming back. Do you have an insight into how that works and what it
means exactly, or is it something you merely recognize?
Van kerckhoven No, the only thing i recognize (for myself) is that there is a
specifc shape that i draw again and again, that i perfect every time again, which
i also fnd annoying, that shape coming back every time. i also know that i
have to work through it, that itll disappear under other things but that very often
it is there. i have to admit i also feel its an ugly shape. but apparently i have to
do that before i can do anything else.
dydewalle but you are, i think, not a real victim of an individual style, or are you?
Van kerckhoven style? is that a style?
wagemans its a way of doing things.
dydewalle Take James ensor for instance; he had an individual style which he
developed up to the age of thirtyfve, and after that he has only repeated him
self. but in your case, i fnd, there is an organic development. What strikes me
also, contentwise, in your drawingits not typical for the artistic milieu; not at
all erotic, is that correct?
Van kerckhoven strange you would mention that. someone like Dirk
snauwaert, the artistic director of Wiels,
2
once referred to my old drawings
as postcoital.
wagemans i feel theres a lot of eroticism in it too.
Van kerckhoven When i frst came out with my drawings people would con
stantly ask me why they were so aggressive. my parents were very shocked with
my frst exhibition, especially since everything was supposedly so sexually
charged. but ive never considered nakedness in itself, nudity, as sexually erotic.
The Freiekrperkultur [free bodies culture], the way ive seen it in berlin, thats
simply freedom, for me. To be stripped of determining signals. its about people,
about bodies.
wagemans Physicality is very central to your work, i fnd.
Van kerckhoven its possible. Not consciously so. Well we are bodies, no?
its not that unusual?
wagemans Thats true, but it provokes those interpretations, i think. if you
recognize a female body and you see an egg and all kinds of curly things, femi
nine shapes, i can imagine that can appear erotic.
Van kerckhoven For the last ten years or so ive placed that aspect of my work
in the tradition of the mystics who integrated sexuality in one way or another.
ive never held a moralistic view regarding anything in that feld. i grew up in the
sixties, the era of free love, but i could never bring myself to become part of that
madness. As a fourteenyearold i thought i had to fnd somebody to love as fast
as possible. To get that out of the way. ive always looked at it like that when
im with somebody that i like a lot, i wont have to deal with those matters any
more. With seducing and being seduced, i mean. i wanted to have a boyfriend
2. centre for contemporary Art Wiels in brussels. Dirk snauwaert and Annemie van kerckhoven are
preparing a drawing and flm retrospective, to open in september 2008. in August a parallel exhibition
will open at kunstmuseum luzern.
and have sex, but otherwise i wanted to deal with more substantial matters, such
as understanding and penetrating the meaning of the world in all its aspects.
[]
wagemans you talk about mind mapping to describe the process of observing
what is expressed. mind mapping also reminds me of the fact that the map
which is ultimately produced should be read as a map of how things are pieced
together internally. is that also what you think?
Van kerckhoven Actually it was susanne Neubauer, my curator at kunstmuse
um luzern, who told me she saw my drawings as some kind of mind map. And
thats indeed how it is. its a very accurate way of seeing things. For me they are
truly maps. ive always regretted that i couldnt exhibit them, to see peoples
reactions, because those reactions could help me along in my evolution as a hu
man being. but thats also why, say, for a long time ive never held any artistic
presumptions about these drawings. because for me they are maps. ill start
drawing, upstairs in my studio, or outside in the open, or on the train. And then i
can move on. Then ive put things in order. And ive returned to myself. in anti
psychiatry there is an equivalency between the artists mind and the schizo
phrenics. When at a given time im left with all different pieces of reality, i break
down as a human being. The artist then produces something new, fnds con
tacts, and the schizophrenic will remain amidst the broken pieces, alone,
in a void. in my case youll see the broken pieces displayed as a mind map.
wagemans you mentioned this at the beginning of this discussion also: that
everything you absorb, the things youre working on, what inhabits your head as
it were, has to be released at a given moment. And then it comes out and that
is the way you give things their place.
Van kerckhoven i can see it happen in front of my eyes. Nothingness gaining
form, while drawing.
wagemans you can externalize it, you can look at it yourself and then let it rest.
Van kerckhoven Theres a defnition of drawing in the oxford compendium of
the mind. its so very special, the fact that we perceive shapes in something as
basic as lines, fnd references to things weve seen before. you dont require
many lines to fnd a connection within your imagination. its typical for human
perception. in nature, form does not exist as a line, you see. you can create
a line photographically through the principle of solarization. Also by putting two
identical transparent shapes on top of each other and shifting them slightly,
that will give you a line. Thats actually what your mind does when you draw a
line. it solarizes your memory. The drawer, the drawing, shifts things slightly
out of place, and creates an outline. This is how form originates.
This interview took place within the framework of Parallellepipeda, a project focusing on collaboration between artists
and scientists and initiated by m [part of the leuven museum] in cooperation with the catholic university of leuven [ku
leuven] and sTuk. Parallellepipeda is curated and coordinated by edith Doove, who also edited this interview. Annemie
van kerckhoven was invited as a central artist. Professors gry dDydewalle and Johan Wagemans are affliated with the
laboratory for experimental Psychology at kuleuven. The interview was translated by michael meert.
214 215
avi pitchon How do you see your project working in the context of The soul?
angela melitopoulos The function of the soul, as i understood it here, is as a
split in the process of constituting a subject. The split as a moment of alienation
that takes place in our mind and that is bound to the judgment of goodness or
badness. This split implies a view from outsideand in my understanding is
exactly what constitutes the outside. The soul is a cultural metaphor for
this split that creates exteriority. The idea of the stratifcation and normalization
of the perception of the self is of course a Foucauldian idea explaining the
society of control and its methods of governing subjects without disciplinary
control. The history of the production of the self, however, is a history of strug
gles. selfcontrol in control societies is produced by the agency between the self
and what controls the self. This agency is a result of the struggle on how sub
jects are constituted. Playing a role in someone elses dream or being stuck in
the idling mode of habits are both images of the fear of a postmodern social
death. in this sense media art is as well the result of a struggle, not merely an art
genre. media art is responding as an individual attempt within the collective
realm to explore potentials of agency in opposition to this postmodern death.
my work speaks about affects and processes that happen before representa
tion, before speech. if the soul is a metaphor operating in the realm of represen
tation it functions with an alreadyconstituted language. What is good or bad is
predefned. i fnd it interesting that Walter benjamin states that the knowledge
designating what is good and what is evil is prattle. benjamin describes also the
fall of the human word as the moment when language stepped out of its own
immanent magic, in order to become expressly, as it were externally, magic. A
word as opposed to a name has no immanent magicit must mean something.
We use words to designate something. The moment when language steps out of
what he terms its paradisiac state, is when the prattle of good and evil starts.
The language of things, however, dissociates from the human language. it op
erates on another time level. it is mute, exits from the prattle, and, as benjamin
ANGelA
meliTopoulos
the language
of Things
a ConverSaTion
with Avi Pitchon
said, allows us to understand the commonality of the world. Art does not
necessarily engage in the passivity of a language that designates things, but it
engages in the language of things.
The language of things comes before representation. Things can speak, and
the language of things allows for the commonality of the world. it is what in fact
gives us our idea of the world, of its materiality. my work deals with time, and
the experience of the amusement park documented in the flm i am presenting
at manifesta has to do with immediacy. video is time, the faculty of human
memory is that of forming time. Time is the glue of the materiality of the world.
Henri bergson believed in the time matter as the common matter between the
material world (matter) and the living world (memory). The video work the
language of things explores a specifc time matter: that of a reproducible form
of immediacy. in german immediacy translates as unmittelbarkeit, meaning
two things: the impossibility to mediate and now.
pitchon you claim the people you document in Japanese amusement parks
are experiencing a bodily immediacy through which they are spoken to by the
language of thingsin this case the amusement park machinesand this
state takes them outside and beyond the designating language of representation
in a way that escapes the traps of good and evil, the traps of the construction
of the soul. Do you mean to say that there is a tangible, accessible, reproducible
state of being allowing that? This, combined with the role benjamin appoints
to art, is potentially a somewhat more optimistic proposition for autonomy than
those of most contemporary thinkers.
melitopoulos i think its crucial to identify mechanisms of control, but its also
important to see it from another side. its true that technology, like architecture,
is planned, designed and engineered to control people. but this is a topdown
perspective. We also live within the bottomup perspective. communication
goes both ways. We are agents, and as such produce things from bottom to top,
which makes things much more complicated. When guatarri says we have the
media we deserve it means that the Tv language is partly infantile because we
feed it back in an infantile way. Analysing only from a topdown perspective
merely produces an image of apocalyptic control which doesnt empower us,
its not enabling anything, its oppressive. We have mass media forming the lan
guage of selfcontrol but we have also the accessibility to video cameras and
media that enables a production of the self resisting forms of control precisely
because the use of a camera or an editing table allows one to analyse how af
fects are technologically constructed in control society. We have to stop thinking
only in the logic of war. i know a time when the logic of war was not so strong.
its important to step out of this language and focus also on the notion of agency.
pitchon How do the language of man and the language of things read in relation
to the calculability of skyreaching affects?
melitopoulos benjamin said something about the difference between the lan
guage of technology and the language of technicians. in that sense technology
is an entanglement of different languages. it is designed by the human nonpara
disiac language of science that designates function. This is how machines are
constructed. it is however not a simple relation of language that takes place
216 217
here. And the affects those machines have are sometimes not included in the
original idea behind creating them. The merrygoround machines and sophisti
cated wave pools in the amusement park are designed to affect people with a
precisely calculated acceleration. They affect bodies with promethic rhythms
rhythms which you cant reach normally. you reach a state of happiness with the
machine, with technology that has the capacity to allow us to access a moment
in time where we go out of our self. it is not joy, but a form of amusement in that
we access something through technology which is before the realm of good and
evil. And it is reproducible.
pitchon so it is a liberating happinessliberating in opposition to control.
melitopoulos reproducible happiness seems to be an even more dangerous
problem for controlbut maybe the split function of the soul exists also in the
speed machine?
The ghost in the machine is a metaphor i like. can this ghost be tracked down
within a controlled society? The event of using the amusement park machine
happens now.
is it the ultimate form of controlling affects? is one functionalized completely?
Functionalization, however, takes time. When you say this is this, its not now
anymore. The event and its controlling thus take place on different time levels.
There is a delay. Technology offers the possibility of accessing the event time
that is ontologically not controllable from a topdown perspective.
pitchon so when a person goes on one of those amusement park rides, they expe
rience a now in the deepest, enlightened sense. The now that gurus talk about.
melitopoulos i dont know. The now of the gurus is never now. in the flm, there
is one speed machine where the extreme acceleration makes it like you are with
out gravity. i was very surprised when i saw the images. The affect is very, very
strong. And surprisingly this affect is different from how the speed machine was
thought theoretically in the past. There is something beyond the rational that is
in excess of our thinking and that we might understand when we have abilities
to look into the time matter differently.
pitchon in order to localize what you are saying and place it in the context of
europe and the european soul, i would say that the language of things, the
animism you recognize in it, the fuidity of the interconnectedness of things in
terrupted by the stratifcation process of designation (by metaphors like the
soul), is parallel to the historical shift from paganism to monotheism. can you
identify a relation to paganism in your own work?
melitopoulos Animism is an interesting concept, because it is based on simulta
neity, on immanence, meaning that one can read the outside as the inside. And
it is no wonder that in order to banish animism and constitute the soul in peo
ples minds, christianity had to use physical forceviolence, inquisition. it was a
long battle against many cultural practices which were punished regardless of
the fact that they werent necessarily religious in nature, like the witches who
had a medical function within society.
but is the language of things a european or a global concept? Where did ani
mism start? is animism a romantic or historical idea? is it still threatening mono
theism? Are artists animists since art does partake in the language of things?
can priests be artists? How can we understand entity without a material com
munality?
Nondialectical thinking is automatically bound to ideas about animism which
are automatically bound to specifc cultural heritages of thinking, in which pa
ganism plays an important part. but i am interested in nomadology, which can
be attributed to paganism but is also a separate culture professing animistic prin
ciples, and which is nonmonotheistic. To what extent nomadology came to my
attention, if it is because i have migrant history, is not clear. but i do connect in
my work the state of migration and migrants with ideas about nomadology. so
the oppositional movement i propose is perhaps only pagan in that it deals with
nomadology, with standards and languages of migration. it is about the state in
duced by mobility, speed, slowness, itineration. i think subjectivity and itinera
tion go hand in hand. so, this dealing with nomadology is not related to religion;
its not an opposition only by merit of it being nonmonotheistic.
pitchon How is the animistic language of things expressed or manifested in no
madology?
melitopoulos Take the Aboriginal cultureitineration, the walk, the passing, is
the moment of turning the outside world inside, and its expressed in storytelling
maps and in painting. it is a very different view of what is the world than that of a
geographical map which gives you a somewhat fxed viewpoint. in nomadology,
instead of having a geographical map instructing us what is here or there, it is
what is around us that tells us who we are and where to go, somehow. listening
to the shape of the mountain to understand oneself. its a different grasp of
space and time. Historically speaking, this nomadic view can be found in all parts
of the world.
Nowadays spacetime is controlled by the mass media, who capture the event
timethe kairos, the open time of the event prior to being able to rationalize its
meaning for regulating it into chronosthe structured time, the controlled form
of how the event is displayed, assigned to good or evil, etc. This happens within
seconds. but again, this process of assignment is not onedirectional.
pitchon in this context you talk about how the shift from analogue to digital sig
nal is increasing control and moving it away from fuidity and towards stratifca
Angela melitopoulos, the
language of things, 2007,
video, 33', video still
218 219
tion. This reminds me of an article that claimed that digital audio reproduction
doesnt actually contain music. The square digital graph signal can only approxi
mate (simulate) the wholeness of the analog sound wave. This means that our
culture is oppressed because for more than two decades now, nobody listens to
music. like in the flm Footloose where dancing is forbidden, the analogue
sound wave is banished. Therefore, the other resistant event to add to the
amusement park is that of a live concert.
melitopoulos i wouldnt say that analogue and digital are opposites. i believe,
however, that the shift to a digital control society was not only a formal develop
ment (mechanical to electric to digital) but socially engineered (with the plan
that governs) in a long and deadly hunt to chase away the ghost in the machine.
Analogue was a fuller signal. if you have a movement from A to b, analogue
travels all the way with the idea of arriving at b. Digital gives a functionalization
of that movement and duration. Analogue has an element of drive. you may
decide you dont want to reach b. it has the possibility of going somewhere else.
The digital function doesnt embody that potential anymore. And if we only
have access to the digital we forget what we had with analogue. but the next
stage is the quantum numeric system that will reclaim parts of the analogue be
cause it is not binaryits a three element structure (0, +0 and 1) that will
calculate not only what is, but also what can be. The potential.
but digital offers possibilities as well. When i moved from analogue to digital
video signal, there was also a shift from the ability to intervene with time
changing the time and fow of the displayed image, accelerating it or slowing it
down, processing the signal, making a second last an hourto a functional
simulation of it. but i learned about the digital weaving property in terms of edit
ingthe narrative function of storytelling which in digital can be nonlinear.
its easier to work on the mnemonic structure of narration. you weavewhile
horizontally telling the narrative, you accumulate elements vertically. instead of
having a single, major, culturally transported image, with digital editing you
fnd different potentials of entanglement in an image that can go against the one
major story. you explore a different possibility of narrationof telling what
happened and what could happen.
pitchon you talk about the event time of the revolution. What takes place
there, in the terminologies weve been discussing?
every revolutionary event is characterized by the opening up of the structure of
language. if you see the flm of William klein about Paris 68, you see how every
body talks with everybody. People on the street talk to people they normally
wouldnt talk to. A break takes place in the way language is structured and hier
archized. This is the very idea of what constitutes revolutionary times: the event
which provides a different understanding of what is the world in which we live.
The action of a strike for exampleit halts chronology and allows the strikers
to understand their situation better. The interval allows for this understanding.
They start talking to one another.
pitchon What is particularly interesting is that it wasnt like there was a commu
nist tribunal saying, ok, we should start talking on the streets. Which means that
there is a potential of resistance lying dormant, waiting for an event to trigger it.
its already here and can erupt spontaneously.
melitopoulos And this potential is produced and realized in the immediacy of
the event, which cant be captured and controlled. Ways of communication that
go beyond the foreseen ways. in a world that is becoming a collective brain, the
life of human beings is as uncertain and probable as the relations among the
synapses. life has no history in the literal sense. it does not run its course direct
ed to a goal, but concatenates situations and can run in all directions. The repre
sentations of the production of the self are not longlasting, they are a tempo
rary expression of a process, but the instance that generates this process is alive.
pitchon but what about systems of control that supposedly work on the realm
before representation, like red lights signaling terrorist attack or just mobile phone
beeps that trigger repetitive, mechanic refex reactionsa controlled animism?
melitopoulos its important to understand how control society is triggered, and i
wonder if fear is what it takes to render digital control operative, but again, we
are agents. We choose to embrace the affect. What if we decide not to partici
pate voluntarily in any control? can machines take control if fear isnt there?
pitchon so do you think it is in the interest of the state to ban amusement parks
because they induce a subversive experience?
melitopoulos i dont think it is subversive, but id say amusement parks, like cin
ema, have a history as a form of proletarian culture. of course it is doubledit
can be this and that, subversive or not. but you can not entirely describe them
only as functions of control societies. Amusement technologies possess some
kind of excess, something surplus is happening. maybe they subvert the apoca
lyptic and destructive view of the logic of war. maybe one only needs a ride
on a speed machine to turn the topdown perspective to a bottomup perspective
and to remember that the now still belongs to us, or some hippie ideas of
collective love and peace, or at least to forget the apocalyptic and disempowering
fear that the world is coming to an end.
220 221
avi pitchon How would you relate your projects for manifesta 7 to the notion of
the soul as a fnal frontiera last, constructed outside, a cultural object, an alle
gory for social relations shaped by ideas and techniques of power?
roee rosen Anselm Franke and Hila Peleg defne the soul as a fnal frontier, a
last outside. This phrasing succinctly describes the confessions of roee rosen,
wherein my Hebrew monologues become those of three illegal foreign workers
who do not understand what they say. The soul, quite literally, becomes an ex
ternalized battleground between me and them. The reversal of inside and outside
in relation to the soul is doubled and even tripled. in fact, one of the workers,
roee rosen2, misquotes Augustine in relation to the soul and claims he wrote
my body is like a shattered house, too small for god to enter (but Augustine, of
course, wrote this about his soul, not his body).
pitchon Do you mean to say that the foreign workers are possessed by you?
rosen yes. Possession here is quite literal: not only are the workers bodies hired
and used as effgies, but also the very act of speech and the pretence of selfrep
resentation is possessed (they do, after all, speak in the frst person, and begin
by telling their nameroee rosen, that is). This possession is anchored in a his
tory of histrionic oral fts and convulsionsfrom the biblical speaking in tongues,
through the Jewish dibbuk to the exorcist and bmovies. These always involve
doublings (two identities, good and evil, familiar and uncanny etc.), an invasion
of one into the body of the other, and the spectacle of struggle.
but by the same token, i am being possessed. if the act of confession and
selfportraiture is to be taken at face value, i am completely transfgured. And
any notion of precision and accuracy, so crucial to both textual and visual self
depictions, is replaced by a chain of mispronunciations, mistakes and displace
ments. some of those really amazed me. roee rosen1, for instance, describes
herself dying, and instead of saying the suffering is great, exclaims, the gar
bage is great. roee rosen3 replaces the Hebrew for tears of horror with tears
of a mother, and instead of the corpses are rotting, utters the cheese is rot
tingall this without knowing what she says. but possession begins earlier, as
a premise. The text is written as a mashup between a male artist and a female
foreign worker.
if we think of rousseaus famous introduction to his confessions, with its
promise to present a true and complete portrait by exposing his inner self, self
rOee rOseN
Confessions
A coNversATioN
wiTh avi PiTChon
portraiture here is innately ascribed by these foreign women (from bulgaria, india
and ghana) and their circumstances. This is true not only as a general structure
but on the level of the monologues details. Thus, for instance, a confession per
taining to scatological perversion is channeled through a description of a maid
cleaning the toilets (and becoming a toilet herself) in a private villa in the sharon,
an affuent region of israel where the narrator actually works as a housemaid.
pitchon What happens when the male artists decadent, bohemian transgres
sive perversions are put in the mouth of the female foreign worker, who, at least
statistically speaking, is probably conservative and traditional? isnt this in a way
doubling the victimhood of the workersadding an extra layer of exploitation?
As artistic practice, is this approach more honest and challenging as opposed to
merely pointing out a bynow familiar state of being of exploitation?
rosen This thorny ethical issue is at the crux of the work. The very motivation is
to enact a moral dilemma rather than sanctimoniously comment upon it from a
safe spot. but what happens in the process is also that those reductive stereo
types (the transgressive artist versus the traditional foreigner) become unstable.
one of the rules i set for myself when we were shooting is that while the work
ers are not privy to the text, they can ask whatever they want about its general
content. roee rosen2 resolutely did not want to know anything: she came to
work, the money was good, and thats that (she maintained, in a way, sovereign
ty through disavowal and resignation). on the other hand, roee rosen1, whose
name is katia, a really smart, funny and powerful bulgarian woman, 65 years old,
became more delighted and engaged the more she realized the perverse nature
of the text.
What is implicated from my vantage point is not the status of foreign workers
but my selfperception, now understood to be innately changed by the presence
of foreign workers. This was also my feeling with former projects such as live
and die as eva braun. by inviting the viewer to become Hitlers lover, you try to
fnd something about yourself, rather than about eva braun.
At the same timethe workers are there, literally, as specifc women. i hope
(and feel) that their presence resonates with qualities other than victimhood:
beauty, power, complexity and, in a very strong sense, intangibility.
pitchon baudrillard described transgression and perversion as accepted, and to
an extent championed by late capitalism as an extreme frontier of consumer in
dividuality. in an age where every shape and form of neurotic dissidence is a
market niche or moneymaking fodder for reality Tv and Jerry springertype
shows, and where every quirk can make one a workingclass hero on youTube,
the form of perversity manifested in your work seems almost elegant, continen
tal, romanticare you aware of that? Are you a retrotransgressor?
rosen Perversion as a consumerist spectacle is dealt with directly in the work,
especially in the trailer. The rhetoric of my son, who is advertising my confes
sions without knowing what he says, is that of an mc pitching the piece hyper
bolically, promising a breakthrough in cinema, culture, spirituality and pure evil
(no less), and bragging that the confessions of Augustine, rousseau and Jerry
springer will pale next to these.
i think that the perverse nature of perversity in these confessions is that they
222 223
do not offer any clear voyeuristic satisfaction, and no cathartic peeping at some
ones construct of a truth. The whole thing is concocted and fantasized and self
contradictory. but if you accept baudrillards sweeping claim that everything is
fodder for capitalist consumption, then what difference do stylistic attributes
such as elegance make?
Perversion is an important construct whose history is relatively short and easy
to trace. you could, if you want, understand my work by applying to it a compen
dium such as kraftebbings Psychopathia sexualis, but the fact that a desire will
be ascribed as perverse doesnt resolve or exhaust it, and it would have been
both preposterous and hypocritical to repress or avoid desires because theyre
deemed retrograde (if i try to put such a reaction to ones desire into words, the
result is quite odd: oh, you desire this and that, how elegant and continental of
you!).
And as for the problematic topic of transgressionmy personal qualifers
when i do something are laughter and sweat. if something makes me laugh and
sweat at the same time, if the body responds against my selfcontrol, then i
know i may have a chance of transgressing myself (and that may already entail
transgressing other laws, as there is nothing internal or autonomous about me).
Deleuze claims (in his book on sachermasoch) that the law can only be chal
lenged by the comic mode. i feel the same way, and see my work as comic. The
last qualifer you mentioned was romantic. yes, i do think i have a romantic,
perhaps infantile, streak.
pitchon What is the role of the confession for you before it is transferred to the
foreign workers? What crimes are you alluding to?
rosen confessions are not only about crimes to begin with: Augustine con
fesses in an instrumental way, to compel us to see the true faith; rousseau con
fesses secret desires and weaknesses to create a cohesive, solid and a full pic
ture of a man; and, as you mentioned before, confessions are a part of the exhi
bitionistic diet of the entertainment and spectacle industry (we consume confes
sions in a collective, cannibalistic fashion). in all three cases it may be said that
someone stands to gain from confessing, so confessions are always about for
tune, whether spiritual or monetary. my own confessions, on one level, are a
travesty of those hidden motives.
To be specifc about the crimes at stake, the confessions roughly deal with
three themes: my ignorance and apathy, my cynical and exploitative representa
tion of the Holocaust (which i claim to have pursued to take revenge on my father,
Holocaust survivor), and sexual perversion. each of these topics in turn is juxta
posed with another, seemingly incommensurate issue. For instance, scatological
indulgence is described after a relatively detailed account of the crimes of israeli
occupation on a specifc day, so it may be said that a crime is being performed
by the very act of speaking: it is presented as wilfully choosing political and moral
inaction. but the main point, really, is that the work presents an oxymoron: the
confession itself is the crime it confesses. in this context it makes no sense to di
vide it from its delivery by the foreign workers whom i corrupt or, in the trailer,
from my son, who, for instance, performs the Nazi salute three times in a row.
pitchon back to perversionis it precisely the Jewish meditation of the perverse
soul as articulated by Freud the reason for the need of the Nazis (amongst oth
ers) to purge the Jew as the biggest threat to the european or Aryan soul, a
threat multiplied by the Jews assimilation? Are you reanimating the spectre of
that Jew, and through this lure the blonde beasts out of the holes they hid in
since 1945?
rosen Theres a nice book by sander gilman called The case of sigmund
Freud, where he claims that as a product of nineteenthcentury psychiatry,
Freud faced an impossible situation where he was initiated into a scientifc
worldview according to which he was simultaneously the doctor and the patent
patient (the Jew bearing his Jewishness as a pathology: his hysteria, his effemi
nacy, his degeneration etc.). gilmans claim is that Freuds reaction was to uni
versalize the symptoms of the Jew (hysteria transformed into neurosis, and sexu
al complexes deemed ubiquitous). The presupposition here, of course, is that the
contemporary trope of the Jew was a specifc dominant fction (to use kaja
silvermans term). certainly the multivalent spectres of the diasporic Jew are
crucial for me, and the attempts to eradicate and erase this phantom are not a
wound that healed in any way. but it should be reminded that Zionism was also
partaking in that attempt to eradicate this Jew and replace it with a new, health
ier one (the israeli as a blonde beast, if you will). in other words, i absolutely
agree with you in terms of motivation, but i think the situation is more entan
gled. i am an israeli and an American citizen. Doesnt that mean, on a certain lev
el, that i am the very blonde beast im set to purge?
roee rosen, the confessions of roee rosen, 2008, HD video, 56'30", video still
224 225
pitchon so, perhaps it is the role and privilege of the Jew (not the israeli) to take
a platform of critique of the contemporary european soul and state, yes, there is
indeed a primordial, free, pagan, preJudeochristian europe (nonJews cant say
it without being ostracized)? How would you explain the fact that neopaganism is
a spiritualpolitical alternative proposed by both radical left and right groups?
rosen As a precursor to an appeal shared by radicals of both poles, one can
think of the way the cult of nudity was celebrated by both the communists and
the national socialists in preWorld War ii germany (by this, of course, i dont
say anything against the idea of nudity or of neopaganism, but about its mallea
bility). Anything that harks towards notions of the primordial runs the risk of
essentialist and purist fallacies that will appeal to the radical right. Perhaps neo
paganism is to the radicals what New Age is for the mainstream (that is, a
consoling, synthetic and narcissistic way of instantly forging yourself as trans
formed, improved and free).
like Freud, i am an ironist and an atheist. so, i do not will myself a neopagan,
regardless of questions of privilege and ethnicity, and i cannot fathom myself
free of the Judeochristian tradition.
i do not think of freedom as a tangible state but as a performative, never
ending attempt. There is a beautiful aphorism by kafka thats relevant here:
There is an aim, but there is no way. What we call a way is nothing but waver
ing. This aphorism is perverted in my confessions by roee rosen1: There is an
address but there is no street. What we call a city is nothing but wavering.
avi pitchon can you describe the work, former futures, you are contributing to
the Trento section of manifesta 7?
Barbara Visser like many of my previous projects, former futures has been de
veloped in strong relation to the time and place of its origin. in this case that is
the exhibition building in Trento, the Palazzo delle Poste by Angiolo mazzoni, its
history and the political and arthistorical connotations attached to it.
former futures is partly based on letters weve found in the archive of the
Trento and rovereto museum of modern and contemporary Art (mart), ex
changed between futurist artist Fortunato Depero and fascistfuturist architect
mazzoni. As an exchange of thoughts through letters, the unbridgeable time
lapse of regular mail is probably a dying form of communication. Not tuned with
futurist ambitions of speed, when seen from the age of email! This is of course
also a natural way to connect with the post offce building, yet the connection
just happened, it wasnt planned as such.
pitchon What is the signifcance of this letter exchange for you? Does it expose
a certain power relation? Does it reveal anything new about this particular histo
ry or the actions of these individuals in it?
Visser in the work, im directly addressing power relations between the artist
and the architect; the artist desperately wants to be commissioned for the large
stained glass windows under the arches of the Palazzo delle Poste, and writes
repeatedly to mazzoni about this in a way that i would call pushing it more than
a little. The commission itself does not sound tailored to the futurist artist: to de
sign windows in a shape and technique which was already an anachronism:
stained glass under renaissance arches.
im concentrating on the relation between the artist who wants something
to work, basicallyand the empowered architect who is able to grant the favour,
or at least give this impression. Although it looks like a purely historical narrative,
not devoid of nostalgia, i do see a parallel with today in the sense that the artist
in the end is at the mercy of many currents and powers outside of his control,
and trying to infuence these often weakens the position of the artist rather than
strengthening it.
However, the more general question that i started to explore in an earlier
work, of which this piece is a continuation, is: why are events, facts and images
which are presently boxed and labelled in different compartments of our expand
bArbArA VIsser
former futures
A coNversATioN WiTH
avi PiTChon
226 227
to produce an artwork that serves as an illustration of what ive discovered, or
show the material plainly as it is. This way of looking at records is therefore very
subjective and unsystematic. if i had answers, i would not make the work of art.
pitchon What exactly is the ambiguity you refer to that you found in the
futurists letters?
Visser This ambiguity is perceived on different levels, and is often found in an at
mosphere that seems to contain conficting interests, rather than in factsfor in
stance in the bravado and expressionism of the futurist language, even in letters
from one person to another, combined with the awareness of a certain hierarchy
in personal relations, and the admiration for the person being written to that is
felt in the letters.
pitchon beyond the context of Trento and manifesta 7, do you have any prior
or particular interest in the futurists?
Visser my interest lies predominantly in how the future is viewed at different
moments in historyor in the future itself for that matter. The fact that a vision
can become outdated has tragic aspects that i like to refect upon in my work.
What is modern? What do we strive for at a particular moment in time and what
does that say about our society? utopia never gets outdated because it can
never become a reality, but the ideas behind it are certainly altered by temporary
interests and beliefs.
pitchon Why do you think the futuristinspired takeover of the city of Fiume
by gabriele dAnnunzio in 1919 is relatively ignored, dismissed as merely a gen
eral rehearsal for fascism, and otherwise divorced or censored from europes
history of revolt?
Visser: What strikes me in all records of the history of futurism (as far as ive
read them) is a political entanglement that is very hard to reconstruct, as there
seem to be so many infuences and decisions guided by emotion rather than
straight political convictions. every reading is incomplete or at least very frag
mented. it is not easy to draw straight lines, they look more like dotted and
striped lines with knots and turns everywherenot a story that reads logically.
To me this also proves to some extent that choices are in the end always per
sonal, even if later on they are attributed to political forces.
pitchon in the sense that, like you said, there is always a gap between history
constructed retroactively and the daytoday, individualistically oriented unfold
ing of events, it can be said that there is always something forgotten, unnoticed,
left behindand therefore, the past can be seen as dynamic. Do you agree? it
seems like there is an infnite potential for revisiting, remixing, restructuring or
deconstructing history.
Visser The past is not dynamic, but our interpretation of it is. in that light, what
ever we choose to discard is diffcult to trace back, and often lost forever. There
fore, the more material kept, the better. many perspectives do not make research
easier, but show the slippery nature of record keeping. The Dutch professor
of ethnology gerard rooijakkers says that probably the most valuable information
to be found about our society in the future is in our waste.
pitchon most critical thinkers try to devise future scenarios and strategies, but
even the title of your work suggests that the actual future of europe can be
ing historical records, perceived so differently when looking at the choices and
beliefs of the individual on the daytoday basis of the actual time of the event?
These individual choices are seldom made with future history in mind; more
often theyre based on chance, opportunism, enthusiasm, bare necessity and
combinations of infuences that are only later separated and simplifed to make
history manageable, readable. yet this is how history is largely perceived: as a
deliberate set of choices that have shaped it. it seems to me that these deliberate
choices are made afterwards. it is hard to admit that sometimes things are too
complicated and intertwined to record and label accurately.
in other works ive focused more on the discrepancy between what we see
and what we think were seeing, or what is meant and how its perceived, or
what we believe to be true and why, and how the way we read and value things
is often shaped by culture or by habitwhich sometimes appear to be one and
the same thing.
pitchon How would you describe the uniqueness, whether advantageous or
disadvantageous, of approaching and investigating what initially is pure historical
research on an almost formal, archival level, as an artist? What can you achieve
artistically that is impossible academically or politically?
Visser The one important thing that the art context enables me to do is to con
duct research in unconventional ways and dig up unexpected material; the
information that is usually overlooked or neglected, not because its not interest
ing, but because it doesnt support common beliefs or prove one theory or
the other, or just looks too plain! A lot of real content is to be found in what ap
pears to be said between the lines or off the record; in the case of futurism
and futurist behaviours, i found a more ambiguous tension in letters written by
futurists than in the futurist manifestos themselves.
i am not in a position to comment on things in the same way that an (art)
historian would, nor is my aim to be objective about the material ive found. i am
a bit hesitant to answer the question directly, since i never do research in order
Deperos stained glass windows for the Palazzo delle Poste, Trento,
mart, Archivio del 900, Fondo Angiolo mazzoni.
228 229
I
The following short essay or collage can be considered an account of how rico-
struzione: disertori/libera: towards a historical fable about Psychology and ar-
chitecture, the project that claudia Honecker and i are contributing to manifesta
7, came about. it may also be seen as an attempt to establish certain links be
tween The Diagnostic moderna longterm research project rehearsing various
intersections of modernist culture and the history of psychology that i am cur
rently pursuingand the conceptual framework provided by Anselm Franke and
Hila Peleg for The soul, the Trento section of manifesta 7.
let us therefore compare the system of the unconscious to a large
entrance hall, in which the mental impulses jostle one another like
separate individuals. Adjoining this entrance hall there is a second,
narrower, rooma kind of drawing roomin which conscious
ness, too, resides. but on the threshold between these two rooms a
watchman performs his function: he examines the different mental
impulses, acts as a censor, and will not admit them into the drawing
room if they displease him.
1
These other studies of man were restricted to the inspection of the
mere tents and houses in which the real men dwelt. The psychologi
cal study of man would use direct access to the residents them
selves. indeed, not until psychologists had found and turned the key,
could the other students of human thought and behaviour hope to
do more than batter vainly on locked doors.
2
Though the concepts of soul and europewhich resonate with each other, es
pecially in the environment of Trento (see Franke and Pelegs introductory essay
in the exhibition index)may not always be addressed straightforwardly, they
nevertheless subsist as heuristic momentum beneath the following musings.
shaped by our perception of former futures. The future is therefore in the past.
Visser Thats very interesting! i would not go so far as to relate it to europe,
since to me europe is merely an idea. There is something to learn from looking
at the ways we deceived ourselves in the past in order to fnd out how we would
like to be deceived in the future.
pitchon you hinted earlier on that the historical narrative constructed in your
work is partly nostalgic. is nostalgia in any way a constructive tool for you? For
example, does it clearly mark what you, or a certain society, group, culture etc.,
long to return to, so that when you identify that you can then also identify the
blind spots? Not just in the banal sense of if you look closely youll see that the
year soandso wasnt really that great, but more in terms of using nostalgia as
an indexing tool for what is remembered fondlymarking a location for excava
tion, so to speak, to fnd blindspots underneath?
Visser my perspective in the installation is to show the moment when the applied
artworks of the Palazzo delle Poste were under construction. They did not exist
yetonly in the mind of the artist (Depero) and in sketches on paper, and in text
in letters. in 2008, as we are visiting the exhibition, they dont exist anymore
some of the arches facing the courtyard are flled with concrete or normal glass.
in between the not yet and the not anymore there is the blank spot of when
they existed. in other words, the perspectives of great expectation on one side
and of looking back (nostalgically?) on the other are two perspectives that meet
somewhere, but the middle is a black hole. its beautiful how these brightly col
oured windows only exist in black and white now, in three impeccable photo
graphs by enrico unterveger, who always documented mazzonis work. For
mazzoni, colour was vital; he made extreme choices, like making this Palazzo
delle Poste a cobalt blue building (later painted over due to protests), yet there
was no colour photography to record it. The installation former futures will also
be predominantly black and white, with colour only added to emphasize that.
Nostalgia is a taboo of some kindespecially where i grew up. modernism in
that sense runs parallel to futurism: only the future counts.
INterIOr
design
Tom HolerT
1. sigmund Freud, introductory lectures on Psycho-analysis (1917), in the standard edition of the com-
plete Psychological Works of sigmund freud, ed. James strachey, 24 vol. (london: The Hogarth Press,
195374), vol. 16, 295; quoted in Diana Fuss, the sense of an interior: four Writers and the rooms that
shaped them (london: routledge, 2004), 6.
2. gilbert ryle, the concept of mind (london: Hutchinson, 1949), 320.
230 231
published in 1993 (one year after Disertoris death). curcio, one of the founders
of the red brigades in 1970, recalls the lively seminars in sociopsychology that
Disertori held at the university of Trento in the 1960s and that made a lasting im
pression on him.
Neither Disertori nor libera, however, nor their relation (which cannot be
traced to any actual, personal encounters; to our knowledge, no historical or
documentary evidence for such a relation exists) should become the subject of a
biographical or scholarly treatment. From the beginning, our intention was to ex
plore their lives and works with the central objective of creating trajectories be
tween the various interests and issues that link the site of manifesta 7, the cura
torial project and our own theoretical and aesthetic preoccupations. in some
sense, Disertori and libera operate as avatars of our historical imagination,
guides leading us through the thicket of the archive. Activating and recontextual
izing the biographies, writings and buildings of the two men also demanded a
certain responsibility and tact. Though we have been granting ourselves license
to use archival fndings and historical knowledge freely and with a deliberate
bent towards fctionalization, we likewise feel obliged not to distort any undis
puted facts or forge new ones.
III
one point of entry was the concept of interiority. As a spatial metaphor, it allows
us to connect the topologies of architecture and the psyche. the sense of an in-
terior, a book by queer theorist and literary critic Diana Fuss, became a major
source of inspiration. explaining her reasons for writing about four writers (emi
ly Dickinson, marcel Proust, Helen keller and sigmund Freud) sensual and psy
chic relations to the interiors of their homes, Fuss points out a characteristic
blind spot or unwillingness among experts in architectural history and theory:
once a house is inhabited and its interior transformed by the detritus of every
day living, architectural scholars tend to lose interest in the life and activities of
the dwelling, preferring to return to the less metaphoric and mutable ground of
program and design.
5
This observation prompted a rush of ideas.
5. Fuss, the sense of an interior, 3.
grace lewis miller, seat
ed at her bedroom vanity
in the miller house, de
signed by richard Neutra,
19361937. Photograph
by Julius shulman. From
stephen leet, richard
neutras miller house
(New york: Princeton Ar
chitectural Press, 2004),
80. courtesy shulman Ar
chives.
Diagrammatic repre
sentation of the soul,
from beppino Disertori,
de anima. saggio sulla
psicologia teoretica (mi
lan: edizioni di comu
nit, 1959).
The individual soul is a dynamic effect in the corporeal matter, in par
ticular the encephalic.
3


With standards more or less formalized, more or less explicit, com
fort serves to structure daily life, to ritualize conduct, especially the
attitudes and postures of the body in relation to furniture and objects
intended for domestic use. it may be noted that comfort expresses,
better than any other cultural contrivance, the techniques of the
body appropriate to modern bourgeois society. [] comfort, giving
emphasis to the sense of the pleasure of private life, ratifes the cen
tral position of home as the place for social activity and contributes
to the formation and consolidation of the modern nuclear family.
4
The relationship of the research and the resulting piece to a variety of contexts,
not least to the implicit demands of context sensibility and site specifcity,
raises all kind of concerns. Hence, the decision to focus on two historical fgures
from Trentino, beppino Disertori and Adalberto libera, was informed as much by
the wish to establish a relationship to the city of Trento, its history, social reality
and architecture, as by a certain sense of obedience and dutifulness, prompted
by the ideological interpellation of manifesta and the art biennial system as such.
eventually, however, historical curiosity and the sheer jouissance of formal
research prevailed, if only to stabilize the imaginary stage on which we operate
and to prevent the disintegration of the project resulting from seemingly exces
sive selfrefexivity and institutional criticality.
II
The theoretical neurobiologist, sociopsychologist and philosopher beppino
Disertori (19071992) was not only a professed antifascist (and, after the war,
the longtime head of the Trentino red cross), but also a rare breed of intellectual
who surveyed vast, interdisciplinary areas of knowledge. The architect Adalberto
libera (19031963) was a major participant in the razionalismo movement in ital
ian architecture of the 1930s and 1940s. Today, liberas work is well document
ed and has been the subject of numerous publications and exhibitions; nonethe
less his fame outside the world of architectural historians probably rests mainly
on the casa malaparte, the eccentric capri villa belonging to fascist writer curzio
malaparte, conceived and built by libera under diffcult circumstances in the late
1930s. (The villa features prominently in Jeanluc godards le mpris [1963]).
Disertori, however, seems to be almost forgotten beyond Trentino, even among
psychologists; his books are out of print and rather hard to fnd in libraries or
secondhand. i came across his name for the frst time in the german translation
of renato curcios a viso aperto, a booklength interview with mario scialoja
3. beppino Disertori, de anima. saggio della psicologia teoretica (milan: edizioni di comunit, 1959), 440
(my translation).
4. Tomas maldonado, The idea of comfort, design issues 8, no. 1 (Fall 1991), 36.
232 233
tions into infantile precedent, conditions, trauma lead to an under
standing, supplementary to the empathy which so puzzlingly makes
cocreativeness an effective mutual attitude and a dynamic phenom
enon of the most eminent social and cultural signifcance.
8
in more than one aspect, this emphasis on the sensual and bodily constitution of
interiority provided the connection to another fgure who enters the flm for a
short moment while otherwise lingering in the backstage area: richard J. Neu
tra, the u.s. architect of Austrian origin. Neutra moved to the united states in
the 1920s to design and build a substantial number of predominantly private res
idences in california, and was one of the few architects and theoreticians of mid
century modernism who explicitly dealt with the psychological and physiological
dimensions of architecture. sylvia lavin, author of an insightful book on Neutras
role in the psychoanalytic culture of the postwar decades, identifes a reconfg
uration of architectural thinking under the impact of contemporary ideas about
affect, psychology and neurology: reconceiving architecture as the production
not of abstract space but of affective environments permitted the discipline to
forge new if unorthodox forms of continuity. Thus the libidinal energy Neutra
thought to exist equally in the human psyche and in the atmosphere could link
architecture and mind through the zone of the window just as empathy could
constitute a theoretical formulation in which aesthetic judgment and psychoana
lytic technique found common ground.
9
As interesting as a focus on the window as physical (and metaphysical)
threshold would have been, we instead opted for the balcony as a different
though closely related instance of an architecturally designed interface separat
ing (and suturing) the interior and the exterior.
modern man strives for communal sport, communal life; in addition,
he desires a silent balcony, a silent room for himself.
10
Walking through the streets of Trento we collected balconies and loggias with
the camera. Partly instigated by the sight of balconies at liberas frst commis
sion after the warthe iNAcasa apartment building on via galilei and piazza
venezia, fnished in 1949the peculiar semiotics and psychology of this archi
tectural feature emerged as a crucial topic within the project.
Home in the evening after the love affair ended at dawn, talking with
a woman friend who has dropped in, vittoria gets a phone call from
a neighbor she hardly knows, a colonial woman from kenya. she and
her friend go over to a window from which they, and we with them,
can see the neighbor at her balcony across the dark street; cut to a
[] the most powerful obstacles to such an architectural reform
as i have been suggesting are to be found in the psychology of the
wageearners themselves. However they may quarrel, people like the
privacy of the home, and fnd in it a satisfaction to pride and pos
sessiveness. [] i believe that a private apartment with ones own
furniture would suffce for people who were used to it. but it is al
ways diffcult to change intimate habits. The desire of women for in
dependence, however, may lead gradually more and more to women
earning their living outside the home, and this, in turn, may make
such systems as we have been considering seem to them desirable.
At present, feminism is still at an early stage of development among
women of the wageearning class, but it is likely to increase unless
there is a Fascist reaction.
6
The project veered towards a methodology and a format that i tested for the frst
time on the occasion of an earlier curatorial project by Franke and Peleg at the
Hebbel am ufer theatre in berlin. like stumbling block: the spectacle of aptitude
(2006), ricostruzione is a short and elliptical video essay, mainly based on still
images and a voiceover narrative.
IV
A collection of photographs, made by ourselves or drawn from books and ar
chives, alongside scans of an assortment of various printed matter, form the ba
sis for our short flm. During the production and editing process, while the script
was still developing, short clips taken from italian neorealist movies found their
way into the folders from which the relevant visual data were retrieved to be
subsequently processed with Apples Final cut Pro editing software.
Throughout a number of strategic and conceptual changes, the questions that
Diana Fuss raises in her book on the interior remained pertinent to us. The most
critical bridge between the architectural and the psychological interior, she
claims, is the human sensorium: sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell [] The
senses allow the body to register exterior impressions and interiorize them.
7
The therapeutic situation is a creative situation [] And will one
day be physiologically illuminated to show what happens between
a patient in general and a therapist. The anticipation of being helped
in a need or in an aspiration toward satisfaction is physiologically an
analogous, probably an identical situation. An architect producing by
proper means rapport with the clients aspirations and expressed or
halfexpressed need is actually acting very closely to the pattern of
procedure of a psychiatrist. His analytical searchings and retrospec
8. richard Neutra, ideas (dated september 24, 1953), Neutra Archive, Department of special collec
tions, charles e. young research library, uclA; quoted in sylvia lavin, form follows libido: architec-
ture and richard neutra in a Psychoanalytic culture (cambridge, mA: The miT Press, 2004), 49.
9. lavin, form follows libido, 115.
10. otto Neurath, kommunaler Wohnungsbau in Wien, die form 6, no. 3 (1931), 110 (my translation).
6. bertrand russell, in Praise of idleness and Other essays (london: george Allen & unwin, 1935), 59
60.
7. Fuss, the sense of an interior, 17.
234 235
distant, haunting pointofview shot, unmoored, unbracketed by any
shots of the observer, from the neighbors inferred perspective: the
point of view of a stranger on vittoria and her friend, now diminutive
silhouettes at the lit window amid the darkness. From the window
they subjectively look out at the world, and now the world, as sub
jectively, looks back at them. The effect is of our suddenly seeing
ourselves as the world distantly sees us.
11
At some point, the symbolic function of the balcony in the fascist spectacle of
power emerged in our discussion. We learned that the term arengario for a bal
cony upon which the speaker stood to address the crowds derives from the me
dieval arengo or assembly of all citizens. but with fascism and in particular with
the case del fascio that mushroomed all over italy in the 1930s and 1940s, this
traditional meaning changed and the power of the commune was transferred
onto mussolini and the fascist state.
There are balconies from which it has always been fun to watch the
busy goings and doings in the streets and then there are balconies
which the powerful or powerseeking preferred for their speeches to
the people in an effort towards or away from the good or evil.
The balcony removes us from the sheltering walls of the house,
it lifts us above the supporting width of the foor, and it broadens the
view and the mind. We feel safe and secure in the room of access to
the outwardly extended balcony, but there is already the element of
transition where the indoors blends into the outofdoors.
balconies are more than just charming architectural details
of houses; they are important links between the in and the outof
doors, between the wide open and the enclosed space which is only
the shell for the human activity and life, and thus they are the links
between introspection and shelter and broadminded acceptance of
environmental infuences.
12
As if to underscore the contrast between this political use of the balcony as a
stage for fascist histrionics and the civil (and civilized) idea of the balcony as a
zone of recreation and family life in the postwar modernism of the reconstruc
tion, some of the balconies of liberas building face the arengario of the former
casa del fascio on the Piazza venezia (or largo porta Nuova) in the centre of
Trento. The fascist headquarters had been built by another architect from Trenti
no, giovanni lorenzi, in the late 1930s. Around the same time, lorenzi also de
signed and supervised the construction of his erich mendelsohninspired
grande Albergo Trento (today known as grand Hotel Trento) at Piazza Dante.
And not only did lorenzi work as a construction supervisor for liberas via galilei
apartment building after the war, libera also built his Palazzo della regione in
the late 1950s and early 1960s right beside lorenzis hotel, where he once again
had to respond aesthetically to an urban and architectural situation largely deter
mined by a preexisting building by his slightly elder colleague.
V
Around the time the construction of the Palazzo della regione reached its com
pletion, which was also the time of liberas death (1963), beppino Disertori
moved into a newly built condominium at number 32 via Petrarca, a street that
leads directly to the palazzo. Disertori stayed in the apartment, where he both
lived and worked, until the late 1980s. interestingly enough, and providing still
another link to our involvement with this exhibition as whole, the temporary
manifesta 7 Trento offce, working under the conceptual heading of The soul,
was located in exactly the same building where Disertori, the author of a com
prehensive book on the soul (de anima, 1959), had lived.
Disertoris reasons for moving to via Petrarca might have been completely
contingent in nature, but considering his biography, it is nevertheless striking
that he chose to move into a house in the immediate vicinity of liberas then
brandnew Palazzo della regione, a multifunctional complex designed to host
the various executive and legal bodies of the government of the two autono
mous regions of Alto Adige (south Tyrol) and Trentino. liberas awkwardly mod
ernist building might be considered an allegory of the postwar political system.
Though it obviously serves the purposes of governing the autonomous regions,
it might as well be perceived as an attempt to embody the idea of a supranation
al europea europe of the regions. (The manifesto of the Trentino socialist
movement was published clandestinely in February 1944, penned by resistance
fghters, giannantonio manci among them. The manifesto states that only an in
ternational state will free the nations from nationalism and will defeat the infer
nal theories of lebensraum, will raise europe above the crisis to an era of peace
and reconstruction.)
13
Disertori (who, due to a polio infection in his childhood, was physically affict
ed throughout his life) conspired against the fascists on various fronts. His oppo
sitional stance towards the regime foreclosed any practice as a neuropsychiatrist
in state institutions during the 1930s and 1940s. Disertoris role in the antifascist
underground of Trento would be an interesting topic in itself. For instance,
Disertoris fathers bookshop, the libreria Disertori in via Diaz in Trento (still in
business today), was a place where resistance activists gathered in secret.
(A monograph on the history of this bookshop is allegedly in preparation).
in summer 1943, when the germans occupied Trentino after allied forces in
13. giannantonio manci, manifesto programma del movimento socialista Trentino. Febbraio 1944, in
giannantonio manci: 14 dicembre 19016 luglio 1944, ed. beppino Disertori (Trento: Temi, 1946), 78
(my translation).
14. beppino Disertori, lapostolato die giannantonio manci (1944), in giannantonio manci, 15 (my
translation).
11. gilberto Perez, The Point of view of a stranger: An essay on Antonionis eclipse, the hudson re-
view 44, no. 2 (summer 1991), 248.
12. Franz schuster, balkone. balconies. balcons. balkone, laubengnge und terrassen aus aller Welt
(stuttgart: Julius Hoffmann, 1962), 7.
236 237
vaded southern italy, Disertori escaped to switzerland. exiled, he continued to
pursue the cause of a new age of humanity and peace. Together with his friend
and role model manci, he committed himself to the idea of a democratic repub
lic. This visionary state was modelled after the political ideas of risorgimento
thinker giuseppe mazzini and based, among other things, on the geopolitical
principle of decentralization. in 1944, Disertori wrote: Through decentralisation,
and by respecting the legitimate autonomy of communes and regions, the au
thentic italian democracy, educator of citizens, will fnally be born.
14
The federal,
supranational character of postwar europe was a central concern of the selfpro
claimed socialists. The very fact that the Palazzo della regione had been de
signed and built by libera, the same libera who had authored the monumental
Palazzo dei congressi (19381954) in the eur quarter in rome and who de
signed the triumphal arc for the fascist exposition in rome in 1942 (never real
ized due to the war), could well have been deeply irritating for someone who had
invested so much of his political and intellectual energy in overcoming Fascism.
To educate a child, to reform a delinquent, to cure a hysteric, to raise
a baby, to administer an army, to run a factoryit is not so much
that these activities entail the utilisation of psychological theories
and techniques, than that there is a constitutive relation between the
character of what will count as an adequate psychological theory or
argument, and the processes by which a kind of psychological vis
ibility may be accorded to these domains. The conduct of persons
becomes remarkable and intelligible when, as it were, displayed
upon a psychological screen, reality becomes ordered according to
a psychological taxonomy, abilities, personalities, attitudes and the
like become central to the deliberations and calculations of social au
thorities and psychological theorists alike.
15
VI
Disertori and libera contributed, if reluctantly and in very different ways, to a
common task, which might be called, tentatively, the shaping of a subject of
(and for) reconstruction. While writing this essay, i stumbled upon an obliquely
related remark by art historian rosalind krauss, in the fnal paragraph of an arti
cle on giovanni Anselmo that she contributed to a special issue of the journal
October on postwar italian art: in its attempt to shore up democratic forms of
government, the marshall Plan was meant to reinstate the enlightenment sub
ject as the basis of european experience. The perceptual apparatus of the cen
tred human subject was being purchased by American largesse. The subject
who consumes.
16
both libera and Disertori were involved in the project of reinstating a europe
an subjectivity shaped by the institutions of democratic reeducation and the
training grounds of Fordist rationality, though their individual interests and pas
sions were hardly in sync with the Americanization of italy. in liberas view, the
imperatives of effciency that organized the postwar reconstruction in europe
had fatal repercussions within the architectural profession itself. in his autobio
graphical essay la mia esperienza darchitetto, published in 1960, three years be
fore his death, libera tried to place himself and his practice in the postfascist en
vironment of the 1950s, where he spent many years coordinating the vast iNA
casa social housing programme. Here, he laments the demise of the architects
practice under the pressure to conform to the laws of quantity and costs, while
being forced to repudiate all sense of art. once a house could be at the same
time building and art, technical and artistic; today the house, one might say, the
decimetre, belongs to the industry. Freedom manifests itself by hectometre and
kilometre, i.e. on the level of urban planning. it is only a matter of payment, of
catering to those interests.
17
The industry and interests that libera targeted
were American. The new building types and the new cities in postwar italy that
reminded him of the new cities in india and south America were manufactured
in America, fabbricando in america.
18
libera regretted the devaluation of art in
favour of a mentality of planning and building new cities (as well as, by implica
tion, new citizens), and he called for the serenit dellanima.
19
but he had also
taken early precautions for a general surrender to the imperatives of effciency
when he sat down to write and draw his treatise on architectural standards and
norms in the fnal years of the war.
on a different terrain and with quite different intentions, Disertori tried to apply
to the social and political situation of the reconstruction years a set of ideas and
beliefs that he had been developing since the late 1920s. Decidedly antimechanist
and neovitalist, his approach had been comprehensively presented for the frst
time in his libro della vita, written in swiss exile and published by mondadori in
1947. Disertori argued for the centrality of Henri bergson, Hans Driesch and other
17. una volta una casa poteva essere contemporaneamente edilizia ed arte, cio tecnica ed arte; oggi
la casa, il decametro, diciamo cos, appartiene allindustria. la libert, invece, si manifesta sullettometro
e sul chilometro, cio sul piano urbanistico. bisogna solamente arrivare a cambiare, a spostare questi in
teressi. Adalberto libera, la mia esperienza di architetto, la casa 6 (1960); quoted in adalberto
libera nel dopoguerra, ed. Alessandro Fassio (sassari: carlo Delfno, 2004), 298 (my translation).
18. ibid.
19. ibid., 299.
beppino Disertori in 1940.
From luigi menapace,
Franco erminio, silvio De
marchi and Jos macotti,
eds. note biografche e
bibliografa di beppino dis-
ertori 19071987 (edizione
donate da riccardo bac
chi), 10
Adalberto libera in 1939.
Photograph by ghitta
carell. From Francesco
garofalo and luca veresa
ni, adalberto libera (New
york: Princeton Architec
tural Press, 2002), 16.
15. Nikolas rose, Power and subjectivity: critical History and Psychology, http://www.academyanalyti
carts.org/rose1.htm.
16. rosalind krauss, giovanni Anselmo: matter and monochrome, October 124 (spring 2008), 136.
238 239
dreAm kiTscH, THe World oF THings,
And THe FurnisHed HumAn being
Dream kitsch, written by Walter benjamin (18921940) in 1925 and published
under the title gloss on surrealism in the journal die neue rundschau in
January 1927, suggests that, in contradistinction to the dreams associated in
romanticism with the imagistic fullness and metaphorical density of symbols,
such as the blue fower after which the literary hero Heinrich von ofterdingen
in Novaliss eponymous 1802 novel longs, presentday dreams have grown
gray. but if benjamin believed that dreams in the context of european moderni
ty in the late 1920s were a shortcut to banality, he did not take that to diminish
either their meaningfulness in psychic life or their potential to play a decisive role
in historical events. For benjamin, the dreams of his own era were connected
not to art (as in romanticism), but to kitschand dream kitsch was kitsch gar
nished with cheap maxims. The surrealists invoked sigmund Freuds epochal
interpretation of dreams (1900) and psychoanalytic theory in general as concep
tual foundations for the renovation of works of art and literature and their capacity
to convey meaning. crucial in surrealism was the reconfguration of banal ele
ments of everyday life in striking juxtapositions designed to transform the per
ceptions and modes of feeling, cognition and eventually social behaviour and
political action of readers and viewers. in Dream kitsch, benjamin associates
surrealist poetry with the aphoristic inscriptions in nineteenthcentury childrens
books, including what are now known as popup or popout books.
in addition to his praise for the surrealist writers Andr breton (18961966)
and louis Aragon (18971982), benjamins essay includes a brief description of a
1. Portions of this essay were published previously in artforum (september 2005). other portions are re
printed, by permission of the publisher, from my introduction to Part iv of the Work of art in the age of
its technological reproducibility, and Other Writings on media, by Walter benjamin, edited by michael
W. Jennings, brigid Doherty, and Thomas y. levin, pp. 198202, cambridge, mass.: The belknap Press
of Harvard university Press, copyright 2008 by the President and Fellows of Harvard college. The il
lustrations accompanying this essay were composed in their present form by carolyn yerkes of y2 De
sign, New york, designer of the exhibition a museum of learning things at manifesta 7, Trento. my
thanks to carolyn for her creativity, graciousness and unfailing good humor. Thanks are also due to An
nie bourneuf and lisa lee, endlessly helpful research assistants on the m7 project and the most conge
nial collaborators i could ever hope to fnd. i am indebted to Dr. Andrea immel, curator of the cotsen
childrens library at Princeton university, and to Dr. martina Weinland, Director, and Dr. rita Weber of
the museum kindheit und Jugend, stiftung stadtmuseum berlin, for granting me access to materials
reproduced here and in a museum of learning things, and for sharing their knowledge of childrens
books and anschauungsunterricht with me. Finally, special thanks are due to Hal Foster and susan leh
re of the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton for providing fnancial and other kinds of sup
port that made this essay and the larger project of which it is a part possible.
leArNING thINGs
1
Brigid doherTy
vitalist thinkers with their theories of lan vital and the entelechic necessity of
life processes. Against the functionalism and mechanism of competing schools
of (neuro)biology, he advocated an elaboration of the psychosomatic relations
in the human brain, taking into account both the metaphysics of the inner light
(luce lintero quadro) and the sciences of neuro and psychobiology.
20
Disertoris
brand of metaphysical neovitalism, his ventures into parapsychology and hypno
sis, his ideas of the individuality of the soul and his detailed analysis of the
neurosis of the subject in postwar mass civilization are still to be rediscovered
as a tacit critique of the subjectivity of the marshall plan and as a contribution
to other, physiologically and metaphysically based soulsearching projects of the
postwar decades. A parking place is where someone else has parked his car,
richard Neutra wrote in 1957; There is no anchorage for the soul, because we
have lost the feel, pay no heed, and continuously ignore all valid current data:
how our million sense receptorsno longer fve senses as for Palladiotake
on in the world.
21
20. see beppino Disertori, il libro della vita (milan: mondadori, 1947), 358 (my translation).
21. richard Neutra, Notes to the young Architect, Perspecta 4 (1957), 53.
240 241
5. The phrases teaching through the senses and training the senses appear in Pestalozzis educational
Writings, ed. J. A. green (london: edward Arnold, 1916), in the introduction to which the full force of
Pestalozzis anschauungs-Prinzip is said to be best expressed by the principle of concreteness, and
where anschauung is variously translated as inner feelings, inner intellectual processes, and con
creteness, while the word concrete is understood to indicate, in the Pestalozzian sense, meaningful
(912, 124, 139).
senses or training the senses) that was grounded in theories and practices de
veloped in the frst half of the nineteenth century by the swiss philosopher and
pioneer of progressive education Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (17461827) and his
german follower, the inventor of kindergarten, Friedrich Froebel (17821852).
5

Just as the technique of photoengraving used to reproduce ernsts frontispiece
to luards book harks back to a technology commonly used in the production of
illustrated books and periodicals in the late nineteenth century, benjamins text
invokes childhood of that epoch in setting the stage for his revaluation of kitsch
in relation to art. According to benjamin, despite their interest in psychoanalysis
the surrealists are less on the trail of the psyche than on the track of things. The
face at the top of the totemic tree of objects after which they seek is that of
kitsch. it is the last mask of the banal, the one with which we adorn ourselves, in
dream and conversation, so as to take in the energies of an outlived world of
things. And it is by means of kitsch and not art (or what we used to call art)
that benjamin suggests his contemporaries can come into renewed contact with
the world of things.
Thus benjamin presents kitsch, rather than, say, great painting, as the stan
dard against which to measure the success of ernsts art. According to
benjamin, the banality of the world of domestic interiors and sentimental con
versations in which bourgeois parents enclosed their children in the late nine
teenth centurythe world benjamin inhabited in berlin and ernst in brhl
reduced those children themselves to crimped picture puzzles confronted with
the abysmal entanglements of the ornament of conversation. but within that
worlds variously crimped, abysmal, ornamental projections of sentiment dwelt
heartfelt sympathy, love, kitsch. in benjamins reading, surrealism at its best
strove to reconstruct a form of dialogue peculiar to a certain historical moment
of nineteenthcentury childhood, and to compel our recognition that, more
generally, dialogic misunderstanding provides a structure through which the
only true reality forces its way into the conversation.
ernst, as benjamin explains in his brief analysis of the frontispiece to rp-
titions, has drawn four small boys. They turn their backs to the reader, to their
teacher, and his desk as well, and look out over a balustrade where a balloon
hangs in the air. A giant pencil rests on its point in the windowsill. The repetition
of childhood experience gives us pause: when we were little, there was as yet no
agonized protest against the world of our parents. As children in the midst of that
world, we showed ourselves superior. When we reach for the banal, we take hold
of the good along with itthe good that is there (open your eyes) right before
you. The boys in ernsts overpainting seem to be gazing, with their hands shading
their eyes, at the hot air balloon high in the sky outside their classroom, an ob
jectin addition to the very big red pencil in the windowsillthat we are invited
to imagine them wishing to grasp. on the unpainted catalogue page, the school
colour halftone reproduction of a 1921 gouache overpainting (bermalung) by
the germanborn artist max ernst (18911976) that appeared as the frontispiece
to rptitions (fgure 1), a 1922 book of poems by Paul luard (eugne mile
Paul grindel, 18951952).
2
The scene in ernsts frontispiece is a schoolroom, and
luards title also invokes pedagogical exercises.
3
benjamin might have known
the original work by ernst, which was in the collection of louis Aragon, but even
if he had seen only the colour reproduction in rptitions, it is worth noting that
the printed sheet on which the overpainting appears is an actual page taken
from a catalogue of teaching aids (lehrmittel) that were designed, as the cata
logue puts it, to promote the purposeful expansion of the sensory activity of
children
4
through an approach to pedagogy called anschauungsunterricht (liter
ally instruction in perception, sometimes translated as teaching through the
2. bermalung was a technique invented by ernst in which he painted with watercolour and gouache on
top of printed pages to create pictures that resembled collages. in the original 1922 edition of rp-
titions, ernsts illustrations are called dessins (drawings), while in a 1962 bilingual Frenchgerman re
print on which ernst collaborated, they are called collages in French and collagen in german. see Paul
luard, rptitions, avec dessins de max ernst (Paris: Au sans Pareil, 1922) and luard, rptitions, mit
11 collagen von max ernst, trans. max ernst and rainer Pretzell (cologne: galerie der spiegel, 1962).
3. Pedagogy and domination, and pedagogy as domination, are key surrealist themes. For example,
ernsts frontispiece and benjamins gloss on that picture fnd an echo in the opening of Andr bretons
1937 surrealist novel lamour fou (mad love), which refers to boys of harsh discipline who evoke for
the narrator certain theoretical beings, [] key bearers, possessing the clues to situations. see breton,
mad love, trans. mary Ann caws (lincoln: university of Nebraska Press, 1987), 5.
4. Dirk Teuber, bilbliotheca Paedagogica: eine Neuerwerbung im kunstmuseum bonn: zur Quellenfunk
tion des klner lehrmittelkataloges fr max ernst, in max ernst: illustrierte bcher und druckgra-
phische Werke: die sammlung hans bolligereine neuerwerbung, ed. katharina schmidt, exhibition
catalogue, kunstmuseum bonn (cologne: Wienand, 1989), 45.
Fig. 1 illustration from bibliotheca Paedagogica. verzeichnis der bewhrtesten und neuesten lehrmittel
fr hhere, mittlere und elementarschulen, sowie von Werken der erziehungs und unterrichtswissen
schaft (leipzig: k. F. koehler, 1914), page 34.
max ernst, frontispiece to Paul luard, rptitions (Paris: Au sans Pareil, 1922). color halftone repro
duction of an untitled circa 1920 overpainting of gouache and ink on a printed page from the bibliothe
ca Paedagogica (leipzig: k. F. koehler 1914). Typ 915.22.3605, Department of Printing and graphic Arts,
Houghton library, Harvard college library. max ernst, by siAe 2008
242 243
advertising. That is to say, those banal pages provided images that entered into
him rather than creating the illusion of a world into which he might have stepped.
by means of drawing and painting understood as technologies for projecting
onto a page images previously lodged in the mind, ernst then refgured those
pages as containers of the dramas of his own desiresdesires that, needless to
say, may themselves have been implanted in him along with the catalogue imag
es. refashioning a phrase from benjamin in connection with her treatment of
ernsts overpaintings, rosalind krauss has associated ernsts construction of pic
torial space with the operations of the optical unconscious.
8
in his own account
of the use to which he put the teaching aids catalogue, the banal images of ad
vertising take up a privileged place in ernsts unconsciousa place out of which
the artist in turn projects what benjamin calls dream kitsch.
As if on the model of the leporello popup picture books mentioned in benja
mins essay, in kitsch the world of things advances on the human being; it yields
to his uncertain grasp and ultimately fashions its fgures in his interior. The new
man bears within himself the very quintessence of the old forms, and what
evolves in the confrontation with a particular milieu from the second half of the
nineteenth centuryin the dreams, as well as the words and images, of certain
Fig. 2 illustration from bibliotheca Paedagogica. verzeichnis der bewhrtesten und neuesten lehrmittel
fr hhere, mittlere und elementarschulen, sowie von Werken der erziehungs- und unterrichtswissen-
schaft (leipzig: k. F. koehler, 1914), page 964.
max ernst, ambiguous figures (1 copper plate 1 zinc plate 1 rubber cloth 2 calipers 1 drainpipe-tele-
scope 1 pipe-man), ca. 1919/20. gouache, watercolor, ink, pencil, and ink inscription on a printed page
from the bibliotheca Paedagogica (leipzig: k. F. koehler 1914). collection Judy and michael steinhardt,
New york. max ernst, by siAe 2008
8. see rosalind krauss, the Optical unconscious (cambridge, mass.: miT Press, 1993), 3293, and
krauss, The masters bedroom, representations 28 (Autumn 1989): 5576.
master surveys the work of his pupils as they raise their hands to inscribe mathe
matical calculations on the writing surface of the scrolling blackboard that is the
teaching aid the page promotes (some letters of the word schreibfche [writing
surface] can be seen through the blue of the sky to the right of the balloon). The
page as overpainted by ernst does not just obscure the blackboard advertised in
the lehrmittelkatalog. ernsts overpainting supplants that classroom apparatus,
replacing it with (the illusion of) a blue sky towards which the children are turned.
Now facing the painted sky with its faroff hot air balloon and the distant horizon
on which the cologne cathedral stands as a tiny sketch, the boys appear as if
transformed bodily, with the gestures of their hands and arms now seeming to
show them looking into a sunny distance, rather than writing on a nearby surface.
in this way, when published as the frontispiece to luards rptitions, ernsts
picture presents itself as both a depiction of and a means to a renovated percep
tionand thus as something like an apparatus for a new kind of pedagogy.
Addressed to those who are at once readers and viewers of his art, the cap
tions inscribed by ernst on his overpaintings might be said to cultivate dialogic
misunderstanding in the sense benjamin intends. integral to the pictures of
which they are a handwritten part, the captions enact, in words, the transformed
relations of subject and object, and of image and inscription, that benjamin pos
es as central to dream kitsch. in the case of ambiguous figures (ca. 191920;
fgure 2), ernsts words1 copper plate 1 zinc plate 1 rubber cloth 2 calipers 1
drainpipetelescope 1 pipemanframe a picture drawn and painted on a page
of engraved illustrations from the teachingaids catalogue mentioned above.
6
For
ernst, the pages of the bibliotheca paedagogica lehrmittelkatalog, on which, as
he remembered them, objects for anthropological, microscopic, psychological,
mineralogical demonstrations were illustrated, became an object of fascina
tion, a source of visions, and an inspiration for what he described as his at
tempt, in the overpaintings of 191921, to reproduce exactly that which was
seen in me [] to obtain a true, lasting image of my hallucination in order to
transform what previously had been merely banal pages of advertising into dra
mas that contained my most secret desires.
7
For ernst as for benjamin, kitsch was what the children of the late nineteenth
century knew, or rather what they learned things from; kitsch was a form of in
struction in perception, and its images took up residency inside them. crucial to
ernsts account of his technique for producing overpaintings as reproductions of
his internal mental imagery is the implication that the catalogue was a source of
images frst incorporated into him and then projected, in the process of drawing
and painting on the commercially printed sheet, back onto the banal pages of
6. on ernsts use of the bibliotheca Paedagogica, see Teuber, bibliotheca Paedagogica, 3539, and
Teuber, max ernsts lehrmittel, in max ernst in Kln: die rheinische Kunstszene bis 1922, exhibition
catalogue, klnischer kunstverein (cologne: klnischer kunstverein, 1980), 206240. molly Nesbit has
explored related issues in an essay on the work of marcel Duchamp (18871968), readymade origi
nals: The Duchamp model, October 37 (summer 1986): 5364.
7. Teuber, max ernsts lehrmittel, 206, and bibliotheca paedagogica, 35. The complete title of the
lehrmittelkatalog is bibliotheca Paedagogica: verzeichnis der bewhrtesten und neuesten lehrmittel fr
hhere, mittlere, und elementarschulen, sowie von Werken der erziehungs- und unterrichtswissenschaft
(leipzig: k. F. koehler, 1914). on the emergence of the education business in eighteenthcentury
germany, see Anke Te Heesen, the World in a box: the story of an eighteenth-century Picture encyclo-
pedia, trans. Ann m. Hentschel (chicago: university of chicago Press, 2002), 5561, passim.
244 245
in rptitions, and was thus unaware that words from the teachingaids cata
logue page remain legible through the gouache in ernsts original overpainting,
benjamins choice of a picture of a group of boys in a classroom hardly seems
arbitrary, given the larger claims of Dream kitsch. His conviction that the
surrealists were in pursuit of thingsand that it was in the context of this pur
suit that the signifcance of their composition of poems and pictures recalling
the maxims and illustrations in nineteenthcentury childrens books emerged
links the treatment of surrealism in Dream kitsch to the aims of anschauung-
sunterricht in its original as well as its updated forms.
anschauungsunterricht is the name Pestalozzi gave to a method of teaching
he developed in the context of his efforts to make primary education available to
children of the lower social classes. variously called, in the discourses of nine
teenth and early twentiethcentury progressive education in the united states,
object teaching or object lessons, anschauungsunterricht stresses the primacy
of perception (Anschauung) in the development of the human capacity to
acquire knowledge of the world, and accordingly organizes its lessons frst with
a focus on concrete sensory experiences of things and then with an emphasis on
the perceptual and cognitive apprehension of representations of things in the
form of pictures, especially captioned illustrations presented in picture books
and primers, as well as on wall charts and in various forms of handheld cards
and tablets (see fgure 3), before proceeding to instruction concerning abstract
concepts expressed in language.
10
Fig. 3 Wilkes bildertafeln fr den anschauungsunterricht nr. 1: die Wohnstube (Wilkes Wall Pictures
for anschauungsunterricht No. 1: The living room) 1839/1880. lithograph. museum kindheit und Ju
gend, stiftung stadtmuseum berlin, inv.Nr.: sm/um 93/637.
artistsis a creature who deserves the name of furnished manor, in a more
literal translation of the german mblierter mensch, furnished human being.
Thus the encounter with kitschand with kitsch as an element in, or potentially
a medium for, works of arttransforms viewers and readers according to a mod
el of reception in which the work as it were approaches and fnally enters into
the person apprehending it, outftting him or her internally with fgures of the
world of things.
For benjamin, it is by means of this internalization or introjection of the
quintessence of old forms that the novelty of the new man or new human be
ing (neuer mensch) of the 1920s makes itself known. in the shape of the
furnished man (mblierter mensch), he envisions a creature transformed by
the introjection of fgures of the recent past as the subject of the dreams as
well as of the avantgarde art and literature of his own day. A variant ending ap
pended by benjamin to a manuscript copy of Dream kitsch further describes
the mblierter mensch as the body furnished [meubl] with forms and
apparatuses, in the sense that, in French, one has long spoken of the mind
furnished [meubl] with dreams or with scientifc knowledge. Derived as
it is from the mblierter herra fgurative, idiomatic term that refers to a tenant
of furnished rooms as a furnished gentlemanthe mblierter mensch of
Dream kitsch might be said to be furnished specifcally with forms and appa
ratuses of a past of which benjamin took the furnished gentleman to be an
avatar. in his writings of the later 1920s and 1930s, benjamin would continue to
explore actual as well as potential correspondences among furnished dwellings,
furnished minds, and furnished bodies in the cultural history of nineteenth
century Paris and the modernity of his own era.
ernsts works are not illustrations but incomplete prefgurations of benjamins
conception of kitsch and its potential to transform perception and personhood
alike. in Dream kitsch and elsewhere, benjamin assumes the present impossi
bility of authentically empathetic projection and asserts the necessity of displac
ing what now amount to simulations of empathy with technologies and effects
of projective identifcation and incorporation that he (and also, i suggest, ernst)
understood already to be determinative in modernity. For benjamin in the 1920s,
a renovation of his contemporaries relation to kitsch held out the promise of
generating effects of estrangement that might make possible a highly produc
tive use of the human beings selfalienation.
9
A creature with capacities to in
corporate and project those effectsa creature like benjamins furnished
manis also the hero of ernsts art, the ambiguous fgure of the pipeman
(rhrender mensch) named in the punning, selfreferential caption of ambigu-
ous figures, a creature who, outftted with a laboratory safety mask, inkedon
seaweed nose, bulbous Pyrex genitals, and a torso complete with handles to be
grasped and cranked, supplants the image of the touching man (rhrender
mensch) and his surefre effects of empathy.
even if benjamin was writing with knowledge only of the printed frontispiece
9. benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological reproducibility: second version, in the
Work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility and Other Writings on media, ed. michael W.
Jennings, brigid Doherty, and Thomas y. levin (cambridge, mass.: Harvard university Press, 2008), 32.
246 247
cHildrens books, PicTure-sTATisTics,
THe colourFul World
A glimpse into the World of childrens books, an illustrated essay that was pub
lished in a special issue of die literarische Welt (December 1926) devoted to chil
drens literature, opens with an account of what happens when children read il
lustrated books, a genre of unique signifcance to benjamin, who possessed not
only expertise but a major collection in the feld (fgure 4).
14
The childrens book
author Hans christian Andersen (18051875) gets it wrong, benjamin says, but
not by much, when in one of his stories the characters depicted in an expensive
book belonging to a princess turn out to be alive (birds sing, and human fgures
leap out and speak to the princess as she looks at the page on which they ap
pear, leaping back in when she turns to the next). Things do not come out to
meet the picturing child from the pages of the book, benjamin states in his cor
rective. instead, in looking the child enters into them as a cloud that becomes
suffused with the riotous colors of the world of pictures. [] He overcomes the
218219, 215.
14. benjamin, A glimpse into the World of childrens books, in the Work of art in the age of its tech-
nological reproducibility, 226235. on benjamins collection of childrens books, see Jrg Drews and
Antje Friedrichs, index der kinderbuchsammlung Walter benjamin, in Zum Kinderbuch: betrachtungen.
Kritisches. Praktisches, ed. Jrg Drews (Frankfurt am main: insel, 1975), 201234.
Fig. 4 Walter benjamin, Aussicht ins kinderbuch (A glimpse into the World of childrens books),
die literarische Welt 2:49 (December 1926), p. 5.
There are two ways of instructing, the introduction to an 1894 english transla
tion of Pestalozzis 1801 book how gertrude teaches her children cites the
pedagogue as saying; either we go from words to things, or from things to words.
mine is the second method.
11
of objects which cannot be brought before
the child in reality, pictures should be introduced, Pestalozzi proposed.
An instruction founded on pictures will always be found a favourite branch
with children, and if this curiosity is well directed, and judiciously satisifed, it
will prove one of the most useful and instructive.
12
benjamin often refers
to anschauungsunterricht in the context of popular education or volksbildung,
but he makes clear that its perceptual and historical effects extended to bour
geois children and, at least potentially, also to adult readers of various classes;
indeed, when writing about childrens books benjamin invoked both the experi
ences of his own latenineteenthcentury berlin childhood and his presentday
collecting. like the scene in ernsts frontispiece to rptitions, the pursuit
of things benjamin attributes to the surrealists counts, for him, as something
like a new kind of anschauungsunterricht.
benjamins Dream kitsch in effect envisions kitsch not only as a medium for
the transmission of new kinds of knowledge about, and new possibilities for
taking pleasure in, things, but also as an apparatus for the internal and external
transformation or furnishing of human beings, as if the experience of furnishing
(or, perhaps better, refurnishing) amounted to a kind of learning, and viceversa.
in a longer essay on surrealism published in 1929, benjamin envisions such trans
formations or refurnishings as prefgurationsin the context of the surrealists
radical concept of freedom and their experiments with virtual and actual intoxi
cation (rausch)of the possibility of political revolution. He speaks of a space
[] in which political materialism and physical creatureliness share the inner man,
the psyche, the individual and he says that the surrealists exchange, to a man,
the play of human features for the face of an alarm clock that each minute rings
for sixty seconds. To win the energies of intoxication for the revolution: this
is the project on which surrealism focuses in all its books and enterprises.
13

10. Pestalozzis conceptualization of anschauung with regard to pedagogy was derived from the philoso
phy of immanuel kant (17241804); english translations of kant variously render anschauung as intu
ition or perception. For benjamins use of the term anschauungsunterricht in relation to pedagogical
theories and practices of the nineteenth century as well as the 1920s, see the text of the radio broadcast
childrens literature, in benjamin, selected Writings, vol. 2, ed. michael W. Jennings, Howard eiland
and gary smith (cambridge, mass.: Harvard university Press, 1999), 251252. in a review essay called
old Toys: The Toy exhibition at the mrkisches museum that was published in the frankfurter Zeitung
in march 1928, and that benjamin understood to be closely connected to his emerging research on the
cultural history of nineteenthcentury France in the work he called the arcades project (Passagen
werk), he praises the exhibition organizers for the breadth of their conception of toys, citing specifcal
ly the inclusion of books, posters, and wall charts for anschauungsunterricht among the objects on dis
play. see benjamin, selected Writings, vol. 2., 98. see also benjamins discussion of anschauung and his
comparison of old and new approaches to popular education (volksbildung) in the review essay gar
landed entrance in benjamin, the Work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility, 6066.
11. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, how gertrude teaches her children. an attempt to help mothers to
teach their own children and an account of the method, trans. lucy e. Holland and Francis c. Turner,
ed., intro., and notes by ebenezer cooke (1894; reprint, New york: gordon Press, 1973), viiviii.
12. Pestalozzi, letter xxviii to J. P. greaves (27 march 1819), in letters on early education, intro. Jeffrey
stern (london: Thoemmes, 1995), 123124; earlier in this letter, which is part of a collection frst pub
lished, in english translation, in 1827, and for which the unpublished german originals are lost,
Pestalozzi states clearly the frst rule is, to teach always by THiNgs, rather than by WorDs (122).
13. benjamin, surrealism: The last snapshot of the european intelligentsia, selected Writings, vol. 2,
248 249
this kind of scene, noting that a quarto from the eighteenth century lies open
before him as he writes.
18
As if to underscore the historical character of his own writing, and thus to
convey the urgency of his engagement with childrens books, in his discussion
of puzzlepictures benjamin makes a passing reference to tests, by which he
means the vocational aptitude tests and, more generally, the socalled psy
chotechnical tests of his own era that would assume an important place in The
Work of Art in the Age of its Technological reproducibility, especially in the two
earliest versions of that essay. Whereas for benjamin the puzzlepictures in eigh
teenth and nineteenthcentury anschauungsbcher (roughly perceptionprim
ers) resemble a masquerade in which words unsystematically take on the ap
pearance of things as if putting on costumes for performances whose tech
niques of play children might learn to imitate, in the systematized tests of his day
similar pictures served as diagnostic tools and models for action in kinds of work
that aimed precisely to replace the inventions and transformations of play with
the acquisition of habit and a capacity for uniform, repetitive action.
in the artwork essay, benjamin compares what he calls the test performance
of the flm actor, which takes place in front of the apparatus of the camera, to a
performance produced in a mechanized test, as in the testing of workers in
preparation for (and indeed, as benjamin argues, in the process of) mechanized
labor. in a passage that drew especially strong criticism from benjamins friend
and Frankfurt school colleague, the philosopher Theodor Adorno (19031969),
who raised the concern that benjamin had protected himself by elevating the
feared object with a kind of inverse taboo,
19
benjamin proposes that the flm ac
tor should be seen as taking revenge on behalf of the majority of citydwellers,
[who] throughout the workday in offces and factories have to relinquish their
humanity in the face of the apparatus. in the evening, he asserts, these same
masses fll the cinemas to witness the flm actor taking revenge on their behalf
not only by asserting his humanity (or what appears to them as such) against the
apparatus, but by placing that apparatus in the service of his triumph.
20
it hardly needs saying that, as an illustrated article, benjamins 1926 essay
on childrens books has something in common with the works that are its sub
ject. The frst page of the article as it appeared in die literarische Welt also makes
vivid another aspect of benjamins writing about images, namely his insistence,
in One-Way street (written 192326, published 1928), that the ubiquity of
advertisements on display in the publications and public spaces of twentieth
century cities should be recognized not only as a symptom but also as an agent
of the transformation of the those spaces and of the kinds of writing, reading,
and viewing that take place within them.
21
Thus it is striking to see, in the
context of benjamins essay, how a large illustrated advertisement for picture
books (bilderbcher) takes up its placewith a brigade of soldiers standing at
19. Adorno, letter to benjamin of 18 march 1936, in Adorno and benjamin, the complete correspon-
dence, ed. and trans. Nicholas Walker (cambridge, mass.: Harvard university Press, 1999), 130.
20. see benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological reproducibility: second version, in
the Work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility, 31.
21. see benjamin, One-Way street, in selected Writings, vol. 1, ed. marcus bullock and michael W. Jen
nings (cambridge, mass.: Harvard university Press, 1996), 444487.
illusory barrier of the books surface and passes through colored textures and
brightly painted partitions to enter a stage on which the fairy tale lives.
15

Although this description of the effects of reading and viewing picture books
differs from the formulations in Dream kitschbenjamin alludes here to Daoist
concepts that informed classical chinese landscape painting, in which clouds
fgure prominentlyit is worth taking note of a similarity enclosed within that
difference. crucial in both cases is the transformation of the reader and viewer,
who changes shape in response to what he reads and sees. in Dream kitsch,
the result is a new kind of furnished human being outftted with things encoun
tered in kitsch (or rather things that come out to greet human beings from within
kitsch), while in A glimpse into the World of childrens books it is a child who
becomes a cloud and enters the pages of the book, and who, suffused with the
riotous colors of the books world of pictures, perhaps in turn can pass into
the things depicted on its pages.
in the 1926 essay on childrens books, one of several benjamin wrote on the
subject, the childs tactile and more broadly bodily experience of the book
emerges as a key concern. children know the pictures in Abc books like their
own pockets; they have turned them inside out, without neglecting the smallest
thread or piece of cloth.
16
This tactile approach to acquiring knowledge of pic
tures and what they represent extends to childrens pleasure in setting the
scenes of pullout books in motion, and to their inclination to complete simple
black and white woodengraving illustrations by scribbling on them. Writing in
1790, Friedrich Justin bertuch (17471822), a pioneering fgure in childrens
book publishing, emphasized that his bilderbuch fr Kinder (17901830) should
be put to use by children as more than mere reading or viewing material: The
child should be allowed free rein in handling it, as with a toy; he should draw
pictures in it at any time, he should color it; yes, with the teachers permission,
even be allowed to cut out the pictures and paste them on carton lids.
17
Twice in his essay benjamin makes explicit his felt connection to children
whose learning to write about pictures in words coincides with their playing at
scribbling on pictures in books. First he offers an invidious comparison of his
own writing about childrens books with the books themselves: for those few
people who as childrenor even as collectorshave had the great good fortune
to come into possession of magic books or puzzle books, all of the foregoing
will have paled in comparison. A few lines later he describes the moment of the
composition of A glimpse into the World of childrens books as precisely
15. benjamin, A glimpse into the World of childrens books, 226.
16. ibid., 227.
17. Friedrich Justin bertuch, Plan, Ankndigung, und vorbericht des Werks, in bilderbuch fr Kinder
(Weimar and gotha, 1790), 3, cited in Te Heesen, the World in a box, 5859. cutting pictures out of
books and mounting them in new locations (on bedroom walls, in scrapbooks, or, as bertuch suggests,
on individual pieces of cardboard) is a practice benjamin addressed elsewhere in his writings, and one
which can be understood as a precursor to practices of avantgarde montage in the visual arts of the
1920s, and, in a different sense, to benjamins own attempts to invent a new mode of history writing in
his unfnished Passagenwerk (arcades project; 192740). see benjamin, chambermaids romances of
the Past century, in the Work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility, 245, and the arcades
Project, trans. Howard eiland and kevin mclaughlin (cambridge, mass.: Harvard university Press, 1999).
18. benjamin, A glimpse into the World of childrens books, 231.
250 251
as the only socialist party to hold absolute power in a major european capital,
Austrian social Democracy combined its traditional orientation towards bildung
with the project of municipal socialism by turning vienna into a showplace of so
cial Democratic institutions designed to transform workingclass citizens into
socialized humanity by a politics of pedagogy.
24
committed to the implemen
tation of a socialist bildungspolitik and its aim of creating a neuer mensch (new
human being) in the form of the socialized citizen, as head of the Housing and
Allotment garden Association (siedlungs und kleingartenverband) Neurath be
gan in 1923 to incorporate didactic public exhibitions into his work in planning
and administration. He described his frst experiment in exhibition design as fol
lows: real, completely furnished houses were built on the square in front of the
town hall. A selection of vegetables was exhibited and large charts displayed the
achievements of the Association.
25
installed as the museum of Housing and city
Planning (museum fr siedlung und stdtebau) at Parkring 12 in central vienna,
the project that began as the housing and gardening exhibition was reorganized
in late 1924 as the museum of society and economy with Neurath as its director.
The museum of society and economy, which Neurath after his emigration to
england in 1940 referred to as the museum of social sciences or the social
and economic museum,
26
opened offcially on 1 January 1925 with the aim of
educating the public and especially the working class in contemporary sociolo
gy, political economy, and related felds. Foundedlike the citys hundreds of
newly built kindergartens, playgrounds, health centres, and so forthas an in
stitution designed to beneft the masses by providing general social educa
tion, the museum of society and economy was oriented to the specifc histori
cal experience of its public. When a viennese citizen enters this museum, he
fnds refected there his problems, his past, his futurehimself.
27
At the muse
um, it was Neuraths ambition to develop media for the communication of socio
economic knowledge and data about social life that would allow even passersby
to acquaint themselves with the latest social and economic facts at a glance.
28

To that end, and in line with his maxim, Words Divide: Pictures unite,
29
Neurath
and his coworkers at the museum developed what came in 1928 to be called the
vienna method of Picturestatistics (bildstatistik; see fgure 5). At the museum,
the vienna method was put to use as a system for making the mass phenomena
(massenerscheinungen) of contemporary lifeincluding ordinarily invisible so
tween the logical positivist philosophy (or antiphilosophy) of the vienna circle and the modernist de
sign of the Dessau bauhaus, see Peter galison, Aufbau/bauhaus: logical Positivism and Architectural
modernism, critical inquiry 16 (summer 1990): 709752.
24. Anson rabinbach, the crisis of austrian socialism: from red vienna to the civil War (19271934)
(chicago: university of chicago Press, 1983), 7.
25 otto Neurath, quoted in Otto neurath: Philosophy, 62.
26 Neurath, From HieroglyPHics to isoTyPes, intro. Paul rotha, future books, vol. 3 (london,
1946), 97, passim (http://fulltable.com/iso/is03.htm). social and economic museum is the term used,
for example, in Neurath, empiricism and sociology.
27. Neurath, empiricism and sociology, 221.
28. Neurath, quoted in Otto neurath: Philosophy, 65. see also Neurath, From HieroglyPHics to iso
TyPes, 97. on the emphasis placed by the vienna method on making pictures to be taken in at the
frst glance, see Neurath, empiricism and sociology, 223, where he writes: A picture that has still fur
ther information to give at the fourth and ffth glance is, from the point of view of the vienna school, to
be rejected as unsuitable.
29. Neurath, From HieroglyPHics to isoTyPes, 100. see also Neurath, empiricism and sociology,
assembly before an offcer mounted on a rearing horsein relation to the
reproductions from nineteenthcentruy childrens books elsewhere on the page.
in an August 1929 radio broadcast on the topic of childrens literature, ben
jamin announces that the extraordinary relevance to the current situation that all
experiments in anschauungsunterricht possess, stems from the fact that a new,
standardized, and wordless signsystem seems to be emerging in the most var
ied felds of presentday lifein transportation, art, statistics. At precisely this
point a pedagogical problem touches on a comprehensive cultural one that can
be summed up in the slogan: up with the sign and down with the word! Perhaps
we shall soon see picture books that introduce children to the new sign lan
guage of transport or even statistics.
22
Although he does not mention the marx
ist philosopher and member of the vienna circle of logical positivists otto Neur
ath (18821945) by name, benjamins remarks in the 1929 radio broadcast call to
mind the contemporary experiments in exhibition design and the presentation of
statistical data in graphic form that were launched by Neurath in his capacity as
founding director of the museum of society and economy (gesellschafts und
Wirtschaftsmuseum), which opened in vienna in 1925. born in vienna, Neurath
studied sociology and political economy in berlin and served as president of the
central economic Administration (Zentralwirtschaftsamt) that was charged with
planning a program of total socialization during the shortlived bavarian soviet
republic (rterepublik) in munich in the spring of 1919. Following the fall of the
soviet republic in may of that year, Neurath was arrested for his participation in
the revolutionary government, convicted of treason, and sentenced to eighteen
months incarceration. Thanks to the intervention of otto bauer, who was at the
time Austrian Foreign secretary, Neurath was released on bail in June 1919, and
in 1920 he joined the social Democratic administration in vienna (commonly
known as red vienna in the period 19191934) as general secretary of the re
search institute for social economy (Forschungsinstitut fr gemeinwirtschaft), a
post from which he soon came to focus his energies on questions of housing
and city planning, and on the settlement or cooperative housing movement
(siedlerbewegung) in particular.
education reform and bildungspolitik broadly conceived were central to the
political philosophy and administrative planning of the socalled Austromarxists
in red vienna.
23
As historian Anson rabinbach has written, during in the 1920s,
22. benjamin, childrens literature, in selected Writings, vol. 2, 251 (translation slightly modifed). De
spite his use of the Pestalozzian term anschauungsunterricht, benjamin does not mention Pestalozzi or
his followers in childrens literature but refers instead to childrens books published by Johann Amos
comenius (15921670), Johann bernhard basedow (17231790), and Friedrich Johann Justin bertuch
(17471822), for all of whom the appeal of illustrated books to childrens faculties of sensory perception
was crucial. see Te Heesen, the World in a box, 310, 4261, passim, for an historical analysis of mate
rial and theoretical aspects of the the work of comenius, basedow, bertuch and others that is especially
relevant to benjamins approach to childrens literature, in particular concerning concepts of use and
play. For benjamin on Pestalozzi, see his 1932 text, Pestalozzi in yverdon, which emphasizes the ex
perimental character of Pestalozzis educational projects, and which also points to the central place of
the hand in his pedagogical theory and practice, in benjamin, ber Kinder, jugend und erziehung, ed.
gnther busch (Frankfurt am main: suhrkamp, 1970), 117120.
23. on Neuraths time in munich, see Nancy cartwright, Jordi cat, lola Fleck and Thomas e. uebel,
Otto neurath: Philosophy between science and Politics (cambridge: cambridge university Press, 1996),
4356, and Neurath, empiricism and sociology, ed. marie Neurath and robert s. cohen (boston: D. re
idel, 1973), 1829. on his role in bildungspolitik in red vienna, see ibid., 5660. on the connections be
252 253
manent main exhibition in December 1927, Neurath sought at once to evolve
a theoretical framework for visual education and to deploy a range of media, in
cluding largescale statistical charts assembled using colored paper cutouts of
pictorial symbols, threedimensional models composed of innovative technical
materials, lantern slides, photographs, flm strips, and diagrammatic flms, each
medium put to use in line with its unique educational characteristics and ac
Fig. 5 otto Neurath and gerd Arntz, die bunte Welt. mengenbilder fr die jugend (vienna: Artur Wolf,
1929), front cover. cotsen childrens library, european 20 1993, Department of rare books and special
collections, Princeton university.
die bunte Welt, p. 19.
otto Neurath and gerd Arntz, gesellschaft und Wirtschaft. bildstatistisches elementarwerk des gesell-
schafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Wien, verffentlichungen des gesellschafts und Wirtschaftmuse
ums (leipzig: bibliographisches institut, 1930), front cover.
otto Neurath and gerd Arntz, bildstatistik nach Wiener methode in der schule (leipzig: Deutscher ver
lag fr Jugend und volk, 1933), n.p.
bildstatistik nach Wiener methode in der schule, n.p.

Fig. 6 otto Neurath and gerd Arntz, die bunte Welt. mengenbilder fr die jugend (vienna: Artur Wolf,
1929), title page. cotsen childrens library, european 20 1993, Department of rare books and special
collections, Princeton university.
die bunte Welt, p. 43.
die bunte Welt, p. 35.
die bunte Welt, pp. 89.
33. Neurath, From HieroglyPHics to isoTyPes, 98100. on the museums exhibition rooms as de
signed by Frank, see empiricism and sociology, 216; on Neuraths concept of humanization, see ibid.,
227248.
cial, political, and economic processsescomprehensible by means of new, cod
ifed systems of graphic representation, structured by a picture language with its
own precise grammar and lexicon of symbols. modern man receives a large
part of his knowledge through pictorial impressions, Neurath explained, illustra
tions, lantern slides, flms. The daily newspaper disseminates more and more
pictures every day. graphic representations and statistics should be made in
such a way that they are not only correct but also fascinating, asserts Neurath
in a formulation that recalls ernsts description of the fascination he experi
enced when looking at the lehrmittelkatalog in 1919.
30
The modern advertise
ment will show us the way!, he announced with a forthrightness akin to that of
benjamins aphoristic pronouncements on advertising in One-Way street. For
Neurath, following the lead, and revising the aims, of the modern advertise
ment would involve planning exhibitions in which pictures presented as a new
kind of hieroglyphic writing would serve as the base for a new sort of educa
tion, and, eventually, a new international language.
31

convinced that visual education leads to internationalisation much more than
word education does, Neurath saw the vienna method of Picturestatistics,
which he later renamed the isoTyPe system,
32
as an historically specifc im
provement on the picture languages that appeared in the context of european
picture books in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in particular the mul
tilingual Orbis sensualium Pictus (composed 165054; published 1658) of Jo
hann Amos comenius (15921670) and the elementarwerk (1774) of Johann
bernhard basedow (17231790), which were also key documents for benjamin.
collaborating closely with marie reidemeister (later marie Neurath; 18981986),
who as head of the Department of Transformation (Abteilung fr Transformation)
was responsible for a dimension of the Picturestatistics method in which
knowledge and data were assembled in order to make them available for presen
tation in visual form; with the german artist gerd Arntz (19011988), who
designed the signs and drew the pictures that made up the graphic fgures of
the pages and wall charts of Picturestatistics themselves; and with the
viennese architect Josef Frank (18851967), who designed the rooms in the
New city Hall (Neues rathaus) in which the museum inaugurated its new per
217, where the phrase is formatted Words divide, pictures unite.
30. Neurath, empiricism and sociology, 214.
31. Neurath, quoted in Nader vossoughian, The museum in the Age of its mechanical reproducibility:
otto Neurath and the museum of society and economy in vienna, in european modernism and the infor-
mation society, ed. W. boyd rayward (burlington, vermont: Ashgate, 2008), 242244; and Neurath, in-
ternational Picture language: the first rules of isOtyPe, Psyche miniatures, general series No. 83 (lon
don: kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1936), 9, 13. see also Neurath, empiricism and sociology, 214217.
32. on visual education and internationalization, see Neurath, empiricism and sociology, 247. in the
mid1930sby which time red vienna had come to an end with the Austrian civil War and the forced
removal of the viennese social Democrats from power in February 1934 and Neurath was living in exile
in The Haguehe renamed the system of Picturestatistics isoTyPe on the suggestion of his col
league and future wife marie reidemeister (18981986), who, as marie Neurath, would go on to publish
childrens books and promote the isotype method under the auspices of the isotype institute in england.
in biology, isotype designates a type or form of plant or animal common to different regions; as a name
for what Neurath and reidemeister envisioned as a universal nonphonetic symbolic helping language for
the purposes of pedagogy, effcient communication, humanization, and internationalization, isoTyPe
took on related meanings. This new means of visual communication, wrote Neurath, is called isotype,
taken from the initials of international system of of Typographic Picture education; the word may
also be translated always using the same types. (Neurath, From HieroglyPHics to isoTyPes, 98).
254 255
pieces could be arranged in different ways. This scrapbook was my frst library
and i liked its strange shape and colour. Among the books in his fathers library
that Neurath spent time looking at long before [he] could read was the atlas
intended to accompany Alexander von Humboldts famous cosmos [184558];
illustrated periodicals he looked through when he was allowed to accompany his
father to the coffeehouses in vienna also served as teaching tools in Neuraths
early childhood visual education.
36
He describes having had a particular fondness
for pictures that did not use perspective, a predilection that prefgures the codif
cation of nonperspectival drawing in the vienna method. orthodox perspective
is antisymbolic he writes, and puts the onlooker in a privileged position.
Any picture in perspective fxes the point from which you look. i liked any method
which allowed me to use things of the same size, whether they were near or
far away.
37
in a formulation that recalls both bertuchs and benjamins emphasis
on the tactile and more broadly participatory aspect of childrens reading and
looking, Neurath concluded there were two currents in my visual career: the
one mainly apperceptivelooking at pictures in books or at paintings; the other
mainly active and concerned with combinationsputting together little
shinies and pasting them in my scrapbook.
38
opened in 1891, the kunsthistorisches museum in vienna made the deepest
impression on Neurath, who describes his special fascination with the muse
ums egyptian rooms, where the walls were covered with egyptian wall paint
ings which greatly pleased me because i could understand every detail, whether
they told of the daily life of the egyptians or of battles and victories. [] every
thing was arranged without any attempt at perspective; the only aim was to con
vey a clear impression of the situation. elsewhere in the museum, Neurath ad
mired the beautifully shaped greek vases with their fne scenes in black, white
and red, but they seemed only to provide information by chance; their true
role, it seemed to him, was merely to be beautiful. in the museums greek and
roman rooms, everything, however beautiful, seemed remote, extraordinary,
detached from my everyday lifenot close to me as were the egyptian wall
paintings.
39
Neuraths experience of the egyptian tomb paintings mounted on
the walls of the kunsthistorisches museum activates the mode of looking
benjamin attributes to kitsch at the same time as it invokes the structural princi
ples of the techniques developed in the vienna method of Picturestatistics.
When i look at isotype pictures today, he writes, i feel again much as i did
when i used to look at egyptian wall paintings. but here is no pageantry for the
dead! it is for the people of every kind throughout the world, whatever way of
life they may accept, whatever creed they may profess or reject, whatever their
colour, whatever language they speak. This is pageantry for the living!
40
37. ibid.
38. ibid., 95.
39. ibid., 96.
40. ibid., 100.

The text on the following pages is reprinted by permission of the publisher from the Work of art in the
age of its technological reproducibility, and Other Writings on media, by Walter benjamin, pp. 236239,
cambridge, mass.: The belknap Press of Harvard university Press, copyright 2008 by the President
and Fellows of Harvard college. graphic design by carolyn yerkes, y2 Design, New york.
cording to the larger combinatory logic of the museums technological systems
of display. Together, the museums experimental, interdisciplinary approach to
the use of modern media and its commitment to socialist pedagogy constituted
an attempt to effect the humanisation of knowledge through the eye.
33
in addi
tion to presenting exhibitions in vienna (in its own rooms as well as in other pub
lic administration offces and schools) and elsewhere around the world (includ
ing Dsseldorf, berlin, chicago, london, Zagreb and moscow, the last an out
post of the museum established as a central institute for pictorial statistics,
called isostat in 1931), the museum of society and economy produced books,
including what Neurath described as the museums great picture book gesell-
schaft und Wirtschaft (1930; see fgure 5).
34
its title echoing that of basedows
classic elementarwerk (1774), gesellschaft und Wirtschaft: bildstatisches elemen-
tarwerk des gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Wien was a portfolio of
one hundred charts published unbound in a folder so that individual pages
would be readily accessible for use as graspable teaching tools or as elements in
a classroom or exhibition display.
The approach to design and pedagogy manifested in die bunte Welt (The
colourful World; 1929; see fgures 5 and 6), a childrens book published by the
museum in time to be purchased as a christmas gift in 1928, corresponds close
ly to the model of contemporary anschauungsunterricht described by benjamin
in his radio broadcast about childrens literature in August 1929. The pages of
die bunte Welt are flled with pictures, charts, and concise textual entries on
contemporary agriculture and industry around the world; on the social and
political relations among nations, regions, and peoples; and on the historical
and economic determinants of those relations. An advertisement for the book
that appeared in 1931 presents the die bunte Welt as a new Orbis Pictus,
a reference that reaches back to comenius at the same time as it invokes the
many other new and newest versions of his work that had been published
since the eighteenth century. The advertisement continues with a promotional
pitch that represents as fully realized the sort of pedagogical transformation
about which benjamin and Neurath always only spoke prospectively: How
many? curious children ask their parents; for to todays youth statistics are as
selfevident as technology was to those of an earlier age. Here the answer is
at the fngertips of one and all.
35
Neurath traced the origins of his interest in visual education to his own child
hood experiences. When i was about four years old, he wrote in a text that
was intended to become part of his unfnished visual Autobiography, i was
given a scrapbook. i started by flling the pages very slowly with little shinies,
in slight relief and often stencilled, representing ships, animals, plants, human
beings, and even little scenes. i was much attracted by the idea that these isolated
34. Neurath, international Picture language, 110; empiricism and sociology, 216217, 222223. on
Neuraths unfnished autobiography, on which he was at work at the time of his death in 1945,
see empiricism and sociology, 459.
35. Advertisement for die bunte Welt (1929) in mrchen und sagen aus aller Welt (vienna: Artur Wolf,
1931), quoted in Friedrich c. Heller, die bunte Welt: handbuch zurm knstlerisch illustrierten Kinderbuch
in Wien, 18901938 (vienna: christian brandsttter, 2008), 324.
36. Neurath, From HieroglyPHics to isoTyPes, 93.
258 259
end of flling time, for i really must pull off a book of considerable length, other
wise ill be even more deeply despised than i am now. one does not quite know
whether the robber is halfway down a path or the narrator halfway through a
story. but as long as we get back to this later its all right for the future to re
main unknown, because now weve got a form of repetition that gives us access
to it. What should remain is not remembrance but the difference between re
membering and forgetting, the difference condensed in this formula. Thus, what
remains becomes the starting point for diversity, for an openness towards the
new, and the ability to be taken by surprise. This one path leads him to another
that would not exist without timeand so the robber moves on.
What propels him is forgetting, or at least the insight that you cannot return
to a past that no longer exists. Forgetting is not notremembering, but just
serves the end of flling time. you remember that you remember, but you forget
that youve forgotten. The capacity of forgetting quite clearly surpasses that of
remembering, since what is possible is of much greater dimensions than what is
presently real, which, by the way, is itself part of what is possible. And so you
make sure that forgetting remains latent. Then you have time to remain in com
mand of this robber story. it is the stimulus of a movement that loses its contin
uation in the course of movements and replaces its subject matter with time. by
not suppressing forgetting in order to remember, this movement actually pro
motes forgetting. or to put it more accurately, it is a form of synchronizing re
membering and forgetting, which is in itself potentially paradoxical, and certainly
pleases the robber.
He gave such a vulnerable impression. He resembled the leaf that a little boy
strikes down from its branch with a stick, because its singularity makes it con
spicuous. in other words, he invited persecution. And then he developed a love
for all that. Well hear more of these matters in the following chapter. Again, this
is the best way of extending forgetting. For it neither erases remembrance nor
creates absence. rather, it promises surplus information, allowing us for now to
forget everything but this trace, which seems not only to enable us to draw on
information but also unleashes abilities capable of multiplying presence and pro
cessing new information.
you might also say the robber has become increasingly abstract and retains
his form precisely by doing so. Whats crucial is the way in which his personal
motions become almost like a sleepwalkers, and are then seized by a movement
that seems to be summoning him. it is as if his mirror image took on a life of its
own, became independent, and then took up its place in the mirror again, and so
enacts a double movement. in between, a zero point, a deferral, keeps surfacing,
preparing a shift of gravitation along different paths.
Though this is not a hesitation between different paths. rather, it is the halluci
natory retrieval of a labyrinth of time that incessantly branches and rebranches
yet without it having to develop a separate realm of the imaginary or of transcen
dence. This socalled persecution signifed for him the resurrection of a sunken
world: his own, we mean to say, which, in his opinion, required animation. mere
ly by occupying, concerning themselves with him, people understood him. For
now he possesses both a surface and a depth, and so reaches a peculiar original
And then the robber robbed stories by constantly reading those little popular
novels and fashioning purely original tales from the contents, laughing all the
while. Now he has a past! Though not because he has preserved what is past, for
he has changed into something that never existed as such. The fact that the rob
ber exists means there is transference. Possibly his spirit is developing into an
italy full of pines or something is shooting out lightninglike from his presence of
mind. The totality of what he is able to do is effectively his soul: the construction
of the exhilaration of his inner life, which dawns on him before his very eyes.
His dimension is contingency. A situation may be given, but not perforce, and
it may be quite different under different circumstances. All the same, the rob
bers potentiality has nothing random about it; on the contrary, he proceeds
quite selectively. starting from specifc situations, he must prove himself despite
and because of their differences, using them as a resource while reactivating his
presence of mind each time: The robber had once, on invitation, given a public
account of his life till then, and his listeners followed these exceptionally charm
ing observations with, it seemed, the greatest interest. its quite possible this
evening lecture shook him up, as it were, and that something dozing within him
was jolted alive. He had been dead, one might say, for a long time. His friends
pitied him and pitied themselves for feeling pity on his behalf. but now some
thing within him had woken up, it was as if morning had dawned in his interior.
yet well surely get back to this later is the formula with which robert Wals
er presents his robber. We fully intend to return in particular to this incident, for
we wish to show him as he is, just this once, with all his faws. Though it is
highly questionable whether this will ever succeed. Preoccupation with the rob
ber is marked by a constant lack of knowledge. yet this is conducive to dealing
with the problem, which is precisely not about increasing knowledge. given the
insurmountable lack of knowledge, people persecute him, to help him learn
how to live. And this is a relationship that can be extended.
As a matter of fact, Walsers formula establishes a memory of transference,
whichalbeit spatially organizedmoves in time. Within it the robber came to
a house that was no longer present, or to say it better, to an old house that had
been demolished on account of its age and now no longer stood there, inas
much as it had ceased to make itself noticed. He came, then, in short, to a place
where, in former days, a house had stood. These detours im making serve the
KINdred sOul
eVa meyer
260 261
this now comes the following confession: rathenau and the robber were per
sonally acquainted. The one scarcely worth mentioning had met the one later
to become minister quite accidentally at Potsdamer Platz in berlin amidst a
ceaseless stream of pedestrians and vehicles and was invited to pay him a visit.
And now he stands there before this supremely affecting notice, which, as it
were, had something extremely joyous and greek about it, something of the viv
idness of ancient sagas. For while outside, off in germany, an intellectual heros
time has expired, and inside things are endlessly and randomly synchronized,
the memory and legend of a timeless contemporary emerges. And this is nothing
else but the most discreet writing and we hope to meet with understanding
in this regard.
so understand that what has so far only existed as a possibility is now turning
into a power. The robber is not a metaphor for the writer robert Walser, even if
the narrator is in danger of confusing himself with himin any case, he and i
are two different things, and naturally, we refuse to feel responsible for such ex
travagancies but are merely calling attention to the strained state of his wits. yet
there can be no defnite criterion for separating them, when the robber robs the
narrator of his speech because the latter can only remain in command of his story
by interrupting it. but then this allows him to preserve the traces of an indirect
origin when entering into a direct relationship with the robber. even if the one
and the other seem to be the same person, who robs himself under two different
names, this person is not adding another possibility to the one at hand. For now a
difference of possibility arises that introduces a third, new thing. it is precisely
because we do not know anything about it that it can be introduced as a playful
element, not an accidental product but an accidentproducing mechanism that
makes the unsuitable in all this suitability its resource. This is why Walsers for
mula implies the difference of a free indirect speech that keeps everyone at a dis
tance. Though it is precisely by doing so that it keeps recharging itself.
so all those facing the diffcult task of stepping, like a traveller changing
trains, from one sort of situation, one sort of home, into a very different sort of
situation and home because they have undergone a change of cars, as it were,
with regard to their disposition, their way of thinking, will stand in their
surroundings with all the more selfassurance, the more they remain strangers
in them: our certitudes must never stiffen or theyll snap. A true certitude of
manner and in ones sense of the world requires a constant, slight fex and
wobble. The ground beneath our feet may and must rise and sink, and to keep
advancing toward perfection we must constantly feel we have not yet fnished
with ourselves and no doubt never will. And then its like this: on our own
native soil and sod, in our own homes, its more diffcult for us to develop.
sometimes a place where we do not belong in the usual sense is where we
best belong, precisely since we didnt grow up there. We learn the meaning
of movement, transplantation, cultivation, selfimprovement and overcome freely
and indirectly the standstill of paradox that becomes the medium of cognition
and no longer of recognition.
At the bottom of this distinction lies another one, which, like the robber,
is eminently adaptable and possesses a certain inborn need for equilibrium.
immanence that is not to be considered the opposite of transcendence. even if
the unknown is hidden at a depth, this is the depth of the only real world. Which
is why it is accessible via the surface where people unknown to each other meet,
mix, separate, and in the process both absorb and create the robber.
you do not ask what his intentions might be, whether his propositions should
be believed or not. you understand him by occupying yourself with him, for nat
urally this does him good. Possibly you were just blocking his way a little,
thats all, but even so, this was perhaps still something, was perhaps a great
deal, for obstacles, after all, can move, animate, exalt us. yet this does not mean
anything substantial; he is not speaking of peoples belief in Heaven, not at all.
The robber requires neither hope nor belief. He requires a possession, and this
he had. its not an accident that it all begins with: edith loves him. more on this
later, for his possession is not about contents but about relationships, and
hence about love, since we are richer for it.
edith loves himthis possibility of existence is at the very beginning of our
robber story: the possibility of a singularity not just noticed but also distinctively
loveable. it is the prelude to a formula of deferral meanwhile familiar, which is in
troduced here as a sign of clairvoyance when, in the robber, it crystallizes the
temporal image of transferences striving to and fro and up and down. on a later
occasion we shall elucidate, illuminate this. much in these pages will strike the
reader as mysterious, which we, so to speak, hope, for if everything lay spread
wide open to understanding, the contents of these lines would make you yawn
instead of following their command. Depending on the forms of synchronization
valid for the robber, time, too, can take on different forms, though these de
pend, in turn, on the mobility of their combinations. This mobility is all the more
independent, the more it is devoid of any kind of empathy. Which is why it dis
plays a manner that is neither real nor imaginary. it lies at the boundary between
the two and refers to a truly hallucinatory faculty.
but its best we say nothing. or well say it later. surely this manner is not so
much a spatial movement but rather an affective one. but time goes beyond even
these individual spiritual changes or affective movements in order to speak in the
style of past eras or rather in a modern mode. so its not about action or reac
tion, or about interaction or refection. Did he deserve persecution? Did he him
self know? yes, he knew this, he felt it, suspected. This knowledge strayed, then
it returned to him, it shattered, and its pieces slipped neatly back into place. And
we can watch his legend emerge in the process: And now to rathenau.
What a difference there is between this lad of ours and a rinaldini, who, of
course, in his day, no doubt split open the heads of hundreds of good citizens,
sapped the wealth from the wealthy and caused it to beneft the poor. What an
idealist he must have been. All our homegrown hero did was to kill, say, in the
viennese caf where a Hungarian band was playing, the peace of mind of a
lovely girl seated at the window, with the piercing beam of his innocent eyes and
with magnetic telepathy.
Now, just let somebody try to make sense out of that: on the one hand, a
coffeecup episode and on the other a major current event of historical signif
cance, for a placard had informed our robber of rathenaus murder and to
262 263
great masses of discomfort ill have to meet and contend with later.
This will certainly not be the call of a nation. The kind of community one
joins with the robber will never coincide with society, because his interventions
do not follow a given structure, but play the card of time, the time towards
which he is moving. Whenever he goes out on the street, he immediately starts
falling in love with something or someone. yet when he is at home, occupied
with some task that requires intelligence, all this infatuation with the world
and man is agreeably remote. but his prayers and laughter, his yelps of joy and
jeers, came all at the same time.
so can forgetting be learned after all? And how might that be arranged?
To do so, wouldnt one need new forms of repetition that allow for greater uni
versality and hence for more multiplicity, just like the idiosyncrasy of the robber?
As said, this isnt at all about erasing remembrance, because only a simultane
ous expansion of remembrance can extend forgetting. i regularly know, in
the morning, nothing of my nocturnal cognitions. in the morning i think new
thoughts. but what is said so nonchalantly has to glow with concentration, be
cause thats the only way to make a successful escape forward, surviving from
one sentence to the next.
but perhaps ill postpone this a short while longer. Though ive been making
good headway. but the interruption, i trust, will not prevent me from showing
subsequent enthusiasm for the very same theme. in order to continue you have
to be a true titan of procrastination, because then things burst lighteninglike
from your presence of mind. Forgive me if i only now, like a tardy tot, remem
ber that one theme exists only as the possibility of another, because, like love, it
can never be determined directly. isnt it true that were always at our kindest
when there are questions within us we cannot answer with certainty? Are we
the most beautiful, the most worthy of notice, when contradictions, struggles of
the soul, noble feelings of anxiety are refected in our conduct? Are we truest in
confusion, clearest in fog, surest in uncertainty?
even if we doubt whether this is the right word, theres nothing that keeps us
from speaking here of a reactive attention by which the robber fnds ways of
constantly correcting his own behaviour in selferasing sentences. since what
happens to him concerns him only halfway, he retains only that part of each
event that is not exhausted by it, in other words, that part of the inexhaustible
possibility that causes his clairvoyance. And to our surprise we realize that no
single occurrence has a single meaning here, since theres never a limiting con
cept intervening. As if his subservience were the only thing alive, the robber
doesnt take it too seriously. rather he transfers itconverts it into extraordinary,
elusive moments of the appearance of a presence that always remains immersed
in the thought of something utterly remote.
Though its true, i regard the indefnite, depending on the circumstances, as
auspicious. For how am i to know what sort of welcome edith will offer us in the
event of our attempting a timid knock at her door? After all, it might well occur
to her to slam the door on our, that is, my and my robbers nose, perhaps saying
to us: get lost both of you. And you have no idea how strange id fnd it to
hear him entreating her. i him her, there you are!
Within the multiplicity of the changeable he grabs the wrong or right opportuni
ties and must put up with the following speech: Arent you almost rather some
what too nice and kind to all these people who play perhaps quite unscrupulous
ly with the generosities that dwell within you, and have you never considered
that you might fnd some more worthwhile occupation than merely plunging into
the seas of good manners? Apparently you like to bathe in the bath of polite
ness, but might this agreeable pastime not bring you inner rifts? viewed
through the lens of this behaviour, one does not get around to passing any real
judgement on you. No one knows who you really are. Do you yourself still not
know what you want in life, your raison dtre? With your obligingness, extend
ed to the point of vanishing, you believe youre able to properly appreciate cir
cumstances, but why dont you go out into the world? Perhaps you will fnd
work there, for, after all, you wish for nothing but to work, thats all that matters
to you, any connoisseur of faces, such as myself, can see this at once. The rob
bers soul is a surface tension in which different incompatible forces counteract.
Absorbed in external demands, he seems to be an agency of transmutations.
He aptly transforms the demands that are in the air into acts of assistance and
service. His standards for forms fnd their ideal in the vanishing of form. He
is so episodic that you never know what will happen next.
Through his head raced the thought that he had once, years earlier, on the
occasion of a railroad journey in the middle of the night, said in an, as it were,
expresstrain manner to a woman travelling with him: im on my way to milan.
Precisely in this way he now thought with lighteningswift rapidity of the choco
late bars you can buy in grocery shops. children like to eat them, and he too,
our monsieur robber, still enjoyed consuming this comestible from time to time,
as though the love of chocolate bars and the like were among the duties implicit
in the rank of robber. but what kind of label is this, how is his life being brand
ed? Formerly he had pilfered numerous landscape impressions. certainly a
curious sort of profession. He also incidentally purloined affections. more will be
said of this at some point later.
yet now a reference to the resort town magglingen, which is situated a thou
sand meters above sea level reminds the robber of Walther rathenau, who
once told him that he, too, was acquainted with the place, but had found it rather
drowsy. As for me i encountered in magglingen quite a number of French offcers
in mufti. This was shortly before the outbreak of our not yet forgotten great War,
and all these young gentlemen who sought and doubtless also found relaxation
high up in the blossoming meads were obliged to follow the call of their nation.
yet whatever can you mean? This is how you interrupt a speech that, at
another time, might continue like this: Perhaps one is of great use with ones
uselessness, dearest madam, for havent quite various forms of usefulness,
in the past, proven harmful? Wouldnt one need to invent a realm at midlevel
for someone like the robber who is the sort you can do what you like with
because he is full of equanimity, which is often confused with apathy, lack of
interest? The countless reproaches made to him because of this have become,
as it were, a bed on which i repose, which is possibly a great injustice on my
part, but i told myself, i best make myself comfortable, for who knows what
264
NOtes ON CONtrIbutOrs
franco Berardi (aka bifo) is a writer and mediactivist based in bo
logna. His many books include felix (2001) and skizomedia (2006).
Brigid doherty teaches the history of modern and contemporary
art and aesthetic theory at Princeton university. Among her recent
publications is an edited volume of Walter benjamins writings, the
Work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility and Oth-
er Writings on media (2008).
anselm franke is the artistic director of extra city center for con
temporary Art in Antwerp. He is currently completing a PhD in vi
sual cultures / centre for research Architecture at goldsmiths,
university of london.
Tom holert is an art historian and critic who lives in berlin and
teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts, vienna. His next book, regie-
ren im bildraum (governing in imagespace), will appear in fall
2008.
maurizio lazzarato is a Parisbased sociologist and social theorist
and a member of the editorial group of the journal multitudes.
angela melitopoulos, artist in the timebased arts, realizes video
essays, installations, documentaries and sound pieces. Her work
focuses on migration, memory and mnemonic processes in video
narratives. www.videophilosophy.de
eva meyer is a writer and flmmaker based in berlin. Her latest
flms she might belong to you (2007) and mein gedchtnis
beobachtet mich (2008) were made in collaboration with eran
schaerf. Forthcoming books include What does the veil know? and
frei und indirekt.
hila peleg is a curator based in berlin. she is currently a PhD can
didate in curatorial knowledge / visual cultures, goldsmiths, uni
versity of london. she directed the flm a crime against art (2007).
avi pitchon is a writer, multidisciplinary artist/performer and a cu
rator based in london. He is currently writing a book about israeli
counterculture in the 80s and 90s.
roee rosen is an artist and writer. He now teaches art and art his
tory at bezalel Academy of Art, Jerusalem. Among his controver
sial novels are sweet sweat (2001) and Ziona (2007).
renata salecl is senior researcher at the institute of criminology
of the university of ljubljana; centennial Professor at the london
school of economics; and a regular visiting professor at cardozo
school of law, New york. she is the author of several books, most
recently On anxiety (2004).
florian schneider is a flmmaker, writer and activist based in mu
nich. He teaches art theory at kit in Trondheim and is advising re
searcher at the Jan van eyck Academie, maastricht.
michael Taussig is Professor of Anthropology at columbia univer
sity. His many infuential books include mimesis and alterity
(1992), my cocaine museum (2004), and Walter benjamins grave
(2006).
anne-mie van kerckhovens art combines computerbased work
with drawings, text, sound, video or painting, and assembles these
elements in multimedia installations. Her work connects different
knowledge systems, explores the areas of the unconscious, and
looks at moral aberrations or the obscene from a female point of
view.
Barbara Visser has worked as an artist in brussels and amsterdam
since 1991 and has taught at various european art and design insti
tutes. Her work has been exhibited internationally since 1993.
Professors Johan wagemans and gry dydewalle are affliated
with the laboratory for experimental Psychology at the catholic
university of leuven.
eyal weizman is a writer and architect based in london. He is
the director of the centre for research Architecture at goldsmiths
college, university of london. His publications include hollow
land (2007) and a civilian Occupation (2003).
managing editor
stephen haswell Todd
Translators
arianna Bove
(italian english)
stephen haswell Todd
(French english)
Cathy kerkoff-saxon & wilfried prantner
(german english)
michael meert
(Dutch english)
The indefnite is a lack of accord and yes, quite a lot depends upon the workings
of circumstance. given the right circumstances: what important words these
are. They must be made a necessity, for it is given the right circumstances that a
lack of accord becomes visible as a community. And edith thinks: i chased him
away, and now hes gone to a respected author and told him everything, and
now the two of them are composing and writing about me with combined ef
forts and i am powerless to defend myself and there is no one to stand up for
me. but the most horrid part, for edith, in this whole story is that he loves me
and is robbing me like this out of pure affection and veneration, and the whole
world knows everything about me. yet this thought is included in a more power
ful context, for meanwhile time is discharging:
The closetogether houses of this lovely city became frst dark with clouds,
then bright with sun, and carriages were pulled by horses, the tram cleared its
throat, that is, whirled past and rattled and spat, and cars drove by, and little
boys began to play, and mothers held their little sons or sprites by the hand, and
gentlemen were off to a card game, and girlfriends confded to one another the
newest events of an interestprovoking nature, and all was motion and life, peo
ple went away, others arrived by foot or train, one was carrying a picture all care
fully wrapped up, another a ladder, another an actual sofa, you might have let
yourself be cosily carried off on it, on the outskirts picnickers revelled, and in
town the church towered up above the houses, like a watchman urging the pres
ervation of unity and love, or like a tall young woman moved by impulses of true
familial earnestness, for eternally young are the moments in which one feels life
to be in earnest, feels that it turns green, smiles and bleeds, and that belief is the
frst of all things, and that it becomes, perhaps, after years in which little or noth
ing is believed in, the last as well, and that it is connected to the development of
buds, and that frst and last, commencement and cessation, are inseparable.
When outer appearance and intercourse remain totally insignifcant, their to
and fro, their up and down achieve an immediate identity between world and
soul. Neither signifed nor signifying, this identity remains unspoken. yet in its in
terruption, the robber emerges, a kindred soul, who is both critical and involved.
Translated from the german by cathy kerkhoffsaxon and Wilfried Prantner. All quotations are from robert Walser,
the robber, tr. susan bernofsky [lincoln: university of Nebraska Press, 2007]. The translation has occasionally
been modifed.
PrINCIPle
hoPe
daydreaming
THe region
edIted bY
adam Budak and
NiNA mNTmANN
CONteNts
adaM budak
v//|///C o///
nina MnTMann
/^///^/ //C//
/ /'/^//^/ /^//^/v/'
lOCAl hIstOrIes ANd
theIr resONANCes
MarCo de MiCheliS and
franCo rella in ConverSaTion
' / v///^|/^/ // /^/'/
gianni PeTTena
/ |/o^/ '/||//
//C^/ ^// ////C^/ |'/
'/// //^/
gianni PeTTena and Mirko zardini
in ConverSaTion
'|ov//'/v/ /////'
uqbar foundaTion
//// ///'/'/// // /^|/^
hOPe ANd Other PrINCIPles
reGIONAlIsM ANd Its CrItIQue
SiMon CriTChley
/ ////' / / '|///// ////
bernd hPPauf
//C//' ^// ////'
'/^/' / / v///^|/^/
//C//^//'/ ^// ///' o/'
///'/ / //
Suzana MilevSka
/ // ^// ////^// /
/ /^/^//C/ / //C//^/ /////
ChriSTian PhiliPP Mller
338 '/^/ /////v|'
alan Colquhoun
346 //C//^//'/
luCy r. liPPard
358 o/// o///C // //^/
JudiTh buTler &
gayaTri ChakravorTy SPivak
'//C' / /^//'^/
363 /^/C|^C/ ////' o///C//C
ayreen anaSTaS, rene gabri and
nina MnTMann in ConverSaTion
368 /// /^/' v' |/ /^/'
eurOPe ANd Its rAMIfICAtIONs
JoChen beCker
368 ^' /|C ^/
T.J. deMoS
385 /|/// / ^//'
erden koSova
392 // /`//^//
396 //' / ///o|/'
270 271
VeNturING beYONd
adam Budak
the daydream can furnish inspirations which do not require interpreting, but working out,
it builds castles in the air as blueprints too, and not always just fctitious ones.
ernst bloch
As much as the exhibition Principle Hope, this chapter of the companion book, bearing the
same title and complemented by the subtitle daydreaming the region, strives to delineate
a horizon of sustainable futures in a sequence of narratives that unfold the problematic of the
local, the vernacular, the national, the regional and the european, and maneuver through
these terms critical variations.
educated hope (after bloch) and critical regionalism (after Frampton) operate as twin
concepts that on the one hand provide a strategy of double mediation in dealing with forma
tive aspects of identity politics, and on the other, they contain a mobilizing act of forward
thinking which sets up foundations of sustainable desire. They act as the agents of resistance
towards uniformed structures of global operations and concentrate on tracing the particulari
ties and idiosyncrasies of places and selves. critical regionalism is actively engaged in a
process of placemaking and cultivating the site through layering and digging into its own
familiar and estranged tissues, while educated hope is concerned with temporalities as a
critical mediator of the present which aspires to the future. Thus as instruments of not-yet,
combining processbased practice and a formative act of subjectivity, critical regionalism and
its methodology, and educated hope and its phenomenology, construct a laboratory of a
placetocome and a temporalitytobeexpected. As an item found amongst all humanitys suf
ferings in Pandoras box, hope is both a futile delusion and a wish to counterbalance evil.
A paradox lies at the heart of critical regionalism too, where a defamiliarizing approach and
alienating stylistic twists sharpen the perception of the vernacular and of the ordinary.
Daydream, this phantasmagoria of awakening, is a habitat where they reside and operate.
Whilst outlining the horizon of a better future, ernst bloch writes:
everybodys life is pervaded by daydreams: one part of this is just stale, even enervating
escapism, even booty for swindlers, but another part is provocative, is not content just
to accept the bad which exists, does not accept renunciation. This other part has hoping at its
core, and is teachable. it can be extricated from the unregulated daydream and from its sly
misuse, can be activated undimmed.
1
Daydreaming through its working of hope reactivates regionalist thinking and its critical
awareness of vernacularity and a politics of belonging. As such, it bears a power to sustain
critical regionalisms role as a fulcrum of a potentially resistant culture.
2
Daydream is a vehicle
for venturing beyond.
3
it includes a wishful element [] which possibly diverts and fatigues
us, or which possibly also activates and galvanizes us towards the goal of a better life.
4

Daydreams, bloch continues, always come from a feeling of something lacking and they want
to stop it, they are all dreams of a better life.
5

The essays gathered in this chapter cover daydreaming areas of hope, regionalism and
europe and critically respond to conditions of belonging, and to the vernacular of current
geopolitical and sociocultural agendas.
The introductory chapter, local Histories and their resonances, provides a frame and
a context for this companions attempt to elaborate the useful vocabulary of the regionalist and
the transregional, as part of the hopebased anticipatory thinking of identity formation.
vernacular in Transit, a conversation between marco de michelis and Franco rella, highlights
the peculiarities of a particular place and it focuses on mapping the potential of the town
of rovereto, the Athens of the Trentino region, as a dynamic site of overlapped borders and
temporalities. And it is especially timely: the pace of peoples lives, according to rella, is
missing in kenneth Framptons elaboration of critical regionalism and in a discourse on
the contemporary city in general. gianni Pettenas essay, The urban structurelegal and
illegal useself Therapy zooms out the perspective on the changing city by highlighting crea
tive methods of reacquiring the urban environment. Written in the early 1970s, this manifesto
from the cofounder of the radical Architecture movement, and the author of lanarchitetto
(1973), still sounds fresh and valid, especially in its insistence on perceiving the public sphere
as an area of negotiation and of an ongoing transfer of values and ownerships. Pettenas
conversation with mirko Zardini further recalls and refers to these subversive components
typical of the discourse of legality in the (mainly American) urban contexts of the 1970s and of
Pettenas practice, which existed at the blurred border between art, architecture and environ
mental activism. unfortunately, they no longer belong to contemporary approaches to and
treatments of urban space. The authors mourn the decline of the radical architectural thought
and daydream a return to the roots in order to deliver a sustainable testimony to current
cultural processes. radical imaginations of regional and transregional origin constitute the
substance of uqbar Foundations artistic contribution to the companion book, Fiori inesistenti
in Natura. The artists unfold a visual narrative, combining scientifc references and mythological
sources, as well artistic quotations jammed with ecological / environmental concerns.
They construct a seemingly utopian platform where diverse temporalities coalesce, inspired
by the stage designs of Fortunato Depero, who used to experiment with notions of simultaneity
in theatre. revisiting the legacy of futurism, uqbar Foundation continues its investigations
into imagined futures and collective desires, which form an essential part of its ongoing
research into the ontology of progress and visionary knowledge.
The following chapter, Hope and other Principles, portrays the phenomenology of a
guiding principle and a venturing beyond of its own horizon towards the possibilities of poten
tial fctions and imaginary constructs. The opening essay, simon critchleys The Politics of
the supreme Fiction, is an outline of political rituals that request the suspense of disbelief and
the presence of illusion. in the spirit of rousseau the author defnes the realms of politics,
law and religion that are inhabited by fctions. The term supreme fction, which is appropriated
from a poem by Wallace stevens, is used to emphasize the critical potential of poetry and
subsequently to link poetry with politics. The supreme fction is based upon a fnal belief: to
believe in a fction, which you know to be a fction, there being nothing else. However
the author fails to identify the possibility that a supreme fction could operate in the world of
politics as a tool around which politics might organize itself and a people might become a peo
ple. bernd Hppaufs essay, regions and centers. spaces of the vernacular: regionalism
and ernst blochs Philosophy of Hope, advocates an unexpected return to a discourse of the
regional and introduces new aspects: the german notion of a hometown and its vernacular.
272 273
The vernacular constitutes an essential layer of blochs elaboration
of hope as a principle that guides our lives and infuences our
perception of spatiotemporal coordinates. Defned as heimat, the
vernacular is an imagined space of promise, a land to come and
as such is rooted in the anticipatory function of thinking. it embodies
a space of the not yet, the main area of operation of blochs concept
of hope. it is a state of mind whose constituency includes both a
strong sense of belonging and a genuine need for the freedom to leave.
A similar oscillation between a utopian belief in complete belonging
and the potential of not belonging has been identifed as a characteris
tic feature of such a disjunctive identity as the regional one by
suzana milevska in her essay The Hope and Potentiality of the Para
digm of regional identity. regionalism is perceived as the dangerous
supplement to national identity, capable of deconstructing
an insuffcient paradigm and shaking the homogenous and stable
frames of regions, as economic, social and cultural constructs. in his
artistic contribution, space rendezvous, christian Philipp mller
returns with a tribute to one of the distinguished artistic minds of the
Trentino region and rovereto in particular, Fortunato Depero (1892
1960), coauthor of the manifesto Futurist reconstruction of the
universe (1915). inspired by Deperos 1936 foat (carro allegorico) for
manifattura Tabacchi (one of roveretos manifesta venues)which,
in keeping with the artistic ideals of the futurist movement, resembled
a cross between a tank and folkloristic allegoriesmller takes the
likewise futuristic 1975 space rendezvous as a model for his
manifesta foat. The artists companion book contribution depicts
a particular daydream and it focuses on contrasting private and local
histories with global mechanisms and political powers: mirror images
of Deperos encounter with America are juxtaposed with detailed
diagrams of the Apollosoyuz Test Project vehicle that was used to
transfer cosmonauts and astronauts.
regionalism and its critique collects essays that approach the
notion of regionalism, and critical regionalism in particular, in a
confrontational way, as a means of embracing the contradictions of
local identities. The essays function as tool to comprehend context
related practices, but also propose possible strategies to cope
with the sociopolitical situation of the postnational and stateless.
Alan colquhoun conducts a constructive critique of this phenomenon
in his essays regionalism i and regionalism ii. After diagnosing
regionalism as a hybrid concept, critically immersed in discourses on
historicism, eclecticism and nationalism and rooted in classicism
and the avantgardes of the 1920s, the author focuses on the relation
ship between regionalism and the conditions of late capitalism. He
welcomes Alexander Tzonis and liane lefaivres concept of critical re
gionalism as an architectural theory that saved the concept of
1 ernst bloch, the Principle
of hope, vol. 1, trans. Neville
Plaice, stephen Plaice
and Paul knight (The miT
Press), 3.
2 kenneth Frampton, criti
cal regionalism revisited: re
fections on the mediatory Po
tential of built Form, in maik
en umbach and bernd Hp
pauf, eds., vernacular mod-
ernism: heimat, globalization,
and the built environment
(stanford university Press,
2005), 193.
3 bloch, Principle, 4.
4 ibid., 76.
5 ibid., 76.
regionalism from the modern movements insistence on regional architecture being authentic
by ridding it of regressive nostalgia. However, he describes critical regionalism as an im
possible project which failed to cope with the challenges of accelerated globalization. Ques
tioning regionalisms status as a theory the author identifes it as an attitude, or an object
of desire, and he concludes the essay with a call for a practice that is unconcerned with
authenticity and able to envisage stable, public meanings. lucy r. lippard shares Framptons
critical arrieregarde position, and in her essay beyond being in Place (a revised version
of the essay being in Place from her seminal book the lure of the local), she further
elaborates the notion of the local and its covert potential for resistance. she also examines
the notion of place as a subjective construct, and thus opposed to the concept of a geo
graphic region. lippard emphasizes the active role of community in the process of place
making, and as no community is monolithic, the main task, the author observes, is to generate
not a place but rather a plurality of places. she ends by venturing beyond with a hope for
a multicentered or decentered form of regionalism that is simultaneously a product of, and
a resistant force against, global hegemonies. Judith butler opens her conversation with gayatri
chakravorty spivak on the structures of language, politics and belonging by asking, What
state are we in when we ask questions about global states? butler draws on Hannah Arendts
notion of statelessness while approaching the nationstate via a complex interplay of belonging
and nonbelonging and focusing mainly on the possibility of constituting a nonnationalist, or
counternationalist, mode of belonging. recalling President george bushs claim that the
American national anthem can only be sung in english, butler asserts the active role of lan
guage as a category of belonging and exclusion. spivak proclaims the decline of the nation
state, as accelerated by globalizing processes, and seeks ways to reinvent the state. According
to her, critical regionalism, able to combat global capitalism, creates an option for venturing
beyond the restrictive confnes of the nationstate. The author sees a strong need for critique
and regionalism, as tools to renegotiate the nationalisms and the abstract structures of the
state, and thus to function as effective instruments for the publics interests. Ayreen Anastas
and rene gabri, in a conversation with Nina mntmann, discuss the spatial politics that
constitute the signifcant layers of their critical art practice, conducted in particular zones of
urgency such as israel, Palestine and guantanamo bay. recalling a number of projects,
amongst them camp campaign, continental drift and m* for bethlehem, Anastas and gabri
articulate their views on global versus personal mapping and on geopolitical deterritorializations
that condition modes of (national and beyondnational) belongings and identifcations.
A set of case studies constitute the content of the last chapter, europe and its
ramifcations. Jochen becker, in Ways Through the War: The African liberation of europe,
turns his attention to colonial histories and investigates some lesserknown episodes from
World War ii. He traces the presence of African soldiers, mostly compulsory recruits, and
details their contribution to the liberation of europe from fascism. The author concentrates on
the soldiers controversial representation, mainly in the works of cinema (and in particular
the italian cinema of rosselini and de sica), but also within the context of local political
debates, such as in the case of the signifcant community of moroccan soldiers in Tyrol. T.J.
Demos, in europe of the camps, perceives the contemporary europe of the schengen Agree
ment as a conficted region of divisions and contradictions. recalling tienne balibars virtual
european apartheid, Demos questions the legality of space and defnes europe as a zone
of denied access and violated human rights. He calls for a more inclusive model of citizenship,
274 275
and, in conclusion, considers a redefnition of the eu as the site of critical regionalism with
its dialectical expression as a means to negotiate global tendencies and local urges. The
perplexity of the social structures of belonging and identifcation systems in the balkan region,
and especially in Turkey, is investigated in the essay Dont explain by erden kosova. The
author strives to decode the matrix of national belonging refected in his own personal experi
ence, within his curatorial practice and in some recent examples of contemporary art from
the region. The current political climate urges kosova to elaborate a doublesided critique
of nationalism and commercialization.
The texts collected in this section of the manifesta 7 companion book elaborate scenarios
of a transitory and mediatory nature that characterize the unstable foundations of a trans
regional matrix of belonging. They reinforce the status of belonging as a fexible concept that
performs a provisional and rhizomatic model of an attachment to place. such dialectics
seem to predominate the discourse on potential structures of belonging and their crucial role
in the production of social and political space, especially the space of regionsactive agents
of resistance, diversity and difference. This intense and pregnant space is inhabited by
daydreams: daylight fantasies, unique moments when a rare animation of consciousness occurs
and a density of experience manifests itself. Here, daydreaming constitutes one of the most
energetic processes of venturing beyond the transitory areas of thought, towards unlimited
imagination and unbound social justice. Principle hope: daydreaming the region is inspired
by the peculiarities of the Trentino region, and especially by the microcosm of a town,
rovereto, the home of the futurist revolutionary Fortunato Depero and of the philosopher of
property and human rights Antonio rosmini. This section contributes to a search for a day
dreamt region, and holds out a genuine hope for the possibility of a better life and the potential
for a sustainable future.
dAYdreAM reGION:
ON POst-NAtIONAl NArrAtIVes
NiNA mNTmANN
manifesta 7 is the frst manifesta not to take place in a city but in a region, in TrentinoAlto
Adige / south Tyrol. visitors travelling to the various exhibition venues and collateral events can
physically experience the region in its breadth and scope. Historical and economic dimen
sions emerge in the different exhibition locations: the Habsburg fortress of Franzensfeste, two
postindustrial sitesex Peterlini and manifattura Tabacchiin rovereto, an abandoned
aluminium factory in bolzano and the former central post offce building in Trento. in general,
exact boundaries only rarely demarcate regions, so that views may vary as to the extent of one
and the same region. moreover, certain places may be assigned to different regions, depend
ing on whether one thinks of an economic region (a wine growing district, silicon valley
in california), a geographical region (the Alps) or the rather dubious revival, say, of a tradi
tional cultural region. regional boundaries are unspecifc, in contrast to national boundaries,
which have often been fought over and settled by wars. regions are perhaps best described
as indefnite buffer zones, somewhere between the citys communal, locally specifc
organizational pattern and the juridical ordering of the territorial state, a fexible public
sphere defying exact localization.
The concept of the region currently plays a signifcant role in various discourses for the
most part concerning the evident erosion of the nationstate. on the one hand, the region as
political structure whose most important feature is its transnationality, the fact that it is not
tied down to national borders, has given rise to a new hope. in the words of gayatri chakravorty
spivak on the critical potential of regionalism: it goes under and over nationalisms but keeps
the abstract structures of something like a state.
1
At the same time, however, there are
contrary developments. Here the region is a backwardlooking microunit representing particu
larized interests with a tendency to provincialism. Discourse is informed by concepts, such
as the authenticity of the local, that are closed to relativizing global contexts and to the ques
tioning of established values. What Arjun Appadurai refers to as minority narcissism emerges
as each ethnic minority demands its own nationwitness the rash of national identities after
the collapse of the soviet union and state socialism in eastern europe, at its most violent in
former yugoslavia. on this view, an emergent region is the nucleus of awakening nationalisms.
An inherently similar opposition informed the discussion around kenneth Framptons
famous essay Towards a critical regionalism, which investigated the potential of architecture
in the regional process of placemaking.
2
Frampton, however, presupposes that a region has
a natural unity and that its particularitiesin contrast to the abstract universalism of the
metropolisshould be preserved and furthered as a matter of responsibility towards nature
and society. Anticipating possible interpretations of his ideas, he explicitly resists the concepts
of populism and the vernacular, thus drawing attention to the contentious areas of his thesis.
What is interesting about the debate sparked by Framptons text are the opposing political
perspectives lodged in the idea of critical regionalism. if, on the one hand, it idealizes the local
276 277
mutual support, socalled new social economies that convey a new
sense of participative belonging from below.
in contrast to fctive national communities and their imaginary
relations, these communities born of necessity are regionally based.
They are in direct contact with and represent the common needs
of the people involved. The socalled new social economies have their
roots in independent, collective entrepreneurship, such as daycare
centres, housing projects, structures and counselling for the develop
ment of economic community projects, Tv stations, family holiday
camps, and so on. Participation is an important component of the idea
of belonging in the new regional social economies, whereas at the
national level belonging has a symbolic and representative character
expressing itself in performative categories that can only be acquired,
regardless of whether they are conformist or oppositional in nature.
but regional context and cohesion also play an increasingly funda
mental role in economic metacontexts. The economic geographer
Annalee saxenian, who has researched the mechanisms and effects
of the social networks in an economic region, in this case silicon
valley, stresses the advantages of regional industrial systems. Accord
ing to saxenian, an economic region is successful if the public and
private regional organizations shape and are shaped by the local cul
ture, the shared understandings and practices that unify a community
and defne everything from labour market behaviour to attitudes
toward risktaking.
6
saxenian does also speak of divided interests.
but she lays particular emphasis on a local culture, in other words an
abstract and, according to Andersons defnition, fctive and ideologi
cal value of belonging, as found in traditional nation formation. it is
thus only an apparent contradiction that the economic region equips
its frms for the global market. Hence in her next book, the new
argonauts, saxenian writes of businesses with silicon valley experi
ence that have founded successful companies abroad, which, however,
makes America richer rather than poorer, and is consequently judged
to be positive.
7
be that as it may, saxenian provides arguments for
the thesis that the ideological construct that generally constitutes be
longing for a national community can also apply to a region, if the
region adopts the mechanisms of the dominant societal form, current
ly those of neocapitalism. Thus, the collapse of the nationstate
does not automatically entail the end of nationalisms. They can be
reproduced in regions, as many parts of eastern europe show.
but even critical regionalism starts with the dissociation of state
and nation, as spivak has pointed out independently of Framptons
concept.
8
in this light, the region bypasses the nation in the optimal
case, and hence also the danger of its ideological confguration,
nationalism, rather than confrming it. but, at the same time, it pre
serves the necessary functionalities of the state, such as redistribu
1 gayatri chakravorty spivak,
in Judith butler and spivak,
Who sings the nation-state?
(calcutta and london: seagull
books, 2007), 94.
2 kenneth Frampton,
Towards a critical regional
ism: six Points for an Archi
tecture of resistance, in Hal
Foster, ed., the anti-aesthetic:
essays on Postmodern culture
(Port Townsend, Wash.: bay
Press, 1983), 1630.
3 benedict Anderson,
imagined communities
(london: verso, 2006), 178
(frst publ. 1983).
4 boris buden, Why not:
Art and contempoary nation
alism? in minna Henriksson
and sezgin boynik, eds.,
contemporary art and nation-
alism, Prishtina institute for
contemporary Art, kosovo,
2007, 1217.
5 spivak, in butler and spiv
ak, Who sings, 76.
6 Annalee saxenian, re-
gional advantage: culture and
competition in silicon valley
and route 128 (cambridge,
mass.: Harvard university
Press, 1994), 8.
7 saxenian, the new argo-
nauts (cambridge, mass.:
Harvard university Press,
2006).
8 spivak, in butler and
spivak, Who sings, 91.
9 giorgio Agamben, the
coming community
(minneapolis: university of
minnesota Press, 1993);
Jeanluc Nancy, the inopera-
tive community (minneapolis:
university of minnesota
Press, 1991).
with the dubious aim of authenticating and glorifying the particular, it is also the vehicle for
an architecture from below, dedicated to the values of participatory democracy.
The diSSoCiaTion of naTion and STaTe
Not only the region, however, but also theoriginally relatednationstate is going through
a contradictory development just now. While the patent decline of the nationstate is sympto
matic of its diminished power, its continued existence remains a fact, no less than its new,
postsovereign roles, such as its participation in a whole range of supranational contexts and in
an emergent global society.
A closer look shows that the decline of the nationstate can be described as a dissociation
of the ideological construct of the nation from the politicalterritorial structure of the state.
in a historically ideal form of political community the two are coterminous, whereby the nation
provides the narrative component, the ideological and symbolic backup for the formation of
the state with its territorial extension and its defnition of belonging. since the publication of
benedict Andersons pioneering work imagined communities, the nation can no longer be
thought of without the fctive and ideological backdrop in the process of the formation of its
identity.
3
How does the drifting apart of state and nation manifest itself, and in what ways do the two
change? To answer the question in respect of national ideology, i would point to boris buden,
who has noted the key fact that, while nations continue to exist, they have lost their common
narrative, the narrative, for instance, of anticolonial nationalism that united the wretched of
the earth in their common interest in liberation and the hope of a common agency.
4
Thus, while the common agenda and hence the narrative of nations has been lost, the new
globalized state has become part of new communities in the form of powerful supranational
decision making structures constituting the new world order, such as the WTo or sAArc
at the economic level, NATo at the military level and the uN at the political level. The states
new responsibilities in its role as freemarket global managerial state within transnational
groups of states serve the postnational character of global capital of current neocapitalist
societal forms.
5
PoST-naTional narraTiveS of belonging
in relation to these new state formations, rather than at the level of a nation concept now,
a key concept emerges that is describable within a global framework (in this case of an unam
biguously Western stamp): competition. The narrative changes accordingly in a global con
sumer mecca. The fullblown patriotism that legitimized the historical nationstate gives way
to a narrative of competition and its values. once events, consumption and proft legitimize the
role of the state in global capitalism, belonging becomes synonymous with participation in
competition and the consumption of products.
in its global relations, the state takes on functions more typical of management, while its
social and welfare services increasingly devolve to the individual or nonstate organizations.
The effect of this cutback in welfare services on the civil population is twofold. on the one
hand, it provokes a battle for public resources and, as we know, widens the gap between rich
and poor. on the other hand, although i am aware of a potentially cynical undertone here,
new alliances develop among the civil population, such as community organizations based on
278
tion, logistics, legislature, and so forth. in order to bypass the ideological principle of the nation
and its premises, the preconditions of community and belonging in the current scenario of
unstable postnational narratives need to be redefned. The communal narrative of an emanci
patory concept of belonging must be defned in opposition to that of historical belonging,
based as it is on national identity. This new defnition of belonging is linked to the hope of a
transnational idea of participation in democratic processes. but how can new, postnational
forms of belonging be established? They would have to develop independently of the mecha
nisms of national identity formation, informed by Nancys and Agambens models for an
antiessentialist belonging without belonging and an inoperative community that resists
populist ends.
9
Platforms are necessary that facilitate participation in public spaces and that
reject the branded structures of the globalized state with its neoliberal agenda and manage
ment functions. Herein lies the hope of a new critical regionalism, a hope that can harbour, like
a daydream, the potential of ernst blochs anticipatory desire. This region would replace
theas sonic youth once referred to the usA in an album titledaydream nation, a mass of
daydreamers shutting out reality. yet if the daydream nation simply becomes a daydream
region, then the hope has failed.
The Principle Hope: Daydreaming the region section of this companion book unites
interest in current developments in the region as a spatial, cultural and political construct with
the principle of hope as formulated by ernst bloch. Adopting different foci with respect to
the methods, perspectives and goals of regionalism and the principle of hope, the authors
discuss current implications of nationalism, postnational identity formation, the vernacular,
community and belonging, architecture, political movements and activism, as well as the colo
nial history of europe.
lOCAl
hisTories
AND THeir
reSonanCeS
280 281
the VerNACulAr IN trANsIt
a ConVersaTion BeTween marCo
De micHelis AND FrANco rellA
franco rella Defning the identity of rovereto is diffcult, as is defning the identity of any
place, thing, event, or person. identity is something that persists through change and is a part
of that change. it is also a relationship in itself and with the other, that other that refuses to
be reduced to the same. Finally it is experience, experience that at times resists being concep
tualized and asks in some way to be made into a story, or better, a tale. As you know, i
grew up in rovereto and live there still today. i am neither a historian nor urban planner or
sociologist. i can only add my story to the other stories.
i witnessed the identity crisis which rovereto underwent during the 1950s, 60s and 70s.
rovereto was the most important industrial centre in the province and for this reason it had
maintained a signifcant cultural and social role. The city could be experienced, and i myself
experienced it, as a place through which energy moved and cultural forces passed (i remember
concerts by Arturo benedetti michelangeli in the early 60s and those of luciano berio, as
well as the effect that lucio Fontanas exhibition made on me). The concentration of economic
activity in Trento, capital city of the Autonomous Province, generated an identity crisis. it
was as if the city no longer knew how to recognize or describe itself. i still cant understand if
it has entirely regained this ability or not.
marco de michelis you say that rovereto was an industrial and cultural centre, yet a
border place.
rella A place of borders, but a border lived not in the sense of closure, but rather in the sense
of transit or opening. This was its tradition. since the eighteenth century rovereto was tied
to the silk textile industry and to german investments: the province of south Tyrol (Alto Adige
in italian), as well as Nuremberg and the rising german state. Following the silk industry
crisis in the nineteenth century, the tobacco and metal mechanics industries began to fourish.
The chamber of commerce of the italian part of south Tyrol was located in rovereto, as was
the frst seat of the italian bank cassa di risparmio.
de michelis How would you describe the relationship between Trento and rovereto?
rella rovereto has always been strongly independent from Trento, since as far back as the
time of the Princebishop,
1
an independence that was reconfrmed following the reannexation
to Austria after the congress of vienna. strongly independent and strongly antagonist.
vienna had invested in the italian south Tyrol. Think of the opening of the railway line from
verona to bolzano in 1859, which was extended as far as the brenner Pass in 1867: an
endeavor that called for modifying the course of the Adige river the following year. in particular
vienna had invested in rovereto with the opening of the tobacco factory in 1854, an enormous
intervention that changed a great deal of things over the course of a few years.
The tobacco factory employed an extraordinary number of workers, above all women.
before the First World War there were 1,800 people employed: a small city within a city (i dont
know what the the number of inhabitants was in rovereto at the time, but i doubt more than
ffteen thousand). The impact, however, was not only felt in economical terms but also at
cultural and identitymaking levels. Here we come to one of the crucial points in the problem
with identity, a point that can be expressed by the term ungleichzeitigkeit, a central theme
in the thinking of ernst bloch. identity is not closed within a topos, but also, or above all, in a
time which is a bundle of different temporalities. Workers who arrived at the factory in the
morning from surrounding towns and who returned to their towns in the evening, experienced
city time and country time simultaneously. in fact, they lived the time of a large factory and
the time of the small countryside, divided into small farms according to the Austrian land reg
ister system. it was a double existence that affected thousands of families (even my mother
worked at the factory).
The tobacco factory held a very important role for rovereto and for the entire area around
rovereto. At the end of the nineteenth century when the silk market crisis, the viennese
stock market crisis, and the grape vine disease crisis all coincided, an enormous emigration
took place which did not touch, or if it did only marginally, the surrounding towns that sup
ported the factory.
de michelis From a certain point of view could rovereto be defned as a border city?
rella im glad you brought this point up: that is, the question of borders. rovereto is situated
along the large roman road that in Julius caesars time led to the ancient province of Pannonia.
Today it is still located in part along this route. The people of rovereto have always proudly
claimed that all trains stop in rovereto. And its true. The fact that it lies along this great
thoroughfare has indeed characterized the citycompared to other similar situations such as
those which took place in the veneto regionas a small metropolis. A part of my personal
story is that my friends from the towns of valdagno or schio used to tell me that going
to rovereto was like travelling to the city. in 1906 on lake lavarone, about twenty kilometers
from rovereto, Freud wrote delusion and dream in jensens gradiva. And just a few kilom
eters from rovereto, on the shores of lake garda, such individuals as Franz kafka, Thomas
mann, carl Dallago and others resided.
Therefore, rovereto has indeed been a city of transit. it is the birth place of intellectuals
who began studying there and then later moved on. Federico Halbherr and Paolo orsi, born at
the end of the 1860s, moved from rovereto towards crete and magna grcia (southern italy
and sicily). in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries architects and artists such
as libera, Pollini, baldessari, and melotti were born in roveretoa group of individuals who
eventually came together with Depero to discuss Halbherrs, orsis and rosminis greece. its
very interesting, quite strange, that carlo belli, the theorist among this group, arrived in this
way at the spiritual in art. some of them went on to complete their studies in northern
europe, while others went to rome or Florence. Nonetheless, they all remained strongly tied
to their native city.
de michelis so this condition of transit or thoroughfare extends outwards towards vienna,
or munich, or Florence, and thus doesnt really need Trento?
rella rovereto is not a marginal place. i believe its presentday condition, although debilitated,
is still that of a place of transit or thoroughfare.
de michelis This peculiar condition of changeableness and transit does not, however, seem
to have any particular effects on the political background. rovereto remains a catholic city.
rella yes, certainly. Although today rovereto remains the city with the best electoral results
for the parties of the left in the Trento province. its only been this year that the frst and
only leftcentre senator was elected in rovereto. it is perhaps due to the history of an intense
282 283
rovereto Teatro Zandonai,
1900
rovereto Piazza rosmini,
1936
1 A Princebishop is a bishop
who is a territorial Prince of
the church on account of one
or more secular principalities,
usually preexistent titles of
nobility held concurrently with
their inherent clerical offce.
(Wikipedia.org)
cultural and political life which later, i repeat, was partially humiliated
by the industrial crisis of the 60s and 70s involving the textile and
metal mechanic sectors (Pirelli, etc). This crisis coincided with the
realization of the provinces unique autonomy and with the shift in
the direction of Trento of enormous resources, which were mainly
poured into the service industry.
de michelis When rovereto was deindustrialized, what became of
the disused industrial areas?
rella it remained an important industrial centre, but basically marginal
with respect to the service industry and, in particular, with respect
to real estate investment in the capital city where prices of homes are
similar to those in milan.
de michelis Where was the market pressure coming from?
rella it came from investments in the province. some years ago a me
dia report revealed that every province employee had sixtythree
square meters at their disposal. it also came from investments made
in the construction of university structures. The university of Trento
library was designed by a wellknown Japanese architect in a centrally
located and valuable area of the city. New industries were founded
in rovereto, but the city remained in a condition of marginality in con
trast to its original vocation. From here stems the identity crisis of
which we spoke.
de michelis When the Autonomous Province of Trento was created,
a subregional reality, the relationship between rovereto and the
capital changed.
rella rovereto was always seen as the economic and cultural heart
of the provincerovereto: the Athens of the Trentino region was a
title you could fnd in scholastic books and encyclopediasand it
found itself having to live through the shift to Trento, including a shift
of its historically institutional offces such as the chamber of com
merce and the cassa di risparmio bank.
de michelis so, what will happen to rovereto?
rella With some diffculty, rovereto is rediscovering its own identity
on the edge of this provincial economy. its identity crisisthe
incapacity to construct believable stories of itselfleads to what at
times are absurd demands such as the claim for a piece of the univer
sity in rovereto at all costs. The case of the mart (museum of modern
and contemporary Art of Trento and rovereto) is emblematic. its
located in rovereto (even though a portion remains situated in Trento)
and has had an impact on the city that still needs to be assessed.
de michelis Hence, no type of bilbao effect took place?
rella in my opinion the daily visits to museum do not seem to have
any true impact on the city. Perhaps it is because the museum is
invisible, hidden, or without direct street access that it seems not to
have experienced the identitymaking effect that similar undertakings
have had in other countries. We should also note the cessation of industrial activity, such
as that of the tobacco factory which is now defnite. Presently, there is the usual discussion
concerning reutilization and conversion of the factory into possibly another museum.
de michelis lets talk a little about the physical transformations, beginning with the more
general ones. Has this new hierarchy between Trento and rovereto provoked the creation of an
uninterrupted linear city? or have the polarities of the old urban centres remained unchanged?
rella Today, there, an uninterrupted city exists. if you follow the brenner state road that runs
between Trento and rovereto you never leave the citys limits. The polarity which existed
up until the 1950s and 60s has now almost completely disappeared. The provincial offces and
activities of the service industries in the capital have absorbed a great number of workers
and, therefore, movement continues uninterrupted in times which are faster than those large
city workers are bound to by duty.
de michelis in the same way the polarity between city and country, between country and
factory, has also dissolved.
rella yes, that too has dissolved. small plots of land are cultivated with intensive modern
techniques. Wine making is a specialized cultivation. Wine grower cooperatives gather local
production and acknowledge the quotas for individual cultivators.
de michelis When speaking of this area, may we not, nevertheless, refer to what bernardo
secchi called the diffuse city?
rella No. The small and slightly larger towns that gravitate towards rovereto for services
(e.g. banks, schools, health and cultural facilities) jealously maintain their own autonomy,
which is often nothing other than a faded ghost of their lost identity. For example, between
rovereto and mori there is a true uninterrupted city, even though mori is a municipality in
itself. To the right of the river Adige about ten or so very tiny towns are grouped together into
two or three small municipalities, and they refuse any suggestion of unifcation. it is diffcult
to consider villa lagarina an autonomous municipality instead of the portion of urban periphery
that it really is.
de michelis lets try to broaden our view for a moment. The average european city, that
which has circa one hundred thousand inhabitants, displays wellrecognizable phenomena.
For example, theres the radical transformation of relationships between centre and periphery.
What is produced is what urban planners call the sprawl, that is, a speckled but not hier
archical settled system which rises, indifferent to any standard of good architecture or any
individual need or taste, and beyond any intention of permanence other than its brief time
of use, or of any taking root in the territory in which itas if almost suddenlyappears. let
me repeat that the sprawl is no longer the periphery of european cities. The sprawl describes
an urban growth without form, an urban landscape void of centre or periphery where not only
the physical forms of the settlement, but also the forms of daily life, are radically overturned.
The onefamily home and car make up the two private cells, anonymous and serial, of this
dispersed city whose public hubs consist of large shopping malls, cineplexes, theme parks,
and airports connected to each other by vast suburban motorway systems. The sprawls
peculiar condition is the complete lack of communication existing between a public space
devoid of urbanity and a nondescript and idealized domestic space. The sprawl is understand
able when considered beyond the historical idea of periphery, i.e. of the growing decentraliza
tion of residential areas, which always presupposed a hierarchically arranged structure with
its nucleus coinciding with the city centre and its ramifcations running along the axes of radial
284 285
traffc towards the outermost areas. it has no stable morphological structure and it extends
into a territory that still encompasses preexisting fragments, such as cities and villages, farm
areas and natural landscapes: a uniformly diffused piece of dust containing settlements of
different functions, connected one to another not by the traditional rules of contiguity but by
a diffused road network allowing absolute permeability of the territory. The sprawl produces an
urban condition lacking in urbanity, as rem koolhaas has asserted. And yet it seems that
rovereto shows no similar process yet.
rella No, not yet. south of Trento a large residential complex has been constructed. To the
north a conglomeration of fnancial and business activities have been chaotically developed.
cinemas, theatres and other basic structures are still concentrated in the citys centre. A
shopping complex has recently been built along the street leading to lake garda, in the south
part of rovereto. And very recently a residential complex containing a bank and supermarket
has been developed in front of the train station. However, the majority of operations and
functions remain within the city.
de michelis The urban hierarchical system of rovereto is still characterized by a main road
along which are located public buildings such as church, town hall, theatre, museum and
other large serviceoriented facilities.
rella The structure is perhaps a bit more complicated than that due to historical stratifcations.
rovereto is skirted by large thoroughfares such as the river Adige, the state motorway, the
railway. leading out from the train station is corso rosmini, lined with trees, banks, residential
homes, and shops. in Piazza rosmini, just to the left of a stupendous pseudovenetian build
ing, there lies corso rosmini, a beautiful eighteenthcentury street where the Zandonai Theatre
is situated, next to the Palazzo dellistruzione which in turn faces the mart. To the right of
the building, in Piazza rosmini, you fnd the sixteenthcentury and medieval parts of the city
which extend up to the Town Hall, located in Piazza del Podest at the foot of the castle
housing the museum of War. beyond the railway station and larger thoroughfare streets, you
can see the mountain slopes speckled with numerous small towns. Taking into consideration
that the distances between areas are very short, what i have just described refers, nonetheless,
to the city centre. Therefore, the effect is exactly that which you mentioned: church, town
hall, theatre, museum, services.
de michelis What about the utilization and transformation of the abandoned areas? What
has happened to the factories and areas where operations were once located, for example the
industries, and which are now in disuse?
rella The textile and industrial factories located within the city have been destroyed and sub
stituted by residential buildings (such as with the case of serica in the heart of the city and
from which the sirens of midday break could once be heard) or by fnancial operations. The
former site of the Pirelli company now houses Tecnofna group of small frms. in my opinion,
there has been no real strategy in this change. instead theres been a process of reabsorption
that has left no space empty.
de michelis so, can rovereto still be considered a wealthy city?
rella yes. essentially, yes. Despite any protests or disputes, also rovereto enjoys the immense
resources of the Autonomous Province.
de michelis What about the tobacco factory, which today houses manifesta (the european
biennial of contemporary Art)? What will happen to it?
rella The factory is now shut down and discussions have begun on reutilizing this very large
and builtup area situated on the outskirts of the ancient village
of sacco (borgo sacco) and skirted by the river Adige. it is, neverthe
less, an area very near the city centre.
de michelis in this case do discussions on future use also include
cultural and educational operations?
rella Here we foresee an obsession with constructing museums,
which is perhaps typical of our times and not only of rovereto or the
Trento Province. The exPeterlini site (more than once occupied by
anarchists), which hosts a portion of the manifesta biennial, risks be
coming the fourth seat of the mart (after that of Palazzo delle Albere
in Trento, the seat in corso bettini, and the home of Depero in
rovereto), with maintenance costs that will most likely exceed those
of the bilbao museum. remember that there is already the civic
museum in rovereto, in addition to the War museum, the mart, and
the house of Depero, and work is underway for the site of a (very
modest) city picture gallery and for another city museum of a nonde
script title. Fortunately for the tobacco factory, the intention is to
develop research and production activities.
de michelis Anarchists? in the Trentino area?
rella Theres a very pugnacious group of young anarchists to which
the city reacts with a sort of distracted indulgence.
de michelis The city exists. The city changes. The territory also
changes. Have the people
of rovereto changed? What about immigration and new residents?
rella The territory changes, a mental geography changes, people
change. There is a high percentage of immigrants in the Trentino area.
many people have come from northern Africa, Albania, and more
generally from eastern europe. When i make my way home from
work each evening i pass through not only different neighborhoods
rovereto Piazza rosmini,
1942
286 287
mart were never discussed in depth. The shock would have forced the city to take an active
stand either for or against the project. but there was no shock
de michelis lets confront a slightly more general question. one of the aims of our discussion
is to refect on the notion of critical regionalism, a term that kenneth Frampton formulated
over twenty years ago. The basic feature of critical regionalism, as Frampton described it
and as the philosopher Frederic Jameson further clarifed, is that of the fulcrum of a potentially
resistant culture. like a condition of friction and chafng among the processes of trans
formation of the physical reality of a place and the reality that resists transformation. like a
strategy able to mediate the impact of universal civilization with elements derived from
the peculiarities of a particular place without being reduced to simpleminded attempts at
reviving the hypothetical forms of a lost vernacular.
rella i have a feeling that this concept of friction constitutes a step forward in respect to
kenneth Framptons article published in casabella in 1984. The crux of that essay, regression
without reaction, was a weak and unresolved point. it remained so even with the generic
reference made to Paul ricoeur and martin Heidegger. citing a passage from Heidegger on
living/dwelling while leaving aside, as Frampton suggests, the question of being, means
citing a totemic or emblematic name, and not Heidegger: a formula of little signifcance.
Nonetheless, it concerns an important text in that it reacted reasonably, on the one hand,
to the homologation of the extreme modernism of international style and, on the other hand,
to a regionalist feature truly reactionary and purely superfcial and aestheticized: a tattoo, or
mask on the face of a building, which does not contrast with international style, nor is it
an ornamentthat criminal ornament which Adolf loos wrote about. Hermann broch spoke
of a very different type of ornament that is not outward appearance, but overfullness. And,
like broch, also the great artists from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
(for example, boccioni who spoke of this idea in his diaries) thought that ornament was a
thrust of inner life and of strength towards an unexpressed that opened up to the heights of
art. ornament as a vernacular mask is a fake and neither touches the substance nor the
tension in which modern visual art dwellsa substance and tension which should also mark
out the destiny of architecture.
de michelis on the other hand, there is no simplifcation more useless than that which
opposes the idea of modernity itself and, in architecture, the idea of modernism, to that of
tradition. between these two extremes a complex and contradictory relationship develops
rather than a pure and simple opposition. you need only to think of a crucial protagonist
like Adolf loos. Although loos seemed completely extraneous to contextual themes, in reality
he was fully aware, as is demonstrated in both his defense of the vienneseism of his build
ing in michaeler Platz and in his conscious recovery of traditional forms from Alpine chalets
for one of his boldest and most mature projects, the kuhner house. However, we should
reconsider above all the dialogue between history and the present that le corbusier held at
the centre of his overall thinking on architecture: the provocatively suggested parallel between
the perfect beauty of the Parthenon and the no less perfect beauty of industrial products from
the Age of the machine; the parallel between the sculptural malleability of new materials,
such as reinforced concrete, and the solidity of traditional stone construction. Are these exam
ples enough? or shall we mention the work of Heinrich Tessenow, of Frank lloyd Wright,
of Alvar Aalto, to underline the centrality of the relationship between architecture and context,
but different language zones. i was recently struck by two young foreigners speaking to each
other in a rough italian, like a sort of mediation language between different cultures.
de michelis Where have most immigrants settled?
rella The majority reside in the historical city centre. This is the case for those worse off.
There also exists a lot of tension around fnding a permanent arrangement and competition for
obtaining homes at cutrate or discounted prices through the Trentino institute for Housing
or via the real estate market directly. These integration dynamics correspond to a rise in
confictual situations that are identitymaking in nature, even within certain groups of immi
grants. There are families where the eldest child continues to speak his or her native language,
whilst the youngest refuses to and speaks only italian.
Nonetheless, apart from claims made by the lega political party, there is no real great tension
or affiction in rovereto. Perhaps due to its original nature of being a city of transit, rovereto
seems to be very open to accepting, if not necessarily welcoming, foreigners.
de michelis Have immigrants found land to occupy in both industrial as well as agricultural sites?
rella Above all in industrial and housing sites. Agricultural networks employ workers from
the outside only during grape harvesting times. There are also cases of domestic workers and
caretakers of children and the elderly.
de michelis Weve mentioned a situation of porosity or openness with respect to the world.
if we were to defne a physical characteristic of the inhabited territory in and around rovereto,
are there be any particular features that would distinguish it?
rella rovereto is partially porous. its opening to the world was not the validation of the
modern style. of course, along corso rosmini many traces of AustroHungarian architecture
have been erased. The great vittoria Hotel, sporting a hall with a marble fountain in the
middle, was converted into warehouses for the department store uPim. Another hotel along
corso rosmini was demolished and condominiums, designed by architect luciano baldessari,
were built. The most recent housing areas, two new neighborhoods where several thousand
people live, are condominium complexes, or even what we might call row houses.
de michelis Do these two neighborhoods contain basic services, for example schools?
rella in a certain sense they are selfsuffcient. schools are located within the neighborhood
or just outside it (across the street). Theres a pharmacy and other basic facilities. These
neighborhoods have not changed the physiognomy of the city. The city grew to what it is
today by absorbing the changes without experiencing any evident shock. even mario bottas
choice to build a new museum inside a city block, and not along the street front, reinforced
the structures complete metabolization without creating the least bit of discontinuity.
de michelis The two buildings along this street were, in effect, used as two wings which
need to be traversed in order to discover the large covered square where the museum,
devoid of any true public faade, is situated.
rella A visual shock would have undoubtedly been positive for a city that, as we have seen,
retreated into itself during the 1960s. As i have said, i believe that the city does not really
experience the museum as its own. or it experiences it paradoxically, as it always has, without
awe and almost automatically. in the municipal council there is an ongoing and heated debate
on whether to eliminate the jobs of professional frefghters who are supposed to be unifed
at a province level. or the debate on the likeliness of ever creating new ultraspecialized hospital
wards, as if dealing with a clinic of a university institution. The cultural politics concerning the
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rovereto corso bettini, 1905
rovereto manifattura
Tabacchi (Tabacco Factory).
Workers, Thirties
Photo credit: Arch.bcr
mArT museo dArte
moderna e contemporanea
di Trento e rovereto
Photo credit: Archivio
Fotografco mart.
between architecture and tradition, over the entire course of twentiethcentury architecture?
The problem is of another kind. it was wellidentifed by manfredo Tafuri when he prophetically
observed that the destiny of architecture was to be deprived of any autonomous meaning
within the panorama of the contemporary metropolisthat city which today is assuming the
form of a megalopolis. simply visit any large city in Asia, for example seoul or shanghai,
where historical identity has been reduced to a grotesque caricature, indeed to a mask of
spires and pagoda rooftops crowning thousands of skyscrapers and boundless neighborhoods.
lets return to rovereto, however. For its condition of transit that we mentioned earlier,
rovereto has not developed its own peculiar vernacular, its own particular dialect of wooden
balconies with ornate fower carvings. in fact, from what you said earlier, what remains are
rather the traces of imperial vienna.
rella Partially eliminated, but real. i mentioned the former cassa di risparmio constructed in
the style of a venetian renaissance palace at the beginning of the 1900s, a tribute to the
history of rovereto, which once belonged to venetian domain. However, even this example
should not be interpreted as an example of mere dialecticism. it too belonged to a part of the
broader urban design, a work by a viennese architect, the same architect who designed the
ring of vienna. it involved a modern spirit rather than a vernacular one.
if we reconsider the question of regionalism, we fnd that another limit of Framptons essay
is to connect the concept of regionalism to topos, or place, only. While it is the question
of time that also characterizes a regional situation. We spoke of the tobacco factory as a
structure in which different temporalities cohabitated: the factorys time, or better, timetable,
and the time of the countryside. The question of time, of the unassimilable plurality of different
times, should be considered within the defnition of regionalism, especially when one tries
to read it, like i said, as a condition of friction between processes of transformation and resist
ance to this transformation. This is because tension lies not only within space and its rem
nants, but also, and perhaps above all, in the pace of peoples lives.
de michelis youre right. This is indeed one of the great questions regarding the reutilization
of historic urban structures after their functions have been changed. one thing is to have a
hotel with a stream of foreign visitors coming and going. but if you transform that building into
a bank, everything changes. As the lights of a hotel illuminate as evening approaches, those
of a bank grow dimmer. While a hotel is still full of tired and resting tourists, a bank is entering
the peak of its activities. This is what happened in most european cities. There is one case i
know very well, that of the city of graz, Austria. Today the centre of graz is just as it was ffty
years ago. The same is true for Treviso or vicenza and for many small cities in switzerland
or germany. They seem not to have changed, although in reality time has radically transformed
them. Thus, the senseor meaningof spatial relationships, between public and private
spheres, changes radically.
rella The Heimat concept, concealed in the idea of regionalism, appears to resist change, yet
it resists it in a fctitious way. A temporal release is also inevitably produced within this con
cept; a decisive thrust opening a path that either leads to modernity or towards a regression into
the past. in either case, that which appears to be heimlich (familiar or intimate), in the end
becomes das unheimliche (the uncanny): a disquieting familiarity which is, at the same time,
extraneous. it is on this border, this edge, and on this opening, that there is space for refec
tion. Das unhemliche is not a nonplace, not a place of anonymity
which renders the airports of Amsterdam, shangai, and Paris alike,
but a sort of estrangement, of atopia, of desituation in which you
might fnd yourself when, once used to a certain pace and time, you
fnd yourself in another time.
de michelis This is exactly the impression produced by todays city
centres, which become dim as evening approaches. Walking through
a historical city that is dead or asleep gives you a truly disquieting
feeling.
rella And nightfall arrives very early. in milan the galleria vittorio
emanuele is completely deserted before midnight, as is Piazza Duomo.
recently, as i was coming out of the cinema, i hailed a taxi because
it was unsettling to try getting around in a deserted city and the taxi
driver pointed out for me a group of latin Americans, perhaps
columbians, at the corner of the piazza. A menacinglooking group, he
said. Probably the same group that had murdered a taxi driver a few
days earlier. This emptiedout impression, this early urban nightfall,
is what truly produces a sense of estrangement and alienation, an oust
ing from the city.
de michelis Frampton takes up this topic in his recent essay entitled
critical regionalism: refections on the mediatory Potential of built
Form. Here he tackles the problem of the architectural buildings
modifed status that cannot be reduced to its sculptural obviousness.
We cannot consider a building as resting in an empty space, as an
anonymous and selfsuffcient entity, mainly because it exists in
relation to the place, in relation to the fows and movements running
through it, to a more complex system than that of the city. What
Frampton criticizes about the architecture of recent years is precisely
this tendency to consider a building as a sort of object, devoid of ties,
lacking in relationships with its surrounding context. i believe it is im
portant to rethink and rediscuss the complexity of the forms of life.
rella Not only important, but essential. The complexity of the
forms of life should be studied in the context of moving and displace
ment, of continuous transiting within a city (for example, in areas
inhabited by new immigrants, where the areas time and use naturally
get changed). certain streets become the dominium of chinese or
Albanian immigrants. but a temporary dominium. more than places
of settlement, they are continuous displacements. in my experience
with milan, the nocturnal emptiness of Piazza Duomo becomes, on
sunday afternoon, the height of Asians gathering in bars around
the square. The following day the area returns to the milanese. it ap
pears that cities design different zones or borders according to holiday
calendars and the hours of night and day.
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de michelis in my opinion this is one of the great holes in presentday debates on architec
ture and the city. it seems that no one is
concerned with the fact that cities do not change their physicalness but their meaning. Their
sense changes in function to the crossings and instabilities running through them.
rella cities once grew and expanded gradually, perhaps with greater acceleration when new
streets opened up or when new quarters were built. Nowadays such displacements propose a
geography that gets designed and redesigned over the course of different hours of the day,
or in different seasons of the year, due to the fact that certain groups of people abandon zones
where they once congregated and move somewhere else. A different perception of a changea
ble geography getting designed and cancelled often without leaving any traces. in the 60s
and 70s we heard about places occupied by, for example, night warriors, through the cinema
or through literature. These places had quite fxed rules and boundaries. Now this no longer
seems the case, except perhaps for the ethnically historical areas of large American cities.
de michelis but there too it is changing. if you look at large cities like london, los Angeles,
or New york, it is really striking how entire neighborhoodsim thinking of soho in New york
or camden city in london, live, during the week, according to the pace and customs, at
times even sophisticated, of a residential community. Whereas at the weekend, these same
areas are invaded by visitors from the city sprawl. And these parts of the city take on a
completely different identity with entirely autonomous behaviours and fows. in some ways
even the normal city becomes, for one day out of the week, a different city: a city of tourists.
once a week soho resembles venice, italy. in venice this happens nearly every day of the
week, while in soho it takes place only at the weekend. The same thing happens in london.
During the work week camden city is still the remnant city of a 70s punk subculture. on
saturdays and sundays it becomes a picturesque village where people go to glimpse the ves
tiges of a subculture that is no longer a threat.
milan is the same. its extremely interesting to observe how different groups of immigrants
take possession of city parks during the weekends, not only congregating in different
areas of the park but carrying out diverse practices and rituals like music, games, and sports:
simply the gathering and consolidating of the bonds of a community that has otherwise been
dispersed. The inattentiveness to these problems on behalf of planners strikes me greatly.
rella A system must be built which is not only critical but also hermeneutic and historical as
well, and one which takes into consideration these phenomena. And im not sure that Framp
tons recent reexamination of the built form thoroughly treats these problems.
de michelis No. im afraid to say that you may be disappointed by Frampton. And disappointed
by all the others as well. This applies even to rem koolhaas, who also has refected upon
the city in recent decades and has worked within transformations of unconfned violence such
as those of the Asian city. koolhaas was the frst to have investigated, with his Harvard stu
dents, the spatial practices of commerce, i.e. shopping, or the urban structure of the African
megalopolis, lagos. but a convincing refection is still wanting regarding the governance
and planning of the contemporary city, whose problems and transformations we are attempt
ing to discuss and describe here.
rella its curious because, in my opinion, some of these problems were already revealed at
the beginning of the twentieth century. im thinking of le Paysan de Paris by Aragon in which
there was a perception that the passages would change appearance throughout the different
hours of the day and night, similar to the buttes chaumont park where one gets a feeling, as
bloch described, that your gaze oscillates, and with it that which is looked at. in early twenti
ethcentury urban literature there was some perception of these temporal aspects of the
contemporary city, which today become so crucial with migration fows, with current move
ment /displacement, and with perceiving todays city as inhabited by diverse inhabitants.
one of the historical streets in rovereto where i was born and where i have my studio to
day, was called the repubblica di Zinevra to indicate a particularity, an identity, and a boundary
of an integrated cultural and innercity community. Today it is the heart of the islamic quarter.
de michelis in reference to this, it should be said that the politicalcultural forces governing
cities continue to operate in a more traditionally capitalistic way. At some point the city
empties out and loses its main functions. it flls up again, almost via osmosis, by weaker and
less stable sectors. immigration produces further degradation and its task seems to be that of
zeroing the real estate value until immigrant communities are displaced by gentrifcation
processes and the city eventually returns to a prosperous state. Half of the downtowns of
America have undergone this process. They empty out to be immediately flled up again by
Hispanic and AfroAmerican communities. When the level of degradation reaches the right
point, a new injection of fresh capital is allowed in and the poorer groups are forced to move
again, giving life to new thematized urban realities whose historically social and cultural
complexities have disappeared for good. This is what amazes me most. And within this proc
ess, what is so astonishing is that if twentiethcentury architecture truly had its own distinctive
character, it was to tackle the problems of the masses for the frst time. Never before then
had architecture dealt with lowcost housing, with city parks, underground stations, hospitals
and schools. Today architecture seems to have retired into somewhat marginal themes.
Todays wellknown architects design and plan museums, theatres, hotels and airports. The
most recent trend is the luxury condominium. such examples do not represent occasions for
critical refection on the forms of dwellings. Plans get drawn up by real estate agencies and
whats important is the buildings facade.
rella it seems to me that the exhibition curated by you and georges Teyssot, on the Domestic
Project, some twenty years ago at the milan Triennale, had shown signs of a similar tendency.
i remember that there were historical paintings on display and drawings by libeskind and
eisenman that seemed to share more with paintings than with the idea of living or dwelling,
more with an aesthetic idea than with an overall function, the latter of which seeming to be
that of the job of architects.
de michelis yes, you remember well. The problem is dramatic because, on one side you have
a statuary resistance of architecture changing. Architecture is still permanent, frmly grounded
in the soil. Their facades may be of light glass, but the buildings themselves are extremely
solid. This feature is particularly emphasized in buildings designed by great architects mainly
because architects design instantaneous monuments. beaubourg looked like a refrigerator
without a bodya machineand yet it was quickly monumentalized. Today, if we even
suggested the idea of demolishing the guggenheim museum built by gehry in bilbao, the
reactions would be the same as if we had proposed destroying the basilica of saint mark in
venice. This status of permanence doesnt change. At a technolological level nothing special
has taken place. The bridge of calatrava over the grand canal in venice is essentially no different
than the rialto bridge built fve centuries earlier. All the new virtual technologies which have
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invaded our daily life have had truly limited effects and architecture becomes ever more
brand architecture. A new terrain to which architecture has applied itself is, indeed, that of
spectacular buildings belonging to top fashion frms. After Prada by koolhaas in New york,
there followed Prada in Tokyo, designed by Herzog and de meuron, vuitton by sanaa, and
Hermes by renzo Piano. They seem almost like museums. in the end they are not that
different from museums. Whats bizarre and interesting is rather how certain contemporary
artistic practices are very attentive to the problems of impermanence which we have been dis
cussing here. in his book entitled lestetica relazionale (relational Aesthetics), Nicolas
bourriaud observes that artistic practices reveal a growing process of urbanization; however,
the city with which artists have occupied themselves over the last forty years is no longer a
city of monuments, squares, and cathedrals, but a city of peripheries and abandoned territory.
robert smithson rediscovered the abandoned caves of New Jersey. Dan graham described
the identicallooking, serial homes of America and interpreted them as minimalist serial
structures. Artists deal with the landscape. They intervene in the natural landscape in an at
tempt to assign meaning to it. in general, artists seem to prefer the most fragile of city
structures: the brazilian favela, the periphery, the nonplaces. it almost seems as if artists
have accepted the condition of immateriality, or precariousness; that which contemporary
architecture indeed fails to see.
rella schopenhauer spoke of architecture as the least of philosophical arts. Paul valry talked
of it as one of the principal arts precisely because it was capable of containing within it all
the other arts. The question, however, is whether architecture is actually able to establish a di
alogue with the other arts. The impression is that here lies the true gap. Don De lillos novel
Falling man is an extraordinary book in my opinion, dedicated to New york, a city which
has become completely invisible and indescribable: the demolished twin towers visually reap
pear in the bottles of a painting by morandi; the brilliant metaphor of a woman teaching
elderly people inficted by Alzheimers disease how to write down their memories, in spite of
the fact that they will soon forget that which they have just written; the desperate effort to
leave some trace or sign in a world that is devoid of memory. A sort of blindness and aphasia,
similar to kafkas metamorphosis, where an insect looks out from its window and at frst
is only able to see the wall in front of it, then later not even that. you no longer see anything of
the city. This sense of a time which is gradually reduced can also be seen in artistic practices.
From gesture painting to performance, there is an act that wears out and time is always a
limited time. if traces of memories can only be recorded through signsvideo, photography
which no longer belong to the performance itself, such traces of memory become another
thing, another language.
de michelis one of the most interesting performers of recent years is a young german
artist, by the name Tino sehgal, who prohibits any photographing or flming his performances.
in this way no trace survives except in the subjective memory of his spectators.
rella There is, therefore, this sense of the world, of the word, being gradually reduced. And
here the view also wears out in the tension that grows so dramatic that it touches upon the
opposite of sublime. When faced with this, architecture that has building the tallest skyscraper
as its goal is an outdated dimension of the sublime, truly eighteenthcentury and even pre
kant. enormous problems still remain unresolved.
one last consideration to make is in regards to the extent that regionalism is regression
and not reaction. Here surfaces an unanswered question that recalls both the messianism of
ernst bloch and the weak messianic force that Walter benjamin spoke of. Actually, this at
tempt to reanimate the past cannot simply be a return to the past. both bloch and benjamin
speak of a revolutionary clash in order to make this past, which has in some way disappeared,
emerge. The remnants of a vanished world cannot be made to reappear in the globalized
universe of international style, unless in a vernacular form. To go beyond dialect or nostalgia
a true clash must be produced.
This is an aspect that must be emphasized in order for progress to be made. Another
important aspect that should be considered if we are to perhaps further our discussion of today
is the question of what will happen if city fows, the mass movement or displacement in
city places, of which we have already spoke, advance towards a form of contamination? What
if the fows combine and mix, almost in the same way as in the act of coitus, so as to
generate something different?
de michelis While from an anthropological point of view this problem has been described
and interpreted in a dozen or so books that treat the matter of muslim behavior in Western cit
ies, of the rules governing the life of these communities in the suburbs of british cities; all
of which have no effect on the planning of the city.
rella its the theme of hybridization which French philosophy, for example Deleuze, has at
tempted to describe as a type of evolution different from mans. in reality it is an obvious resis
tance to this other evolution due to the fact that identity is at play. There is also resistance
to the movement towards another state, which originates in places that are protected by an
architecture that is erected like a tiny fortress in defense of the past, or in defense of a
new that is somehow confrmed even before it comes to life. Free space seems to be the
space of the periphery, of the favela, which is described by the probing anthropologist as an
exotic extraneousness, like the pueblo in the Amazon forest, incapable of communicating
with the rest of the city or bringing into play the different forms of living and dwelling.
de michelis They are two extremes: on the one hand, what koolhaas brilliantly baptized as
the generic city, materializing above all in the Asian megalopolis: a very different city from
the diffused city which secchi described by using the example of the metropolitan area
around milan. seoul has nearly twenty million inhabitants in a condition of inexorable anonym
ity, in the sense that the entire city is made of tall residential buildings and settled areas of
extremely high density, within which nothing is to be found. This is a real city: on one side the
great fragility of a brazilian favela that, nonetheless, gradually establishes itself into a normal
city, and on the other, this city, permanent in a material way, where boundaries, orientation,
and limits are no longer recognizable. in seoul, if it were not for the river which saves you,
which shows you which side of the city you are on, in what direction lies the sea, where north
and south are, there would be no way of knowing or saying where you stood.
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the urbAN struCture.
legal and illegal use.
selF THerAPy.
gianni PeTTena
(how to salvage the city environment through a creative contribution to the reclaiming
processemblematic objectsProperty and non property objects).
1
in order to be able to speak of creative methods in the reacquisition processes of the urban
environment it is necessary to put oneself in a position to distinguish two types of creativity:
one being spontaneous and daily creativity, and one which can encompass the interrelation
between the visualising forces in an urban structure and can therefore directly infuence
this interrelationship. one is a creativity which can, at the most, transgress the daily rules
(i.e. coming out from an Autogrill and using the entry door without a handle on the inside, in
stead of going all the way to the prescribed way out). The other comes from controlled
people, who rebel against this type of interrelationship of forces between one power seizing
everything and building an environment refecting its own image, which the inhabitants can
not recognize as their own.
The play of forces is, technically speaking, advantageous to a few civil servants only but
the discovery of the vulnerability of certain controlling organisms can introduce a type of
mental or physical guerilla warfare, which can be as violent as the interrelationship of forces
which have been called into play: thus the lawfulness can, indeed, become an abstract
concept to be played with or to be transgressed.
The lawfulness of certain reclaiming processes often represents the watershed between
the nuances of conceptual articulation and sincerity.
it must be noted that reclaiming and the actions involved therein, whether mental or physical
as they may be, are in fact a decision, a result springing from a careful analysis of the availability
of different degrees of freedom and their possibility of physically using a milieu and from
the awareness of the nonexistence of degrees of freedom which were neither foreseen nor
restrictive.
A decision to regain the city depends entirely on its inhabitants; saving a fringe of the
city, or another place one thousand kilometres away, it is in fact an operation which bears the
ratio of the relationship one has with ones own town.
in fact one of the most interesting phenomena in terms of a conceptual contribution to
the problem of architecture, that is to say land art, is unthinkable if it is not conceived by the
inhabitants of the city and referred, as a basic document, to the city and the citizens.
The relation between empty and built up areas, between a physical desert and a desert city,
both of them seen as natural conditions, is fundamental to establishing land art as a contri
bution to the problems of conceptualization related to operating spaces. The will to reclaim
the city structure implies a basic consideration on the exchange of opinions and city manage
ment itself. This means recognizing the city as a domestic scene, where one has chosen
to operate in order to carry out personal therapies: as an operational feld, the choice is some
what symbolic of the conditioning which has taken place or which has sprung anew as the
case may be. The choice of the place or land on which to operate. At any rate to operate in a
nonurban area implies an operation in relation to ones own decision to live in ones city. one
can operate away from the city, if this can serve the purpose of our living within the city: it
can be suffcient but not thrilling. Therefore he who regains the city has chosen to be a native
in wellcodifed situations, assuming as a given the existing urban structure in as much as a
desert is a natural fact.
The reacquisition of a city also implies a breakdown of the code of personal habits in
order to achieve impersonal habits, which can in turn be divided into legal or illegal, and this
really means permitted or nonpermitted. events of urban guerilla warfare and enforcement
of the law or democratic rule, are two differences which will be illustrated.
This plan can be put into a clearer perspective by analyzing the domestic environment:
often one tends to reclaim or to reacquire through mental processes or through physical
means suitable to its domestic milieu, in this way one does not feel the need to 1) adopt
a public environment, unless the choice is dictated by a workingin situation. He who choos
es to inhabit a loft or a barge, to use the vernacular, can scarcely sense the city as if it were
a theatrical condition for his own solo performances. or 2) the yearning to intervene in urban
space when one does not fnd his domestic expression satisfying. From this it follows:
a) a legal use of reclaiming: hiring of advertising posters, bill sticking, intervention by paint
ing a muralfresco on white walls.
b) an illegal use of the urban structure by the act of drawing objects or situations to be
symbolized or on which one can read (or understand) a different role. There is a clear cut sep
aration between the two phenomena, as this represents a distinction of the legal or illegal
use of the given structure.
To change the illegal to the legal implies reaching, through reacquisition, a degree of poetic
psychological stability. We are in fact speaking of the use of the security blanket. reacquisi
tion really means attaining the use, whether legal or illegal, of the objects which are related to
an infantile condition. it is when one sits at a table with an arm leaning on it and one hand
supporting his chin, and the middle fnger or the ring fnger in front of his lips, that he substi
tutes the allowed need which children feel for the security blanket. revealing various degrees
of conditioning, and of selfconsciousness and sincerity, is the choice of various situations, ob
jects, etc. which can in fact represent, for the chooser, a precise moment of selftherapy.
objects of property (even domestic): houses, choice of a house, house in the country, or at the
seaside, where and how. To be built, to be rented, to be renovated, to be sold, to be bought, or
to be destroyed by fre and water. boat, barge, pontoon, loft, desert, where to park campers
proper use
proper legal use
Does not release the desire of reacquisition
Degrees of consciousness
use of property structures
choice of intervention and location
Domestic environment
use and choice of
improper use
improper illegal use
reveals the desire of reacquisition
Degrees of consciousness
Non property
choice of intervention and location
Public environment
use and choice of
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volkswagen vans etc., customized cars, dragsters. A choice of objects,
to be used with illegal or legal means. The intervention into public
space can also be legal or illegal: pavements, parks, squares, streets,
cars, buses, underground trains, planes.
Amongst the facts one ought to simplify there are the interventions
of some artists and of some groups of unknown New york urchins.
Hans Haacke has carried out research and arrived at a precise analysis
of the conditions, for example, with a photograph of a building in
Harlem and after having noted the number of the inhabitants, class,
census, name of the landlord, his class and census, income from
renting the building, etc.
Though this work was rejected at Haackes one man exhibition
at the guggenheim museum in 1971, it was followed by a more exact
survey of visitors to the John Weber gallery in New york, where
Haacke, having asked the visitors precise questions by means of spe
cial cards, arrived at conclusions through data processing and an
nounced them at a following exhibition. From this data he produced
a map of New york with the relative visitors residences, etc.
This type of methodologicalsurvey reveals perhaps the most
mature manner (and nontherapeutical) for reclaiming a structure visu
alizing given conditions, but it also suggests a didactic method for
cultivating a collective creativity. other artists display a creative behav
iour within the urban space, which more or less corresponds to their
research condition, but more often than not to their selftherapeutical
research.
Therefore their intervention has a certain coarse methodological
cleverness, a technical ability which burdens the poetic element within
the framework of intervention. even if it is obvious that between an
intervention into unpolluted nature, in order to take back to New york
a document, and operating within a polluted city, but understanding
this as a natural fact, the latter case is far more acceptable: only
christo can intervene indifferently in one or the other reducing the
possibilities of both of them. in fact his intervention by wrapping up
buildings on broadway, in the West end, on the West (california)
coast, by using the same methodology and the very same language,
avoids a priori dwelling on the whereabouts.
but the most spontaneous and, at the same time, most thrilling
result in the last few years was the activity of unknown New york
street kids who covered the underground trains with large colourful
and graphically unusual letterings, and thus obtained a creative
recovery in the process of reclaiming the urban environment. This
was a most refreshing, symbolic and precise recovery.
These kids live in the slums of Harlem and Queens (New york),
where the tube depots are, and by night they carry on their secret work
and paint the various carriages covering them in letters, numbers
Text: gianni Pettena,
The urban structure
1 This article was originally
published as legalit e
illegalit in Progettare
inPi (DecemberJanuary
197374).
and battle names. Doors, windows, walls, all that is a surface, and their technique has reached
the point where they can juggle with words on the very opening of the sliding doors, so
that the reader will be kept on the alert to look out for the design or the message to be com
pleted when the doors close. They have adopted the same colours and patterns of the gar
ments, the ribboned hats and highheeled shoes worn by the Harlem playboy.
The technique has evolved from 197172 when this type of intervention was monochrome
and graphic and the wagons, the underground station, the milklorries, the school playgrounds
and central Park had already portrayed this process. Now it is an explosion of a violent chro
matic fantasy, an emotional freedom, and has an incredible emotional and optical impact.
Whilst waiting for a slow train the sudden noisy apparitions of express trains bursting from a
dark tunnel to fash through the light space of the station, are in fact group exhibitions lasting
a few seconds only.
There are large names such as HouDiNi or moses as big as a carriage, and many others
besides, with corresponding numbers and battle names, the most fantastic pseudonyms
chosen as symbols of elusiveness. There are also dialogues between these artists with a spray
gun and the superintendent of Police who has been charged with their capture: brown,
you will never catch us! And details like the small arrow painted on any seat which reads He
who sits here is a Queer, which implies either that the place has been booked or that anyone
going to sit there is a predestined victim. in practice this is one way to appropriate an entire
city by striking hard into its soul and by striking all the fowing elements in her, in a wild
fantasy of subtle all pervading games.
in April 1973, two editorials appeared simultaneously on this phenomenon, one in
Newsweek, and the other in the New york Times colour supplement. Newsweek criticized the
spreading of this by now uncontrollable phenomenon and went on to attack the mess it
involved, the illegality and the money which had already been spent in checking it: a special
police squad had been put in charge and workers regularly cleaned the trains which would
secretly be reclaimed during the night. The New york Times on the contrary interviewed the
street kids, without mentioning their names, and recounted how they worked in the depots
on a shiftbasis so as to elude the police patrol.
The subway train as a never stopping object which runs through New york 24 hours a day.
The mobile writtenon surface, which would stop for a few seconds only, is indeed an uncatch
able apparition, which can not be traded, it stops just long enough to be read then leaves again.
This is a choice, which can hardly be repeated for it is perfect in its symbolism, form and style.
The situation has quite a different aspect when the New york, boston, los Angeles,
minneapolis building fronts are painted on. in Dinky Town, minneapolis, it was the owner who
commissioned the hippies to paint on several walls. The same thing happened in los Angeles,
whilst in chicago and boston this same thing took place through the area organizations, in
a hypocritically named aesthetical requalifcation in the poorest and most squalid parts of
town. These interventions have meant nothing more than a great fantastic capacity for mural
painters, but no identifcation process related to power has come to the surface. consequently
the result is orderly and aseptic.
The walls painted by artists, on commission, in various American towns have not solved
anything nor have they communicated anything other than the state of utter dependence
of artists on their commissioners. it is much better for those who have reinvented abandoned
places, in order to reclaim them and, in the process, have founded a new language (or means
298 299
of communication) of total, formal and conceptual freedom.
The loft, originally a storehouse, is seen as a natural fact and it
is qualifed to play the role of an island where, with fotsam and jetsam,
an environment is built to beft a new condition. marine city in
sausalito bay on the other side of the golden gate, facing san
Francisco, has sprung up with the same criteria and the scrap yard
of old boats and ancient piledwellings is now a city facing the city,
antithetical and alternative to the city itself, where the urban
environment is made from scrap qualifed as building material for
acategorical buildings, an assembly of infnite forms and ways of in
habiting. When this acategorical concept of town building became
categorical the places were abandoned and nobody lives there
now but longhaired berkeley professors and television playwrights.
Another note on the recovery of domestic objects as a dialectical
means of asserting an identifcation, the customized cars which
can be divided into: 1) identifcation of symbolic models through the
fantastic transformation of the carobject. The customized car par
excellence. And, 2) the dragster, which so often contains both the
physical and the H.P. transformation. both versions are precise
choices of identifcation with the urban environment and of a dialec
tics with it.
The easy rider motorcycle is a customized car, as claustrophobia
is. This is a car seen in the same traveling exhibition, a chevrolet,
where the windows, the windscreen and the dashboard have been
sawnoff to a few centimeters and then perfectly rebuilt. The authors
clad in overalls in the same colours and with the same stars with
which they had painted the bumpers.
The dragster is for running a shrieking mile at top speed. but the
beautiful one, built as a torpedo, with front bicycle wheels seven
metres apart, is an object for rich exhibitionists only. The autodrome
is full of other things: pickup trucks with grandprix tyres and
supercharged engines, and restored grandmas cars painted in all
colours. These are the performing actors on a sunday afternoon in
the outskirts of midwest or southwest towns. These symbolic objects,
rich both in appearance and cost, symbolize a creativity limited in its
development by the unconditioned use of evening television serials
and by planned regular morning journeys from a house with a garden
to a desert of offce buildings. A different creativity altogether from
the one expressed by the anonymous New york artists, but one which
reveals a potential force waiting to be primed.
subVersIVe COMPONeNts
a ConVersaTion BeTween mirko Zardini
AND giANNi PeTTeNA
gianni pettena Have you noticed how different the pace is in America compared to europe?
mirko Zardini Well, i dont fnd North America very interesting nowadays. unlike your
experience there during the 1970s, i think there are other places of greater interest now.
pettena Also, i think the times are different, in the sense that when my generation was in their
twenties, we were bent on getting away from the rationalist schemas administered to us at
school as the perfect interpretation of the real, even if thirty years later. While with the
growing revolutions of young people in music, art, cinema, and literature, everything was
about reading things differently, in direct line with the evolution of the culture of the time.
Zardini Whereas today? id claim that today there is renewed interest in the experiences
of the 1960s.
pettena Thats true! i feel the same way.
Zardini This is interesting, but the times are very different now. The market now focuses on
this experience: also your renewed centrality, and then the rediscovery of the italian radicals.
There is a new type of focus on you that is unlike anything in the past.
pettena regarding the italian radicals, i have always felt slightly different from them. Do you
remember the work i did called io sono la spia (i am the spy)? When we had the photo taken
for the global Tools foundation in 1973, i pulled out the sign i am the spy to emphasize
the fact that i wasnt very interested in reexamining the discipline or in continuing to perpetuate
it through traditional means. At the beginning of the 60s i was studying architecture. i was
really diligent about the work for the frst year, but soon i started spending more time in
art galleries than at lessons. i used to go to Toselli in milan, to sperone in Turin, to Fabio
sargentinis Attico in rome. i visited the galleries where my contemporaries used a different
language to deal with the physical and visual world, so much so that eventually this lan
guage became my own. i didnt stop pursuing architecture, but my work involved making
architecture via artistic tools.
Zardini indeed, you were always seen, for example here in America, as an artist.
pettena yes. For example i was called an environmental artist in the book by Alan sonfst,
environmental art, published in the 1980s. At heart, i was looking for trouble, but by no
means do i regret it.
Zardini This interdisciplinary vision of yours seems right to me, one which in the 70s was pre
cisely the overlapping between art and architecture. Today, by reexamining these strategies,
it seems that in contemporary situations art has paradoxically occupied, and still occupies,
much of the traditional working space of architects. its as if there were still an architectural
insuffciency with respect to contemporary problems.
pettena The fact that in order for architects to work they have to always relate to a future
client obstructs the continuity of research, which in the end pays off. This continuity gets lost,
as does the intensity produced by it. continuity is what i have always pursued. Nowadays
i am invited to participate in various exhibitions, always and only with younger artists, also
300 301
gianni Pettena
tumbleweed catcher
(1973)
because many of these young artists relate in an ideal way to my work, almost as if recognizing
a legitimate ancestor with whom they can restart working the space. many of these artists
are former architecture students who continue to work, just as i have, in that feld. Names
such as italo Zucchi in italy and riccardo Previdi in berlin come to mind, both of whom contin
ue to work in the architectural feld but with the specifc artistic instruments of their generation.
Zardini Would you speak to me about your American works, such as the ice House, the
Tower of Weeds, and the clay House?
pettena These works were the result of an accumulation of frustration after having worked
for some time in europe. When i produced those stripes on the Arnolfo Palace in san giovanni
valdarno, it was in a situation that forced you to work in very dense contexts, stratifed by
century after century of generations and cultures. There were too many preexisting factors,
along with an everweighty presence of the past, to carve out a niche for oneself in contempo
rary terms. Therefore, my choice to work in America was intended as an opportunity to re
search those places, such as the deserts, where i thought the need to relate to the overlapping
layers of previous generations no longer existed, and where instead i could fnally work from
a tabula rasa, a blank slate. only to discover that this blank slate didnt really exist due to
the fact that the deserts were already architecture in themselves, architecture that had once
been interpreted by Native American cultures. Thus monument valley, for example, wasnt
a desert but a true valley of temples for the Navajos; mesa verde and Taos were cities; while the
hogan, in the end, was nothing more than an artifcial cave, a simple shelter like those still
made today by nomadic populations throughout the world. in this way, my work was aimed
at adopting those places as already architecture, and of those places the use of natural materials
which are provocatively transferred into the types of permanent architecture practiced by us,
i.e. architecture that violates and contaminates the environment. introducing the ice House
through the use of a natural material such as water, which during the minneapolis winters
freezes almost immediately, is to make a statement about architecture, to revive the expressive
values of natural materials, and to take a stance for construction that is less traumatic on the
environment as well as, admittedly, temporary.
Zardini What do you think about todays rediscovery of such subjects as sustainability
and nature?
pettena Architects, late as always, are referring to what bucky Fuller warned us of thirty
years ago. i cant help but think of the grass Architecture drawings i made in 1971. Those
strips of grass that are lifted up to identify a space, to construct a work of architecture. i cant
help but think of this when i see the santiago de compostela by eisenman, or the Foreign
offce Terminal at yokohama, or the House by the sea, by Future systems.
Zardini certainly. Also today when i see the proposal for all these green walls
pettena Heres the Tumbleweeds catcher (made in 1972)!
Zardini The naturalization of a building.
pettena When i made that skyscraper of bushes in salt lake city, on a conceptual level i later
found it corresponded to the works of gordon mattaclark, when he would extract pieces
of buildings ready to be demolished. even today many contemporary artists, both european
and noneuropean, take parts of residential structures, of architecture, of interiors, and repro
pose them, either by reelaborating them or not, and recrossin their own waythe same path.
Zardini Does your book, lanarchitetto, have something to do with gordon mattaclark?
pettena i wrote lanarchitetto in the months of November and December of 1972 and it was
frst published in February of 1973. i met gordon through robert
smithson, whom i had known from when he did his Asphalt rundown
at the Attico. i was pleasantly surprised when gordon and the others
formed the group Anarchitecture. There was a show of the same
name in 1974: these were things foating in the air. He had an exhibition
of his work at the sonnabend gallery at 420 West broadway, where
leo castelli and John Weber also were, and in that same place i had
exhibited my ice Houses, Tumbleweed catcher, and red line in 1972.
Zardini How did the citizens of salt lake city react to that work?
pettena When we were making the clay House, a young boy
on a bicycle stopped to ask me whether we were building something
or destroying something. i liked what he said a lot. The year prior to
this, in minneapolis, i had been working on abandoned houses,
whereas the house in salt lake city was lived in by a flmmaker who
worked at the university where i too was working as a guest. it
happened that while we were working there some neighbors called
the police. When the police arrived i told them we werent vandalizing
anything, that we had the owners permission. in fact, the owner
of the house came out to confrm this. The police replied, Well, as long
as youre happy and left.
Zardini you also pointed out the question of legality and unlawfulness
which took place in urban contexts during those years. you were
already speaking about graffti in those times and what was happening
on the east and West coasts. Do you see any similar urban opera
tions taking place today?
pettena That subversive component no longer exists. However
today you fnd true consistency for example in the works pursued by
the stalker group, in their itineraries within the network of the frayed
urban fabric, in the census, for example, of housing for nomadic
people within these fringes. They themselves told me that they knew
of my work from those years. in my article legalit e illegalit in
Progettare inPi (DecemberJanuary 197374), i analyzed all that
spontaneously took place as a modifcation of the urban structure,
from the visual explosion in the city of New york to the murals of areas
occupied by hippies, from dragsters to every manifestation of popular
language, as with the signs and tiny fags in the storefronts and
plots of used car salesmen, and las vegas itself. but i was seduced
and in love with the constructions made by hippies. i strolled about for
months taking photographs of their villages, such as the Pacifc High
school in Palo Alto, or gate Five in sausalito where, besides the
AntFarm, corso, Ferlinghetti and ginsberg had also lived. They were
incredible structures made from the wreckage of demolished boats,
homes and cars. All of this was obviously ungrammatical according to
the norms of offcial architecture, but in reality it revealed a linguistic
clarity and impeccable aesthetic taste, typical of a country where
302 303
gianni Pettena
the ice house
(1971)
gianni Pettena
the clay house
(1972)
the average education in the visual feld was greatly superior to that
of europe. These dropouts from offcial culture showed the innate, but
not yet practiced, gift that exists in all of us. All of us have this ability,
even though we do not use it and, instead, put our trust in the most
banalizing architects.
Zardini if you had to choose another place besides europe in which
to work and live, where would it be? And if today you could repeat
a similar experience to the one you had in the united states in the 70s,
where would you want it to be?
pettena in russia, or china, or india. Places where this traumatic con
tact with a growing banalization actually exists, created by the pro
gressive industrialization of those places, which could possibly allow
for something similar, even if, in my opinion, young people, including
artists, are resigned to integrating themselves, in any way possible,
with the process underway.
Zardini so the role of art is still that of critical consciousness? some
thing that architecture tends to forget?
pettena Architecture tends to forget, but it forgets only when its con
venient to do so. because, when architects fnd it necessary to cover
all the functional parts of their projects, they then draw on the world
of art, as all of the twentieth century testifes. Architecture never pre
cedes an avantgarde, but always follows it. From futurism to dada
ism, to the conceptual art of kosuth slavishly imitated in the 70s by
eisenman and Hejduk, architects are forever arriving late, after being
awakened by the jolts produced by someone else in the art feld.
Zardini you spoke earlier of the reaction young architects from the
1960s had to modernism, of this feeling of architectures insuffciency.
With respect to those times, what do you feel about the contemporary
world? What are your reactions to the condition in which we fnd
ourselves today?
pettena my feelings are quite negative. in spite of the vivacity of certain
museums, such as that by Peter cook in graz, and of certain sky
scrapers, i fnd that most rigor still comes from artists who are work
ing at the margins of the architectural profession but who are seriously
dedicated to renewing the language of architecture, as well as the
conceptual platforms which architecture conditions and pervades.
Zardini yet you refer to only a few artists. because today the art
market is truly vast and evasive
pettena yes, undoubtedly evasive of both moral and theoretical
questions. i dont look at the mediatic or commercial success of these
phenomena, but at the most innovative points of research.
Zardini Always in search of the subversive aspect of operating on
the physical space
pettena or the innovative aspect. if this innovation then takes on a
subversive value in the eyes of the common middle class, all the
better! in the sense that, if the things you do end up being mentioned with enthusiasm by a
middle class clientele, youre doing something wrong. This means that there is something con
solatory for them in what you are producing instead what you do should is disturb them.
Zardini its not worth it to go deeply into the evolution of italian architecture. What would be
interesting to me is if you could speak about yourself and your role in the 1970s.
pettena i wanted to get a degree in architecture and to enroll in the professional register of
architectsthat way i would have really scared someone. once during a public debate in salt
lake city i was asked how i had the courage to be so underprofessional. i loved this type
of reaction. but id be interested to know what your point of view on this subject is, consider
ing your position as Director of the canadian centre for Architecture.
Zardini it is essentially based on an attempt to reconstruct a new platform for discussion,
by recuperating many of the elements discussed in the 1960s and 70s: a bricolage, as usual
in which to collect pieces of the past of interest, and in my opinion the 60s and 70s were
crucial years.
pettena yes, they are very important years because they point to a direction which was
then, however, acknowledged a bit too superfcially by certain architectural research. if those
of us who started back in the 60s and 70s inherited anything from modernism, it is a moral
attitude towards the profession of architecture.
Zardini This rediscovery of the 60s and 70s cannot be reduced to an operation of sterilization
of those years.
pettena That would be to totally misunderstand them.
Zardini For this reason this subversive component of yours interests methat is, your reading
of environmental works, of natural conditions, of spontaneous illegal operations. All that has
disappeared in what now gets mentioned of the research and work of those times.
pettena more than provocationsand we did not consider them such thenthey were
desperate cries, like those of gordon mattaclark. We used to say, Why are we going in this
direction? Why dont we reexamine, from the roots, exactly what it is we should be doing
when we produce something meant to last, something that should be a testimony of the cul
tural process of our times?
Zardini i think all of this is essential for establishing a basis for discussion for the next ten
or twenty years. its something that cannot be put off.
pettena i agree. otherwise it becomes a formal exercise. Thats what happens nowadays
when technology apishly follows you: you invent the artichoke of bilbao, and you are glad to
be able to do so, because todays technology allows you to. While thirty years ago it was
impossible. Today these exploits are done for pure aesthetic pose and with them we do not
express any emotional or moral tension which indeed we should.
fIOrI INesIsteNtI IN NAturA
uqBar foundaTion
311
hOPe ANd
oTher
PriNciPles
reGIONAlIsM
and iTs
criTiQue
the POlItICs Of the suPreMe fICtION
simon CriTChley
There is a double miracle at work in politics. on the one hand, politics requires a willing
suspension of disbelief. it requires that the many believe in the fctions told to them by the few
who govern them. That is, government requires makebelieve, whether the belief is in the
divine right of kings or the quasidivinity of the people that is somehow meant to fnd expres
sion through the magic of representative government, the organ of the party, the radiant
sunlike will of the glorious leader or whatever. but, on the other hand, the extraordinary thing
about politics is that it not only requires a willing suspension of disbelief, it also receives it.
The force in any polity always lies with the many, yet somehow, for most of historywith
certain rare and usually brief, glittering, but feeting exceptionsthe many submit to the will
of the few who claim not only to be working in their interest, but to embody their collective
will. of course, it might be pointed out that political power is always possessed by the people
with the guns and sticks, usually the police and the military, and if the many dont possess
them, then they are powerless. That is, of course, incontrovertible, but it doesnt begin to
explain what we might call the fctional force whereby the many submit to the few without the
constant threat of physical violence. considered closely but disinterestedly, politics is a very
curious matter. in order to understand its operation, all we possess is history, which is what
makes the work of historians of politics so essential.
With that in mind, id like to turn briefy to edmund morgans inventing the People. the rise
of Popular sovereignty in england and america. The central theoretical category in this fasci
natingly rich historical account of the transition from monarchical to popular sovereignty in
england and America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is fction. The main con
cern of morgans book is to explain how it is that the fction of the divine right of kings gave
way to that of the sovereignty of the people. The interesting thing about this conjunction
of fctions is that whereas it is diffcult from this end of history to see the idea of the divine
right of kings as anything more than an absurdity based on the idea of the king as the visible
god, the overwhelming majority of people and politicians are attached to, or at least ventrilo
quize, some version of the idea of popular sovereignty: that all human beings are equal or
indeed created equal, that government should be by the people and for the people, that gov
ernment embodies and enacts the will of the people, blah, blah, blah. morgans point is that
historically one fction succeeds the other in the extraordinary years of the 1630s and 40s in
england and in a different but strongly related way in the American colonies in the 1760s and
70s. but, more importantly perhaps, conceptually one fction resembles the other much more
closely than we might like to imagine: god the king becomes god the people. As rousseau
writes in his discourse on Political economy, the voice of the people is indeed the voice of
god. morgan notes,
The sovereignty of the people was not a repudiation of the sovereignty of god. god re
mained the ultimate source of all governmental authority, but attention now centred on the im
mediate source, the people. Though god authorized government, He did it through the people,
and in doing so He set them above their governors.
312 313
indeed, it might be said that the fction of popular sovereignty is a more fctional fction than
divine right. A king is a visible presence with a crown and scepter and usually a large family
with expensive tastes, but where might one see the people? one can see people, but where
exactly is the people to be found? The fact that most of us might happen to believe in the
fction of popular sovereignty and the idea or ideal that legitimate government is the expression
of the will of the people, in no way diminishes its fctional status. A moments thought reveals
that it is based on a series of logical dcalages: namely, that the people are the governed,
but also the government, and that this identity of government and the governed somehow
happens through the miracle of representation, which is truly the central shibboleth of liberal
democracy. but how exactly can a few be said to represent the many? How can a particularity
speak for a generality when the latter is not actually present? of course, it cannot. What is the
case, however, is that the legitimacy of the few rests on the fction of believing that they
represent the many. At which point, a number of opposing possibilities arise: either politics
and politicians are entirely cynicaland i am not ruling that out at allor they actually believe
that they incarnate the will of their voters and the people as a whole through the magic of
representation. similarly, either the electorate believe that their politicians are a group of cynical,
selfinterested, moneygrabbing crooks or they actually believe that their will is miraculously
represented through the mechanism of the vote. one powerful option at this point is to return
to rousseaus critique of representation and to ask the question of size. in order to avoid
the magic of representation, the sovereign authority of the people can only be exercised in a
polity that is very small. As rousseau nicely points out at the end of his critique of political
representation,
All things considered, i do not see that among us the sovereign can henceforth preserve
the exercise of its rights unless the city is very small.
For rousseau, like montesquieu and voltaire, small is beautiful in the political realm as it
minimizes the gap between the sovereign legislative authority of the people and the executive
power of government. As voltaire succinctly puts it, The bigger the fatherland the less we
love it, because divided love is weaker.
in this regard, it is fascinating to consider madisons reversal of this argument from size
in the debates around federalism that found their expression in the great constitutional
convention of 1787 and subsequently in the u.s. constitution. The problem that madison
grappled with in the years following independence, was how to bring about a national govern
ment that might override the interests of the various states. madisons view was that the
vigorous and longestablished attachment of citizens to their particular states worked against
the forging of a new national identity, what morgan calls the invention of an American people.
madisons innovative solution, based explicitly on Humes ideas on government, was to pro
pose extremely large constituencies with relatively few representatives. The assumption was
that large constituencies would ensure the election of the right kind of people, namely the nat
ural aristocracy of landowning gentlemen, indeed people rather like madison and his friends.
Although this natural aristocracy eventually gave way to the capitalist plutocracy that still happily
governs the united states, it is worth recalling that this system of government is, in madisons
revealingly candid words, the only defence against the inconveniences of democracy consist
ent with the democratic form of government. representative government prevents the
inconveniences of democracy, namely the genuine sovereign authority of a people. in my opin
ion, the united states of America is the least representative of the Western democracies.
Politics, then, is a kind of magic show, where we know that the rabbit has not miraculously
appeared in the empty hat and the magicians lovely assistant has not been sawn in half, but
where we are willing to suspend disbelief and go along with the illusion. This is where
rousseau is so instructive, as he is the most fctively selfconscious of philosophers, whichever
genre he works in: the theatrical comedy of manners (narcisse), the sentimentsoaked epistolary
novel (la nouvelle hlose), the didactic treatise in moral education (emile), the quasiscientifc
hypothetical history of humanity (discourse on inequality), the creation of a sexualized
subjectivity defned and divided by intimacy (the confessions), or meditative askesis (reveries).
The concise, neargeometrical abstraction of the social contract is a political fction, the
fction of popular sovereignty understood as association without representation, which is, for
rousseauand i think he is rightthe only form of politics that can face and face down
the fact of gross inequality and the state of war. The being of politics is the act of association
without representation. This fction requires, in turn, other fctions, those of law and religion.
The fction of politics has to be underpinned by the authority of a quasidivine legislator and the
dogmas of civil religion. For rousseau, the binding of a political collectivity has to be the
selfbinding of the general will and this requires the ligature of religio. such a religion has to be
inculcated through shared beliefs, civic values and what can only be described as political
rituals, such as pledges of allegiance, national anthems, honouring the war dead, the sacred
ness of the fag, or whatever. such is the necessary armature of any theologia civilis.
so, is my conclusion simply that we cannot and should not enter into discussions of politics
without acknowledging the dimension of fction, particularly religious fction, in legitimating
political life? That would seem to be what lies behind the skeptical, rather Humean, historical
approach adopted by morgan. This approach has much to recommend it, particularly at the
level of description, diagnosis and critique of the kind we also fnd in emilio gentiles work on
the religions of politics, particularly fascism. Politics requires fctions of the sacred and rituals
of sacralization for its legitimation and these fctions need to be exposed for what they are. Any
empires new clothes need to be stripped away in order to see the old, rotting fesh of the state.
However, let me push my argument a little further and speculate. it should not be thought
that i am opposing fction to fact here, where the former is adjudged false in the face of the
latters veracity. i do not think that a general critique of political fctions is a mere sacrifce on
the altar of empiricism to the god of political realism. in my view, in the realms of politics, law
and religion there are only fctions, but i do not see this as a sign of weakness but as a signal
of possible strength. The distinction that id like to make is not between fction and fact,
but between fction and supreme fction. in saying this, i allude to Wallace stevens, and the
dim possibility of a fructive collision between poetry and politics. For stevens, poetry permits
us to see fction as fction, that is, to see the fctiveness or contingency of the world. it
reveals in his terms the idea of order which we imaginatively impose on reality. such is what
we might think of as the critical task of poetry, where i understand critique in the kantian
sense as demystifying any empiricist myth of the given and showing the radical dependency
of that which is upon the creative, ultimately imaginative, activity of the subject. more plainly
stated, the critical task of poetry is to show that the world is what you make of it. but that
does not exhaust the category of fction. Paradoxically, a supreme fction is a fction that
we know to be a fctionthere being nothing elsebut in which we nevertheless believe. For
stevens, it is a question here of fnal belief. He writes,
The fnal belief is to believe in a fction, which you know to be a fction, there being nothing
314 315
else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fction and that you believe it willingly.
As he writes elsewhere, fnal belief / must be in a fction and the hope of a supreme fction
is to furnish such fnal belief. in his most important and diffcult poem, Notes toward
a supreme Fiction, stevens attempts to articulate the conditions for a such a fction, but
only offers notes towards it, something indeed like musical notes. He writes of the supreme
fction that it is not given to us whole and readymade, but that, it is possible, possible,
possible. it must be possible.
my hope here is that we might begin to transpose this possibility from the poetical to
the political realm, or indeed to show that both poetry and politics are realms of fction and
that what we can begin to envision in their collision is the possibility of a supreme fction.
What is to be hoped for in politics is the possibility of a supreme fction, the fction of political
association, the fction of politics as such. This requires that we begin to start thinking about
politics as radical creatio ex nihilo, as bringing something into being from nothing. This is
what marx attempted in his 1843 introduction to the critique of hegels Philosophy of right
where, it seems to me, he gets close to the idea of a supreme fction. For marx, the logic
of the political subject is expressed in the words: i am nothing and i should be everything (ich
bin nichts, und ich mte alles sein). That is, beginning from a position of nothingness or
what Althusser calls total alienation, a particular group is posited as a generality, which re
quires the total alienation of this total alienation, in the act of political association. marxs
name for the supreme fction is the proletariat, which he qualifes as communist, that
is, as rigorously egalitarian. To borrow a line of thought from badiou, what is lacking at the
present time is the possibility of such a name, a supreme fction of fnal belief around which a
politics might organize itself. What is lacking is a theory and practice of the general will
understood as the supreme fction of fnal belief that would take place in the act by which a
people becomes a people. What is lacking is an understanding of how the fction of political
association requires the fctions of law and religion for its authorization and sacralization. in the
absence of a new political name, the political task is the poetic construction of a supreme
fction, what stevens also calls the fction of an absolute. such a fction would be a fction
that we know to be a fction and yet in which we believe nonetheless. All we have at the
present time are some notes towards this fction.
reGIONs ANd CeNtres
spaCes of The VernaCular:
regioNAlism AND erNsT blocHs
PhiloSoPhy of hoPe
Bernd hPPAuf
I
globalizaTion and regionS
Will the present homogenization of lifestyles, architecture and space leave room for the
indigenous and for local identifcation, given that, as Niklas luhmann puts it, spatial boundaries
make no sense for functional systems aiming at universalism?
1
recent emphasis on the
region is an attempt to respond to the pressures of worldwide uniformity. globalization is a
process that cannot be tamed. While it spells hope for many in poor regions of the world,
in europe it is associated with the fear of loss, loss of difference and identity. Antiglobalization,
there is no doubt, acts with the interests of individuals in mind and is based on ethical
positions. yet, there is a widespread feeling that its struggle was lost before it began to gather
momentum. if globalization cannot be tamed, does it leave room for countermovements?
if resistance is hopeless, can it be sidestepped? can a space be explored that denies globaliza
tion its allencompassing power and offers alternatives with the potential for withdrawal?
While the nationstate is being absorbed by the powers of globalization, the region, for a long
time believed to be the relic of a bygone past, is experiencing an unexpected return. is region
alism a mere response to globalization, a defensive rebellion comparable to the luddites
lost rebellion against the machine, or could it be freed from its position of negation and turned
into an active force? could these outoftheway places, once associated with narrowness
and sterile provincialism, be transformed into openings in the seemingly closed process of
vanishing diversity? could regions be the crack in the tight architecture of economic and cul
tural globalization, and open spaces of creativity and for the preservation of indigenous
languages? in an attempt to explore such a potential, architectural critic kenneth Frampton
has used the phrase critical regionalism.
2
This essay is an attempt to determine historical
and philosophical origins of the new discourse on region and globalization by focusing on is
sues of a specifc variant of the region, the german hometown and its vernacular.
II
CenTreS and The vernaCular
From the eighteenth century on, life in europe was centred on capitals where pervasive norms
were defned according to which the world had to live and write and paint. The history of
western european arts and literatures developed in the framework of the nationstate, and the
big city was the centre of gravity during the era of the nationstate. History, including the
history of art and literature, was made in the metropolis, which not only controlled their dis
semination but also shaped mentalities, styles of painting and performing, genres of writing.
Theories of modernity are therefore focused on the big city. They tend to operate on a mac
ro level, offering explanations of the processes of modernization through highly general
316 317
concepts. one such concept is abstraction. its principal elements are
rationalization of space, acceleration of time, and urbanization. it
constructs the world in terms of a process that over the course of time
inevitably creates uniformity and makes place and spaces immaterial.
models of modernization make the category of space appear insignif
cant in relation to time. observers have suggested that, from the
beginning of the traffc revolution, the acceleration of time conquered
space and destroyed place. The abstractness of modern existence is
interpreted as a consequence of the rule of standardized international
time independent of place, the seasons, the movements of the sun
and moon, or individuals inner sense of time. rationalized and
abstract urban life in big cities is considered the universal objective
of modernization, rendering all other forms of life anachronistic.
A second constitutive concept in theories of modernity is that of a
bourgeois, or brgerliche, society. it is broad and illdefned. many
of its theorists, such as Hegel, marx, and Adorno, defned it in terms of
its intrinsic contradictions. bourgeois/brgerlich for them was
identical with a system of antagonisms, of dividing and splitting and
a resulting anomic, to use Durkheims term, condition of society
and the individual. constructed in a framework of Hegelian dialectics,
these contradictions contribute to the process of fnally creating a
homogeneous order, eradicating opposition by marginalizing or
absorbing it. The powers of internationalism, now called globalization,
appear to be successful in marginalizing or absorbing any resistance,
including the resistance of space. The new guggenheim museum
at bilbao has been called a prime example of this tendency. in the
view of many critics, the $100 million building represents the
ongoing mcDonaldization of spanish art. The franchise ideology is
supported, Dina smith argues, by the fact that the museum is almost
completely managed by its New york branch. most of the recent
acquisitions have been works by famous American artists, with very
little indigenous spanish or basque art represented.
3
Are we experiencing a time when the specifc character of places
is irretrievably disappearing as a result of modernizing europe and
the world? The question is associated with value judgments. it gives
rise either to expressions of the triumph of modernity, or to an ani
mosity towards the culture of the bourgeoisie that defnes the
anonymous market, economic rationality and the accumulation of
capital as universal objectives and has no place for the particular and
individual. Problems emerge as soon as we leave the macro level
and focus on the particular rather than the general. There are differ
ences that resist inclusion in the paradigm, details that will not ft, and
countermovements and retardations at the margins of the european
American model. While theories of modernization construct the
world in terms of a process that over the course of time inevitably
creates uniformity and therefore leaves no room for regions, it is surprising to note that globali
zation has led to the return of space by transforming the temporal category of modernity
into a spatial framework. To be sure, global space is being emptied of its qualities and subjected
to the requirements of the time of rationalization. yet a new awareness of regional differences
of temporal orders, of the importance of space and the tension between internationalism
and places of distinct local cultures, is emerging.
modernity, its furor of change and innovation notwithstanding, may have lived off values
and images inherited from previous times for which it demonstrated little but contempt.
Among the contradictions of modernization, the one between the tendency towards economic,
fnancial, or architectural internationalism and an insistence on cultures of local and regional
identifcation was never seriously addressed. A tacit dependence on the local and concrete
appears to have been much deeper than the dominant selfimage in the name of progress to
wards abstraction would suggest. A theory of modernity capable of accommodating this
dependence might lead to a different image of modernity, its genesis, and its current condition.
critical theory has demonstrated a lack of sensitivity to the local and regional, and to spaces
of the vernacular. The binary opposition of place and internationalism could well be an over
simplifcation resulting from theoretical blindness, and a more complex theoretical framework
needs to be developed. From a different perspective, it seems that the small and local,
although hopelessly overshadowed by the gigantic creations of modernity, has been a potent
concealed force in the construction of the modern world. rather than disappearing under
the mounting pressures of globalization, space, it can be argued, has never lost its constitutive
power. The relationship between modernity and space is no longer easily identifed with that
between emancipation and a naive longing for a lost place free from alienation. There is a
rising awareness that a sense of place and the desire for the experience of identity in a small
and familiar environment was as much a part of modernity as the spectacular changes in
the world through progress and internationalism. it could be characterized by the perspicuity
of its repudiation and simultaneous but unintentional fostering of regions.
The term vernacular conveys a tension between closed domestic space and the open pub
lic arena. it does not exist in german and is usually translated by the noun heimat. This
equation is problematic, because during the nineteenth century, the term Heimat acquired
immense emotional weight. in contrast to vernacular, it emphasizes emotional ties to the
place of birth and childhood, set in opposition to a sense of otherness and being alien,
fremd.
4
like vernacular, Heimat refers to a space defned in terms of a physical, cultural, or
mental place of belonging. The word refers to a sphere set aside from the public, protected
from exposure and designed for the creation of identity. but Heimat also designates a space of
ambiguity that easily turns into aggressive opposition. identity requires boundaries and
exclusion, whereas the imperative of modernity is unrestricted openness through a destruction
of borders. The challenge of this contradiction remains one of the unresolved philosophical
problems of the present. it has profound political implications.
in opposition to the internationalism of modernity, the vernacular is defned as the category
of the particular, based on an unequivocal sense of place, and it was therefore trivialized
and written out of history until recently. Theories of modernity failed to take into consideration
the vernacular and excluded it as insignifcant or identifed it with the obsolete. its disappear
ance seemed imminent. but, humble and contemptible though it was, the vernacular
demonstrated the strength to survive the ideologies of internationalism and power of scale,
1 Niklas luhmann, die
gesellschaft der gesellschaft
(Frankfurt am main:
suhrkamp, 1997), 809. For a
more detailed analysis of the
question see maiken umbach
and bernd Hppauf, eds., ver-
nacular modernism: heimat,
globalization, and the built en-
vironment (stanford: stanford
university Press, 2005).
2 kenneth Frampton, To
wards a critical regionalism:
six Points for an Architecture
of resistance, in Hal Foster,
ed., the anti-aesthetic: essays
on Postmodern culture (Port
Townsend, Wash.: bay Press,
1983). The term critical re
gionalism was frst used by
Alexander Tzonis and liliane
lefaivre. Frampton draws on
phenomenology and asks Paul
ricoeurs question of how to
become modern and to return
to sources; how to revive an
old, dormant civilization and
take part in universal civiliza
tion. critical regionalism is
consciously ambivalent and
should adopt modern archi
tecture for its universal quali
ties, but at the same time in
clude the particular context.
emphasis should be placed
on the tactile sense rather
than the visual.
3 Dina smith, The Narrative
limits of the global guggen
heim, mosaic 35, no. 4 (De
cember 2002), 98.
4 A comprehensive history
of the word is provided by
carola mller, Der Heimat
begriff: versuch einer Anthol
ogie, in Wesen und Wandel
der heimatliteratur, ed. karl
konrad Polheim
(bern, 1989), 20763.
318 319
changed but not obliterated. The assumption that the triumph of the
modern inevitably spells the death of the vernacular, although
widespread, is diffcult to sustain. rediscovered and raised to the
level of theoretical refection, it is gaining a surprising signifcance and
the potential to contribute to the ongoing reconstitution of images
of modernity and modernism.
Discourse on space and the vernacular is burdened by a past
when theories of space were closely connected with reactionary anti
modern ideologies. An unstable amalgam of a veneration of the
vernacular, propagated as the base for identity, and an aggressive
advocacy of modernism characterized european fascism.
Fascism and National socialism were sly in appropriating the
appeal of the vernacular for their political purposes. in the struggle
for the soul, National socialism was extremely successful in appropri
ating literary, artistic, and architectural versions of the vernacular
characteristic of regions. However, the weakness of this Heimat
movement was apparent. The emphasis placed on identity as an
essential state of being and authenticity was unconcerned with free
dom and required a devaluation of history and historical time. This po
litical defnition of Heimat as a concrete place leapt back into an over
simplifying idea of an antimodern romanticism. it defned both the self
and its place in terms of an early moment in the history of metaphys
ics. Heimat was presented as presence by turning it into vulgar
metaphysical fundamentalism. The simultaneous fascination with
speed, aviation, communication technology and other innovations of
an aggressive modernization remained an unrelated juxtaposition.
by comparison, the philosophical and political position of the left
was unambiguous. committed to a teleological vision of historical
progress, critical theory constructed an opposition between the mod
ern and the vernacular. Hegels concept of a universal history and
marxs theory of international capitalism made space immaterial. The
intellectual horizon of the dialectical philosophy of history was deline
ated by an abstract concept of time that privileged the future. conse
quently, this philosophy of history was wary of any association
with the tangible, the present, the local and provincial. The vernacular
of regions was identifed with a problematic politics of identity.
Adorno spoke for many when he associated Heimat with identity poli
tics, which, in turn, he identifed with untruth and, in concrete
political terms, with fascism.
ernst blochs philosophy was an exception. He shared Adornos
indictment of identity politics, yet by the same token, he made an at
tempt to free space from its ideological identifcation with immobility
and reactionary nostalgia. bloch (18851977) was the philosopher
of the vernacular, one of the frst to consider it worthy of theorizing.
5
The question can be raised whether the vernacular was not only a
suppressed detail but modernity was tacitly shaped by it much more than its selfproclaimed
program seemed to permit. if the acceleration of time is signifcant for modernity, the vernacular
is a retarding element. The question arises as to whether this retardation is a vanishing relic
of the past or rather an integral element of modernity that calls for a reconsideration of the role
of space. This essay contends that closer examination of the vernacular will lead to a revision
of received theories of the relationship between modernity and space.
III
The MeTroPoliS and The /////'^/
in the late eighteenth century, the german Kleinstadt or hometown as a frame of mind was
invented as an imagined space loosely related to the small towns located on maps and
described in travel guides.
6
kleinstadt is a fuzzy term referring to both real and imagined space,
a place for living and a frame of mind, characterized by sets of values and norms. As a result
of this ambiguity, the term can be used as a descriptive category only with a great deal of
caution and easily confates distinct dimensions. As a critical term that sensitizes one to con
trasting theories of modernity, it is, however, worth elaborating. it subjects universalizing
theories to testing scrutiny and points to their defciencies as well as to damages and casual
ties resulting from the process of modernity. The kleinstadt was simultaneously the swan song
of a doomed community and a product of the new period of industrialization and urbanization.
The modern citys objective was the rationalization of space. The ideal was symmetry
and perfect geometrical forms, which although ultimately unattainable were pursued with
rigor. The pervasive ideal of geometrical order ruled the modern period from Newton on; in po
litical terms, it was a refection of the order of absolutist rationality. This spatial organization
left deep traces in the construction and reconstruction of the modern city. The order of the
medieval town was now perceived as disorder, and as such, it had to be banished. Traces that
the premodern and pregeometric thinking of individuals, guilds, and the church had left in
the arrangements of streets, squares, big and small houses and factories became intolerable to
an aesthetic mind that was dominated by the ideal of reason and identifed reason with geo
metrical order. These apparently anarchic relics of the past had to be destroyed through the
eradication of the crooked anatomy of old towns and its replacement with clear and geometrical
arrangements. This was often done against strong resistance by the inhabitants of these
quarters. in the course of the nineteenth century, Paris with its systems of boulevards and
squares where they cross, dividing the space of the city into elements of a geometrical fgure,
became the model. This fundamental change was twosided. it created the pleasure of ruling
over space by subjugating it to the aesthetics of geometry and symmetry and at the same
time, it subjugated those living in the city to the new rigid spatial order. The metropolis was
a space where the nationstate, modern socioeconomic forces of centralization, rationalization,
and political domination, and a state of mind expressed in literature and the arts were
intricately interwoven.
in opposition to this centralization and domination, images of small regions and the coun
tryside were closely tied to romanticism and reactionary politics. in the course of the
nineteenth century, the idealization of regions and their vernacular came to be increasingly
associated with antimodernism and lost its attraction. The nineteenthcentury novel became
the most centralized of all literary genres.
7
From balzac to Dickens and Joyce, the big city,
places like london, Dublin, moscow and Paris, provided the cognitive and emotional anatomy
5 it was georg simmel who
sharpened a generations per
ception of the small and the
insignifcant. idealism had al
ienated the german mind
from the touch of the con
crete [...] and it would be pro
ductive to entice it to listen to
things [in die sachen hinein-
lauschen], siegfried kracauer
wrote (Philosophische brock
en, in berliner nebenein-
ander: ausgewhlte feuille-
tons, 193033, ed. Andreas
volk [Zurich, 1996], 205). sim
ilarities and overlaps with the
later Heideggers philosophy
of the thing would warrant
close scrutiny.
6 mack Walker has written a
political and social history and
prehistory of the german
kleinstadt which he calls the
home town. Walkers ger-
man home towns: communi-
ty, state, and general estates,
16481871 (ithaca, N.y.,
1971), is not concerned with
the cultural signifcance of the
kleinstadt as a symbolic con
struction, but with its political
history. He places its begin
ning after 1648 and sees the
end of its history as a result of
the creation of a unifed na
tion in 1871.
7 Franco moretti, atlas of the
european novel, 18001900
(New york, 1998), 165.
8 kenneth clark, Provincial
ism, in: moments of vision
and Other essays, New york,
1981), 5062: 51. clark goes
on to develop a sophisticated
argument about the inde
pendent mind of the modern
provincial artist.
9 Niklas luhmann, die ges-
ellschaft der gesellschaft, 667.
320 321
of the modern novel. it created an ideal space for a narrative that lost its paradigmatic position
only in the late twentieth century.
it is, however, an oversimplifcation to juxtapose the urban novel as the medium of the
modern with the novel of the country and village as its opposite. The spatial constellations are
far less clearly defned. Provincial towns in French novels could be modern without, however,
replicating the living conditions of Paris. kenneth clark suggests that provincialism could
be interpreted as merely a matter of distance from a centre, where standards of skill are high
er and patrons more exacting [...] and the provincial artist is launched on his struggle with the
dominating style.
8
such a view presupposes a unifed feld and linear forces operating be
tween centre and periphery. it is predicated on the perception of a national culture constituted
by a linear centreperiphery distance. As a result of the increasing distance from the metropo
lis, the centripetal force of the centre is gradually decreasing, but it nonetheless remains the
defning power in the entire feld. However, the space of cultural production is far from being
unifed and homogeneous. systems theory also speaks of the centreperiphery relationship
but defnes it as a form of difference.
9
This difference is never characterized by a linearity of
distance. The powers of cohesion, repulsion, and gravity of a uniform, Newtonian space do not
operate in the space of cultural production. it is polycentric. it is a feld with a plurality of
forces and conficting movements, localized gravitational pulls and epicentres. This uneven
space was a precondition of the survival of the vernacular in a world of rapid centralization.
in germany, it was not only the idealized countryside and its hamlets that gained signif
cance but also a geographical and sociopolitical structure that differed from the cityprovince
divide of england and France. The cultural historian Wilhelm riehl, an astute observer, referred
to geographical regions and called them individualized country.
10
it created a space that
liberated itself from the pervasive pull of the centre and the dominance of its geometry and
ideological and political power. it was less compelling than the big city and opened up oppor
tunities for local democracy, for joining in or staying away from circles of friendship, and
for celebrating creativity. it was an architectural and political space that protected one from
the pull towards uniformity.
in contrast to the metropolis, the kleinstadt retained its curved streets and lanes, and its
lack of geometrical order. it did not follow the imperative of rationalized order and could still
be experienced as a place of ones own. it was familiar and offered a sense of security and pro
tection from the violations inficted on the subject by modernity. it not only created a time in
dependent of the time of social modernization but also saved the time of individual biographies
from the ossifcation associated with the countryside. The hometown was urban, yet it was
also a site where the confict of modern history between freedom and compulsion, strongly ex
perienced in the big city, appeared to be repudiated in favour of the individuals autonomy.
These were the preconditions of a life in which the individual was not lost but able to maintain
a sense of self. it was conceived of as a space ft for the attempt to maintain a sense of
place and concreteness in a world that dissolved all that had once been concrete and tangible
into abstraction.
The kleinstadt created an imagined space for cultivating subjectivity, including its irrationali
ty, in contrast to the rationalization of industrializing societies, and for the local and particular,
in contrast to the universalism of enlightenment values. but at the same time, it was also
the space of the eminently modern struggle of the self to determine its place in a society of
growing abstraction and in the anonymity of a world increasingly defned by instrumental
rationality. under the conditions of modernity, the Kleinstadt provided
a space for a life of untimeliness. it did not ft into patterns of effciency
and time management and maintained a degree of authenticity
otherwise absent from modern life. its space remained crooked, the
way kant, who experienced the world in the remote small town
of knigsberg, thought human nature was crooked. it created not only
an irregularly striated space for physical and social movement, but
a space to which its inhabitants were attached, not wishing to be any
where else.
The kleinstadt thus served as an obscuring force that rendered
the clear image of the centreperiphery power struggle obsolete. it
obfuscated the unilinear power relations by creating many small cen
tres and shifting peripheries, and it provided a space for the unfolding
of cultural distinctions between tangible and invisible groupings.
Provincialism is not a function of the distance from the centre;
rather, it is defned by a state of mind and a sense of inferiority.
11
The
literature of the kleinstadt was not defensive, but conscious of its
innovative qualities and independent standards. its vernacular actively
obscured the relationship of dominance and dependence. it did not
cringe culturally.
IV
The hoMeTown
The hometowns emergence was predicated on the tension with
the simultaneously emerging grosstadt, or big city, as the centre of
the changing physical and mental geography of the industrializing
century. it gave a name to a space characterized by a specifc lifestyle.
it seems justifable to interpret the hometowns spatial decentralization
and retarding of momentum as a complementary attempt at creating
a modern world, less consistent, less glamourous, and ultimately
less dominant in terms of political power and philosophical persua
siveness, yet with a queer obstinacy. in the arts and literature,
the hometown developed into an imagined space that differed equally
from the built environment of city dwellers and that of peasant farm
ers. Paradigmatic for this kleinstadt are goethes Weimar, kants
knigsberg, schellings Jena, Hlderlins Tbingen, mrikes
cleversulzbach, and the romantics Heidelberg and Jena. These
towns were imagined spaces of fantasy and thinking, geographical
and architectural representations of the ideal type of Kleinstadt. it
was an imagined place that merged the small towns of the century
with the idea of a vanishing urban culture. it created a place in
the history of mentalities that invented a space for modern life at the
margin of modernity defned in terms of the politics of the western
european nationstate.
12
During an extended period of transition from
a society of early manufacturing to high capitalism, the hometown
10 Wilhelm Heinrich riehls
term individualized country
resonates with kenneth
Framptons critical regional
ism and, in certain respects,
can be read as a complemen
tary precursor to it. Among
the weaknesses of his ap
proach is the opposition he
creates between two oppos
ing forces, the forces of retar
dation (beharrung) and dy
namic forces (bewegung). in
contrast to Framptons em
phasis on aspects of mobility
and critique inherent in re
gionalism, riehls preference
for persistence created an ob
stacle for the perception of
the contradictory character of
modern society that succeed
ed in integrating dynamics
and retardation to a complex
system. see riehl, die brger-
liche gesellschaft (stuttgart,
1853) and land und leute
(stuttgart, 1855), 132217.
11 The foremost example of
the selfassured kleinstadt as
an intellectual and artistic ex
centric centre was Weimar.
Among the numerous publi
cations on the musentempel,
there are very few that deal
with spatial aspects in the
Weimar myth. most common
are variants of the history of
ideas paradigm. An early at
tempt to write a cultural histo
ry in terms of a modern defni
tion of material culture, fol
lowing raymond Williams, is
Walter H. bruford, culture and
society in classical Weimar,
17751805 (cambridge,
1962); more recent is the pop
ular Peter merseburger, my-
thos Weimar: Zwischen geist
und macht (stuttgart, 1998;
3rd ed., 1999). The frst publi
cation that combined images,
including photography, and
texts in an attempt to capture
the atmosphere of Weimar as
a place was a small book by
the goethe admirer Wilhelm
bode, damals in Weimar
(leipzig, 1912; facs. reprint,
Weimar, 1991).
322 323
offered a space for a specifc form of cognitive and emotional produc
tivity, for refection, selfsearching, and the transformation of tradition
into new ways of thinking. it is the central paradox of the kleinstadt
that some of the most pertinent analyses of the destructive elements
of modernity emerged precisely under its auspices.
The relative independence of the hometown was a pillar of cultural
pluralism and lived democracy. The kleinstadt functioned as a
microsphere that was constitutive for specifc ways of living and
communicating, resonating with and at the same time opposing mod
ernization. Alongside membership in a profession, a religion, a state
and, possibly, a secret society, the hometown offered its own mem
bership to its inhabitants, one endowed with distinctive cultural
values and virtues that rendered the importance of other member
ships relative. it was not lost on kleinstadt dwellers that this member
ship was a constitutive part of the competition between systematic
order and creative disorder, between centralism and particularism.
13

members of the community of a kleinstadt did not give up or
attenuate their other memberships. However, they entered into a
specifc commitment that set them apart from others as a result of a
voluntary decision. This added to the palette of cultural distinctions
available to them. by combining visible and institutionalized with
informal and invisible memberships, they continued an old tradition of
opposing the power of central and local authorities. (stadtluft macht
frei was the slogan of bondsmen who succeeded in escaping from
their lords and obtained their freedom after living in a town for
more than one hundred days.) A cultural history of the kleinstadt could
be written in terms of this emancipatory spirit.
The literature of the big city offered images of an unlimited
freedom, but at the expense of a defenseless exposure and vulnerability
of the subject. in opposition to these places of isolation and loneliness
where personal bonds were severed, the Kleinstadt provided a space
for the cultivation of intimate relationships. shielded from the
unbridled acceleration and commercialization of life in the city, but
also distanced from the anachronisms of the quest for identity and au
thenticity in the backtotheorigin discourse, the kleinstadt became
the site where memory could evade the erasure of the past character
istic of big cities.
communication
The cultural construction of the Kleinstadt provided a space for the
vernacular as a state of mind that inevitably clashed with the
ways of thinking and being in the world emanating from the metropo
lis. it created a space for writing and living, neither isolated nor
subjected to a centres domination. identifcation with the local as a
place of difference was the response to the modern worlds insistence on a unifed central
standard. its forms of communication were an attempt to reconstitute a dialogical culture of
persuasion and an immediate contact alien to modern political institutions of mediation.
The city offered new and unlimited forms of political freedom and independence for intel
lectual productivity. it also created its own casualties. An increasing realization of the egalitarian
ideal was accompanied by the breakdown of traditional social and communicative structures.
unlimited freedom to publish was merely the fip side of the silencing of the individual by
market forces that have no ears to listen and no mouth to speak. Networks of communication
and social intercourse were destroyed, and the subject was exposed to a threatening anony
mous and unbridled market. under the conditions of the Kleinstadt, other forms of communi
cation developed, maintaining a certain degree of orality and emphasizing the authenticity
of facetoface communication rather than equity of the exchange of symbolic values in anony
mous markets. An important aspect of the hometown culture was that it retained polycentric
functions of public discourse dismantled in the modern city, which had no physical or mental
space for the agora. The imagined hometown emerged at a time of germanys infatuation
with greek culture perceived in opposition to rome and was conceived of as a polis. it was
based upon an idealized view of greek antiquity and created private and public institutions and
clubs devoted to intensive communication that requires presence.
14
The physical and narrow
place of the agora was being replaced by the space of the town as an imagined sphere of gen
uine dialogue. in contrast to the anonymity of the big city, it was the Kleinstadt where the ideal
of communication prior to the impact of modern media continued to be cultivated. This was
not communication as a result of a struggle with the deindividualizing powers of the metropo
lis, but dialogue embedded in lived structures of physical presence and corporeal proximity.
The relaxed communication of these small urban communities was the positive side of a
culture oscillating between recreating ideals of the classical past and the bourgeois present. it
stands in equal distance to the medieval town built around centres of worship and the collapse
of central authority in the industrialized modern city. it maintained a certain degree of direct
and polycentric communication through orality. Friendliness or comitas (comity) of social
interaction imbued life in the Kleinstadt with an aspect of a civil society. This civility of commu
nication operated on two different levels. it was characteristic of communication in everyday
practices, which Wieland, goethe, schiller, and Herder, who lived in a Kleinstadt, attempted to
frame in theoretical and literary terms, and it was also operative in distinct discourses of phi
losophy, philology, history, and aesthetics, all of which thrived in eighteenth and nineteenth
century germany, not least due to the conditions provided by the Kleinstadt.
creativity
The literature of the kleinstadt was not a derivative of the metropolis. based on her visit in
1803 and 1804, madame de stal compared France, where the focus of literary life was only
on Paris, with germany, where small towns created an empire [...] for the imagination, serious
study, or simply benevolence.
15
she experienced the kleinstadt Weimar as a place whose
citizens inhabited the universe and, through reading and a width of refection escaped the nar
row boundaries of the predominant circumstances.
16
The latest european developments in
arts, literature and fashion were discussed within the spatial constraints of this humble place.
in contrast to her expectations, the narrow conditions of individual lives did not lead to
claustrophobia but, instead, were channelled into intellectual productivity. Her idealized assess
12 Alon confno, the nation
as a local metaphor: Wrt-
temberg, imperial germany
and national memory,
18711918 (chapel Hill, N.c.,
1997) creates a hierarchy and
interprets Heimat as an auxil
iary tool for the overriding ob
jective of nation building.
13 maiken umbach, The Pol
itics of sentimentality and the
german Frstenbund,
17791785, historical journal
41 (1998): 679704 specifcal
ly refers to goethes political
concept in the context of ten
sions between berlins politics
of centralization and Weimars
counter position. The essays
political interpretation of
friendship creates a contrast
to the reading suggested in
this essay.
14 An example is the Tafel
runde, or roundtable, in the
Wittumspalais of the duchess
of saxonyWeimareisenach,
Anna Amalia (17391807),
which is well known through
georg melchior krauss 1795
painting of it. see www.bib
lint.de/goethe_tafelrunde_
kraus.html .
15 Annelouisegermaine de
stal (17661817), madame
de stal, de lallemagne (Paris
Novelle dition 1879), 7980.
16 ibid., 119.
17 The period of philosophi
cal and literary innovation
around 1800 was linked to the
hometown in ways that, de
spite deep changes, can be
observed again in the early
twentieth century, when Wei
mar once again became the
focal point of an innovative
movement in the arts, archi
tecture, and literature. crea
tive minds such as Harry graf
kessler and Henry van de
velde chose Weimar as the
site for their experiments.
yet this was the swan song
of the kleinstadt, a last mo
ment of creativity before its
fnal collapse.
18 The Weimar exhibition
Aufstieg und Fall der mod
erne (19992000) presented
the early beginnings and dem
onstrated the importance of
this anticentre. Darmstadts
mathildenhhe would be an
other example.
324 325
ment contributed to the emergence of an image that created its own
momentum and its own reality of the mind. it provided the context
for the surprising cultural productivity that made a substantial contri
bution to the concept of the modern.
17
it borders on the grotesque
that the term world literature was born in an obscure town in
provincial germany. goethes term Weltliteratur was indicative of
ways of thinking that came from within but transcended the narrow
boundaries of provincial places, extending rousseaus citoyen and
kants vision of a citizen of the world in an emerging world society.
There are numerous examples in nineteenthcentury literature
where the tension between the kleinstadt and the open space of the
world is transformed into aesthetic creativity. Jean Pauls novels
oscillate between the narrowness of the kleinstadt and the unlimited
world of imagination, of an idealized, borderless love of humanity.
Turgenev paints a favourable picture of the german kleinstadt. The
opening pages of gottfried kellers novel der grne heinrich sing the
praises of the openminded small towns, pulsating with traffc and
commerce, on the river rhine and lake constance. At a time when, in
the capital, artistic preferences were conventional and nationalistic,
it was in provincial Weimar where the modern French art of manet,
czanne, gauguin, and rodin was celebrated.
18
rodin devoted
fourteen modern watercolours to this provincial place, where they
were exhibited. The bauhaus was founded at Weimar by Henry van
de velde, Walter gropius and others. it certainly was not the brainchild
of the kleinstadt spirit, yet it was conceived under the conditions
and in the specifc environment of this provincial place where, as
madame de stal had observed a hundred years earlier, the narrow
streets bred a universalism of the spirit that resonated with the innova
tive centres of the world. When, in 1922, representatives of the
Dada and constructivist movements gathered in Weimar, it was a
signal to the world that the german hometown still had the potential
to create an open space for imagination and creativity.
This image, it needs to be emphasized, was not innocent or idyl
lic. it interfered with the power play between centre and periphery
that was at the core of the creation of modern europe. it would be na
ive to portray the struggle for domination as a painless redirection of
infuence and pure rearrangement of the distribution of knowledge.
The relationship between centre and hometown was characterized
neither by harmonious exchanges nor by diffusion, but rather by con
fict.
19
in the increasingly international europe, the focal points of ori
entation and power over the mind were Paris and london, and, from
the end of the nineteenth century, also vienna and berlin. The position
of the kleinstadt within this feld of shifting power relations was one
of resistance to a totality of space organized according to geometric
and political imperatives.
it maintained rapidly disintegrating principles of social stability and morality and at the same
time was creative in transforming them. However, the kleinstadt and its image soon deteriorat
ed. The crisis of modern civilization at the end of the nineteenth century wrote fnis to the
story of the german hometown. modernist poets rebelled against the fake ideal of the home
town, which they perceived as a remote, closed space of the past. viewing the kleinstadt
through the eyes of its modern despisers, informed by their disdain for its narrowness and
hypocrisy, will inevitably bar our understanding of it as a productive site, which it was in the
real and symbolic worlds for more than a century. it was never a place only of creativity, or
only of provincial sterility, but a fragile mix, an ambivalent combination of contradictory forces.
V
ernST bloChS PhiloSoPhy of The vernaCular
ernst blochs philosophy provides an initiated insight. in opposition to academic philosophy
since Plato, his thought elevates the simple, the narrow, and the concrete to the level of
philosophical refection. if we take his philosophy of space and his regionalism as the point
of departure, the question arises of how imagined space can be linked to observed space and
time. is a philosophical ethnology of space and things possible? in contrast to the Hegelian
concept of history, space is pivotal for blochs way of thinking. His regionalism signifes an
emotional state and resonates with a spatial defnition of being. He turns place and the tangible
banalities of existence, mere obstructions for transcendental and analytical philosophy alike,
into prime objects of philosophical enquiry. endemic specifcities of places, such as local
customs and regional proverbs, become moving forces in a thinking that fuses philosophy and
an ethnology of space. blochs philosophy is engaged in a search for spaces of revelation.
20

He combines this theological search with the marxian theory engaged in changing rather than
interpreting the world and he elaborates upon the small and the concrete, upon a focus on
the vernacular as a model of the envisaged new world.
blochs philosophy grapples with the timespace relationship. His point of departure is a
spatial turn in philosophical refection on past and future. His philosophy avoids the identifca
tion of space with the immobile and of the vernacular of regions with insignifcant detail,
with ornament or arbitrary motif. in the tradition of georg simmel, and not unlike his contem
poraries siegfried kracauer and Walter benjamin, bloch develops a phenomenological gaze
that discovers regions and their vernacular as the matrix of a different way of perceiving
the world. Not abstract concepts and conceptual models but images of regionalism constitute
the hinge connecting the individual and society, the natural and built environments. The ver
nacular of blochs regions is concrete and tangible and preserves traditions derived from a
world familiar to us as an imagined past, although it may never in fact have existed. The ver
nacular is at the centre of his attempt to connect philosophical theory with a world outside of
thinking, a world of concrete things and of action for which the social practice of building,
represented by architecture, provides the model. spaces need neither logical connections nor
continuities. like kracauer, bloch describes them as discrete miniatures.
21
The early bloch refers to the specifcs of geographical regions such as southwestern
germany and its democratic traditions, or regions in bavaria. He emphatically speaks of the
need of a site (ein Fleck) for the individual to stand on. space in terms of specifc sites
and concrete locality is crucial to his attempt to overcome the damages inficted by modernity.
19 cf. Peter J. Hugill and D.
bruce Dickson, eds., the
transfer and transformation of
ideas and material culture
(college station, Texas, 1988),
esp. Torsten Hgerstrand,
some unexplored Problems
in the modelling of culture
Transfer and Transformation
of ideas and material culture.
20 in a different context,
siegfried kraucauer remarks
in a review of blochs ap
proach to history that bloch
does not care the least about
reality. [...] His learned syncre
tism is incompatible with his
magic conjuring of the end
[...] the miracle comes by de
cree, the leap turns into a
process and we happily arrive
at a dialectics of history with
Hegel and marx (Propheten
tum: ernst blochs Thomas
mntzer als Theologe der
revolution, in kraucauer,
schriften, ed. inka mlder
bach [Frankfurt am main,
1990], 5.1: aufstze, 191536,
201).
21 siegfried kracauer pub
lished small feuilletons in the
frankfurter Zeitung on unrelat
ed and capricious spaces
such as the hotel lobby, the
underpass, the unemploy
ment offce, the bar, a danc
ing hall, etc. see kracauer,
berliner nebeneinander, ed.
volk; schriften, ed. inka
mlderbach (Frankfurt am
main, 1990), 5.13.
22 This was shared with oth
er thinkers of his time. spatial
images are the dreams of so
ciety, kracauer wrote. Wher
ever the hieroglyphics of any
spatial image is deciphered,
there the basis of social reality
presents itself. see David
Frisby, fragments of moderni-
ty: theories of modernity in
the Work of simmel, Kracauer,
and benjamin (cambridge,
mass., 1986), 109186.
326 327
His philosophy of space fragments unity and continuity and creates
spaces for selfdetermination.
22
His turn toward space transforms the theoretically insignifcant
word Heimat into a notion of philosophical refection. in his interpre
tation, it is not a word designating an ethnographic place. Heimat
is absent from modern life and needs to be made present as an imag
ined space of promise, a land to come. it is a sophisticated construc
tion, and its simplicity is artifcial. Heimat becomes a topos of the
individuals right to a self as soon as it can be rehabilitated against the
domination of the temporalized and homogenized space of moderni
zation without falling prey to an ideology of stable identity. blochs
philosophy turns the ethnographic term Heimat into the philosophical
term for an imagined space of emergence. it has a historical potential
that his Prinzip Hoffnung or hope as a principle,
23
associates with
future reality. Heimat is identical with images and imaginations that
point into a space of the not yet. it is rooted in the anticipatory
function of thinking. The invention of Heimat is a continuous task and
the passage to it requires imagination and philosophical refection.
Heimat can be conceived of only in close connection with a sense
of contrast nurtured by the open space of the world. it is a state of
mind in which happiness is associated with a sense of belonging and,
at the same time, a sense of the freedom to leave. Heimat is a
relational term, not one that defnes a static, solipsistic life. heimweh
(homesickness) is inconceivable without its contrary, fernweh, the
pull of the unknown and desire for faraway places.
24
reconstituted as an imagined space, Heimat can be rescued from
the fetters of the parochialism of identity politics and its stigma of
an antimodern idyll. blochs philosophy creates heimat as an alternative
place determined, frst and foremost, by negativity. bloch makes it
very clear what heimat must not be. it is a negation of capitalist pro
ductivity as well as of nostalgic anticapitalist escapism. it is out
of sync with the time of modernization, ungleichzeitig. He calls hope
a principle, dissociating it from romantic words such as longing
or melancholia, and is rescuing it from the nostalgic longing for an
ideal past. Any memory of Heimat is deceptive. bloch knows that
searching for a free society in the past is akin to the untruth of the
idyll. He cannot share the romantics idealization of the middle Ages
or the rural life of the past as a golden era before modern alienation.
in blochs defnition, Heimat is not a place that can be visited
or reconstructed in individual memories, because it never existed in
any known past. He insists that Heimat is neither the space of a
bygone age nor the fnal destination of the individuals unhappy journey
through the hostile modern world. Heimat cannot provide a space
for reconciliation, because it needs its opposite and would be incon
ceivable outside of a structure of differences and struggle. Heimat is
not, bloch maintains, a place for stable identity.
25
Heimat never
connects to a frst beginning but is always already the product of im
agination and dreaming. being at home is not to be identifed with
a fnal arrival, because Heimat is an imagined space within the param
eters of modernity and a creation through language. bloch shares
this antiessentialist defnition of place with other critical thinkers of
his time, notably simmel, kracauer, and benjamin. in a related way,
Francesco Passanti reads le corbusier, whom bloch considered an
archenemy of his own concept of architecture, as an ally in the
struggle for selfdetermination. le corbusiers diary from his balkan
trip serves as an example of the experience of the vernacular without
an antimodern escapism.
26
A philosophical ethnology of space would provide a common
ground and meeting place of the two distinct disciplines of philosophy
and architecture. His idea of architecture is characterized by con
creteness and smallness, and prefers the tactile over the visual.
in blochs philosophy, the hometown is an architectural space where
loss can be addressed and where modernity meets its own contradic
tions and offers compensation for its destructions. regardless of
negative or positive connotations, Heimat is for bloch the central term
for the place of emotional attachment, love, or hate, and, in its own
way, contributes to paving the path into modernity. it needed a post
modern mentality to acknowledge this contribution.
Heimat and the kleinstadt resist the destruction of space. in oppo
sition to a life congruent with modernity, the kleinstadt provided a
space far away from the stream of the time, in a remote region. The
opposition to a life continuously adapting to modern trends needed
a space removed from the domination of time in order to create an at
titude of independence that has been achieved by many hometown
citizens. They are provincial in a way that adds a much older life to
retardation.
27
This reevaluation of the provincial and of slowness in
terms of an alternative to the destructive process of acceleration links
the space of the town to the future for which we crave. in blochs
view, it is the recourse to an older lifea life before the emergence of
the modern, the bourgeois society and the rule of the clockthat in
vests the kleinstadt with negativity, which, in turn, he interprets as
a power of resistance and a genuine countermodel within modernity.
This countermodel creates the space for the vernaculars character
as a dream into the future. He constructs the vernacular of the
kleinstadt as an urban space that, in spite of the capitalist perversion
of ideals of urban civilization, keeps the utopia of the good life alive.
in his assessment of the victory of reactionary politics in the
1930s, bloch contended that the vernacular had been abandoned by
23 ernst bloch, das Prinzip
hoffnung, 3 vols. (1954;
Frankfurt am main, 1959);
trans. Neville Plaice, stephen
Plaice and Paul knight as the
Principle of hope, 3 vols.
(cambridge, mass., 1986).
24 see bloch, Prinzip hoff-
nung, vol. 1, 19.
25 see Helmut Plessner,
grenzen der gemeinschaft.
eine Kritik des sozialen
radikalismus (bonn 1924;
new ed., Frankfurt, 2002),
trans. Andrew Wallace as the
limits of community: a cri-
tique of social radicalism
(Amherst, N.y., 1999.
26 Franco Passanti, The ver
nacular, modernism, and le
corbusier, in umbach and
Hppauf, eds., vernacular
modernism.
27 ernst bloch, tbinger ein-
leitung in die Philosophie
(Frankfurt am main, 1963), 1,
122.
28 manfred riedel refers to
Nietzsches infuence on the
early bloch. but it is precisely
the utopian dimension in
blochs thought, referred to
by riedel, that marks the
sharp difference between
their respective conceptions
of present and future. man
fred riedel, tradition und
utopie: ernst blochs Philoso-
phie im licht unserer ges-
chichtlichen denkerfahrung
(Frankfurt am main, 1994),
268ff.
29 bloch, Prinzip
hoffnung, 22f.
30 Foucault also uses the
metaphor of hollow spaces
left behind by the exit of the
gods. He thinks of a third al
ternative by drawing attention
to spaces power of opposi
tion to scientifc discourse re
duced to an endless stream of
words in a modern culture de
void of meaning and purpose.
michel Foucault, naissance de
la clinique: une archologie
du regard mdical (Paris,
1963), trans. A. m. sheridan
smith as the birth of the clin-
ic: an archeology of medical
Perception (london, 1973),
179.
328 329
intellectuals and architects engaged in shaping the condition of
modern life. it needed to be recaptured. While bloch shunned identity
politics, he was equally aware that human life is impossible without
boundaries and exclusions. His philosophy of hope is characterized by
an idealized space made present through the imagination, which,
as he was well aware, is deceptive, but which he was unwilling to
abandon. bloch mourned a loss, and his oeuvre is undeniably motivat
ed by nostalgia for a place that never existed. Despite his lifelong
dialogue with Nietzsche, blochs philosophy of hope was based on
a misreading of Nietzsche. Nietzsches attack on the modern world and
his critique of morality was not, as blochs reading suggests, the
springboard for a project to change the world.
28
Nietzsches analysis
of deception included the gay and gleeful invitation to embrace
the world as a neverending play of ambiguities and delusions. it aban
doned all the dreams associated with Heimat. in opposition to
Nietzsche, bloch regarded this kind of play as indicative of an inau
thentic life. His hope was identical with the expectation that the
play of presence and absence will come to a happy conclusion. in a
short but signifcant passage, bloch refers to a childhood memory of
building a playhouse in the branches of a tree that could not be
seen from below, sitting in it high above the ground, and having
pulled up the ladder, interrupting the connection to the ground below,
we felt absolute happiness.
29
The combination of concrete childhood
memories and the lofty dream of an imagined place of happiness
referred to a fragile and transient, primitive structure that, despite its
imaginary constitution, contained within it the promise of a humane
future. could a dream of the future be farther away from Nietzsches
myth of a new man in a newly mythologized world?
30
blochs philosophy is that of a visionary architect of imagined
spaces designed to replace the world of capitalism with something
radically different, a space and time for which he had no better word
than Heimat. it was reminiscent of the security, trust, and good
experiences of a time experienced in life, a time that in memory com
bines events, dreams and imagination, the time of childhood. read as
a guide for action, blochs paradoxical combination of utopia and
place calls for the dismantling of the modern city and the substitution
of transient, weightless structures that would make it possible to
experience Heimweh and Fernweh in the same space. This vision was
clearly informed by romantic fantasies. His architecture of revolution
used building and dwelling for the blueprint, the entwurf of a new
world that has the potential of becoming a space for the experience
of Heimat. yet bloch failed to take the historical experience of the
twentieth century into consideration. in the wake of the catastrophes
of his century, we need to ask whether it is still legitimate to maintain
images of Heimat as an ideal for modern architecture, or whether it may have turned into
a crime of the mind.
31
His dreams do not belong in the adult world of frivolous games, but in the serious playing
of children, who associate dreams with promises that burst reality open. bloch shared chil
drens belief in dreams power of becoming real. They represent the promise inherent in escha
tological thinking. An architecture that corresponds to the needs of the subject in a postindustrial
world would need to develop responses to the challenge of fusing modern aesthetics and
the ethics hidden in the inconspicuous vernacular. in spite of globalizations pressure for uni
formity, there are signs that recent conceptions of space may be responding to this challenge.
critical regionalism articulates the tension between globalization and the local. it rehabili
tates the region as a space in its own right with a potential that is not exhausted by retardation
but opens space for creativity and the productive imagination. like the lost hometown of
the past, it creates its own conditions for life and literature safeguarding individuals against the
effects of globalization and supporting independence against the power of eliminating differ
ence. it is a crack in the system and creates its own humble architecture of existence and its
own time that is not synchronized with the time of modernization. What robert musil called a
sense for potentiality (mglichkeitssinn) that distances the imagination from the tyranny of
the real will thrive only once life is shielded from exposure to the merciless powers of global
markets for everything including language and emotions. if there is hope for life beyond
insipid and sterile uniformity, we need to turn to microspheres. The region of TrentinoAlto
Adige / sdtirol, where two cultures, italian and Austrian, intersect could serve as an example
of the quiet power of a region. it is a remote place at europes margin and at the same time
it is privileged in terms of cultural diversity and independence from a powerful centre. if what
used to be the centre is now fragmented in many centres that have moved to the periphery,
this region qualifes as such a centre and is fertile ground for experimenting with ideas of a
future more colourful and diverse than architects of the global world are capable of imagining.
31 bernd Hppauf, Heimat
die Wiederkehr eines verpnt
en Wortes. ein Populrmythos
im Zeitalter der globalis
ierung, in gunther gebhard,
oliver geisler and steffen
schrter, eds., heimat. Kon-
turen und Konjunkturen eines
umstrittenen Konzepts
(bielefeld [transcript], 2007),
109140.
330 331
the hOPe ANd POteNtIAlItY Of
The paradigm of regional idenTiTy
suZANA milevskA
When embarking on writing about the hope and potentiality that are embedded in the notion
of belonging it is actually inevitable to attempt to bridge the principle of hope and the utopian
belief in complete belonging (either to a nation or to the world in general) with the potential
of not to belong that is necessarily attached to belonging.
1
not to belong is especially implied
in the notion of regional belonging where national meets cosmopolitan halfway. While the
phantasm of belonging to a nation and of belonging in general is based on a positive and uto
pian hope, the very actuality of belonging. For example belonging to a region is defned by the
potential of belonging without belonging or belonging without having something in common.
2
of all the emphatic expectations and phantasms emerging among different peoples and
nations in the new europe, the very desire and projected hope to belong to the eu has become
the most urgent. The eu political superstructure has started to function as a kind of political
redefnition and even replacement of european geography. The eu is neither a nation nor
a region but belonging to it functions as a kind of suprabelonging. Within such a political and
cultural context i will try to address the notion of regional identity as one of the recently
emerged political instruments of integration and belonging.
regional identity appears to be a kind of aporia, a specifc form of disjunctive identity that
as a certain political compromise, a kind of dangerous supplement, overarches belonging
to a nation with belonging to a european union, which is comprised of different nations and
identities.
3
ultimately, the concept of regional identity emerges as a kind of concession that
contaminates the unconditional belonging with the potentiality of a partial nonbelonging as the
biggest nationstate danger.
4
What does it mean to assume a regional identity: does one ever genuinely identify as balkan,
mediterranean, Trentinian, or Northern macedonian (in greece); does this mean that national
identifcation suffers a loss of patriotism because of the expansion of the strictly national
identity into a more heterogeneous regional identity, or does this only help clarify ones own
identity? or is regionalism just a pragmatic tool used by smaller nations and ethnicities to
boost their hopes of completeness, of belonging to the globalized world? All these questions
can be addressed indirectly, through culture, art and architecture, because it was there that
regionalism was applied as a means of analysis of different codes and phenomena.
one example of the justifcation of regionalism was critical regionalism, a concept frst of
fered by Alexander Tzonis and liane lefaivre and later developed by kenneth Frampton.
critical regionalism in architectural theory worked as a kind of cultural mediator between
universal civilizations codes and the specifcity of place.
5
situated between universalized cul
tural codes of a globalized and unifed world and locally recognized visual codes of world
cultures, critical regionalism actually focused on specifc topography, climate, light, tectonic
forms: on the haptic rather than visual perception.
in the wake of postmodernist critical theory critical regionalism offered the urgent and
necessary hope of the synthesis of, on the one hand, the architectural forms that were created
within minor cultures and regional borders and, on the other, universal cultural values that
could be reached through a critically conceptualized regionalism. Thus there was a hope for an
architecture that could address the particularity and peculiarity of space whilst at the same
time overcoming the limits of local industrial production and the obstacles to selfsustainability
so necessary for neoliberalist and globalized culture.
The viCiSSiTudeS of hoPe
Hope as longing for something better, for supplementing life as it is, was the main subject of
ernst blochs the Principle of hope.
6
According to Douglas kellner, for bloch individuals
are unfnished, they are animated by dreams of a better life, and by utopian longings for
fulflment.
7
Furthermore, for bloch, hope permeates everyday consciousness and its articula
tion in cultural forms, ranging from the fairy tale to the great philosophical and political utopias.
8
What made blochs understanding of daydreams, fairy tales and myths, popular culture,
literature, theater, and all forms of art, political and social utopias, philosophy, and religion dif
ferent from the other marxist ideological critiques is his belief that all these forms contain
emancipatory moments which project visions of a better life and that they put in question the
organization and structure of life under capitalism (or state socialism).
9
According to kellners profoundly analytical reading of the Principle of hope, in blochs map
of humanity there are three dimensions of human temporality,
a dialectical analysis of the past which illuminates the present and can direct us to a better
future. The pastwhat has beencontains both the sufferings, tragedies and failures of
humanitywhat to avoid and to redeemand its unrealized hopes and potentialswhich could
have been and can yet be.
10
The not-yet but realizable hopes of the future and a vision of a free future are the most
important part of blochs projections and convictions about creativity. The not-yet but awaited
manifests itself as future and futurity: as an event of a coming, or future advent, as it is
understood in some more recent work of philosophy and literature.
11
That is where the adven
ture of creativity is projected since the hopes tense is always a future tense. in kellners
opinion bloch encourages us to look for the progressive and emancipatory content of cultural
artifacts that are frequently denounced and dismissed as mere ideology.
12
Following kellners analysis of blochs principle of hope one could easily agree with his
conclusion that bloch provides us with a model of cultural theory and ideology critique that is
unique since it differs from other more dominant critical models. While lenin, Althusser, and
to a certain extent the Frankfurt school, presented ideology critique as the demolition of
bourgeois culture and ideology, thus, in effect, confating bourgeois culture and ideology,
13

according to kellner, bloch is more sophisticated than those who simply denounce all ideolo
gy as false consciousness and interpret dominant ideology primarily as instruments of
mystifcation, errors, and domination of the ruling class interest within ideological artefacts
because he rather sees emancipatoryutopian elements in all living ideologies, and
deceptive and illusory qualities as well.
14
instead of a denunciatory approach to ideology critique that he called halfenlightenment,
because of its rationalistic dismissal of all elements that do not measure up to its scientifc
criteria, bloch suggested reading more attentively for any critical or emancipatory potential. in
terestingly enough, at frst sight paradoxically, bloch deemed ideology not only responsible
for having a negative impact on society but also he believed that ideology contained a certain
332 333
emancipatory dimension. Discourses, images, and fgures that pro
duced utopian images of a better world according to him helped the
reconciliation of subjects with the existing world. That is of course
only if one believes and hopes that such reconciliation is possible.
Today ernst blochs assumption that arts mission, even when it is
overburdened by ideological patterns, is to assist the subjects
fulflment and reifcation somehow resonates with the guattarian
concept of art as a process of becoming. even though he understands
art as a kind of autonomous zone of production, it is still important
for the innovative segments of the socius, since according to him
the future of contemporary subjectivity is no longer to live indefnitely
under the regime of selfwithdrawal.
15
Artists mission is to re-create
and reinvent the subject:
The artist and, more generally, aesthetic perception, detach and
deterritorialize a segment of the real in such a way as to make it
play the role of a partial enunciator. Art confers a function of sense
and alterity to a subset of the perceived world. [] The work of art, for
those who use it, is an activity of unframing, of rupturing sense,
of baroque proliferation or extreme impoverishment, which leads to
a recreation and a reinvention of the subject itself. A new existential
support will oscillate on the work of art, based on a double register
of reterritorialization (refrain function) and resingularization.
16
regionaliSM aS dangerouS SuPPleMenT
The hope and potentiality for such a reinvention of contemporary sub
jectivity is under new pressure, in particular the pressure of globaliza
tion and the tensions between the nationstate and national identitari
an politics versus new overarching political and universalist concepts.
Following richard rortys skepticism expressed in his 1996 essay
globalization, the Politics of identity and social hope about the rele
vance of the way in which globalization affected identitarian
politics, and having in mind his remark about the loss of faith in
cosmopolitanism and universalist notions,
17
i want to argue that at
present there are certain attempts to compensate for the lost
social hopes of cosmopolitan values and these are mostly based
on newly provoked beliefs in regional values of everyday life.
it is no accident, though, that todays main contradictions and
tensions are not to be found along the line of globallocal but in the
pragmatic and calculative move between globalregional wherein
regional is seen as the democratic potentiality of the future, a concept
that could supplement the local.
The logic of the supplementation of national identity with the
paradigm of regional identity reverberates with a kind of Derridean
understanding of the notion of supplement: as two apparently contra
dictory ideas comprised in one concept. The more obvious defnition
of the notion of supplement, as something that aims to enhance the presence of something
that is selfsuffcient and therefore already complete, is overshadowed by the idea that a
thing that has a supplement cannot be truly complete in itself. but always by a way of com
pensation for [sous lespce de la supplance] what ought to lack nothing at all in itself.
18

consequently, if it were complete without the supplement it shouldnt need or lean on the
potential supplement.
let me then ask here, what would be the origin of this Derridean originary lack within the
national identity that needs to be flled with something, that needs to be expanded, supple
mented or complemented (by the regional identity?) in order to make it a whole? Pragmatic
and economic arguments are in favour of the needs of the global markets and can eventually
explain only the market value of the establishment of regional markets as instruments for
easier and easier regionally distributed advertisement and distribution of commercial goods
and regional art. However, one can assume that an explanation of the rapid rise of the
phenomenon of regional identity is not as simple as that. Needless to state, homogenous,
stable and selfsuffcient national identity once again shows its cracks, inconsistencies and
fuzzy borderlines, which are accompanied exactly by the insistence and the hope of expansion
in the realm of the regional.
in the context of the extrapolation of the intrinsic mechanisms of rapid globalization,
regionalism might seem an obsolete concept, yet it has actually fourished in recent decades.
The most important thing to state from the outset of this discussion on the regional paradigm
is that the regions are social and cultural constructs and are established because of the
belief in a common history and consideration of common interests.
19
For example, hardly any
scholar still takes seriously the so frequently used regional geopolitical framework: the balkans.
it became clear that the region could not function as a relevant identity concept due to the
danger of essentialization and the overburdening complexities and exclusions that prevent it
being used as a common denominator.
However, regional distinctions and defnitions are not only still in use, they are also valued
much higher today, and not only as metaphors. Perhaps they are necessary in pragmatic
terms, for example for smallerscale cooperations in the context of vast globalization: they
facilitate economic networks, boost markets and advertising, enable political negotiations etc.
Also, regionalism is seen as announcing the turn from identity politics towards what Nira
yuvalDavis so successfully dubbed transversal politics.
20
As an alternative to universalistic assimilationist and exclusivist politics, as well as to
identity politics, transversal politics deal with, people who identify themselves as belonging
to the same collectivity or social category [that] can actually be positioned very differently
in relation to a whole range of social locations (eg class, gender, ability, sexuality, stage in the
life cycle etc). At the same time, people with similar positionings and/or identities, can have
very different social and political values.
21
regional governanCe
For some theorists, the only adequate political response to globalization is the consolidation of
democracy through the strengthening of national borders. For others exactly the opposite is
required, and preferred, when the national and other values are questioned from abroad. many
theorists of democracy would agree that democratic government could be maintained only
by extending its borders beyond the nation. The expansion and acceleration of cultural, political
1 i am using the negative
concept potential not to in
terms of reference to the phil
osophical notion of aporia be
tween potentiality and actuali
ty known already in antique
and middleAge philosophy.
see giorgio Agamben, Poten-
tialities, ed. and trans. by
Werner Hamacher and David
e. Wellbery, introduction by
Daniel Hellerroazen (stan
ford: stanford university
Press, 1999), 243271.
2 suzana milevska, Phan
tasm of belonging: belonging
without Having something in
common, volksgarten: Poli
tics of belonging, ed. Adam
budak, Peter Pakesch and ka
tia schurl, exhibition cata
logue (cologne: Walther
knig, 2008), 110119.
3 i hereby refer to Jacques
Derridas concept of danger-
ous supplement; see Jacques
Derrida, Of grammatology,
trans. gayatri chakravorty
spivak (baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins university Press,
1976), 141165.
4 giorgio Agamben, the
coming community, trans.
michael Hardt (minneapolis:
university of minnesota Press,
1993): Whatever singularity,
which wants to appropriate
belonging itself, its own be
inginlanguage, and thus re
jects all identity and every
condition of belonging, is the
principal enemy of the
state (87).
5 kenneth Frampton, To
wards a critical regionalism:
six Points for an Architecture
of resistance, the anti-aes-
thetic: essays on Postmodern
culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port
Townsend, Wash.: bay Press,
1983) 1630.
6 ernst bloch, the Principle
of hope, 3 vols. (cambridge,
mass.: The miT Press, 1986).
334 335
and economic activities cutting across national and regional borders
is not inherently incompatible with democracy.
Adam lupel identifed three different ways in which the politics
of transnationalism could serve to broaden democratic legitimacy be
yond the nationstate: (i) cosmopolitan democracy, (ii) democratic
regionalism, and (iii) democratic network governance.
22
According to
lupel the politics of regionalism found a supporter in Habermas,
who offered a theory of a democratized european union in terms of
postnational citizenship and regionalism:
one way to imagine the middle course between a retreat to
national isolationism and the rush to global integration is the pursuit
of regional structures of governance. The accelerated integration
of separate nationstates into new political and economic units on
a regional scale may be read as a particular response to the exigencies
of globalization. Habermas offers a theory of a democratized european
union in these terms. His version of the postnational constellation
presents a form of regionalism as an attempt to demonstrate how
democratic politics might be reconfgured to regain power lost
to transnational economic and political actors.
23
The newly emerged regionalism is usually interpreted as a political
project that would lead us more easily towards democratization and
globalisation. such a tendency is seen not only as a gradual reintegra
tion of a previously divided territory but also as a project that seeks
to transcend longstanding ethnic or linguistic divisions.
24
Habermas
version of the postnational constellation presents a form of democrat
ic practice beyond the nationstate based on regionalism that is,
an attempt to demonstrate how democratic politics might be recon
fgured to regain power lost to transnational economic and political
actors. And in this sense regionalism can be generalized to represent
a normative project for the articulation of a new global order.
25
Habermas suggests that the achievement of postnational citizen
ship, taking into account recent developments within democratic
structures, cannot happen by a simple and rapid shift from national
identity to democratic identity. Thus regional integration emerges
as necessary, but it has to be taken into account that the, regional po
litical integration depends not only on a shared commitment to the
values of liberal democratic practice but on a shared historical experi
ence which may provide a common backdrop for the interpretation
of basic constitutional principles and to a specifc shared way of life.
sharing the values of liberal democratic practice is not the same
as sharing a specifc way of life.
26
on the contrary, one could argue that precisely the intrinsically
different experiences and common but troubled past put into question
the viability of political integration on the regional scale.
27
This is
exemplifed by the most recent eu expansion to include former com
munist bloc countries and by the tensions among these countries and the countries that were
not accessioned. it is diffcult to see how a democratic consensus could be reached at a
regional level between the conficted parts, for example in troubled regions such as the
balkans, where the borders and identities continuously overlapped and changed in the past,
and the fghts for common historic events and people are still at work. in such context,
chantal mouffes agonistic model of democracy has very few chances to survive because of
much deeper confrontations at work than the ones needed for the privileged terrain of
agonistic confrontation among adversaries.
28
if one agrees that a perspective like agonistic pluralism differs from a model of deliberative
democracy since it reveals the impossibility of establishing a consensus without exclusion
and warns us against the illusion that a fully achieved democracy could ever be instantiated,
29

then it is obvious that regionalism has opened an even bigger space of dissent and democratic
contestation, which is vital for agonistic pluralistic democracy.
To go back to globalization and its contradictions, Habermas, for example, thinks that
the challenges of globalization call for the reaggregation of political authority at a level that,
goes beyond the national frame but pulls up short of the global.
30
He argues that in the ab
sence of a global government, a democratic regionalism represented by the continuing project
of the european union could provide the necessary infrastructure for the democratic coordi
nation of economic and political processes of globalisation.
31
According to Habermas, european political integration depends upon a territorially based
political identity situated in a shared history. in the sense that this shared history occurs at
a regional level and entails solidarity among a variety of ethnic groups, it is understood as post
national. on the other hand, one could equally discuss this in terms of an extended national
ism, or a regional civic nationalism. However, it should be clear from the outset that regional
governance does not transcend the relationship between universal citizenship and political
particularity. Furthermore, the tension between the two remains and often results in coercion.
liberaliSM and regionaliSM
Political theorists commonly describe liberalism as a normative political doctrine that treats
the maintenance of individual liberty as an end in itself. liberty is seen as limiting both the ob
jectives of government and the manner in which those objectives might be pursued. even
Foucault accorded it a central place in his account of liberalism as a rationale of government.
Although he did not perceive the issue of individual liberty in normative terms, he suggested
that the signifcance that liberalism attaches to individual liberty is intimately related both
to the aim (which it shares with political reason) to recruit the government to its own larger
purposes, and to a prudential concern that the state might be governing too much. Thus, the
state regulation of certain kinds of behaviour might in fact turn out to be counterproductive.
in practice, however, and louis Althusser noticed this frst, it is clear that authoritarian
rule has always played an important part in the government of states that declare themselves
to be committed to the maintenance and defence of individual liberty, contrary to the
government of states that do not make that commitment and do not force the citizens to
make similar commitments.
unfortunately coercive and oppressive practices are clearly currently employed in many
governments. such governmental practices continue to play an important part, not only in the
independent states that took over the old imperial domains, but also in Western states
7 Douglas kellner, ernst
bloch, utopia and ideology
critique, http://www.uta.edu/
huma/illuminations/kell1.htm
(19 April 2008), 1.
8 ibid.
9 ibid., 2.
10 ibid., 2.
11 JeanPaul martinon, On
futurity: malabou, nancy and
derrida (london: Palgrave
macmillan, 2007) 152153.
12 kellner, ernst bloch, 3.
13 ibid., 3.
14 ibid., 3.
15 Flix guattari, chaosmo-
sis: an ethico-aesthetic Para-
digm, trans. Paul bains and
Julian Pefanis (indianapolis:
indiana university Press,
1990), 132.
16 ibid., 130.
17 richard rorty, Philosophy
and social hope (london:
Penguin, 1999), 229239.
18 Derrida, Of grammatology,
145.
19 lothar Hnnighausen,
marc Frey, James Peacock,
and Niklaus steiner, eds., re-
gionalism in the age of glo-
balism, vol. 1: concepts of re-
gionalism (madison: universi
ty of Wisconsin Press, 2004).
20 Nira yuvalDavis, What is
Transversal Politics, sound-
ingsa journal of Politics and
culture 12 (summer 1999),
94.
21 Nira yuvalDavis, Human/
Womens rights And Feminist
Transversal Politics, in myra
marx Ferree and Aili Tripp,
eds., transnational feminisms:
Womens global activism and
human rights (New york:
New york Press), http://www.
bristol.ac.uk/sociology/ethnici
tycitizenship/nyd2.pdf, 17.
22 Adam lupel, Tasks of a
global civil society: Held,
Habermas and
Democratic legitimacy be
yond the Nationstate, glo-
balizations 2, no. 1 (may
2005): 117133.
23 ibid., 123.
24 ibid.
25 ibid.
26 ibid., 124.
27 ibid.
336 337
themselves; in systems of criminal justice; the policing of romany people; the neglect of AiDs
patients, immigrant communities and the urban poor; the provision of social services; and
the management of large public and private sector organisations. Authoritarian rule has also
been invoked as a necessary instrument of economic liberalization in much of latin America,
parts of southeast Asia, and central and eastern europe.
How do such authoritarian practices relate to the liberal government of freedom? indeed
if, as Foucault suggests, the market plays the role of a test, then it is a test that surely cuts
both ways, indicating not only that some people and some felds of activity can best be
governed through the promotion of suitable forms of free behaviour. in this respect the de
scription of liberal political reason, considered as a rationale of the government of the state as
a whole as being concerned with governing through the promotion of certain kinds of liberty,
must be regarded as incomplete.
32
most importantly, governing is closely concerned with determining which individuals
and which areas of conduct within the state can best be governed in this way and which can
not, and with deciding what can be done about governing the latter. liberalism can hardly
avoid the question of what to do about individuals and areas of conduct that seem not to be
amenable to government through the promotion of suitable forms of individual liberty.
Thus, rather than describe liberalism as committed to governing through freedom, it would
be more appropriate to present it as claiming only that there are important contexts in which
free interactions might be the most appropriate means of regulation: that certain populations, or
signifcant individuals and groups and activities within them, can and should be governed
through the promotion of particular kinds of free activity and the cultivation of suitable habits
of selfregulation, and that the rest just have to be governed in other ways.
if ones agrees that a nationstate is governed too much, and that liberalism and individual
liberty are subjected to strict rules and state interests within its borders, then one can easily
agree with Habermas that regionalism and regional governance could help postnational
development to reach a higher level of democratic governance. However, one should be aware
that common history and the common way of pursuing everyday life may also entail easier
regional agreement on which peoples are socially amenable, and which are not, which habits
and liberties are seen as welcome and which are not. in this respect, regionalism and regionali
zation for some can facilitate the hopes of future belonging to a global and universal society
but to others can bring ever more and bigger restrictions and borders.
This inner contradiction between liberalism and regionalism could be exemplifed in atti
tudes towards minority rights. on the one hand, if one is a liberal, supporting individual
autonomy, then one will oppose minority rights as an unnecessary and dangerous departure
from the proper emphasis on the individual.
33
on the other hand, minorities and minority
rights are seen by communitarians as valuable societal and communal assets worth protecting
for their coherent collective way of life that have yet to give up under the pressure of
individual autonomy and liberalism.
34

However, perhaps the most important question here is whether minorities want to be
protected from liberalism and rapid modernisation at all or, as Will kumlicka stated, they would
rather be equal participants within mainstream liberal societies.
35
The vernaCular language of deMoCraCy
and The deliberaTive PoTenTialiTy of
regional belonging
even though the potential of not belonging to a homogenous national
identity inscribed within the broadened concept of regional identity
cannot be either the ultimate answer to the problems of limited politi
cal, cultural and economic resources of the nationstate, or the
answer to a homogenized and globalized cultural identity, it could
enable the democratization of various societal patterns of behaviour
and bring forward certain hopes for the future.
When kymlicka stated that democratic politics is politics in the
vernacular, he invested his hopes in the local and familiar, and not in
the global and unknown.
36
He was concerned with the language of
democracy that in his view is not universal since it needs to address
many concrete and particular issues that are expressed specifcally in
different cultures. it is a general rule for him that the more the political
debate takes place in the vernacular, the greater the participation.
37
Finally, it becomes clear that the questions of belonging and of
participatory and deliberative democracy, particularly in the case of re
gional identity, are intertwined in a complex and reciprocal relation.
being dependent upon each other in this case means that this leaning
on belonging to a certain community, and not to some other, provides
the motivation for a demanding participatory democratic process.
28 i agree with those who
affrm that a pluralist democ
racy demands a certain
amount of consensus and that
it requires allegiance to the
values which constitute its
ethicopolitical principles.
but since those ethicopoliti
cal principles can only exist
through many different and
conficting interpretations,
such a consensus is bound to
be a confictual consensus.
This is indeed the privileged
terrain of agonistic confronta
tion among adversaries.
chantal mouffe, the demo-
cratic Paradox (New york: ver
so, 2000), 103.
29 ibid., 104.
30 Adam lupel, regionalism
and globalization: PostNation
or extended Nation? Polity
36, no. 2 (January 2004), 153.
31 Jrgen Habermas, The
Postnational constellation and
the Future of Democracy, the
Postnational constellation
(New york: Polity Press,
2001), 58113.
32 barry Hindess, Politics as
government: michel
Foucaults Analysis of Political
reason, alternatives: global,
local, Political 30, no. 4 (octo
berDecember 2005), 392.
33 Will kymlicka, Politics in
the vernacular: nationalism,
multiculturalism, and citizen-
ship (New york: oxford uni
versity Press, 2001), 19.
34 rather than viewing
group practices as the prod
ucts of individual choices,
communitarians view individ
uals as the product of social
practices. ibid.
35 ibid., 20.
36 ibid., 214.
37 ibid.
sPACe reNdeZVOus
ChrisTian philipp mller
Photo credit: mArT,
Archivio del 900, Fondo
Depero, Dep.7.1.1
Photo credit: mArT, Archivio
del 900, Fondo Depero,
Dep.2.5.72
342 343
344 345
346 347
reGIONAlIsM
1
alan Colquhoun
regionaliSM i
2
ever since the late eighteenth century one of the main directions of architectural criticism has
been that of regionalism. According to this approach, architecture should be frmly based
on specifc regional practices based on climate, geography, local materials, and local cultural
traditions. it has been tacitly assumed that such a foundation is necessary for the development
of an authentic modern architecture. i want to subject this idea itself to criticism and to con
sider the notion of regionalism so defned in relation to the conditions of late capitalism.
i would like frst to put the concept of regionalism into its historical context. let me begin,
therefore, by looking at the historical period nearest to us, the avantgarde of the early
twentieth century. The twentieth century avantgarde can always be viewed from one of
two perspectives: either as having inherited the principles of the enlightenment, or as emerging
from the tradition of the enlightenments great enemy, romanticism. one can hardly avoid
noticing the presence of these contradictory strands: on the one hand the promotion of
rationalism, universalism, and identity; on the other a recurrent enthusiasm for nominalism,
empiricism, intuition, and difference. These contradictions came into the open during the
famous debate between Hermann muthesius and Henry van de velde at the Deutsche
Werkbund conference at cologne in 1914, when van de velde maintained a ruskinian belief
in the virtues of the artist/craftsman and a betrayed medieval tradition.
At frst glance it would appear that the former stranduniversalism and rationalismwas
triumphant in the modern movement of the 1920s. The elementariness of de stijl, the rappel
iordre of le corbusier, and the neue sachlichkeit in germany and switzerland were all
basically rationalistic. but, as has often been pointed out, the situation was in reality a good
deal more complicated; rationalism was only one side of the modern movement. For
example, when the paradigm of schinkelesque classicism emerged in the frst decade of
the twentieth century, it not only laid claim to universal values but took over and transformed
the regionalist philosophy of the Art Nouveau movement that it replaced. one example of
this phenomenon is when classicism and mediterraneanism were adopted by the cultural
nationalists of suisse romande.
3
This fact was extremely infuential in forming the mature ideol
ogy of le corbusier, in whose work reference to the mediterranean vernacular (cubic form,
white walls, etc.) was just as prominent as the idea of industrial standardisation. These
tendencies became increasingly important in le corbusiers work in the 1930s when, under
the infuence of anarchosyndicalism, he began to think in terms of separate vernacular
regional traditions, and even proposed a europe divided into natural regions, including a
mediterranean region.
4
but le corbusier was only one case among many, though certainly the
most articulate. mediterraneanism was, i believe, deeply embedded in the whole modem
movement from 1905 onwards. As for regionalism, one only has to look at the introductions
to the successive editions of sigfried giedions space, time and architecture, frst published in
1940 and revised in fve editions until 1968, to realise the extent to which regionalist ideas
increasingly permeated modernist theory in the postsecond World
War period. For example, Alvar Aaltos work was added in the
second edition.
so there is a case for saying that the 1920s was not just the simple
triumph of rationalism that it often seems. instead, it should perhaps
be seen as the stage on which a deep confict of ideologies was
still being enacted. What was the nature of this confict? To answer
this question it is necessary to go back to the eighteenth century and
the beginnings of romanticism and historicism. it was then that
europeans started to notice the existence of ancient cultures that
were neither antique nor biblical. At the same time they began to be
interested in their own pastsin the vernaculars that had existed
before the revival of antiquity in the renaissance. one of the most sig
nifcant results of this process was the creation of an alternative
model for humanistic culture, one that made a sharp distinction be
tween the study of nature and human history. both Johann gottfried
Herder and giambattista vico independently claimed that the two
studies demanded totally different methods, scientifc in the one case
and hermeneutic in the other.
This doctrine had a powerful effect in the german speaking coun
tries because it coincided with the revolt against the hegemony of
French culture. but it also affected France and england. elaborate ge
nealogies were invented to support the new sentiment of nationhood.
The english traced their ancestry to the Anglosaxons, or, even more
remotely, the celts, who, in their scottish Highland incarnation,
arrived complete with a fctitious poet, ossian. in germany, the goths
were supposed to have invented gothic architecture on german soil
until it was proved (by an englishman) that this event had taken place
on the isle de France. i will return to this invention of tradition,
as it has been called by the historian eric Hobsbawm, when i come to
mention the national romanticism of the late nineteenth century.
5
more important for an understanding of the origins of the doctrine
of regionalism are the theories that were developed later in the
nineteenth century, again mostly in germany, concerning the problem
of the rationalisation of social life under industrial capitalism. This
process was perhaps given its most powerful formulation by max
Weber when he coined two expressions that are still bywords for our
present situation: the disenchantment of the world due to individu
alisation and secularisation, and the iron cage of capitalism in which
the modern world is imprisoned.
Among the concepts that german postromantic theory used, two
are of particular interest, if only because they reduce the problem to
simple binary oppositions. The frst is the distinction between Ziviliza-
tion and Kultur. As Norbert elias has shown, this distinction goes back
to the early nineteenth century and was the direct result of the ger
1 collected together here are
two essays originally pub
lished as The concept of re
gionalism and critique of re
gionalism, respectively. in
black Dog Publishings forth
coming title, Alan colquhoun:
collected essays in Architec
tural criticism, they will be
published as regionalism i
and regionalism ii.
(editorial note)
2 originally published as
The concept of regionalism
in gulsum baydar Nalbantoglu
and Wong chong Thai, eds.,
Postcolonial space(s) (New
york: Princeton Architectural
Press, 1997), 1323. reprint
ed courtesy of the author. (ed
itorial note)
3 guiliano gresleri, vers une
Architecture classique, in
Jacques lacan, ed., le cor-
busier: line encyclopedic (Par
is: centre georges Pompidou,
1987).
4 mary mcleod,
le corbusier in Algiers,
Oppositions 19/20 (Winter
spring 1980), 5.
5 eric Hobsbawm and Ter
ence ranger, the invention of
tradition (cambridge: cam
bridge university Press,
1983).
6 Norbert elias, history of
manners (oxford: blackwell,
1994).
7 Thorn, martin, Tribes with
in Nations: The Ancient ger
mans and the History of mod
ern France, in Homi k. bhab
ha, nation and narration (lon
don: routledge, 1991), 2526.
8 Though the irish revolt
started much earlier, its cul
tural manifestations belong to
the 1890s.
9 As had already happened
in the balkans earlier in the
century.
10 maurice barres, as cited in
Thorn, Tribes within Nations,
3839.
11 Houston stewart cham
berlain, die grundlagen des
neunzehnten jahrhunderts
(munich, 1900). Translated
into english as foundations of
the nineteenth century (New
york: John lane The boldly
Head, 1910).
12 Ferdinand Tnnies, ge-
meinschaft und gesellschaft
(leipzig, 1887).
348 349
man revolt against French cultural dominance. Zivilization meant aristocratic materialism and
superfciality, as opposed to the less brilliant but more profound Kultur.
6
The idea of this dis
tinction spread to other countries with the dissemination of romanticism. in england samuel
Taylor coleridge adopted the word culture with its german connotations. The concept was
absorbed by John ruskin and William morris and, in the form of medievalism, became the cor
nerstone of the Arts and crafts movement. in France itself, a school of historiography infu
enced by chateaubriand held the view that the Frankish invasions of the ffth century were the
true origins of modern French culture, rather than the institutions founded by the galloro
mans.
7
in the late nineteenth century the idea of Zivilization received the slightly different con
notation of modern technological society, in opposition to preindustrial human values. but,
both in the earlier and later senses, Zivilization represented the rational and universal as against
the instinctual, autochthonous, and particular. We fnd approximately the same set of ideas in
giedions space, time and architecture when be talks about the split in modern life between
feeling and intellecta confict that he hoped to dissolve by arguing that science and modern
art were in reality dealing with the same phenomena but from different perspectives.
The distinction between Zivilization and Kultur is a fruitful way of looking at the widespread
nationalist movements of the 1890s, which in so many ways repeated the impulse of the earli
er romantic movement. Just as the germans had done around 1800, so a number of groups
distanced themselves from the countries by which they had been politically or culturally domi
nated: the irish from the english, the catalonians from the castillians, the Finns from the rus
sians and the swedes.
8
in Finland, for example, the Finnish language was offcially adopted, an
ancestral aural literature was reconstructed, and an eclectic architecture representing Finn
ishness was put together from various stylistic sources, some indigenous, some external (for
example, one of its main sources was the english Arts and crafts movement).
9
such a repre
sentation of national essence was largely fctional, but it had a clear ideological function: the
legitimisation of a nationstate in terms of a regional culture, and in this it was successful.
The notion of Kultur was also taken up, in spirit if not in name, by chauvinistic movements
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. maurice barres wrote in 1902, There is in
France a static morality... kantianism. This claims to regulate universal man, without taking in
dividual differences into account. it tends to form young persons from lorraine, Province, brit
tany, and Paris in terms of an abstract, ideal man, who is everywhere the same, whereas the
need will be for men rooted solidly in our soil, in our history.
10
in germany the idea was adopted by the National socialists in the 1920s, taking up the ide
as of writers like Houston stewart chamberlain, who had used the distinction Zivilization / Kul-
tur to promote the concept of racial purity.
11
in so doing they recruited several architects of the
Heimatschutz persuasion, such as Paul schulzeNaumburg, whose ideas were derived from
the Arts and crafts movement.
The second concept i want to discuss is the distinction between gesellschaft and gemein-
schafta distinction made by Ferdinand Tnnies in his book of that title of 1887.
12
According
to Tnnies these two words represent two types of human association. gesellschaftlike associ
ations are the result of rational deliberation, whereas gemeinschaftlike associations are those
that have developed organically. Again, we fnd the same opposition as in the case of Ziviliza-
tion and Kultur, one term based on the idea of a natural law independent of historical or geo
graphical contingency, the other implying rootedness in the soil. examples of the former are
bureaucracies, factories, and corporations, in which social relations are rational means to a de
sired end. examples of the latter are the family, friendship groups,
clans, and religious sectsall groupings in which social relations are
ends in themselves.
i do not need to demonstrate that the doctrine of regionalism be
longs to the Kultur and gemeinschaft side of these oppositions. The
problem i would like to address is this: given the radically changed cir
cumstances of the modern world, does this cluster of concepts still
make sense, and, if so, in what way will its concept of cultureabove
all in its architectural manifestationsdiffer from those of its earlier in
carnations: romanticism, Art Nouveau, and the early twentieth century
avantgarde?
obviously, the anxieties that were experienced in these periods
have not simply evaporated. many still feel disquiet at the increasingly
abstract and homogenised world of modern postindustrial society.
but it is questionable whether these doubts can any longer be ex
pressed adequately in terms of the oppositions i have outlined. clear
ly, the doctrine of regionalism is based on an ideal social modelone
might call it the essentialist model. According to this model, all soci
eties contain a core, or essence, that must be discovered and pre
served. one aspect of this essence lies in local geography, climate and
customs, involving the use and transformation of local, natural mate
rials. This is the aspect that has most often been invoked in connec
tion with architecture.
The frst thing to note about this model is that it was formulated in
the late eighteenth century precisely at the moment when the phe
nomena that it described seemed to be threatened and about to dis
appear. This is hardly surprising. The elements of society that operate
without friction are invisible. it is only when imbalances and frictions
begin to occur that it becomes possible to see them. so, from the
start, the concept of a regional architecture was not exactly what it
seemed. it was more an object of desire than one objective fact. The
architecture of regionalism put forward by the romantics was not that
authentic thing of which it had formed a mental image, but only its
representation. The question as to whether such an authentic thing
ever existed is an idle one, so long as our only access to it is by means
of its later conceptualisation. Nevertheless, the theory of regionalism
adopted by the modem movement insisted on the need of such an ar
chitecture to be authentic. Thus, what had to be eliminated were the
very practices of the romantics themselves, by which gemeinschaft
like societies had been invoked by mimicking their forms. it was not
by such means that the essence of regional architectures could be re
covered, but rather by discovering the causal relations that existed be
tween forms and their environment. but if what i have said is correct
this would be a hopeless task, even if we restricted ourselves to the
regionalisms of romanticism. What would be discovered after the out
13 Alexander Tzonis and li
ane lefaivre, The grid and
the Pathway: An introduction
to the Work of Dimitris and
susana Antonakakis, archi-
tecture in greece 15 (1981).
14 ernest renan, cited in
Homi bhabha, Dissemination:
Time, Narrative and the mar
gins of the modern Nation, in
Homi bhabha, ed., nation and
narration (routledge, 1990),
310.
15 ernest gellner, nations
and nationalism (oxford: basil
blackwell, 1983).
16 michel de certeau, the
Practice of everyday life (ber
keley: university of california
Press, 1984).
350 351
er layer of mimetic forms had been removed would simply be a deeper level of mimesis. The
use of local materials, sensitivity to context, scale, and so on would all be so many ways of
representing the idea of an authentic, regional architecture. The search for absolute authen
ticity that the doctrine of regionalism implies is likely to create an oversimplifed picture of a
complex cultural situation.
Fear of such an oversimplifed approach seems to have lain behind one of the more sophis
ticated recent theories of regionalism. by qualifying the old term regionalism with the new
term critical, Alexander Tzonis and liane lefaivre have tried to preempt any imputation of re
gressive nostalgia. According to them, the word critical, in this context, means two things.
First it means resistance against the appropriation of a way of life and a bond of human rela
tions by alien economic and power interests.
13
if we take away the mildly marxian overtones
of this statement what is left corresponds exactly to the notions of Kultur and gemeinschaft
that i have outlined above. it represents an attempt to preserve a regional essence that is seen
to be in mortal danger and to uphold the qualities of Kultur against the incursions of a univer
salising and rationalising Zivilization. but any doctrine of regionalism has always implied such
an intention, so that, taken in this sense, the word critical would seem to add nothing of sub
stance to the concept. The second meaning Tzonis and lefaivre give to the word critical is to
create resistance against the merely nostalgic return of the past by removing regional ele
ments from their natural contexts so as to defamiliarise them and create an effect of estrange
ment. This seems to be based on the russian formalist theory of making strange.
These two meanings do not seem to have anything to do with each other. What is being
presented as a single idea, critical regionalism, is in fact two separate ideas. but the problem
goes deeper, because the second interpretation of critical actually appears to contradict the
frst. it draws attention to the fact that the postulated organic world of regional artefacts no
longer exists. Far from resisting the appropriations of rationalisation, it confrms them by sug
gesting that all that remains of an original, unitary body of regional architecture are shards,
fragments, bits, and pieces that have been torn from their original context. Taking this view,
any attempt to retrieve the original contents in all their original wholeness would result only in
a sort of kitsch. The only possible attitude towards regionalism and the values of Kultur and
gemeinschaft would therefore be one of irony.
behind the doctrine of a regionalism based on the old virtues of an organic (and therefore
unconscious) social and artistic unity, lies the doctrine of a sophisticated manneristic art that
consciously juxtaposes incongruous elements to produce unstable combinations. This being
so, perhaps we should stop using the word regionalism and look for other ways of conceptual
ising the problems to which the word is supposed to respond. in saying this i am not saying
that there are no longer any regions with their characteristic climates and customs. What i
want to say is that regionality is only one among many concepts of architectural representa
tion and that to give it special importance is to follow a welltrodden critical tradition that no
longer has the relevance that it had in the past. it is true that many interesting contemporary
designs refer to local materials, typologies, and morphologies. but in doing so their architects
are not trying to express the essence of particular regions, but are using local features as mo
tifs in a compositional process in order to produce original, unique, and contextrelevant archi
tectural ideas.
Take, for example, a recent building by the swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de
meuron. in this small house in italy there is play between local drystone walling (standing for
the rural) and a rational concrete frame such that wall and frame are related in unexpected
ways. it is impossible to read this building as a synthesis. rather it is a sort of endless text.
What we fnd here cannot be called regionalism. instead it is a work that makes subtle com
ments on a number of architectural codes, including the fentre en longeur, the cube, the
frame, and the organicity of natural materials. one is not quite sure whether what is being
suggested is tectonic solidity of theatricality, closure, or openness. in contemplating the build
ing the mind tends to oscillate between a number of hypotheses, none of which are complete
ly confrmed or denied.
Another example is the housing recently built in The Hague, The Netherlands, by Alvaro
siza. Here siza imitatesbut rather indirectlycertain features of Dutch vernacular classicism,
such as its entry system, window proportions, and materials. can this be called regionalism? if
so, whose regionalism? but is not the question an absurdity? The one fact that could be called
regional is its ownership. if one wants to use the word regional in such a context one must
see it as a secondorder system, fltered through the eclectic sensibility of a particular archi
tect. it is the result of a voluntaristic interpretation of urbanistic values, one that takes into ac
count existing urban forms as an artistic context; it is certainly not a confrmation of a living lo
cal tradition. The architectural codes that were once tied to the customs of autonomous cultur
al regions have long ago been liberated from this dependence. it is a matter of free choice. lo
calism and traditionalism can therefore be seen as universal potentials always lurking on the
reverse face of modernisation and rationalisation.
one of the intentions of a regionalist approach is the preservation of difference. but differ
ence, which used to be insured by the coexistence of watertight and autonomous regions of
culture, now depends largely on two other phenomena: individualism and the nationstate. As
regards individualism, the architect, as the agent through which the work of architecture is re
alised, is himself the product of modern rationalisation and division of labour. Designs that em
phasise local architecture are no more privileged today than other ways of adapting architec
ture to the conditions of modernity. The combination of these various ways is the result of the
choices of individual architects who are operating from within multiple codes.
With respect to the nationstate, in spite of the worldwide and almost instantaneous dis
semination of technologies and codes, which results in an underlying similarity of the architec
ture in all Western and most eastern countries at any one moment, it is usually possible to dis
tinguish between the more typical products of individual countries. in this sense, the nation
state is the modern regiona region in which culture is coextensive with political power. but
this culture is of a different kind from that of the regions of the preindustrial world. We may
not quite agree with ernest renan when, in a lecture at the sorbonne in 1882, he denied that
national boundaries were dictated by language, race, religion, or any other natural factor.
14

but at least we can admit the truth of his statement that what creates a nation is a will towards
political unity rather than any preexistent set of customs. These two functions may be coex
tensive but they do not have to be. The need for placing regions that often differ from each
other under a single political umbrella comes from the needs of the modern industrial econo
my. As ernest gellner has pointed out, the reasons for the rise of the nationstate were the op
posite of those underlying regional differentiation. Differences between regions were part of
the structure of the agrarian world. The needs of industrial society, on the contrary, demand a
high degree of uniformity and the fattening out of local differences.
15
Perhaps it will be argued that this is not true universally. recent events in the exyugoslavia
352 353
and the exussr have shown that old regional identities are still very much alive. but it is diff
cult to assess the status of regionalism in these cases, since it is obvious that ethnic emotions
are being fanned for political reasonsthat is, reasons connected with the formation of mod
ern nationstates and the control of political power. The confict in the exyugoslavia cannot be
attributed to profound differences in regional cultures but rather to residues of previous con
ficts between the Habsburg, ottoman, and russian empires. As far as architecture and every
day artefacts are concerned, the cultures of the combatants are identical. The person who
stands for the satanic other is not marked by any specifc cultural differences. indeed one of
the striking aspects of the television coverage of the war is that it is taking place in the familiar
and banal context of badly built modern blocks of apartments and supermarketscontexts
common to the entire modern world.
A more plausible exception may be made of the socalled developing worldespecially
that part of the third world consisting of ancient cultures, such as the indian and the islamic. in
these countries, it will be argued, nationhood does sometimes coincide with living cultural tra
ditionstraditions that are in confict with modernisation. but however much we hope that
crucial aspects of these traditions may turn out to be conformable with modernisation, we
have to admit that the modern technologies and cultural paradigms that increasingly predomi
nate in the urban centres of these countries also affect the rural areas. in these societies differ
ent historical times exist together, and under these circumstances it is already diffcult to speak
of authentic local traditions in a cultural feld such as architecture. it may be desirable to sat
isfy the demand for traditional forms with their socially embedded, allegorical meanings, even
though the artistic and craftsmanlike traditions that originally supported them have begun to
atrophy, due to prolonged contact with the West. but these are matters of strategy rather than
of essence.
With these questions we come to the core of the problem. What is the relation between
cultural patterns and technologies? The problem is, to some extent, obscured in the West, be
cause industrialisation evolved out of local cultural traditions, and adaptation to a postindustr
ialised culture is already quite far advanced. The problem is glaring, however, in the east and in
Africa because of the friction between two worlds and two times: the agrarian and the indus
trial. Are cultural patterns absolutely dependent on an industrial base, or can they maintain a
certain independence? is an industrialised culture irrevocably eurocentric?
but these questions take me too far from my theme, and i would like to end by looking
again at the problem from the point of view of the technologically advanced countries, and at
the same time to sum up my observations on the concept of regionalism, as it concerns these
countries. modern postindustrial culture is more uniform than traditional cultures because the
means of production and dissemination are standardised and ubiquitous. but this uniformity
seems to be compensated for by a fexibility that comes from the nature of modern techniques
of communication, making it possible to move rapidly between codes and to vary messages to
an unprecedented extent. This greater freedom, this ability of industrial society to tolerate dif
ference within itself, however, does not follow the same laws that accounted for differences
within traditional societies. in these societies, codes within a given cultural region were com
pletely rigid. it was precisely this rigidity that accounted for the differences between different
regions. in modern societies these regional differences are largely obliterated. instead, there
exist large, uniform, highly centralised cultural/political entities, within which differences of an
unpredictable, unstable, and apparently random kind tend to develop.
The concept of regionality depends on it being possible to correlate cultural codes with geo
graphical regions. it is based on traditional systems of communication in which climate, geog
raphy, craft traditions, and religions are absolutely determining. These determinants are rapidly
disappearing and in large parts of the world no longer exist. That being the case, how is value
established? Whereas in earlier times value belonged to the world of necessity, it now belongs
to the world of freedom that immanuel kant foretold at the end of the eighteenth century.
modern society is polyvalentthat is to say, its codes are generated randomly from within a
universal system of rationalisation that, in itself, claims to be value free.
clearly this way of generating meaning and difference in modern technological society has
serious consequences for architecture, whose codes have always been even less amenable to
individual and random manipulation than the other arts and more dependent on impersonal
and imperative typologies and techniques. in the preindustrialised world these technologies
summed up in the greek word technewere connected with myths relating to the earth and
the cosmos. in modern society technique is irreversibly disconnected from the phenomenal
world of the visible, tangible experience upon which such myths were built. in the modern me
dia the process of meansend abstraction has resulted in the rerouting of artistic codes from
the stable to the apparently random. To speak more accurately, they have been rerouted from
the public to the private realm. such a process of privatisation has been suggested by michel
de certeau, for whom modern technocratic life has not so much destroyed the myths and nar
ratives characteristic of agrarian societies, as it has confned them to the family and the indi
vidual, where they reappear as fragments of an older narration.
16
This, then, is the problem of architecture in the postmodern world: it seems no longer pos
sible to envisage an architecture that has the stable, public meanings that it had when it was
connected with the soil and with the regions. How should we defne the kinds of architecture
that are taking its place?
regionaliSM ii
I
regionaliSM, roManTiCiSM, hiSToriCiSM
The discourse of regionalism belongs to the larger collection of ideas normally known as his
toricism, according to which cultural values, including those of architecture, are not a priori,
unchanging, and universal but depend on particular, local, and inherited practices. This con
cept carries with it the apparently paradoxical assumption that one culture is able to under
stand another, thus reintroducing, at another level, the universalism that it has just thrown
out. regionalism also implies the belief that regional cultures are autochthonous and spring
from the folk rather than from standards imposed by social and intellectual elites. generally
speaking, supporters of regionalism have been concerned with anonymous, vernacular archi
tecture (though there are exceptions, as when classic traditions are identifed with particular
nation states, to be discussed later).
regionalism has always been implicated in a metaphysics of difference, rejecting all at
tempts to generalise cultural values into systems based on the concept of natural law or other
such universalising theories.
The idea that culture is particular and hereditary rather than universal and rational sprang
354 355
from antienlightenment tendencies within eighteenth century thought, exemplifedthough
in different waysby Herder and vico. later historicists were to see history as an evolving sys
tem, but for Herder and vico history was a decline from a golden age, and this idealisation of
the past was to be shared by the various regionalist movements of the nineteenth and twenti
eth centuries.
Historicism and romanticism led the attack on the classical system of the arts that had
dominated europe since the renaissance. The enlightenment had already disputed the mythi
cal substructure of classical thought but it had left in place many of its concepts, including that
of imitation. in romantic theory, imitation ceases to be the representation of external forms
and becomes the revelation of an inner, organic, and indivisible structure. in a corresponding
movement, historicism forbids the artist the freedom to combine, mechanically, as it were, dif
ferent historical forms as if they were lying readytohand in the same historical space. but the
nineteenth century, in its obsession with the past, never freed itself from the classical tradition
of imitation. The problem of how to recover eternal architectural values without imitating the
forms in which they were embodied was apparently insoluble. Thus, there were two traditions
leading to regionalism, one stemming from classicism and the other from romanticism; one
fgural and combinatory, the other functional and holistic.
II
regionaliSM and eCleCTiCiSM
At frst sight eclecticism would appear to be the antithesis of regionalism, with its doctrine of
authenticity. yet if we accept the proposition that regionalism was heir to two separate tradi
tions and that its proponents have always had diffculty in relinquishing stylistic imitation, we
must admit that the two concepts are dialectically related. Within eclecticism the criteria of
choice are still the classical ones of propriety and character. Just as, in the classical tradition,
the different orders were the appropriate metaphorical representation of certain ideas, so, in
eighteenth century eclecticism, different styles produced certain associations. in both cases,
architecture was seen as capable of creating specifc moods in the observer. in the classical
tradition it was accepted that this was achieved by artifce, in other words by deception, (the
vraisemblable). Although this idea began to be challenged in the late eighteenth century, nine
teenth century eclecticism still followed it implicitly. The romantic attack on the classical tradi
tion was, on the contrary, based on the belief that the idea could be symbolised without the
mediation of secondary images. Translated into the terms of regionalism, this implied that the
genius of the folk had a subtle body that persisted through changes in external form. This si
multaneous appeal to the Zeitgeist and to the past depended on the possibility of the resurrec
tion and transformation of an essencean idea that could take hold only when history came to
be seen as evolutionary and apocalyptic and the idea of a fxed golden age had lost its power.
III
regionaliSM and naTionaliSM
regionalism owed much of its infuence to the growing power of the centralised nationstate.
The relation between them was twofold; on the one hand, peoples whose cultural identity had
been suppressed used the concept of the volk to legitimise claims to unifcation or independ
ence: on the other, nationstates themselves sometimes idealised their own folk traditions.
germany in the early nineteenth century and France in the late nineteenth century are the main
examples. it is often hard to distinguish between these two types. german romanticism,
which was searching for a common cultural and political identity, was exported to France and
england, both of which already had such an identity, and all three nations claimed a similarly
reconstructed medieval world as their own.
The phenomenon of international cultural traditions being used to reinforce the selfimage
of individual nationstates occurred again in the early twentieth century, when both germany
and France appropriated aspects of the classical tradition.
The romantic idea of the volk and the positivist idea of material progress (and its corollary,
liberal politics) were in contention with each other throughout the nineteenth century. in the
1890s there was a renewed burst of interest in folk myths, and this found expression in the
movements of reform of the crafts as well as in the Art Nouveau movement. These tendencies
were simultaneously progressive and regressive. enthusiasm for primitive, naif, and popular art
prompted the rejection of classicism and the search for new forms. but they also encouraged a
return to tradition and the condemnation of industrialism. in belgium and catalonia the Art
Nouveau movement emphasised modernity and novelty and became the emblem of a new in
dustrial bourgeoisie. in Finland, on the other hand, it played a more mystical role, conjuring up
remote folk origins, even if it represented these in the current idioms of the Arts and crafts
movement, just as in the music of Jean sibelius we fnd late romantic forms being used to
convey the primitive essence of the Finnish landscape.
in germany and France, too, conservatism existed alongside experimentalism. Julius lang
behns best selling book rembrandt the educator (1890) claimed vlkisch origins for a com
mon germanic Kultur. in France, charles maurras and maurice barrs promoted regional diver
sity and rejected a republicanism that had suppressed regional traditions in the name of an ab
stract, universal principle. This ideology was accompanied by a regionalist movement in archi
tecture, equivalent to the heimatschutz movement in germany.
IV
regionaliSM and The 1920S avanT-gardeS
The pages of lesprit nouveau testify to the antagonism of le corbusier to the eclectic region
alism that dominated popular architectural taste in postwar France. le corbusier was merely
the most persuasive of those in europe as a whole who opposed eclecticism with the ideal of
universal modernism based on the abstract forms of modern painting and the industrialisation
of the building industry.
unlike mies van der rohe, who was still designing biedermeier villas for wealthy clients as
late as 1926, le corbusier had renounced his prewar, behrensinspired neoclassicism. but he
nevertheless claimed to be working within the French classical traditiona claim that was in
harmony with postwar French nationalist sentiment and critical opinion. it is not only in the
context of postwar France that we fnd this rappel lordrethis connection between modern
ism and classicism (a connection that had, in fact, already been made in Werkbund circles be
fore the war). in scandinavia the modernism of the 1930s grew directly out of the neoclassi
cism of the 1920s, as can be seen in the early work of Asplund and Aalto. in germany, critics
supporting the neue sachlichkeit movement in painting recognized its kinship with the French
postwar neoclassicism of painters like Picasso. if we slightly extend the meaning of classical,
we can add to this list the Dutch de stijl movement, which promoted a rationalism that was
opposed to the idea of an organic architecture springing from the soil. but in spite of the pre
356 357
dominantly rationalist spirit of the postwar avantgarde, vlkisch and antirationalist ideas lay
just below the surface. The organic or functionalist school in germany, and the post1929
work of Aalto (so enthusiastically championed by giedion in the later editions of space, time
and architecture), proposed a regional modernism based on concrete local conditions and spe
cifc programmes.
even before the First World War, as i have already suggested, classicism had been seen as
an essential ingredient of regionalist architecture in France. it is therefore not altogether sur
prising to fnd le corbusier, in 1928, writing a book (une maisonun Palais) in which a fsher
mans hut is seen as the humble forerunner of high classicism, thus separating classicism from
its aristocratic and elitist connotations. We seem to be dealing here with an abstract notion of
classicism which, with its emphasis on ethnography, is conformable to romantic theory. From
the late 1920s le corbusiers interest in vernacular and regional building increased. Disillu
sioned, like many French intellectuals of the period, with parliamentary democracy, he became
involved with the protoFascist neosyndicalist movement, with its combination of populist re
gionalism and authoritarian technocracy. unlike the governments of germany and the ussr,
which outlawed modernism and returned to eclecticism, le corbusier and the neosyndicalists
confated regionalism with modernism, believing that art and technology were inseparable and
that modern architecture would become popular.
The belief that popular customs and regional traditions could be reconciled with modem
technology remained the mainspring of le corbusiers work for the rest of his life. Already in
1929 he had stated the problem with characteristic lucidity:
lArchitecture est le resultat de ltat desprit dune poque. Nous sommes en face dun
vnement de la pense contemporaine; vnement international [...] les techniques, les prob
lmes poss, comme les moyens scientifques de ralisation, sont universels.
Pourtant, les rgions ne se confondront pas, car les conditions climatiques, gographiques,
topographiques, les courants des races et mille choses aujourdhui encore profondes, gui
deront toujours la solution vers formes conditonnes.
Translation:
Architecture is the result of the state of mind of its time. We are facing an event in contem
porary thought; an international event, which we didnt realise ten years ago; the techniques,
the problems raised, like the scientifc means to solve them, are universal.
Nevertheless, there will be no confusion of regions; for climatic, geographic, topographic
conditions, the currents of race and thousands of things still today unknown, will always guide
solutions toward forms conditioned by them.
This statement can be taken as more or less representative of a post1930s architectural
avantgarde that sought a modernism that would be determined simultaneously by modern
technology and by the perennial architectural values inscribed in regional materials and cus
toms.
V
regionaliSM and laTe CaPiTaliSM
The statement by le corbusier quoted above makes several assumptions, the most important
of which are:
1. modern architecture is (should be?) conditioned by a universal technology.
2. modern architecture is (should be?) conditioned by local customs, climates, etc.
Despite (or because of) the clarity of the statement, it presents two determinants as independ
ent absolutes whose relation to each other remains a total mystery. What it ignores is the pos
sibility that universal technology and local custom are intimately connected, so that a change
in one necessarily produces a change in the other. The idea that they are somehow independ
ent of each other seems to be derived from the saintsimonean notion that technical decisions
made by specialists who know what they are doing merely provide the optimum conditions
for the peoples enjoyment of unchanging needs and desires. but under the conditions of late
capitalism desires and needs do not remain constant. They are affected by the changing
technologies which make them possible. This is precisely the difference between the modern
and the preindustrial world. but in revenge, if, in this way, desires seem to become fuid,
the gross economic conditions that create this fuidity become increasingly universal, abstract,
and interdependent. once the economy as a whole is commercialised the natural (i.e., stable)
relation between the individual and the social group ceases to exist, as sociologists like georg
simmel and max Weber pointed out many years ago. When subsistence farming gives way
to cashcrop farming (as has happened in europe and is even now happening in, for example,
india), the old symbiotic relation between culture and nature disappears. in Western europe,
manual, rural economies coexisted for a long time with industrialisation and this gave
some plausibility to the regionalist argument. but in late capitalism the arm of technology
extends into the remotest regions, even in the socalled developing countries which
have no choice but to modernise.
The relationship between industrialisation and traditional cultures and techniques is not one
in which they become organically fused with one another, as le corbusier implied, but one of
hybridisation, where different cultural paradigms, detached from their original contexts, coex
ist in an impure and unstable form. As an example of this in the area of urbanism, one can cite
the coexistence of different economies in a city like chandigarh, where an unoffcial econo
my of recycling has become necessary to facilitate the circulation of goods to the lowest social
strata. (in le corbusiers plan such a theoretically impossible situation was not allowed for.)
but this is the frst stage of a process in which ageold habits become transformed and con
taminated with international cultural paradigms spread by modern systems of communication.
local customs do not disappear completely; they become reterritorialised. virtual cultures of
choice take the place of cultures born of economic necessity. Dubrovnik becomes Disney World.
in conclusion, it is worth mentioning a third assumption in le corbusiers statement accord
ing to which society is conceptualised as an endgame situation. culture is seen as having
achieved a state of harmony and balance. An imagined and ideal state of organic unity is pre
sented as a situation immediately attainablean instant utopia. in this situation of tautological
illusion all solutions become selffulflling prophecies. This is true both of the claim that there
is a spirit of the poque and of the belief in the persistence of regional cultures. but the real
situation is not one of cultural stasis and fulfllment, but of indeterminacy and change, in which
a complex, interlocking global economy creates new forms out of old cultures as it goes
alongforms whose precise and determinate nature cannot be foretold with any accuracy. Ar
chitecture will certainly, when the economic conditions allow, continue to imagine ideal socio
cultural forms, but its infuence over social reality will be limited.
358 359
beYONd beING IN PlACe
luCy r. lippard
in contrast to kenneth Framptons notion of critical regionalismwhich is more critical than
regionalmy own interests lie in the ways in which independence (and sometimes power) is
generated even by temporary and/or serial senses of racination. Framptons framework is
world architecture, which is often irrelevant to my preoccupation with cultural landscapes.
Nevertheless, i aspire to be a member of what he calls a critical arriregarde that distances
itself equally from the enlightenment myth of progress and from a reactionary, unrealistic im
pulse to return to the architectonic forms of the preindustrial past, avoiding nostalgic histori
cism or the glibly decorative, as well as conservative populism and sentimental regionalism.
1

my own project (and i am hardly alone) has been to untie the regional from such dated asso
ciations, to set it free from the notion that the local is by defnition sentimental, reactionary,
and nostalgic and even fascist, and to describe its covert potential for resistancefor the
most part unconscious and unrecognized.
The originators of the term critical regionalism (Alexander Tsonis and liliane lefaivre) ob
served that regionalism bears the hallmark of ambiguity.
2
in fact, everything interesting bears
that hallmark, and the local is no exception. critical regionalism is a valuable concept in re
gard to public space, urban planning, and institutional architecture, but it is certainly ambigu
ous when applied to landbased lives and multicentred livesas lived, untheorized. Too much
academic writing on place today is written from a highly esoteric and objective viewpoint that
ignores the facts and the character of places themselves, forcing populism and communal (as
opposed to jingoist) identity politics into the rightwing column. (if this smacks of the dreaded
nostalgic anticapitalist escapism, so be it.)
much has been written about the sense of place, which is symbiotically related to a sense
of displacement. i am ambivalent about this phrase even as i am touched by it. A sense of
place has become not only a clich, but a kind of intellectual property, a way for nonbelongers
to belong without doing anything other than declare their undying love for the place where
they momentarily fnd themselves. The plural, senses of place, on the other hand, makes it
clear that every place is different for every inhabitant and that most people are formed by their
experiences of multiple places. What i call multicentredness implies a serial sensitivity to
place, which can be an invaluable social and cultural tool, providing muchneeded connections
to what we call nature and, sometimes, to cultures not our own. such motiveswhich usually
(and fortunately) lie under the theoretical radarshould be neither discouraged nor disparaged.
All places exist somewhere between the inside and the outside views of them, the ways in
which they compare to, and contrast with, other places. A sense of place is a virtual immer
sion that depends on lived experience and a topographical intensity that is rare today in the
united states, both in ordinary life and in traditional educational felds. From the viewpoint of a
writer or scholar, it demands extensive visual and historical research, a great deal of walking
in the feld, contact with oral tradition, and an intensive knowledge of both local diversity and
the global contexts in which it endures. on the one hand, there is the quick read, rapid adapta
tion to a new place as a survival toola kind of scanning known to city dwellers as well as to
woodsmen, and a source of mapping in indigenous societies. on the other hand, memory is
stratifed. if we have seen a place through many years, each view, no matter how banal, is a
palimpsest. Among the layers are stories told by others. memory is part frstperson, part
collective. some memories are positive, and they deserve to be remembered and utilized rather
than being relegated to mere nostalgia. in the virtually permanent energy crisis that faces
the world today, a diminution of the need and motivation to move, travel, wander and tour is
not nostalgic so much as it is necessary. return need not mean return to the past as a
way of ignoring the present, but returning to reconsider a set of values that make possible a
sustainable future.
celebrations of nomadism and cosmopolitanism are of course woven into many celebra
tions of the local, including my own, thus the concept of multicentredness, which means
thoughtfully touching down during ones lifelong trajectory. There is no point in travelling if we
never know where we are, and if we never know how anyone else sees the place we are in.
i too (as miwon kwon has put it) remain unconvinced of the ways a model of meaning and in
terpretation is called forth to validate, even romanticize, the material and socioeconomic
realities of an itinerant lifestyle, and the ways in which uncertainty, instability, ambiguity, and
impermanence are taken as desired attributes of a vanguard, politically progressive artistic
practice.
3
However, without resorting to the kind of either/or thinking that has supposedly
been supplanted by postmodernism, stasis and motion can be reconciled.
senses of place, as the phrase suggests, do indeed emerge from the senses. landscape,
and even the genius loci, or spirit of place, can be experienced kinetically, or kinesthetically,
as well as visually and conceptually. Walking was a major tool in guy Debords psychogeo
graphical project of urban deconstruction. if one has been raised in a place, its textures
and sensations, its smells and sounds, can be recalled as they felt to a childs, adolescents,
adults body, especially the walking body, passing through and absorbing the landscape.
And every landscape is a hermetic narrative. Finding a ftting place for oneself in the world is
fnding a place for oneself in a story, says Jo carson, a professional storyteller from Johnson
city, Tennessee. The story is composed of mythologies/histories/ideologiesthe stuff of
identity and representation. carson is in a sense a narrative geographer. Her stories begin
with basic central place functionsgrocery store, gas station, auto mechanic, restaurant,
movie house (read video rental, these days) and decent bookstore. but when she talks about
place, she means not only landforms and built environment, but the favor of a society, the
beliefs and activities of people who make up a given place.
4
When these change, the place
changes too, and not always for the worst. The local is a continuity, broken and reconstituted
by events and individuals.
Place is most often examined from the subjective perspectives of an individual or a com
munity, while region has traditionally been more of an objective geographic term. in the
1950s, a region was academically defned by george Wilson Pierson as a geographic center
surrounded by an area where nature acts in a roughly uniform manner.
5
A region can also be
understood not only as a politically or geographically delimited space, but as one determined
by stories, loyalties, group identities, common experiences and histories (often unrecorded),
rather than just a place on a map. i prefer this looser defnition of region, like michael
steiners: the largest unit of territory about which a person can grasp the concrete realities
of the land, or which can be contained in a persons genuine sense of place.
6
(The New
mexican phrase patria chica has a similar meaning.) Although it is beyond the scope of this
360 361
essay, bioregionalism seems the most sensible, most revolutionary,
if least attainable, way of implementing a critical regionalism.
rejecting the artifcial political boundaries that complicate lives and
divide ecosystems, a bioregional structure could accommodate
changing human populations as well as distinct physical territories
determined by land, life forms, and especially watersheds. ultimately,
a region, like a community, is delineated by those who live there,
as in Wendell berrys description of regionalism as local life aware of
itself,
7
emerging from a communal awareness that can and should
have political ramifcations.
As early as 1947, geographer John k. Wright stated the impor
tance of including in his feld the way people saw the world as well as
its physical attributes, of mapping the desireability and undesireability
of places and the reasons people feel the way they do about them. in
the 1950s through the 1990s, geographic essayist John brinkerhoff
Jackson extended the notion of the cultural landscape to include con
temporary views from both the local and the stranger. The concept
of cultural landscape has infltrated archaeology as well, fnally remov
ing the focus from material culture and drawing it out towards a vor
tex of land and lives. The relationship of peripheral places to central
places provides a key to cultures across the centuries. but it will al
ways be a changing relationship, just as the places themselves, even
as we experience them, are morphing into places we have altered,
consciously or unconsciously, responsibly or irresponsibly.
in the united states, regionalism in the arts was named or prac
ticed as either a generalized, idealized allAmericanism or a progres
sive social realism (the two styles overlapped). it was most popular in
the l930s when, thanks to hard times, Americans moved voluntarily
around the country less than they had in the 1920s or would in the
1950s. During the great Depression, the faces and voices of ordinary
people (i.e. the working or unabletofndwork class) became visible
and audible through art and writing, photographs and journalism that
had a profound effect on New Deal government policy. John Dewey
and other scholars recognized that local life became all the more in
tense as the nations identity became more confusingly diverse and
harder to grasp.
in the art world, the conservative 1950s saw regionalism denigrat
ed and dismissed, in part because of its political associations with the
radical 1930s, in part because its narrative optimism, didactic oversim
plifcation and populist accessibility was incompatible with the cold
War.
8
regionalism also fell out of fashion in the heyday of the sophis
ticated, individualist postwar Abstract expressionist movement, just
then being discovered as the tool with which to wrench modern art
away from Parisian dominance. Today the term regionalism continues
to be used pejoratively to mean corny backwater art fowing from trib
1 kenneth Frampton, To
wards a critical regionalism:
six Points for an Architecture
of resistance, in Hal Foster,
ed., The AntiAesthetic: es
says on Postmodern culture
(Port Townsend, Wash.: bay
Press, 1983), 1920.
2 Alexander Tsonis and lil
iane lefaivre, The grid and
the Pathway, architecture in
greece 15 (1981).
3 miwon kwon, One Place
after another: site-specifc art
and locational identity (cam
bridge, mass.: miT Press,
2002), 160.
4 Jo carson, high Perform-
ance (Winter 1993).
5 george Wilson Pearson,
The obstinate concept of
New england, the new eng-
land Quarterly (march 1955).
6 michael c. steiner, re
gionalism in the great Depres
sion, geography review
(1983).
7 Wendell berry, The re
gional motive, in a continu-
ous harmony: essays cultural
and agricultural (New york:
Harcourt brace Jovanovich,
1972).
8 im obviously talking
about leftwing populism, not
the knownothing or sage
brush rebellion variety.
9 Hppauf/bloch. i use the
local here rather than blochs
heimat/hometown, which
can be irrelevant to a multi
centred perspective.
10 see Hppauf on the Klein-
stadt. He remarks that provin
cialism is not a function of the
distance from the center;
rather it is defned by a state
of mind and a sense of inferi
ority.
11 Frampton, 21.
12 Daniel lazare, mouseke
topia, in these times (march
17, 1997), 35.
13 Henri lefebvre, the Pro-
duction of space (oxford:
blackwell, 1991), 52.
utaries that might eventually meet the mainstream, but are currently stagnating out there in
the boondocks. New york city remains the art capital of the united states. it is rarely labelled
regional because it is the receiver and transmitter of global infuences. The difference be
tween New york (or los Angeles or chicago) and local art scenes is that other places know
what New york is up to, but New york is divinely oblivious to what is happening off the market
and reviewing map.
it has been argued that there is no longer any such thing as aesthetic regionalism in our
homogenized, peripatetic, electronic culture, where all citizens have theoretically equal access
to the public librarys copy of art in america, if not to the museum of modern Art (which now
costs twice as much as a movie). in fact, all art remains regional, even in the heyday of
cyberspace, although its home bases are increasingly invisible in the actual globalized prod
uct. everybody comes from someplace; most of us come from a lot of places. The places
we come fromcherished or despisedinevitably affect our psyches and therefore our work.
if art is defned as universal, and form is routinely favoured over content, then artists are
encouraged to transcend their immediate locales by turning to placeless international styles.
but if content is considered the prime component of art, and lived experience is respected
as a raw material, then regionalism is not a limitation, but an advantage, a welcome base that
need not exclude outside infuences but sifts them through a local flter. The most effective
regional art has both roots and reach. it is often at its best when it is not a reaction to current
marketplace trends, when the artist is simply acting on his or her own instincts; the word
innocent is often used rather condescendingly. but this can also be a matter of selfdetermi
nation. Artists are stronger when they control their own destinies (and means of production).
some theorists of postcolonial and global art, deeply skeptical of both universalism and
authenticity, pride themselves on departing from the original voices (now dismissed as es
sentialist). They paradoxically create a new, deracinated authenticity in the process, with
irony as a ubiquitous escape hatch. yet the sources of landbased art and aesthetics remain
opaque to those who only study them as opposed to living them.
All discussions of place involve questions of generalizations and specifcs. To alter
Hppaufs paraphrase of ernst bloch, the local can be a site of resistance and a genuine
countermodel within modernity [] [a] space where loss can be addressed and where
modernity meets its own contradictions and offers compensation for its destructions.
9
This
is relevant to the region where i live, New mexico, an economically poor and culturally
rich state in the southwest united states, which remains unlike the rest of the nation. its
capital is santa Fea relatively selfconfdent, openminded small city
10
and tourist destina
tion that has been touted as the third largest art market in the u.s.
on a recent trip to vienna, i was amazed to see the gigantic, curiously shaped and mirrored
Haas Haus rising abruptly on saint stephens square, across from the cathedral. This would
never be allowed in santa Fe, where the Historical (Hysterical) Design review board main
tains an iron claw on new and old construction, disallowing innovation, no matter how com
patible with the concocted past. santa Fe (aka adobe Disneyland and Fanta se) has chosen
to allow itself no option beyond the regional, in order to proft from tourism, second homes,
and the flm industry. This economic and sometimes highly emotional decision in favor of be
loved traditions (or, from another angle, hypothetical forms of a lost vernacular
11
) virtually
excludes the critical. The result is the misrepresentation of a beautiful and poignant town
whose history and failures are closer to the surface than in most u.s. cities. Despite its reac
362 363
tionary architectural policies, however, santa Fe is also known for its progressive politics,
manifested in effective attempts to deal with water shortages, renewable energy, and a living
wage. (immigration, affordable housing, suburban sprawl, and destructive gas and oil develop
ment in santa Fe county are still on the table.) Here the contradictions inherent in the specif
cally local are exposed, vulnerable, and hopeful.
Daniel lazare writes that true reurbanization requires repoliticization, a reengagement
with history and renewed class consciousness. And it requires democracy.
12
This statement,
which embodies what i would hope for from the local, is equally applicable to large and small
cities, small towns, and rural life. New urbanism has been offered as a solution to urban
unrest and suburban sprawl. its fundamental principles are certainly desireable: building for
people, not for cars; designing communities that emphasize walking and facetoface contact,
mixed use instead of segregation by zoning. but once built, the actual places often seem
sterile, overmanaged, and, by implication, apolitical. The commodifed communalism, the pic
tureperfect aspect of these monotone, mostly white and middleclass towns leaves me chilly.
At the moment, the centre of santa Fe is being transformed by the construction of a new
convention center, a new History museum, a new county building, a new railyard Park and
adjacent commercial development. This is all part of an attempt to both make and to maintain
a place that is in danger of losing its character, and it has been undertaken with a vast amount
(but perhaps not enough) of community input and participation. Placemaking has become a
popular term that needs scrutiny as a rather arrogant presumption on the part of planners deal
ing with the public domain. However, at the end of the day, only the community itself can
make a place. it doesnt happen overnight, or on the drawing board. urban dilemmas can not
be reduced to design alone. No community is monolithic; the task is to make places rather
than a place. From a necessarily defensive position, where too many regional neighborhoods
fnd themselves, a strong sense of identity across race, ethnicity, and class is a powerful ingre
dient in creating community, providing a kind of armor against destructive changeif people
can be organized and mobilized. The real task of urban planners is to offer a fexible structure
in which things can happen unpredictably, to set up the context in which a place can be
made over time. its easier to recognize than to make a place, but that means you have to
learn to read it, see what its used for, who goes there and why, where, and when; in other
words you need to learn to think and see like a local. one defnition of a local is a person who
gives more than she takes. its disconcerting to realize how many people feel they bear no
responsibility for or have any control over their places, which means of course that they have
abdicated critical capacity as well. it is this apathy or resignation that calls desperately for the
principle of hope. A real critical regionalism will fnally come down to grassroots activism.
As Henri lefebvre has declared, a new space that confronts the abstract homogeneity
of modernism and big capital cannot be born (produced) unless it accentuates differences.
13

is there, then, some possibility of a multicentred or decentred regionalism that is simultane
ously a product of and a resistance to global hegemony? Hppauf, noting that critical theory
has demonstrated a lack of sensitivity to the local, the regional, and the vernacular,
asks could the regions be the crack in the tight architecture of economic and cultural globali
zation? could they open spaces of creativity and indigenous languages? i hope o.
whO sINGs the NAtION-stAte?
language, poliTiCs, Belonging
1
JuDiTH buTler &
gayaTri ChakravorTy SPivak
JudiTh buTler
What state are we in when we ask questions about global states? And which states do we
mean? states are certain loci of power, but the state is not all that there is of power. The state
is not always the nationstate. We have, for instance, nonnational states, and we have security
states that actively contest the national basis of the state. so, already, the term state can be
dissociated from the term nation and the two can be cobbled together through a hyphen, but
what work does the hyphen do? Does the hyphen fnesse the relation that needs to be ex
plained? Does it mark certain soldering that has taken place historically? Does it suggest a
fallibility at the heart of the relation?
The state we are in when we ask this question may or may not have to do with the state we
are in. so: how do we understand those sets of conditions and dispositions that account for
the state we are in (which could, after all, be a state of mind) from the state we are in when
and if we hold rights of citizenship or when the state functions as the provisional domicile for
our work? if we pause for a moment on the meaning of states as the conditions in which we
fnd ourselves, then it seems we reference the moment of writing itself or perhaps even a
certain condition of being upset, out of sorts: what kind of state are we in when we start to
think about the state?
The state signifes the legal and institutional structures that delimit a certain territory
(although not all of those institutional structures belong to the apparatus of the state). Hence,
the state is supposed to service the matrix for the obligations and prerogatives of citizenship.
it is that which forms the conditions under which we are juridically bound. We might expect
that the state presupposes modes of juridical belonging, at least minimally, but since the state
can be precisely what expels and suspends modes of legal protection and obligation, the
state can put us, some of us, in quite a state. it can signify the source of nonbelonging, even
produce that nonbelonging as a quasipermanent state. The state then makes us out of
sorts, to be sure, if not destitute and enraged. Which is why it makes sense to see that at the
core of this statethat signifes both juridical and dispositional dimensions of lifeis a
certain tension produced between modes of being or mental states, temporary or provisional
constellations of mind of one kind or another, and juridical and military complexes that govern
how and where we may move, associate, work, and speak.
if the state is what binds, it is also clearly what can and does unbind. And if the state
binds in the name of the nation, conjuring a certain version of the nation forcibly, if not power
fully, then it also unbinds, releases, expels, banishes. if it does the latter, it is not always
through emancipatory means, i.e. through letting go or setting free; it expels precisely
through an exercise of power that depends upon barriers and prisons and, so, in the mode of a
certain containment. We are not outside of politics when we are dispossessed in such ways.
rather, we are deposited in a dense situation of military power in which juridical functions
364 365
become the prerogative of the military. This is not bare life, but a
particular formation of power and coercion that is designed to produce
and maintain the condition, the state, of the dispossessed.
[Hannah] Arendt refers to statelessness in this essay [the Origins of
totalitarianism]
2
, writing in 1951, as the expression of the 20th centu
ry, even as the political phenomenon of the 20th century. This is surely
a strong claim. she cannot possibly know, she has only barely made it
into the 51st year of that century, but, clearly, she is also saying that
whatever else comes next, it will not deny her thesis. it is an extreme
ly provocative claim that leaves us, in a way, to test it or read it and to
see in what ways it remains at all readable for us. Arendt argues that
the nationstate, as a form, that is, as a state formation, is bound up,
as if structurally, with the recurrent expulsion of national minorities. in
other words, the nationstate assumes that the nation expresses a cer
tain national identity, is founded through the concerted consensus of
a nation, and that a certain correspondence exists between the state
and the nation. The nation, in this view, is singular and homogeneous,
or, at least, it becomes so in order to comply with the requirements of
the state. The state derives its legitimacy from the nation, which
means that those national minorities who do not qualify for national
belonging are regarded as illegitimate inhabitants. given the com
plexity and heterogeneity of modes of national belonging, the nation
state can only reiterate its own basis for legitimation by literally pro
ducing the nation that serves as the basis for its legitimation. Here
again, let us note that those modes of national belonging designated
by the nation are thoroughly stipulative and criterial: one is not simply
dropped from the nation; rather, one is found to be wanting and, so,
becomes a wanting one through the designation and its implicit and
active criteria. The subsequent status that confers statelessness on any
number of people becomes the means by which they are at once dis
cursively constituted within a feld of power and juridically deprived.
if our attention is captured by the lure of the arbitrary decisionism
of the sovereign, then we risk inscribing that logic as necessary and
forgetting what prompted this inquiry to begin with: the massive
problem of statelessness and the demand to fnd postnational forms
of political opposition that might begin to address the problem with
some effcacy.
The focus on the theoretical apparatus of sovereignty risks impov
erishing our conceptual framework and vocabulary so that we be
come unable to take on the representational challenge of saying what
life is like for the deported, what life is like for those who fear deporta
tion, who are deported, what life is like for those who live as gastarbe-
iters in germany, what life is like for Palestinians who are living
under occupation. These are not undifferentiated instances of bare
life but highly juridifed states of dispossession.
in the last few years, the prospect of rights to legal residency and, ultimately, citizenship have
been debated in the us congress, and time and again we seem to be on the brink of a proposal
that will pass. in the spring of 2006, street demonstrations on the part of illegal residents broke
out in various california cities, but very dramatically in the los Angeles area. The us national
anthem was sung in spanish as was the mexican anthem. The emergence of nuestro hymno
introduced the interesting problem of the plurality of the nation, of the we and the our:
to whom does this anthem belong? if we were to ask the question: what makes for a non
nationalist or counternationalist mode of belonging?then we must talk about globalization,
something i am counting on gayatri to do. The assertion not only claims the anthem, and
so lays claim to rights of possession, but also to modes of belonging, since who is included in
the we? For the we to sing and to be asserted in spanish surely does something to our
notions of the nation and to our notions of equality. its not just that many people sang togeth
erwhich is truebut also that singing is a plural act, an articulation of plurality. if, as bush
claimed at the time, the national anthem can only be sung in english, then the nation is clearly
restricted to a linguistic majority, and language becomes one way of asserting criterial control
over who belongs and who does not. in Arendts terms, this would be the moment when a
national majority seeks to defne the nation on its own terms and even sets up or polices
norms of exclusion deciding who may exercise freedom, since that exercise depends upon
certain acts of language. The problem is not just one of inclusion into an already existing idea
of the nation, but one of equality, without which the we is not speakable. so when we read
on the posters on various public walls that favor legalization for illegal immigrantswe are
Americaand we hear illegal immigrants declaring in the streets, il pueblo unido jamas sera
vencido, we can trace the rhetorical terms through which the nation is being reiterated, but in
ways that are not authorizedor not yet. The monolingual requirement of the nation surely
surfaces in the refusal to hear the anthem sung in spanish, but it does not make the anthem
any less singable in that or any other language.
gayaTri ChakravorTy SPivak
The national anthem of india was written in bengali, which happens to be my mother tongue
and one of the major languages of india. it has to be sung in Hindi without any change in
grammar or vocabulary. it has to be sung in Hindi, because, as bush insists, the national an
them must be sung in the national language. No translation there. When the indian national
anthem is sung, some bengalis sing loudly with a bengali pronunciation and accent which is
distinctly different from the Hindi pronunciation and accent, but the anthem remains Hindi,
although it is bengali. The nationstate requires the national language. The anthem mentions
many places with different nationalities, different language, and, sometimes, different
alphabets. Two different language families, some of them indoeuropean, some Dravidian in
structure like the Finnougric agglutinative languages. The anthem also mentions seven reli
gions. remember, this is not the situation of postenlightenment immigration as in the united
states. These are older formations. yet, the language of the anthem cannot be negotiated.
Arendt theorized statelessness but could not theorize the desire for citizenship.
When Arendt talks about these eastern european and central european places, the activi
ties of the russian and the Habsburg empires, she tries again and again to say that the minori
ties were treated as if colonized. This is a good strong point in the context of global states
today. if you reterritorialize Hannah Arendt out of the situation in 1951 and the rights of man,
1 This text is an excerpt from
a conversation between Ju
dith butler and gayatri
chakravorty spivak published
as Who sings the nation-
state? (calcutta and london:
seagull books, 2007).
2 Hannah Arendt, the Ori-
gins of totalitarianism (lon
don: Harcourt, 1994), 297.
366 367
you notice arguments that the experiment of the nationstatesuggesting that it is the nation
that organizes the modern stateis only slightly more than a century old and has not really
succeeded. she says that its disintegration, curiously enough, started at precisely the moment
when the right to national selfdetermination was recognized for all of europe, and the su
premacy of the will of the nation over all legal and abstract institutionswhich is the state
was universally accepted. The nation won out over the state, as it were.
Today, it is the decline of the nationstate that we are witnessing in globalization. but the
point to be made is that its genealogical force is still strong. in general, the decline is a result
of the economic and political restructuring of the state in the interest of global capital. but
Arendt allows us to realize that this may also be because the nationstate as a form was faulty
from the start. As varieties of nationstatestyle unifcation programs collapse all around us,
what is emerging is the old multiethnic mix. on the one hand, there are the east and central
states, the balkans and the caucasus. emergent also are india and china. Huge states with
many nationalities that cannot be thought of as nationstates in the Arendtian sense. yet, in
spite of the postnational character of global capital, the abstract political structure is still
located in the state. The united states has generated a somewhat postnational combative
structure which complicates the issue.
The reinvention of the state goes beyond the nationstate into critical regionalisms. These
polyglot areas and these large states are of a different model. Hannah Arendt, speaking of
them in the wake of the second World War, could only think of it as a problem. We, in a differ
ent conjuncture, can at least think of solutions. it may be possible to redo the fairly recent
national boundaries and think about transnational jurisdictions. confict resolution without in
ternational peacekeeping asks for this precisely in order to fght what has happened under
globalization. We think of the decline of the national state as a displacement into the abstract
structures of welfare moving toward critical regionalism combating global capitalism.
let us for a moment consider what globalizing capital does do. let us also remember that
capitals move toward becoming global, which is an inherent characteristic of capital, and
which can now happen for technological reasons, is not all related to nationstates or bad poli
tics. because of this drive, barriers between fragile state economies and international capital
are removed. And, therefore, the state loses its redistributive power. The priorities become
global rather than related to the state. We now have the managerial state on the freemarket
model. galbraith had the sense, a long time ago, to point out to people that the socalled free
market was deeply regulated by the interest of capital. When these managerial states with
these globally regulated priorities work, some kinds of demands do not come up. The market
is never going to throw up demands for clean drinking water for the poor.
critical regionalism is a diffcult thing because of the potency of nationalism, even ethnic
subnationalism and, on the other side, because the transnational agencies go nationstate by
nationstate. but a word frst and foremost about Habermas and the european constitution.
The european constitution is an economic document. To implement this, a certain cultural
memory is invokedperhaps to take the place of mere nationalism. The treaty toward the
european constitution did not pass because France and the Netherlands voted no. The docu
ment begins as if there was always a europe, even as people came into it. We know that con
stitutions must always perform a contradiction [] yet, there is an asymmetry between
different performative contradictions. Thus europe bringing itself into being by invoking its
originary presence for consolidating economic unity in the new global marketand thus
giving itself access to cosmopolitheiacannot be seen as the same as the undocumented
workers in california calling for a right beyond the nation and thus bringing it into being, sim
ply because they inhabit varieties of performative contradiction. When Habermas talks about
the advocates of a cosmopolitan democracy based in europe and the creation of a new
political status of world citizens, place it within this argument.
When Habermas and other european thinkers talk about cosmopolitheia, they are talking
about kant. For lack of time, i will merely refer to Derridas rogues where he attends to the
entire kantian architectonics and shows that kants as if for thinking the world and freedom
and the connection between cosmopolitheia and war make him unsuitable for thinking and
committing oneself to a global democracy to come. And, as i have been insisting, it is not
unimportant to look again at Hannah Arendt because, in the context of statelessness, shes
thinking the nation and the state separately. Derrida will later call this undoing of the connec
tion between birth and citizenship the deconstruction of genealogy in Politics of friendship.
And that is where critical regionalism begins.
our global social movements have been taken away from us. We are helped at every turn.
The lines are not clear. but you do see why the critical comes into this thinking of regional
ism. in the newspapers, india and Pakistan are still enemies although the prime ministers
speak well. china and india are supposedly competing for the favor of the united states. And
so on. Do the old lines, predating bandung, between panAfricanism and anticolonialism,
survive? Heroes of the humanities like Anyidoho, Ndebele, Ngugi, and soyinka would make us
hope so. can the New latin America check the eurous craze for universalism? evo morales
would make us hope so. Hence, why critical and why regionalism. it goes under and over
nationalisms but keeps the abstract structures of something like a state. This allows for consti
tutional redress against the mere vigilance and databasing of human rights, or public interest
litigation in the interest of a public that cannot act for itself.
368 369
Ayreen Anastas & rene gabri
Prisoner of War on motorcycle
(2006)
courtesy the artists
Ayreen Anastas & rene gabri
afternoon in camp Perry
(2006)
courtesy the artists
theIr MAPs Vs. Our MAPs
a ConVersaTion BeTween ayreen anasTas,
reNe gAbri, AND NiNA mNTmANN
nina mntmann We frst met as participants in liminal spaces, a longterm international art
project consisting of workshops, conferences, excursions and an exhibition developing modes
of expression towards the israeliPalestinian situation.
1
many of our discussions referred to
the spatial dimensions of the occupation, like the colonial situation in the West bank including
the ever expanding settlements; the absurd experience of distance induced by checkpoints;
limited access to roads for Palestinians; the wall; the ethnicreligious segregation of Jerusalem;
the spatial politics of Arab neighbourhoods in israel; legal issues around space, like land
confscations etc. The experience of space and place in the region appears as a constant con
frontation with limits, and people being exposed to a power which formulates itself through
the execution of arbitrariness.
in your recent works you were exploring how people see and experience sites of the sus
pension of law, for example Palestine, where the public sphere is militarized and space is or
ganized by mechanisms of warfare. i am thinking of your flm What everybody Knows
(20062008), which was initiated within the framework of liminal spaces and includes inter
views with people living under occupation in Palestine as well as Palestinians living inside
israel. but also of your project camp campaign, for which you drove a van through the usA
and opened different situations to consider the internment camps in guantanamo bay.
by doing this you also brought information and awareness to the people you encountered,
whose lives are not directly affected by militant spatial politics, but who are living in a country
that is setting up camps that are defying any lawful jurisdiction.
both projects were based on an extensive trip you made through Palestine or respectively
the united states, so your own experience of spatial dimensions, your mapping of the territory
served as the background for your encounters and interviews with people living in these
places. could you elaborate a bit on your interest in the spatial politics these projects are un
folding as well as analyzing?
rene gabri Well in both cases, we begin with political problems which mark extreme condi
tions and call upon us to think. They are not only thoughtprovoking, but ask of us more
than thought: they require acts, simply, and this is interesting for us. How to be present to our
own time and to try to mark it, to give ourselves over to it?
on the one hand, it opens a question about where the work of art may be. in these cases,
we say here, here is where things matter to us, politically. Where we see an important point of
struggle or fssure in the ordinary discourses of development, democracy, equality or socalled
freedom. on the other, it is necessary to also have a position, to take a position or try and
formulate one through ones research, otherwise, the research has no force.
The questions in relation to the law or to spatial politics emerge from research and inquiry
into specifc problems (e.g., guantanamo, Palestine). They also happen to be key nodes of
struggle and resistance for many political activists today, because it is at this level that the
largest and most violent forms of dispossession are taking place.
in the cases of guantanamo bay and Palestine, by saying they are
extreme cases, we can also say they are exceptional instances. They
are spaces of exception, within which the law applies by disapplying,
or remains suspended, in limbo, spaces within which individuals are
deprived of basic human and political rights.
yet, as exceptional as these sites are, the perimeters of these
spaces are also marked by historical precedents, by structural, legal
precedents, which open up to the world and connect them to other
sites and times.
in this way, they are also examples, belonging to a set. We are
against the set to which they belong.
so, as much as we needed to be as precise as possible in under
standing specifc situations, whether in Palestine and israel or east
baltimore (just as we did in Palestine, we spent signifcant time, taking
daily trips, meeting individuals, documenting what we saw); with
camp campaign, we also attempted to use our case studies, to broad
en the terrain, historically and spatially. To ask ourselves, where are
the confnes to this camp in guantanamo bay? What does such a
space mark? What is the relation of that space to our own contempo
rary cities? What kind of subject constitutes a threat today? And
which legal and spatial strategies are used by the state to dispossess
these individuals of agency or simply their ability to exist?
ayreen anastas The spatial politics are not separate from the demo
graphic engineering israel is attempting and from the overall political
situation. They are interconnected. What you mention above in
relation to the occupation are a few examples of that interconnected
ness. our interest, as rene mentions, came from thinking about the
overall context and trying to understand and reformulate the ques
tions. in our trips through occupied Palestine and then the few trips
in israel, we found from our meetings that israel uses the law and
planning to obfuscate its actions against Palestinians. House demoli
tions or creating open green spaces, for instance, in east Jerusalem
are done in the name of good planning. but in both of these cases,
these specifc actions are taken to limit the opportunity for Palestinians
to build viable communities.
The overall context i speak of also involves our work. We would like
to defeat specialization, both in relation to us as artists (open to be
come something else) and in observing the situation on the ground.
For instance, we consulted not only specialists (like geographers and
architects) but also everyday people, passersby, thus exploring differ
ent layers of those realities. spatial analysis is necessary, but it is not
enough, one has to constantly be using more means and tools of
analysis. on our trip across the united states for example, we organ
ized a few events to discuss the camps in guantanamo, but we did so
through two videos which acted more as agents to open up the con
370 371
versation. one was shot in Allydd and Alramleh, in which a Palestinian architectactivist,
buthayna Dabit, explains how Palestinians within israel, who are citizens of israel, are deprived
of a livelihood, through different measures of planning and regulations. We then showed a vid
eo of a drive through east baltimore with the activistorganizer glenn ross. Again, in that vid
eo he discusses how the city of baltimore and John Hopkins university have used planning
and regulations to displace the African American community for development purposes. in
this case, to provoke thought, we wanted to confront people with three different situations
and try to fnd points of relation and difference.
mntmann The strategic concern of the spatial reorganization of Palestine seems to represent
a military avantgarde. The complexity of the A, b, and czones that are under Palestinian
administrative and military authority, or under Palestinian administrative and israeli military
authority or under israeli administrative and military control, respectively, is very different from
the way territory is conquered in traditional warfare or land seizure. i fnd it interesting to
look into the psychological dimensions of these strategies, and also try to see if and in what
way we fnd similar processes elsewhere. Although very different from the outset, you
mention the similarity of the camp situation in guantanamo and Palestine; this is also where
the psychological dimension comes into play, the spaces of exception as you said, spaces
within which individuals are deprived of basic human and political rights. it is obvious to think
of Agamben in that context. since Agamben is so widely accepted these days in artrelated
discourses, i fnd it interesting to consider a critique that was recently reformulated in a con
versation between Judith butler and gayatri spivak, who are also referring to the situation of
the Palestinians, and which says that these are not undifferentiated instances of bare life
but highly juridifed states of dispossession.
2
since the exposure of a potential of resistance is
also crucial for your approach, i wonder how you see Agamben or butlers critique respectively
in relation to your own practice.
anastas before we answer the question directly, i would like to comment on a few words, as
they may shed some light on the question of resistance. For example: the word avant-garde
originates from the military and yet i would prefer not to use such a word in describing the
israeli military. in fact, there have been some efforts to emphasize the experimental aspect of
israeli military strategies or occupation strategies, but this kind of discourse risks fetishizing
the very machine it purports to critique.
We have to arrive at an appraisal of the situations that does not ignore the intricacies at
which violence is taking place: the measures we have alluded to, the scales at which israelis are
given agency and Palestinians denied, etc. but if we step back, it is also important not to lose
ourselves in those intricacies, distracting us from a bigger picture, which is much clearer. Here
what appears as complexity masks and obfuscates a brutal military and civilian occupation. so
the law, the planners, the settlers, the military, the police, the nongovernmental organizations,
corporations are given various degrees and forms of agency, creating what looks like a very
complex picture, when in fact, the effect on the lives of Palestinians is quite uniform and con
sistent. it denies their rights as political subjects to determine the fate of their own territory.
Neither traditional warfare nor warfare are suitable words for the israeli context because
for me, the words already bring a misrepresentation of what is taking place.
What if instead we began to speak about the West bank and gaza as a largescale prison
or camp, which is being offered selfrule? Within that everconfned space of selfrule, there
are some who have elected to refuse, some even resist with very crude arms. but within
that perspective, it is much clearer that for Palestinians it is an uprising and revolt which refus
es the policies of a state and the undignifed life which it allots for them. unfortunately israels
warfare is largely against civilians.
gabri i think for us as artists, it is even clearer that we cannot change the situation without
also contesting the language which is being used. language can open, but it can also confne
and restrict our ability to understand a context or to see solutions. People who are actively
involved in resisting israeli policies are very aware of language as one site of struggle.
i want to go back to this idea of an avantgarde, however, and say more generally that i fnd
that today, whether we are talking about military development or neoliberal development,
there is clearly an experimental aspect to it. And clearly even this side of it, its employment of
the latest technologies for instance or materials, is at times used to garner a strange fascina
tion and to sanitize very violent processes. We can think about largescale developments in
city centers or the latest war on iraq. For example, i am thinking of how the u.s. media spent
a great deal of effort to showcase new weaponry being used by the military in their initial
assault. clearly, these efforts at emphasizing the newness often masked what David Harvey
has characterized as a new imperialism.
i suppose upon my frst entry within israel and the occupied Territories, i did have this
sense that i was entering an experimental site unfolding on various levels and scales including
but not limited to weapons, surveillance equipment, strategies of warfare, spatial planning /
zoning, legal measures, and psychological operations. A laboratory for various forms of dispos
session, control, and collective punishment. To understand this, to have a clearer idea of the
scales at which violence is present, the strategies being employed; one does need to go to
particularities.
However, as we were saying earlier, the problem is not isolated. it has precedents histori
cally and it is connected to a practice and discourse of security globally today. clearly, it
is a bankrupt discourse/practice which trades on fear and acts through unilateralism, disre
garding its own laws or international ones, to purportedly protect itself and its people. Today
israeli policies allow it to dominate the lives of Palestinians, but they have not won it any secu
rity. on the contrary, they have brought it ever closer to an impending collective catastrophe.
either israel will succeed in expelling Palestinians from these territories or it will hasten
its own collapse. if it is the latter, the question is whether this collapse will happen peacefully
through international cooperation and advocacy, as was the case in south Africa in the strug
gle against apartheid, or it will happen through a protracted war which will destroy millions of
lives and involve many different states. unfortunately, we are seeing an immense investment
materially, discursively and psychologically on the part of many governments around the
world, most obviously the united states and to a lesser extent great britain, towards the idea
of a protracted war. The more they can create theatres of war, the more they can sell the idea
that we are at war. We are not looting and robbing a country of its resources, we are not tak
ing strategic control of a region, we are not creating managed chaos, we are at war!
of course, it emboldens and appeals to the most conservative elements within each and every
society, and it is an immense challenge for every human to resist, at the level of our life and
work.
recently, i read an article, in the financial times of all places, about the election of romes
frst fascist mayor since the mussolini era.
3
incredibly, the headline of the article said that Jews
in the city and local fascists were united in celebrating the victory. in the article, the main
372 373
reason cited for the Jewish support of the fascist politician was his and his partys support of
israel. i fnd this sad and sadly telling of where we stand today.
anastas When we did camp campaign, in thinking about guantanamo, we were also thinking
about the relation between the united states and israel. And it seemed to us that there was an
arrow connecting the manifest destiny practiced by early American zealots who strove to
conquer greater land at the expense of the territories used by Native Americans, and Zionism.
For Zionists, the land of israel, including Judea and samaria, which is how they continue to
refer to the West bank, is their manifest destiny and they would like nothing more than to
create small bantustans or reservations for the natives to live in. And what rene is referring to
is how that arrow now comes back toward the united states.
The specifc means israel is using may be new and unique to it, but we can see in these
eight years of bush that they are fnding traction on a much larger scale. reducing nearly all
forms of resistance to its appointment with the future as the work of evildoing terrorists who
are against our freedom. it is scary to think that nearly every Palestinian male we encountered
on our trip in 2006 spent some portion of their life inside an israeli detention center for extend
ed periods in increments, mostly without any charges, arguing that they pose a security threat.
gabri This is the space of exception that Agamben talks about, which is where the law tries to
appropriate what is outside of it by suspending itself, in matters of state security for instance.
His reading is a very rich and textured inquiry that unfortunately gets reduced to a few key
words and notions, like bare life, which never retain the ambivalence and nuances that one
fnds in his writing. Agambens approach is poetic in that he makes various movements to
wards a problem, without ever reducing it to a simplifed account. so the majority of the prob
lems emerging with Agamben for me, particularly as he is used within academia or art,
emerge from mangled regurgitation or oversimplifcation. i think in our case, in our work in
Palestine for instance, we were inspired by Agambens refusal to acquiesce to a reading of the
Nazis as a singular and aberrant exception in the history of the world. To also fnd that there is
something which took place in those camps that is repeating itself. it attempts to look at
various discourses and procedures, precisely at the level of the juridical, to fnd the specifc
manner in which those camps were born. He makes a specifc attempt not to just decry the
horrors of the camps but to try to present an account of how they worked. We wanted
to do something similar with our trips in Palestine and the united states. moreover, just as
he is attempting to extend the research of particular thinkers and be in dialogue with them, we
could be said to try something similar in our work. And in this sense, his ideas are confronted
with various other cases and realities. our process is not illustrative but interrogative and
associative, a process of thinking with other thinkers and activists. For us, it was important in
What everybody Knows (20062008) to give time and space to a few individuals who are
working within that local context, not to present a viewer only with effects of suffering but
rather with the psychological impact of israeli policies and the specifc modes the state and
various other actors (corporations, settlers, military) produce the harsh facts of the occupation.
Having said this, we both have a great deal of respect for gayatri spivak and Judith butler, as
extremely close readers, as important thinkers, and especially butler being a very adamant
and public critic of israeli policies. so to engage with their critique of Agamben would require
greater familiarity with their discussion. but i do think that Agamben is also writing about
the dispossession that takes place within the framework of the law, whether it is in applying it,
as the Nazis did in fully stripping Jews of citizenship (denationalizing) before sending them
to the camps, or in suspending it in the name of preserving it.
mntmann in camp campaign you have been traveling through the united states exploring
the different iterations of states of exception or camps within its history. in connecting that
inquiry to the camps in guantanamo bay, you were also provoking a certain awareness of
present circumstances and their possible relation to historical precedents. How do you see the
relation to the asylum camps in europe and the awareness of people in europe?
gabri When we were doing our preliminary research for camp campaign, our friends in
rotterdam, liesbeth bik and Jos van Der Pol, took us to a detention center for migrants who
have no legal status in the country. it was located in a very nondescript harbor area, not far
from the center of the city of rotterdam. it looked like a small mediumsecurity prison. These
kinds of holding or detention centers are proliferating across the globe, particularly in the over
developed world, i.e. the economically dominant countries. Just as the private prison industry
in the united states is proliferating, so too is the demand for surveillance equipment and tem
porary imprisonment and humiliating architecture for refugees, asylum seekers and migrants.
in europe and in the united states, there is a double language spoken with a forked tongue.
on the one hand, open borders, the free fow of capital and goods. on the other, the move
ment of bodies, the policing of borders, new walls, new surveillance and security apparatuses.
both movements have the potential to undermine the order of the modern nationstate, but
only the movement of bodies threatens the economic orderparticularly when it is unscripted.
i make the latter point because we know that many industries (from agriculture to construc
tion) need precarious, lowwage workers who have less recourse to labor protections, and so
there is often a structural need for nonlegalized workers. but today we see governments at
tempting to create guest worker programs which derive the benefts of migrant workers with
out offering the legal and social protections afforded to citizens.
our friend Alessandro Petti likens the emergent world order to a series of enclaves (where
movement is restricted, delimited) and a network of interconnected archipelagos (which give a
semblance of a smooth and borderless space). The economic or political refugee, the not
legalized migrant, undermines this order and reminds us that these archipelagos are nothing
but a feld of gated communities separating the world of privilege from what Frantz Fanon
called the wretched of the earth. so for us, one of the great scandals of our time is not that
these camps exist. After all, governments have historically protected the interests of the rich.
The scandal is that we the people being governed do not revolt. We are inculcated not only
to accept them, but even to ask for more of them for our security or our jobs. There are
amazing groups of activists in europe and a strong noborder network, more organized than
any u.s. network i know of, but the struggle is large and demands a complete rethinking
of current economic and legal frameworks. A discourse of no borders calls for a radical critique
of the state, of citizenship, and of capitalism.
anastas Nina, in relation to our activities as artists and curators, maybe more specifcally for
you as a curator, how do you see your role working in a context such as Palestine and israel?
And where do you place the question of resistance within your own practice as a curator?
What are for you the means and ideas that enable you to think and act in such situations,
Palestine or another?
mntmann The basis for any political work in the art feldalso eventually implying moments
374 375
of resistancethat is commenting on or intervening in any region of crisis and confict, is
the awareness of the relation of specifcity and relativity in this very situation. This means ana
lyzing the specifcity of a situation without lapsing into claiming a sense of authenticity and
uniqueness, and at the same time discussing similarities of situations without denying the
individual dimensions of the effects this very crisis has on the lives of those people affected by
this situation. Therefore, if you only look at the particular aspects of a crisis you imply that
this could never happen again and in no other place; but it is equally fatal, to only point out the
relativity of situations and seek similarities to other conficts, times and regions.
i am interested in the emancipatory potential of these alternative spaces that you can create
within the framework of an art or researchbased project, and also in fathoming the participa
tory potential of these spaces. i am also interested in participating in and contributing ideas
to a collective process of thinking that for some might lead into activism, for others it becomes
part of wider research. Also, for me it is always from the position of a participantobserver
that i am speaking, be it at a symposium on art and nationalism in israel or when teaching stu
dents in ramallah about the notion of New communities, a subject that for Palestinians is
bringing up questions about communities that are imposed on you rather than selfchosen, on
ideas of a nation without a nation, united by a common struggle.
if we stay for a while with this image of the alternative or emancipatory space an art
project can produce, how would you relate this rather abstract space in your work to the actual
territories you are mapping? And what role do the people you are interviewing or including
in other ways play?
gabri There are many ways to answer this question, but i see in it two clear lines: one is
relating to the physical sites of our inquiries and the second is opening up to the individuals
we may involve or work with on these aforementioned projects. i cannot think of a text more
suitable to cite in attempting to answer this question than gilles Deleuze and Flix guattaris
nomadology: the War machine.
4
The text may be familiar to some, but i will try to explain
what interests me in it and how it may refer back to your question. Directly at the beginning of
this text, which is a section of a thousand Plateaus, they distinguish between the state
apparatus and the war machine. To illustrate the difference, they refer to the games of chess
and go. chess stands in for the state, in its treatment of the game pieces, in the possible
relation the pieces can have with one another and the spaces they occupy. The pieces, they
argue, are coded (they have an internal nature or assigned properties) and their range of move
ment is determined by this coding: A knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a
bishop. if chess (standing in for the state) speaks on behalf of interiority and fxed essences,
identifying the role and potential for each actor to move, go, then, stands in for exteriority and
no fxed essence or possibly one that is morphological, that is able to change. The pieces are
pellets, discs, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective or third person
functionit makes a move. it can be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. moreover, if
in chess it is a question of arranging a closed space for oneself and of coding and decoding
space, go for the two is a question of arraying oneself in open space, holding space, territori
alizing and deterritorializing it, not moving from one point to another, but in a perpetual move
ment, without departure or arrival. For me, their ideas are very rich in recircuiting our habitual
modes of reading space or understanding our own agency within a particular feld. There is
also a great deal of potential for this thought to encourage further thinking. We have both
been inspired by brian Holmess recent inquiries investigating guattaris research and propos
ing possible modes of escaping the overcode. Within the context of
your question, i can simply say that our struggle when we work with
any space or any context, is to open it up, see how it has been coded
and try, if possible, to destabilize or open up a different relation to it.
This can sometimes be done alone and sometimes it requires the help
of others. one hopes that in working with others, one is able to utilize
a similar ethics, which does not functionalize or ascribe a fxed com
petence to the other, but leaves room for the individual to invent new
moves, to join with you into an assemblage, a war machine, able to
equally occupy and hold a territory or to unhinge, deterritorialize it.
Although the discourses are quite different, i would liken rancires
notion of the redistribution of the sensible to this act of deterritoriali
zation. if art, politics or any feld of struggle for that matter is to
retain a potential for emancipation, it must have the capacity to resist
this ascription of fxed competences, identities, or essences.
mntmann essentialist conceptions of identity are constituting the
central idea of any nationalism, which offers the narrative for the his
torical nationstate. i say historical, because the nationstate is appar
ently changing rapidly mainly in regards to its political power, but also
in its territorial responsibilities. in what way do you see your work as a
comment on different geographical, territorial and political entities,
like the changing parameters of the nationstate, regional and local
contexts, borders etc? maybe you could mention a few examples.
anastas We could probably give a number of projects which can in
some way address your question. maybe the most interesting here is
a collective one. continental Drift is a modular and experimental semi
nar that 16 beaver initiated together with brian Holmes and various
Ayreen Anastas & rene gabri
fear is somehow Our for
Whom? for What? and
Proximity to everything
far away (Detail, 2006)
courtesy the artists
1 organised by galit eilat,
reem Fadda, eyal Danon and
Philipp misselwitz, www.limi
nalspaces.org.
2 Judith butler and gayatri
chakravorty spivak, Who
sings the nation-state? (cal
cutta and london: seagull
books, 2007), 42.
3 Fascists and Jews united
for rome mayor, the finan-
cial times (4 may 2008).
4 gilles Deleuze and Flix
guattari, nomadology: the
War machine
(semiotext(e),1986).
376 377
other individuals. We started three years ago, with the desire to investigate some questions in
volving the geopolitical and economic shifts which took place between 1989 and 2001. more
precisely, we were thinking about continental integration, which refers to the constitution of
enormous blocks like NAFTA and the eu. These blocks that are functioning units one scale up
from the nationstate, created to manage the unleashed energies after the technological devel
opments of the last forty years: this means not only the reorganization of spaces and fows,
but also creating and channeling new forms of subjectivities. it is important to remember that
those changing parameters by capitalist power are extensive across social, economic and cul
tural life, as well as intensive, infltrating the most unconscious subjective strata. Thus one can
no longer claim to resist solely from an outside, through traditionally ascribed spaces of politics.
its equally important to resist on an everyday level, and being aware that both levels are crucial.
often the question of art and politics is reduced to the extensive level; it is our task to connect
to other artists and activists taking into consideration that we are working on both levels.
The idea of continental Drift was to create and think about projects through a geopolitical
and geocultural lens. moreover, to begin a process of dialogue which could inform one
anothers practices. We also wanted to create a space where the individual research implicit
in many cultural practices could have a chance to enter a more collective process of thinking,
uttering and resisting. And if this kind of work is to become effective, it needs to happen
outside of scripted spaces, which limit the potential for individuals from different felds or
backgrounds to affect one another. if the work calls for the reconstruction of human relations
at many levels, then we believe that it is necessary for the forms we employ to also take
into consideration our desires.
mntmann And what about your own history, rene, you shot/did the video movements
(2001) in Armenia, and Ayreen, you did m* for bethlehem (2003) in your hometown. could you
elaborate a bit on the personal dimension of these works, the relation you created between
your personal history and a more common narrative?
gabri What connects me to Armenia is mainly through culture and language. Armenians have
had a historic land they called home, but that map has shifted, at times through bottomup
processes like trade, cultural and religious ties, and at other times through topdown process
es, often associated with sovereign state violence.
so there are multiple Armenias to belong to. one may be said to cling to the origin,
particularly in contesting the forced displacements and genocide under ottoman rule of a land
and a people. Another is the Armenia that exists today, which has a rich connection to soviet
history and communism. And then there is the Armenia which has had connections to exile,
diaspora cultures, migration, and movement. The Armenia that William saroyan quipped was
constituted wherever two Armenians met. i think today, we need to reinvent this idea, not
in opposition to a notion of a homeland, but in addition. A new Palestine wherever two
Palestinians meet. i do not have to move back to iran to feel iranian, nor Armenia to be consid
ered Armenian. it is a notion that can propose a different space for retaining a cultural identity
away from ones own country or region of origin and at the same time contest the model
more dominant in the West, which constructs cultural identity solely through the lens of the
nationstate, and thus views any perceived nonassimilation as a threat.
so for me, this question of home is also a hurdle, a mountain i have been looking to climb
or blast through. What constitutes the personal and is proper to ones own can be in some
sense a part of this re and deterritorialization.
Today, being born in iran, Palestine, Armenia, or any place facing extreme political or economic
unrest presents immediate challenges that someone living in another country may not have
to confront, but they are connected intrinsically to global dynamics and forces. Thus, exploring
these particular challenges and experiences can provide certain insights and allow one to
possibly understand our shared world a little better. i think for both Ayreen and i, any attempt
to connect to these sites is in keeping with the latter idea. We cannot fully escape or forget
where we come from (even if we always start in the middle) and what we have been given,
and thus we also must be selective and make use of what we inherit. Nevertheless, i feel it is
an important struggle to resist the kind of essentialism that is presented today as the only
recourse or response to counter capitalist globalization.
We reject the Disneyfcation of the world. We reject the homogenization of the global
mall that enterpriseminded individuals would like to construct. We reject the exploitation of
lands and energy of poor peoples. We reject the neoliberal values being employed by or forced
down the throat of nearly every government today. All of these forces present a very restricted
global community which locates equality and freedom strictly on the plane of consumption.
We need to project upon a different plane, a different justice, a different movement, another
space-time and we cannot comfort ourselves by believing that this vision can be found exclu
sively in some origin.
anastas m* of bethlehem was a spontaneous experiment of overlapping and shifting several
layers on one another. What were these layers? First, my visit to bethlehem, my mother during
a period after the siege of 2002, a calm but very disturbing time in which curfew was regularly
imposed. second, a map of bethlehem from 1972. Third, the meaning of bethlehem.
What is the meaning of bethlehem? it is the home, and home weakens. We can never rest
in it, we have to constantly challenge it. similar to language, to words, to meaning. We cannot
rest assured of meaning, and constantly have to invent new words. How overdefned bethlehem
are you? For me you are always new: an impression, a connection, a fash of an idea, a day
in the future and a task in the present. simply a present. How are you different than all others?
i am one of many: Arab, capitalist, Defne, enemy, Fundamentalism, good, Homeland, israel,
Jew, knowNothing, left, marx, Nation, orientalism, Palestine, Quote, representation,
security, Terrorist, use, vampire, Woman, xenophobia, yes, Zionism.
What is the map of bethlehem? it is the diagrammatic representation of an idea or ideas
showing connections between personal and common narratives aiming at creating new modes
of resistance in language. True, there is no thought outside language, and no resistance with
out thought. interconnectedness is crucial. i am not where i come from, and yet i come from
there. i drew the map anew to place myself in it. The map is not fnished, it is changing me as i
am drawing it. it is expanding and connecting to you. Do you have enough space and what
about them? The state has an offcial map, its scale is enormous, i do not see you there
anymore. The state is erasing our maps! We will redraw them once more, again, anew, another
time if needed.
379
eurOPe
and iTs
rAmiFicATioNs
wAYs thrOuGh wAr
the AfrICAN lIberAtION Of eurOPe
1
JoChen BeCker
during the war we saw those who had been our colonizers the day before naked. We fought
at their side, suffered the same hunger and thirst, wept over the same sorrows. it was clear:
there was no material difference between us. but the french made friends more readily
with german enemy soldiers than with us, their black comrades. that embittered us. these
experiences changed many things.
senegalese flm director and war veteran ousmane sembne in a lecture held
in Tbingen, 19 september 1995
The eighth of may 1945 is regarded as the day europe was liberated from National socialism,
as manifested in the victory of the Alliesthe usA, the soviet union, great britain and
Franceover the Axis powers germany, italy, Austria and Japan in World War ii. The wars
battlefelds had spread over almost the entire globe, forcing millions of people to places that
were not of their own choosing. i do not mean only those deported to and murdered in camps,
or prisoners of war, the displaced and the hunted.
in Algeria, for instance, 8 may 1945 is remembered as a day of massacre perpetrated by
French colonial troops in stif and de guelma. The end of the war, with French troops rein
forced by tens of thousands of Algerian soldiers, was to be celebrated in the country as else
where. but when demands for Algerian independence were voiced in celebratory processions,
French security forces stepped in. in the event, up to ffteen thousand Algerians were mur
dered. in retrospect, this was the start of the Algerian War of independence that was to end
in liberation a full eighteen years later.
viewed thus, World War ii not only changed europe (creation of the eu and the Warsaw
Pact) and the usA (leading world power) as established historiography claims, but also re
shaped the continents of Africa and Asia, while at the same time fundamentally altering rela
tions between the global south and the North. The socalled Third World was a not inconsider
able mainstay of World War ii, as battlefeld, component of the wartime economy and recruit
ing ground. colonial exploitation of natural and human resources, the plundering of raw mate
rials (the uranium for the atom bombs came from the belgian congo) and agricultural prod
ucts, the devastation wrought by acts of war (the destruction of subsistence economies) and
the wartime economy are generally omitted from historical accounts. After the war, the recon
struction of France and great britain were effected with raw materials from the colonies, and
colonial goods were used to pay off dollar debts to the usA. it was thus truly a guerre mondi-
al, which did not have any real year zero.
At the outbreak of World War ii, great britain, the largest colonial power, presided over an
empire that embraced a quarter of the worlds population. Frances colonial empire was twenty
times the size of the fatherland with over one hundred million inhabitants. mobilization in the
French colonies also began in 1939. The threat emanating from National socialist racism was
real enough in the African countries and was systematically exacerbated. by may 1940, in
380 381
North, West and central Africa half a million soldiers had been recruit
ed, generally by force, and transported across North Africa to europe.
2

As we crossed the libyan border on 18 November 1941, as the
south African ambulance driver Frank David kyzer put it, i experi
enced german stuka bomber attacks for the frst time. it was hell, ab
solute hell, and i asked a comrade, Just what are we doing here in
this war? Around a ffth of the over fve hundred thousand compul
sorily recruited tirailleurs sngalais
3
fell in the frst months of the war
and the germans swiftly captured another ninety thousand.
(nouS SoMMeS leS) indigneS
(de la rPublique)
The Third World war victims were and are never counted. Not until
independence in the 1960s do historical accounts of the formerly col
onized peoples begin. in the 1990s, French West African veterans as
sociations succeeded at least in ensuring they were no longer passed
over in memory. survivors are still fghting today for the same pen
sions as their fellow combatants born in France.
The feature flm indignes (Days of glory, literally Natives, 2006)
by the Algerian director rachid bouchareb deals with North African
soldiers as they make their way for germany across France in winter.
4

The soldiers contributed considerably to the struggle for europes lib
eration. yet their equipment was outdated, they wore sandals not
boots, and their greatcoats were World War i stock. They were denied
furlough and promotion. They were also vilifed and subjected to chi
canery.
indignes helped pass the debate on to the next generation. rachid
bouchareb sees his 14.5 millioneuro project not only as a historical
redress, but as an aid to the immigrants descendants in their search
for identity. Touring the suburbs of French metropolises with flm and
actors, the director has stated: Adolescents need coordinates, role
models and reasons to feel proud and hopeful. my heroes are their
forefathers, men with courage who were ready to make sacrifces,
children of France and the republic one and all. The offspring of im
migrants and soldiers had already staked a claim to their rights under
the motto Nous sommes les indignes de la rpublique (We are in
digenous members of the republic).
Jacques, you really must do something, bernadette chirac is re
puted to have said after a private viewing at the centre Pompidou in
Paris. Punctually for the flms premire, the lyse Palace announced
that pensions of the over eighty thousand surviving colonial soldiers
would be brought up to those of the French ancien combattants as
of January 2008. The flm received broad attention in France and trig
gered further discussion in the banlieues, whose populations continue
to be discriminated by the French majority.
1 The research that led to this
essay was conducted during a
residency at the knstlerhaus
bchsenhausen in 2007, and
was followed by the exhibition
liberation/libration at the
kunstpavillon innsbruck in
2008.
2 Protests and subversive be
haviour (speaking in indige
nous languages, copying of
fcers, forging paybooks, pur
loining and selling army mate
rials, drinking methyl alcohol,
strikes, absenteeism, feigned
sickness) were rife among
british colonial troops. in east
Africa alone, some twelve
thousand men deserted in
1944, and another fouteen
thousand the following year.
british offcers were also oc
casionally shot or sent letter
bombs.
3 The senegalese rifemen,
as the colonial soldiers of
French West Africa were
called, had been conquering
new territory for their colonial
masters since the midnine
teenth century. Napoleon iii
had formed the corps in 1857.
by the start of World War i
over a million men had been
recruited. They were deployed
for the frst time in europe in
the FrancoPrussian war
187071. military service for
the fatherland became com
pulsory for the indignes of
French West Africa in 1919.
These compulsory recruits
were intended to fll the gaps
in the French army left by the
mass killing of World War i.
After World War ii, the tirail
leurs sngalais were de
ployed in colonial wars
(195153 indochina War in
cambodia, 195961 Algeria,
and in putting down revolts in
lebanon, syria, madagascar,
Tunisia, morocco, mauretania,
Niger and cameroon). At the
end of the colonial era the
corps was disbanded, the sol
diers returning to civil life or
transferring to new national
armies.
red waS in The air
more than thirtyfve years ago the late senegalese director ousmane sembne had addressed
the subject of soldiers, mostly compulsory recruits, from the French African colonies in two
feature flms, emitai (god of Thunder, 1971) and camp de thiaroye (camp at Thiaroye, 1988).
based on a real event in 1942, emitai tells of awakening resistance in a senegalese village
when the French colonial power requisitions recruits and later the rice harvest. The recruits are
shipped to europe in defence of the fatherland, i.e. France, and to combat fascism. A poster
of the new chief, de gaulle, goes up in the village.
5
The women organize resistance.
in emitai ousmane sembne addresses the period before wartime deployment, while camp
de thiaroye begins with demobilization on African ground. West African soldiers from the vari
ous French colonies return to the transit camp de Thiaroye near Dakar, proud of having
fought for France. To communicate with each other, they speak the colonial language of
French with their different dialects. Their journeys through numerous African and european
countries are at an end.
6
Thirteen hundred tirailleurs returning from europe were transported from the port to the
military camp. From here they were to return to their respective countries after receiving
outstanding pay, dismissal allowances and other bonuses. bad food, ill treatment and unpaid
allowances became their daily bread. The francs they had brought with them from France
were converted into the colonial cFA (communaut Financire Africaine) currency and lost
half their value.
When vichy sympathizers tried to force the African soldiers back into old colonial patterns,
europes black liberators rebelled. on 31 November 1944, French tanks surrounded the camp
and opened fre at 5 a.m. The corpses of the former liberators were buried without coffns.
The exact number who died is unknown. The documents on the subject are still top secret.
entire French West Africa was shocked by the massacre and the news spread through
the villages like wildfre.
in emitai, but especially in camp de thiaroye, ousmane sembne addressed virtually for
gotten history on the road to decolonialization. The director and writer, who died only recently,
joined the French colonial forces in 1942, fought in the artillery and assisted in the liberation
of Alsace. in 194748 he took part in the big railworkers strike along the DakarNiger line,
a key event in the politics of African selfdetermination. He worked as a docker in marseilles,
became a trade unionist and joined the communist Party.
oPeraTion TorCh
on 8 November 1942 the landing of british and u.s. troops in North Africa with the support of
mainly JewishAlgerian resistance organizationsone of the rare Jewish victories in World
War ii as lucien steinberg puts it in la rvolte des justes. les juifs contre hitlerbroke
vichys supremacy in Africa. De gaulle set up the central African colonial administration in
brazzaville and persisted in compulsory recruitment. The African soldiers constituted the bulk
of the Free French Forces. in 1944, the Allies drove the german troops out of North Africa,
and the colonies under vichy authority had to cede control to the Free French Forces. The
Allies advance from the mediterranean began with the landing in Provence in August 1943. in
November 1944, African soldiers reached Alsace and lorraine.
roberto rosselinis episodic flm Pais (1946, script with Federico Fellini) tells six short
stories of italian, german and u.s. soldiers who meet in italy in the course of the wars progres
382 383
sive ending there, from sicily in 1943 to the Po valley in 1945. in Na
ples a puppettheatre moor is contemptuously treated. enraged, a
black gi intervenes and fnds himself on stage. The episode is part of
the history of black soldiers who fought in europe, Asia and Africa for
liberation from fascism, and who were also colonized, or, as in the
usA, discriminated and segregated.
The rosselini scene recalls an incident in ousmane sembnes camp
de thiaroye. When returning West African soldiers go out in American
uniforms, they are welcome enough; but the moment people realize
that they are not black gis but African soldiers, they are thrown out of
the bars and brothels of Dakar.
Two woMen
vittorio de sicas la ciociara (Two Women, 1960, script: Alberto
moravia; with sophia loren, raff vallone and JeanPaul belmondo) is
one of the few feature flms to show not only soldiers of the Western
Allies but also Africans. His moroccan soldiers, however, who appear
as grimaces and shadows, or in hordes, are heavily stereotyped and
lack individuating features. Worse, at the end of the flm they rape the
two heroines in a church. The flmpresenting a profusion of material
on the chaos of war, italian opportunism in the face of fascism, and
diverse other nationalities, occupiers, liberators and forced labourers
went down in cinema history in particular because of the rape scene.
Paths of fight, migration, retreat and attack cross and recross be
tween rome and Naples.
MoroCCanS in Tyrol
Austria, like germany, was partitioned among the four victorious
Allied powers. The respective capitals of vienna and berlin were like
wise divided for years into four sectors. That the French army would
one day march into the former administrative district of Tyrolvorarl
berg as well as vienna and oversee the countrys transition into peace
could not be foreseen until shortly before the end of the war. Not until
the end of 1944, thanks to de gaulles intervention from the depths of
the French colonial empire (klaus eisterer, institut fr Zeitgeschichte,
university of innsbruck), did France receive a seat on the european
Advisory commission and join the military administration alongside
the usA, great britain and the ussr. The French troops arrived tardily
in Tyrol, taking over the sector from the swifter u.s. troops on 4 July
1945. general mariemile bthouart, a former soldier in morocco,
was the frst military governor based in innsbruck.
7
Two rooms on the ground foor of the present Tyrolean galerie in
the Taxispalais served the French occupiers as documentation centre
and library as early as 1945. in 1951, an indochina exhibition was
on show here, indochina being colonially allied with France in the
4 indignes has found no
distributor or DvD outlet in
the germanspeaking world.
The flm received an award at
the cannes Film Festival 2006
and was nominated for an
oscar but lost to Florian
Henckel von Donnersmarcks
entry Das leben der Anderen
(The lives of others).
5 For a while African colonial
soldiers of the vichy regime
under marshal Philippe Ptain
fought against troops recruit
ed for the Free French Forces
(Forces Franaises libres) by
de gaulle. The governors of
individual colonies had to
decide for vichy or the Free
French Forces. Ptain always
considered the colonies as
under his control, and in the
ceasefre negotiations with
the Nazis declared himself
ready to allow them a share
in plundering the colonies.
6 my title derives from
brigitte reinwalds study
reisen durch den krieg
(Journeys Through War) where
she writes of the experiences
and life strategies of West
African war veterans.
7 A wooden footbridge over
the inn is named after him.
8 before de gaulles troops
ceremoniously entered the lib
erated French capital, orders
were given for the blan
chissement of the armed
forces. While the Free French
Forces marched under the Arc
de Triomphe in Paris and were
celebrated as liberators, the
tirailleurs were waiting in tran
sit camps in central France to
be repatriated. or they were
dispatched to the next theatre
of colonial war.
vietnam War. in July 1945, the French propaganda offce, the so
called Direction de linformation, took up its work in innsbruck, but
was transferred to vienna in November. The Direction de lducation
et des beaux Arts responsible for education, intellectual exchange
and denazifcation, which had been set up in August 1945, remained
in innsbruck. The French cultural institute innsbruck, opened in July
1946, still testifes today to the French presence in postwar Tyrol.
Postwar Austria was to be detached from the german reich and
the germanitalian Axis smashed. Already at an early stage the
French were profling the country as a victim of National socialism.
Troops moving in were greeted with ici lAutriche Pays Ami (Here
Austria, friendly country) to make the point that Austria, unlike
germany, had been liberated and not conquered. general de gaulle
even described Austria as the key to europe, meaning eastern
europe, which in the event came under the soviet unions sphere
of infuence in the cold War.
more than half of the 550,000 men fghting in the French army in
1944 had crossed the mediterranean to defend the fatherland. They
came from the maghreb and subsaharan francophone West Africa
to liberate europe from fascism. A littleknown fact is that contingents
of moroccan soldiers recruited by the colonial power formed a large
part of the thirty thousandstrong French army presence in Austria.
The occupying forces were made up to begin with by the 4th
moroccan mountaineers Division, which crossed the border to the
Tyrolvorarlberg district on 29 April 1945, followed by the 2nd
moroccan infantry Division, which proceeded to landeck in Tyrol.
As early as september 1945 the moroccan units were relieved by
the 27th mountaineers Division from grenoble consisting of (white)
French resistance troops. This was known as le blanchissement (the
whitening/whitewashing).
8
With the increase in military operations on
the indochinese front the remaining troops were withdrawn from the
French occupied zone almost completely in 1953.
raPoldi Park
Headlines such as Tougher crackdown on moroccan scene, Depor
tation custody for moroccans without Papers and North African
criminal scene in innsbruck set the current tone of local political
debate in the regional capital innsbruck. moroccans as criminal ele
ments in the rapoldi Park scene here are synonymous with drug
dealers. The local city newspaper quotes the Austrian interior minister
gnther Platter with the words: innsbruck must be made as unattrac
tive a location as possible for these people. The provincial governor
of Tyrol, Herwig van staa, has even called for detention camps for
criminal asylum seekers.

The recruits from a senega
lese village are shipped to
europe to defend the father
land. A poster of the new
chief, general de gaulle,
goes up and replaces the one
of fascist friendly, marshal
Ptain.
ousmane sembne, emitai
(1971)
The murdered corpses of the
former liberators of europe
were buried without coffns
near Dakar, senegal.
ousmane sembne
camp at thiaroye
(1988)
eric Deroo / Antoine
champeaux
la force noire. gloire
et infortunes dune
lgende coloniale
(2006)
384 385
every monday at midday, the citys youth Welfare offce offers cous
cous and mint tea at the Z6 youth centre. streetworker mor Dieye is
there to help the young North African men, among other things in
their dealings with the authorities. Himself from senegal and a prac
tising muslim, Dieye learned Arabic while studying in cairo, is married
to a Tyrolean woman, and enjoys the trust of these youths. For four
years now there has been an increase in youths from the maghreb
living in innsbruck and pushing light drugs obtained via connections
to italy. They are regulars at homeless centres, and some of them
still know each other from when they were street children on the mar
gins of casablanca.
some of the youths have Austrian girlfriends and are already
fathers. As with the occupation children of binational relationships
after 1945, this has caused a considerable stir in the media. There are
still many postwar offspring of liaisons between moroccan fathers
and Austrian women who are not prepared to talk publicly. born in
1962, the author and psychologist Hamid lechhab, who moved
to vorarlberg for love, began recently to organize trips with a few
occupation children to the land of their fathers.
froM / To euroPe
european troopsthe british army against the german Africa corps,
for instancefought on the battlefelds of North Africa, while African
soldiers marched through France, italy, germany and Austria. DDay
in particular, the invasion of the Normandy coast by Allied troops in
1944, is generally picked out for special attention by the media. What
this overlooks is that the struggle for an antifascist europe was also
waged from the south via the mediterranean and sweeping across
France, italy and the Alps. Paths, attacks and rearguard actions may
have touched each other. From the Norths perspective, 8 may 1945 is
the day of europes liberation from fascism, fought for by soldiers
from throughout the world and, in no small part, by soldiers from the
African continent. This is something their children can be proud of.
moroccan soldier approaches
the young refugee.
vittorio de sica
two Women
(1960) Film still
on the cover of the Tyrolian
Newspaper Neue no more
compassion for criminal asy
lum seekers
internierungslager
Photograph: Jochen becker
(Translated from the german
by christopher JenkinJones)
Further reading
klaus eisterer, ed., tirol
zwischen diktatur und
demokratie (19301950)
(innsbruck: studienverlag,
2002)
Hamid lechhab, mein vater
ist marokkaner. die vergess-
enen Kinder des Zweiten
Weltkriegs in vorarlberg
(self published)
brigitte reinwald, reisen du-
rch den Krieg: erfahrungen
und lebensstrategien westafri-
kanischer Weltkriegsveteranen
(berlin: klaus schwarz verlag,
Zentrum moderner orient,
2005)
rheinisches Journalistinnen
bro, unser Opfer zhlen
nicht: die dritte Welt im
Zweiten Weltkrieg (berlin: ver
lag Assoziation A, 2005)
eurOPe Of CAMPs
T.J. demos
in foreigners camps in europe and in mediterranean countries, a 2007 map by the migrants
rights collective migreurop, the region is shown riddled with detention centers.
1
There are
camps for those awaiting examination of their admission requests, camps for the soontobe
deported, and informal camps, mostly in North Africa, built by clandestine travelers. it is in
view of such proliferating spaces of enclosure that xavier Arens created his likeminded map.
schengen, the castle (2008) similarly portrays europe as an environment of segregation, a
walled continent, combining blocks of text that describe the effects of the schengen agree
ment, which has transformed europes interior into a borderless area, with documentary imag
es of migrants stationed around its periphery who attempt to gain access to that wellguarded
land. The point of these projects is to chartand equally to contesteuropes transformation
into a stratifed cartography, one constituted by increasingly controlled social, political, and
economic hierarchies.
What does it mean to exist in the midst of this conficted region, divided between the space
of legal citizenship and the camps for criminalized immigrants? living and traveling in europe,
one comes across few signs that these spaces of containment and segregation pockmark
the continent. The enjoyment of relatively easy and affordable transportation within europe, in
other words, disguises the rarifed privilege of such mobility, at least when considered in rela
tion to the larger global context in which travel is now strictly regulated. The invisibility of
these immigration camps is all the more striking, moreover, as europe has become so thor
oughly cosmopolitan, with multiple languages on the street continually within earshot and the
appearance of denizens always heterogeneous and foreign. And it is this europe that is com
monly vaunted by historians, policy makers, and politicians, who praise it as a paragon of
international virtues. As American economist Jeremy rifkin writes, the european Dream in
contrast to the largely discredited American one, now mired in unilateral militarism and ob
sessed with freemarket liberalism, is a beacon of light in a troubled world. it beckons us to
a new age of inclusivity, diversity, quality of life, deep play, sustainability, universal human
rights, the rights of nature, and peace on earth.
2

such a utopian view as rifkins is surprising, for it indicates no awareness of the fact that
the new age he describesdefned by inclusivity, diversity, and universal human rights
conceals a nearly invisible level of strict control, criminalization, and incarceration, which
awaits multitudes wishing to gain access to that european dream. europe consequently
turns into the site of a deep contradiction: on the one hand, we speak of its cosmopolitanism,
freedom of selfdetermination, and open society; on the other, its paranoid sense of security
and xenophobia, which has given rise to what migreurop calls the great confnement,
recalling a term used famously by Foucault to characterize the mode of generalized imprison
ment originating in the seventeenth century.
3
The european dream, it appears, masks a
nightmare of historical regression. The contradiction could not be greater. celebrating freedom
of mobility within its walls, the eu refuses that freedom to outsiders. And it is precisely this
regime of separationbetween zones of legality, rightful belonging and political representation
386 387
and those of illegality, exclusion and political negationthat defnes a particular aspect of
what tienne balibar recently diagnosed as a virtual european apartheid, a phrase used to
signal the critical nature of the contradiction between the opposite movements of inclusion
and exclusion, reduplication of external borders in the form of internal borders, stigmatization
and repression of populations whose presence within european societies is nonetheless in
creasingly massive and legitimate.
4
voiced as merely one of several possible futures, balibars
worstcase scenario seems to be moving toward realization today.
in fact, rather than inaugurating a new era of freedom, the schengen Agreement, upon
which Arens bases his map, established the same contradiction of opposite movements of
which balibar speaks. realized between 1985 and 1990, schengen both abolished physical
borders among participating european countries and instituted the standardization and coop
erative enforcement of external border controls.
5
in attempting to erase the divisions between
european countries, in other words, it has expanded and exteriorized those divisions to the in
ternational register of economic, social and political relations. in this regard, the accord coin
cided with europes move toward globalizationparticularly in the postwall years following
the beginning of the dissolution of soviet bloc countries in 1989as well as mirrored its own
contradictions. globalization may refer to worldwide economic and political integration, desig
nating open borders, free trade zones, and transnational structures in the form of administra
tive, corporate, and representative bodies, which for balibar suggest so many postnational
cosmopolitan anticipations.
6
However, even as globalization creates smooth spaces of (prima
rily) economic mobilityas has the schengen agreementit transposes local and national
mechanisms of inequality to the supranational level, creating regions of economic and political
privilege well protected from the undeveloped, impoverished, and unfree areas outside its ter
rain. Whereas in years past commentators articulated the hope that the formation of the euro
pean union would uphold democracy and popular sovereignty in the face of the economic and
political pressures of globalization, recent analyses have argued conversely that the eu is
overwhelmingly about the promotion of free markets [...] regnant in this union is not democra
cy, and not welfare, but capital.
7
Not surprisingly, one fnds the same extremes and contradictions in recent developments of
artistic practice. The period since the institution of schengen has coincided with the emer
gence of the now wellestablished and often celebratory cultural discourse of nomadism, ac
cording to which artistic identitiesfrom practitioners to critics, from curators to dealers and
collectorsare said to be given over to itinerancy. As artworks have become dispersed across
media, whether dematerialized as digital transmission or easily transportable DvDs, and un
grounded from specifc geographical location, biennial exhibitions and art fairs have provided
the new playing feld for the global art world, fguring as so many sites of diasporic experience
and endless exchange.
8
one sees the same transnational cosmopolitan anticipations in these
developments, even if at times they inspire romantic idealizations.
9
While the origins of this re
cent trend can be found in the nomadology of gilles Deleuze and Flix guattari, frst men
tioned in their book a thousand Plateaus, published in 1980, the complexity of their account is
often lost on those who celebrate the nomadic. While Deleuze and guattari hoped that the
forces of dispersion and mobility would variously contest the despotic state apparatus, rigid
economic structures, the reifcation of identity, and the hierarchical stratifcations of space,
they also warned that deterritorialization could play into the very hands of fexible capital,
fueling adaptive militaryindustrial, and multinational complexes.
10
This contradiction retains
1 conceived out of a work
shop devoted to The europe
of camps at the european
social Forum in Florence, No
vember 2002, migreurop rep
resents a network of activists
and scholars aimed at
spreading knowledge about
the complex reality of migra
tion and camps, and organiz
ing exchanges between differ
ent groups to facilitate action
against illegalizing migration.
For further information and
further online versions of their
maps, see http://www.mi
greurop.org.
2 Jeremy rifkin, the europe-
an dream: how europes vi-
sion of the future is Quietly
eclipsing the american dream
(New york: Penguin, 2004);
cited in Perry Anderson, De
picting europe, london re-
view of books (20 september
2007).
3 see: http://www.migreu
rop.org/article643.
html?lang=en; on the great
confnement, which for
Foucault represented an insti
tutional creation peculiar to
the seventeenth century inso
far as it designated an eco
nomic measure and a social
precaution, see michel
Foucault, madness and civili-
zation: a history of insanity in
the age of reason (1961),
trans. richard Howard (New
york: vintage, 1988), 6364.
4 tienne balibar, We, the
people of europe? refections
on transnational citizenship,
trans. James swenson (Princ
eton: Princeton university
Press, 2004), x.
5 The schengen Agreement
was signed on 14 June 1985
by France, West germany,
belgium, luxembourg, and
the Netherlands. The 1990
convention implementing the
schengen Agreement put the
agreement into practice. To
day, a total of twenty nine
statesincluding twentyfve
european union states and
four noneu members (ice
land, Norway, liechtenstein
and switzerland)are signato
ries to the full set of rules in
the schengen Agreement,
with most having implement
ed its provisions.
its relevance today, the danger being to proclaim the virtues of no
madism without awareness of the cost and limits of its freedoms, as
if its postnational cosmopolitan anticipations didnt cast the dark
shadow of virtual european apartheid. The solution, however, is not
merely to critique the terms of nomadism as privileged and elitist;
rather, this freedom of mobility should be universalized as a funda
mental right of all.
To date, schengens cruel effect has been the creation of a vast
terrain of excluded people, economic deprivation, and political repres
sion outside europe. one could have expected so much given the
recent handling of european security, which the eu has effectively
subcontracted to countries in North Africa and the middle east, offer
ing them economic incentives of development aid for the control of
their population fows.
11
because the eu habitually overlooks human
rights abuses and selectively funds governments on the basis of the
effectiveness of their border controls, the enforcement of security has
led, not surprisingly, to the criminalization of emigration, as govern
ments such as moroccos and libyas have made it illegal for inhabit
ants to exit their countries without the consent of the increasingly
restrictive authorities.
12
The consequence is the virtual imprisonment
of whole populations, giving rise to a system that all too conveniently
feeds into the markets of deregulated labor and cheap manufacturing
in those areas, which, as exploited by the eu, supports its own goals
of proft and prosperity, even while cheap travel and free mobility are
celebrated within europe irrespective of the costs.
13
When migrants do make it out of their countries of originnormally
at great economic cost and physical hardshipthe camps that greet
them are not simply spaces of containment; more fundamentally, they
operate to keep foreigners at a distance, both spatially and legally,
from the communities of host countries.
14
While this mechanism of
separation is meant to fend off the perceived loss of europes distinc
tive cultural character to the invading hordes, the installation of camps
corrodes that character by other means, for it negates european
claims for safeguarding human rights, including the freedom of mobil
ity, and ends up withdrawing those rights from the migrants it impris
ons. For inside the camps, there is no freedom of movement; basic
rights to asylum, to family life and private life, as well as minors rights
are not guaranteed, while inhumane and degrading treatments are of
ten perpetuated.
15
one might argue that the presence and function of
camps is merely an anomaly in a europe whose true colors are demo
cratic and humane. yet given the growth and permanence of these in
stallations, this conclusion seems inaccurate. indeed, for giorgio Ag
amben, the camp represents a state of exception that has become the
rule, proposing nothing less than the new biopolitical nomos of the
planet.
16
in Agambens reading, now well established over several
388 389
migreurop
foreigners camps in
europe and in mediterranean
countries
(2007)
6 balibar, We, the People, viii.
7 Anderson, Depicting
europe; on the democratic
defcit of the eu, see Jrgen
Habermas, opening up
Fortress europe (2006), http://
www.signandsight.com / fea
tures / 1048.html (consulted
June 2008).
8 on the ungrounding of
sitespecifcity, see miwon
kwon, one Thing After An
other: Notes on site specifci
ty, October 80 (spring 1997).
on the biennial as proposing a
diasporic public sphere, see
okwui enwezor, megaexhi
bitions and the Antinomies of
a Transnational global Form,
manifesta journal 2 (Winter
spring 20032004). Not least
of these developments has
been the formation of mani
festa, the nomadic paneuro
pean biennial. However, to its
credit, manifesta established
itself in the mid90s as a plat
form for questioning sites of
geographical diversity and
confict within europe and be
tween the local and the glo
bal, rather than merely rejoic
ing in the regions newfound
borderless space.
9 such idealizations are
questioned and problematized
in James meyer, Nomads,
Parkett 35 (may 1997), which
distinguishes between lyrical
nomads (gabriel orozco and
rirkrit Tiravanija) and critical
nomads (christian Philipp
mller, Andrea Fraser, rene
green, mark Dion); and also
carol becker, The romance
of Nomadism: A series of re
fections, art journal (sum
mer 1999).
10 gilles Deleuze and Flix
guattari, a thousand Plateaus:
capitalism and schizophrenia,
trans. brian massumi
(minneapolis: university of
minnesota Press, 1987), 387.
books, current forms of sovereignty are directly proportionate to the
authorization of spaces of legal exception (witness the growth of
American presidential authority in george W. bushs administration
precisely via the capacity to maintain spaces of exception outside u.s.
territory, such as the detention center at guantnamo bay). but the
very logic of the camp turns its solution into a crisis: by including
others on the basis of exclusion, nationstates incorporate increasing
numbers of people without political rights, giving rise to a twotiered
political situation divided between citizens and residents that is
clearly untenable (are human rights contingent upon nationality,
or are they truly universal?). it is precisely this growing zone of indis
tinction between the outside and the inside that defnes the europe
of camps today.
ironically, externalizing security to repressive noneuropean coun
tries ends up exacerbating poor living conditions abroad and provides
further motivation for escape, driving, in turn, fears of invasion within
europe. And this logic has only intensifed since september 11, 2001
and the subsequent and ongoing wars in iraq and Afghanistan, as well
as the continuing crisis in lebanon. in response to these geopolitical
upheavals, illegal migration, once associated largely with drug traffck
ing, has consequently become infused with terrorist threat. more
and more, the migrant is depicted as the enemy, and war vocabu
lary is often used to describe the situation and to act against it: mili
tary equipment for controls at sea, high technology, walls and barriers,
camps and collective expulsions.
17
in european media and politics,
one now confronts a paranoia of foreigners, particularly from North
Africa and the middle east, tied to the menace of terrorism as
much as to a feared islamicization, which, even more than the main
streams annoyance at nonassimilative cultural divergence, appears to threaten europes secu
lar, democratic, and socially liberated makeup. under such conditions, popular support for
balibars notion of transnational citizenship, advocated only a few years ago, seems remote
at best. rather the opposite: governments continue their movement rightward with ever more
politicians elected on the basis of antiimmigration policies and xenophobic fear mongering.
18

it seems european apartheid is winning out.
How can we reverse this trend, challenging the movement toward social and political sepa
ration with a more inclusive model of citizenshipa political identity that is open to continu
ous admission of new peoples and cultures in the construction of europe, as balibar propos
es
19
or even with a modeling of some innovative form of life beyond citizenship that could
guarantee rights for all? Agamben proposes the construction of a new political philosophy
starting with the fgure of the refugee, which brings the originary fction of sovereignty to
crisis, for it ruptures the naturalized connection between nativity and nationalityas if rights
must be founded upon birth, and being human necessarily entails being a citizenwhich de
fnes modernitys politicaljuridical categories.
20
if that originary fction is rejected, then citizen
ship would cease to function as the basis for either collective identifcation or social exclusion.
in that case, a europe of the nations would no longer protect the ius (right) of the citizen,
but rather would secure the refugium (refuge) of the singular, and would thus defne an ater
ritoriality or extraterritorial space in which the status of european would then mean the be
inginexodus of the citizen.
21
The advantage of such a dislocation is that it entails both the
identifcation with those who are displacedvia a series of reciprocal extraterritorialities [...]
where exterior and interior indetermine each other, as Agamben notesand the recognition
of oneself as ultimately nonidentical to ones ethnic, racial or national community.
given that matrix of identifcation and estrangement, what would it mean to reconstruct
europe as a refuge of the singular? Agamben provides no specifc answerselsewhere he
claims it represents the politics of a coming communityand it is at this point that we might
turn to artistic practice for imaginative and experimental proposals for a critical rethinking of
geographical space and political being. There are numerous ways that such a topological in
determination of citizen and migrant has been advanced by recent artistic and exhibition
projects, of which i will only cite a few examples.
22
Among the foremost artistic ones, in my
view, involve creative documentary approachesboth in photography and videothat pro
pose unconventional relations to fgures that fee nationality (as in yto barradas a life full of
holesthe strait Project [19982004], a suite of photographs that capture moroccans in tran
sit), or that place the spectator in the role of beinginexodus (as in steve mcQueens Pursuit
[2006], offering a luminous installation of sensory defamiliarization). other compelling projects
may analyze the individual stories of exile (as does the work of emily Jacir, particularly her re
cent installation material for a film [2007], detailing the tragic life of Palestinian Wael Zuaiter);
or they may situate the desires for migration historically and politically (as in the various video
essays of ursula biemann); each of these cases shatter prevailing stereotypes that distance
refugees and migrants in the same way that camps enclose them within their walls. These ex
perimental aesthetic forms have the advantage of establishing modes of proximity, even inti
macy, with migrants that foster compassionate identifcations; alternately, they may also evoke
antagonisms that provide pause to automatic behavior, provoking critical selfscrutiny in rela
tion to the european treatment of migrants.
23

Another route that collapses the distance between citizen and migrant has been the crea
390 391
tion of interventions in public space, which facilitate the expression
and interrogation of relations to the socially and politically excluded.
For instance, consider Ayreen Anastas and rene gabris camp
campaign (200607), which investigated the present and historical
circumstances of the camp in the united states via a processbased
project comprising extensive research and discussions with different
publics, travel across the united states, video documentation, and in
terviews with activists and artists made available online.
24
The result
critically placed the detention center at guantnamo bay in relation to
other historical camps, bringing out a longstanding paradigm of legal
exception that has been constitutive of Americas political formation.
Also exemplary is christoph schlingensiefs foreigners Out! (2002),
for which the artist housed twelve refugees in a container placed near
the steps of viennas opera House, and ran a website where the
viennese could vote, big brotherstyle, for one deportation per day.
schlingensiefs political theater performed sardonic interpretations of
the extreme rightwing policies of Jrg Haiders recently elected
Freedom Party government, eliciting their fascist roots and present
dangers. consider as well Pawel Althamers fairy tale (2006), for
which the artist used his invitation to the berlin biennial as a platform
for social change. Althamer wrote to berlins interior minister to save
an eighteenyearold kurdish man, besir oclay, from imminent depor
tation, spending the artists cultural capital to direct media attention
toward the cruel fate of one individual caught up within germanys
harsh treatment of noncitizens. each of these projects brought about
the opportunity for a disidentifcation from current regimes of separa
tion, whether by intimating the historical catastrophes that have
resulted from such policies, or by creating platforms for political oppo
sition that splinter the homogeneous image of the public and perfo
rate the divisions between interior and exterior, citizen and migrant.
might these projects, lastly, contribute to a redefnition of the eu
as the site of a critical regionalism? if so, then they must develop
further what kenneth Frampton theorized as its dialectical expres
sionthat is, a force that would both contest the rapacity of
economic globalizations homogenizing tendencies by cultivating local
values and differences, and oppose the reactionary return to autoch
thonous elements by learning from paradigms drawn from alien
sources.
25
if the interventions of current art reanimate these strate
gies, then critical regionalism cannot merely lead to a philosophy of
cosmopolitanism celebrated solely within europes frontiers; rather, its
dialectical expression must take into account the global position of
the eu visvis its outside, as well as consider the regional corre
spondence between its internal borderless space and its detention
centers for migrants. Frampton suggests that the enclave offers a
way to conceive of a bounded fragment [posed] against [] the
ceaseless inundation of a placeless, alienating consumerism.
26
yet
while his argument is careful to reject any regressive return to the
nostalgic or populist vernacular, the rearticulation of critical regional
ism today must be careful as well to resist the transformation of the
enclave of cultural distinctiveness into a community guarded against
the residency of alien people. The enclave, in other words, must be
topologically perforatedto return to Agambens strategyin rela
tion to the camp, where inclusion and exclusion are mutually can
celled, opening up the path toward a more fexible modeling of
political being based around transnational existence. given todays
pervasive atmosphere of fear and aggression toward foreigners, the
expectation of such a change in popular attitudes appears unlikely.
yet the answer is not to dismiss these creative proposals as naive or
idealist, for this would only represent a surrender to the defeatism that
drives political disengagement and serves the interests of those in
power. rather, let us animate these proposals with renewed urgency.
(minneapolis: university of
minnesota Press, 2000), 45.
Also see giorgio Agamben,
state of exception, trans.
kevin Attell (chicago: univer
sity of chicago Press, 2005).
17 migreurop, From europe
an migration and Asylum Poli
cies to camps for Foreigners.
18 Witness the return to pow
er of italian Prime minister sil
vio berlusconi, as well as the
recent election of romes ne
ofascist mayor, gianni Ale
manno, running on a notori
ous antiimmigration platform.
19 balibar, We, the People, viii.
20 Agamben, beyond
Human rights, in means
without end, 21.
21 bid., 2425.
22 A sampling of recent exhi
bitions that have investigated
the present conditions of mi
gration today include no
Placelike home: Perspec-
tives on migration in europe at
brussels Argos, 2008; Port
city: On mobility and ex-
change at bristols arnolfni,
2007; the vanabbemuseums
be(com)ing dutch, 2008; or
berlins kunstwerkes b-
ZOne: becoming europe and
beyond, 200506.
23 i have analyzed much of
this work over the course of
several essays, including life
Full of Holes, grey room 24
(Fall 2006), 7288; sahara
chronicle: videos migrant ge
ography, geobodies: the vid-
eo essays of ursula biemann
(umea, sweden: bildmuseet,
forthcoming, 2008); and emi
ly Jacir: Poetrys beyond,
hugo boss Prize 2008 (New
york: guggenheim museum,
forthcoming, 2008).
24 For more information, see
ayreen anastas & rene gabri:
camp campaign (New york:
Art in general, 2008).
25 kenneth Frampton, Pros
pects for a critical regional
ism, in kate Nesbitt, ed., the-
orizing a new agenda for ar-
chitecture (New york: Prince
ton Architectural Press, 1996),
472.
26 Frampton, Prospects for a
critical regionalism, 482.
xavier Arens
schengen, the castle
(2008)
courtesy the artist
11 see Ali bensad, The mili
tarization of migration Fron
tiers in the mediterranean, in
the maghreb connection:
movements of life across
north africa, ed. ursula bie
mann and brian Holmes (bar
celona: Actar, 2006).
12 As the president of mi
greurop claire rodier points
out, the criminalization of em
igration is in contravention of
article 13, point 2 of the uni
versal Declaration of Human
rights, signed by all uN
member states, which states
that everyone has the right to
leave any country, including
his own, and to return to his
country: emigration ill
gale: une notion bannir,
libration (13 June, 2006).
13 on these different overlap
ping and interconnected
economies, see the analysis
presented in schengen, the
castle.
14 by camp, migreurop
means a process as much as
a physical space: isolating and
rallying foreigners does not
only occur with the creation
of closed centres. The eu
rope of camps is the whole
set of devices that forces the
disruption of migration paths.
Preventing people to cross
borders, to enter territory, as
signing them to residence
legally or by police harass
mentlocking them up to en
sure the possibility to escort
them back, jailing them to
punish the crossing of bor
ders, those are some forms of
this europe of camps. At
the present time, police
camps may appear covered
under humanitarian necessity:
despite an offcial rhetoric of
compassion and euphemism,
it is nothing more than the ex
act opposite policy that is car
ried out in the eu to isolate
foreigners. http://www.mi
greurop.org/article643.
html?lang=en
15 migreurop, Defnition of
camps.
16 giorgio Agamben, What is
a camp? (1993), in means
without end: notes on Politics
392 393
dONt exPlAIN
erden kosoVa
At some point during our early formation someone comes up and tells us that there is actually
a social unit that is larger than our family and the group of people in our immediate vicinity.
We are told that there are a certain number of units like this. They are said to be specifed by
cultural differentiations and shaped by untraceably lengthy chunks of time. my own experi
ence with this teaching has been a problematic one. During childhood i failed to establish a full
sense of identifcation with this large unit called the nation, due to some complexities in my
background, and other reasons, like an obsession with a certain colour as a result of a strong
affliation with a particular football club. later, when at university, on account of affliations
with organizations and publication projects whose radical politics were not only critical of the
fctive character of national identity but also claimed to produce nonessentialist forms of be
longing to ones own territory, my distance from an imposed sense of national belonging
reached its limit. Finally, my recent geographical mobility occasioned by links to academic and
art institutions brought me to a point where i could fnally assure myself that i was now stand
ing outside. This position of exteriority has recently become unstable.
During an exhibition project i cocurated in cyprus three years ago, i came up against some
criticisms (aside from the constructive ones) that occasionally became resentful in tone. This
resulted in the curatorial team becoming branded with certain names. i was called yet another
colonizer from istanbul, and more pejoratively the Turk. There is perhaps nothing peculiar
about this. many people suffer from this kind of abuse, but it was, genuinely, my frst experi
ence of having my worldly existence reduced to a single dismissive word specifying a national
and ethnic identity. in the last couple of months i have been faced with the opposite extreme
of this this is what you are attitude. some groups, motivated by nationalism, within the feld
of art in istanbul have branded me, and also a number of my colleagues from the local con
temporary art scene, as a traitor to national interests, and more blatantly, as a promoter of eth
nic confict within the country. but when did this ferce nationalist rhetoric enter into the feld
of art (or has it been always there) and when exactly did i enter into this minefeld?
STraTegieS
The work that inspired me to concentrate more closely on the ways in which issues of national
identity were being employed by contemporary artists was a video installation by erzen
shkololli, exhibited at manifesta 4. hey you (2002) consisted of a flm of skurte Fejza performing
in traditional Albanian dress. Fejzas song, contrasting with her historical costume and folkloric
musicality, had lyrics that made direct reference to the immediate political agenda by address
ing europe in a tone of complaint and commenting on the suffering of the divided people
of Albania. Her hypnotic voicebare and touchingher unconstrained forward looking pose,
and the flms dreamlike atmosphere, effortlessly grabbed the attention of the audience. i
was informed about Fejzas troubled background. Her music was constantly criticized for its
patriotic content, but shkololli was a resident of the kosovar city of Peja, so i was puzzled
about how to relate these two details. How did the artist situate himself in relation to his sub
ject? in comparison with other works by the artist, hey you was ambiguous with respect
to the position of the artist within the work. in a later photographic work, the hilariously funny
albanian flag on the moon (2003), shkololli detourned an iconic image from recent history
by making the national fag of Albania (and problematically also of kosovo) appear to have
been placed on the moon. He managed to establish a cunning and ironic matrix of the absurdi
ties of a disproportionately enthusiastic nationalism and the peculiar status of kosovar territory,
in terms of international law. The fact that the Albanian fag was actually carried to the
moon by the u.s. astronaut Alan shepard (who was of Albanian origin) in 1971 was also a
playful comment on contemporary politics. but could a similar sense of irony, and political
commentary, be found in hey you? Did the works blankness run the risk of endorsing the con
tent of the sung lyrics? Are we entitled to expect from contemporary artists an awareness
of all the possible implications of their work and that they maintain a distance between them
selves and their subjects?
For an exhibition entitled speculations (Plaform garanti, istanbul, 2003), a curatorial collab
oration with vasif kortun, we paired shkolollis work with two other videos. one of those,
vahit Tunas europe, europe hear us (2000), was composed of shots of an empty football
pitch and the aggressive gestures and chanting of a hooligan supporting the Turkish national
team. The hooligan, played by the artist himself, recited the then widely popular song chanted
at the stands whenever Turkish clubs played against european teams. The lyrics were of an
excessively sexist, fascist and alterimperialist nature. reminiscent of Anselm kiefers early
photographic work (besetzungen), in which he is pictured giving the Hitler salute in the public
squares of various european cities. in kiefers work the size of the public squares dwarfs and
ironizes his isolated presence. Tunas enactment of the hooligan took a humorous twist
because the neglected and underdeveloped state of the pitch, and its surroundings, made the
nationalist rhetoric sound ridiculous.
The experience with speculations led me to focus on critical tools used for interrupting the
absolutist call for full identifcation with the nation. i came across plenty of works that con
tained strategic identifcations, as in shkolollis albanian flag and Tunas europe, europe,
which set to displace the quoted ideology in the content through irony. The ljubljanabased
music group laibach and the artist group irWiN pushed irony to the extreme and formed a
mode of overidentifcation that created an ambiguous zone, in which the critical stance of the
work is rendered unreadable or suspiciously complicit. still, the grotesque and exaggerated
eclecticism of laibachs concerts, set between the iconography of conficting authoritarian
ideologies or the juxtaposition of a number of tropes of nationalisms with an equal distance
consequently stripped them from their monopolistic claims for identity and superiority. The
thirteen plus one national anthems that are brought together on their album volk (2006) posi
tions the audience in relation to a critical investment in a strategy of overidentifcation. similarly
blurring the distinction between overidentifcation and nonidentifcation, irWiNs performanc
es with Nsk embassies challenge the limits of the sovereignty of existing nationstates, whilst
contemplating the possibility of alternative governance. one that is not bounded by ethnicity
and that discloses the absurdity of reproducing state rituals, like offcial paperwork, when
cut off from a sense of national belonging.
Periods of political crisis and territorial confict may reinforce an upfront and engaged cri
tique rather than ironic distance. gott liebt die serben, a series of installations by rasa Todosi
jevic produced throughout the nineties, were courageous warnings against the ongoing
394 395
militarization of yugoslavian society, the adoption of national socialism, and the ethnically mo
tivated violence that was traumatizing the region. Along with her other works, milica Tomics
video installation, xy ungelst (1997) operated as a reminder of a veiled act of violence com
mitted against the kosovar Albanians by the serbian armed forces back in 1989 (and as a
warning of things to come in the following years). in Turkey, Hale Tengers works from the
early nineties onwards took the form of atmospheric installations whose elements built up na
tional allegories based upon themes of selfimposed detention, introversion, militarization
and violence. The works of these and similarly motivated artists certifed that the authors had
openly resisted the hasty calls for union around nationalist causes in times of crises. They
disassociated themselves from offcial politics and tried to deconstruct ongoing discursive
manipulations, and lamented crimes inficted that led to civil wars, massacres and ethnic con
fict, whilst pleading for political lucidity and common sense unbiased by fanaticism.
other artists pursued a slightly different path, in which they retained a critical tone against
nationalism and other essentialist ideologies, but they also made it clear that their criticality
was implicated by the discursive feld in question. it relied upon a perspective from within. Avi
mograbis fim works that combined methodologies of fction and documentary are examples
of this prudent criticality. in how i learned to Overcome my fear and love ariel sharon (1997),
mograbi gave an account of how his outright hatred of sharon gave way to complex emotions
and thoughts (fctional or not) after establishing intimate contact with him whilst flming his
political campaign. by acknowledging the fact that one has to inhabit the same territory as
people whose political and cultural orientations are unbearably different, and that besides the
apparent drastic divergences one might share similarities with a political enemy, a selfrefexive
view on political criticism was opened up.
in happy birthday mr. mograbi, the artist deconstructed, as he had with other works, the
myths that had been employed in building up the israeli state. yet, by focusing on the coinci
dence that his birthday and that of the state of israel coincide on the Hebrew calendar, mograbi
set up a flmic game in which his personal fate ironically tied to him to the life of the state.
ConTexT
All the examples cited above hint at the conviction that any artistic practice has to be critical
of, or at least distant from, nationalist thinking. This conviction is apparently informed by
the cultural context i am residing in. Putting the personal stories aside, i would argue that the
discursive feld of contemporary art in Turkey has emerged and expanded in conjunction with
the maturation of a certain politicotheoretical view of the local fed by theoretical positions
such as postAlthusserian socialism, poststructuralism, anarchism and genderbased politics
led by feminism. consequently, a politically charged aesthetics, fed by critiques of statism,
nationalism, militarism and paternalism, and based upon narrative structures, became the
prominent character of the emerging contemporary art scene. Due to the strict conservatism
dominating painting and sculpture departments at the academies, this new language attracted
people coming from peripheral departments within the academies and other disciplines such
as philosophy and literature, which reinforced this tendency towards politicization. in the
absence, or weakness, of local support and interest, the synergic interaction among certain
circles managed to establish links with Western european art scenes (with the help of the
maturing istanbul biennial). There was a political message but the audience for this message
was not the one that the message was addressing. The critical edge in the works could not
penetrate the processes of public negotiation.
in the last couple of years a lot of things have changed. There has been a sudden interest in
contemporary art among the prominent bourgeois families and some corporate institutions
partly motivated by the cultural consequences of Turkeys membership negotiations with the
eu, and partly by the need to reinforce the public image of the rootedness of those families
and frms in istanbul. New institutions of impressive scale have emerged. These new, steri
lized, socially fltered spaces needed to exhibit some internationally acclaimed works from the
local scene. This produced strange occasions where some artworks with quite an edgy
character were coopted by these projects.
The political climate also changed considerably. until recently one could trace the logic of
traditional distinctions between left and right. The heated paranoia on the kurdish Question
following the upheaval of the invasion of iraq and the shift of power, which brought the
exislamic movement into power, triggered nationalistic refexes. The fear about the prospects
of territorial unity and the cultural advances of the republican Project caused a substantial
split within the left, a massive part of traditionally left voters and intelligentsia sidelined with an
ideological amalgamation between secularism and nationalism. old enemies became new
friends. New fronts have been shaped.
Against this background, what is called the contemporary art scene found hostile opposi
tion. linked with european organisations, the support coming from certain funds became
highly suspicious. The political criticism of the previous years is taken as evidence of a betrayal.
The recuperation of parts of this criticism by the new institutions is seen as a sign of deca
dence. The feld of contemporary art is being portrayed as a prime example of moral and intel
lectual corruption. moments of confict and trauma ensued. An independent art space
exhibiting photographs of the pogrom organized against nonmuslim minorities ffty years ago
was raided by (left and rightwing) nationalists in 2005. A series of trials were opened against
public intellectuals by a group of nationalist lawyers in 2006. The enlightened president of
the republic refused to congratulate the Nobel Prize winner orhan Pamuk in 2006. Hrant Dink,
a journalist of Armenian origin and one the countrys most precious intellectuals, was assassi
nated in 2007. An ultrareligious newspaper accused an independent art space of blasphemy,
and the police who came to protect the audience at the opening launched a prosecution
against the exhibition, again in 2007. in 2008 italian artist Pippa bacca, who was travelling in
a bridal gown from her country to lebanon as a performance, was raped and killed.
Perhaps not representing the whole of the scene, but a number of artists have gathered
around groups that work on specifc issues, to try to maintain the political legacy of recent
years, to collaborate with antimilitarist and queer groups, to open up art practice to larger so
cial groups, and to elaborate a doublesided critique of nationalism and commercialization.
A series of emails that circulated on the internet warned the authorities about the group
WHW, the curators of the upcoming 11th istanbul biennial, alleging that the Zagrebbased
group would incite ethnic confict in Turkey.
ayreen anastas is a writer
and flmmaker. Her work has
been shown internationally in
festivals, museums and cine
mas. she is one of the organ
izers of 16 beaver group
(16beavergroup.org) and she
often collaborates with rene
gabri. recent commissions
include camp campaign
(www.campcampaign.info).
Jochen Becker is a critic,
teacher and cultural producer
based in berlin. He contrib
utes to taz, springerin and
camera austria. recent publi
cations include, Kabul / tehe-
ran 1979ff (2006), architektur
auf Zeit (2006) and self
service city: istanbul (2005).
recent projects include
liberation/libration,
kunstpavillon, innsbruck
(2008) and doppelprojektio-
nen, Haus der kulturen der
Welt, berlin (2008). (www.
metroZones.info)
adam Budak lives in graz
and krakow and is currently
curator for contemporary art
at the kunsthaus graz am
landesmuseum Joanneum in
graz, Austria. He studied the
atre studies in krakow and
history and philosophy of art
and architecture in Prague.
He worked with acclaimed
artists such as John baldessa
ri, Pedro cabrita reis, cerith
Wyn evans and monika sos
nowska, and has curated a
large number of international
exhibitions.
Judith Butler is maxine elliot
Professor in the Department
of rhetoric and comparative
literature at berkeley and the
author of numerous works in
cluding giving an account of
Oneself (2005), antigones
claim (2000), the Psychic life
of Power (1997), excitable
speech (1997), bodies that
matter (1993), gender trouble
(1990).
alan Colquhoun is Professor
emeritus of Architecture at
Princeton university. He has
taught at the AA, cornell uni
versity and university college
Dublin, among many other
schools of architecture. He is
the author of several books in
cluding the seminal essays in
architectural criticism (1981),
modernity and the classical
tradition (1991), and the
Oxford history of modern
architecture (2002).
simon Critchley is Professor
of Philosophy at the New
school for social research,
New york. He is the author of
many books, most recently
infnitely demanding (verso,
2007) and the book of dead
Philosophers (granta, vintage
2008). A book on martin
Heideggers being and time
is forthcoming.
marco de michelis is the
dean of the faculty of arts and
design at the iuAv university
in venice. He was the editor
of Ottagono (19891991) and
the chief curator at the Trien
nale Design museum in milan
(19931996). He has written
extensively on contemporary
architecture. recent publica
tions include heinrich tesse-
now (stuttgart/DvA and mi
lan/electa 1991); Walter gro
pius, ludwig Hilberseimer
(special issues of rassegna,
1983 and 1986); bauhaus (mi
lan/mazzotta 1996); luis bar-
ragan (milan/skira 2000); and
enric miralles (milan/skira
2002).
TJ demos is a critic and a
lecturer in the Art History De
partment, university college
london. He is a member of
the editorial board of Art Jour
nal and writes widely on mod
ern and contemporary art. His
articles have appeared in jour
nals including artforum, grey
room, October, and texte zur
Kunst. He is the author of the
exiles of marcel duchamp
(miT Press, 2007), and is cur
rently at work on a new study
provisionally titled migrations:
contemporary art and globali-
zation.
rene gabri organizes public
discussions, readings and so
cial activities, largely through
his involvement with 16
beaver, which he coinitiated
in 1999. Together with erin
mcgonigle and Heimo lat
tner, he also works under the
name explo (explo.org).
Their collaboration has result
ed in a variety of public art
projects and commissions
exploring cities and the social,
economic, and political forces
which shape the organization
of space.
Bernd hppauf is Professor
of german at New york uni
versity. He lives in New york
and berlin. He has published
widely on a range of topics in
cluding the literature and cul
ture of the Weimar republic,
representations of war in liter
ature and photography, and
image theory. Among his lat
est publications are vernacu-
lar modernism with maiken
umbach (stanford university
Press, 2005), bild und einbil-
dungskraft with christoph
Wulf (mnchen, 2007), and
science images and Popular
images of the sciences with
Peter Weingart (london, New
york, 2008).
erden kosova is an art critic
based in istanbul. He is on the
board of the art magazine art-
is and is a PhD student in the
visual culture Programme,
goldsmiths college london.
He teaches at kadir Has uni
versity in istanbul.
lucy r. lippard is the au
thor/editor of 20 books on
contemporary art and cultural
criticism, most recently: the
lure of the local: senses of
Place in a multicentered soci-
ety (1997) and On the beaten
track: tourism, art and Place
(1999).
suzana milevska, Ph.D., is a
curator and visual culture the
orist based in skopje, mace
donia. she has curated over
70 art projects and conferenc
es internationally, and as an
international correspondent
writes for the feminist re-
view, contemporary and
springerin. Her writing has
also been included in many
publications on art and theory.
nina mntmann is a curator
and writer, and is Professor
and Head of the Department
of Art Theory and the History
of ideas at the royal universi
ty college of Fine Arts in
stockholm. she is a corre
spondent for artforum, and
contributes to le monde
diplomatique, Parachute, me-
tropolis m, frieze among oth
ers. recent publications, as
editor, include art and its in-
stitutions (black Dog Publish
ing, 2006) and, as coeditor
with yilmaz Dziewior, map-
ping a city (Hatje cantz,
2005).
gianni pettena is an artist,
architect and designer. He
was a key fgure in the radical
Architecture movement in ita
ly. He has shown his work in
ternationally since 1968 and
created many seminal works,
including clay house (1972),
tumbleweed catcher (1972),
and ice house (1971). (www.
giannipettena.it)
Christian philipp mller is
an artist and has exhibited in
ternationally since 1986. His
work has been shown in ma
jor exhibitions such as Docu
menta x in kassel, germany
(1997) and at the venice bien
nial (1993). recent solo exhi
bitions include a retrospective
at the museum fr gegen
NOtes ON CONtrIbutOrs
wartskunst, basel (2007) and
cookie-cutter, a project for
orchard, New york (2008).
Permanent work by the artist
can be found at, among other
sites, the campuses of bard
college and Queens college
and in the cloister garden in
melk (Austria). He has also
published many artists books.
(www.christianphilippmueller.
net)
franco rella is Professor of
Aesthetics at the universit
iuAv di venezia and head of
the PhD programme in history
and philosophy of the arts. He
has worked in italy and
abroad on essays, readings
and the organisation of exhibi
tions. His publications include
figure del male (2001), ai con-
fni del corpo (2000), lio nello
specchio del mondo (1998),
miti e fgure del moderno
(1993), lenigma della bellezza
(1991), and the novel lultimo
uomo (1996).
gayatri Chakravorty spivak
is university Professor in the
Humanities and Director of
the institute for comparative
literature and society at co
lumbia university and author
of numerous works including
death of a discipline (2003),
a critique of Postcolonial
reason (1999), Outside in the
teaching machine (1993),
the Post-colonial critic (1990)
and in Other Worlds (1987).
uqbar foundation is a
project initiated by artists
irene kopelman and mariana
castillo Deball. recent
projects include a for alibi at
de Appel, Amsterdam (2007);
Philosophical transactions at
the Historical observatory,
cordoba, Argentina (2007);
and One eye, two eyes, three
eyes, a seminar on storytelling
at the Piet Zwart institute,
rotterdam (20072008).
mirko Zardini is an architect
and writer. He is Director of
the canadian centre for Archi
tecture, and was editor of
casabella magazine
(19831988), lotus interna-
tional (19881999) and served
on the editorial board of
domus. His publications in
clude asphalt (2003), an al-
most perfect periphery (2001),
back from the burbs (2000),
Paesaggi ibridi: highway, mul-
tiplicity (2000), the dense-
city: after the sprawl (1999),
Paesaggi ibridi: un viaggio
nella citt contemporanea
(1996), and frank O. gehry:
america as context (1994).
managing editor
dan kidner
Translators
Christopher Jenkin-Jones
(germanenglish)
Jennifer knaeble
(italianenglish)
Adam budak and Nina
mntmann would like to
thank all the authors and
artists for their thoughtful
and inspiring contributions,
the translators, and
particularly Dan kidner
for his great work as
managing editor.
July 2008
manifesta 7 is an initiative of the
international Foundation manifes
ta, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
and the Autonomous Province of
bozen / bolzano and the Autono
mous Province of Trento.
manifesta 7 is organised by the
comitato mANiFesTA 7
MANIfestA 7 COMMIttee
PresiDeNT
Hedwig Fijen
vicePresiDeNT
Allard Huizing
HoNorAry TreAsurer
marilena Defrancesco
HoNorAry secreTAry
birgit oberkofer
members
gianluigi bozza
Antonio lampis
MANAGeMeNt teAM
DirecTor
Hedwig Fijen
coorDiNATor ProviNce
oF TreNTo
Fabio cavallucci
coorDiNATor ProviNce
oF bolZANo / boZeN
Andreas Hapkemeyer
ProJecT mANAger
ProviNce oF TreNTo
cristina de Tisi
M7 CurAtOrs
Adam budak
Anselm Franke / Hila Peleg
raqs media collective:
Jeebesh bagchi, monica Narula,
shuddhabrata sengupta
OrGANIsAtION
dePArtMeNt
bOlZANO / bOZeN
AssisTANT coorDiNATor
lisa mazza
AssisTANTs
marion lafogler
verena malfertheiner
treNtO
oFFice mANAgers
orietta berlanda
cristina maymone
TrAvel & AccomoDATioN
oFFicer
betty balduin
AssisTANT orgANisATioN
sara Dolf Agostini
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laura colucci
GrANts
geNerAl coorDiNATor
marieke van Hal
PrOduCtION
DirecTors oF ProDucTioN
Peter Paul kainrath
sabrina michielli
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oF ProDucTioN
chiara Prada
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Francesca batori
marianna liosi
valentina malossi
chiara veronesi
katharina kolakowski
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Weber+Winterle Architetti
TecHNicAl AssisTANTs
resPoNsible For veNues
Andrea Polato bolzano / bozen
erwin canderle Fortezza /
Franzensfeste
Thomas Pilati Trento
Andrea miserocchi rovereto
Av TecHNicAl DirecTor
Pascal Willekens
Av TecHNicAl TeAm
kevin bellemans
charles gohy
Hannes van Hoof
Thomas Nijs
sam raedts
bart reynartz
imanol sistiaga
Pieter vervynck
COMMuNICAtION
HeAD oF commuNicATioN
Alessandra santerini
Press OffICe
iNTerNATioNAl AND
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chiara costa
locAl Press TreNTiNo
Danilo Fenner
locAl Press souTH Tyrol
klaus Hartig
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sofa Patat
Francesca rossi
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relAtIONs, sPeCIAl
PrOGrAMs
ANd eVeNts
Daniele maruca
with chiara Del senno
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silvia scarpa
Tim van lingen
eduCAtION
HeAD oF eDucATioN
yoeri meessen
coorDiNATor souTH Tyrol
Thea unteregger
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Francesca sossass
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barbara mahlknecht
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stefania schir
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romina Abate
Antonia Alampi
marco Anesi
Dorothea Arbesser
martina baroncelli
oriana bosco
barbara campaner
silvia conta
valentina curandi
Daria ghiu
Nathaniel katz
riccardo lami
linda Jasmin mayer
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marion oberhofer
martina oberprantacher
Alexandra ross
karin schmuck
giovanna Tamassia
chiara villani
PAtrONs PrOGrAM
mariapaola spinelli
AdMINIstrAtION
mariano brutto
matteo sartori
rodolfo Tosi
Dea martini
relAtIONs IfM M7
saskia van der kroef
suzanne Dijkema
marieke van Hal
PublICAtION INdex
mANAgiNg eDiTor
maria cristina giusti
eDiTors
rana Dasgupta
stephen Haswell Todd
Dan kidner
eNglisH eDiTor
Jonathan Turner
AssisTANT
claudia Zini
PublICAtION
COMPANION
coorDiNATiNg eDiTor
stephen Haswell Todd
eDiTors
rana Dasgupta
stephen Haswell Todd
Dan kidner
Nina mntmann
Avi Pitchon
PublICAtION sCeNArIOs
eDiTor
Julia moritz
GrAPhIC desIGN / websIte
surface, Frankfurt am main:
markus Weisbeck, Florian Feineis,
oliver kuntsche, Pascal kress,
max Weber
exhIbItION sCeNArIOs
(fOrteZZA /
frANZeNsfeste)
curATors
Adam budak
Anselm Franke, Hila Peleg
raqs media collective:
Jeebesh bagchi, monica Narula
shuddhabrata sengupta
AssisTANT curATor
Julia moritz
AssisTANTs
silvia Ploner
Ausra Trakselyte
exhIbItION the rest Of
NOw (bOlZANO / bOZeN)
curATors
raqs media collective:
Jeebesh bagchi, monica Narula,
shuddhabrata sengupta
AssisTANT curATor
Denis isaia
curAToriAl ADvisors
Anders kreuger
Nikolaus Hirsch
graham Harwood
veNue ArcHiTecTs
Nikolaus Hirsch / michel mller
AssisTANTs
marianna sabena
elisa Tosoni
Daniela unterholzner
exhIbItION the sOul
(treNtO )
curATors
Anselm Franke, Hila Peleg
AssisTANT curATors
katia Anguelova
reseArcH AssisTANT
Nana bahlmann
veNue ArcHiTecTs
kuehn malvezzi
AssisTANTs
Fabrizia endrizzi
irene leveghi
exhIbItION PrINCIPle
hOPe (rOVeretO)
curATor
Adam budak
AssisTANT curATor
lorenzo Pezzani
curAToriAl ADvisors
krist gruijthuijsen
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Andreas spiegl
christian Teckert
AssisTANTs
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virginia malucelli
INterNAtIONAl
fOuNdAtION MANIfestA
DirecTor
Hedwig Fijen
ProJecT coorDiNATor
saskia van der kroef
exTerNAl relATioNs
yoeri meessen
oFFice mANAger
suzanne Dijkema
grANTs mANAger
marieke van Hal
bookkeePer
george konig
bOArd
cHAir
gilane Tawadros
vicecHAir
viktor misiano
HoNorAry TreAsurer
renze Hasper
members
Daniel birnbaum
rector stdelschule Art Academy,
Frankfurt am main,
Director Portikus gallery,
Frankfurt am main;
iara boubnova
Founding Director institute
of contemporary Art,
sofa, curator manifesta 4;
Fabio cavallucci
Director galleria civica di Arte
contemporanea, Trento,
coordinator manifesta 7;
charles esche
Director van Abbemuseum,
eindhoven;
massimiliano gioni
curator, New museum
of contemporary Art, New york,
curator manifesta 5;
Andreas Hapkemeyer
Former Director of museion,
bolzano / bozen, coordinator
manifesta 7;
sirje Helme
Director kumu museum, Tallinn;
Allard Huizing
lawyer at greenberg Traurig,
Amsterdam;
sarat maharaj
Professor of visual Art and
knowledge systems, lund
university, malm;
marieke sandersten Holte
Former member of the european
Parliament, Amsterdam
hONOrArY COMMIttee
Of MANIfestA 7
PresiDeNT
sandro bondi,
minister of cultural
Heritage and Activities, italy
members
lorenzo Dellai
President of the Autonomous
Province of Trento;
luis Durnwalder
President of the Autonomous
Province of bolzano / bozen;
margherita cogo
vice President and councillor
for culture of the Autonomous
Province of Trento;
sabina kasslattermur
councillor for Family, cultural
Heritage and german culture of
the Autonomous Province
of bolzano / bozen;
luigi cigolla
councillor for cultural Heritage,
italian culture and Housing
Development of the Autonomous
Province of bolzano / bozen;
Florian mussner
councillor for ladin education
and culture, Public infrastructure
of the Autonomous Province of
bolzano / bozen;
egbert Frederik Jacobs
Ambassador of the royal kingdom
of The Netherlands in rome;
Alberto Pacher
mayor of Trento;
luigi spagnolli
mayor of bolzano / bozen;
guglielmo valduga
mayor of rovereto;
Johann Wild
mayor of Fortezza / Franzensfeste;
lucia maestri
councillor for culture, Trento;
sandro repetto
councillor for Assets and
Housing Politics bolzano / bozen;
Primo schnsberg
councillor for culture, research
and strategic Development
bolzano / bozen;
giovanni cipolletta
vice mayor and councillor for
culture Fortezza / Franzensfeste;
elmar Pichlerrolle
vice major and councillor
for economic and Financial
Affairs bolzano / bozen;
Franco bernab
President mArT museum of
modern and contemporary Art
Trento and rovereto;
Alois lageder
President museioN museum
of modern and contemporary Art
bolzano / bozen;
gabriella belli
Director mArT museum of
modern and contemporary Art
Trento and rovereto;
corinne Diserens
Director museioN museum of
modern and contemporary art
bolzano / bozen;
innocenzo cipolletta
President university of Trento;
Hanns egger
President Free university
of bolzano / bozen;
Davide bassi
Head of the university of Trento
rita Franceschini
Head of the Free university
of bolzano / bozen;
MANIfestA 7
oFFice bolZANo / boZeN
via crispi / crispistrae 15
39100 bolzano / bozen
Tel. +39.0471.414980
fax. +39.0471.4141989
oFFice TreNTo
via Petrarca 32
38100 Trento
Tel. +39 0461.493670
fax. +39 0461.493671
info@manifesta7.it
www.manifesta7.it
MANIfestA At hOMe
(Foundation offces & archives)
Prinsengracht 175 hs
1015 Ds Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Tel. +31.20.6721435
fax. +31.20.4700073
secretariat@manifesta.org
www.manifesta.org
COMPANION
MANIfestA 7
commissioNeD by
comitato manifesta 7 and
international Foundation manifesta
curATors
Adam budak (Principle Hope)
Anselm Franke & Hila Peleg
(The soul)
raqs media collective
(The rest of Now)
eDiTors
rana Dasgupta (The rest of Now)
Nina mntmann (Principle Hope)
Avi Pitchon (The soul)
eDiToriAl coorDiNATor
Dan kidner (Principle Hope)
stephen Haswell Todd (The soul)
coPy eDiTor
stephen Haswell Todd
TrANslATors
Arianna bove (italian english)
rana Dasgupta (French english)
stephen Haswell Todd
(Frenchenglish)
christopher JenkinJones
(germanenglish)
Jennifer knaeble (italianenglish)
cathy kerkoffsaxon & Wilfried
michael meert (Dutch english)
Prantner (germanenglish)
shveta sarda (Hindienglish)
PublicATioN coorDiNATors
sara Dolf Agostini
maria cristina giusti

PublIsher
silvana editoriale, milano
ProDuceD by
Arti grafche Amilcare Pizzi spa
DirecTioN
Dario cimorelli
ArT DirecTor
giacomo merli
iTAliAN / eNglisH coPy eDiTor
Alessandra galasso
germAN coPy eDiTor
Jan Heberlein
ProDucTioN coorDiNATor
michela bramati
eDiToriAl AssisTANT
sabrina galasso
icoNogrAPHic oFFice
Deborah Dippolito
Press oFFice
lidia masolini,
press@silvanaeditoriale.it
eAN 9788836611270
GrAPhIC desIGN
surface, Frankfurt am main:
markus Weisbeck,
Pascal kress, max Weber
dIstrIbutION
silvana editoriale spa
All rights reserved. No part of this
publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording or
any other information storage and
retrieval system, without prior per
mission in writing from the pub
lisher. The publisher apologizes for
any omissions that inadvertently
may have been made.
2008 Authors, curators, interna
tional Foundation manifesta
2008 silvana editoriale spa
cinisello balsamo, milano
silvana editoriale spa
via margherita De vizzi, 86
20092 cinisello balsamo, milano
tel. +39 02 61 83 63 37
fax +39 02 61 72 464
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reproduction, print and binding by
Arti grafche Amilcare Pizzi spa,
cinisello balsamo, milano.
Printed in July 2008.
COlOPhON
PROVINCIAAUTONOMA
DI TRENTO
iNiTiATors
CITT DI FORTEZZA/
STADT FRANZENSFESTE
suPPorTeD by
commuNicATioN PArTNer sPeciAl PArTNer meDiA PArTNer TecHNicAl PArTNers
coNTribuTors
DAlle NogAre Ag/sPA, leiTNer Ag/sPA, kPmg iTAliA, oPerA uNiversiTAriA Di TreNTo, NieDersTTTer, sTADT brixeN / ciTTA Di bressANoNe, sTADTWerke Asm brixeN/bressANoNe, uTe &
loreNZ moser, ArTe muNDiT by FTb remmers, greeNberg TrAurig, PAPiN sPorT, sTAHlbAu PicHler, museioN, mArT, gAlleriA civicA Di ArTe coNTemPorANeA Di TreNTo, PresTAbici,
museumPArTNer, mArTiNA scHulliAN, serviZio coNservAZioNe DellA NATurA e vAloriZZAZioNe AmbieNTAle ProviNciA AuToNomA Di TreNTo, cooPerATivA il gAbbiANo, TAgesZeiTuNg
HoTel lAuriN / HoTel greiF bolZANo / boZeN grAND HoTel TreNTo, sTADT HoTel ciTT bolZANo / boZeN
oFFiciAl ArT HoTels AlTo ADige / sDTirol oFFiciAl HoTels
sPoNsors mAiN sPoNsor ProDucTioN PArTNer
grANTs orgANisATioNs
AgeNcy For coNTemPorAry ArT excHANge (AcAx), AlliANZ kulTursTiFTuNg, ArTis, AssociATioN FrANAise DAcTioN ArTisTiQue (AFAA), briTisH couNcil, ceNTre cANADieN
DArcHiTecTure, ceNTer For icelANDic ArT (ciA.is), ceNTre NATioNAl Des ArTs PlAsTiQues (cNAP), ceNTrum beelDeNDe kuNsT roTTerDAm (bmk), culTure irelAND, culTuresFrANce,
DANisH ArTs couNcil, DirecogerAl DAs ArTes (DgArTes), FoNDAZioNe Di veNeZiA, FoNDAZioNe Per gli AlTi sTuDi sullArTe (FAsA), embAssy oF isrAel iN rome, embAssy oF isrAel iN
THe HAgue, ForD FouNDATioN, FuNDAo cAlousTe gulbeNkiAN, FuNDAo luso AmericANA, HelleNic miNisTry oF culTure, iNsTiTuT Fr AuslANDsbeZieHuNgeN (iFA), iNTerNATioNAl
ArTisTs sTuDio ProgrAm iN sWeDeN (iAsPis), i sTANbul klTr sANAT vAkFi (iksv), isTiTuT culTurAl lADiN, isTiTuTo PolAcco Di romA, isTiTuTo romeNo Di culTurA e ricercA umANisTicA
Di veNeZiA, lATviJAs rePublikAs kulTrAs miNisTriJA, miNisTre De lA culTure eT De lA commuNicATioN De lA FrANce, miNisTrio DA culTurA De PorTugAl, miNisTry oF culTure oF
THe rePublic oF croATiA, miNisTry oF eDucATioN scieNce AND culTure icelAND, oFFice For coNTemPorAry ArT NorWAy (ocA), sTerreicHiscHes buNDesmiNisTerium Fr uNTerricHT,
kuNsT uND kulTur (bmukk), Pro HelveTiA, scoTTisH ArTs couNcil, socieDAD esTATAl PArA lA AcciN culTurAl exTerior (seAcex), sTATe corPorATioN For sPANisH culTurAl AcTioN
AbroAD, THe NeTHerlANDs FouNDATioN For visuAl ArTs, DesigN AND ArcHiTecTure (bkvb), uNiversiTy iuAv oF veNice, vlAAms miNisTerie vAN culTuur
MANIfestA 7 hAs beeN MAde POssIble
wIth the suPPOrt ANd COllAbOrAtION Of
The exhibition is sponsored by the danish art
Council Committee for The Performing art