A symposium reflecting on the role of architecture and design post S11
Authors' Abstracts and Biographical Statements
Faido Atto and Michael Linzey: The Open Society and its Enemies in Baghdad
Mauro Baracco: Spaces in a Condition of Co-Belongingness
Michael Chapman and Michael Ostwald: Crowds, Power and the act of Terror: The Spatial Politics of Urban Survival
Boo Chapple: The Spaces Between: Transit Zones, Points of Access, Borderlands
Graham Crist: No Blood for Oil
Ursula de Jong: In Defence of Melbourne: critical reflections on the history and the legacy of Point Nepean
Harriet Edquist: Representing the ‘state of exception': the pictorial tradition of the Western District homestead 1856-1871
Hélène Frichot: Escaping the Camp and Imagining an Ethico-Aesthetics for Architecture
Stuart Geddes: Complexity & Communication in Social, Cultural & Political Experience
Jane Kenway and Anna Hickey-Moody: Embodying the global: Spatio-Temporal and Spatio-Sensoral Assemblages of Youthful Masculinities
Jo Law: Making the Hidden Perceptible: The Discontinuous Space and Time of Airports
Michael Linzey: Saving Alexandria. Civic Ethics in the Court of Augustus Caesar
Mirjana Lozanovska: Angels of Death: Progress, War and Architecture
Lachlan MacDowall: Bombing Trains after Madrid: Graffiti and Security on Melbourne's Train System
Megan Marks: Waiting Spaces: From Transit to a Permanent Temporariness
Beatriz C. Maturana: Fear and our cities: Separation, Specialisation and the Abdication of Responsibility
Janet McGaw: Fissures in the Urban Fabric: The Terror of Transparency
Anoma Pieris: Outside in the City: Seriality, Anxiety and the Unstable Nation
Peter Raisbeck: Biometric urbanism: Digitising the Body in Global Cities
Jane Shepherd: ANZAC Cove Revisited: Myth, Ritual and National Identity After the Bali Bombing
Charles Stivale and Eugene Holland: Deleuze and Terror, or Casting Planes Across Chaos
Jess Whyte: Guantanamo bay: The Politics of Space in the State of Exception
Soumitri Varadarajan: Language as project: Making cruelty and oppression acceptable when dealing with the other
Esther Charlesworth: Architects without Frontiers
Faido Atto and Michael Linzey,
The Open Society and its Enemies in Baghdad
After April 9th 2003 the city of Baghdad emerged as the new ground zero, presented to the world as the new urban centre in the struggle against terrorism. This new event or global political role for Baghdad has had the effect of disconnecting the city from all that it related to in the past era. Modern Baghdad is chaotic and mobilized on many levels, political, economical, historical, and religious. There are little or no controls in place. The widespread poverty and enormous emotional pressure are every day placed on the citizens. Unlike New York and 2001, Baghdad's fate shows signs of being permanent or at least a very long term and protracted event.
In this new event of emergence, new leading figures are reinhabiting old places and converting them for their own use. There are new piece engineered changes being made by others. Homeless families take over lesser deserted buildings, while active groups often choose to occupy the more historically important buildings. The urban cake has been a reallocated to the hungry and the greedy alike, the size of each share being determined largely on the basis of power and aggression.
Baghdad is terrorized in every meaning of the word. Citizens go to school or work in the morning but no one can guarantee their safe return. The centre has lost its attraction for many, while it attracts others with different attitudes. Pollution and destruction, noise and never ending traffic jams are everywhere.
In an effort to make an objective account, the paper employs Karl Popper's vision of “The open society and its enemies”. It is investigating the newly generated spatial structure and Identity of Baghdad focusing on the shaping factors: politics and terror. The questions addressed in the paper are:
1. What kind of spatial changes are we witnessing in Baghdad in terms of urban space formation?
2. On what ground are these changes taking place and for whose benefit?
3. In what ways are these changes being carried out and will they be maintained?
The research identifies problems which could prove to be long term urban conditions not only for Baghdad but for other cities too, thus helping to promote new ways of thinking about global terrorism in terms of urban design and architecture.
Faido Atto is an assistant professor at the University of Baghdad, Iraq, a consultant architect, and a member of the Iraqui Engineering University. He is currently enrolled as a PhD student at the School of Architecture, University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Dr Michael Linzey is a senior lecturer at the School of Architecture, University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Spaces in a Condition of Co-Belongingness
It could be argued that the absence of distinctive references may possibly represent a favourable condition to discourage terroristic strategies inclined to hit representative and symbolic elements.
Official histories of architecture and urban design are filled with projects in which the layout of urban space is constantly conceived as a combination of distinctive references: from the religious and secular monuments of Classical Greek and Roman cities to the sense of centrality of the Renaissance city; from the axes, squares and civic places of Baroque and Neoclassical cities to the “regulating lines” invoked by Le Corbusier, the infrastructural nodes and the functional zoning of the modern and contemporary metropolis in urban dissolution.
Although many recent urban theories argue that the design of contemporary urban spaces is characterized by a pervasive sense of de-construction, fragmentation and disintegration of order, current urban environments are still however extensively informed by projects in which architectural, urban and landscape elements are related to each others in hierarchical ways, thus confirming a diffused need of manifest and distinct objects to be read as references. As references, indeed, they are directly instrumental to an illusory idea of order which we instinctively pursue in order to remove our original and quintessential sense of Anguish (the Heideggerian ‘Angst').
Critical of this design approach, other different projects investigate the possibilities of alternative layouts of spaces in which architectural, urban, landscape and infrastructural elements tend to be interrelated to each other as coexisting parts that ‘reciprocally co-belong together', somehow reflecting that quintessential condition of reality well described by Heidegger as “the belonging together of things” (Martin Heidegger, Art and Space . © Die Kunst und der Raum , 1969). These projects test the fading
– the weakening – of distinctive boundaries between architectural, urban, landscape and infrastructural spaces, evenly considering them as equal terms of the design equation, resisting the logical and rational inclination to a reassuring sense of order apparently achievable through the production of hierarchical systems of references.
Inherently conscious of the possibility to weaken boundaries between distinctive elements, and therefore to focus on the design of relational spaces rather than on the production of single objects, these projects suggest explorative reflections that relevantly address the current and urgent need to occupy and inhabit the land in a considered and sustainable way.
This paper will show and discuss some speculative works produced throughout the design studios run by myself and other collaborating tutors in the last two years as part of the final thesis course of the Architecture Program at RMIT University. The discussion will be illustrated not only through the investigative research and the final proposals produced by the students, but also through some urban, architectural and landscape projects, and some theoretical positions which are empathetic to the design approach embraced throughout the research: the work and thought of Alison and Peter Smithson, Superstudio, Archizoom, Robin Boyd, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Massimo Cacciari, Germaine Greer, and other modern and contemporary references.
Mauro Baracco is a senior lecturer in the Program of Architecture in the School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University. He is also a practicing architect.
Michael Chapman and Michael Ostwald,
Crowds, Power and the act of Terror: The Spatial Politics of Urban Survival
The opening section of Elias Canetti's epic work Crowds and Power defines the spatial experience of the crowd as a reversal of the fear of being touched, where individuals take solace and safety in close proximity to other individuals. The spatial structure of the crowd guarantees individual anonymity, the abolition of hierarchy and the continual urge to grow and absorb surrounding spatial structures. This implicates the crowd in Canetti's broader theory of power. For Canetti, the ultimate form of power is survival, which causes individuals as well as animals to congregate in large numbers for not only safety but individual empowerment.
Terrorism represents a new paradigm in the history of the spatial relationship between the crowd and the city. Acts of terror directly target the crowd, infiltrating its spatial structure, suspending its bonds and undermining its legitimacy. In its most primitive form terrorism is an assault on the architectural space of the crowd. For this reason governmental warnings to terrorist prone regions now regularly advise against frequenting crowded environments (hotels, clubs, restaurants and cafés, bars, schools, marketplaces, places of worship, outdoor promenades, shopping malls, recreation events) simultaneously encouraging individuals to remain indoors wherever possible and to maintain a high sense of personal awareness (proliferating, in Canetti's sense, the fear of being touched .)
By revisiting the work of Canetti, this paper will examine the way that acts of terrorism have redefined the architectural space of the crowd and its broader urban environment. Where the formation of a crowd historically represented a structure of political empowerment in the demarcation of urban space, terrorism has rendered the crowd a space of vulnerability, radically destabilising the historical power structures of the city and undermining its political demarcation. This dismantles the principles of survival that Canetti adhered to and necessitates the formulation of new ones.
Professor Michael Ostwald is Dean of Architecture at the University of Newcastle, Visiting Professor at RMIT and a Professorial Research Fellow at Victoria University Wellington.
Michael Chapman is a Research Assistant and teaches Architectural Theory at the University of Newcastle. He is currently writing a PhD on the relationship between crowds and urban space.
The Spaces Between: Transit Zones, Points of Access, Borderlands
There is no neutral ground between life and death …. civilization and terrorism.
George W. Bush
Poised bewteen life and death, apparently wired up to kill … turning himself into a human bomb…. We were not permitted to ask him any questions.
SBS World News March 25 th , 2004
The emotive media power of the terrorist, or more generally, terrorism, is deeply dependant on a conception of life which holds as its opposite, death. The terrorist represents the unnatural and indeterminate status of death in life. Hence, they not only threaten individual life, but the very basis upon which civilisation and the western liberal conception of the ‘human' is predicated by challenging the binary oppositions (life/death) on which these constructs are predicated. Biometric and other surveillance technologies used to police and maintain national borders and the division between good and evil necessary to ‘civilisation', are also dependant upon generating and reinforcing certain binary thresholds within the living body. The codified space of life and non-life (or death) existing between body and world, thus, interpenetrates, and is co-extensive, with the political space of borders and terrorism in the material and figurative constructions of our time. A time in which zones of indeterminacy are obfuscated by an opppositional rhetoric, that paradoxically, emanates from a military industrial complex whose novel techno-flesh couplings are equally as disruptive to the liberal humanist paradigm.
This paradox is illustrative of the hierarchised access to the ‘spaces between' which is operative on a global scale. Transitory spaces - the ‘spaces between' - are spaces of definition, they give power to define an identity, to become something else, to initiate beginnings and endings. A large percentage of the world's population is excluded from such spaces. They are not permitted to move across national boundaries, they do not have access to communications media – the space of virtual connection between people, ideas and places - yet they are still subject to the inscription of these boundaries, these informational relations, in their flesh. It is not coincidental that terrorism involves a forcible occupation of these spaces. The terrorist is a being between life and death. The act of terrorism is most commonly manifest in airports, at borders and on transport vehicles. And through these means it explodes into the global media.
In my presentation I would like to discuss transitory spaces, the indeterminate zone between life and death and the construction of terrorism in relation to a performance installation that I directed in 2004, entitled ‘How to Turn Your Solar Plexus into a Terrorist.' This work was installed as an obstruction in a city laneway, linking Little Bourke St and Lonsdale St. The installation was a transition space dense with boundaries to be negotiated with difficulty by the performers. Passers by experienced the inability to move easily from one street to the next. The two performers wore wireless cameras set to the same transmission frequency. Images from these cameras were displayed on five television monitors suspended in the space. There was interference of images, a miscommunication, a manifest confusion of body, data, and spatial boundaries – walls, bars, wire. In negotiating the connection between my conceptual framework and this project I situate my art practice and my academic research in a critical and mutually constitutive relationship.
Boo Chapple is undertaking a PhD in the SIAL (Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory) research group in the School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University.
No Blood for Oil
Immediately before the US led invasion of Iraq, as demonstrating crowds gathered in cities worldwide, ‘No Blood for Oil' could be seen and heard in chants and posters. This blunt command asserts the view that the Age of Terror or the War on Terror are at best a by-product of the Age of Oil.
This paper will examine the relationship between oil dependency, architecture, and terror in the western world. It intends to make the blunt assertion that architectural design practices contribute to oil dependency and consumption; this consumption contributes to western foreign policies; these foreign policies contribute to actions of terror, and these actions contribute in turn to spatial and political practices.
This crude linear argument is used for a number of reasons. It seeks to foreground, just as the no blood for oil movement did, the economic underpinnings of the middle east situation, thus drawing terrorist actions into broader western economic policies. Secondly it seeks to isolate from this focus, the last clause of the chain, that which reacts to terror or its perceived threat. The spatialisation of power systems and the theorisation of power through these objects largely lies outside of architectural practice. That is not to say that prisons, internment and security measures they of no concern to the discipline of architecture, but rather that they are sufficiently virtual and/or specialised to have been taken out of the hands of architects.
Rather, broader and more insidious consequences of design practices might be drawn into questions of terror via the consumption of resources. That is, how do architectural design practices affect the dependency on fossil fuel, and how does fuel dependency effect foreign policy? For the first part of the question, there is a well established discourse of design practice with concrete outcomes. However, these discourses make claims around the natural environment generally, and frequently are unfocused politically. Perhaps by making the case for the long chain, a sharpening of the focus toward immediate consequences might occur; between, for example, the green building and the brutal political environment.
The analogy is made between the War on Terror and the War of Drugs. There, it has been argued, the focus was on controlling supply rather than controlling demand, on intervening in foreign markets rather than on local social policies. The most brutal consequences can be found, not just in US jails but in foreign nation states.
So too, middle east policies seek to ensure fuel supply, rather than control demand.
To reverse this attention might have concrete consequences for architecture.
Graham Crist is the program director of the Program of Architecture, School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University. He is also a practicing architect.
In Defence of Melbourne: critical reflections on the history and the legacy of Point Nepean
Fraught with forgetfulness, we consider the threat of terrorism a contemporary one, but it is a term that gained currency at least as far back as the French Revolution. It must be considered as inextricably tied up with the politics of modern nation states and their relationships with communities, whether major or minor, colonising, indigenous or migrant.
The forts and quarantine station at Point Nepean were developed in response to Victoria's perceived need for defence, and continued to expand as various threats of invasion, war and pestilence presented in the 19 th and 20 th centuries. Community apprehension, apathy and political pragmatism, action, and evolving technologies are intertwined in the history of defence at Point Nepean, where the narrowness of the Heads allowed Port Phillip Bay to be easily defended. Already in 1853, the Argus warned ‘in the event of war we are in a very defenceless state and that the fact of it being known all over the world that we have a few millions worth of solid gold within cannon shot of the Bay is a circumstance which renders us peculiarly liable to attack. Various global skirmishes had alerted the Colony to its continued vulnerable state in the decades that followed. In 1885 Russian attempts to take Afghanistan alarmed Britain and her Colonies. In response to over two hundred war scares, Victoria's defences were constructed using the latest technologies. During the 1880s and early 1890s Point Nepean was known as Victoria's Gibraltar. However life was far from idyllic for the men who manned the guns at Fort Nepean: ‘ … we were treated more like dogs than men, in fact used like convicts. We were made to do the work of horses, and indeed, horses get better accommodation than we had at Queenscliff and Point Nepean.'
Nevertheless the defence infrastructure developed into one of Australia's largest defence networks, at the isolated tip of the Mornington Peninsula at Point Nepean and the Bellarine Peninsula at Queenscliff. Happy Valley just below Cheviot Hill, during the second world war, was according to Warr's reminiscences ‘a most miserable place … worse than sub-standard. It was unsewered, flies were a problem. Fly traps were in use but the stench made eating unpleasant … Huts held six men in two tiered bunks … no windows … no sheets or pillows … no place to dry clothes.' On duty in the concrete bunkers it was ‘a cold damp existence where one dare not blink, for fear of missing something; the job an eye strain, a mental strain.' The cold was unbearable, seeping from your boots through your whole body.
After the detonation of the atomic bomb at the end of the Second World War, defence systems as they were known were made redundant; the defence installations at the Heads fell into disrepair and over time the forts were buried under thousands of tons of sand. Making use of existing barrack and quarantine accommodation, training of defence personnel continued on site. By 1994 the Australian Government's strategic planning focus was on capabilities rather than threats. Substantial asset rationalisation occurred in 1997 and Point Nepean ceased to play a role in the defence of Australia.
Over the years on Anzac Day morning I have listened to a number of the commemorative programs broadcast on ABC radio. A reporter from the Gallipoli Peninsula and Anzac Cove mentioned the quiet beauty and spirituality of the place. I thought of Point Nepean and how sacred that place is too - sacred in this instance for the memories of all the soldiers who served here from the 1880s/1890s, the first world war, the second world war, and those who subsequently trained here to defend our nation. I thought of their stories, the tediousness, the loneliness, the difficulty of fighting a war when there is no gunfire; a war of surveillance; the fear of missing something if they fell asleep or lost concentration; the cold, the isolation, the desolate landscape; all so at odds with the beauty, stillness, solace Australians now seek here. The legacy of the defence years remains. Cotter reminds us that ‘ … some of the most beautiful yet fragile countryside in Australia was held captive and kept from the public in order to isolate the sick, defend the capital city, confine prisoners of war, train officers and medical personnel or provide accommodation for refugees.'
Threats are now to our heritage: natural and cultural. The ruins of the fortifications, tangible reminders of the presence of threats real and imagined, stand in silent testimony to those who served here; they also testify to the ravages of time, and the tumultuous forces of nature; hospitals stand disused; unexploded ordnance testify to the rape of this coastal landscape. Landscapes such as Point Nepean are witness to and contain traces of past activities which co exist in complex, sometimes contradictory, and profound ways. This paper will critically reflect on the history and the legacy of Point Nepean in the context of the politics of space in the age of terrorism.
From the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade “Travel Advisory to Israel, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank”. Similar warnings are current for Indonesia, Sri Lanka and parts of Africa. See:
http://www.smartraveller.gov.au/zw-cgi/view/Advice/Israel_Gaza_Strip_and_West_Bank
The Politics of Space in the Age of Terrorism, brief and call for papers.
The Argus , 31 December 1853, quoted in Frances O'Neill, Point Nepean: A History , Department of Conservation Forests and Lands, Melbourne, 1988, p. 39
Quoted in Jim Tate, A History of Fort Queenscliff in the Context of Port Phillip Defences , Queenscliff, 1982, p. 47
‘Notes on the Defences of Port Phillip in the era of 1937 to 1943', prepared by G H Warr, retired communications engineer, stationed for eighteen months at Forts Lonsdale, Crow's Nest, Nepean, Queenscliff, Pearce and Cheviot. Notes held in the Nepean Historical Society Archives, Sorrento, Barrie Follows file.
Defence White Paper 1994, Defending Australia , Australian Government Publishing Service, pp. 21, 22
Barrie Follows, Defence at Nepean , NHS, Sorrento, 1999, p. 98
Richard Cotter, A Short History of the Nepean Peninsula , Lavender Hill Multimedia, Melbourne, 2004, p. 105
Dr Ursula de Jong is Senior Lecturer in art and architectural history in the School of Architecture and Building, Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria, Australia. Research interests include the 19 th century Gothic revival and the concept ‘sense of place' as demonstrated in urban and non-urban contexts. De Jong is Trustee on the Federal Government Point Nepean Community Trust (PNCT); an advisor on the State Government Point Nepean Advisory Committee (PNAC); and a Director of the National Trust of Australia (Victoria).
Representing the ‘state of exception': the pictorial tradition of the Western District homestead 1856-1871.
Many of the issues to be addressed in this symposium are not new to Australia; indeed their beginnings can be found from the time of settlement at Botany Bay. Martial law, terror, camps and slavery were all techniques that were employed from the first against the Aboriginal population ‘in a species of warfare waged around the fringes of settlement'. In his 1980 Boyer lectures Bernard Smith devoted one lecture to the topic of ‘the mechanisms of forgetfulness'. ‘Since the beginnings of white settlement Aborigines have been steadily dispossessed of their lands upon which their well-being, self-respect and survival have depended. It is a story of homicide, rape, and forcible abduction of children from their parents; and it is remembered in the folklore of the survivors. But for most white Australians it is a nightmare to be thrust out of mind'.
Of the techniques of forgetting, Smith nominates three: the Darwinian equation of Aborigines with animals that could be dispensed with; the equation of settler occupation with an Arcadian idyll ‘with squatters singing the 23 rd Psalm as they led their flocks into green pastures, like Abraham into the promised land' and finally, the establishment of reserves which ‘helped throw a white blanket of forgetfulness across the central tragedy of Australian settlement'.
It is to the second of these that this paper will address itself although all three techniques will form some part of the discussion; in particular it will propose that the ‘portraits' of Western District squatters' homesteads and runs painted during the 1850s and 1860s were, and continue to be, a major contribution to the culture of forgetting. The politics of space investigated here will be, thus, the space of pictorial representation.
Harriet Edquist is Professor of Architectural History and Head of the School of Architecture & Design at RMIT. She has published widely on Australian art and architecture, her most recent publication being Harold Desbrowe-Annear. A Life in Architecture, Miegunyah Press 2004. She is currently completing a book on Australian Arts and Crafts architecture for Melbourne University Press
Hélène Frichot, Escaping the Camp and Imagining an Ethico-Aesthetics for Architecture
At the closure of his essay, The Camp as the Nomos of the Modern , Giorgio Agamben locates the biopolitical site of the camp not at the margins of the contemporary city, but in its very midst. In a horrible moment of clarity the camp and the city become indiscernible, and we discover ourselves no longer as citizens, but refugees. The refugee camp in the Australian socio-political context constitutes the kind of pressing problem Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari encourage us to confront in What is Philosophy? The political space of the refugee camp is a problem for which we must invent new concepts so as to find a way out, a means of escape. Agamben's paradox of the permanent state of exception at work in the logic of the emplacement and regulation of the refugee camp, which is further embedded in his paradox of an attendant process of ‘dislocating localization,' becomes particularly pertinent here. The hidden matrix of the camp creates an impasse with respect to the potentialities of what Agamben has ventured to call ‘the coming community', and suppresses any project for a coming philosophy, that is, a philosophy of immanence. Between Agamben, Deleuze and Guattari, and the ethical project of the 17 th Century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, this paper seeks a passage along which our contemporary society can escape the camp, and specifically a way in which the discipline of architecture might begin to imagine an ethico-aesthetics. A true ethics, after Deleuze's reading of Spinoza, is that in which we explore what a body can do, and simultaneously, a way of discovering the unthought in thought, such that we can proceed into the future in such a manner that we remain worthy of what happens to us.
Dr Hélène Frichot received a PhD for her thesis, The Making and Unmaking of Sense: Gilles Deleuze and the Practice of Creative Philosophy , in the department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her first discipline is architecture, and she currently lectures in the program of Architecture at RMIT University, Melbourne. She has published several academic articles, and has a number of book chapters forthcoming. In 2004 she was the co-convenor of the annual conference, SAHANZ (Society of Architectural Historians, Australia, New Zealand), hosted by RMIT University. Recent publications include: “The Limit of the Refugee Camp and Our Coming Community,” in Harriet Edquist and Hélène Frichot, eds, SAHANZ Limits 2004 (Melbourne: RMIT, September, 2004); “Stealing into Deleuze's Baroque House,” in Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert eds , Deleuze and Space (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, forthcoming ).
Complexity & Communication in Social, Cultural & Political Experience
Why, for the sake of argument, do we simplify matters of great complexity? Why is politics meted out in soundbytes, as it was in the Australian 2004 federal election? This paper will discuss two research projects (Dear John & Is Not Magazine), approached through collaborative methodologies to investigate the design of complex emergent social, cultural and political dialogue.
Dear John was a website-based viral design campaign that aimed to contribute to the defeat of the Howard Government in the 2004 federal election by promoting discourse of the issues at hand amongst potentially ill-informed voters. Is Not Magazine is a pluralist investigation of the city and it's inhabitants. Located within the urban landscape, Is Not Magazine is an intervention and a proposition. It questions the forms of communication we are subject to in the city and proposes a deeper engagement with the spaces in between ideas–the intersections and overlaps.
In reaction to the predominantly reductionist practice of graphic design, and in particular to the ready simplification of Adbusters and culture-jamming, these research projects position complexity as a necessary virtue for fostering pluralist discussion.
Stuart Geddes is a co-founder of Studio Anybody, a Melbourne Graphic
Design studio and recently he co-founded Is Not Magazine. He teaches in
Communication Design at Monash and RMIT Universities. He is also
completing a Research Masters by Project at RMIT.
Jane Kenway and Anna Hickey-Moody,
Embodying the global: Spatio-Temporal and Spatio-Sensoral Assemblages of Youthful Masculinities
Taking up debates about the significance of place in global and globalizing times, this paper deploys such theories to develop place-based methods of studying masculinities in globalized spaces beyond the metropolis. We build upon Nespor's (2000, 33) model of the body in place as ‘… a location, a set of densities' the production of which ‘is always tenuous, the result of ongoing struggle.' Here, the body is a primary site of identity. The terms upon which such a struggle to become a located set of densities takes place and the contexts in which points are assembled into bodies are two key lines of inquiry that we turn our attention to as the paper unfolds. We show some ways in which masculinity as a spatial construct involves a global nexus of traditional and new patterns of meaning that can be read as an articulation of the specificities of place. We begin by establishing the affective nature, or powers of, place for young men beyond the metropolis. We do so through the notion of ‘live and dead zones'. In developing this idea of places being either lively or dull we examine the roles consumer culture plays in establishing different powers of place for young people. We theorize some ways in which relationships between place and identity are configured differently by young people in out of the way places. In so doing, we take into account the gendering nature of spaces and consider how divergent qualities of space and place are implicated in the limits of masculinities beyond the metropolis. This inquiry leads us to some co-ordinates for how young male bodies are assembled in out of the way places and what the boundaries of such assemblages are. We then widen our analytic lens to consider how places, like young men, can be reconfigured by corporate bodies and how such processes of reconfiguration shift the possible co-ordinates of young men's identities in place. Throughout the paper we identify various constructions of out of the way places. We show some identities that these places are ascribed by young people and the basis for their ascriptions. We also illustrate how globalization both informs and changes these places' identities via media images and corporate flows. In undertaking such lines of inquiry, we look to develop some conceptual tools that will assist in thinking through the embedded complexities of the spatial politics of place. It is our contention that various spatio-temporal assemblages are created by virtue of being in place and these affect young men's identifications and dis-identifications with particular spaces. Similarly, with a conceptual lens that looks beyond the individual foci of the young men in question and theorises the material connections between boys and the ways they use their possessions, travel, communicate and engage in meaningful activity, we theorise spatio-sensoral assemblages. These are the connections boys experience in place and the ways in which young men's identities are embedded in the spatial relations that characterise their lives.
References:
Nespor, J. ‘Topologies of Masculinity: Gendered Spatialities of Preadolescent Boys', in Lesko, N. (ed.) Masculinities at School, (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2000b).
Professor Jane Kenway holds a chair in Global Learning, Culture and Diversity at Monash University. She has authored seven books and has published widely in edited collections and journals. Her research focuses on global educational politics and socio-cultural change.
Dr Anna Hickey-Moody is a research associate at Monash University. She has recently submitted her PhD and is a co-author of Masculinities Beyond the Metropolis (Palgrave 2006) and co-editor (with Peta Malins) of Deleuzian Encounters: Studies in Contemporary Social Issues (forthcoming). Anna has published writings on poststructural research methodology, affect and the collaborative works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
Making the Hidden Perceptible: The Discontinuous Space and Time of Airports
In 2004, I received a grant from the Australia Council's New Media Arts Board to carry out a research and development project that focuses on the contemporary experience of airports.
In the development of this project, the site of airport is explored through its multiple flows of information, people, and goods. The screen works will respond to these flows, managed by various visualising technologies ranging from security x-ray machines, computerised check-in systems, ubiquitous monitor displays of flight schedules, to television screens providing 24 hour non-stop broadcast, in the context of an atmosphere of control, anxiety, fear, and expectation. The screen works incorporate the use of an array of media, combining natural and synthetic data to further explore the relationship between the controlled image and the seemingly ‘seamless' environment.
In In Place of the Public: Observations of a Frequent Flyer artist Matha Rosler documents the airport as the site of flows, characterised by identification, retention, expulsion, and fear. She uses photographic stills to freeze and examine the nature of these movements and make visible otherwise invisible processes. Her practice deals with the problem of creating a reflexive experience of the airport for both artist and audience rather than merely concerning airports as places for re-enacting dramas of lost and found.
My project seeks to makes perceptible these experiences through the ‘immersive' and ‘interactive'. The practice of artist Diana Thater offers an interesting and relevant model for working in this way. Drawing both upon a tradition of structuralist filmmakers such as, Hollis Frampton, her interactive video works investigate the relationship between audience, place, and history. In this way, her works, generate self-reflective experiences that bring to the fore a contemporary engagement with specific places in the context of their historical resonance.
Discussing these practices of making the hidden perceptible in relation to my work-in-progress, I seek to address the question of how elusive experiences, such as one of modern airports, can be constructed as representations. The representation of this largely ‘sealed' and discontinous space - ones that has always been fraught with autocratic/ technocratic control and contention, directly influence our perception of identity through the types of narratives it suggests, generates and imposes. By actively engaging with the practice of depiction, it is then possible to reflect back upon the kind of experience arising in airports: a paradigmatic contemporary space of flows regulated by the production of expectation, anxiety, fear and control.
In particular, the focus of the paper and presentation of work in progress will look at the constructed representation of experiences as a means to pursue and reveal truths. Both Martha Rosler's and Alan Sekula's practices are exemplary in this regard. Like photographic images that provide a constructed, but nevertheless convincing evidence of truths. This paper and presentation, therefore, aims to analyse the process of this construction and identify strategies that can be adopted in making possible the representation of the discontinuous space and time of airports.
Jo Law's works span across fields including, contemporary arts, experimental film and video, multimedia, screen cultural and curatorial programs.
Jo's films and videos have been shown widely across Australia and internationally in screenings such as 2000 Women Make Waves Film & Video Festival in Taiwan, 22nd Hong Kong International Film Festival and 45th Melbourne International Film Festival. She has received awards including the Festival of Perth WA Young Filmmaker of the Year, the Silver Spire Award in New Vision at the San Francisco International Film Festival: Golden Gate Award, and the Distinguished Award in Experimental Category at the Hong Kong Independent Film and Video Awards
Jo's installations have also been exhibited nationally in Australia as well as in cities such as, Hong Kong and Taipei. Jo lectures in multimedia in the Department of Design at Curtin University of Technology.
Saving Alexandria. Civic Ethics in the Court of Augustus Caesar i
It was an early mark of the statesmanship of Octavian Caesar that immediately after the Battle of Actium he did not destroy the city of Alexandria. This ethical inaction is all the more remarkable when we compare the recent unhappy fate of Baghdad at the hands of a 21st century scion of Republicanism who also seems to be bent on global domination. A famous story tells of Augustus Caesar entering Alexandria arm-in-arm with his Egyptian court philosopher Arius Didymus. The victorious emperor declared to the terrified Egyptians that he would spare their lives and not destroy their city for three reasons: on account of their god Serapis, in memory of Alexander, the city's founder, and because of the advice of Arius Didymus, their fellow countryman. ii Yet little more that a century earlier Roman forces had devastated the African city of Carthage, declaring that the Carthaginians adhered to ?gforeign gods?h; Alexander the Great had comprehensively razed a number of fine cities starting in 335 BC with the Greek city of Thebes; this then only left the ethical advice of the Stoic philosopher. Charles Kahn writes, “We would naturally like to know what kind of theory shaped Arius's advice to Augustus, and what kind of policy he recommended”. iii
I will argue in this paper that the general outline of Arius Didymus's ethical theory, even down to the actual advice with regard of Alexandria, are preserved in the form of a reader on pagan ethics which Ioannes of Stobi prepared for the edification of his son some time early in the 5th century AD. Where Stobaeus got it from in turn is not recorded, but it is reasonable to assume that the text had been published with forbearance from the court of Augustus. This ethical epitome of Arius Didymus was recently translated into English by Arthur Pomeroy. iv It is often assumed that the writings of Arius Didymus are fragmentary and incoherent. This new translation reveals on the contrary a reasoned policy and an extended argument in defence of cities, following from a Stoic theory of virtue ethics. Its author concludes that virtuous cities, which is to say cities that are architecturally refined ( asteion ), ought not to be destroyed, for to deprive citizens of their homes and their seat of justice would reduce them to a state of savagery and lawlessness. To destroy a city or allow a refined city to be destroyed would be a worthless and immoral act, and unbecoming of a virtuous king.
This classical tract is remarkable in the modern context of global state terrorism. It is all the more remarkable because it was grounded in pagan ethics. Its argument in defence of cities extended even to the foreign city of a declared enemy of the Republic. The New Testament book of John that was written probably late in the 1st century AD advises us to love our neighbours as we do ourselves. But even the New Testament does not specify we should love the foreign cities of our enemies.
i An earlier version of this paper was presented to the 2004 SAHANZ Conference in Melbourne.
ii C. H. Kahn, “Arius as a Doxographer”, in W. W. Fortenbaugh, ed., On Stoic and Peripatetic Ethics, The Work of Arius Didymus , New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1983.
iii Kahn, “Arius as a Doxographer”, p. 6.
iv A. J. Pomeroy, ed., Arius Didymus Epitome of Stoic Ethics , Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1999.
Dr Michael Linzey is a senior lecturer at the School of Architecture, University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Angels of Death: Progress, War and Architecture
Architecture can be monumentally erected and can have a presence that inspires awe and wonder, but it can also be de-erected, demolished, destroyed. It can be de-constructed in a way that the literal sense of the term signals its symbolic frailty, revealing and concealing the ways in which the symbolic and physical are tied through fantasy, memory and fiction. Thus architecture, not merely building, is the target of war, invasion and colonisation. In this paper I will continue my exploration of ‘a gap of history' in architecture, reading the city and the land, through psychoanalytic theories. In response to the theme of the conference, ‘The Politics of Space,' I propose to explore three components of ‘a gap of history' in architecture. Firstly, that of ‘mechanization and the war machine' in which architecture is turned to rubble, a matter of mixed and uncertain identity between building, bodies and dirt. Secondly, that of ‘non-architecture' in which journalism, intelligence, advertising and empirical documentation are practices which occupy ‘the gap' and prepare the ‘symbolic' ground for another architecture. Within this component, the urban space of the city and the inhabitable space of ‘interiors' have lost their order, becoming a field of social disintegration, political confusion, and ambiguous identities. And thirdly, that of ‘reconstruction' in which architecture becomes the concrete expression of recovery after war, proposing the fantasy that architecture is redemptive.
Addressing specific scenes of the destruction of Iraqi and Palestinian architecture from media representation, I would like to propose a tentative architectural history of the present, a history which is contested and which participates more directly in the ‘politics of space'.
Dr. Mirjana Lozanovska is a senior lecturer in the School of Architecture and Building, Faculty of Science and Technology, Deakin University.
Bombing Trains after Madrid: Graffiti and Security on Melbourne's Train System
This paper investigates the ways in which changes in security procedures and the new designs of trains and train yards have structured the post-s11 production of graffiti on Melbourne's train system. It argues that the transition from state ownership of the train network to corporate control has produced new security regimes and had distinct effects on the kinds of graffiti that are produced in Melbourne. These shifts are also reflected in the new designs of trains and train-yards and in emergent security developments in the wake of the Madrid train bombings.
With the ownership and identity of Melbourne's public transport system split between corporate control and state government regulation, two modes of security coexist: a pragmatic and efficient corporate army whose aim is to minimise the visible effects of graffiti and a residual state bureaucratic system with responsibility for criminal enforcement and public safety.
This dual system of security is also reflected in the shift in train design from the Hitachi and Comeng designed models of the 1980s and 1990s to the new Siemens trains. For example, Hitachi and Comeng trains have a series of horizontal striations running the length of the carriage, designed to prevent the application of paint and particularly to spoil the visual effect of graffiti murals. In contrast, Siemens trains have a flat surface. Instead of restricting spray-painting, the new series of trains anticipate a graffiti attack. They are designed not for graffiti prevention – a war as unwinnable as the war on terror – but for the rapid and effective cleaning of graffiti, making it invisible. Ironically, the design of the new Siemens series of trains draws heavily on the New York subway carriages of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the heyday of a nascent graffiti culture which spread worldwide and still maintains the sides of trains as its surface of choice.
In the aftermath of the Madrid train bombing Federal Transport Minister John Anderson noted that trains were the most vulnerable of all transport systems to terrorist attack. ( The Age , May 11, 2004). Future developments in security and design aimed at minimising terrorist attacks have the potential to further transform the production of graffiti in Melbourne, linking the effects of terrorist bombing with graffiti “bombing” (in graffiti argot, the tagging of trains).
Dr Lachlan MacDowall has a PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of Melbourne. His doctoral research examined the conjunction of bisexuality and terrorism in popular culture. He currently coordinates the research program at the Victorian College of the Arts.
Waiting Spaces: From Transit to a Permanent Temporariness
Within the globalized world, increasing information, financial and commodity exchange, as well as the movement of people have created apparently fluid networks. Such diverse subjects as travellers, global workers and migrants can utilise these networks, encountering the airport as a threshold into the transitory state, mediating departure and arrival. The airport has become a internalised border of the nation state, where, as Justine Lloyd argues “the governance of subjects by nation-states is becoming equally the governance of subjects in spaces of transit and exchange”. i The design of airports has been focused on emphasising the drama and excitement of air travel through the built form. There are, however, strict control and separation of space within the buildings into a ‘airside' area; the zone beyond passport control restricted to passengers and airport officials, and a ‘landside' area.
Within this paper I wish to explore the nature of space within the airport, and the political implications on the body in transit in terms of the controls and restrictions placed upon that body. I also wish to examine anthropologist Marc Auge's idea of the airport as a non-place, a waiting room of a “perceptually invisible space”. The space of non-place “creates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude, and similitude”, ii as seen within the ‘airside' zone of the airport, where, once unburdened of luggage you find yourself wandering aimlessly in the duty free stores. This is a anonymous, voiceless space of commercial advertising, global commodity exchange outlets and the slick clean international architectural style.
To enter this space some validation of identity is required, and the fluidity of movement throughout the global network is dependant on passports and work or travel visas. Movement is therefore restricted to those bodies with the power attached to sovereignty and the nation-state. The stateless bodies of individuals like asylum seekers and refugees can become trapped within the non-space of transit, restricted from entering the nation-state. What is the plight of the stateless individual who becomes trapped within the border territory of the airside zone and the detention centre?
i Justine Lloyd, “Departing Sovereignty”, Borderlands ejournal , Vol 1 no 2, 2002. http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol1no2_2002/lloyd_departing.html.
ii Marc Auge, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity , translated by John Howe (London: Verso, 1995).
Megan Marks is an undergraduate architecture student at RMIT University, Melbourne (fourth year).
Fear and our cities: Separation, Specialisation and the Abdication of Responsibility
On September 11 th a direct attack against democracy and civilisation took place, resulting in over three thousand deaths. From then on, our cities changed and a deep sense of fear took hold. A building that embodied the long tradition of democracy was destroyed, to be restored a few years later, in the hustle to make life in the city appear normal. This was 1973 - when I experienced terrorism.
September 11 th 2001, was not the first instance of international terrorism. The unprecedented media coverage was not only attributed to the unimaginable methods employed, but to the target of this attack, being the cradle of the world's economic power – to some, terrorism itself.
As an episode, the attack on the World Trade Centre merged with a myriad of worldwide changes that were already challenging the notion of the role of representative governments. In Australia, in a convoluted manner, a tough approach to “terrorism” has translated into a tough approach to all social, political and economic agendas, thus facilitating the dominance of the free market regime.
Terrorism is essentially about collective fear, and this emotion, real, manufactured or both, can be manipulated, accentuated or overcome.
Translated to an individual level, fear immobilises our sense of curiosity, limits our compassion and focuses our attention on the immediate - our families, our jobs, our consumption, our welfare and our personal security.
On the grounds of security and the shifting definition of public space, the behaviour and movement of individuals is surveyed and limited. Meanwhile, social housing is almost disappearing from our cities' agendas as the construction of privately owned infrastructure, the privatisation of public assets and the increasing management of the public space, becomes more ingrained. Who could have imagined in 1973 that, in 2004 the chancellery of our most prestigious universities would be behind security screens and the reason for the visit assessed, not by an administrative personal but by armed security guards.
Not only are citizens today more willing to surrender their individual rights in the name of security, we have also become more tolerant to diminishing the rights of others. Detention centres for the “aliens” has become an accepted form of dealing with the victims of terrorism and poverty. From an earlier conception of temporary accommodation on humanitarian grounds, to today's “detention centres” – conveniently located, geographically and mentally distant from our senses - we have changed our notion of generosity, hospitality and compassion.
This paper will explore issues of fear and its responses, more particularly in the creation of spatial separation and mental disconnection in the pursuit of a safe heaven. I will argue that separation, firstly emotional and subsequently physical, are the intrinsic products of fear and investigate the process of separation and specialisation. Particularly interesting in this process is the abdication of responsibility by the inability to understand the situation in its entirety.
Fissures in the Urban Fabric: The Terror of Transparency
Where does terror lie for the already marginal? With the radical extremists, as our governments and newspapers would have us believe, or with those responsible for maintaining control and order on our city streets? I curated an architectural installation entitled Urban Threads in September 2004 with a group of homeless women in Melbourne for whom terror comes in the form of uniforms of office, men in suits, and unachievable social expectations. What most citizens would regard as a quick, safe protected shortcut through the city is for them a Path of Most Resistance. And when many regard a steel security door as a requirement for domestic safety, these women craft dwelling spaces from cardboard in other people's doorways, hoping that yet another security guard won't move them on tonight. For some of our citizens, the city has the ambivalent status of a place of surveillance, social control and ostracism yet also a home where they can find hidden places of refuge.
Urban Threads explored the ways in which those without land, money and power shape the urban fabric; in particular, the private territories that are staked out in the public realm and the spatial practices that connect them. Nine “domestic” rooms were set up or demarcated throughout the city from Little Lonsdale Street, through to Flinders Street between Swanston and Exhibition Sts including WAR(d)robes, bedroom/chrysalises and Living Room (Primary Health Service). Each tested the extent to which architecture could be made in “tactical” ways, to use Michel de Certeau's terminology, by temporarily usurping space and materials from the strategies of the city (those elements with place and power) through movement and timing. i
Political scientist, Nancy Fraser argues that “marginals” need to create what she calls “counterpublics”… “spaces that offer recuperation, resistance and ”home”. ii She argues that these are not always geographically or spatially defined but may also be theoretical or spatial displacements where individual dreams and collective thoughts can be expressed in safety.and where community intrusion and state surveillance are not permitted. iii This paper will present the surreptitious process of making and setting up the Urban Threads installation and will argue the importance of “cracks” and “fissures” in the urban fabric as spaces of safety, rather than terror for some.
In an Age of Terror we are led to believe that public safety lies in a transparent city, one where no one can hide, where people are not permitted to remain idle for too long, where anyone standing still with a suitcase may be taken for questioning while their belongings are detonated. But in this process, do we create more terror for those already on the margins?
iMichel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, , trans. Steven Rendall, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1984, p xix.
iiNancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy ”, in Calhoun, C. (ed) Habermas and the public sphere, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991, pp56-77.
iii Michelle Fine and Lois Weis, the Unknown City: Lives of Poor and Working Class Young Adults, Boston: Beacon Press, 1998, p252-3.
Janet McGaw completed an M. Arch. by Design at the University of Melbourne in 1999 entitled The Politics of a Minor Architecture . She is currently working towards a PhD, also by design, entitled streetwise. Recent publications include “Architectural (S)crypts: In Search of a Minor Architecture”, Architectural Theory Review , Vol. 4, No. 1. April 1999, a paper streetwise at AASA conference in 2003 and a chapter in upcoming book Transportable Environments III .
Outside in the City: Seriality, Anxiety and the Unstable Nation
In January 1998, three members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam mounted an attack on the historic Dalada Maligawa , the temple of the sacred tooth relic of the Buddha in Kandy, Sri Lanka. They drove an explosive laden truck in front of the building just after 6 on a Sunday morning and detonated it, reportedly causing the deaths of 10 civilians. Among them were five members of one family from Embilipitiya, Ratnapura district including a two year old and a seven year old child.
The attack was strategic. Timed to occur a week before the Prince of Wales visited Kandy, its objective was to remove the site from his itinerary and draw attention to the separatist cause. The hour of the attack, before the city awakened and the choice of Sunday for it, suggest that the motive was not so much to harm civilians but to make a statement. In its wake, the city would barricade its temple against future attack and demand security checks of all pilgrims entering the temple. Steel fences would wrap around the ethereal cloud-wall that encircled the palace and its image of heaven. They would stop short the circumnavigation of the historic Kandy Lake, so endemic to the experience of the city and the temple. This looming threat to the treasured city would be further inscribed on its citizenry forcing them to refashion their daily routines around the obstacle course that was laid before them.
In this paper I discuss the self-reflexive rethinking of city, historic capital and urban space prompted by an act perceived as terrorism. The violation of a sacred site and the tearing open of a cultural wound momentarily exposed the national psyche forcing its re-conceptualization. The attack on the temple was an attack on history, on a particular formulation of nation-hood and a specific religio-ethnic formula for citizenship that had marginalized all others. Although fatalities were few, the blow was felt at the level of the individual citizen.
The 1998 incident had many outcomes that would close down the space for secular citizenship in Sri Lanka. Representations of the incident and its spectacular impact, when translated through the media, would endorse ethnic divisions along religious lines. The threat of consecutive or simultaneous explosions and their performative circumnavigations of the city would make civil gatherings untenable. Serial disruptions of urban space and their violent trajectories would hitherto be inscribed on the Sri Lankan consciousness. The collision of distinct modern and anti-modern practices in physical space would expose their inherent ambiguities promoting a crisis of self-definition. Their attendant perils, traumas, discursive outpourings and anxious national subjectivities are the subject of this paper.
Dr.Anoma Pieris is a lecturer in the Department of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne. She has degrees in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and UC. Berkeley.
Biometric urbanism: Digitising the Body in Global Cities.
The technological revolution in information systems and telecommunications has had a profound effect on large globalised cities. In this world system, governments jockey to brand and promote cities as destinations of capital investment. Within these cities investment capital has fuelled property speculation as well as expanding telecommunications infrastructures. Neo liberal governments have sought to shape this investment by using it to form geographical clusters of related economic activities. Within these clusters activities are devoted to economic collaboration, innovation, design and production alongside new modes of entertainment and leisure. Often the pervasive images which entertain the body in miraculous and fairy-tale like digital worlds are produced within these innovation clusters. In response architects and urban designers have proposed new urban spaces for these emerging clusters. Employing captivating and plastic geometries, they have used digital software to design and visualise these new parts of cities. In this paper, these innovation clusters will be considered as the building blocks of future global cities. For this reason, these entities will be explored in relation to emerging developments in biometric technology. Biometric technologies allow physical and biological information about the body to be scanned and recorded in databases. The Australian Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (DIMA) is currently looking at a range of biometric technologies as a part of a ‘broader identity management strategy.'i These techniques include fingerprint, facial, iris and voice recognition. The information gained can be used in access control systems in buildings. Emerging research in the field also includes using biometrics to recognise various individual signatures, body parts, gaits and even—just like the Stasi—body odour.
The aim of this symposia paper is to examine these technologies in relation to their possible impact on innovation clusters. To achieve this the paper will firstly outline recent technological developments in relation to biometric software as a generic class. The sources of finance which fund biometric research will be identified in global equity and venture capital markets. This will enable the structure of the global biometrics industry to be mapped. The main firms producing, marketing, licensing and distributing biometric products will highlighted. This analysis will enable these products to be situated in relation to the access control systems of spatial structures. Using Koolhaas's idea of ‘junkspace'—the space that is left over after machinations of capitalism—as a point of comparison the paper will attempt to foresee the spaces created by biometrics. In other words, those spaces left over after the machinations of territorial defence. Consequently, the types of urban spaces that biometric products might create within innovation clusters will be explored. In concluding, the paper will speculate that biometric technologies, alongside other digital technologies, will create future cities that may share common traits with medieval cities. This is because the spaces constituting these cities will simultaneously control and entertain the body. On the one hand, creating new rituals of discipline and control, whilst on the other hand, creating enchanted and magical spaces for the body to inhabit.
i See < http://www.immi.gov.au/facts/84biometric.htm > accessed 18/04/05
Peter Raisbeck is a Ph.D. candidate Melbourne University and currently a sessional tutor in architectural theory and design at Melbourne University and RMIT University. During the dot com boom he was the senior research fellow in the centre for the Strategic Management of Information Technology at Melbourne Business School.
ANZAC Cove Revisited: Myth, Ritual and National Identity After the Bali Bombing
On October 12 2002, terrorist bombs exploded destroying two night clubs in Kuta, Bali. 202 people were killed including 88 Australians. With this event terrorism lost its abstract global quality and became an Australian experience. Three days after the attack, Prime Minister John Howard told the Australian people;
Many of us feel the poignancy of this attack coinciding with the end of football season in Australia. So many of the young people in that club that night were members of Australian rules football teams, rugby league teams and rugby union teams. They were having a bit of fun at the end of a hard season.
This paper examines how the ‘Bali Bombing' and subsequent events were appropriated, particularly by the Australian tabloid media and the Australian Federal politicians in service of a neo-conservative political agenda. It will be argued that tabloid media and politician's responses after the Bali Bombing reinforced existing myths about national identity. This has provided a compelling distraction to avoid public debate on the unstable and complex issues of terrorism, its definitions, meanings and political motivations in the contemporary world. The employment of national myths has been one element or perhaps side effect reinforcing a coercive strategy that encourages public and parliamentary compliance to the introduction of wide ranging counter terrorist measures (including new legislation) with its significant implications for reduced civil liberties. Objections to any counter terrorist measures can be framed as a very un-Australian response. It can also be argued that reactions to the Bali Bombing have added to the rising wave of racism that is at the very least an implicit part of contemporary neo-conservative political and cultural agendas in contemporary Australia.
Within this framework this paper will consider the way Bali bombing anniversary events have contributed to an Australian ‘Gallipoli' sensibility through memorialisation events and ritualised behaviour that taps into myths of national identity. Consideration will be given to relationship between ceremonial behaviours and the formal and spatial aspects of the Bali bombing memorials and will argue that the architectural and landscape elements are of far less enduring significance than the production and reinforcing of cultural values that these events allow and encouraged. While attending the first Anniversary ceremony in Bali, October 12, 2003, the Australian Federal Opposition Leader Simon Crean captured this ‘Australian spirit' when he suggested that ‘something typically wonderful' would unfold during the anniversary weekend, ‘There will be a game of footy for example- just like that famous photograph we all know of young diggers playing at Gallipoli. It's a typical reaction to a crisis'.
Jane Shepherd is a lecturer in Landscape Architecture who teaches history, design and communication courses in the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University. Jane has particular interests in the social, political and economic forces that inform the cultural contexts of design. In teaching design studios, Jane encourages students to consider the political environment of their projects and the potential advocacy role for designers wishing to effect change.
Charles Stivale and Eugene Holland,
Deleuze and Terror, or Casting Planes Across Chaos
This proposal is inspired by the conjuncture of the RMIT call for papers and our reading for different research purposes of Gilles Deleuze's study entitled Foucault. In the volume's final discussion of how subjectivity is constituted in the face of savage forces of the Outside, Deleuze affirms: "However terrible this line [of the Outside] may be, it is a line of life that can no longer be gauged by relations between forces, [a line] that carries man beyond terror" (F 122). Deleuze asserts further that whereas the relations between forces tend to ignore "the fissure within the strata", that is, the fold where the subject is constituted, the line of life "forms a Law, 'the center of the cyclone, where one can live and in fact where Life exists par excellence '”(F 122). This process, says Deleuze, realizes "the central chamber, which one need no longer fear is empty since one fills it with oneself . . . [as] master of one's speed . . . in this zone of subjectivation" (F 123).
Beyond terror, Life par excellence , no more fear -- these descriptors at the end of Foucault offer vision and understanding of a potential for subjectivity that would seem at odds not only with the atmosphere of fear, threat and terror that now engulfs us, but also with Deleuze's own positions as expressed, for example, in the 1978 essay on the Palestinians, "Les Gêneurs", his various writings in support of Toni Negri, and the 1984 "Grandeur de Yasser Arafat." In these texts, Deleuze does not evidently identify a line beyond terror, nor any excellence in life, but rather "terror" deployed by States to discipline, control, silence, and/or kill those subjects identified as “terrorist” by dint of their posing apparent threats to State sovereignty.
However, as we will argue, Deleuze's statements in Foucault coincide quite precisely with these more overtly political interventions. In both discursive venues, Deleuze reveals his lasting commitment to finding an active and vital mode of resistance to the forms of terror at once aimed against the individual and against the collectivity. This mode, as we will explain corresponds to his particular understanding of a utopian dimension of thought, but also to his conception of creativity as a mode of resistance. By examining excerpts from his final collaborations both with Claire Parnet and Félix Guattari -- respectively “L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze” and What Is Philosophy? as well as Deleuze's Foucault –, we will consider how terror and Life intersect with subjectivity in Deleuze's and Deleuze and Guattari's confrontation with chaos. We will draw particular attention to their insistence in What Is Philosophy? that we "cast planes over chaos" in order to assure that the ethical subject might establish and maintain a space beyond various forms of terror in order to sustain an active engagement precisely with the forces that would deny our possibilities for thought, creativity and life itself.
Prof. Charles J. Stivale teaches in the Department of Romance Languages and Literature at Wayne State University, USA.
Prof. Eugene W. Holland teaches in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French and Italian at the Ohio State University, USA.
Guantanamo bay: The Politics of Space in the State of Exception
Amongst the numerous rationales provided by the US administration to justify the use of Guantanamo Bay as an interrogation camp, perhaps the most disturbing is the argument that such a space is necessary to prevent so-called “unlawful combatants” from “returning to the battlefield.” In the context of a war without temporal or spatial limitation, this battlefield comes increasingly to coincide with the extent of the globe, while spaces like Camp X-ray fulfill the function of preemptively excluding the potentially ‘dangerous' in order to enable the constitution of a controlled global space. Like in Giorgio Agamben's conception of the camp, Guantanamo Bay, and the relation of exception which exists within it, is not divorced from the ‘normal' order but is constitutive of it. If we accept that Guantanamo Bay plays this constitutive role, then any attempt to understand the juridical and political regime that is created by the war on terror must include an examination of the juridical architecture of Guantanamo Bay. This paper will trace this architecture—through an investigation of a series of inadvertently declassified US administration memos—in order to illuminate the regime of power that is increasingly overflowing the spatial boundaries of Guantanamo.
In particular, I will examine an initial discussion of the application of Geneva protections between Colin Powell and then Counsel to the President, Alberto Gonzales. While Powell favored the application of the Geneva Convention, Gonzales—who has since been appointed US Attorney General —is adamant that this should not occur. In a series of memos, Gonzales lays out an argument, later adopted by the administration despite Powell's dissent, which focuses on three things: unpredictability, flexibility and risk. Central to Gonzales's argument is the depiction of the war on terror as “a new kind of war” which “renders quaint”, in his words, the established laws of war. The key characteristic of this new kind of war is its unpredictability. As Gonzales puts it: “It is difficult to predict the needs and circumstances that could arise in the course of the war on terror,” In this increasingly unpredictable world, the argument goes, the US faces unimaginable and potentially catastrophic risks. In Rumsfeld's infamous distinction between the known-knowns, the known-unkowns and the unkown-unkowns, the war on terror increasingly takes the form of an unkown-unkown. In this argument, notions of legal certainty and stability—as provided by international law, human rights conventions, treaties and judicial oversight—are replaced by the valorization of the flexible state, which can respond quickly to new threats, unconstrained by the norms developed in a past that is no longer seen as an adequate guide to the future. This paper will view Guantanamo Bay as the ‘experimental laboratory' in which an exceptional juridical regime enables the creation of new ‘flexible' techniques of control. It will trace the relation between the spatial arrangement of the Cuban camp, and the juridical regime of exception that escapes it, and reflect on the role of the camp in a social space that is conceived as potential war zone.
Language as project: Making cruelty and oppression acceptable when dealing with the other
With all the land on the planet discovered, staked and settled the conquest of ‘the space of the other' no longer motivates societies. If anything spatiality has emerged in these societies as a driver for the transformation of language; as a way to think, to inform and construct the discourses of possession, dispossession and repossession. One aspect of the discourse of possession is the conversion of the other into something familiar or the obliteration of the other-ness; this is still the project of conquest. Another is that the violation that accompanies dispossessions needs to be negotiated and this is done most visibly as new language constructs - words and phrases – such as ‘terror' and ‘the age of terror'. The paper pursues such namings and categorizations of the other and points at a glossary of terms in use for contemporary knowledge construction in the discourse of power.
Dr Soumitri Varadarajan has a first degree in mechanical engineering. He then went on to do a Diploma in Industrial Design at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad in India. After completion of his design studies he ran a firm, part design consultancy and part factory making metal furniture. Alongside this he taught in an architecture school * where he set up a department of industrial design targeted at graduate architects. In the early 1990s he trained at the Hitachi Design Studios in Tokyo. In 1994 he was appointed Associate Professor in the Industrial Design Programme at the Instrument Design and Development Centre at IIT Delhi. He joined the Industrial Design program at RMIT as Programme Director in 2003.
Architects without Frontiers
My paper will examine the multiple roles of design professionals (which here includes architects, planners, urban designers and landscape architects) in the reconstruction of a range of cities decimated by war and social conflict. I attempt to walk the talk -to move from the {often fetishist} theoretical discourse of reconstruction, to the pretty rough task of actually delivering projects in conflict zones.
Research and design projects that I have executed across multiple zones of contention over the last decade, highlight the limitations of traditional design methods in post-disaster reconstruction and suggest that such practices: (1) are often detrimental to the quality of the urban environment and to those living in polarised cities; (2) limit architectural contributions to the larger and longer-term peace-building process, and (3) deny cities and their people access to the design expertise that may help redress post-conflict, social, economic and spatial divisions.
Finally, I will discuss through a roadmap of six design typologies, how both architecture and planning are systems of spatial thinking that can be linked to both site-specific design problems and to a wider contemplation about contested urban and regional territories. This broader definition of design extends the role of the architect beyond acting as just the conceivers and executors of blueprint plans to potential negotiators and mediators of urban politics and planning.
The architect can then become a crucial figure in the re-making of a profession that looks more towards humanity and social justice than just the production of singular objects and related profit. With this shift in our discursive practices, numerous roles and possibilities are revealed for the design profession - to act as mobile and ethical agents of change- as architects without frontiers.
Dr Esther Charlesworth is Founding Executive Director of Architects without Frontiers (Australia), Honorary Research Fellow at The Globalism Institute (RMIT) and Director of the CITYEDGE International Urban Design Series at the City Of Melbourne.